Tim O'Reilly: The Internet Is Being Scapegoated in a Lot of Ways (2019)
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Maybe we need something stable that can maintain a functional equilibrium and act in the defence of the norms of the whole system. Responsiveness and stability are usually antithetical, and systems designed to be responsive to the immediate urges of large masses of humanity are rarely anything but monstrous.
So what is politics replaced with? Some other system/s - computer networks, AI, 'the market'.
The appeal there is that they seem apolitical. They are not - they have baked in political ideas. Moreover they allow people with power to take political actions and can credibly that they are not political.
In essence they move people further away from having some say in issues that can significantly affect their lives. They lose power. They lose it directly - they have less say, and indirectly in that their arguments are harder against a supposedly apolitical non human entity.
Moreover the default of any such system is to maintain stability. Which in general gives most benefit to people who are already satisfied by the status quo. Tech people quite like the status quo right now.
Lastly and most importantly such systems have no vision of the future. That requires people.
The end result is a stasis, and increasing frustration from the people who aren't benefiting.
Much of this is covered well by the documentary 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace', which is now available on Amazon Prime.
My attention span is pretty bad these days, but I enjoyed reading the first half just now.
"Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies politics is referred to as political science. "
For that matter, what would it even mean to talk about "the failure of politics in the West" in a context beyond government?
With enough gymnastics, "politics" becomes a scary game that faraway, bad people play to get ahead, whereas we, the good, close people who are all equal, have no need to think about power in our daily lives at all.
I find speaking only in vagueness like "status quo" and "good for <the elite>" major red flags - the first especially as implying the changes you want with no knowledge and impossible to reconcile across even two people. Essentially the same sort of lie of populists. The second is a warning sign for fallacious zero sum thinking - best succicently and snarkily refuted as "It is also good for rich people for the atmosphere to be breathable at all."
The assertion that AI and networking are by default pro status quo and that is a bad thing looks like gibberish without any reasoning backing it. Not even "was funded by X" has been a guarantee that it would sustain a stasis.
The arguments leave me with an uneasy feeling of superfically trying to sound good while lacking any substance.
The reason it cannot be replaced is that there will always be resentment and dissatisfaction brewing among society's relative 'losers'. Eventually, society's "losers" will want to change things. Whether those people are right or not about which policies are hurting them is almost irrelevant. They will want the agency to make some change - any change. But: if you factor out all of the things that are still up for debate and start re-categorizing them as laws of nature or apolitical infrastructure, then there's nothing left to change! It will be cold comfort to them if all of human policy is "above changing". What they will hear is "Everything is fine. Stay where you are."
It sounds like something from a cyberpunk novel, but much of this baked in politics resides within powerful mega-corporations, playing within their moats and exploiting their walled gardens. People high up in those corporations have their own agenda. Much of this agenda is carried out with the aid of lobbying.
Deep inside those mega-corporations, other strata of lower-level functionaries from an entirely different social class are carrying out their own agendas. Often these agendas clash with the higher-ups. Often, these agendas clash with those of the users and ordinary people.
such systems have no vision of the future. That requires people.
Many of the problems arise when people with some power have dehumanized other people in their minds, and start to mistreat them, within whatever level of power they may have. By their very nature, such mega-corporations tend produce many such opportunities.
'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace'
This title, as a phrase, describes The Culture in Iain M. Bank's books.
This is a good insight. That many efforts in the fairly recent past to alter the the situation have failed spectacularly, or at least not turned out in the way it was expected. As examples, 'communism' seems to degenerate into a strict hierarchy of authoritarianism and associated suffering (perversely such a hierarchy being an anathema to principals of communism). The Arab spring, something seen in a positive light in the west, seems to have in several cases failed. It could be argued the failure was in part because it didn't have a clear vision or the people in place to make the change happen - there was a power vacuum.
These failures make us very wary of people talking about any significant change. They seem at a default that they could be dangerous. That predicting the future is hard.
It is important to be wary. What really is a red flag is claims of a better future, when it's not explained clearly what that future is, and the policy changes that will need to be undertaken to get there.
All that being said it seems to me important for a society to strive to be better, and to think of other solutions than just more of the same.
Delay is a feature of government, with a special carve out for emergencies.
People tend to think of and idealize best case scenarios rather than likely scenarios. The likely scenario is China. Mass mobilization and change in policy from one day to the next.
Even ignoring the phrasing that could be read as claiming no major wars since the medieval era, we don't have to go so far back. I mean, sure, the Cultural Revolution killed more Chinese people than WW2 and the Korean war did combined, but that's still eleven million or so Chinese people dead in those conflicts.
> they haven't been involved in any major wars and yet still dictate policy in the region.
As far as I know, the last major war China fought in was when they invaded Vietnam in 1979 after Vietnam had invaded Cambodia (Chinese ally) to get rid of the Khmer Rouge (the same regime that killed everyone who wore glasses because they may have been reading too much)...
The built environment of the U.S. has changed remarkably little in the past 40 years, and we are paying for this stasis today with our housing crisis from not building enough housing supply, our congested and crumbling roadways, our lack of transit infrastructure investment (NYC subway has been frozen in time for almost a century practically, and all we can celebrate elsewhere are a handful of light rail lines that usually sit in traffic with the cars), we've voted to defund our schools, and have refused to expand our public healthcare system to those younger than 65 as originally planned in order to protect private insurance industries.
The only improvement the west has made in the last 40 years was figuring out how to move a greater proportion of its wealth into the hands of the few, and iPhones I guess.
No one is saying that authoritarian governments are good, but opposition to efficient governments just makes life worse for everyone.
Or, for that matter, the Nazi economic "miracle". In their case, they started from the wreckage of WW1 and the Weimar Republic, but they used knowledge and corporate organization that predated both to rebuild, while letting their ideology and leadership take credit.
As far as that, I don't see how hiring foreign advisors somehow make your own economic achievements worthless - anyone can do that, and it's stupid to expect everyone to reinvent the wheel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
As far as that, I don't see how hiring foreign advisors somehow make your own economic achievements worthless
Because there were no "own economic achievements" in this case. The USSR claimed to pioneer a new and superior economic system to the capitalist West, but their greatest period of growth and improvement was accomplished through Western direction.
They imported technical experts from the West to help them design and build things until they figured out how to do it themselves. That is orthogonal to the economic system.
It certainly hasn't solved violent oppression of minorities, though admittedly it's more industrious and organized in that field than any Western government.
I'm not imagining anything. For one, China has been able to deal with the pandemic much better than the average Western government, beyond that there is the issue of infrastructure development such as high-speed rail, internet connectivity, etc.., as well as the issue of staying away from major wars, and so on. That's not to say it's overall any better, but that Western governments do everything better is simply false.
>It certainly hasn't solved violent oppression of minorities, though admittedly it's more industrious and organized in that field than any Western government.
Since you're making the comparison, I don't think the Western massacre of around 150 million minorities for it's development nor the murder of 1 million+ people in the Middle East for a recent example, or the millions in penal labour, is anything that the Chinese have to envy. Murder and opression works just as well in "free" governments, thank you - it's just exported, for the most part.
Ah, a shift of goalposts from "many problems we aren't able to solve" to "better than the average". Meanwhile, Western and heavily Western-influenced countries like New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan have done much better than China regarding COVID, without all the authoritarianism.
"as well as the issue of staying away from major wars"
Give or take at least eleven million war deaths in WW2 and the Korean war. (And, pointedly, excluding the larger Chinese government democides of its own people.) If we take that to a round century, we get another three million dead or so. You really are cribbing from the same bizarre talking points as the other guy in this thread, aren't you?
"I don't think the Western massacre of around 150 million minorities for it's development"
Ah, but there's the problem. You're comparing centuries of history of the West--which would be comparable to the wars and imperial abuses inflicted on its neighbors by China over centuries of its history--to what China is doing right now with a system of concentration camps. That's not just tu quoque, it's downright sleazy, especially when you cite "millions in penal labour" as a defense of the PRC.
(It's also telling that you keep referring to "the West" when you clearly mean "the US".)
The West has implemented NATO and thus offloaded most of it's foreign intervention to the US in exchange for other concessions.
>Give or take at least eleven million war deaths in WW2 and the Korean war. (And, pointedly, excluding the larger Chinese government democides of its own people.) If we take that to a round century, we get another three million dead or so. You really are cribbing from the same bizarre talking points as the other guy in this thread, aren't you?
China was in a defensive position in WW2, they didn't have a choice. As for democides, sure, those are pretty bad, do you want to compare them to the atrocities of the third Reich or does that also not count as the West? I kept West to West.
>Ah, but there's the problem. You're comparing centuries of history of the West--which would be comparable to the wars and imperial abuses inflicted on its neighbors by China over centuries of its history--to what China is doing right now with a system of concentration camps. That's not just tu quoque, it's downright sleazy, especially when you cite "millions in penal labour" as a defense of the PRC.
No, I compared the million of deaths in less than 20 years to that, after you made the comparison in the other comment. I'm not a making a defence, I'm responding to your whataboutism in kind. Just as easily I could have read the above comment as defense of the murder of a million people in the Middle East by comparing it to mere reeducation camps, which is downright sleazy, but I didn't, because I assumed you were arguing in good faith.
From someone who lives literally anywhere outside of the West, including Muslim countries, the atrocities of the PRC are very comparable to those of the West.
People keep thinking that only authoritarian government commit attrocities, while their own governments commit warcrimes at the same time. What cognitive dissonance.
Stream music? Sell sex? Buy stuff across state lines or internationally?
Imagine what we'd be able to do if the megacorps and government didn't start carving it up.
Maybe it's just me, but most of the things that the Internet can currently do don't feel all that great. My interaction with the Internet is primarily an adversarial one: I have to make a positive (and normally unsuccessful) effort to avoid the hellscape of targeted advertising and rent seeking that all of the dominant platforms currently depend on for income. But at least I can buy junk online (and damage my local economy in the process); is that worth it?
And, for what it's worth, the Internet had protocol-level streaming well before it was fully commercialized[1].
Just to take the Chinese example again - less people died due to Mao's atrocities in China than due to regular old poverty in India, despite them starting at the same spot.
We just have normalcy bias by the absolutely staggering amount of death that comes with poverty, whereas a comparatively smaller amount of death brought by a government that fixed the former is much more interesting.
What is the source of that?
Note also that China had deaths both from poverty and Mao dictatorship.
Mao definitely had deaths both from poverty and inhuman atrocities. but way less death from poverty.
I am quite suspicious and dubious about claim that Mao had any sort of positive effects that would balance his criminal incompetence and/or cruelty.
I am willing to be convinced by good source but ...
Here is the source : https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/Population/
For a more concise analysis : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jNJxQNxQKd3MbtAzn2Ji...
As you can see, the death rate in China was consistently lower than in India, and while it got close during the "Great Leap Forwards", China pulled ahead even farther once it was completed.
The inertia of the bureaucracy can be a hindrance but at the end of the day any bureaucrat will move mountains if a tyrant is breathing down their neck with knife in hand.
For that matter, despite all the creepy enthusiasm for dictatorships in this thread, they tend to be remarkably incompetent, being even more dysfunctional than democracies due to lacking their corrective mechanisms.
Despite the myth, Mussolini never made the trains run on time--he just relaxed the definition of "on time" until the trains were never officially late and then punished anyone who complained.
An ineffective government is a long term path to instability often leading to a risk of non-democratic rule.
In other words what you're arguing against here isn't rapid change, it's democracy as a whole. You can't prevent people from having stupid ideas, and on a long enough timescale any democratic system will eventually implement those ideas.
The idea of gridlock as a design objective is very harmful. The "inability to form a government" is considered a failure states in most government systems, having a government that is actually able to enact policy is a good thing.
In practice however, this gridlock does not produce any incentive to pass "things everyone really agrees on" at all, as you can see by various topics that have 90% public support (eg cannabis legalization) that have been ignored for decades. It just produces gridlock and nothing gets done at all, not even the stuff that "everyone" agrees on. This, too, is a form of un-democracy.
A lot of the "gridlock = good" comes back to people blindly falling back on the fetishism they were taught about the US constitution in grade schools - checks and balances are a good thing, who could be against checks and balances? But if there are too many checks and balances that drags the whole system to a halt - again, having a government that is able to actually enact policy without a supermajority control of all branches of government is a good thing. They only work when everyone has a "gentleman's agreement" to play nice and actually do the things that help constituents - when everyone starts playing hardball to the maximal extent permitted by law, the systems drags to a halt and stops working. And once that becomes a matter of routine as opposed to a last resort due to extremity, the systems begins to fail. That's a design flaw, that gets brushed under the rug because we're all taught "checks and balances are automatically good!" as children. Having some checks and balances is good, but too many can also be bad.
With inertia taken to an extreme you get the Polish Sejm and the liberum veto - where any single member could object and veto not just the current legislation but every bit of legislation that had been passed in that session. That certainly "slowed government down", and eventually led to the collapse of the polish government. So there clearly exists some configurations where there can be too much inertia and it leads to an inability of the state to respond to a changing world and eventual collapse. Where does the US fall? Compared to most other countries, far far on the side of too much inertia, and we are also failing to a much greater extent then most other states at the moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto
In particular I think the election of the US president separately from the legislature is very harmful. The executive and legislative agenda largely should be aligned, the cases where it's adversarial have been largely periods of "failed government" where nothing really gets passed. Of course that is also tied up with representative-level gerrymandering and state-size mismatches in the senate. The fixed 2-4-6 year cycles of the US government is also harmful compared to the (potentially) more frequent election cycles in other countries, as those countries can respond to losses in public confidence much more quickly. As such - the best solution to an unpopular president/legislature is likely a variable election cycle to get them back out quicker once they lose a mandate.
I am completely willing to trade the other party being able to accomplish more of their agenda while they're in office, for me being able to accomplish more of my agenda while I'm in office. Elections should result in a mandate to enact policy, that is a good thing. It is better to have frequent elections that result in a mandate to lead, with changes in control when the party no longer reflects the will of the people, than to have nobody able to do anything all of the time.
This is a spherical-cow version of politics that doesnt reflect reality. There are plenty of path- and timing-dependent effects that shape public opinion and policy, especially given the powerful status quo bias most people use as the core of their cognition about policy.
> what you're arguing against here isn't rapid change, it's democracy as a whole.
There are two senses of the word democracy that you're conflating. One is democracy as a pure platonic concept, and one is the much more universal colloquial use to refer to a polity that meets a certain threshold of being democratic. The maximal case of the former word sense would be something like direct democracy with no constitutional protections. Very few people would argue for this form of "pure" democracy, and a marginal directional move away from that end of the spectrum doesn't suggest one is opposed to a country being democratic in the colloquial sense. (The distinction of the senses is important enough that explicitly anti-democratic phrases like "tyranny [of the majority]" are often used to refer to the "pure democracy" perspective).
A second assumption you're making is that the distribution of the "goodness" of a policy is completely neutral with respect to policies that the masses are whimsical about vs have sustained support for. This is quite an extraordinary claim to make so confidently. If anything, it seems more plausible to me to assume that this distribution would shift in favor of the sustained-interest policies, which is precisely what inertia optimizes for.
Now obviously, it matters where you are on the inertia scale. A society going through rapid, ill-considered, constant change is going to benefit from inertia while a sclerotic, declining polity in need of bold gov't action would benefit from less. But showing that the second case is relevant and making a case for the necessary policy shifts is a far heavier lift than the oversimplified assumptions you rest your general case on.
Negative. Bad laws are the program (business logic) itself, not the vulnerabilities. In lieu of refactoring society, I'd vote to continue underclocking the CPU.
In so many words, "move fast and break things" isn't how I want society to be run. You have proposed we "move fast but don't break things". I do not believe that possible.
Step debugging is exactly that: slowing down the execution enough so that errors in the process become apparent before the program reaches its fatal state.
I disagree that it's a non-sequitur. What you want is for government to move slower than its observing processes, otherwise you can't prevent disasters, only correct them after-the-fact. Whether that means slowing down government or speeding up transparency (e.g. journalism/foia requests) is open for debate, but slow(ish) government is essential to the process of checks and balances.
We’ve seen government be far more efficient and successful at “the fundamentals” than privatization.
Postal service, Medicare/caid, Social Security all financially stable, and logistically competent until meddled with politically to benefit a minority closest to the politicians.
I don’t want efficient government when it comes to species stability. I want reliable and resilient.
Let man-children speculate about reality without politically contrived economic uncertainty foisted upon everyone. I wasn’t a party to signing a contract that says I have to believe Musk and the rest are that much more worthwhile to humanity as decided by politically contrived fiscal economics.
If you all want to be kowtowed like teen girls at a Beatles concert, have at it. The majority just want to live their lives.
IMHO - this is largely fair and true, only his POV is distinctly technocratic. He says China does “some bad things” with facial recognition but the tech has some great potential. We’re not scapegoating Big Tech - we’re applying the brakes because it operates like a monopoly and enables far scarier scenarios than Big Tobacco or Big Oil.
The interview starts off really bad, comparing "AI" (which does not mean Artificial Intelligence here) with Donald Trump, and comparing making a system of laws for a large country with Google changing the order of the search results. Then he moves the goal posts on scapegoating the internet to "big tobacco was worse than facebook" to avoid answering the question.
actually, that depends a lot on the distance. Humans are the long distance speed champs among mammals on land; humans can run down both horses and cheetahs, slow and steady wins.