Rise of the new collective intellect @ Issues Contents

Now, in late 2011, the entire world is bearing witness to mass uprisings, while immiseration of the majority seems to be reaching the point of irreversibility, i.e., especially due to the financial and nuclear meltdowns in ensemble. People who have nothing to lose have begun to take everything into their own hands. Generally speaking, these uprisings consist of innumerable players, and do not seem to be led by any particular movement, organization or individual. Repeating shifts of hegemony from one to the other, the impetus cannot even be called ‘anti-authoritarian’ in the sense that they are not intentionally coordinated as a whole, notwithstanding without any leadership. They are assemblies of desperate and enraged masses of all kinds, of diverging political and affective tendencies from one another. But importantly, what they share in common are the space for action and the means to communicate--or the meeting point between the two. They seem to share the way street action and formation of popular knowledge interact, namely, the way social body and collective intellect interact. But this intellect seems to be different from both individualized intellect (from the Bourgeois modernist model) and the so-called general intellect (from the Post-Fordist model) in the precise sense. Then, what is this?