“At this point, some of them start to live for theirselves: the objective of the community becomes the community itself, not the original cause that made them to meet. They dream the possibility of a completely virtual life with their real community. Sometimes it takes the form of virtual countries, other times of exclusive social networks or even different kinds of transnational activism. That is what we call “Digital Zionism“, a kind of digital segregationism. But Digital Zionism is an unstable terrain: economy matters and in the long run no conversational community can afford a complete identity, alternative no national identities if it cannot explain the very basis of the personal subsistence of its members.*“
The material below is sourced from the book by David Ugarte et al., entitled “From Nations to Networks”
David de Ugarte et al.:
“Real communities of people who share and debate are flourishing, and distributed, de-territorialised socialisation is becoming an accepted cultural fact. Citizenship is being joined, if not displaced, by what Marcelo Estraviz had called linkship back in 2001:
That’s what linkship is. It’s citizenship without cities. It’s deterritorialised. Actions are local, but connections are global.
We explore our linkships, our belonging to socialisation spheres where abundance prevails, where there is no need to vote on anything, where pluriarchy is the”natural” regulating system. That’s what’s addictive about digital life. Inevitable, the will arises to move the highest possible number of socialisation spheres to that pluriarchic, diverse, free world. That is what we call “digital Zionism”.”
“The name itself comes from a post by Pere Quintana in a 2006 forum in which he celebrated the result of the collective experience: a life that is autonomous from the public agenda set by the media, an environment of trust and conversation constituted both by visitors and by peers who have been in the network for years:
– For some time now we haven’t been Spanish or European or anything else. For some time now we have been digital Zionists. What brings us together is certain common values, not the fact of having been born here or there. In fact, we don’t even see each other’s faces – our identity lies in our online texts. We don’t belong to the newspaper world. We are free!
The forum in which this was published – possibly not by chance – was “Ciberpunko Internacia”, a short-lived mix of two traditions, the pluriarchy of Spanish cyberpunk in the nineties and noughties, and old Zamenhof’s dream of a trans-national space. But digital Zionism is something more than a mass social trend in cyberspace. It is the matrix from which a highly interesting reflection sprang to which this book owes a debt.
To being with, digital Zionism must understand and re-appropriate internet comprehension. The apex of the Web 2.0 discourse had been accompanied by the ranking boom. The blogosphere was depicted as a single space, relatively homogeneous and hierarchised (in terms of “influence”), in which small communities constituted a tiny, irrelevant “long queue”. It was a bad place to understand and place oneself.
Digital Zionism is actually a pluriarchic, free-aggregation communitarianism, not a marginality discourse. It remaps the blogosphere and produces a topology that radically refutes the media message. There is certainly a huge web in the blogosphere, but there are also thousands of small independent networks, hardly connected to each other, autistic in the face of the striking and media-advertised circus of the gurus’ blogosphere. This is the sea of flowers. Ongoing experiments and measurements have ratified the fact that the sea of flowers is many times larger than the great central artichoke.
The internet is a space of irreducible diversity, of different and more or less overlapping identities between which one can continually skip. A huge chessboard through which to move and in which to socialise, not a cheap digital version of the 20th-century de-centralised media universe.
But when the freedom of pluriarchy is recognised, when our main social community is really articulated in virtual conversations, and these, within the universe of the Western Latin languages, quickly transcend state borders, a new and inevitable question arises. Can’t I also take my economic life to such a world? Can’t I work within an online network, make my way of making a living independent from erratic economies and national crises in the same way as my conversation has gradually become mongrelised, open, and independent from the media agenda? There are small and medium businesses that work within online networks. Having a virtual co-worker, keeping one’s IM window permanently open, starts to be common. This kind of change starts to be of interest to entrepreneurs who have very small companies.
The time has come to look at large companies, the trans-nationals which some multinationals are gradually becoming. The time has come to experiment with hard core of every social articulation: the economic-territorial structure.”