Encouraging individual sovereignty and a healthy commons
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Like we all knew this was an option of where we were going but to see it actually happening is kind of surreal.
Source? I agree with your ideas overall but I'm genuinely interested in this aspect.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/facebook-...
I think calling four full time guards a "small private army" is a little hyperbolic, but it is safe to say he is heavily protected.
So I'm not necessarily saying that we're living out a mashup between Shadowrun and that Simpsons episode where Homer starts working for a supervillain, but I'm also not ruling it out.
Private armies for the wealthy aren't new either: see the Pinkerton Agency.
Note that Fordlandia fell apart and the Pinkertons were outlawed when people realized what a terrible idea that was. But I guess those who don't learn their history are doomed to repeat it.
This has been a thing for over a decade now. Blackwater/Xe/Academi. The guy who founded this company (and got the US kicked out of Iraq), is our Education Secretary's brother. He is being consulted to provide extra security for Trump outside of the Secret Service.
That doesn't work, because the world is a complex system. It needs to be more functional, not more centralized.
The NNTaleb view is that to be sustainable and stable, the world needs to be decentralized and antifragile. In other words: not 1 government, but 100 well designed, functional governments with small, local democratic governance.
This seems necessary since societies are changing more rapidly, dealing with more problems and crises than before that just can't be effectively solved by bloated entities (see the EU), can't adapt quickly enough to various changes (see all the places in the US without fast internet), and aren't future-oriented enough because of inertia (see Singapore as a counterexample). It also seems more realistic than the article.
Edit: I didn't expect this response to blow up, so let me address more of the article:
1) Completely disagree that technology is "part of us". Amazon isn't a part of me, just a company I shop at. The closest thing we have to "explants" are the platforms we use, like Facebook or WhatsApp. The article seems heavy on buzzwords and light on common-sense. Encrypted messaging is the best solution, to maintain freedom of communication and reduce corporations' influence. That only requires installing Signal or WhatsApp, not "creating a new world".
2) People are not "property". You are free to share what you want. Others are free, too. If you want to work (Naval-style) towards decentralized, encrypted platforms, that's a step in the right direction. Doesn't require buzzwords either.
3) It seems like the article's worldview is based in an even greater influence of technology over our lives (as if the author realized that technology isn't really part of us, but wanted to make it so). The personal cloud would be hosted by "individual organizations", but what makes you think that 1 or 2 orgs won't emerge on top, and cause the exact same problem again?
You've buried an awful lot in that sentence without justifying any of it. I could just as easily say "decentralization and local governance don't work because the world is a complex system" and sound just as correct.
The bigger the banks, the more centralized the banks, the more fragile the banking system. Same for governments. Systemic risk increases as you increase the system's complexity, and you increase its complexity when you centralize it.
Explain what's missing then.
The question is how we maintain decentralization even as all short-term goals push us towards monoculture, and without completely destroying the long-term benefits of large civilization (i.e., I'm not an anarcho-primitivist.) And the only answers I can think of are bizarre and science-fictional, but I suppose that doesn't mean they can't come true.
I think it is rather ironic that the new "left" love them globalization all of the sudden, even when their younger brothers were tear-gassed protesting it, just a decade ago or so protesting against it.
(More discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682260 along with a promising book on the subject, 'The Technological Society' by Jacques Ellul suggested by Drumlin. Still waiting for it to come from Amazon)
The best thing we can do is make sure that whatever power structures we guide into place during that process serve the largest coalition possible.
Maybe none of this is in the interest of factory workers, but that's not what the left is about anymore, and it's not the left's fault either. The world moved on. You will never get the "old left" back. Weakening the influence of corporations will still be popular on the left, but reversing globalization and freedom of movement will hopefully never be a left-wing position again.
The factory-worker type who complains that his job moved to China, while he only buys the cheapest Chinese crap at Walmart, is not the future of the left.
What about the poor Mexican farmer who couldn't make a profit because NAFTA stripped away tariffs of import and he now has little chance except to pay a smuggler to take him up north so he can wash toilets or pick cotton away from his family. Is he the future of the left.
> I grew up in pretty "elite", mostly left-wing circles, who were heavily pro-globalization.
I think it is fair to say that "elite" left-wing circles are probably also not the future of the left either.
> The reason in a nutshell is "freedom".
When were elite's freedom ever restricted? Even in the most restrictive dictatorships elites can fly and spend the weekend in New York shopping.
> you'll be pro-freedom of movement.
That's exactly what the left has been fighting for. The PR twisting of the concept of "freedom". Elites and corporations always talk "but don't you want to be friends with everyone and hold hands and trade". What they mean is they want to be able to move without restriction and tariffs and exploit labor or resources in any country they want. The poor and disenfranchised are precisely even more restricted in the new "globalization". The more companies and elites more around, the more inequality they create and the more restriction, passport controls, visas and the poor get.
That's what welfare and unions are for. Free trade deals are, overall, better for everybody.
The solution is education and retraining, not protectionism. You can see this in South-East Asia, where various countries progressively went from agriculture, to low-tech manufacturing, to high tech, over a few decades. Manufacturing jobs won't come back. Making labor more expensive will just make automation come quicker.
Furthermore, restricting trade will just hurt the US, from a game theory standpoint, since other countries will just compensate by trading more.
> What they mean is they want to be able to move without restriction and tariffs and exploit labor or resources in any country they want.
Globalization doesn't mean letting companies evade taxes. That's a problem that precisely can't be solved individually, and has to be solved on a global level. It can be solved, and is being solved, worldwide.
> When were elite's freedom ever restricted? Even in the most restrictive dictatorships elites can fly and spend the weekend in New York shopping.
That's precisely why the elites are pro-freedom of movement. They couldn't imagine life without it.
> Globalization doesn't mean letting companies evade taxes. That's a problem that precisely can't be solved individually, and has to be solved on a global level. It can be solved, and is being solved, worldwide.
I don't see this as being true at all, and it seem at odds with your earlier point about things "that just can't effectively be solved by bloated entities." There's elements of what you are saying that I agree with (anti-fragility, industrial inertia leading to stagnant workforces, the importance of retraining/education), but on the whole it seems a little one-foot-in-one-foot-out (which may have been intentional, if you're making a subtle point about hedging strategies.)
Again, apologies if I sound obtuse.
You're not, I was thinking of how to reconcile the two comments while writing the second one actually. I see globalization as driven by a) inevitable and b) irreversible trends. Like increasing ease of movement, ease of communication, ease of money transfer (Bitcoin). That doesn't exclude decentralization.
For your first point:
"Decentralization" doesn't necessarily entail every country breaking up into a billion tiny Singapores. It just means decisions being made locally, from the bottom up. In the US, it could look like increased states rights. Want to try libertarianism? Want more refugees? Legal drugs? Go ahead. There wouldn't be half the hysteria if willing states could just opt out of welcoming refugees. They'd keep them out, but that would be that, and there wouldn't be much fuss beyond that. The attitude on the right just would be: "glad we avoided that, why go through the trouble?", instead of moral outrage and self-preservation instincts. In complex governmental systems, you inevitably have coercion, which leads to instability.
Someone in the Northern UK might not meet many immigrants, but he doesn't like the idea of someone from migrant-heavy London voting to bring migrants into his little town, if he views it as a threat. It breeds resentment. Democracies, especially complex ones, have to compromise between millions of voters that each want different things. The more people that want different things from official government policy, the more unrest. If you're in a political minority, there's functionally no difference between a government being democratically elected by a majority that is nothing like you, and an authoritarian regime that's accountable to nobody. In both cases, you're (effectively) not represented (how many Clinton supporters feel represented by Trump?). The larger the scale, the more disparate the population, the more important it is to favor local power structures over national ones.
You know the argument that goes "democracy is just war by another name", and is a very nice thing because it allows for "bloodless revolutions"? That's not the case if the country is too complex (population too disparate) and the government represents only 30% of the country rather than 80% (pretty sure only a quarter of the country voted for Trump, the earlier figure is a reference to that, everyone else probably dislikes him to some extent; and in a functional, ideal country, you may not have voted for the current government, but still don't mind them too much, that's what the 80% refers to).
Not sure you mean by "how we got here". Low growth and economic uncertainty seem necessary for populism. In the EU, the euro is the main cause of that (not an optimal currency area, preventing there from being true freedom of movement for labor, as well as messing up the exchange rates and screwing any country that isn't Germany). I'm very pro-EU (and live there) but there's little doubt in my mind that the euro is responsible for much of the rise in populism here, and it's the quintessential example of something done for small incremental efficiency gains while disregarding the systemic aspects. The Greece situation is already worse than the US Great Depression, and resembles the one between creditors and Germany before WW2. It isn't that bad yet, but the only reason is that they had the euro, so inflation and capital flight couldn't destroy the value of their currency. Yet, in all of history, every multinational currency has eventually collapsed. Greece may not have the euro forever. The current debt loads aren't the only problem: if any country leaves, the destruction of wealth caused by inability to settle TARGET-2 balances might cause a cataclysm. In other words, we increased systemic complexity, and vastly increased systemic risk.
For your second point: you can coordinate to solve global problems, without increasing systemic complexity and risk. In a more decentralized world, you'd have more direct governments, and so populations that really care about "green" would just vote straight for that, and those that don't would eventually have enough smog that they would vote straight for it, too. Right now you have 50+% of the US population that wish US climate policy was more progressive but has exactly 0% of power over those policies. Wouldn't decentralization be better on the whole?
Chomsky interestingly also predicted the influx of immigrants from Mexico after NAFTA years back: https://chomsky.info/secrets03/
For example he mentions:
---
In addition, cheap US agricultural exports are expected to drive several million people off the land. That’s going to mean a substantial increase in the unemployed workforce in Mexico, which of course will drive down wages.
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I think there definitely was an influx of poor farmers being displaced looking for work. That didn't happen as an act of God or just randomly as it may seem. It was predicted and expected.
Movement of people (labor) at the behest of capital (but not freely on their own)—e.g., various employer-sponsored work visas—is often part of that.
> Believing in freedom of movement,
I believe in equality of freedom. So far I haven't seen a lot of poor and disenfranchised being able to move freely. Are you saying Facebook here represents or is a proxy for them and so when it talks about globalization it means anything other than getting more clicks and users who log into it.
> but I think you're swallowing a lot of right-wing lies about what "the left" believes.
I don't listen to much to right wing lies but I don't listen to left wing ones as well. I am happy to not be in either camp. I've always been an outsider. Quite used to it. But here I am trying to even see what left even means anymore. I just made a point that in what "left" means has changed, and I think it is an interesting change.
Elections have become an us vs them thing focusing on a few issues that will divide us, but mostly the population are significantly to the left of both parties in the US on actual issues.
If you described something exactly like Obamacare, but called it Trumpcare it would be super popular with GOP voters and maybe hated by democrat voters.
> The democratic party is to the left of the GOP but to the right of anything else,
I think at least in the PR domain they don't shy away from calling themselves "the left". Which I think it is interesting. And the left (if there is one, and that's separate point to talk) hasn't exactly disavowed or pushed against it too much.
> but called it Trumpcare it would be super popular with GOP voters and maybe hated by democrat voters.
The fascinating thing is Trump has picked up "the concern for the workers", NAFTA and TPP as central talking points and ran with it. That was Democrat's bread-and-butter in the past. I am not sure if it was is sincere or pure opportunism (he did pull out of TPP, so that's something...). But I can't deny that it was a good strategy for him.
Even more interesting to me is to see that as soon as he did those things, the new "left" almost immediately reverted to talk about "how TPP is great" and "NAFTA is a good thing" and workers are just idiots brainwashed by fake news and such.
I was watching Reddit's /r/politics and after TPP pull-out and there were posts explicitly saying "we have to support TPP because Trump is against". There is something fascinating there, I think. Remembering the DNC primaries with TPP signs everywhere. And then few months later "what do you mean, we love the TPP".
There will be less healthcare, less worker protections and less taxes paid by rich people.
The TPP is interesting in that as I understand it was meant to be a big political bargain to fence in China with a lot of concessions give to large cooperations.
Another thing is that free trade in general is good for poor workers somewhere, but unless it comes with some agreement on worker protections they will all be eroded in the long run.
Both left wing and right wing people can find something to like there, it depends on how it is implemented. Kind of like UBI which the far right and the far left in theory agree to, they just use the same name for widely different things.
I'm assuming you mean big-D Democratic Party. When you say American people, what do you mean? A majority? How much of one? What are you basing this on? Polls? If so, which ones? Something else?
I'm pushing a little because the statement seems to lack nuance, which is something I think we so desperately need in American political discourse.
I wish I could give you a better answer, and will concede my documentation is lacking. I do believe this is true based on my conversations with Democrat and GOP voters when living here. Most people are fairly leftist when it comes to specifics, well except paying taxes.
I'm not sure it's even true that the left wing anti-globalization movement is actually smaller rather than better dealt with at events like the G20 and/or perhaps less reported on.
Yes, it's important to note that Hitler started out as a Socialist, at the dawn of Socialist thought. He differed with them on the idea of globalization and multiculturalism. As it turns out that's a pretty huge ideological split, and in Hitler's case, it became a violent one. He basically said: "screw you guys, I'm going to start my own Socialist Party - with blackjack, and hookers. And racial purity, global war, and genocide."
That's why you get rightwingers accusing the Left of being "Nazis" because the "Z" in the NAZI acronym stood for the German word for Socialism.
As the Nazis began to gain ground in Germany; they used propaganda tools to tell Germans what they wanted to hear: "you're a 'master race', and all others are inferior", and "We'll get rid of these foreign influences, and degenerates of other races, who are the cause of all your problems!"
At the time, REAL socialists ran counter protests, and would even riot at Nazi meetings and demonstrations, and there was a lot of civil violence over this issue. (Which is today, romanticized heavily by the far-left, anarchist, and 'antifa' movements). In their minds, WWII was a large-scale playing out of this conflict, between Soviet Socialists, and German Nazis, who lost. The result was the bombing of much of Europe (and especially Berlin) to Rubble. Millions dead.
The rise of America's free-enterprise system was seen as a repudiation of these two extremes of thought (Socialism vs Nazism). And became an extreme viewpoint all it's own. It became what the Socialists, and Nazis were rebelling against, and now we're repeating the whole thing all over again.
I think anyone who thinks they are "left wing" AND anti-globalist, is ignorant of history, and quite confused. Part of that is due to the anti-globalist propaganda, which mostly uses the argument: "these foreigners are causing all your problems - let's build a wall and get rid of them". (can't really argue for 'racial superiority'; because it's so easily disproven - very nearly nobody who thinks they're "Aryan" can actually trace their ancestry back long enough to make a case that they're not a mongrel just like the rest of us - the only way they can accept this ideology is to be in denial).
But what I find most interesting about this reply/rant, is that it - like most of left, always seems to envision a world without power. And you can't confront entrenched power, without seizing power, and using it to transform society.
The left recognizes, correctly, that the people in power - the leaders - are not angels. So the left wants them gone - wants there to be nobody in power.
The problem is that the people who are not in power also are not angels. Left to themselves, a fair number of them will find ways to harm (economically or even physically) people around them. They need someone with power to restrain them.
But then you're back to having people in power, and they're not angels...
The way I see it, left doesn't want people to have power. So it limits politician's power. And then, the financial/corporate interest seize all powers, and use it as they will.
But any legal fiction can be simply signed-away into non-existence. There is no technical reason this can't happen. In theory.
The problem is, there is no political will to ever actually do it, even when it's necessary. Our entire facade of legality rests on political willpower.
This isn't to say that such a world is easy to imagine, or easy to bring about.
Fuck that.
This guy wants a world like Craigslist, but Airbnb already taught us that free and p2p is easily subsumed by slick and centralized.
In BitTorrent and Usenet we've had great, free p2p media distribution for years. How does iTunes, Netflix and the rest compete? By doing all the evil, centralized, corporate stuff -- like advertising -- the pirates won't do because pirates have morals.
I'd also submit that even if you trust Zuckerberg to be a benevolent king, he won't be king forever. He may grow bored of Facebook and move on, have an untimely accident or a poor diagnosis...these are all events that can put all things Facebook in the hands of somebody far less (presumably) benevolent.
Imagine it in the hands of a Larry Ellison. Or Martin Shkreli. Or Keith Alexander. Or Dick Cheney, if you will.
facebook needs to be torn down. It is a toxic apparatus, being used against the population.
Just saying.
Mark is just the last incarnation of people that scratched the social itch. If Facebook failed, we'd still have G+ or MySpace. At this point, he seems like an inevitability.
And the names I listed are just examples; my point remains that one cannot predict who will hold the reins in the future. We can debate how much of a monster Zuckerberg may be, but I'm convinced that there can be somebody much worse in charge.
I think the most productive thing most of us can do in the short term is to convince everyone we know to stop using that platform.
Mark Zuckerberg and others like him do what they do best, it's up to the 'masses' to develop critical thinking about their everyday actions and impacts. It's easy to blame the Emperor, much more difficult to admit our part in putting him into power.
Thus, once we acknowledge this simple fact, we can also CHOOSE not to use it anymore.
That's the core of my point I tried to make originally.
Thanks for your patience and feedback.
And the harping on that choice is, by people much more malicious than you, designed to disempower movements to rein in organizations like Facebook, because--hey, people can just not use it. (Even though choosing to not use it doesn't do anything.)
You're providing cover for a narrative that wants to hurt you.
But in reference to this quote:
>The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.
That's going a little far, filter bubbles and propaganda have existed since forever. The public sphere was never a panacea for these problems. Certainly with facebook and social media it's changed the whole landscape, and perhaps made it worse given what happened during the last election. But returning social interactions to the public sphere isn't going to entirely fix the dissemination of fake news or suddenly pop the filter bubbles we live in.
If social media were outlawed tomorrow it might weaken filter bubbles, but a suburban upper middle class republican from Kansas is still going to be getting way different info and building a much different world view than a barista in Brooklyn would.
I'm not sure the kinds of bubbles we have aren't brand new. The bubbles used to map pretty closely to geography and political structures. The bubbles now are oriented around where our information lives, not where we physically are.
Also, I think you're overstepping with 'panacea'. I don't think anyone who believes in decentralized life thinks universal panaceas even necessarily exist. But it can still be true that central planning has displaced local living without fulfilling all the same purposes. And if so, the result could be a net negative.
It doesn't need to be entirely fixed. There's no need to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I think that the "private infrastructure posing as public space" is a real and serious problem. When all complaints of censorship/manipulation/etc on a social media site of any reasonable size is thoughtlessly brushed aside with "their site, their rules", that is a very unhealthy environment being created.
I hadn't read Zuck's manifesto until now. I literally laughed out loud reading it. It makes me wonder if he ever actually looks at the news feeds regular people see.
The reason I quit Facebook was precisely because its uninformed and non-inclusive. From what my wife tells me, nothing has changed. Like-minded people reinforce each other and people with conflicting viewpoints just argue.
I hope Zuck at least has good intentions with his post and he's just slightly short-sighted.
Another person who has been talking in this way is the philosopher Bernard Steigler, he uses this term 'general organology' in an attempt to rehabilitate our technological entanglements from the skeptical cul-de-sac demonstrated by the OP and supported by most recent philosophy (e.g. Adorno, Debord, although crucially not Walter Benjamin)
Although I am sure he would be equally vitriolic about FB the general overview of Steigler's thought here is a neat compliment to the POV of the OP.
http://nootechnics.org/general-organology-the-co-individuati...
I have corrupted this angle a little bit and tried to treat Facebook with kid gloves here:
https://iainmait.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.htm...
This is Urbit.
So when I see zuck going on about revolutions I have to wonder where he gets his information. Does he really think a large and growing percentage of the planet uses his website for everyday tasks? That's marketing spin. I think reality is much more humble.
Yes. Because it's true. Facebook has more than a BILLION active users. Let that sink in for a minute.
Frankly, if something I made had reached even 5% of the whole human population, I'd consider that freaking huge! Hell, I can't even imagine what it's like to have that much influence.
Don't get me wrong: I dislike FB too, I don't use it, and I lobby against it when it comes up. But it is, unfortunately, rather big.
1. Address book, messaging (FB & Whatsapp)
2. News
3. Buying/selling through a newish marketplace feature
4. Event organisation (events & groups)
5. Promoting business and communicating with customers (B2C and vice versa through enabling messenger feature for a page)