I’ve always looked very much askew at this “iSummit” in the past because basically, I think if you scratch away all the rhetoric about i-this and me-that — it’s just the same old socialist concept dressed up in cyber clothing. I never see any of the authoritative voices on free media and strugglers for free media and civil rights broadly speaking on the roster at this conference, which basically appears to be about harnessing new technology in the service of the old ideologies for which this part of the world is notorious.

Creative Commons, while it rings all the chimes of rhetoric about empowering content-creators and raising up Africans from poverty etc. etc. ultimately is about disabling and defeating big corporations that the CCers think are evil, unaccountable and concentrative of media powers in their own hands.

And precisely because big corporations are sometimes evil and unaccountable, they can get some traction with this. One thing I’ve learned about CC — they have hugely mobilized, energized, organized, and zealous supporters so that if you try to criticize them, they will whack at you from many directions to try to prove that you “never know enough” etc. (like BDSM). If you google these folks, you’ll see very few ever take them on.

Nevertheless, I ask questions about them and always will. They are an ideology, an organized and zealous one, trying to put themselves over on others, with only some of the tip if the iceberg of their thinking visible widely in the concept of making content both easier to distribute and easier to get micropayments — because the rest of it, about dismantling what they hate as the capitalist corporate culture/economy is more hidden.

For example, take this very slogan of this very conference:

“”to make sure that, at its crossroads, we guide the world along a path that will enable the kind of free culture and decentralized innovation that has characterized the early years of the Internet.”

So…let me get this straight now! A self-selected group of people at something hokey called “an i-Summit” will be the ones to “guide the world along a path”. And…this guiding is what will ensure that we will “enable the kind of free culture and decentralized innovation that has characterized the early years of the Internet.”

So…am I the only one who wonders how “guiding the world along a path” by a certain “we” will result in “free culture and decentralized innovation”?

Of course not, and that’s only Marxian Inherent Internal Contradiction No. 1.

So the Internet/social media need people to work hard to keep the space free of heavily controlling commercial interests? Well, maybe, if you can persuade me that these “guiders” are the thing that will actually keep it free. But I’m never persuaded. Instead, ironically enough, I see corporate interests who have a bottom line to worry about and mass taste to keep happy to be far more attunded to the real public mind and will than self-appointed i-summiteers with ideologies accountable to no one.

That’s always the problem with these leftist movements, they don’t have the experience of really being accountable in government — or are have only failed track records — such as to inspire the broad public in their fairness.