Digital dialectic

template of "thesis-anti thesis-synthesis" to be applied in a doctri­ naire manner to politics. Dialectic was, rather, the concrete movement of social history itself. Marx, the next signpost in the development of the dia­ lectic, identified history with the history of civil wars and violent revolu­ tions, but Hegel's dialectic originally included the more subtle shifting forces of social change that propel human evolution. In those systems that adopted Marx's philosophy, the dialectic became the cornerstone of official ideology. In the Soviet Union, for example, mil­ lions of students in Communist schools carried textbooks bearing the stamp "DIAMAT," short for "Dialectical Materialism." The dialectic in its Marx­ ist-Leninist form belonged to materialistic phi losophy as a rigid set of doc­ trines defining the socioeconomic struggle between capital and labor. The straight party l ine of communism largely eroded the original meaning of "dialectic" as a term to describe historical dynamics. This was particularly ironic, for, as we have seen, dialectic resists stability, finding its form in the unsettling, the changing, the shifting. Both historical and critical discussion of the dialectic runs through this paper, but it i s important to acknowledge that the present taint of the word "dialectic" is due to its centrality to Marxist thought and policies. As a result, many people automatically recoil against dialectic and fail to see its usefulness in weighing the new reality layer. It is true that networked com­ puter media have launched an information space that ill befits the material­ istic mold of Marxism, based as it was in the reading of early industrial capitalism. I believe, nonetheless, that we can still use dialectic as a tool to move beyond the polarity of fear and fascination that characterizes the continuum binding the fans of the antitechnology Unabomber to the mil­ lions who use computers to surf the Internet. The dialectic I have in mind is that which preceded Marxism and can be clearly described. I want to show that dialectic can indeed illuminate the paradoxes of the current debate about the value of cyberspace. Though bound by an underlying ontology, the dialectic can still illuminate the con­ fusion and tension created by new media. There is something of the joke or paradox that propels all dialectical thinking. We live in a most appropriate era (0 savor the dialectical joke. An appropriate joke, indeed, for an era when people express their support for anarchist-inspired attacks on technology by posting messages to the World Wide Web.