Republic.net
: Jack Balkin looks back on a year of blogging and uses the occasion to debunk the idiocy of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com, a tribute to Internet ignorance and technological xenophobia that contended that the Internet would restraint free speech and that argued somebody should tell us what links we’re required to give. I always thought his arguments were so patently inane that they didn’t deserve the bits to rebut them. But Balkin, as he has done all year, raises the level of discourse.
3 responses to “Republic.net”
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The guy had a point.
But yes, what messes up sunstein’s thesis (the intellectual ghettoization part) is that you can’t disagree with someone without pointing out their argument. -
By the way (if the pic didn’t make sense), PubSub basically returns searches of weblogs against keywords you choose in a continuous feed.
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I always thought Sunstein was deeply mistaken, and said so at the time. Not because of blogs – but rather because, in my view, he’d simply made a wrong calculation. What he’d done was to vastly extrapolate, to the extreme, where even a small effect was dubious. It’s not that you have to read the opposition’s arguments – that was a mistaken view (the fallacy there is that you don’t really have to read the arguments, just strawman versions of them). Rather, he attributed far too much change to a conjectured technology of extreme personalization which simply didn’t exist.
