I was going to comment on just the recent use of unmarked federal agents in Portland. I never thought that within the single term of US president things could swing so far. I used to question how it happened in WWI/II, but now I see it first hand.
As for Portland, that appears to be an unusual use of Federal authority, but as far as I can tell, they actually do have relatively sweeping legal authority, even if it's not often exercised (see the lawfare blog for some analysis thereof) and everyone is being processed in the regular court system. So it's not exactly the case of being "disappeared" that some reports claimed.
One article had an account of someone abducted, searched, and released, and then the authorities said they did not have records of arresting him. If there's no records, it's not the regular court system, even if it happened in the court building.
It's not clear to me what other records they would have in that case and again, this isn't exactly being "disappeared" given that they were turned over to the police for processing and then released without charges. Sounds more to me like some cops were lazy with the paperwork when they were going to release them anyhow.
The feds have wide-ranging authority to arrest people and always have, though:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-heck-are-federal-law-enforc...
If that happened to someone you were walking with and they left you there, wouldn't you call police and report that your friend was abducted?
Also, the government officials have claimed the people weren't arrested, and my understanding (which could easily be wrong) is being detained by law enforcement means you're not permitted to leave, not that you must go with them, so I'm out of words.
http://opb-imgserve-production.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaw...
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It appears that the State has largely backed away from any argument that the federal agents were not at all identifiable as law enforcement. Mr. Pettibone acknowledges that their uniforms said “Police,” Pettibone Decl. [1-1] ¶ 3, and the video shows agents wearing clothing clearly marked as “Police.”
One antidote to hate and fear is laughter and play; see for example Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, author of "Homo Ludens" (who was eventually held in detention by the Nazis): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens
And playfulness and laughter can be regained: https://myshrink.com/dont-laugh-anymore/ "If your nervous system activation increases over your lifetime, chances are you'll lose your capacity for spontaneous laughter. Those folks who notice the difference in themselves might say they are "tapped out" or "I don't feel like myself". Indeed, there's some folks who've never had the ability for a good laugh to begin with. Don't despair. Just because you don't laugh anymore doesn't mean that can't be changed - it's temporary - unless you decide to do nothing about it."
I've started watching the original "The Prisoner" series again ( https://archive.org/details/The_Prisoner ) and reading comments on it. It is becoming clearer that ultimately, fifty years after that series first aired, we are all part of a global village now... For good or bad, we are part of that system -- and there is essentially no possibility of "escape" because that system in some form is everywhere.
And seeing the Prisoner series again decades later -- informed by some comments -- it is also clearer the series does not take an absolutist stand on one side or the other of the free-seeming individual or the structured-seeming community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner "A major theme of the series is individualism, as represented by Number Six, versus collectivism, as represented by Number Two and the others in the Village. McGoohan stated that the series aimed to demonstrate a balance between the two points."
From the second Prisoner episode, "The Chimes of Big Ben" which I re-watched today: https://subslikescript.com/series/The_Prisoner-61287/season-...
Number Six: You're just as much a prisoner as I am.
Number Two: Of course, I know too much - we're both lifers. I am an optimist. It doesn't matter who Number One is. It doesn't matter which side runs the Village. It's run by one side. But both sides are becoming identical. What has been created is an international community, a blueprint for world order. When both sides realise they're the same, they'll see this is the pattern for the future.
Number Six: The whole earth as the Village?
Number Two: That is my hope. What's yours?
Number Size: To be the first man on the moon.
For example, the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek is essentially a surveillance state where the computer knows everything everyone is doing all the time -- but somehow we don't see the series through that surveillance state lens. Perhaps that is in part because of the amazing opportunities that cheap energy, matter replicators, space travel, holographic simulations, and so on make possible through widespread abundance for all Federation citizens in that (still) fictional universe? Or perhaps also it is because the surveillance is somehow behind some sort of assumed legitimate authority of access and (virtual) privacy?
See also on the issue of surveillance and power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society "The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy."
The recent unrest in the USA is emerging not from surveillance by the police of the citizenry but (via cell phones) from surveillance by the citizenry of the police (and what some specific police officers did to George Floyd).
A related touchstone by Manuel De Landa: "Meshworks, Hierachies, and Interfaces": http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
Theodore Sturgeon's 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu"(which inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext, and in a way eventually led to the World Wide Web) also has an interesting take on privacy in a world where people are surrounded with networked technology. Audio: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 Text: https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_195...
I suggest the only justified criterion of authority and rule of law emerges from a high-performance liquid democracy built on infrastructures owned by the people. Those in power have little egoistic reason to enable that thing to evolve. Spontaneous mass cooperation that radically leverages webs of epistemic trust toward maximizing the utility of the those at the bottom appears to be our only hope; I do not predict it.
As your point implies, authority is given by the people. The same point is made in the US Declaration of Independence about "consent of the governed": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed
As is shown (fictionally) in Voyage from Yesteryear, if many people stop obeying like with a general strike (at least until full automation) or just by walking away to new opportunities in a different part of the system, then authority comes under pressure to respond (hopefully positively) or it will eventually will collapse. A similar point is made in the chapter on the "Ghands" in the 1962 sci-fi novel the The Great Explosion" by Eric Frank Russell who live by the adage "Freedom can say "I won't"".
The same has been true throughout human history as explained in Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure" where he shows how centralized governance has collapsed many times in human history as whatever problems emerged in it (often from external pressures like droughts or plagues leading to systemic stress) caused most people to just walk away back to the wilderness to live off the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Civilization
For good or bad, walking away is not much of an option these days given large populations, global surveillance, and also WMDs like nukes and plagues and so on that could be unleashed accidentally or on purpose if power centers collapse.
Collapse of power centers in modern times is also often problematical regarding what comes next -- when most people can't walk away -- is usually the next-best organized group taking over. For example, students in Iran could eventually overthrow the US-installed Sha -- but then better-organized religious hardliners took over in the resulting power vacuum (which is probably not what most Iranian students had in mind for their future). Or, as other examples, the USA could relatively easily overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi in Libya -- but the resulting power vacuums have created politician and humanitarian disasters which have been very costly to the USA (especially in Iraq, costing trillions of dollars to US taxpayers -- although as a bunch of defense companies have made billions that may have been part of why it went forward despite many people pointing out what was likely to happen: https://www.wanttoknow.info/warisaracket ).
Related humor: "Monty Python: What have the Romans ever done for us?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djZkTnJnLR0
Of course, power centers also tend to actively disrupt any possible other power centers. See the "Old Guy" Cybertank novels for some graphic sci-fi accounts of that in one.
Or for the real world, see for example Noam Chomsky's "The Threat of a Good Example": http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.h... "No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ... As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars. There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" "
As you say, people in power have little reason to embrace change -- since their power derives from the status quo. Related on "Orthodoxy" by G. K. Chesteron: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.x.html "We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. ..."
Classically, people have "organized" via a certain sort of social process, such as documented in "Politics the Wellstone Way: How to Elect Progressive Candidates and Win on Issues": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/234876.Politics_the_Well...
One can wonder how effective such classical organizing is anymore given tightly controlled (by money) major broadcast media. And even if that was somehow circumvented, then as with Bernie Sanders (twice), the establishment has other ways of preserving itself like by convincing candidates to drop out of the race.
Then there are other possible ways of disrupting such organizations vulnerable to things like, say, small plane crashes involving key organizers. Wellstone died in a small plane crash, which of course might have just been an accident despite suggestions to the contrary: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/10/well-o29.html "Wellstone’s death comes almost two years to the day after a similar plane crash killed another Democratic Senate hopeful locked in a tight election contest, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, on October 16, 2000. The American media duly noted the “eerie coincidence,” as though it was a statistical oddity, rather than suggesting a pattern. One might say, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, that to lose one senator is a misfortune, but to lose two senators, the same way, is positively suspicious."
Another idea other than "organizing" that fits with what you wrote on spontaneous mass cooperation is "quorum sensing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing "In biology, quorum sensing is the ability to detect and to respond to cell population density by gene regulation. As one example, quorum sensing (QS) enables bacteria to restrict the expression of specific genes to the high cell densities at which the resulting phenotypes will be most beneficial. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In a similar fashion, some social insects use quorum sensing to determine where to nest. Also, quorum sensing might be useful for cancer cell communications too. In addition to its function in biological systems, quorum sensing has several useful applications for computing and robotics. In general, quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system in which the components have: (a) a means of assessing the number of other components they interact with and (b) a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected."
Ultimately, if systems of power refuse to negotiate new terms for support by the governed when circumstances change, either they will be successful at suppressing dissent by whatever means or they won't. But if centers of power are going to fail, the longer they fight change, often the worse the failure, and the less the existing power may have a say in the new order (for good or bad).
Still, in the past, some power centers (typically organized around control of a key resource like water) have lasted for thousands of years (such as the Egyptian Empire) -- so people in power can always hope they will be part of the next Ancient Egypt. As G. William Domhoff writes regarding "four main organizational networks -- ideological, economic, military, and political -- as the building blocks for power structures": https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/theory/four_networks.html "Before civilizations emerged, there may have been "inverted power structures" in which the rank-and-file could discipline would-be dominators through gossip, scorn, shunning, and if need be, assassination (Boehm, 1999). Only where river flooding allowed the possibility of alluvial agriculture, in conjunction with close proximity to geographical areas that encouraged different but complementary networks, did the "caging" of populations make possible the development of the fixed power structures of domination and exploitation that have characterized all civilizations. The strong egalitarian tendencies that characterized pre-historic social groups were submerged when power seekers could build on a religious, economic, military, or political base to gain control of others."
I've been hopeful for a Universal Basic Income eventually to soften the worst extremes of the USA's current economic system for many people (as part of a healthy mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned activities in society). But given that the obvious solution was not tried on an even temporary basis for the pandemic despite multiple congress people endorsing monthly payments for the duration, it seems like the USA is still not quite there yet -- even if closer than ever, given increased public awareness of the idea. For example Kamala Harris: https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1271151635549556736 "Roughly 44M Americans have filed for unemployment over the past 12 weeks. That’s why @BernieSanders, @EdMarkey & I introduced a bill to give $2,000 monthly payments to people throughout this crisis. Bills didn’t stop just because we’re in the middle of a pandemic."
Rashida Tlaib, AOC, and other Congressional representatives have similar ideas. Instead of those ideas, the USA quickly threw trillions of dollars at wealthy people: https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-bailouts-tradit...
G. William Domhoff has some other interesting thing to on his website, stuff sometimes many years old, like: https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_why.html "Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up. On a less positive note, many ordinary white workers have priorities that they put ahead of economic issues. As all voting and field studies show, a large number of average white Americans do many things based on their skin color. They often vote Republican, for example, especially in the South. They protest against affirmative action programs. They live in segregated neighborhoods. White Americans also often vote their religion -- that is, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics who vote Republican are members of non-college-educated blue-collar and white-collar families. In terms of their economic situation, and their need for unions, they should be for the Democrats, but many of them aren't. It is these alternative issues, both positive and negative, rooted in their own lives and experiences, not a false consciousness created by the capitalists' ideological hegemony, that explain why most Americans don't rebel -- or even vote their pocketbook -- most of the time. In short, the theorists of consciousness may be serious thinkers, and they work at a level that is very attractive to most leftists, but they are wrong when it comes to understanding why positive social change does not happen. They have misconstrued the problem, which has to do with structures of power and life circumstances and the compelling nature of everyday life, not the chains of consciousness. They have misunderstood everyday people, and in effect blamed them for the failures of the left, even though at the theoretical level it seems like they are blaming the overwhelming powers of the dominant class or power elite. They have made the people the problem instead of considering the possibility that what the left offers does not make any sense to most people."
Outrage and destruction resulting from unhappiness and stress is one thing; coherent collective action to some positive ends is another. Destruction is relatively easy compared to making things better. It's OK to be angry or sad as recent protesters in the USA must be feeling, but as Mr. Fred Rogers sings, "What do you do with the Mad that you feel?" And as Domhoff suggests, that can be a difficult question about how to change things to make them better for more people without making things worse for lots more other people.
If you ever drive south a few hours, and would be up for meeting for dinner, coffee, a beer, whatever, let me know. It would be my honor to meet you offline too.
I would like to know your dreams, your wild speculations, and your gut feelings about what the post-scarcity world should look like and how it might come to be.
Communism doesn’t work. We have already found a better system. Do not introduce regressions.