The best part of "Internet As Social Movement", the opening to the latest issue of the ever-delicious n+1, is the introduction:
Alexander Blok was enchanted by the Bolshevik Revolution. The leading poet of the pre-revolutionary symbolist school, Blok and his pale handsome face had been freighted in the years before 1917 with all the hopes and dreams of the Russian intelligentsia. In early 1918, when that intelligentsia was still making fun of the crudeness, the foolishness, the presumption of the Bolsheviks—the way contemporary intellectuals once made fun of Wikipedia—Blok published an essay urging them to cut it out. “Listen to the Revolution,” he counseled, “with your bodies, your hearts, your minds.”
Three years later, Blok was dead, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, the tribune of the Revolution, wrote his obituary. “Blok approached our great Revolution honestly and with awe,” Mayakovsky wrote. But it was too much for him: “I remember, in the first days of the Revolution, I passed a thin, hunched-over figure in uniform warming itself by a fire near the Winter Palace. The figure called out to me. It was Blok. We walked together. . . . I said, ‘How do you like it?’ ‘It’s good,’ said Blok, and then added: ‘They burned down my library.’”
A group of peasants had torched Blok’s country house. Blok, however, refused to choose between the “good” he saw in the Revolution and the burned library, Mayakovsky wrote. “I heard him this past May in Moscow. In a half-empty auditorium, he read some old poems, quietly and sadly, about Gypsy songs, about love, about a beautiful woman—the road led no further. Further on was death, and it came.”
Then the editors begin their "brief history of webism", a distinctly nostalgic glimpse at how far we have come through the ether to touch this moment which has already morphed into the next rss feed. The fellow twittering fails to stir the senses as does the feel of another sweaty palm touching yours all for the sake of the latest revolution. We are aroused, titillated, excited, and certainly always "on" for this revolution. But we cannot be "enchanted", as Blok was enchanted, for there is something very disenchanting about our online social movement-turned-momentum. There is so much to say about this, and not enough battery power in my portal-to-the-revolution for it to be said tonight....
