The New Control Society
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
Why are aesthetics in media and elsewhere converging towards a homogeneous blob of everywhere-consistent, but meanwhile politics has exploded into a kind of anything-goes mess where there is consensus on nothing? (If the answer is supposed to be "protocols", I guess you can make that work but that feels like a non-answer, similar to how "money" as an answer kind of works but doesn't directly explain much.) Maybe the two things are even unrelated, but the effects are extreme and concurrent, so it seems unlikely to be a coincidence.. and I admit I am kind of expecting an answer along the lines of "same process/forces at different stages". And thinking along those lines, converging on complete consensus in political thinking sounds even worse than zero consensus, probably looks like an accelerating slide towards fascism.
This seems contradictory to me:
1. Liberal politics is all aesthetics. This is why people claim proudly to be moderate regardless of what two political stances they're alleging to moderate between. If you look at actual policy differences between the two parties there's mostly just wedge issues. 2. Our perception of politics is straightforwardly dictated by newsrooms.
In fact, the retreat from consensus to internal peace displayed in this post seems consistent with the liberal (by which I mean both parties) defense of individualism over collective/social responsibility.
How to make a closing paragraph that will make the reader feel "Yes! I'm special! I'm not one of them! There is still hope for me!" - while actually applying to absolutely everyone...
It may actually be intended as such, however, I think the effect is more like the esotericism of Plato's Republic - the text says one thing, but a careful reader is likely to come to opposite conclusions.
Anyway, it doesn't feel like "wanting to be special" or "just like everyone else" are concepts interesting enough to discuss, let alone get under your skin. Surely grappling with differences and similarities is just part of everyone's normal existence.
Still, the first step is understanding you have a problem, and maybe just understanding it is enough to get started.
One of the difficulties I’ve noticed is that it’s very difficult to spend any length of time pointing out this central insight (the undesirable character of our new and unaccountable “control society”), because of its proximity to the New Right. And you can’t get caught saying there’s a grain of truth to the dark enlightenment, because It’s too easy to be confused for a clever fascist hiding a more odious and primitive agenda. This establishes a sort of containment zone that prevents you from straying too close to the barriers, pre-empting the conversation we really should be having. If you stray too close to the edges, alarm bells go off and people assume your real goal is far more nefarious.
And yet, as annoying as this ‘thought barrier’ is, you really have to lay the blame for it at the feet of the New Right people. It’s not the left’s fault that they went way off the deep end. You get the sense that if the Curtis Yarvin-style dark enlightenment voices had just stayed in their lane and limited their criticism to the world they actually understood (the internet - its power and its foibles), they could have created a reasonable counter culture. Hey, the decentralized bureaucratic forces that shape our lives have no basis for accountability! That’s refreshing! We can take that somewhere!
But no, instead, they disappeared up their own asshole and came out the other end as catholic monarchists. And it was their boosting of a populist megalomaniac that has now put us on a ridiculous, idiotic path of self-immolation. (And won’t it be rich at the end of this to hear them complain that we never tried Real Monarchism?) Any wisdom about the insidious nature of headless disaggregated power is now lost - aliased by the Frankenstein monster that is the current administration, stupidly and cynically assembled by them in their grimoire laboratory.
> Make virtues of irrational attachment, cultivated ignorance, and stubborn loyalty
Right. Easy peasy.
But you need to be honest with yourself about why you believe what you believe about the world. We all have contradictory beliefs (and sometimes values), so it's only a matter of time before you catch yourself believing in stuff not rooted in your values. This could be harmless, or it could be destructive to yourself and the people around you, or it could allow people to have an unhealthy degree of control over you, your behavior, and how you perceive and interact with the world. All good advice still requires good faith interpretation, and some people aren't going to do that. How much are we supposed to concern ourselves with people who don't try to understand us?
And in general, I'm pretty damn skeptical of anyone who roots their identity in political alignment. Like I'm pretty firmly on "the left", but it's not like I walk around identifying as an anti-capitalist, which is such a broad and vague term I can't control how people perceive it even if some will take me in good faith. And that's still dozens of layers above the values that actually inform my political alignment, and there's a lot of bad-faith actors who appeal to political alignment to get you to work against your values basically in every aspect of society. It's still up to you to notice this and care.
The prose was a bit dense at times, but it was coherent
I'm pretty sure the exact same info could have been conveyed in 1/4 the number of words. I found it impossible to read the whole thing, word for word, and was seriously skimming by the end. Very low information density.
It really seems aimed at people who order McDonalds via DoorDash, neither company from which I would ever buy anything. Who actually wants to eat that sh1t?
And like all "the market is magical" puff pieces, it bases it's conclusions on dream state theory with no accommodation of actual human involvement. One example is the complete avoidance of anything inferring wealth's "third option".
When responding to "the network treats any censorship as damage, and reroutes", entrenched capital always has the third option: when a threat to profit can't be overcome by first ignoring it, and second by actively trying to crush it, it can always be defeated with the third option, by simply acquiring it.
FacePlant bought InstaGram, Goggle bought youtube, M$ bought github and linkedin.
The ultimate veto power of the third option is evident all around us.
And like the vacuous market theory that claims "market competition solves all problems", major capital entities hate competition, and take any step necessary to eliminate it. Since most startups fail, the first option is simply to wait for the problem to go away. When that doesn't work, active opposition often solves the problem. But when all else fails, buy it.
As a development engineer over decades, I often cited the theory vs reality maxim:
The main difference between theory and reality, is that in theory they're the same, but in reality they're not.
This applies doubly to economic theory...
I'm not aware of any market theory that makes such a claim. Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" as referenced at the beginning of this essay certainly doesn't claim this. What Hayek claims is that a centralized economic approach can't allocate resources more efficiently than a decentralized market because the information required for central planners is too vast, changes too quickly, and is too dispersed across individuals. This is not the same as saying that a free market is perfect or solves all problems, it's just the most practicable system we know of currently.
The main point the article seems to be making is that there's a new form of control operating through decentralized algorithms that subtly but pervasively shape tastes and behaviors. These algorithms, rather than traditional institutions, are becoming the mechanisms of social order. Future political battlegrounds may be fought over these methods of control. I could be wrong about the main takeaway as it was a long article, but I didn't read it as being a "market is magical puff piece".
More efficiently for whom?
"Efficient" in what way?
The extent to which a thing is "efficient" or "optimal" is entirely based on a desired outcome being comparing to actual outcomes. All magical market theory is completely silent on the desired outcome or who would be the beneficiary...
The hyperbolic paraphrasing "market competition solves all problems", is for the purpose of pointing out that making a few of the richest people much richer, while impoverishing the rest of the world's population, may be "most efficient", but it's not really helping make the world a better place to live, even for the most wealthy...
The problem isn’t that magical market theory takes an average and determines we’re all better off because we all got poorer and one guy got way richer. But it might say that we’re all better off if everybody DID get richer, but one guy got _extra_ rich. That we still might object to the latter situation is a valid concern, but it’s a very different level of oversight on the part of the economist.
Another one that comes up is that people seem to think that because the consumer is assumed to be ‘rational’, this implies that the economist is imagining people as unfeeling automatons incapable of valuing experiences over material wealth. When really it’s more like “if I offer you two paid vacation options for the same price, you will choose the one you prefer”. Even that, it turns out, is inaccurate and incomplete - but it’s a much more defensible simplification.
I'm sure you've heard of GDP, it's pretty much exactly what you say the market theories are not about...
When in fact, GDP is the most common metric used to illustrate economic health.
WRT theories of the "rational consumer", no memes are required, an entire field of modern economics is dedicated to debunking this assumption:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
Outside of all of that, both previous rebukes to my comment fail to address the main point, the majority of people are not better off even given massive economic growth of recent decades.
> FacePlant bought InstaGram, Goggle bought youtube, M$ bought github and linkedin.
> The ultimate veto power of the third option is evident all around us.
...
> The main difference between theory and reality, is that in theory they're the same, but in reality they're not.
> This applies doubly to economic theory...
Economic theory is based on assumptions of human behaviour. This makes it fundamentally a study in sociology.
So while there are some brilliant mathematical mechanisms used, relying on those numbers to mean something in the real world that humans inhabit is a stretch, and has very often had a hard time when comparing it's own predictions to the historical record.
Hayek argued that the best health care outcomes would come from private investment, and Keynes predicted we'd be working 15 hour weeks. Both of these are in stark contrast to the reality on the ground in the world today.
My main objection is not against what specialists do when working within their field of expertise, it's that the main impacts of economics on society at large is via the:
> politicians or non-economists “playing with dad’s gun”.
And like the outcomes of the literal interpretation of that analogy, the results are often deadly, and usually for innocent bystanders.
Wealth often presents actions as if they are shown to be mathematically correct, via "economic theories", when they are primarily used as justification of exploiting others for more gain for the people that already have the most.
If economics is going to be beneficially applied outside of experts working in their field, then it needs to be corralled by bounds that consider the impacts on society as a whole in the real world, and unfortunately that's not what's happening.