Tech barons like Jeff Bezos want to colonize space and the oceans
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'm perfectly happy with people doing this in the physical world. I think we could use a lot more experimentation with community design and rules, and most governments simply aren't willing to do this. As long as these communities are opt-in, and not forced on anyone, I think it's great.
Clinging to sands is lonely, and I refuse the big sites.
People do it all the time, but they keep themselves to themselves and you don't find out about it.
Where we have seen successful upstarts in social media is when they have a different product. So Tik Tok can enter this space. But a Twitter clone or Facebook clone will have a hard time.
The technology isn’t the blocker. It’s that the nature of the social media product works differently, and the lack of competition is inherent to such a product.
so you have opted out of your local police protection and healthcare plan and rely on reddict detectives and crypto-marketplaces for your life insurance? When you need your teeth fixed do you rely on the guy who got his training from khan academy and youtube videos or someone who went to a good public school? YoU'd rather board a plane that, instead of being regulated by the government was regulated by a blockchain startup in the cloud?
Private internet fiefdoms do reasonably well at things that aren't made out of atoms. If you'd want to put it less charitably, the internet works for things that don't matter. Something Thiel, who is mentioned in the article as chief advocate for this weird feudal-libertarianism, has lamented himself.
And we've seen in 2016 how great it really is when it leaks into the physical world.
> I think for the most part the internet works much better than the physical world
And it works abysmally poor in crucial areas. The internet has turbocharged child porn distribution, using such private fiefdoms you romanticize as safe havens -- out of reach for government agencies and thus quite often with impunity for the perpetrators. (And that's not even taking the real-world implications of rising demand through near effortless accessability and anonymity into account.)
> Reddit gets to run itself the way reddit wants, HN the way HN wants, etc.
They can to that in the physical world, too. And in both worlds Reddit and HN still have to oblige laws and regulations.
Woah, that changes everything! Shut internet down now!
All of a sudden, control over basic resources becomes a problem that just doesn't exist in the simplistic internet mirror.
And people will kick up a stink about that much quicker than they would over eg, FB misinformation or "free speech".
For $7 a year you can host a website that's accessible from anywhere in the world. Things are better not worse.
To see exactly how this can go horribly wrong, read up on the Irish famine, which was mostly caused by how the England-based land-owners were using the land to extract value. The local people didn't own any land and would have had to leave the entire island for an alternative.
At this point, "start your own" is extending down to "build your own currency and payment processor."
Anarchist communes can exist only so long as people that don't want to belong to them are free to leave, venture a bit further out into the vast frontier, and start up their own new thing. The moment people are forced to live together with other people that don't share their same beliefs, we start to need social structure, rules, and formalized decision-making processes to prevent violent strife.
We should have more experimentation of alternative systems of governance. Creating experimental, small scale and opt-in societies to do that is a low risk way to achieve that. Then the process of selection takes over: the most desirable model becomes dominant as more people move there voluntarily. In the end we will have more competition between states, especially as remote work becomes the norm.
This is very different to an attempt to radically transform an existing society, which requires hoisting things onto a large number of unwilling people who haven't opted in, and risks destroying something that's already working pretty well. We shouldn't confuse the two.
The companies running on top of it not so much I agree. Imagine if Google or Apple built the Internet today and what a weird walled garden that would be. Would we even have concepts like net neutrality?
In an ideal world, yes, especially if those investments end up influencing the lives of millions/billions afterwards.
Moreover there is no reason to believe that a democratic process will produce better outcomes than alternative (technocratic?) processes. The public is poorly informed, manipulable, and their sentiments aren’t optimal.
If you want a colony, go advocate for more funding for NASA. The US government’s budget is in the trillions and up till now it deficit spends like crazy. That is far larger than the entire net worth of any of these billionaires.
The real issue is that government and society now is too fractured and inefficient to actually execute on such a project and people just want to commandeer things instead.
Who said anything about "non-hurting"?
Going back to tech investments, I'm pretty sure that if we were to put the initial investments into companies like Facebook, Twitter or even Google up to vote ("do they deserve the money or not given their future influence on society?") the results would be pretty close, given how much they actually did hurt part of our society.
The same goes for these "colonies", which are basically just another tech investment with the potential to influence the life of millions/billions in the future, potentially for the worst.
Here are some examples. Look at the Pilgrims. They left because of religious persecution. It doesn’t matter at all if they were or were not rich. Why should you have a say as to why they should not be able to leave?
Where things get weird is that he is one of the wealthiest people in the world by a large margin. It's weird because it's due to the most potent ingredient: luck. This doesn't invalidate how extraordinary he is, it's just an important factor. Right place, right time, right family, etc.
So that has made him one of the wealthiest people in the world, meaning he can shape society and move governments. Do you think it makes sense for that kind of power to come down to a roll of the dice?
Yes. Do you think it makes sense to look at human prosperity and say “there’s a large random component to who gets wealthy and who does not. Lets change that from “random” to “I decide.”” Do you see why other people would rather have wealth distributed by a randomized meritorious process than by bureaucratic fiat?
I see a call in your comment for rewards to be given out of innate qualities rather than observed outcomes. If you have a method for determining that; how about we do a small trial in politics first - where it would do more good - and argue about how well it worked? There is no evidence in my view that it is possible to determine people's innate qualities from a distance. The difference between a genius and a fool is too slim. It is doubtful that there has ever been a method to do that which worked.
Between, say, the American way of embarrassing riches and the EU way of equality I note one didn't produce many tech companies.
Between, say, the American way of embarrassing riches and the EU way of equality I note one didn't produce many tech companies
This is a great point that is often ignored. People like to claim that X or Y EU nation is better governed than the US or enjoys greater happiness. However they are also beneficiaries of all the innovation that has come out of America for them to have those standards of living - things like the smartphones and the Internet in recent times.
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of innovative technologies were invented in Europe, but most of them end up being commercialized in US due to market incentives and the whole funding and support infrastructure these incentives created.
(My emphasis).
That's simply not true. People nearly always ignore the element of luck that allowed success to happen, and it's the biggest mistake that people make in terms of their politics, IMO. There are countless examples of people's success which they put down to characteristics such as these, but they ignore the luck that allowed those things to come to fruition (and indeed the blind luck that allowed them to have the skills in the first place). They didn't happen to many others with the same characteristics, who no-one has ever heard of.
Floyd Mayweather Jr., arguably the most successful boxer so far is also luck? Luck to be born a great boxer?
> the blind luck that allowed them to have the skills in the first place
Oh phooey. I don't know anyone who was touched by the wand of the Magic Skill Fairy and suddenly was a chess master, a virtuoso guitar player, a physicist, a champion bodybuilder, etc.
> They didn't happen to many others with the same characteristics, who no-one has ever heard of.
Because they failed to recognize the opportunity, or couldn't be bothered to do the work to take advantage of it.
We already elect governments and they already have immense resources, more resources than even the richest individuals. So replacing "luck" with democratic election probably just ends up with more and bigger government? That just concentrates all power in government which I think would be worse than the problem you see.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just wondering if things are any better in government roles.
Everything is a roll of the dice if you stretch it enough.
All the politicians, all the wealthy and rich people are right place, right time and right skill set.
We need a rubric that doesn't entail boiling people down to their causal antecedents, because doing so doesn't let us dismbiguate between worthy and unworthy - everyone and everything is a byproduct of this definition of luck.
We do this already, they’re called laws.
Nobody can buy their way out of civilisation, even if some people obviously dream of doing so. No man is an island entire of itself.
The primary blocker is that the nations who have nurtured these characters will not take kindly to any assertion of independent sovereignty. They’re funny that way, and tend to start to start wars over such things. $200 billion is a lot of money for a person to posses, but it’s a rounding error in an international conflict.
Best to stick to what they are good at: finding highly profitable niches (through profit and government subsidies) within existing civilisations (which I suspect is what they’re actually planning).
Sure they can. Find a place which is not taken already, have enough money and you're on.
There isn’t anywhere, and if there is, there will be war over it. Things like seasteading and colonising the solar system are for the birds; these are not prime areas of real estate. You’re talking about places that we struggle to keep robotic probes alive for a significant amount of time, never mind people. If I was to attempt this, I’d probably go for Antarctica, but the challenges involved make the endeavour just seem absolutely ludicrous.
have enough money
Nobody on earth has enough money for this.
This is all ignoring the fact that once you found a new nation, you’re just recreating what you were trying to escape from in the first place: the hell of other people.
Probably worth just paying the parking fines instead.
As a democracy, we are free to think up tax schemes to ensure engaging activities, hope, and meaning for that masses.
As a supporter of the democracy, I can not say that is happening when only a few govern the largest sums of wealth.
Society is especially at its worst when they get in the way of individual freedoms and free market distribution of wealth. I think a good example of this is California, whose policies are bad for business, whose public services are terrible despite massive taxes, and whose overall economic size is more because of a lucky agglomeration in the Bay Area than because of intentional governmental policy.
Imagine a bunch of Amazon workers suddenly decide to start ignoring directives from on high and pursuing goals other than enriching the shareholders. They're fired, naturally. They keep showing up to Amazon and using its resources. Some people from payroll are in on it. Why can't this happen? At some point the government gets involved and people start getting arrested.
The idea that private wealth is somehow separate from public governance is common enough in our society, and it's easy to hold on to if your idea of government is always an interference with the status quo, but if you consider that the status quo is created by a system of government actions in the first place, it's clear that this idea doesn't actually make sense.
People already "intervene", by enacting laws and systems that subsidize the creation of individuals like Zuckerberg or Bezos in the first place.
Frontiersmen historically have worked brutally hard and died young. It's an inevitable result of going somewhere where there is no infrastructure and no support structure. You have to do it all yourself. And you can't afford to bring anyone along who isn't going to work.
The disparities between rich and poor were getting smaller for much of the 20th century. Rich now has a new top bracket which is insane. And, its built on disruptive digital finance models.
Bezos however, is an old school robber baron. His money directly correlates to the relative poverty of his workers and his opposition to unions has a rational basis which equals his wealth.
I do think that this gesture may be something only they can afford, and I also think that Amazon should be broke up because they are immune to competition. But I feel like the characterization of Bezos as a robber baron and claim that his wealth is a result of his workers’ poverty has no basis in reality.
Bezos can't spend his money. He'll die before he can realise the value of his money. Gates is giving ALL of his money away. Whats Bezos doing?
https://aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap...
Woah. From the 15th - 18th century, colonization of the 'New World' was the equivalent of today's space ventures. There were innovations in funding (joint-stock ventures), technology (vessels that could cross dangerous ocean environments & navigation technology), and in the European perspective, a sense of mystery about a voyage into the unknown. It was seen as a way to start life over, and if you couldn't afford to pay the passage (5 pounds in 1650 is roughly $16030 - $307285 today) you would indenture for a master to work off the debt. Sound familiar?
Hello, I'm wondering how you calculated this figure
Both Plymouth Colony and Jamestown started out as communes. They starved. Plymouth Colony switched to free markets and prospered, Jamestown failed.
As for environmentalism, you cannot afford that when it's a bitter struggle just to survive. Besides, what does environmentalism even mean on Mars? There is no biosphere.
It means protecting the environment which is basically everything not just the flora and fauna.
So I guess something like don't just brutally strip mine the entire surface of Mars for 4% cheaper cement or whatever at the cost of another planet's environment
What difference does it make? It's already rock and sand.
It's like the old cliche: design your life or it will be designed for you.
The cause of this is the continued capitalist enclosure and privatization of science and technology.
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." [1]
Only a system that honours actual material scarcity of all resources (and thus the immaterial abundance of written/drawn knowledge: blueprints, trade secrets+patents ('intellectual property'), any other type of human knowledge; enabled through the zero-marginal cost of digital reproduction), can change this:
hREA (by Mikorizal): http://mikorizal.org/futures.html + https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea
holochain: https://developer.holochain.org/docs/concepts/1_the_basics/
I'm not sure where you get the idea that this is the case.
Yes, creating AAA games and blockbuster films is the province of large corporations with massive budgets and many people. But drawing? Writing short stories? That's something everyone still has access to—more than ever, in fact, because the technology (programs like Photoshop, Scrivener, even very simple text and image editors) makes the process easier in many ways.
It's certainly true that there is a lot of corporate-produced content available to consume, and that some people fill their lives with consuming it, but to conclude from that that the modern age makes it impossible, or even significantly more difficult, for the average person to engage in creative endeavors is a ludicrous leap of logic.
I, personally, have been working over the past month on writing something that, by the time it is finished, will be something between a novella and a novel in length. Hundreds of millions of people the world over write fanfic and create fan art—and also write original fiction, and create original art, if that distinction matters to your idea of what creativity is—every day, and share it online.
Just because it's not published for profit doesn't mean it's not a genuine creative act.
> SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off.
Why would this be something inherently "bad" ?
> We must envision more public-spirited, collective futures
I don't think I need to be an expert about the history of "collective" and "public-spirited" countries, to understand how dangerously authoritarian this can become.
If given the option to watch innovation happen because of nation-states in an arms race, or billionaires duking egos, I'd rather the latter. My kids will outlive the ego, and may get to live in a new environ because of it.
If we get the scalable collaboration thing down as a species, we wouldn't need billionaires or politicians to move big matters forward. I hope that gets borne out this decade, where we learn to think, code, and act in coordination over shared priorities, beyond the bounds of corporations and nation-states. I look to the open source model for spiritual inspiration there, but it doesn't offer many examples of large projects that can collaborate effectively over multiple generations without central control of a BDFL. Maybe our brains aren't wired that way, that we need a just do need a strongman to get anything done. I sure like to think otherwise. We can get machines to do distributed consensus pretty damn well these days, why can't we upgrade ourselves to do the same?
It's reasonable to want to have more public sector involvement in many areas and alternative views for our future, but none of these require that you have to 'stop' people like Musk and Bezos from doing what they're doing.
Building things is actually really hard. Much harder than complaining about the status quo.
Thankfully, destiny belongs to those who act.
He forgot to mention it's $5M to fly back.
... the difference being that the WEF wants to force everyone into a particular mould, not unlike 20th century socialist visions for a "better society". We all know how that worked out...
But from an economic standpoint, I don't mind crazy, unrealistic visions for colonizing oceans and planets. At least such dreams give billionaires something to spend money on, which translates into more jobs and more families fed, not to mention the scientific and engineering advances that are funded along the way.
yeah, the joy of Fascism, Communism, and all those other future gems produced by the infallible agencies, institutions, and academics.
"Billionaires" don't design humanity's future. People with ideas do and only if these ideas are freely embraced by other members of the public. Freely is keyword here. And if that person's ideas prove widely embraced and successful, they possibly become a billionaire. It's an organic and natural process, fair and square; in direct opposition to this are the govt. agencies and academics who in most cases has to force their thinking on the public and as history has proven - to catastrophic results.
Naturally some of these successful people become arrogant or simply delusional and start spawning other ideas and grand plans, but that is normal human flaws and nothing out of the ordinary. In such cases, the ultimate error correction mechanism - people's acceptance - kicks in and at best Mr. Future ends up with losses, useless inventory, and some media frowns.
Author of the article has a sick and fundamentally broken perception of reality. By saying that successful people shouldn't be allowed to make things for others to possibly use (or not), he's taking away the very fundamental freedom that is responsible for making the better part of the civilized world today.
I love Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age is one of my youths defining books (as I suspect it is for the new owners of the ocean liner)
But one is a fictional book twenty years old, and one is a newspaper at its best reporting on real problems right now, not imagined problems in the future
Seasteading is a joke, and despite all the cool cyberpunks, we are not going to become 'phyles and tribes. Geography and demographics are still our destiny for the next few centuries.
(Amazon passed some kind of event horizon - 1.3M employees makes it bigger than almost anything out there - armies etc. The thought of being head of HR for amazon flat out terrifies me. And this means we can find any amount of abuse in Amazon if we look hard enough.)
Are there better ways for Bezos to spend all the money he got - in my view yes.
If enough people like me agree we can do this democracy thing and tax it away from him and into better places.
But the problem is not billionaires or seasteading.
The problem is sensible democratic action. The problem is regulation (the 2020s call to arms)
Write your congressman.
Edit:
Uncalled-for Advice to the Head of HR at Amazon:
Unionise and Democratise
Firstly 1.3 million - that's an insane number of employees - Walmart and Mcdonald's might just outstrip you, but I would not look to them for guidance - look at Indian Railways or the US military. At this sort of size Amazon will be a "safe place to work". Mothers will start to advise their sons to take work there because it's too big to fail. You know that's not true but you need to avoid large scale resentment - and that starts with employee welfare - and welfare starts with feeling they have support against the the man - unions.
Yes they will make life harder - but you have fine from startup to being your own government - people will expect to spend their working lives in Amazon like they do in Walmart or the DoD or railways. As such they can either be part of the decision making process and protected from abuse - or they can be abused and powerless and work less effectively for you and eventually cause so much bad press that your name is mud.
I guess you know all this - but democratising is not just unionising - I think it is coming - i think that companies are going to find it harder and harder to exist by fiat - that every decision will need to be published and publiscise like regulators do now - and this will lead to people wanting a say or a vote on such decisions - internal company referendums as it were.
Anyway ranting too much.