{"id":11686,"date":"2013-08-15T22:09:27","date_gmt":"2013-08-16T03:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=11686"},"modified":"2013-08-16T12:17:38","modified_gmt":"2013-08-16T17:17:38","slug":"z-on-snowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/08\/15\/z-on-snowden\/","title":{"rendered":"\u017d on snowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Freedom in the Cloud Assange, Manning and Snowden are the new heroes of the era of digitalized control.<\/a>
\nAugust 13, 2013<\/p>\n

Back in 1843, the young Karl Marx claimed that the German ancien regime \u201conly imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing.\u201d In such a situation, to put shame on those in power becomes a weapon\u2014or, as Marx goes on: \u201cThe actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicizing it.\u201d And this, exactly, is our situation today: we are facing the shameless cynicism of the representatives of the existing global order who only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights, etc. What happens in Wikileaks disclosures is that the shame, theirs and ours for tolerating such power over us, is made more shameful by publicizing it.<\/p>\n

What we should be ashamed of is the worldwide process of the gradual narrowing of the space for what Immanuel Kant called the \u201cpublic use of reason.\u201d In his classic text What is Enlightenment?, Kant opposes \u201cpublic\u201d and \u201cprivate\u201d use of reason: \u201cprivate\u201d is for Kant the communal-institutional order in which we dwell (our state, our nation\u2026), while \u201cpublic\u201d is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one\u2019s Reason:<\/p>\n

The public use of one\u2019s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of one\u2019s reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of one\u2019s reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him.<\/p>\n

We see where Kant parts with our liberal common sense: The domain of State is \u201cprivate,\u201d constrained by particular interests, while individuals reflecting on general issues use reason in a \u201cpublic\u201d way.<\/p>\n

This Kantian distinction is especially pertinent with the Internet and other new media torn between their free \u201cpublic use\u201d and their growing \u201cprivate\u201d control. In our era of cloud computing, we no longer need strong individual computers: Software and information are available on demand, and users can access web-based tools or applications through browsers as if they were programs installed on their own computer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Freedom in the Cloud Assange, Manning and Snowden are the new heroes of the era of digitalized control. August 13, 2013 Back in 1843, the young Karl Marx claimed that the German ancien regime \u201conly imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing.\u201d In such a situation, … Continue reading “\u017d on snowden”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11686"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11692,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11686\/revisions\/11692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}