Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

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Although I've got quibbles with some of his points and emphases, I can tell his heart is in the right place. So now what?

There's reforming the system, but we've been reforming the system for decades, and it's gotten worse consistently since the 1970s. We elect a professed civil libertarian as President, and he brings the State to unimaginable and exciting new heights of violence against individual liberty.

Burn the system to the ground? Okay, sure. But we all know how most revolutions turn out. Which is to say, in the usual and best case they fizzle out, despite the strong emotions of would-be revolutionaries. Worst case scenario: well, look up any revolution, and let me know if you've got a solution beyond "Well I'm a good guy, I wouldn't be like every other revolutionary!"

I've settled on something in the space that's occupied by ideas about "counterpower" or "dual power" (using a Left-frame) and Konkinite agorism (using a Right-frame). We need to build up alternative institutions to government power to rebuild the civil society. Many institutions--certainly all the major media, corporations, unions, nonprofits, and universities--are so closely integrated in the network of State power that attempts at reforming them are pointless. Instead we should development alternative, parallel structures that we can live and operate in, trying to limit the amount we interact with and serve the government.

Doing that, and figuring out how to do that, is the hard part that requires lots work. As technologists, I think we're in an ideal position, as the technological frontier is relatively unexplored compared to other ways of doing this. Research decentralized manufacturing: simpler supply chains and homogeneous production facilities means more fault-tolerant production, which means fewer opportunities for the State to exert control. Support open source: software is going to eat the world, and code that anyone can access disperses power from large entities incorporated by the State to anyone who's able to use it. Be thoughtful supporters of structures like Bitcoin: despite their flaws, they have the potential to make large portions of the economy illegible to the State.

This approach also doesn't ask us to relinquish the right to interact with the government if it suits our ends, particularly in legal cases and occasionally electorally.

I agree that we need new solutions that are distinct from the existing power structures. The idea of voting for "representatives" seems completely absurd when almost everyone is "connected" now - we could build systems which allow us to vote on issues directly, rather than people - and using distributed, anonymous cryptographic protocols with public ledgers, we could be sure there is no vote fraud. I'd envision a system where you can decide exactly how your tax money is distributed too, rather than a single central power structure, so we could literally put our money where our mouths are.

The big elephant is the existing tax system though. Alternative structures will never have anywhere near the resources governments have, and the government will always retain power for as long as it has the perceived legitimacy to tax by force. A new model would not be able to trump the government unless it makes the government seem illegitimate, or obsolete, to the point where people consciously decide where to put their money.

Pay-as-you-earn schemes are perhaps one of the biggest obstacles. Most earners have no control of where their money goes, so can not consciously object to state power without potentially losing their jobs and livelihoods. Most people would live on the breadline than take such risks, which is really the purpose of the welfare state - to ensure than the poverty threshold is just high enough for the majority of people to cope - because any lower would activate the switch people have, where they overcome that fear and say "enough".

Cryptocurrencies are very interesting, but I think we need to have stronger anonymity in transactions, and in the means of connecting into the network (via meshnets, or whatnot). This is the potential Achilles heel for the state, which is why they are building such vast surveillance and censorship platforms to try and prevent these from ever taking off.

Of course, we always have the problem that the existing government can simply declare any new structure we create as "illegal," with some poor propaganda spread through their MSM mouthpieces to justify those decisions, which will be effective while the majority of the population remains a bunch of gullible sycophants. Unless there is a big change in perception, and soon, it's more likely we'll have a bloody revolution, or boot stamping on our faces.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

>The idea of voting for "representatives" seems completely absurd when almost everyone is "connected" now

The classic counterexample is California's direct democracy. People constantly vote for spending and against raising revenue, driving the state government to financial ruin. At this point Congress doesn't seem to be doing any better, but there is something to be said for people who are at least supposed to govern responsibly.

They're failing now, but that's a noteworthy failure. The masses will always behave like the masses and there's nothing you can do about it.

Not sure I agree with this line of argument, but "completely absurd" is a stretch.

Most people probably have no idea what they're voting for, which is a shame, but they are given the option to decide their own fates, and they can only blame themselves if things go to shit. Direct democracy can be self-correcting - if people realize things are going to shit they can change it - this can't happen with a government of rogue politicians taking bribes left and right, and where these elite groups live under a separate rule of law to the rest.

What I find absurd is the belief of some that we live in a free or equal society, when the whole concept is based on "You're too stupid to decide for yourself, serf". The obvious undemocratic thing about our alleged democracies is the absence of "None of the above" on the ballot, or the failure to count non-votes as a legitimate position - of not supporting any party or person, but oneself.

I honestly don't expect many people to elect themselves are their own representative - most people will not have the time, nor the patience to do research (like any politician, really), in order to make informed decisions.

I'd expect instead, a system where one can delegate their own decision making power to some third-party representative they can trust will use those votes in a sane way, but the most important requirement for such delegation of voting power is revocation ability (effective immediately rather than in 4-5 years or through violence), so that if said representative is taking bribes, or backpedaling on their promises, they can switch to someone else. We could probably build something like this with public-key crypto.

Are you seriously saying the system has become consistently worse since the 70's ? In what respects ?

I think we have (in the USA) a better safety net (especially now with Obamacare), a lot more respect for gays, a lot less racism, a lot more controls on the police, plus the internet which somewhat decentralizes power. I'd say it's had its ups and downs, but has been getting better overall

Yes, I am saying that, primarily with respect to civil liberties. The 1970s represented a high water mark in privacy rights and rights recognized of the accused; the latter have been whittled down to a phantom of what they once were primarily as a result of the government's so-called "drug" war against marginalized communities, and our actual level of privacy is lower than what people had in East Germany, owing to technological advancement.

Advances have been made on race and especially gender, but although that intersects in various ways with civil liberties, that's a separate axis of progress. (I would also point out that most of the gender progress occurred in a way that echoes my suggested strategy: build power external to State power, and the State acceptance or co-optation of it is a fait accompli.)

Inequality has grown since the 70's also.

http://drpop.org/2010/02/battle-for-a-living-wage-uk-us/

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ― R Buckminster Fuller

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