How India, the World's Largest Democracy, Shuts Down the Internet
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
"India, the World's Largest Democracy, Shuts Down the Internet " - False.
"India, the World's Largest Democracy, Shuts Down the Internet in the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan " (they had it blocked for entire state of Jammu and Kashmir) where terror attacks are (were?) a norm, specially in Kashmir
Even if only for a relatively small region, this government blocked access to information and communications.
Edit: I mention this to call out the tendency of this government to use internet access cuts to suppress dissent regularly as a powerful tool.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/internet-shutdown-...
Some more context: The Internet was cut off in regions where protestors resorted to violence. And usually, the violence here doesn't just mean fighting among people. It involves burning buses and destroying public property.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...
https://morungexpress.com/index.php/mayhem-bengal-anti-caa-p...
There was no internet shutdown in cities like Mumbai and Pune where protestors remained peaceful.
It's an interesting thought experiment what those tools would be like.
Maybe something like freenet mixed with ipfs over a wifi mesh network? Not sure how that would work with that much latency.
You could have throwaway wifi dropboxes to propagate between people.
One project I read about was a raspberry pi wifi "grenade". It boots off a usb with the encryption key then it runs off a ramdisk. Then you "pull the pin" and leave it. If it's discovered then nobody can analyze it to find out what it was doing or who it was communicating with.
Regardless of the proposed merits of the shutdowns (I don't consider them valid), the concept of this is horrifying.
"Update 27 January 2020: News reports state that India's government has restored Internet access to the Kashmir region"
RESTORED (albeit partially)
It's also worth noting that this started in August 2019.
I've also read about still using the usb sticks or something similar for the transport but using ipfs or dat so you can propagate updates to files, eg an archive of news or resistance communications.
You could actually do this with carrier pigeons.
I realize states typically have full autonomy w/r/t 'fighting terror', but the economic implications for just about everything seem like this could result in all kinds of lawsuits and also wouldn't be tenable from the perspective of 'political capital'
1. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-s-police-force-amo...
Whatever happened with the idea of a future where corporations would be truly transnational and would have private armies and police forces and such and really dwarf governments in power? ...it sounded like a dystopia back then, but nowadays I'd really wish we'd be in that variant of the future instead of the current one!
And the government structures of mega-corporations will by necessity dilute into some techno-algorithmic-cyber-socio-capitalism thingy that would likely be uncomprehensible to us from our current view point. Authoritarian regimes as you can see in the world today rise mainly in small nation states! Also in places with low-information-bandwidth! You can dilute autocracy out of existence in a big enough entity where the decision making is technical by necessity because it needs to optimize a numeric output: profit. (Reason: the complexity of technical decision goes beyond the computing capacities of one mind, so you get dilution by technical necessity... true, not "democracy" by any means, but something that could be mathematically similar enough to it.)
Anyway, if other ways to keep communication and transport infrastructure out of the hands of nations could be seen maybe they'd work better. The point would be to enact "separation of powers" at the next scale/level of humanity - separate "communication, transport/mobility and trade powers" from "government and administration powers". (Separating mobility part would also "open the market" and create healthy competition between governments as some people start moving around and "shopping" for a better nation. Over time, you'd end up with better products in the "states & nations" aisle of the world supermarket.)
The end game is increased freedom and prosperity opportunities for all. It's just that I don't think that we're going to get this by looking at what worked or didn't work in the past - the future will not be at all like the past, we may not have reached "the singularity" or whatever, but we're staring at a big dark wall of unpredictibility regarding the future, and our previous experience is mostly worthless at seeing through it, we need to really really think far outside the box at how we can get what we want.
> pseudo-anarchic libertarian
a feudal warlord system is neither 'anarchic' nor 'libertarian'
You'd get the freedom & liberty that you'd get in a loosely managed empire at the bottom of it's power pyramid, because the "top of the pyramid" would focus on profit and growth, not bother imposing strict rules towards the bottom, and would favor open borders and open trade for reasons of efficiency optimization.
States would keep their power functioning as "providers of order" and "regulators of religion, culture etc.", but whenever they'd try to restrict the flow of goods or information, the "outer gods" would come down and give them a good whooping.
Also, the natural tendency would be to have the decision making of these corporations more and more automated and diluted/distributed (the media-focusing founders' power would eventually dilute in big corporate cauldrons), until step by step they'd actually become non-human, half-biological AGIs in effect, using humans inside them as components, solving the annoying problem of having "other humans" ordering you from the top of the pyramid. Sure, the power transition needs to be gradual to avoid violence, but this is the road towards "crafting our gods". Nation states, as you'll start to see more and more, will try to restrict, regulate and slow down technological progress, even at the cost of their own (and of all of us) economic impoverishment.
Probably a good lesson to be learned from BEIC for future transnational megacorps: (1) keep your focus on making profit and growing (growing in the do-lots-of-R&D to increase your technological supremacy sense - you probably can't grow marketshare after you're already a monopoly), (2) let governments do the "drawing borders" and maintaining local civil order part, and (3) diversity, diversity, diversity - if all your owners are from one nation and one social-class / race / whatever, you'll be phagocytized or subverted by that nation and/or sub-group.
An entity over which no government has effective power is a government, whether it calls itself that or not.
> Under a few big "Unbrella Co."-s you could have a nice pseudo-anarchic libertarian global system.
No, you couldn't. Because if its under a few whatevers, its not any relative of anarchic. Those things its under, that's the -archy.
If, collectively with other 1000 board members, "own" 1 billion people, you're part of an "elite power structure", and you can do a lot of things to make the lives of those people better - you'll still want your profits, but by having a monopoly on some things you know that no rival can put you out of business so you can relax a bit...
-archy's nature is changed by scale just like everything else, we're not fractals!
We have a couple elite power structures that rule over ~ a billion people, they don't seem all that relaxed and pseudo-anarchic. I don't see how them having a formal profit interest and being named “corporation” rather than “state” is likely to change that.
Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning.
Maybe drop the "corporations" name, just call them "global orgs", since a few of them could also be not-for-profit (but allowed to self-finance, and to maintain forces of self-defense) and handle "global responsibility" issues like oceans pollution, climate issues etc. Other would be for-profit could focus on providing communications infrastructure, people transit security services etc.
In the end the total amount of power could end up even more split up, or maybe a little bit more concentrated but across different borders at different layers (mostly avoiding overlapping the borders of the state level below to the ones of the layers above), some even completely non-physical/non-geographical, maybe "bordered" by different purposefully-non-trivial-to-exchange crypto-currencies.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, the core idea was not "corporations" as we know them, neither concentration of power - just that we'd need self-financing and self-defense-capable trans-national organisms that would be better fitted for providing naturally-global services like communications.
Doesn't work as a stable state; if you want corporations to be effectively independent of government cpntrol you can't split the powers up this way. Because those functions alone don't make something independent of the power of entities retaining the monopoly on violence, which is the defining feature of government.
To make corporations independent of the power of nominal governments, they have to either be an exception to or replace the nominal governments’ monopoly on violence, making them either components of or replacements for government. And once they share or solely exercise that power, they can't be kept out of every other domain. And if there is more than one of them, they will compete.
But I don't think that's how it works at all. Things are stable when people believe they are stable, that's it. Just like speculative prices in markets. Communism and socialism sort of worked for the short stretches of time that people were true believers in them - imo it failed bc it contradicted human psychology so the belief couldn't last. Capitalism is stable bc people believe in it, probably bc it matches better our competitive and aggressive psychology.
If the Overton-window shifts to a place where people can start believing that "global orgs" can be stable, they will be stable. Maybe it's more complicated, maybe that place is pretty strange and far away. But I wouldn't think so, it's only needed that one proof-of-concept implementation starts to be believed as stable and beneficial, and then the pattern can be propagated through a chain reaction of people betting more and more on it and then fighting to protect the outcome they've betted on.
Think the French Revolution and the ensuing toppling of most monarchies throughout Europe - that's probably the best model we have for a process like this, just that instead of toppling you'd hopefully have transformation (think modern parliamentary monarchies like the UK, which successfully transformed), and it worked out for the better in the end :)
I think that there is ample historical evidence that (1) the set of institutions together exercising a monopoly on legitimate force tend to merge into a single institution and, (2) that institution or set of institutions (even without yet having merged) tends to exercise broad compulsory power without any stable limits on domain.
> Communism and socialism sort of worked for the short stretches of time that people were true believers in them
When did socialism (as distinct from Communism) stop working? Heck, Communism (even specifically the branch rooted in Leninism) is as alive as capitalism. (That is, there remain systems that identify themselves that way that still exist, despite being radically different from the original form.)
> Capitalism is stable bc people believe in it
Capitalism is not stable (the thing now called capitalism is not very much like the thing initially called capitalism, which lasted about a century after being named.) Capitalism is mistaken for stable because people have developed feelings around the name, and just keep calling whatever the dominant economic model of the developed West is “capitalism”.