Monday, October 03, 2005

''Politics as Usual''

Susie from Suburban Guerilla posts this about Kos from her "esteemed colleague Michael Diet .... about the reaction of some of the big-dog bloggers to the march last week"...

Then again, for all his gabbling about the netroots and such, it’s been clear for some time now that Markos is not fundamentally more comfortable with popular activism than the Establishment consultantocrats he makes a show of railing against. “Netroots,” when you come down to it, is just Kos’s branding statement: as his strictures against the non-branded (or competing) forms of grassroots work should make plain. He’s managed to progress not an inch past the Establishment’s degraded, and degradingly passive, reduction of all politics to a traffic in “messages.” There are the funders (and, optionally, in small ways, disseminators) of messages, the professional operatives (enforcers of “message discipline,” one of the more unfortunate phrases of our moment) who formulate and direct them, and the “media consumers” who receive them, and if Kos has any brighter idea than that about what activism is supposed to be, I’m not aware of it. And that, I’m afraid, is the endpoint of the vaunted Kos revolution: a few new faces taking (appropriately compensated) seats around the same goddamn old conference tables. But now they’ve all got Blackberries!

I mean—media consumers? Does it even occur to Kos that there might be something else going on here, should be something else going on here, than a form of political advertising?"

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