The universal push for expanded security trumping all is concerning.
At this point authoritarian pushes are the best case scenario - I’m fearing it’s preparation for wartime.
At this point authoritarian pushes are the best case scenario - I’m fearing it’s preparation for wartime.
The Internet and social media in its current form makes it easier for social groups to get larger and more intellectually and ideologically homogenous. As these groups get larger, it becomes harder for individuals to communicate across groups or think for themselves because there are various in-group moderation mechanisms (filtering, banning, ranking, deplatforming, cancel culture, etc). Eventually, the echo chambers become large enough to fight over who gets to run a nation's government. The winner turns into a government that moderates its people (like it always did before it became the government). Multiple such governments emerge around the world. This happened in cycles in the past as well, but modern technology facilitates the process.
To prevent this, we must realize two democratic principles simultaneously: "one shall have the freedom to decide what one sees and hears" and "one shall have the freedom to express whatever they like". It wasn't possible to realize both principles simultaneously in the past without a central authority because if someone is doing something in a public space, you cannot selectively filter them out. If you cover your eyes and ears, you block out not just that person, but everyone else as well. So we came up with rules for behavior in public spaces and wrote them into law. This didn't drastically raise the probability of a democratic society turning authoritarian because there were physical limits on practical group size. It was very hard to rally a large group of intellectually homogenous people. But the Internet and social media completely broke this safeguard imposed by physics. Now, echo chambers form naturally and grow rapidly.
To fix this, we must normalize not moderating or filtering content online in any centralized manner. Instead, we build user-configurable client-side content filters and ranking algorithms so that each individual can decide what they see and post, but nobody can decide what anybody else sees or posts.
We need to replace server-side content filters and ranking algorithms with offline solutions controlled by each individual on their own device. Get rid of likes and dislikes, and get rid of server-curated feeds. Have the server send a raw RSS feed of everything posted in the past day (or whatever time window, sparsely randomly sampled if there's too much) at once, then get it ranked and filtered on the user's device based on the user's preferences and viewing history, and then fetch the actual media associated with those feed entries.
This will, somewhat counterintuitively, increase social cohesion by limiting the inter-group rift between individuals and prevent the formation of large echo chambers. People will be more likely to engage with eachother in good faith. Authoritarian patterns will be more likely to naturally dissolve.
I think I'm missing something here. Why would people not just choose to remain in their echo chambers?
It would speed up the rate at which individuals become delusional. But once a certain divergence threshold is reached, they get corrected by reality. The proposed solution hypercharges this delusion-correction process and contains it at the individual level so that it's less likely to grow to the nation-state level where most of the violence and oppression is siloed.
In a democratic society where each person gets a vote, individual delusions of this sort cancel eachother out like random noise. What ends up being voted into law will be what people want in common.
Also, people will gradually realize that being delusional is disadvantageous regardless of what goals they have, so they'll want to filter less and less over time.
China is going to attack pearl harbour in the hopes that a sudden unexpected attack will cripple the pacific fleet and knock America out of the war. It won’t work, we’ll go through hell again. But every time these places think it will work, and they don’t factor in the fact that they are completely reliant on foreign trade for their economy.
Russia is pretty much in war economy now, they have no choice but to escalate and invade Eastern Europe. They have no chance of winning, but that never matters to crazy people.
If China cut trade ties with the US, which country do you think will still be able to produce everything it needs? People like to think of China as just a source of cheap consumer goods, but we are much more reliant on them than that. Every power plant has Chinese components that keep it functioning. Every farm, automobile, communication network, aircraft, factory.. they all rely on Chinese components and equipment. The list touches every facet of modern American life.
China could make the US unrecognizable within 5 years, without ever launching a single missile
Things would get a little more expensive. We are already seeing that with Trump's trade policies. But if the west-aligned world stopped trading with China their entire economy would collapse overnight, with mass unemployment.
It is a shame that Trump is deadset on alienating all of our natural allies in this conflict - especially those in the apac region.
If things get to that level of 'touchy' what makes you think shipping through that area wouldn't be interfered with? South Korea, Japan and arguably the Philippines are the main countries that wouldn't be going through areas that China regularly tries to claim or at least exercise authority over.
China hasn't fought a war in anyone's living memory. That is a hard place to fight nearly the whole world from.
Just an example from today:
"N8n raises $180M (n8n.io)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45525336
That's what the US (and Europe?) seems to invest in - but things like that doesn't make the US any more competitive with China.
What if instead it was $180M in new green mining tech or something.
They are now the manufacturing capital of the world, and our position of being the preeminent consumer in the world lasts only as long as our consumers can afford to purchase things.
China runs a precarious political situation which is only as strong as the country is economically stable - which currently it is veering to unstable. It goes without saying the US is also in a precarious situation - it is much more publicized due to the nature of the US airing all its dirty laundry publicly.
My main concern as a European is Russia. It is a historical truth that once a country goes through the process of starting a war economy it doesn’t usually dissolve or sit idle - conflict is going to happen there.
For America, watching from the outside, a civil war seems much more likely than direct war with china.
We are likely in pre-war era right now, dismissing it as "internet phenomenon" is shortsighted.
They can barely hold on to Eastern Ukraine, them taking the entirety of Ukraine is not likely at all given that they have had to slog for many years just to take and hold one small part of the country.
If they can’t even take all of Ukraine, I don’t think it’s very likely they try to attack any more of Europe.
And despite of 23k of sanctions they've imposed on Russia, which is the absolute record by a looooooong margin on its own.
And you conveniently forgot that Hitler was from Germany - Europe. And he was the one who invaded USSR - Russia. Not the other way around. As well as he, indirectly, invaded China - by the help of Japan.
The Ukrainian war has been presented to me as a mad man trying to take over the world a la Hitler. I think it's more complicated and concerns about NATO expansion, the US Dollar as the world reserve currency, and Russia controlling warm water naval access make sense as motivations for the war, even though they are also be tools of propaganda. It seems clear that Russia believed they had the opportunity to establish themselves as a great power once again alongside China and the US in the "new multipolar world" they harp about.
My question is this: In light of this information, why has the Ukrainian conflict become seemingly (based on resources allocated and increasingly provocative drone incursions into NATO territories) existential for Russia? Are the us sanctions crippling long term without Ukrankan resources? Why are they willing to sacrifice so much if they already have Crimea free and clear?
This crashes with the western view where countries and populations have a right to self determination. Some of the countries that Russia want to fall under their sphere are also members of the EU, which make this even more problematic. Seen from Moscow, EU and western countries have encroached on their turf and this is a problem for them. Seen from the western side, this is wrong, and if Russia is such a bad neighbor that its neighbor join defensive alliances to get out from under their thumb, that is their own fault, and the way the world is supposed to work.
Russia also has a geographic vulnerability where there is no geographic chokepoints from at least Poland and straight to Moscow, which historically has given Russia problems.
Give this, there is actually a rational for what Russia is doing, personally I think it is a bad rational, but there is logic in the madness, even if from my perspective, it is based on a deeply wrong world view.
It’s really time to retire this type of statement. For example, are you aware the CIA or US government has officially acknowledged its involvement, or declassified documents pertaining to coups, overthrows, and assassinations in Iran, the Congo, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Afghanistan?
Maybe this enlightened point of view is promoted by Western academics and (some) think tank types. But that is not how Western governments have been acting for at least the past 75 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution
It's the idea that fraudulent elections in former Soviet states were not merely the result of fed-up populations, but were actually western backed conspiracies with the aim of eroding the Russian sphere of influence.
Ukraine matters to NATO because they are turning more and more to our classical liberal values of freedom, and that is something NATO wants to encourage in general. (in general - note that Turkey and Hungary are part of NATO that don't want to encourage this, and there are other countries not sure)
We can only guess why Russia/Putin thinks Ukraine is existential to Russia. Our best guess is because they were a historical part of the Soviet Union that they are trying to restore. Putin cannot fulfill his vision without Ukraine. NATO countries like Latvia were also part of the Soviet union and so we expect they are next.