Let's just play: WHAT IF?
Is there a Matrix-like Reality Lurking Behind Daily Kos?
What if Daily Kos is a long term CIA information-gathering operation designed to create a massive post-September 11th database in which millions of comments from 50,000+ left-leaning Americans are archived and organized in preparation for eventual "extraordinary measures" to secure the Republic.
Will your intemperate diaries or overly pungent comments someday be submitted as "proof" of your anti-Americanism in showtrials akin to those in the Soviet 1930s?
What if Markos was not just a regular guy training as an artllerist in the US Army, but a brilliant covert operative? That is, is it not strange that Markos appeared as if out of nowhere and assumed a position of remarkable importance among the American Left in the course of two short years?
The investigation continues below....
Moreover, since you don't actually see the other participants on the web site -- how do you know that your favorite contributors aren't actually sitting in a Homeland Security-funded cave in Colorado?
I admit that the proposed Kos Convention and the ad-hoc meetings in LA and such are going a long way toward undermining this hypothesis, but....you know...these could be actors who are just playing roles...
Perhaps this is the government's #1 intelligence-gathering program on the American Left and we should all be very afraid...
Or maybe not. In fact, it might be the exact opposite.
Maybe Daily Kos presents the most advanced example of the participatory global democracy of the not so distant future.
On the Left, throughout the twentieth century, from Lukacs to Debord to Hardt and Negri, there has been a continuing controversy: how to create a system in which the vast majority of the population could express its will directly and immediately to those in charge of making policy.
Originally the idea centered on hyper-democratic "workers' councils" or in Russia on community groups ("soviets") but the idea had pretty much died by the time the Berlin Wall came down. It seemed as if all forms of Leftwing "democracy" boiled down to attempts to employ a clumsy and potentially dictatorial state apparatus.
However, it may be that Daily Kos's self-policing "mojo"-driven organization has already begun to lay down the groundwork for an economic and political structure that could be applied throughout society, not just in America but globally.
I mean it is not just a free for all here, but then again, no one controls it from above either. Daily Kos functions as a "soviet" that really works.
In other words, as the most popular political web site of our time, Kos may become the inadvertent engine for revolutionary political change much as the Jacobin Club had this role in Paris post-1789.
Someday your sub-40,000 Daily Kos User ID number may be viewed as a most cherished badge of honor among a blogging, liberated global proletariat.
Or else spending time at Kos may just be a cool way to kill time at work...
I have now reported. You decide!