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An informal comparative review of Taylor, A. (2014) The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age London, Fourth Estate & Tkacz, N. (2015) Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

“Openness is a philosophy that can easily rationalize its own failure, chalking people’s inability to participate up to choice… “(Taylor 2014:139)

It is open season, so to speak, on ‘openness’. Both of these important, and very differently orientated, books stress that whether something is described as ‘open’ or ‘closed’ (whether it be a society – as in Popper’s anti-Marxist philosophy – or any other system) is far less important than other features of its political structure and organisation.

Openness in late twentieth-century thought has stood for freedom, radicalism but above all for meritocracy – the notion that in ‘free’ exchanges (whether in a market economy or an internet forum) the best will rise to the top by a process that appears entirely spontaneous and unplanned. Not so, say both writers: Taylor from the perspective of the philosophic and documentary artist and Tkacz from that of an analytic media academic.

Tkacz’s post-modern analysis is careful and astute and argues from close involvement with the most ‘open’ system of all, Wikipedia. Taylor (2014:221) exempts Wikipedia from her strictures about the limits of openness, which makes Tkacz’s (2015;65) argument all the more urgent since he argues, that ‘Wikipedia is defined through the systematic exclusion of certain kinds of knowledge.’ However, based in very urgent cultural struggle it is Taylor that throws out more light, even if of a very diffuse kind. Whilst Tkacz’s argument is controlled and ‘academic’ in its generic conventions, Taylor throws out tough-minded apercus’ of considerable brilliance that ring in the mind and which speak to the H800 experience better than anything I have read:

“Strategically constructing an identity requires a kind of feigned authenticity” (OUCH! – that hurts!) “that involves continual management and monitoring of audience feedback. Self-censorship is inevitable; one must be ‘liked’ above all … It puts a premium on quickness and sensation, on the emotions of anger and awe proven to trigger virality. If slow-moving and sometimes solitary work was always at a disadvantage, now it is even more so.” (Taylor 2014:208)

Hence, she claims that art and certain constructions based in patience and passive experience are its victims. Hence that brilliant pun! ‘Virality’ is a criteria of noisy, timely and crowded success that just nearly sounds like ‘virility’. Taylor’s is a highly sophisticated and gendered argument but it works like art more than it does the philosophers she so admires (and about whom she made very ‘edgy’ documentaries: Zizeck! and Examined Life). Tkacz, with its careful discriminations about conceptions of knowledge and truth in relation to ‘point of view’ and ‘exit’, is another thing, but it has its moments that might sound like Taylor:

“To be ‘well-behaved’ is to produce statements that stick to the topic at hand and the rules in play. Well-behaved statements are ones that ‘find consensus’ and ‘avoid edit-wars.’ (Tkacz 2015:101)

Above all what both point out is that certain aspects of the world as we have known it are at risk and that we allow them to pass without comment at peril to the quality of our lives together.