Slashdot Mirror

Using LinkedIn and Facebook may be perceived these says as a practical necessity for many people, of course. There is such a thing as social networking effects. But using them is still overall a bad thing for society -- even ignoring the personal mental health effects: https://www.medicaldaily.com/s...

Essentially, profiling (or ratting on) your colleagues and friends/family and defining all your relationships to them to a central authority on an ongoing basis is in some sense immoral in a democracy when other decentralized alternatives exist (e.g. email, IRC, personal websites,and more). It is immoral because it pushes too much power (as information) into a few centers instead of keeping that power decentralized across society. It does not matter if those centers are industrial or governmental.

Giving up such information voluntarily to big central authorities is the kind of thing that anyone who went to public school in the 1960s or 1970s would have been taught reflected the values of Soviet Russia and its pervasive intelligence apparatus (e.g. listening in on all phone calls) -- not the values of a democratic USA.

As Mark Zuckerberg himself said, it is just dumb:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks

Of course, given such a high level of informational immorality over the past decade (trading privacy for convenience), the world indeed may have changed. It is possible there is no going back -- even as various people, myself included, have worked towards more decentralized communication alternatives.

Instead, we may have to consider, say, David Brin's "Transparent Society" as a different option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Of course, there is likely a healthy balance of meshwork and hierarchy needed, so not all one or the other:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

No easy answers... But a big potential problem...

See also for the past:
https://ibmandtheholocaust.com...
"IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing throughout World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s."

And for the present and near future, China's Social Credit system:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
"Chinaâ(TM)s social credit system, a big-data system for monitoring and shaping business and citizensâ(TM) behaviour, is reaching beyond Chinaâ(TM)s borders to impact foreign companies, according to new research. The system, which has been compared to an Orwellian tool of mass surveillance, is an ambitious work in progress: a series of big data and AI-enabled processes that effectively grant subjects a social credit score based on their socia

by Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...

The conclusion: "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

As a political example of the appropriate need for balance between meshworks and hierarchies, here is an excerpt from and essay where conservatives call (propertarian) libertarianism the "Marxism of the RIght": https://www.theamericanconserv...
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoonâ(TM)s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family [as well as health and community, I'd add] are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments."

That song, "Peter Paul and Mary: Because All Men Are Brothers", reminds me of the new movie "Senn" which we watched last night. Specifically, the PPM lyrics of: "My brother's fears are my fears, yellow white and brown. My brother's tears are my tears the whole wide world around."

"Senn" is an impressive movie, especially considering it was produced supposedly for only US$15000. That goes to show what modern technology and an internet-connected gift economy can do nowadays.
http://sennition.com/

This is a bit of a spoiler, but the connection is because of a key aspect of the movie's plot relates to humans' feeling each others emotions and how that changes how they behave, especially in a corporate context.

Which also reminds me of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy."

And some people labelled sociopaths or psychopaths may not have much of these feelings or may feel them more selectively.
"Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch"
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Yet many of our corporate and political leaders at these point may fit that description...

And what do you do with various criminals who often engage in psychopathic behavior? And by whose definitions? Put your "brother" in jail?

And in a big city, given out current economic paradigm, people may also need to learn to switch off or decrease empathy in some way just to survive thousands of interpersonal encounters an hour when walking down the street...

On this plane of existence, there seems to be a complexity of human (and other) life existing in practice at a middle ground between chaos and stasis, competition and cooperation, fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, and so on.
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...

The Lathe of Heaven (as another spoiler) has a section where the protagonist wishes for "world peace", and it is accomplished by the appearance of an alien invasion of the moon, which unites all humanity in opposition...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

So, while we should be careful what we wish for, and things are complex, still, there are so many possible environmental menaces that more cooperation is in order, IMHO. But it is never quite so simple as "all men are brothers". After all, sadly, even "brothers" sometimes fight each other like in the US Civil War.

Still, our culture may shape how competition or aggression is expressed or channeled into more positive directions. Like Mr. Fred Rogers' sings: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" As with Haber, a chemist can figure out a way to feed billions of people with nitrogenous fertilizer, or they can figure out how to kill large numbers of people with poison gas, or, in Haber's case, a chemist can even do both. The irony is that Haber's doing the first (to feed people) made doing the second (to kill people) unnecessary -- except that politics has taken a century to catch up with the potential of his (and others') inventions.

Likewise, even now, imagine what we could have had if the USA had invested three trillion US dollars on fusion energy research and better batteries and solar panels and energy efficiency -- instead of incurring that much and more on the Iraq war. Carter had the right idea, but he was not re-elected, even though (or perhaps because) he said:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of f

By Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

According to Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. "

So, for example, if some centrally planned bureaucracy (say the USA in the 1930s) decides to have a nation-wide arts program, then you might see a lot of creativity there.
http://americanart.si.edu/exhi...
"In 1934, Americans grappled with an economic situation that feels all too familiar today. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration created the Public Works of Art Project--the first federal government program to support the arts nationally. Federal officials in the 1930s understood how essential art was to sustaining America's spirit. Artists from across the United States who participated in the program, which lasted only six months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934, were encouraged to depict "the American Scene." The Public Works of Art Project not only paid artists to embellish public buildings, but also provided them with a sense of pride in serving their country. They painted regional, recognizable subjects--ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life--that reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community and optimism."

Or about photography:
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.o...

Or other ways:
http://newdeal.feri.org/nchs/l...
"Activity in the arts was one aspect of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Established in April 1935 and directed by Harry Hopkins, its purpose was to provide socially useful work for the unemployed. WPA programs included the construction of public buildings such as schools, hospitals and courthouses; highways; recreational facilities such as athletic fields and parks and playgrounds; and conservation facilities such as fish hatcheries and bird sanctuaries. In addition four WPA arts projects ("Federal One") were established. "Federal One" not only provided work for artists, writers, musicians, and actors but nurtured young men and women who were embarking on a career in the arts during the Great Depression. Writers and artists such as Ralph Ellison and J

http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

As a software developer, in some ways I think we hit a peak with languages like Smalltalk, Common Lisp / Symbolics, Erlang, and C in the 1980s and an OS / VM architecture like IBM's System 360 and VM (which was in a sense "open source" till the mid 1980s) and things have been sliding backwards ever since. I learned C around 1983 on Unix (VMUTS) running on VM hardware (on an IBM mainframe with two CPUs where typically when I did a compile VMUTS got one CPU and 100 I/O bound users shared the other, giving me ten a second turn around for "hello world"). VisualWorks+ENVY in the late 1980s was just amazing for its times, solving issues in practice that Java and Eclipse in practice still struggles with on 1000X faster hardware. That all could have just gotten less expensive, faster, and grown gradually, and become more (not less) open. See also: "VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future"
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/

The reality is, in the US marketplace, people usually create incompatible "standards" on purpose to gain vendor lock-in, or to make some marketing claim, or to work around some copyright or patent. As with Microsoft in the past, companies may intentionally try to sabotage standards (embrace, extend, destroy) as an example of market failure relating to monopoly and externalities. Still, another reason this happens is that creating new things from (seemingly) scratch can be a lot of fun (even as almost everything is built on layers of past work, including notions of physics).

I'm all for experiment and diversity, and I'm all for plug-in modularity, and I'm all for learning-by-doing including through building systems from the ground-up (e.g. http://www.nand2tetris.org/ ). But, practically speaking, our bigger problem these days is mostly too much software, too many standards, too many programming languages, too many libraries, too many IDEs, too many OSes, too many drivers, too many plugins, and too many applications (all with too much accidental complexity). Instead of having a few comprehensive reliable (and free and open source) systems implemented in the above languages and using a common VM standard, we have many half-made buggy ones. This is not to say those languages above could not be improved or that another addition to them would be bad. It is just that at some point a plethora of half-finished choices is its own kind of oppression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less

See also:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we mana

Whatever one can say about what really went on around 1776 in North America, in theory, the whole meaning of a democratic republic is supposedly that it is "government of the people, by the people, for the people".

As John Gardner wrote in "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society", every generation must learn anew for itself the meaning of the world carved in the stone monuments.
http://books.google.com/books?id=U5hXpnwUmW4C&printsec=frontcover

Or as he wrote here:
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/JohnGardner-RoadtoSelf-Renewal2.pdf
"We cannot dream of a Utopia in which all arrangements are ideal and everyone is flawless. Life is tumultuous -- an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory. Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and refought. You may wonder if such a struggle, endless and of uncertain outcome, isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world."

Or, as Edmund Burke said, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

So, the struggle against bad government , to ensure the government remains responsive and accountable and appropriately effective, is a bit like fighting mildew in a bathroom -- a never ending struggle. Still, we also need both hierarchy and meshworks in our lives, and indeed, we always have a mix of them as they keep turning into each other:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm

And if the Earth does become one big thinking war machine (like in "Colossus: The Forbin Project") then the algorithms running on its internal homogenous API interfaces become the new actors struggling for resources and democratic accountability (in a purely computational meshwork/hierarchy context).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

Of course, we "people" all may be such already. :-)
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

How many googols of years has this been going on?
"The World Was Probably Already Destroyed"
http://www.digitalcosmology.com/Blog/2012/12/06/t/
"Some people wonder if our planet will be destroyed on December 21, 2012. I have friends asking me every day whether I think the world will end in a few weeks. But it is possible that our planet was already destroyed and before that occured its scientists managed to send a capsule in space with a supercomputer running its simulation. ... Will the destruction happen again in the simulation? Probably not since the conditions that caused it were of stochastic nature. However, even if the destruction takes place in the simulation, the computer will restart it and the world will be created again in an endless fashion. ..."

Still, there is always the first time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

Yet, each time, people (or creatures that act like people) must find anew some balance of competition and cooperation, of meshwork and hierarchy, of a middle ground between fire and ice (to ignore the n-dimensional aspects as another layer of complexity).

Bob Altemeyer says there are both left-wing and right-wing authoritarians. See also G. WIlliam Domhoff on similarities among left-right extremists:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.htm
"Although the [extreme] Right and Left have major differences that make it almost impossible for them to agree on anything, they also have certain -- if not immediately apparent -- similarities as well. In fact, they are remarkably similar for how different they are. Since these similarities are of a type that tends to make them blind to any other view, these similarities further reinforce the dichotomy between them: that is, the similarities I am about to discuss make for more differences.
First, they share the same high degree of moral outrage and anger. This strong moral outrage makes them into absolutists. They become True Believers in their cause, with no doubts whatsoever. They see everyone else as sell-outs and trimmers. This includes many people who share their sympathies, but not their fanaticism. This disdain for less fanatical friends who share their general beliefs also reveals to us what the tamer versions of Rightists and Leftists, that is, conservatives and liberals, have in common: they are more pragmatic, tentative, and experimental in their beliefs. As might be expected, then, and as everyday observation makes apparent, there is often tension between moderate conservatives and Rightists on the Right side of the divide and between liberals and Leftists on the other side. ..."

As Manuel De Landa says, we need both meshworks and hierarchies in our society. As others say, life exists at the interface of order and chaos, in the boundary area between fire and ice, or somewhere between altruism and selfishness.
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm

Your past few posts on this issue seem to me to come across as tending extreme Left, given you seem to be implicitly calling for either essentially exterminating millions of people (or their potential offspring?) or at least chemically altering them because you claim they have some variant of some gene you don't like (with the variant expressed somehow in, say, suggesting that global climate change might be more a function of changes in solar output or soil erosion than burning fossil fuels, or perhaps, say, arguing we may be overall better off with a warmer global climate since plants will in general grow better,etc.). You are afraid such people with this gene variant will destroy humanity, and so you have expressed an implicit desire to either kill them first or perhaps just turn off that gene version somehow by forcing them to ingest medication? Hitler argued the same thing about the Jews -- that Jewish blood would weaken Aryans and destroy the world, and they needed to be destroyed or contained or sterilized. As Domhoff says, there seems to be an unexpected and not yet fully explained tendency of why extreme Leftists tend to resort to violence readily because they feel it is morally justified -- more so than extreme Rightists who tend to be somewhat more rule-driven and following a chain of command. Perhaps that tendency is "genetic" and people expressing such a Leftist inclination should be identified somehow and their genes suppressed? :-) [Ironic sarcasm in case it was not clear.]

All people have a mix of characteristics, inclinations, talents, and preferences that can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation. It's also true there are some real stinkers in the bunch. I hope you can find a way to make the most of yours to contribute to a healthy diverse society. Human intelligence (both the reasoning part and the emotional part) are so complex and so influenced by experience that it is unlikely everything about someone's world view will come down to having one variant of some gene instead of another. And in any case, natural

Some satire I wrote five years ago when Google created Knol, reposted here: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-February/000401.html

Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense. ...

Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by?
Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.

----

Maybe the same goes fro private drones in the balance between meshworks and hierarchies?
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Interesting ammendent suggestion. Also related by me: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

All that said, I think Eric Schmidt has done a lot of great things, and we could have much worse at the heart of Google. Anyone in that position would face a lot of constraints about what he could say or do; it's amazing anyone could do as well as he has. As Langdon Winner wrote about, the systems (including bureaucracies) we create shape the nature of what components are allowed to exists in them. If the components (including people) act too far out of expectations, they are replaced.

"All that's needed is an over-abundance of trying to be "helpful" in just the wrong way."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands

"Incidentally that's the way we've been going down so far, with equating "user friendlyness" with "hiding the controls so you don't have to worry about it"."

Sad but true. Brilliant insight.

"Make the fscking things self-cleaning if you must ..."

Now that I like -- a self-cleaning vegetable juice...

"but at least give them interfaces with published, open specs that I plug into my kitchen controller that I tell what to do"

Again, very insightful. We need open kitchen standards more than specific whiz-bang appliances. Although those standards might apply to any kind of factory automation or home control.

From Manuel De Landa:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible."

See especially JP Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear: http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

BTW, some social semantic desktop ideas to consider for Tonika (but in Java): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623

Something to cosider on social organziation: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

Se also on new economic balances my "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

Thanks for the great post! See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia
http://phys.org/news/2012-02-classic-ecological-stability-years.html

In general, it seems stability (like of climate) creates diversity of species more than the other way around.

However, like so much of life, there are tradeoffs. Diversity maintained by exchange networks (including sex and migration) helps a species or community be resilient in the face of some threats, while isolationanism (which tends to reduce diversity) helps protect against other sorts of threats.

See also Manuel De Landa on "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces":
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Evolution also happens at all levels of all systems (genetic and memetic) all the time across every possible combination -- despite narrow views of what is going on (e.g. "The Selfish Gene").

It would be great to have more FOSS simulations on these themes.

You make some interesting points, and it is true the government at all levels can indeed do various bad things for all sorts of reasons, but the problem is that coordination of some sort is so darn useful. For example, what are you going to do when someone pollutes your groundwater? Call the EPA? Who is going to prevent endless feuding between your neighbors with guns? The Justice Department? (At least, in places that still have a reasonable level of economic order.) Who is going to maintain the roads? Who is going to support really basic long-term research (under our current economic paradigm without a basic income)? Who is going to redistribute wealth to account for the fact that "the rich get richer"? Who is going to make sure that markets take in account externalities like pollution, local risks, and systemic risk?

Yes, in theory one can come up with less formal social organizations to do these things. But there is still some organization. And probably one then has voting or key decision makers with permissions, or people who defer to other people for various reasons and so on. Perhaps the best sci-fi story about such an alternative is James P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear, but even he admits that the story took it too far from what probably could be made to work in practice (but it's still an inspirational story you'd probably like).

So, one way or another, you end up with something like a "government" when you try to build a real society. Different forms of government may work better or worse for different cultures, times, situations, or personalities, but we still need some form of organization and agreement.

Something on the theory:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Something on the practice:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. "

And health and community are important to happiness (but a US conservative typically might not want to admit that...)

The fact that some parts of governments in the USA may be doing a bad job, and may be captured by the interests they are supposed to regulate, does not mean all government is bad. Several European governments (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden) are doing better in many respects. We may need a more general paradigm shift in our socioeconomics though before our government can start working well again. But in general, the most thriving societies have both good government and a dynamic business exchange sector.

This reminds me of general issues with operant conditioning; you can't get a being to do something it won't normally do, but you can change the probabilities of different behaviors.

However, people are more complex than most other animals; it's hard to say how interventions can change the social dynamics. Just losing a war may have led to social change in Japan and German through introspection, regardless of what the USA did as an occupying force? How could one tell which was the bigger psychological issue, losing or being occupied?

I agree with the general idea in this thread that taking a strong state like in Germany or Japan and shifting its direction somewhat after a major military loss (towards making it less belligerent militarily) is different from forming a stronger cohesive system in the first place like in Afghanistan. Or, in the case of Iraq, there you had a long term civil conflict suppressed by an aparently strong state, and when destroying the state (as the USA did, although often things can be more hollow then they appear), then the civil conflict broke out (a religious minority dominating a majority leading to reprisals etc.).

On finding good situation-specific balances between meshworks and hierarchies:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

By the way, this says Rikyu was seventy at the time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sen_no_Riky%C5%AB

If you look at the UK, that was the world's previous (before the USA) big undisputed empire, and look at what the people are like now. That is maybe the future of the USA?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
""The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we [in the UK] are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""

And part of why:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

Thus the war on kids (through schools, originating in Prussia for military reasons) to turn them into soldiers and workers for a military-industrial complex, which is its own form of secular religion:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Compartmentalization can lead to lots of secrecy ("need to know"). Secrecy helps some things, but it also makes it easier for snakes to hide inside something, or for people to be unable to "connect the dots". I heard about one sociology professor who said, studying movies, that the "good guys" always win because they have better communications than the "bad guys". There are endless books about how organizations can improve their internal communications for greater effectiveness. Also, consider that analysis is about putting things into compartments, but synthesis is about putting things together, and both are important for creative problem solving, and the needs of our society seem to be shifting towards creative synthesis:
"RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

What good is a "secure" organization if it can't perform its primary function (whatever that is) very well?

There are always tradeoffs of security vs. effectiveness/useability. See:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/security_vs_usa.html
Which links to this:
http://jnd.org/dn.mss/when_security_gets_in_the_way.html
"The numerous incidents of defeating security measures prompts my cynical slogan: The more secure you make something, the less secure it becomes. Why? Because when security gets in the way, sensible, well-meaning, dedicated people develop hacks and workarounds that defeat the security. Hence the prevalence of doors propped open by bricks and wastebaskets, of passwords pasted on the fronts of monitors or hidden under the keyboard or in the drawer, of home keys hidden under the mat or above the doorframe or under fake rocks that can be purchased for this purpose. We are being sent a mixed message: on the one hand, we are continually forced to use arbitrary security procedures. On the other hand, even the professionals ignore many of them. How is the ordinary person to know which ones matter and which don't?"

One might expect people at the NSA to be quite a bit more disciplined and trained than average, but certainly this point holds for other organizations.

And about another three letter agency (quoting from Wikipedia) apparently struggling with compartmentalization:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"All of this has the effect of making it hard for DI analysts to interact even with the classified outside world. The CIA view is that there are risks to connecting CIA systems even to classified systems elsewhere. Mitigating those risks sends implicit messages to analysts: that technology is a threat, not a benefit; that the CIA does not put a high priority on analysts using IT easily or creatively; and, worst of all, that data outside the CIA’s own network are secondary to the intelligence mission."

And links on open alternatives for most of any nation's intelligence needs:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
http://www.phibetaiota.net/abou

Just as a caveat, and to clarify my own beliefs, I believe in the importance of both meshworks and hierarchies as Manuel DeLanda talks about:
    "MESHWORKS, HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES"
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
we need to be careful not to turn the oppression of people against each other into the oppression of the group against the individual. So, it is a dynamic and creative balancing act...

An example of the other side of this that people rightly reject:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Change_of_Mind
"This episode deals with conformity, methods of enforcing it, and the consequences of its rejection.[2] In particular, it has been said that the episode addresses both McCarthyism (in which "unmutual" is equivalent to "communist") and the show trials of Stalinist Russia (which often featured coerced confessions), as well as the ethical issues of lobotomy.[3] At one point, some of the other prisoners are shown going through "self-criticism", which was common in China at the time."

So, to the extent social institutions can help people find that balance, they can be good things. But, that does not mean schools-as-we-know-them are good at that, or ever would be.

"All anarchistic links, it appears. Which is great, except anarchy fails, in education. Miserably."

How can you call Alfie Kohn or John Holt or Jeff Schmidt anarchistic?

I'd say those links were about trying to find a more appropriate balance between meshworks and hierarchies than authoritarian schooling represents. From Manuel DeLanda:
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

BTW, if Gatto is insane, how was he selected as NYS Teacher of the Year and how did he teach for so many years in public schools? :-)

Also, it seems like you are admitting kids don't get to practice either freedom or democracy in mainstream public schools. So, how are they supposed to learn to do those things when they turn 18 and can vote?

If the schooling idea is so great, why is creativity plummeting?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1159241/The-Creativity-Crisis

Is this guy, knighted by the Queen of England for services to education, an anarchist?
"Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

How can you say that the Prussian model was rejected when just about everything about schools reflects it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
"The Prussian system instituted compulsory attendance, specific training for teachers, national testing for all students (used to classify children for potential job training), national curriculum set for each grade and mandatory kindergarten."

A link from there to a documentary on Prussian Schooling:
http://www.quantumshift.tv/v/1198046178

How come the people who started Google went to Montessori schools?

Did you go to school? Do you spend much of your time talking to school people? Then you are in the system...
    http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict “ideological discipline.” The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional’s lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."

Have you looked at this?
    http://www.thewaronkids.com/
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnwm11d6II

How do you evaluate schools on how creative or cooperative or democratically-oriented or critical thinking or kind or helpful or healthy or resilient most kids are after they come out of them?

What a great post. Here is an excerpt from an essay by Manuel De Landa that amplifies on your theme:
    "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"""
To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us.
"""

"What will determine the hierarchy when money is disposed?"

That's what James P. Hogan goes into at length in the 1982 sci-fi book, Voyage From Yesteryear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
"Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing - resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and must be put to use if they are to be acknowledged. As a result, the competitive drive that fuels capitalist financial systems has filled the colony with the products of decades of incredible artistic and technical talent, and there are no widespread hierarchies. No one person or group of people can know everything, so no one person or group of people is expected to speak for all. They have no centralized authorities; some would say they have no government at all."

In one interchange in the book, it is made clear that people there think what humans aspire to on Earth, to make a bunch of money and then sit on their behinds or just do frivolous recreational things, would be considered mental illness there, and further, such a mentally ill person would be taken care of by that society by giving them every material thing they wanted. Stuff was so easy to come by there, with robots making most stuff, and with cheap energy (they had fusion power in the story, but solar and wind and geothermal etc. can also provide more than what we need).

And that society does have a meritocracy of sorts, but the difference is that is not a strict hierarchy, but instead a complex and fluid mix of hierarchies and meshworks (see de Landa),
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
where competence is recognized in very small local hierarchies about single issues within a gift economy framework. If you think about aspects of how, say, Debian GNU/Linux works, or some other open source projects taken as a whole across the entire community, there are some similarities.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202

But, even while there is meritocracy in the society James P. Hogan depicts, again, there is neither fiat dollar money as we know it, nor credentials, nor titles, nor formal government, nor a lot of other things we accept as "normal". They do this by assessing each others competence in different areas with skills they have learned from birth. So, not really a "popularity" contest.

Now, that is just a fictional world. Debian is at least real. The key issue is that as less and less labor is needed, a variety of different possibilities open up for organizing society. So, it only takes in the USA about 1% of the workforce for farming using air conditioned tractors with stereo systems vs. 90% for farming with horses 200 years ago; 12% and dropping for manufacturing with CNC machines and design software versus 30% for manufacturing with hand-operated drill presses and the same thing I predict will happen for many services (addressing vitamin D deficiency may potentially cut medical care costs by 30% or more).
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html

The fact is, much of accumulation of money is precisely about winning a popularity contest. Granted, often times the contest is rigged -- so, for example, I read that the oil companies and car companies and tire companies got together t

If goverments were so bad, why is much of Western Europe with more intervention but more democracy overall generally happier than the USA?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html

The biggest point is from here, that the income-through-jobs link is becoming more broken every day as we see sci-fi robots become reality, as forseen in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"""
The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system.
"""

Some of this may be that you are seeing the part you want to see and trying to pigeon hole these arguments. Here is a good essay for a broader perspective:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"""
To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constan

From: "Liberatianism: Marxism of the Right"
    http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. "

Health and community are important too, but that article leaves out the government's role in promoting them too, befitting typical US conservatives. :-)

See also:
    "MESHWORKS, HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES" by Manuel de Landa
      http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"""
To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us.
"""

Most US libertarians could be termed "Propertarian Liberatrians".
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propertarian

Another flavor, Noam Chomsky's, is "Libertarian Socialist" (which I mind less, and we may well see more and more of as we transition to a post-scarcity society):
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

But, as Manuel de Landa suggests, we need concrete experiments to see what works well in different situations.

"If we all had our one acre of land, even if one of us screwed it up, humanity could continue. But if the King owned all the land, then, the King could screw up all the land, and frequently, will."

And if one of those people on their one acre of land makes a bioengineered plague, then everyone dies? Or, when the nuclear power plant next door melts down, we permanently evacuate Manhattan?

Here is something to consider, by Manuel de Landa:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Manuel de Landa suggests we need a healthy balance between meshworks and hierarchies.

By the way, make sure you get enough Vitamin D while working inside on simulations, as I agree the public health agencies have dropped the ball on a lot of things:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/vitamin-d-and-h1n1-swine-flu.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html

Also, on "socialism":
http://digg.com/political_opinion/Socialist_Agencies_Destroying_America_Graphic
"""
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.
I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level
determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.
On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.
And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in me

I put a reference to your insightful comment on the "open manufacturing" mailing list:
    "Forfeiting plumbing for self-determination?"
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/8462e40751be6966#

What I found interesting in the comment and reply is the perceived tension between relying on (centralized?) manufacturing and freedom.

Anyway, it seems to be the general feeling of slashdot that there is no land one can go to right now to escape these trends (other than perhaps the future. :-)

David Brin suggests in his transparent society that the only alternative to one-way surveillance is for everyone to be able to inspect all surveillance:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

In the "utopia" at the end of Marshall Brain's Manna story, there was no anonymity and effectively probably no privacy:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
But that is sort-of like Brin's Transparent Society idea.

Another post in this Slashdot discussion makes the point that "Freedom" and "Justice" are not the same thing as "Democracy" (even if they often may go together). One can wonder if "Privacy" is orthogonal to those as well? Have so many things changed that privacy is indeed history? On the other hand, in the short story "The Skills of Xanadu", which is another open manufacturing utopia, people had total privacy even in plain sight when they wanted it, out of social conventions and a form of computer-mediated telepathy.
    "RE:The Skills of Xanadu online at Google Books?"
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/13e85ebf99d0554f

In any case, another implication of your comment is that, for many people, the conceptual goal for open manufacturing in a free society may not need be as high as producing everything we have now (even indoor plumbing?). Just producing enough to support a reasonably free and sustainable society may be a good enough first goal? Anyway, there are bound to be a diversity of opinions on that; I'm just drawing together some themes.

I remain convinced, along the lines of Manuel de Landa, that there is *no* possibility of choice between hierarchy and meshwork, because all systems have both aspects. One can at best talk about balances between the
centralized hierarchies and grassroots meshworks in different situations.
    "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm

Anybody raising kids is almost never bored. :-)

Power is relative and is always to some extent distributed:
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Also, even with a lot of free software, I spend a lot of time reading about it and learning how to use it, just like hunter-gatherers spent a lot of time learning about medicinal plants and the habits of animals. There is a lot we can learn by looking at how hunter-gatherers lived. From:
    "The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
    http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

In hunter-gatherer times people spent a lot of time raising kids, traveling, singing, dancing, and so on (beyond collecting food, which took fairly little time compared to an eight hour work day today). A lot of time was just spent admiring the natural world and the stars in the sky in a spiritual way. So, I have little doubt people will find meaningful things to do, even in a world of material abundance.

I want to raise some of the deeper issues behind the problem of cyber-warfare (or even just most plain cyber-crime related to fraud).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwar

Most of the movie "War Games" is silly, but this statement from it is profound: "the only winning move is not to play". Or to generalize it, there are finite games and infinite games, and infinite games are about continuing to play, not about winning (see author James P. Carse on _Finite and Infinite Games_).
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-962221125884493114
Now that we are confronted with global warfare, whether nuclear, biological, or cybernetic, we need to rethink what games we want to play. As Albert Einstein said "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking." The same might be said about genetic engineering or the internet. We need to somehow transcend these arms races instead of try to win them.

It continually boggles my mind that people are willing to admit to problems of such extreme magnitude caused by "progress" so far -- like the threat of nuclear war, the threat of bioengineered plagues (or even just cluster bombs and land mines), the threat of economic collapse (speculation, derivatives, etc.), the threat of widespread pollution with unexpected consequences (e.g. endocrine disruptors from plastics), the threat of global climate change, the threat of universal fascism (by "liberals" or "conservatives" :-), the threat (or opportunity) of an upcoming technological singularity, and so on
including the threat of cyber-warfare or cyber-crime (essentially the technological face of the usual horsemen: war, plague, famine, leading to death), but then, when faced with these huge threats, the solutions proposed are timid, piecemeal, or regressive. Why not consider that big systemic problems (sometimes resulting from incremental quantitative changes over time adding up to vast qualitative changes) may require widespread transcendental changes (even if just a change of the heart or the prevalent mythology)?

=== the need for mutual security and a resilient civilian infrastructure ===

As long as the US defense strategy is based on strategic dominance of others
"Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance"
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289
and not mutual security for all, the US will not be secure, because it will be a threat to everyone by its own logic. Such a one-sided strategy will promote the development of the very ruinous arms races which have already cost trillions and left both the USA and the now-defunct USSR as losers of the cold war (the USA just taking a little longer to fall from the financial punches of the past few decades).

These issues were outlined in the book _Brittle Power_ in the 1980s,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
mainly in regard to the US energy infrastructure, but the ideas apply everywhere including manufacturing and likely the internet. Systems which balance meshwork and hierarchy
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
(and so are at least moderately decentralized, compared to hierarchical monopolies) will stand the greatest chance of survival. Unfortunately, the civilian systems which the General is charged with protecting are mainly not of that variety. The internet is more-so like this than almost any other system, but it still has its key weaknesses in practice (including widespread use of difficult-to-audit proprietary software like Microsoft Windows). That lack of resiliency is a product of the failure of decades of civilian governance in terms of

I should also add:

http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm
"To speak of the "end" of work is to speak in the passive voice as if work is ending itself, and needs only a nudge from progressive policies to wind down without a fuss. But work is not a natural process like combustion or entropy which runs its course of itself. Work is a social practice reproduced by repeated, multitudinous personal choices. Not free choices usually -- "your money or your life" is, after all, a choice -- but nonetheless acts of human intention. It is (the interaction of many) acts of will which perpetuate work, and it is (the interaction of many) acts of will which will abolish it by a collective adventure speaking in the active voice. Work will end, if it does, because workers end it by choosing to do something else -- by living in a different way."

also: "The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and
Negri" by George Caffentzis
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article1927.html

And the schooling system perpetuates the problem:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7c.htm
"The devastating defeat by Napoleon at Jena triggered the so-called Prussian Reform Movement, a transformation which replaced cabinet rule (by appointees of the national leader) with rule by permanent civil servants and permanent government bureaus. ... At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen, where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command. The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require. From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these "real schools," learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations--to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain. Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended "people's schools" where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history."

http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/
"A sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong."

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
"Now, when I asked my audience why educated Americans supported the war, they couldn't figure it out. One thing I heard is that since working-class young men had to go to war, naturally they and their families opposed it. But research shows that when people expect to go to war-whatever educational level they are-they tend to support that war. Because of cognitive dissonance, people come to believe in what they have to do. So I pointed out that there are two social processes, both tied to school, that could help explain why educated people supported the war. One, educated Americans tend to be more successful and affluent, and thus have more allegiance to society. They have a strong incent

"Free" may be the only thing that "works" in the the long term, check out:

    "Why work"
    http://www.whywork.org/

    "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

    "A critique of a neo-futurist's vision of the decline of work" by Bob Black
    http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm

    "RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine."
    http://www.reprap.org/

    "The Triple Revolution" letter to the president sent in 1964
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

"Free" used to work in the past in America:
    http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."

Let's hope "free" works again in the future, or we may get this:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"In other words, Manna spread through the American corporate landscape like wildfire. And my dad was right. It was when all of these new Manna systems began talking to each other that things started to get uncomfortable."

A sci-fi novel about a clash of old and new ways of thinking:
    _Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan
      http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29

Inspired by Manuel de Landa's writings,
http://t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
I think the world needs both meshworks and hierarchies, but the hierarchies have the upper hand right now so we need more meshworks to balance.

Some ideas:
Solar power -- like better PV panels or hot water heaters, literally decentralizing the power infrastructure (after production)
Wireless mesh networking -- like in OLPC, decentralizing the information infrastructure
Home gardening literacy and simulation -- decentralizing the food production infrastructure
3D printing -- like RepRap, decentralizing the production industry
Free and Open Source software -- like Debian, decentralizing the copyright industry

Think along those lines for whatever works with your skills and local conditions.

Then of course there is David Brin's approach (make all surveillance cameras publicly accessible, including ones in police rooms):
    http://www.davidbrin.com/privacyarticles.html
See also this related story:
    http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Thanks for the interesting reply.

You might like this link, which relates abstractly to what you said:
http://t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

More related stuff on that web page. Or here:
    http://www.mediamatic.net/article-5914-en.html

Manuel De Landa puts it in another context:
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding
meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to
make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only
because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but
because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties
of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete
experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs
or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn
out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the
appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the
services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other
hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a
better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory
occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten
years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an
increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities.
But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity
articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution.
After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we
do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of
property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions.
Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the
solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental
attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what
the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze
and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

Another interesting conference on a smaller scale was held in Viennal last week: Free Bitflows. Participants there were Brewster Kahle from Archive.org (with images of the Amsterdam PetaBox), Ian Clarke from Freenet, Musicians favoring fair and free distribution, and the organizer of Wizards of OS, among others. What are links to comparable events in the US?

And it becomes obvious why cryptography is so important...

http://www.t0.or.at/crypto/crossbow.htm

Nikola Tesla suggested a *wireless* worldwide power grid around (IIRC) 50 years earlier, and demonstrated the technology to make it posssible.

How about calling it Port Watson? Or maybe a TAZ?

The question remains, who wants to be first? Maybe you can count Sealand, but that's a bit of a stretch.

NAZI s! We have NAZI s! Here at crazy uncle Sam's project Paperclip, we have the finest NAZI s your taxpayer money could buy!

We've got big name NAZI super-scientists like Wernher von Braun, who single-handedly built the US space program when we couldn't get even a mouse into space without blowing up on the pad! And don't you believe those who would cast aspersions on his character! He used concentration camp slave labor to build his V1s & V2s that he blew up innocent Londoners with!

If you're looking to beef up your intelligence services, Reinhard Gehlen is the NAZI for you! He's the NAZI that can make those commie bastards talk! He comes with a vast cache of intelligence documents on the USSR compilled by the pain-staking tourture and interrogation of red commie-bastard prisoners. Why do your own legwork when it's already been done for you?!! This man would be a great addition to any spy agency, and a sterling influence upon your junior agents!

If you're a US presidential candidate, and want to ensure that you crush your ineffectual, peanut-farming Democratic competitor, Heinrich Rupp is the NAZI for you! With strong ties to the Arab community, he can manage complex three-cornered schemes that will ensure that those hostages aren't released while there's a Democrat in the Oval Office. As a bonus, you can use the proceeds to fund anti-communist fascists in Central America.

We also have such all-stars as Arthur Rudolph, Kurt Blome, Walter Schreiber and Licio Gelli! We have everything you need to build an enlightened, democratic new world order! So hurry on down to crazy uncle Sam's before all of our NAZI s are gone!


(One of our most notorious NAZI s now works for Microsoft where he continues to commit crimes against humanity.)

NAZI s! We have NAZI s! Here at crazy uncle Sam's project Paperclip, we have the finest NAZI s your taxpayer money could buy!

We've got big name NAZI super-scientists like Wernher von Braun, who single-handedly built the US space program when we couldn't get even a mouse into space without blowing up on the pad! And don't you believe those who would cast aspersions on his character! He used concentration camp slave labor to build his V1s & V2s that he blew up innocent Londoners with!

If you're looking to beef up your intelligence services, Reinhard Gehlen is the NAZI for you! He's the NAZI that can make those commie bastards talk! He comes with a vast cache of intelligence documents on the USSR compilled by the pain-staking tourture and interrogation of red commie-bastard prisoners. Why do your own legwork when it's already been done for you?!! This man would be a great addition to any spy agency, and a sterling influence upon your junior agents!

If you're a US presidential candidate, and want to ensure that you crush your ineffectual, peanut-farming Democratic competitor, Heinrich Rupp is the NAZI for you! With strong ties to the Arab community, he can manage complex three-cornered schemes that will ensure that those hostages aren't released while there's a Democrat in the Oval Office. As a bonus, you can use the proceeds to fund anti-communist fascists in Central America.

We also have such all-stars as Arthur Rudolph, Kurt Blome, Walter Schreiber and Licio Gelli! We have everything you need to build an enlightened, democratic new world order! So hurry on down to crazy uncle Sam's before all of our NAZI s are gone!


(One of our most notorious NAZI s now works for Microsoft where he continues to commit crimes against humanity.)

NAZI s! We have NAZI s! Here at crazy uncle Sam's project Paperclip, we have the finest NAZI s your taxpayer money could buy!

We've got big name NAZI super-scientists like Wernher von Braun, who single-handedly built the US space program when we couldn't get even a mouse into space without blowing up on the pad! And don't you believe those who would cast aspersions on his character! He used concentration camp slave labor to build his V1s & V2s that he blew up innocent Londoners with!

If you're looking to beef up your intelligence services, Reinhard Gehlen is the NAZI for you! He's the NAZI that can make those commie bastards talk! He comes with a vast cache of intelligence documents on the USSR compilled by the pain-staking tourture and interrogation of red commie-bastard prisoners. Why do your own legwork when it's already been done for you?!! This man would be a great addition to any spy agency, and a sterling influence upon your junior agents!

If you're a US presidential candidate, and want to ensure that you crush your ineffectual, peanut-farming Democratic competitor, Heinrich Rupp is the NAZI for you! With strong ties to the Arab community, he can manage complex three-cornered schemes that will ensure that those hostages aren't released while there's a Democrat in the Oval Office. As a bonus, you can use the proceeds to fund anti-communist fascists in Central America.

We also have such all-stars as Arthur Rudolph, Kurt Blome, Walter Schreiber and Licio Gelli! We have everything you need to build an enlightened, democratic new world order! So hurry on down to crazy uncle Sam's before all of our NAZI s are gone!


(One of our most notorious NAZI s now works for Microsoft where he continues to commit crimes against humanity.)

Not a high school paper - note that it's actually signed at the bottom 'Hakim Bey' - an American 'underground' (whatever that means nowadays) writer. If you're bored, have a look here , among many other places on the web (including the EFF archive) for some of his writing. It's often incoherent, but usually in an eloquent, interesting way.

why is that some folks insist on labelling any who don't agree with their free-for-all attitude toward sex as "morbid", "deeply afraid of sexuality", "loathing of females", "repressed"/"oppressive", "Victorian", and/or otherwise "mentally ill"?

I think it was Freud. But seriously, did Angst Badger really use the term "free for all"??

Anyhow, I feel that the comment which you dislike,

institutionalized form of mental illness, a phobia of sexuality that manifests itself in the form of political oppression on the grand scale and domestic terror

is not completely out of place. It's our very own western psychology and psychotheraputic studies which have produced insights into our unacknowledged sexual "stuff". And 'terror' and 'oppression' are the sorts of words used in connection with these issues, exactly because 'terror' etc. are typically experienced. Now I'll stop there, as I'm not qualified, but let me add that Angst Badger's post bears some resemblance to the issue of how we go about measuring sanity -- ie. 'the degree to which an individual has adjusted to society'. This definition of sanity raises the issue, as extensively researched by Erich Fromm in "The Sane Society", of whether society itself is sane.

So while I agree with your principle of reserving the right to a "difference of opinion", you may wish to ask yourself just where "your" opinion came from.

Two friends have worked in this area for some years now, Bob O'Kane and Ulrike Gabriel of Otherspace, an Art & Technology Duo (Ulrike originally from Germany, Bob was in Buffalo for a while and is the tech side.. skills ranging from analog circuitry to SGI Onyx programming). You may find them by searching for Terrain project, one old page is at > t0 (http://web.t0.or.at/t0/terrain/page001.htm)</a>. In the versions I have tried in Tokyo, two participants sit about 8m apart separated by a 3m diameter low round platform on which a fleet of light styrofoam/solarpanel/sensor covered mini robots twirl about. The table is lit from above by a giant bank of bright halogens, and from below relatively dim panels from which reectangular portions of the platform seem to randomly change in intensity. The robots move faster depending on the amount of current in the halogens, and the light from below changes their behavior. In some versions the intensity of emotion in the participants (measured by headbands linked to transceivers) is measured, and like amounts would produce a synergistic effect in the robots. A later version worked more on similarities in emotion. When I say emotion it obviously is not a chemical sensor, it works more on the ration of beta and delta waves if I remember correctly. It was very difficult at first to use and when I tried it the lights went bang! on and off which startled everyone. Apparently they had precalibrated the system for Japanese minds. An interview with Bob by Volker Grassmuck (who was also in Tokyo and is now in Berlin) is available at <a href="http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic014/vol ker/volker_e.html">http://www.ntticc.or. jp/pub/ic_mag/ic014/volker/volker_e.html</a>.

How does a Tesla Coil work

A short bio

The Tesla Coil webring

The Nikola Tesla Museum

Huge ftp archive with Tesla pcitures

Tesla's Autobiography

Very thorough plan on how to build your own Tesla Coil

This guy already made his own Tesla Coil

Enjoy,
Arno

-------------------------------------------------- -------------------------
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitler

http://www.picturez.net/ - All the people all the pictures

How does a Tesla Coil work

A short bio

The Tesla Coil webring

The Nikola Tesla Museum

Huge ftp archive with Tesla pcitures

Tesla's Autobiography

Very thorough plan on how to build your own Tesla Coil

This guy already made his own Tesla Coil

Enjoy,
Arno

-------------------------------------------------- -------------------------
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitler

http://www.picturez.net/ - All the people all the pictures