Digital technology demands a new political philosophy | Hacker News Reader

Digital technology demands a new political philosophy

noemamag.com

23 pointsNoRagrets13 comments

I worry we're reinventing the wheel WRT tech policy, policy in general, and philosophy (which informs lawmaking).

Ten-ish years ago we didn't even have titles like "Privacy engineer", "UX researcher", or "Public interest technologist" in popular parlance.

I think we have plenty of philosophy, we just need to quit inventing ever creative names for basic concepts like "iterative design" or "client-server model", paired with following ALL the guidelines.

(For example, in an American context, that would mean paying more attention to state constitutions paired with respect for the 9th Amendment[1])

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-9/n...

[2] Ex: Nevada has federal supremacy. Hope you folks enjoyed Defcon! https://www.leg.state.nv.us/Const/NvConst.html#Art1Sec2

We just need to start with better self governance, exploration, review & moderation & justice. I imagine most of our best futures starting as voluntary, non-binding, additive/annotative atop existing channels & forums. Systems of peers & juries.

More than just momentary summary judgements & things which help us reflect & ascertain how others are seeing us.

Real democraccy, when done well & with regard, is about an promotion of freedom, expanding liberty. This article focuses like so much of the day does on regulation, on accepting as given the confined & prisons that happen to be about, corproate run, & projects development of additional new constraints to guide things a certain way. Im not opposed to exploring ways forward here, but my hope for where democracy happens is elsewhere, lies in thise wanting to understand & share the world & themselves better, more openly, & working forwards newer mediums.

When you claim something like "real democracy" leads to better freedoms and the expansion of liberty, how can someone come along and claim "real socialism" leads to better freedoms and the expansion of liberty, and one is immediately rejected while the other is expected to just be accepted as true?

Is it me or are democracy and socialism not opposites? They are two different philosophies that can and usually do co-exist. Socialism is based around means of production, while a democracy is a system of government which dictates how that government is run.

They’re somewhat orthogonal to each other, but they aren’t opposites.

In practice, relatively few socialist/communist regimes had what could be charitably described as democracy (with the exception of the Nordic countries), but when the political philosophy really gained steam in the early 20th century, many of the branches of socialist philosophy were rooted in democratic control, of all society. Even during the Russian revolution, socialist takeover mean democracy within the government, the factories, and the military. It was only later once the Bolsheviks consolidated power that reality shifted away from that, under the shadow power structure of the party.

Can you think of any example in history where a socialist revolution didn't get taken over by a Bolshevik like group creating a large state apparatus and authoritarianism instead of democracy? I can't and I don't think it's right to ascribe democratic leanings to a philosophy that has never had any except for perhaps very fleeting and unstable amounts of time (conceding it is a philosophy for the point of discussion even though it is really more of a religion).

Most revolutions end in authoritarian states, frankly. When a group is biased towards a will to power, that tends to give them a leg up when there’s a power vacuum.

As I alluded to previously, though, the Nordic countries were largely governed by socialist parties for much of the 20th century. They didn’t devolve into dictatorships.

They didn't start with a revolution either, and they moved away from much of that socialism stuff towards a strong market economy with lots of social services within a few decades of moving towards socialist ideas.

Socialism is democratic, generally. People vote under any type of socialism I've heard of, maybe too much.

Can an idealistic libertarian view survive in a larger and larger world? Bad actors can abuse such a system more easily with more anonymity, and with a larger population, you're going to have more bad apples.

I think this binary view is itself problematic, and indeed not really valid:

> "At root, the big question for the future of powerful technologies is this: whether they are ultimately economic entities which should be governed according to market principles, or whether they are in fact political in nature, and so should be governed by democratic norms and principles."

First, why not democratize the economic entities to some extent? It's been proposed before: let the employees of Twitter have as much net voting power as shareholders or private owners do when it comes to major corporate decisions (like, say, who to appoint to upper management). There can perhaps be some degree of hierarchical voting power (more experienced people might make better decisions), but the notion that economic entities should be absolute dictatorships run from the top down like private feudal outfits makes little sense in today's world.

Second, everyone should recognize that 'market principles' have at least as much power when it comes to who gets to hold political power as these 'democratic norms and principles' do. See the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling: everyone knows politicians need large sums of money to gain electoral office, and more often than not, that money comes from major players in economic markets. Indeed, there are reports that the two major US political parties demand that elected politicians who seek powerful committee positions deliver >$1M to party coffers as a minimal condition of appointment. Is that a democratic norm or a market principle?

One thing is fairly certain: both state and private entities have a great interest in controlling what information and opinions are delivered to the general public, as the past 100 years of radio and TV broadcasting makes clear. The internet opened the floodgates to a much broader range of information and opinions, and now the very same interests who worked so hard to control what got onto TV and radio are trying as hard as they can to do the same with the internet. Blocking them from doing so is certainly in the interest of the vast majority of human beings on this planet.

It is not necessary to have a single monopoly company if our goal is to distribute messages globally.

Certainly not easy, but one would think that HN would have some understanding of the powerful capabilities of advanced types of protocols.

"In this context we can, albeit dimly, view the political battle-lines that are now being drawn for this century — between digital nationalists who regard powerful technologies as a vehicle for national greatness; digital liberals who wish to order the digital world according to notions of rights and consent;[...] "

This is a classical American debate no? On one side you have the digital version of a sort of Jeffersonian Yeoman Republic of merchants, artisans and farmers, 'small is beautiful' etc, vs the Hamiltonian vision that is nationalist, corporate, centralized, urban, and so on, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say it's the focal point of the entire American project.

I don't think it really needs a new philosophy, it's the same old debate in a different space. I think the author does make a mistake though by framing this primarily as a philosophical issue. The sheer centralizing force of technology is a reality and has favored one side for much longer than computers are around. Trying to appeal to Republican ideals out of a sort of idealism will not get proponents very far.

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