The Great Aboveground Empire | Hacker News Reader

The Great Aboveground Empire

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> people want all the cachet of being outside the boundaries, in lawless territories where you survive on the wit and bravery (or brutality) of Taking The Initiative and damn the costs and risks, but also want to be protected and safe with all the constructs we in Civilization provide

One fundamental problem is in the second word, "want". Many people take this childhood perpsective, based around 'want', like someone else will provide it for them. When you're an adult, you provide. There's nobody else to do it. The government, the community, the society is you. If you don't act to create a free, safe, prosperous, harmonious community, there's nobody else to do it. There's no cavalry, no parents, it's just you and me. What you do determines what community we have; if you're lawless, your community will be lawless - that's what you built.

My sense is that community has always been something like a (inexact numbers) 5%, 35%, 60% split of "make things happen" "help those who make things happen" and "enjoy the fruits of the work of the minority, while occasionally making token gestures of contributing"

The prosaic version of Lenin's vanguardism. I also like to remind myself that those groups aren't fixed--at any moment the composition of the 5% can be different, and any particular person can often be placed in different groups according to context.

Except the implementation of Lenin's principles is 35% locking down those 5% by preventing their freedom of movement and competitive employment, so that their results may be bought at far below market rate and distributed between the remaining 95%.

This is where you begin to see state serfdom and exit visas.

Compound by the fact that everybody tends to be quite poor as productive people don't feel the need to overstretch themselves producing.

My sense is that our current society is pretty similar to what you write here except with the labels completely reversed, and the 5% that depend on basically the rest of society to operate and maintain the titanic lifestyle they've accustomed themselves to tell themselves that they are "the minority that make things happen". Ultimately we still need to dig food out of the dirt under the hot sun more or less, and nail together wood and lay down shingles, again either under the hot sun or in the freezing cold, etc, etc. Its a whole ton of getting your hands dirty and wrecking your body for decades until the bill comes due, and then watching as someone whose hands are buttery soft says "Thanks for the fruits of you labor, remember that I 'made this happen'" in reference to their token gestures of contributing.

Society in the large operates in many ways this way; I was thinking about community in the small. Groups within an order-of-magnitude of Dunbar's number.

Yesterday, I turned off the caching, thinking "It'll be fine." Whoops.

Going back on again.

Privatizing profit while socializing risk is not a new phenomenon. But it's not all bank bailouts, Golden Parachutes and bitcoin millionaires who run to the SEC when things go south. It's also rescue services when my backpacking expedition goes wrong, or the fire department when I stupidly start a grease fire. There's a difference between "I want the rules not to apply, except when I do" and "I made a colossal mistake and I hope the apparatus of society that I contribute to can help me," but I'm not sure where it is.

> bank bailouts, Golden Parachutes

> rescue services, or the fire department

I think it's around "when a life is at stake"

Perhaps. But I'm also a big advocate for a social safety net because people make mistakes. I was a pretty poor kid because my parents made some bad decisions. They weren't bad people, but they were immature and unlucky. Without that net, I'm not a productive professional today.

I realize this article is abou t the cultural issue, not the political one. From crypto anarchists to VCs, people want to profit of off "disruption", then fall back on the safety net of society when that goes wrong. They have all the trappings of underground with the real benefits of a structured society. I agree, but the metaphor the author is using strays closely to a world really unfortunate people inhabit either through their decisions or someone else's.

> There's a difference between "I want the rules not to apply, except when I do" and "I made a colossal mistake and I hope the apparatus of society that I contribute to can help me," but I'm not sure where it is.

Probably exactly around where the rules are. If you made a legitimate mistake, well, shit happens. If enough people are making the same or similar mistakes, it points to a systemic problem, and eventually rules will be changed to mitigate it. From that point on, the bad situation stops being a mistake - it requires one to intentionally disregard safety advice and/or break the law. The society might not be willing to help you with that anymore (or rather, it will still help, but also bill you for it afterwards).

Isn't HN pretty aboveground, by the articles definition?

Fundamentally.

So if I read this right...

There are multiple "symptoms" that sort of signal abovegroundedness. Like advertising the "undergroundness" or lack of life altering/nonreversable risk.

But it really comes down to how much reliance on current societal functionality you have to reduce your risk (things insurers will insure, societal services or infrastructure setup to keep you safe, monetary backing provided by others who can absorb it)

And as like many things it's a spectrum of "abovegroundedness" and "undergroundedness" with areas in between.

Personally, I think as long as your reliance on society is not antithetical to your mission, then it seems reasonable to use society where you can and cut reliance where you cant

This thing reads like a weird adolescent fever dream with the multiple mentions of an unspecified cool "underground" unrelated to an actual sense of purpose for why you are breaking the law.

I mean you can clearly be a criminal, an radical activist or a any kind of excentric if it suits you while negotiating your own relationship with the rest of society as you see fit if you are ready to deal with the consequences of your actions but I'm not sure I would call that an "underground".

Huh. This seems related to a hypothesis I had that saddens me a bit - that progress of civilization, both the real one we see and a hypothetical better one (as utopian as possible to achieve with how actual humans behave) - necessarily tries to eliminate individual autonomy and self-sufficiency. This creates a conflict similar to what the article describe - people want to both do sketchy shit and enjoy the benefits of civilization, except replace "sketchy shit" with meaningful autonomy.

Couple examples to anchor the intuition here:

1. Progress of technology seems to increase the amount of destruction a single individual can trivially inflict on others.

We live in an era of easy access to firearms and even easier access to knowledge for building DIY bombs (conventional or chemical kind), not to mention all the extremely vulnerable safety-critical infrastructure, from residential gas pipes to water treatment plants and the power grid. Today, any motivated individual could easily kill dozens or hundreds of people. 200+ years ago, the worst a random person could do was to grab a knife and get stabby. 20-50 years from today? You can replace "DIY bombs" with "DIY engineered pathogens". And don't get me started on the space program - if we ever seriously expand past Earth surface, your average space trucker will be flying around in a WMD. Better hope they're not aerobraking under influence.

Now, almost all people are nice and friendly and not murderous. But there are always some individuals who, for whatever reason, carry destructive intent. Keeping the society safe and the civilization functioning requires countering the threat of individual randos, in lock-step with the tools they have available. This seems to fundamentally require increased surveillance, more protocol, more red tape - all removing individual autonomy. E.g. there's plenty of chemicals you could easily procure 50 years ago that you can't today (and/or trying to do it will put your name on the top of terrorist watchlist).

2. Everything as a Service.

When you buy and own stuff, you have full control over it (and full responsibility for maintenance), at least within the limits of applicable laws, which mostly deal with concerns adjacent to point 1 above. However, there's a trend of replacing property with services, renting instead of buying. Each case of this, however, puts you in a relationship with some organization. Usually one involving recurring payments. There are various and perfectly good reasons one would prefer renting to owning, but their side effect is fixing your role in the modern economy. Instead of accumulating and spending resources, what you're really doing is more of securing and allocating cash flow. There's much less buffer here. If everything you use is rented, then you can't go off the grid, and temporarily losing your income source might make all your tools and amenities suddenly disappear.

The impact of that is, again, reduced autonomy. In an Everything-as-a-Service world, you need to advance on an optimal (effectively prescribed) path of a worker drone, producing value, collecting reward, and spending it in limited ways afforded by your civilization.

I could go on, but it's late, and I hope the two examples make it somewhat clear why I feel the future is "wonders of civilization vs. individual autonomy, pick one".

Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20230523070732/http://ascii.text...

i am afraid it has long escaped tech.. and has become just everyday.. a wishfull-thinking-ocean of kind.

i mean, "i did 10 headshots in a row" isn't about passport photos..

> It’s a situation where people want all the cachet of being outside the boundaries, in lawless territories where you survive on the wit and bravery (or brutality) of Taking The Initiative and damn the costs and risks, but also want to be protected and safe with all the constructs we in Civilization provide so you don’t wake up with your throat slit and your pockets turned out.

I thought this was going to be anarcho-capitalism based on this introduction

I have a longer essay coming up and I was worried that I was going to be sidetracked/waylaid into a rather silly debate, so this essay is meant to be pointed to when I hit that part of the discussion. Naturally, these are themes present in a lot of discussions, I just wanted one for my set.

U.S. Army libertarians

My first thought was people whose disaster preparedness strategy is guns and ammo before water and food. Imagining violently defending your compound between weekly trips to the grocery store feels very Aboveground to me

During the LA Riots, some people parked in the parking lot spaces to loot supermarkets.

If we're talking some sort of civilizational collapse scenario, you would unquestionably want firearms over food as preparation. First of all you can hunt with a gun. Secondly, you can take other people's food with a gun. Finally you can defend your own food from being taken once you've acquired it by any means necessary.

Doesn't this require a ton of resources (gas and mobility gear, manpower to find and move food, or continuously migrating your living area) and assume everyone you meet will be an enemy you will want to take food from?

Based on my reckoning, it would behoove you to hunt first and foremost with a firearm, to secure food for yourself and your family. A single deer could feed a family for a month plus. A cow could feed a family for months.

But undoubtedly, skirmishes would happen. Humans are tribal creatures and tribal structures would almost instantly form in such a vacuum.

Above firearms, you want a community where trust exists.

Guns over food seems like a straw man. I was interesting in survivalism a couple decades ago, and every writer I came across put a heavy emphasis on water and food. Guns were something they considered necessary in an environment where you're one of the few with clean water and food. Trying to attack others who'd stocked up wasn't recommended by anyone; if they stocked up on food they'd probably have their own guns.

Eventually I read a great little book by someone who'd lived through the currency collapse in Argentina, who said all their rural survivalists got picked off by roving gangs. That doesn't mean the gangs had a great life expectancy either. He advocated staying in town and getting to know your neighbors, setting up a neighborhood watch, helping people start gardens, etc.

Thanks for mentioning this. A quick search turned up this book, is it the right one? https://archive.org/details/modernsurvivalma0000agui. Fernando Aguirre, 2009. The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse.

It would be really interesting to compare/contrast his account from others from Ukraine, Syria, the Balkans. What I hear in your comment is that the advice you heard was about having weapons for a strong defensive posture rather than to be used offensively. I guess the strength of both communities and gangs is in their size, they'll win out over the lone wolf fantasy.

Yep that's the book!

Serious survivalists know perfectly well that what you'll need is water, food, and skills like farming, spinning, sewing, cleaning, digging latrines, etc.

Unfortunately, there are a hell of a lot of people in the US who are essentially "survival LARPers" who imagine themselves as heroic alpha (or, better, sigma!) wolves who fight off thousands of degenerates coming for their canned food. ...Hey, did anyone think to get a can opener?

A hell of a lot of Americans are descendents of literal frontiersmen and women who were subjected to cow thieves, roving gangs, robberies, Indian raids, revolutions, European proxy wars, dust bowls, depressions, and terrible diseases (with no cures in their day) hundreds to thousands of miles from the closest forts or cities.

Yeah no one in the country doesn't own a can opener AND a shotgun or rifle AND know how to can their own veggies. But if you don't have peace, you aren't going to be able to farm in peace.

Do you even have acreage to farm? Do you have tools and skills to farm? If not, how would you get access to it?

First of all: Those "frontiersmen" suffering "Indian raids" looked, from a very slightly different perspective, an awful lot like "foreign invaders who murdered millions and took their homes being attacked by some of the few that remained trying desperately to avoid also being murdered and having their homes stolen." Parroting Manifest Destiny narratives isn't a good look in 2023.

Also those "dust bowls" were largely caused by their own incompetence at land management, expecting to import a specific brand of European farming practices to a completely different continent with many different biomes and have everything Just Work, because, of course, God Wanted Them To Take It.

I'm also not trying to claim that there's no value in having the knowledge and tools to defend yourself. But when you've got a bunker full of thousands and thousands of rounds of ammo, enough canned food to survive unpleasantly for about 6 months, and no understanding of how to grow more or interest in learning, that speaks of someone who expects to be murdering other people and taking their food to survive for the rest of his life.

If you want to farm enough to feed your family, you don't need 2,000 acres of farmland. That kind of acreage is mostly needed for specialist farmers and for grain. Furthermore, what's actually effective at making you ready to survive in a situation like what's being posited isn't total self-sufficiency: it's community. The people in the area get together and work out what land should be used for the village's potatoes, peppers, onions, etc, what should be used for pasturage for the animals, and what should be left fallow this year. (Hopefully in collaboration with some of the indigenous people who we haven't totally managed to wipe out, and some of whom still retain their historical land management practices, which were effective at making this land a flourishing place providing plenty of food for millennia before my ancestors came and tried to exterminate them in the name of gold, God, and glory.)

The U.S. was basically settled by rural survivalists not even four or five generations ago in most of the country. There is an abundance of clean water and food in North America but that never stopped rival natives from warring with each other, and raiding, enslaving and pillaging their opponents, even before the Europeans brought their wars and rivalries to the continent.

That all being said, there isn't enough land in a town to feed a town. No, you can't live on an herb garden. You need many acres to feed a single family. All modern cities in particular are completely dependent on reliable deliveries from mass production farming operations in rural communities. If that supply chain ever was cut off, there would not be enough food in the cities for the millions that live in them.

Maybe the Western US was. The Midwest and East has been settled for many times that.

My own great great grandfather settled in frontier Minnesota in the 1860s from Norway (assigned to move there by the immigration department of the time). It was still very sparsely populated in the 1860s, and was on the edge of the frontier with the Sioux Indians controlling much of the territory. The Federal government had reached an agreement with the Sioux to pay for land, but during the tense and financially constrained period of the Civil War, the government fell behind on annuity payments. So the Sioux retaliated by attacking and killing 600+ immigrants that had settled in the land the Sioux had sold. My ancestors barely escaped, their house was burnt down, and the ensuing wars with the Sioux persisted for several decades afterwards.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/dakota/Dak_acc...

Yes, every serious survivalist puts a heavy emphasis on water and food. I was not talking about the serious survivalists - I was calling out the silly minority

There is also a point where another gun or another case of ammo doesn't help as much as a case or three of MREs or HDRs

A single deer can feed a family for weeks. That only takes one shot.

That only takes one gun

Most people can only fire one gun at a time. There is a point of diminishing returns on stockpiling weapons.

Outside of some mass extinction event where we'll probably be dead anyway, I never really understood what exactly the scenario this would be prepping for. Even if all of societies institutions collapsed overnight, the winners are going to be whichever group reorganizes itself quickest. Not to mention some group is likely to inherit a ton of heavy weapons that aren't going to just disappear from the planet overnight.

This is not an imaginative scenario. Humanity has been through multiple civilizational collapses in its history. The fall of the Roman empire, followed by the Justinian Plague and the famines of 536 AD, is one such example. In the wake of the collapse there were thousands tribes that formed, which gradually recoalesced into modern european nation states (and invariably many of those made a pass at superceding Rome's former glory).

It would be likely that many groups would inherit heavy weapons but it's not clear that they would be particularly useful. If victory always went to the most heavily armed, then the U.S. would have handily won the Vietnam war without many casualties. And the Afghanistan war while we're at it.

Years ago I found a wonderful anecdote on Metafilter about someone who lived through this very situation:

https://www.metafilter.com/78669/What-if-things-just-keep-ge...

Thanks for sharing that, it’s a heartbreaking and yet extremely practical perspective that will stay with me for a long time

I'm not sure I know many preppers who have a gun but don't also keep a food store. Plenty of people do the opposite: lots of food and supplies, but no weapons. I think both are bad ideas, but If I had to choose one, I'd want to be in the former group, and then go around and find people in the latter group and see what they had.

This is the exact mindset that I was imagining: How are you going to find people in the latter group? Are you planning to drive around, refueling at abundant and well-serviced post-apocalypse gas stations in between your murderous rampages? Are you planning to walk or bike around, before you have any spare food, killing whoever you meet on sight? How long do you expect to live, when every meal is a firefight?

Are you really so heartless? What if it's not truly a zombie apocalypse scenario, but the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts and you are stuck in place, but will likely be able to evacuate in a month after roads get reconstructed? Is it worth killing your neighbors then? How about 3 months? What do you do when you go to kill someone for their food and they see that you're in a shitty spot and offer to help?

I have no qualms with also having guns and an ammo stockpile, especially for hunting, but that is significantly less important than figuring out water and food.

It's more that, while acknowledging that both would be important, in this completely contrived scenario where you have to choose only one, which one would you choose? In a world where your greediest next door neighbor is free to choose guns over canned goods, do you choose canned goods, only to have them taken away at gunpoint? Or, do you choose a gun and go find someone to take canned goods from? Again, a ridiculous thought experiment in the first place.

(GPT-4)

OpenAI's push for regulations in front of Congress can be seen in two ways:

OpenAI, recognizing the potential risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and other AI technologies, is advocating for regulations that will ensure these technologies are used safely and ethically. This move aligns with societal expectations and the growing call for more transparency in the AI field. In doing so, OpenAI is positioning itself visibly in the public eye, taking a stance that illustrates a responsible and forward-thinking approach to AI development and use. This type of positioning is a hallmark of being "Aboveground", operating within societal norms and expectations.

On the other hand, the push for regulations can also be seen as an "Underground" move within the "Aboveground" framework. By leading the conversation on AI regulations, OpenAI may be subtly shaping the regulatory environment to suit its interests. This allows OpenAI to maintain a public face of transparency and responsibility, while also ensuring that the emerging regulations are compatible with its operations and future plans.

Here are a few proposals to enhance verifiable transparency:

Open-Sourcing: This has been one of the cornerstones of transparency, especially in software development. OpenAI could continue releasing their models and training datasets, to the extent it is safe, ethical, and legally permissible. This allows third-party researchers to inspect, reproduce, and validate the results, enhancing the credibility of their work. However, as AI models become more powerful, there could be increasing safety and misuse concerns, which need to be carefully managed.

Independent Audits: Regular audits by independent organizations can help verify claims and ensure that the practices of the organization align with their stated principles. These audits should be comprehensive, covering ethical, safety, privacy, and security aspects of AI systems.

Explainability: As AI models become increasingly complex, it's important for AI developers to strive for transparency in how their models work and make decisions. Advanced explanation methods, understandable to non-experts, can help shed light on the inner workings of these models.

Public Engagement: Regular communication about their work, plans, challenges, and decisions can help OpenAI build trust with the public. This could be in the form of public forums, town hall meetings, or public consultations, especially when making significant decisions.

Collaboration and Partnership: By working together with other research and policy institutions worldwide, OpenAI can ensure that its approach to AI and AGI development is aligned with global standards and best practices.

Transparency in Policy Advocacy: If advocating for AI regulations, it's important for OpenAI to make clear their reasons and motivations. They should also disclose their engagements with policymakers and regulators.

Documentation and Reporting: Providing thorough documentation of research processes, decisions made, trade-offs considered, and lessons learned during the course of developing AI systems can increase transparency. Regular, detailed reporting on safety, fairness, and privacy measures would also be beneficial.

Ethics Review Board: Establishing an independent ethics board can help monitor and evaluate OpenAI's activities from an ethical perspective. The board could provide public-facing reports on their findings and recommendations.

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