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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Hmm... as a Libertarian / Voluntaryist / Anarcho-capitalist / whatever-you-want-to-call it, I am sympathetic to what Larry Page is saying. But there are definitely aspects of this story that are fairly unappealing (Larry Page naked, for starters).

I'm not sure what the answer is though: By now it should be clear that "government" as a tool to social engineer a perfect world, isn't working. Corporations are always the villians in this cyberpunk'ish stories, but you don't have corporations without government. But you can have technology without government or corporations, so what happens when the tech itself becomes so powerful that it changes the basic nature of society? Getting rid of government and/or corporations won't help, and if you try to counter technology with more technology you just have an arms race.

OK, I'm depressed now. :-(

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>but you don't have corporations without government. Who says you don't, or won't in the future.

Many corporations are now bigger and wield more power than quite a few (maybe most) governments. Corporations are often international and don't really care about governments or countries as much as possible.

We live in a world where China is having fights with Google over censorship. That's a government having issues with a corporation, not another country.

In the case of China things are a bit more interesting, with communism in the mix it seems like the .gov and companies are basically the same. There the government tells the companies what to do. Else where it seems the opposite is on the way to becoming true.

Note that I'm using "corporation" here to refer specifically to the legal fiction, created by the State, that isolates the owners of a corporation from liablity. The "organization" itself might exist organized through some other means, of course. But using the modern, legal definition of "corporation", they depend on the State for their existence.

Now, you might ask, "mindcrime, aren't you just pedantically arguing about semantics then?" To which I'd say, no. The difference being that the modern, legal definition of "corporation" is a big part of what allows companies to grow very large, thanks to that ability to pool capital and dodge liability as an individual. If we didn't have the corporation (as we know it today) as a legal fiction defined by the State, it's very possible that we wouldn't have the huge mega-companies that you speak of.

Of course that raises the question of whether or not we'd be better off without those, but that's a whole other topic.

> By now it should be clear that "government" as a tool to social engineer a perfect world, isn't working.

Perfect is unattainable, but engineering a better world seems to be working over the long term (though "engineering" might be overstating the process) however chaotic and back-and-forth things are over any short time scale, and government seems to be a pretty darned important tool in that process.

Technology can never solve social problems. The answer is to simply work on fixing the problems we have in society the only way we actually can: through discourse, activism, democracy.

Technology can never solve social problems. The answer is to simply work on fixing the problems we have in society the only way we actually can: through discourse, activism, democracy.

I'm not actually sure anything can truly solve social problems. I tend to believe that human nature is such that we will always have some level of strife and conflict in our world. I think the best we can do is to minimize it, and create structures that at least respect the sovereignty of the individual.

But even what I just said gets to the point of why "we" will never be uniformly happy. Different people have fundamentally different goals and principles and there's objective way to resolve those disputes. My foundational principle is freedom from use of force or aggression, and the primacy and sovereignty of the individual. Other people have more of a utilitarian "the most happiness for the maximum number of people" as their principle. And unless the former inevitably leads to the latter by coincidence, there's really no way to reconcile those two positions, in terms of "how do we solve social problems" since those two people don't even agree on what the problem is in the first place.

As for democracy: "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Liberty is a well armed sheep contesting the vote".

Even in a representative republic like in the US, democracy is nothing special if you're the under-represented minority who has to suffer the "tyranny of the majority".

> Technology can never solve social problems.

It certainly can facilitate solutions to social problems.

Technology can be a huge help in solving social problems. For example , the pill has caused the biggest impact on the goal for woman equality, by far.

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