Technology is making the world more unequal; only technology can fix this | Hacker News Reader

Technology is making the world more unequal; only technology can fix this

theguardian.com

78 pointsa_w28 comments

Guys. He's saying that while technology made it easy for elites to protect themselves, it's also begun making it easy for groups undermining those elites. An example of the former is how easy dragnet surveillance is today. An example of the latter is how easy cryptographically secure communication is today. That's the entire essay.

There's some rubbish going on in this comment section about fundamentalist Islam but it's not an important part of the article. Spare yourself the discussion.

Wikileaks is based on this insight.

Here is a very interesting perspective on Assange thinking.

"... according to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary. ..."

Another interesting tidbit:

"...This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:..."

https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-a...

"An example of the former is how easy dragnet surveillance is today. An example of the latter is how easy cryptographically secure communication is today. That's the entire essay."

This is the common claim. It's also super simplistic given elites control the law, the Internet backbone, the entertainment industry, copyright/patent system, and often venture capital that decides which tech will dominate next. That's why most people are on Windows, iMessage, Android, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. The incentives for and ambitions of startup founders also mean they will not likely make the system more equal with their next innovation since their goal is getting as far ahead of everyone else as possible.

The percentage that have influence over markets, are aimed at improved equality/privacy/security, and setup to stay that way are so small they make successful startups look common. Tech can help change the situation but overall a tiny part of doing so. It will take legal, political, or other muscle targeted right at the elites and their control structures.

Yeah this article's a bit mixey.

Side note: You know I have a Saudi friend who told me that it's incredibly patronising when the 'West' talk so much about their (lack of) rights, like as if they're so helpless and living such miserable lives ... they're practically reduced to the very black figures they were criticised to be.

> because its inventor was stuck indoors waiting for her “male guardian” to drive her somewhere

But yeah. Things are changing even in Saudi Arabia.. http://m.gulfnews.com/news/gulf/saudi-arabia/saudi-prince-su...

He mentions Islam twice (he circles back around to it), so it is an important part of the article. Besides, what is militant Islam but the most effective harnessing of technology to undermine elites there is? To ignore that is to ignore a very practical example of this at play.

Militant Islam is very useful to elites. The U.S. particularly constantly screws around in the Middle East supporting groups that later become terrorist targets of ours. The biggest offenders have the U.S. governments' hands all over them before they became that. The U.S. protects Saudi Arabia and gives military aid despite them harboring top promoters of terrorism. The media and U.S. government here constantly warn people about terrorism with the defense contractors making billions from that and powermongers getting all kinds of laws such as Patriot Act passed when people were afraid. They also like doing this with threats from drug dealers, kidnappers, and pedophiles. There's even a meme for it they do it so much on Internet side:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Not sure how it undermines elites? In fact it could be playing into their hands, as a scared population will vote for more draconian measures.

Technology improvement: Ranked Choice voting

Political impediment: Dismantles the two party system and its vested interests.

Technology improvement: Algorithmic redistricting

Political impediment: Eliminates a strategic job security system for already-elected politicians.

Technology improvement: Cryptography

Political impediment: Eliminates a surveillance and control mechanism of politicians.

This is why we need some form of limited direct democracy. Politicians will never vote for something that directly or indirectly contradicts their own personal self interest. They won't vote for shorter term limits, bans on insider trading, stronger 4th amendment protections, ranked choice voting, objectively neutral redistricting, etc. Technology can only help us to the extent that policy and politics allow it.

First, Ranked Choice is not a single election strategy; it depends how you handle the case when your top choice is not elected. You are probably thinking of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), where the bottom choice is eliminated and everyone who picked that candidate as their top choice gets their votes transferred to their next choices respectively.

IRV is better than our current system, but not by that much. Range (aka Score) Voting -- where you give each candidate a score from 1-10, like a judge in the olympics -- is much better. http://rangevoting.org/ (alias: http://scorevoting.net/) has a wealth of information on this topic, albeit in a website straight outta 2005.

These are all great points. In some cases, ballot initiatives offer some hope. Check out Represent.US - they're using ballot initiatives to push for things voters support but elected leaders often don't.

Check out California to see the sheer lunacy of the ballot system in action. Voter apathy combined with an incredibly uninformed voting population, and on top of that the inability to make any political modifications to a prop once it's passed? Yeah. Brilliant plan for populism, but otherwise not so good.

It gave us prop 8, written deliberately confusing to sway the vote. It gave us prop 47, which was a truckload of measures, many good, some horrible. Resulting in a huge increase in property crimes, which was a side effect that you'd only realize if you actually read the damn thing instead of the summary. Voters don't have that attention span. It gave us prop 69, essentially a state-run DNA database - into which you're entered on arrest instead of conviction. Because "but the children" always sells.

Or Brexit where people voted as a sign of protest, not because they wanted it. People who voted for it were surprised it passed.

"The notion that many people who voted "Leave" in the EU referendum now regret their vote because they didn't think "Leave" would win or they didn't realise the consequences of leaving the Single Market would be so bad." [1]

I think many of the problems of representative democracy stem from the fact that people don't read the bills, and they dont check their representatives voting history. Direct democracy seems much worse in that regard.

1. http://www.businessinsider.com/brexit-vote-regret-leave-marg...

Edit: added additional thought

These are great suggestions, but they beg the question of how do we achieve some form of limited direct democracy?

Arguably, we don't. The people who are currently supported by representative democracy wouldn't like that to happen. Having direct democracy with instant recall of delegates will likely not be accomplished any time soon, due to "the powers that be" lobbying against it. And if it ever were to succeed, they'd up the advertising game to mislead and misinform people more than is already done.

Perhaps I am cynical, but I do not believe that a system which benefits the average person, the vast majority, can be accomplished in a system where the profit motive exists which is in most cases a direct contravention to the long-term wills of humanity, that is, our safe continued existence, and maintaining a relatively free way of life.

Edit: also worth looking at what has happened with previous campaigns to make the voting system fairer; in the the UK, the alternative vote referendum was opposed by those parties which drew large gains from FPTP, namely the Conservative Party. Their website compared the AV to a system in which your child wins an egg and spoon race, but he isn't given the trophy.

In other words, it's the technology stupid.

I wouldn't claim it's making it more unequal though but rather it pushes the "highlander principle" on any industry or nation that becomes "technologized".

Contrary to locally based businesses or nations like restaurants or several states in ex. Africa where technology doesn't have access, in a technology driven groupings there mostly can be one and a few runner ups far far down.

But yeah the way out of the problems of technology is trough technology. I wonder if not jumping onto the technology bandwagon will render som nations obsolete in a few years.

> While Saudi hydrocarbonism denies humanity to women, American hydrocarbonism denies credibility to climate scientists.

Heh, nice word.

The core premise is false. The world is becoming less unequal, not more. Technology is assisting that. That trend has been - aggressively - ongoing for decades. The world is the most equal it has been in recorded history, almost entirely thanks to the rapid spread of technology that began in the developed world and was quickly adopted down the chain economically. The Gates Foundation expends a fair bit of effort every year trying to correct this line of ignorance, it appears to not be making a dent in the problem.

One cannot omit policy as a driving force.

Interesting read. I expected something more focused on post-scarcity societies and automation.

Some thoughts cause I'm bored:

* There are a lot of parallels to Acemoglu and Robinson and their Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which puts a strong emphasis on inequality. This seems like a decent review:

http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/2006/01/book_rev...

* "Forming and coordinating groups is the hard problem of the human condition; the reason we have religions and corporations and criminal undergrounds and political parties."

Weirdly contradictory, if forming groups is hard, why are there so many religions, corporations, etc? Forming groups seems to be exceedingly easy and it is perhaps human to want to be part of something larger even if its nonsensical or bad for us.

* "Of course, the power of crypto to organise surveillance-resistant communications lines protects everyone from the coercive power of states: not just nice activist groups that want a fairer society, but also whacked-out white supremacists and Islamophobic conspiracy theorists."

Kind of feels weird to take a shot at "Islamophobic conspiracy theorists" when Islamic terrorist groups are the very "insurgent groups" he's talking about and probably as effective as any other group at using this tech.

Finally, just kind of disagree with the premise. If tech made the Saudis rich, if it is empowering the Zuckerbergs and the Erdogans of the world, then there's nothing inherently good about it. Technology only gets applied within a larger social context, which is why it's not the tech that matters but the civic institutions and social morality which discourages invasions of personal rights and greed which are what really matter. Robert Putnam has some really interesting stuff on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

I also like the part where:

1. Fundamentalist Islam is a "delusional superstition".

2. "Modern insurgent groups" -- the most famous of which all follow the said "delusional superstition" -- are the good guys.

3. Even though fundamentalist Islam is a "delusional superstition," "Islamophobic conspiracy theorists" are still "whacked out".

And Doctorow probably sees himself as religiously tolerant, despite all this. This is why you want to check on your beliefs from time to time, to make sure they're not contradictory.

(And I forgot to mention the part where Saudi Arabia's wealth comes from technology; Doctorow's using "technology" to mean Internet technology, high-bandwidth transmission, and the like, not oil wells and internal-combustion engines.)

Am I the only one reading this article as needlessly anti-Islam? I'm not Muslim, but I certainly wouldn't attack their faith as "delusional superstitions".

Delusion and superstition is a large part of most religions. It's legitimate to criticize Islam for this, especially considering that morally questionable applications of Islam - such as Sharia - directly reference superstition.

If we accept that more accurate representations of reality generally lead to better outcomes, then criticism effectively becomes a moral imperative.

Or at least single it out for that treatment... I think the more difficult problem with Doctorow's criticism specifically is the degree to which many Saudi women support the system. Are there also critics? Yes, of course, and I personally hope they make the kind of social changes the article champions. But it's not really something that can be forced on them from the outside.

I don't think he's talking about Islam in general, he's talking about Wahhabism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism

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