Gentrification is a paradigm. Every gentrification of an electronic neighborhood creates burden and loss for the poorest in it. The lowest-income kosaks don't have the money to buy increased RAM and faster processors, or pay a technician to do that work on their computers, far less pay a carrier for faster speed just to connect. They're damned lucky to have any of it at all. And they're NOT even the poorest in America and the world that we keep saying we want to help.
This is where realworld political rubber meets the road.
If it's true what I'm told, that most of what DK 5 does makes photos and graphics easier to put into diaries,that means kosaks with the income to own the kinds of computers and peripherals that allows using photos and graphics at all —kosaks whose income allows the leisure to involve themselves with that and consider it imperative for them to have it easier— are held more valuable and entitled than the poorest here. The upper-percenter kosaks "need" to be "saved" the time and effort of learning how to handle material the "old way" merely so their privilege-skewed influence can have even more disproportionate impact in the blogosphere (a bourgeois word if ever there was one).
So much for claiming that the voices and lives of the weak and poor matter most to protect, help and uplift. Wall out the people who may most genuinely need the fellowship, morale/moral support, and occasional bits of survival information that DK should HELP make accessible to them. Wall out the people whose voices speak of a tougher reality than the reality of people who demand the best toys for playing with pixels because they have the time and $ to do it and they WANT to.
A longtimer recently told me, "Don't look for the revolution to come from here — that's not what DK is made of." How many past DK revisions have forced how many thousands of past kosaks out because they were too poor to make your upgrade?
How much has DK blunted and blurred its potential in national politics by destructive self-indulgence in so many ways just like this? ...by utterly bourgeois disinclination for extrapolating the true consequences of their actions, by utterly bourgeois refusal of collective and individual self-discipline and self-restraint?
How do we not "get" that our addiction to more and better computer crap comes out of the hide of those we claim to help and care about. How do we not get that walling them out of the discourse and away from survival information RIGHTFULLY disillusions them about our true allegiances?
Which part of "LIVE SIMPLY, THAT OTHERS MAY SIMPLY LIVE" does DK not understand?
My take: most of it.