Stanley Fish in the online New York Times today —
". . . Because it is an article of their faith that politics are bad
and the unmediated encounter with data is good,
internet prophets will fail to see the political implications
of what they are trying to do, for in their eyes political implications
are what they are doing away with.
Indeed, their deepest claim — so deep that they are largely
unaware of it — is that politics can be eliminated. They don’t
regard politics as an unavoidable feature of mortal life but as
an unhappy consequence of the secular equivalent of the
Tower of Babel: too many languages, too many points of view.
Politics (faction and difference) will just wither away when
the defect that generates it (distorted communication) has
been eliminated by unmodified data circulated freely among
free and equal consumers; everyone will be on the same page,
reading from the same script and apprehending the same
universal meanings. Back to Eden!"
The final page, 759, of the Harry Potter saga —
"Talk about magical thinking!" — Fish, ibidem .
See also the above Harry Potter page
in this journal Sunday morning.