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Sovereign Individual (Part One)
Predicting the future is risky, especially when it comes to technology, whose history defies anything like a rational approach. But The Sovereign Individual, recently published in paperback by Touchstone, raises profoundly interesting questions about the information age and the future, the kind of questions worth kicking around.
In my work, I read lots of books about technology and the future, but this one captured my imagination in an unusual way. While I don't have the answers that Davidson and Rees-Mogg are looking for, I have the feeling they are asking many of the right questions. So we're plucking several of the most interesting ideas from Sovereign Individual and passing them along.
One of the major themes in The Sovereign Individual is the notion that the revolution unleashed by digital technologies is liberating individuals at the expense of the nation-states that have governed much of humanity for thousands of years.
Though all of human history, there have been three basic stages of economic life: hunting-and-gathering societies; agricultural societies; and industrial societies. Now, sparked by the rise of computing and the growth of the Net and the Web, something entirely new and different may be just over the horizon, something all of us are already a primitive part of, a fourth stage of social organization: information societies.
To Lord Rees-Mogg, a former editor of The Times of London, and Davidson, a venture capitalist, the civic myths of the 20th Century are beginning to erode under the pressure of the ascending information age. The death of Communism is only the latest evidence. Western governments, the authors say, may be more benign but are also tired. They're losing their governing authority, their leaders void of answers and ideas, mouthing platitudes fewer and fewer people believe or listen to. An entirely new reality will emerge in cyberspace, ruled by a cognitive elite based in cities like Frankfurt, London, San Jose, Singapore and Tokyo.
Unlike the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions, the Information Revolution will not evolve over hundreds of years. Like the technology that created it, it will take hold more rapidly than any other social phase of human life. The Information Revolution, now already well underway will play out within our lifetimes, and it's time to get ready.
"Technical and economic innovations will no longer be confined to small portions of the globe," write the authors. "The transformation will be all but universal. And it will involve a break with the past so profound that it will almost bring to life the magical domain of the gods as imagined by the early agricultural peoples like the ancient Greeks (and SF writers in games like Mage and Shadowrunner). To a greater degree than most would now be willing to concede,it will prove difficult or impossible to preserve many contemporary institutions in the new millenium. When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of cave dwellers."
In a world awash in punditry and hype, why take The Sovereign Individual more seriously than any other attempt at futuristic navel gazing? One is these authors record: In previous books, they predicted the stock market crash of the late 80s and the fall of Communism. Their view is also less America-centric than much contemporary writing about technology, incorporating a global and economic perspective that is original and provocative.
Are we the first citizens of a new kind of society? Or simply participants in the ongoing modification of the old one?
Look soon for Part 2: Reviving Laws of the March; Virtual Merchant States that Transcend Nationality
Come on Jon be consistent.
Wouldn't it be a better option to focus more of our resources on petrification technology? Please do, the hot teen girls of tomorrow will thank you!
______
Love Always,
Cobalt
I mean, couldn't that have been said with the advent of the printing press, the library or television for that matter? Is the Internet just a sequential evolution of how we handle information or is it truly a new 'society'? Are we putting the carriage before the horse here?
pronoblem
It is time to seriously start thinking about one's separation from the state. It would be interesting to see citizens claiming their rights for independence and sovereignty. Those who have land will have more advantage over those who live in a city and have almost no land. A one family, or even one man or woman state is coming near you now. You set up your own rules, your own government, your own banking and all of it is made possible due to the Internet.
Of-course there are about one billion questions to be asked and problems to be solved, but with today's computer speed, it's not too difficult. (Who is going to be running those sewers though?)
You can't handle the truth.
This book seems to look at the individual vs the state, but the same arguments apply to the individual vs the corporation. Technology liberates employees from dependence on any single company, creating a nation of "free agents".
Technological skills are portable, the fast pace of technological change favors the flexible (which tend to be individuals, not companies), and technology reaches everywhere, freeing those who would otherwise be tied to the local corporate giant.
This is, needless to say, a Good Thing.
This is exactly the point that alot of us "extremists" have been making about the Napster and DeCSS debates. Not that it isn't a violation of Copyright, but that copyright laws are too outdated, and anything that the current court system tries to churn out will be worthless for the most part. Today's gov'ts are exactly what Katz is saying here... Tired, worn out old men. There isn't much left in them in the way of life, and hopefully, the entire old school paradigm of governments will be shattered soon. I don't know about the state of other countries, but I believe the Second American Revolution is coming. Are you ready?
Paulydavis, Corporations already do rule us. They are what religion was to the medival societies, but spinning their own disinformation to the public in hopes they might make a quick buck. What's really scary is that the government is like the kings and queens of the past, protecting the corps., for the sake of stability. Ignorance==Stability?
Sig it.
Sorry: couldn't resist.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
And as the "information" revolution occurs and we move into a new techno-utopia we will be finally able to forget that the real world is not as perfect as it seems to the average geek. We'll drown in so much useless information that we won't have to worry about starving children in Africa any more.
The increasing amount of information watering holes online which are targetted to a certain type of person has a serious negative consequence which you don't often hear about. They encourage conformity and suppress new ideas. Why? Because when the only people whose opinions you read or hear are those who share the same interests as you and agree with your outlook then you're not being challenged.
Just look at Slashdot for a great example of this. Plenty of like-minded people and a lack of tolerance for alternative opinions. Indeed, moderation provides a wonderful mechanism to encourage conformity at the price of healthy argument.
As the trend increases and we enter a true "information" age, it will get to the point where people do have access to all the information they could ever want, but instead they limit themselves to the unchallenging and comfortable. It'll be a million times worse than the television, because it'll be personal.
In this situation who will be bothered about the have-nots? Because there are a lot of have-nots out there, for a lot of different reasons. These people will become an underclass, and the difference will be serious. Today homeless people find themselves trapped because without an address they cannot get jobs or other things we take for granted - how much worse will it be when people are unable to do anything without an online presence?
is where does this leave the Government/ stable society? I have not read the book but am curious about the idea of these "Big Brother" cognitive elite? Methinks maybe these authors have read "Brave New World" one to many times. Then again like "Brave New World" the corporations are spreading disinformation and control to the public so maybe it isn't too far off. Mmmmmmmmmm...Soma.
Sig it.
People have the power to change the way in which they are ruled independent of technology.
I know of at least one political party that honors the role of the individual above that of the state. They have been around since the seventies. They are called the Libertarian party.
Voters in this country have made the choice of the state over the individual by voting for the same old Republicans and Democrats. If they ever decide they don't like the current state of affairs they can get off their fat asses and hit the voting booth.
If you want sovereignty, vote Libertarian. Your vote won't require Internet access or even a computer.
that is the best analogy of where the corporations fit into modern society that I have heard yet.
... what Clive James used to find so amusing with Lord Smogg?
Despite the fact that my current career basically hinges on the advent and future of the Internet, I cannot say that it is this huge paradigm shift Mr. Katz wants to make of it. Certainly, its volume and openness make information widely available but it's not changing the way I get information, fundamentally. I'm still reading, viewing, and listening to content, be it news or advertising or whatever. In that sense, the printing press, radio, or television created a much bigger shift. The internet takes those "information roads" and adds instant access to it. It's just not really "new".
What will it be then? Necessarily, whatever new dimension we can add to human interaction. My guess will be virtual reality; the internet, however, ought to provide the backbone for VR interactions across distances, which makes the 'Net an important first step.
Can what is formed say to that who formed it, "Why have you made me thus?"
It's true, the world (or the US anyway) may be on the way to another revolution, but who's to say that the old school politicians can't squash it before it happens? They've done quite a job on DeCSS and napster (so far), and there's only more to come. The world is a better and *cheaper* place because the net has smashed economic walls. Prices go down when I can buy the cheapest product in the world, rather than in just one store, state, etc. Borders between states, countries, etc. hold less meaning daily because it's possible to buy from another city, state, or country without even leaving your desk. This only makes the old school have to work harder to stop it, because it's harder for them to make a buck. ...which is what they set out to do in the first place. What can we do? political reform? I don't know, but the world can't just change while geeks sit idly by.
-Never underestimate the power of underestimation.
It drives me nuts when people come out with these grand predictions based on only one of many concurrent trends in society. Technological growth is not the only factor that will determine whether governments retain their power. Even if it were, the conclusions the authors draw from this (as quoted by Katz; I haven't read the book) are questionable even in that context.
For openers, technology as a liberating factor is still only relevant to a relatively small segment of Western population. Advanced technology in general is present throughout society, but the specific sorts of tech that might be considered liberating (Internet and desktop publishing come to mind) are really only available to an affluent few. Cell phones and pagers are widely available, but how liberating are they? How many people treat them as a leash instead? Certainly most sysadmins I know. And ultimately, how much control does an individual have over the technology he or she uses? Even the brightest are at the mercy of their ISP, telco, or manufacturer for service. It seems to me that the tendency of a technological infrastructure will not be to push control back to the people from government, but rather to large corporations from government.
And of course, that is supposing that technology is the only force currently driving social change. It isn't. As an example, take population growth and a related phenomenon, urbanization. As more and more people keep being packed into less and less space, the social pressures for more law and regulation will increase, not decrease. Government will be seen as more necessary, not less. This is a trend that pre-dates the Industrial Revolution and has continued through it and the Information Revolution both; yet it does not seem to have met with the authors' consideration.
Which is my problem with most books/articles/diatribes like "The Sovereign Individual." They are written in the same manner as most science fiction--extrapolate a single technology and imagine what will happen with society as a result--but presented as well thought predictions. Essentially, it's wishful thinking, which I'm not opposed to in general, but I find it a little frightening that some people will take for granted that all of these new things are good things. We should not reject new technology out of hand, but neither should we necessarily embrace it without more careful consideration than Katz and pals seem to have.
No relation to Happy Monkey
will everyone please just aknowlege that the internet is not the groundwork of a new society. At its best it is a monumental timekiller following in the footsteps of television and radio.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exception of handg
I don't think so. Since Locke's philosophy of the social contract was adopted during the writing of the U.S. Constitution, and his philosophy states that people come together and give up some of their rights for the better of the group, if these governments we're talking about aren't doing it for the good of the group, then the people can (in theory) just leave(and form another government elsewhere)! I suppose that's what this book is talking about in regards to a "digital revolution"...of COURSE this is all just theory, today's nations would never willingly allow their land and resources to be ceded to a bunch of free-thinking indivduals who want to start their own country. I guess what I'm meaning to say (through all my rambling) is that if the government is a body of the people for the people (and it goes bad), the people should be able to disperse and regroup as another body with better intentions.
Jim Davidson & Lord Rees-Mogg also publish a monthly newletter, parts of which are available on-line at the Daily Reckoning, although this is mostly investment-oriented.
This sounds like an interesting read ... still, it occurs to me that where the train is going is much easier to predict once it's already started or, in the case of change, been going in a certain pattern / direction for awhile. I don't think the process of change is linear at all (at least with respect to the train metaphor) but Alvin Toffler said a lot of things years ago, which it seems are recycled by others and branded with their name.
Hey, it's ok though ... these things are usually interesting reads regardless of who said what first, imho.
Regards,
John
Falling You - beautiful
To get a handle on just how hopeless Mogg's predictions have been in the past just check out this this article by Francis Wheen. Scroll down to the paragraph headed "The Guru Has Spoken". I have to admit that I practically choked on the (absurdly late) sandwich lunch I was eating when I caught sight of the original post on the usually clueful Slashdot site. Rees-Mogg may have edited the Times, but he is still (IMHO) an upper class, establishment nitwit of the highest (lowest?) order. Incidentally, for those of you reading outside the UK, the "London" Times is no longer considered the "newspaper of record" here. It has declined shockingly since becoming part of that "Virtual Merchant State", the Murdoch media empire. Wheen, on the other hand, writes for the Guardian, probably the best broadsheet newspaper in Britain today (and the only one with any real claim to independence). He is that rare thing, a commentator I frequently disagree with violently, but who always gets my attention. William "Lord" Rees-Mogg isn't.
To horribly misquote; It comes from the barrel of a gun. Even a gang member in LA can tell you that.
The nation states are not going away. This is why those nation states (and all such derviatives since the beginning of recorded history) have armed, military forces who are designed to efficiently and effectively kill, mame and destroy anything and anyone who poses a serious risk to their soveriegn power to rule. As the dominant states today (USA, USSR/Russia, China..) have absoule power (specifically, advanced nuclear weapons & guidance systems, and really, really horrible biological weapons that make nukes look like candy) they will be around forever.
Get real. Don't believe me? Don't pay your taxes for a few years and you'll find out first hand.
..don't panic
... is to identify & defeat The Sovereign Individual. Everything publicly said about drug-dealers, terrorists, etc. is just clean PR for the TV-tube dumb voter set here in the US ("we're the smart guys up here on the election podium... you people down there just trust us ... go vote for me (or my pal opposing me)... go to work... and pay your taxes so that we can keep this really big, really great party just rolling along here!").
The Sovereign Individual discloses the TRUE threat to The State... these unruly citizens carrying their assets out of the statist's jurisdictional control. So don't you think that rather than looking for drug dealers and terrorists that this neat new technology is primarily looking for US citizens over-seas investment activities ?
Are you making money in a stock market account located off-shore ? Do you think the US is going to trust that you're voluntarily going to reveal this activity, claim this income on your US tax return ? Sure... "paying income taxes in the US is voluntary..." try claiming that and see how long your freedom lasts around here.
Every forward thinking person already understands this true use of the Escalon/Carnivore technology... it's to discover and catch US citizens using the convenience of the net to make money overseas... don't buy any of the smoke & mirrors (about bogey-men) to the contrary.
The State has taken notice of the threats to its power elucidated in "The Sovereign Individual" and is intelligently responding to that threat on the same playing field the threat is presented... the net. We can't have "freedom" in a statist world culture... perhaps because NOBODY would truely ever meaningfully respect paying "voluntary taxes"...
The State needs the cover of Drug Dealers and Terrorists to essentially hunt out their own tribes tax cheaters... unless of course you're part of the "leaders' krew" in which case, you have the option of sacrificing the central focus of your's lifes work efforts (drop dreaming about ever doing anything "productive" in your life), and instead dedicate yourself to specializing in the esoteric/political intricacies of legal tax shelters...
Escalon/Carnivore DEFINE the State's response to the threat of world/cultural change suggested in The Sovereign Individual. They're not going to give-up the fight too easily. Unfortunately for all of us sovereign-individual wanna-be's out here... it's going to be very tough getting past the Too-Net-Capable State in any meaningful way.
In conclusion, understand that all of your income related activities on the net will be under automated State scrutiny... your activities are not anonymous... you will be watched, and inevitably controlled.
There are ways around this all... but lets NOT talk about it... keep these things to yourself friends !!!
Anyone who values freedom in the United States has noticed our freedoms being slowly eroded over the past few decades. The Federal government is larger than ever. We have more failed government programs than ever before. ("Failed government program" is redundant. Can anyone think of a government program that actually worked?) The US government is trying hard to pass laws to disarm Americans (did they stop to think that only law-abiding citizens obey laws? Did they pay heed to the consistent statistic that passing gun legislation increases crime?) We have gross violations of the 4th amendment in the name of the insane, grossly expensive, horribly malicious, and completely ineffective "war on drugs."
Currently the top 50% of wage earners in the US pay 96% of the taxes. This is why the concept of "tax breaks for the poor" is ridiculous. It also shows how the concept of the rich "paying their fair share" is equally as stupid. If anything destroys the American empire, it will be when the top 49% of wage earners are paying 100% of the taxes.
In the United States we have apologists arguing that life in Cuba can't be so bad, with its "free" and "free" education. If it's not so bad, then why have Cubans been rafting to the US in droves for the past few decades?
I can go on all day. It seems to me that tyranny and ignorance are alive and well here is the US. I am sure it can only be worse in other parts of the world.
"In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other." --Voltaire
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Governments exist to protect the property (material or otherwise) of the governed.
In order to do this, goverments have a monopoly on force. Think about it: Can your neighbor decide to levy a tax on you? Sure. Can he throw you in jail if you don't pay? Nope. Only a government can. If some foreign army occupies your house, can you make your neighbors throw them out? Not directly, but your goverment, made up of you and your neighbors, can!
The problem with governments is that the power of government is corrupting. People always want government to do things that it can not do without violating it's charter of protecting all of the governed.
A few comments before I get flamed.
Property, of course, does include a wide range of things. Intellectual property is protected by copyrights and patents, your person is protected by laws against murder and assault.
No, I don't hate your favorite government program, but think about it: Is it fair to use force to take my property (my money) to give you something? Not protect your property (that is the purpose of government - we have to fund the courts, the police, & the military) but to buy you a (choose any or all) a water treatment plant, baby food, prescription drugs, sports arenas?
Flowery Katz-language aside, this is artive is much better than his average, with food for thought. This paragraph though, I am not sure it can possibly correct. Katz is as arrogant as the scientists at the end of the 19th century who claimed that everything that could be invented already had been, if he believes this. I think the information revolution started with the development of computers in the middle of last (this?) century, and I doubt we will have discovered everything to be discovered of this new age for quite some time.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Industry continues to rule, and will continue to for quite some time. Alan Greenspan knows this and so does every other economist worth his/her salt. The "New Economy" is just some rhetoric to help us swallow the bitter pill that the US will no longer be a superpower because its industrial infrastructure is being dismantled, and be replaced by China or Russia as the world's political and economic leader.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Corporations are not equal to religion. Personally I dislike people who are historically ignorant to the means and wherefores of their past.
Medieval socities had people who lead brutal, short, horrible lives. Their only means of recreation, life, social gatherings, common grounds, etc were through churches. Personally I can't say that I would blame them for wanting a better life after going through shit in mine.
Corporations don't have that same ability to give people that kind of comfort. They are in fact cold sterile giants composed of men and women who do their own jobs and move slowly to do collective work.
Corporations more closely compare with Faciasm than any sort of organized religion. Ultimately Faciasm was seen as crap and people finally figured out that they were getting hurt. Personally the only way a company can really hurt you is if you don't have a job or if you are an idiot. Considering that most people have jobs (the US has only about 4% actual unemployment) I can't really see any problem in that area. The only other area is that people are idiots. I have argued this many times in the past. Essentially most of the jobs that are out there now are specialist types of things and usually take something more than your typical high school diploma or GED equivelent. That means that people are going to learn things and make them work.
Personally I don't think people are ignorant and I don't think the so called internet society will change anything.
Like I have said there are no conspiracies to do Faciast level evil.
Respond to s
If the gap were to close and it ended up with 500,000 jobs and a million tech workers, free agency wouldn't be quite so appealing as it is now. Bouncing from job to job would be a serious risk where as now, it is almost to the point that not bouncing is the risk (for you look stagnant).
The ability to do this is not a function of the skills involved or the portability of those skills, but rather the job environment. If there was high demand for short order cooks and nobody to fill the positions, you'd see short order cooks leaping from job to job and making a ton of money too.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Aren't these the same two geniuses who wrote several books about how to survive and get rich during the (then) impending economic apocalypse?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I have read this book- a couple of years ago actually. The over-riding point that I took from the book is that the information age makes location unimportant. Today, for the most part, if you want to sell to the masses of American people, you have to be here physically, and thus subject yourself to US law. However, in a future world where we may do almost everything online - the business location may not be terribily imporant to the transaction and that could open up competition among the nation states as they position themselves as the place to locate. And of course, competition among the nations of the worls would in theory reduce the cost of doing business in any one of them.
I think some of this is already happening today with several carribean islands marketing themselves as tax havens for off-shore businesses and I think you can buy Swiss citzenship for a one time "fee."
However, I tend to believe that the "state" won't go down easily and that getting to this point, if we ever make it, will be a long and probably bloody affair.
In all fairness, one thing would not exclude the other. This is like asking "Was the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic just a sequential evolution of how we acquire food, or was it truly a new 'society'?"
But still, the idea behind your question is dead on. All this hype about the "Information Age" is just corporate propaganda bullshit designed to sell books, IT stocks and technology, plus do clearly misguided things like spend school's scarce money on computers and not on teachers, to the benefit of the IT industry.
Take the Neolithic, for example. This involved major changes in the forms of production of basic goods, and the living conditions of the majority of people in the societies affected-- hunting ceased to be the primary economic activity of personkind, to be supplanted by agriculture. People settled into towns, instead of wandering around.
The industrial revolution: the way goods were produced was radically altered. Instead of skilled craftpersons organically creating the end product, the unskilled laborers tend to the machines that make the product. Social effect: deskilling of workers, but above all, people move to the cities.
Now try to show whether the "Infomation Age" (whose "start", anyway, should be the invention of the telegraph, the first device to allow instant communication) has made major changes in the modes of production of the basic goods, or whether it has made fundamental material changes in the way people in "information societies" live. And the answer is: No. This is still the industrial age.
His previous book "The Great Reckoning" was fascinating reading, even though the particulars never came to pass. (For example, he predicted that economic leadership would pass to Japan.) But his "big picture" was provocative, so I will be looking for more thoughtful provocation in the new book (though I will discount its predictive power).
I mean, couldn't that have been said with the advent of the printing press, the library or television for that matter? Is the Internet just a sequential evolution of how we handle information or is it truly a new 'society'? Are
we putting the carriage before the horse here?
Exactly think about it. In reality the internet is just merely a method of gathering data and making it fancy. It dosn't create any new or powerful coalition in any sense.
The industrial revolution hasn't been supplanted by the internet and really hasn't been eliminated. What has changed is that more and more of the ecconomies of traditional European powers from rougly WWI on have shifted to service ecconomies and their populace have seen a change in government. This occurs on a small scale in the US but we actually have enough material goods to be able to deal with things nicely so that it really dosn't change.
Respond to s
This is a wasted post, I know. Just thought I'd add my voice to this line of reasoning though. Which is almost participating in a reflection of the situation you speak about... only seeking out and responding to information that you agree with.
I'm already caught in the net. :-)
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
Are we the first citizens of a new kind of society? Or simply participants in the ongoing modification of the old one? Not that this hasn't been said a hundred times before, but the way things are now has little difference to the way they were before. The names have changed and the technology has advanced, but things are still the same. Some people are more equal than others. Might makes right. He who has the gold makes the rules. How is the buying of influence in Congress any different than Borgias controlling Popes? Many people don't believe that might makes right, but the "might" of the sword has simply been replaced with the "might" of the dollar. Corporations are modern translations of the "robber barons" of last century and trading guilds of previous centuries. Every new technological advance will supposedly change the way we conduct our lives. Bread and circuses have been replaced with Big Macs and television. The intellectual elite still make their debates and the common man still has little control of the institutions that control his life. Nothing really changes except for names, dates and methods. And that is why Santayana was right... People keep forgetting the past. We just keep deluding oursleves into thinking that the situations we see are like nothing that has ever happened before. The article states "The transformation will be all but universal." If history has taught us anything, it tells that transformation is anything but universal. It is a slow process that tends to build quietly and then explodes under its own pressure in a place where there is little resistance. Look at any technological advance or social or religious movement of the last five millenia. We're still following paths laid in place in the past and governing authorities will change to accomodate the changes coming. They have before. They will again. It will take time and patience, but they will.
"...heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Why do I bring this up? I do so because the Athenian Democracy had an enormous information management problem on their hands. The democracy came about by the revolution of the mob overthrowing a tyranny held in place by mercanaries hired from Sparta. Almost every citizen had a hand in this, and so had an interest in making sure that the rule of the tyrants did not return. A recent television series on PBS about the rise of the Greek culture illustrates this point with excellent clarity. As a result, one of the components of citizenship was that the required participation of every citizen. They had to manage and organized this process of the day to day workings of the democracy, selecting citizens at random from the various demes (tribes) for almost all offices and public functions.
There is a lot of data processing going on there. This was handled brilliantly by the mechanism described in the articles mentioned above. They had created a mechanical computer of sorts to handle the problems of handing out the assignments for juries, the routine bureaucratic assignments, all the rest. It is probably a work of genius, and is fundamental to really understanding how the whole place worked. It is obvious that such a system could easily be implemented on almost any database engine worth its' salt.
We now come to information societies. We can easily implement such a society using modern computing technology. The downsides of this are the modern apathy to political processes, as well as the desire for privacy. The upside is that you have a system that really reflects what the members of the community want. There is a certain conflict of interest inherent in this.
A possible solution to this is some sort of opt-in citizenship, with responsibilities attached along with the perks that go with it. This is a difficult question, because of the difficulties associated with question of rights and priveledges over others that are not earned, but are granted without cost.
In this context, I am thinking of the old problem of the haves vs the have-nots. If you win the lottery, make it big in a dot-com, or whatever, you will be surprised by how many new relatives you now have who think that they have more of a right to the money than you do, and who get insulted when you do not just hand it over. You also see this with certain culture clashes in the area of immigration.
An Information Democracy is possible, but I am still quite unclear as to how it could be implemeted. We see hints of this to some degree in the character of the various development communities, such as Microsoft Vs Open-source. Microsoft is probably closer to the old style greek tyrants, no matter how much they want to be portrayed as the philosopher kings of the computer age. The Open-Source community is far more adhoc in its organzation, and is not sufficiently organized to be a formal democracy like Athens. It might be said that Linus is probably the closest thing we have to a philosopher king in this context, although he is far more of a philosopher than king by far.
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It is time to seriously start thinking about one's separation from the state. It would be interesting to see citizens claiming their rights for independence and sovereignty. Those who have land will have more advantage
over those who live in a city and have almost no land. A one family, or even one man or woman state is coming near you now. You set up your own rules, your own government, your own banking and all of it is made
possible due to the Internet.
That's total bull. You cannot create a new state within another without provoking the ire of the government (it's called civil war and insurrection). People finally learned this during the Civil War. See there were a group of people who didn't get along with the United States we'll call them Southerners. The Southerners were basically being lead by the rich amongst them and controlling the poor. They wanted to stay in power making the good money off their stupid cotton business (which was propped up via an invention by a *notherner* named Eli Wittney and the north was propped up by an invention from a southerner). Well they got irritated at unkie sam and decided to "claim their rights for independence and sovreignty" (and in almost those exact words too). Well why don't we see any people walking around from the CSA (Confederate States of America) now?
Of-course there are about one billion questions to be asked and problems to be solved, but with today's computer speed, it's not too difficult. (Who is going to be running those sewers though?)
Computers are tools, they cannot change anyone without actually having someone operate them. AI is a ***Loooooonnnnnnngggg*** way off from being practical.
Respond to s
"You can be as liberated as you want... As long as you follow our rules."
As Sam Morse said "What has God wroth?" when the electric telegraph connected the world nearly instaneously in 1844 (plus about 15 years to wire up much of the world). This first phase led to the daily newspaper. It had a financial mania not unlike the dotcoms.
... Each had its social change and investment mania.
Subsequently came other electronic media revolutions: motion pictures, radio, TV, computer, the Web
The utltimate end will be point-to-point video anywhere, anytime, drawing on vast stored archives of human culture (I hesitate to call it electronic, because it may be optical or something else).
As for the final social impact, it is still hard to tell. There have been many experiments with different types of governments and means of production, with liberal democracies and selfish-incentive capitalism currently winning. Orwell predicted a different end for an information-centered society.
I suggest Katz's view is myopic, magnifying the current millieu which is a hyperactive blip on a two to three century process.
Just so you know, the head of the patent office was being sarcastic when he said that. He was pleading to Congress to not cut funding of the Office, and he said something along the lines of "Well, I guess it's OK, since everything's already been invented that CAN be invented, eh?"r It's much the same as the way the head of GM said "What's good for America is good for General Motors," but everybody reverses those clauses. 88
Further information on this topic may be found here.
I think one cannot look to institutions, commercial or otherwise, to look after one's own interest. To do so is to invite totalitarianism. From a certain point of view, what we are seeing is just natural progression of society from a paternal state to one in which people have to take more personal responsibility for their own well-being.
Of course, that doesn't mean it's acceptable for companies to outright deceive the public - such as the case of rBGH milk. But I think that is a sympton of the fact that we are in a transitional period from a paternal state to a personal society - the counter-acting mechanism is yet to be formed. Some people would say that's what the government/the press are for. But I disagree.
Most people expect their government to look out for their well-being, based on a deep seated belief about what civilized society is all about. But things change, human civilization evolve. What we've been taught to believe is 'right' is just that, a belief. That doesn't make it 'real' or 'right'. The fact of the matter is, the insitutions (government, press, church, etc) we came to rely upon no longer work.
Once we realize that there is no going back to the past, instead of trying to fix these institutions, perhaps we should concentrate on inventing new ways of safeguarding our own lives. After all, what's the point of all the supposed education people get these days if they can't be bothered thinking? According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube. So I don't believe 'busy lifestyle imposed by modern society' is a very good excuse.
Right now, we have more free time and resource than ever before in human history. The average middle-class individual in the Western World now has more power at his/her disposal than ever before. But one cannot have true Freedom and Power without Responsibility. Every social change brings about disruption and sometimes genuine misery. But if one step back and look at the big picture I think it would be obvious that life is good and as a whole, things have never been better.
An entirely new reality will emerge in cyberspace, ruled by a cognitive elite
I don't really think that this is what will happen. Brains will rule over brawn, for sure, but there will be so many strata to the new ecomomic and social food chain that it will be difficult to say who is in charge at all.
Pretty much any good or service you can buy can is being reviewed, crituqed, and consumed via the web now. It won't be long before every garage mechanic has a discussion forum based on him, where digitally signed and authenticated contributors (who are themselves subject to these same reviews and trust evaluations) will rate the performance of the mechanic, etc. This will make integrity pretty important.
Sure, the local garage will be able to rip non-car-savvy people off like they have always done, but the person willing to dig for information will have a better chance at getting a good deal when they get thier car fixed.
The same principle will apply to large corporations, governments, criminal trial (maybe), etc. What is to prevent the rise of some system that gives ruling power to the politician/party who has the highest trust rating? Isn't this what voting does? Why not imagine the election as an ongoing and dynamic process that affects the balance of power. This would really make politicians accountable---it is also mob rule. And "Rome is the mob".
--8<--
--8<--
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
Things are changing. Look at how much trouble governments are having at controling the exchange of information. What governments haven't figured out is that they can't stop the information. Anyone who wants to can find DeCSS or kiddieporn despite them both being unlawful to diseminate in the US.
Well, I for one am becoming more and more negative about the impact that technology has on our lifes. This is because it is becoming quite obvious that technology is not been shared and distributed equaly. By this, I do not mean the old story about how the poorer nations are being kept in the dark ages. What I mean, rather, is that technology is bringing new problems with it. For example, a few years ago, people were amazed that the world was split in two by the cold war. That people could not really communicate. 10 years later, it is private interest's abuse of technology that decides to cut the world in 7 DVD zones. Most people would (as I did) not think much of it at first, but WHOM DO WE COMPLAIN TO when things like these get implemented? What power do we have to bring such a cartel to an end? No buying a DVD from them? Then from whom? :-)
We do not elect the Bill Gates and Murdocks of the world.These guys are where they are because they wheel and deal with one another and are not kept in check. There absolutely no check in balance mechanism to keep a few of these people from enacting a tremendous amount of control on people.
Another (quick) example of the sort of things that I find scary is to see Murdock (SKY Digital) want to add a Tivo-like appliance into every SkyDigital topset box, but with the added feature that an advertiser can disable your fast forward button! I resent the fact that renting a digital receiver can enslave me several minutes at a time just so that some other guy might get a bit richer.
And if you think that this is ok because it is afterall commercials that pay the bill, then just wait and watch big companies as they slowly creep in more and more into your personal life: have you notice how more movies in DVD zone 1 no longer come with any other language than English? Big companies do not care about the few millions people who happen to not be speaking English in North America... the market is too small. And, unlike these "tired old goverments", they certainly do not have to protect the rights of minorities ...
Goverments might be tired, but at least they (well, some..) are 1) responsible 2) elected 3) democratic. It took centuries to get some of the world into a state where most of us are prosperous and living peacefully. Runaway capitalism and the control of many by a few rich folks is not a step forward. In my opinion, it is a step backward. The actors have changed, the weapons have changed, but it is the sma eold story: most people have very little freedom, and telling them how great their lifes are and how free they have become does not change the reality that they are not in control of their lifes.
Sounds like a lot of rah rah - don't-look-too deeply-into-how-we-invest-your-money kind of pitch. WTF does a VC know about government or governments except that they're bad for unregulated absolute free market capitalism? Another book about the irrelevance of government in the global economy. Don't be too sure that governments and nation-states will just roll over. History hasn't borne that out.
Nation-states are a unique creation of the twentieth century. They were in part developed as a way for for retreating imperial powers to keep the peace in their former colonies. It has had almost precisely the opposite effect, as political borders are imprecise and minority ethnic groups (nations) exist within the new countries(states.) Pakistan-India, Kosovo, Angola, Nigeria, Rwanda, even Belgium all feel the pain of imposed borders and imprecise Nation-Statehood.
OK, I know I'm going to make myself look like a real extremist here, but the thing is that's exactly what the media and the gov't want you to think. The only people who want to overthrow the government are a bunch of wacko fringe groups that we should all mock on Late Night Talk Shows, then go back to our happy fat consumerism. This America is so far from it's original vision it's disgusting. The only way that it will be taken back is with an uprising, violent or no. Are you going to keep being a puppet, or are you actually going to stand up for your rights?
Astoundingly astute observation. But I'll play futurist too and disagree with one point. I predict that we won't have starving children or homeless people. Eventually, a world-wide government will arise, although probably not as an official entity, but rather as an agreement in the UN or such, which the US will dutifully follow and enact laws to conform with. We (the US) will move further towards a socialist society. Eventually everyone will, due to amazing productivity gains, work a short day (if that), and have food, health care, and housing (and internet access, in whatever form) provided to them if needed for free.
This information, targetted entertainment, and so on, will truly become the opiate of the masses. There will not be a digital divide, but a motivational one -- most people will opt to not tell, and ambition will become the world's most valued commodity.
What's worse, because of the satisfaction of the general populace and a belief in the goodness of the world, there will be an incredible abuse of power by those possessing it. With everyone too satisfied to play watchdog, those with ambition, right or wrong, will be in charge, and will discover that what tyrants have tried throughout history with secret police, torture, murder, conscription, etc, and failed at, they can accomplish with the carrot instead of the stick. Provide a television and a cozy couch, and who will challenge you?
I'm blanking on who wrote the story of a similar line, where the populace had a choice to either take a totally side-effect-free happy-drug and live their life in bliss, or to stay off it and try to help run the world. In the story, the happy people really WERE the populace, but my vision is a bit more prone to Morlock raids, to borrow from another piece of fiction. Obviously, the lesson is to master technology, not let it be your master, but its a lot more seductive in real life, as the geek-ified slashdot reader should know.
On another point, you're right on about the moderation system -- it is trivial (yes, I'm guilty) to post karma-whoring crap, and it often seems as though anyone who can put a coherent sentence together can end up at a 5 if they post in the first 10 minutes. Meanwhile, I've had some of my most well-document and empassioned (and dangerous) comments moderated down as flamebait because what I expressed was unpopular with the reader. As a moderator, I tend to have to keep myself conscious of the fact that I need to moderate up well written, original, insightful comments, and not comments which merely crystallize my own thinking in an eloquent way. I try to promote comments which put for unique, well reasoned, or well documented arguments, rather than promoting what I agree with. It's too bad, in that vein, that if you want to rack up karma, the easiest way to do it is to post early when your (obvious) 2 cents is in great agreement with the masses.
Good post.
I happen to think Sovereign Individual was pretty cool. But I'm one of them eeeevul cyberselfish libertarian types.
But Katz? I was expecting a massive flame of Biblical proportions - and yet Katz is "interested". Katz is probably the exact opposite, ideologically, of Rees-Mogg and what-not. I'm stunned that Katz didn't use the word "corporatism" or "globalism" once! These guys make the most slavering Randroid look like a shiny-happy hippychick.
Hey kids, if you liked Sovereign Individual, you'll love Ian Angell, who argues (quite convincingly) that The signs are clear: the future is inequality.
Lucky for us geeks, we actually have a chance to win in the upcoming global social catastrophe. Pity about the other poor bastards, though.
Nation-states might be having some difficulties, but to associate this with the continued rise of info techs is forging a link that need not be there.
Keep in mind that we are still in the immediate aftermath of the world wars. Even after the Peloponesian war had sealed the doom of ancient Athens, it still lasted for a century, though the democracy was crippled by a disenchanted public. One could argue the nation-state is in the same phase. WWII exhausted Europe, at least.
The result of that, of course, could easily be a shifting of locus. America and Russia replaced Europe as the world centers. Russia has collapsed, but how America fairs has yet to be seen. It is a mistake to assume that the power shifts of a century mean a permanent decline.
Furthermore, if there is a decline, it is absurd to consider it coming from the rise of the common man; this should make a democracy stronger, shouln't it? The problem should come from the growth of aristocracies at the expense of the common man, as undermined Rome, Byzantium, and Han China.
Just some thoughts...
Now, with a few clicks through Yahoo, I can not only read what the major U.S. news sources have to say, but I can also read opinions from all over the world. So, for example, I can easily get both the Arab and Israeli points of view regarding their conflict, not just the U.S. view.
The western European countries developed into nation-states towards the end of the Middle ages (with the notable exceptions of Germany and Italy). The concept of nation-state did not extend throughout the rest of the world until the 20th century, but clearly Europe had an impact disproportionate to its size.
Funny you should ask. Al Franken responded to the exact same bit of retoric from Rush Limbaugh by calling up a bunch of major conservatives and asking them to name non-military goverment programs that had achieved their objectives. People as conservative as George F. Will and Bob Dornan listed multiple sucessfull programs ranging from rural electification to the Federal Deposite Insurance Corporation.
The governement has done a lot and a lot (if not most) of it has worked. No, welfare has not eliminated all poverty, but no one with an ounce of sense thinks that makes it a failure, any more than the continued existance of sick people makes modern medicine a failure.
Its real easy for privileged little brats to sit and talk about how useless the govenment is. (but still expect fire departments and police to be there when they need them) but for those of us who have lived a while on the harder side of real life, its just more pathetic whining.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
I agree that the balance between the individual and the group 'scales' of societal structure is shifting, but I think you can argue it's going the other direction:
The sovereign individual has reached its apogee in western culture, and is (arguably) on the decline in favor of dynamics, structures, and behavior based in the group or cultural entity. Certainly, the old-style nation-state is also fading; the structures I mean are based in cultural and informational substrates, not (traditional) politics or militarism.
This is not a good or bad thing, though I find aspects of it quite frightening and exciting. But I liken these times to a metaphorical moment when single-celled life began to give rise to multi-cellular organisms. One imagines that prokaryotes first discovered the advantages of cooperation and mutual support. Then, after a few (million...) generations, began to notice that they were increasingly less able to function as 'individuals', but had been subsumed into a larger structure, in which each played a needed role, but was unable to exist as a seperate entity. One can abuse the admittedly stretched metaphor further by imagining 'prokaryot rights' groups protesting the invasive behavior of the larger eukaryiotic structures: defending the privacy of individual nuclei, decrying the increasing lack of independance and moral fibre of the younger generations in favor of better assimilation - maybe even attempting to fight the tide with direct (chemical) action (the birth of immune systems - as Cops or Protesters?)...
Consider the increasing acceptance of the loss of individual privacy in deference to 'security' or 'societal cohesion'. Consider the increasing power of cultural phenomenon and movements in political and legal arenas. Time was, we'd look at these and cry 'conspiracy' but that's clearly old-school. I increasingly find that one can explain most conspiracy-like structures more satisfactorily without recourse to some star-chamber of indiviuduals planning the whole thing out.
Rather, I see these phenomenon as emergent behavior not originating in individual preference or schemes at all. Noam Chomsky loves to use NY Times complete avoidance of certain topics as an example of classical consiracy; I love to use the same thing as an example of 'emergent' or 'structural' conspiracy: one can imagine a thousand individual choices, all innocent and minor, based on style/mood/cultural trends/etc, having the same end result without any individual ever deciding to censor news about, say, East Timor. I see many political and societal changes coming about this way, with no individual choice except at a very local, simple level, yet with a higher level impact very reminicent of concious behavior. Increasing technological advance excacerbates this change, and we increasingly resemble the individual components comprising larger organisms, which in turn, depending on your point of view, look like something between: on the positive side, Vernor Vinge's 'Transcendant Powers' or some utopian 'society of mind'; on the negative, Star Treks' 'Borg' or Dr. Who's 'Daleks'...
Not that I neccesarily see things as this extreme, or even buy any of this at all. But I think it's an intersting way to look at things, and I can't resist viewing societal structures as large scale organisms - and this has some odd implications for the concept of 'The Sovereign Individual'....especially when you've had few cups of coffee and don't want to do your PHP coding....
Let us not forget that the wonderful democracy of Athens had put Socrates to death by poisoning after an entirely democratic proceedings where he was found guilty of impiety and corrupting the minds of young citizens of Athens.
The online moderation [of /.] is just a good example of democracy: The majority decides what is right and wrong, and the abnormal is ceased. _But_, the difference between this and old, non-online democracy, is that the online-one doesn't _prevent_ anyone froms eeing what is deemed as non-conforming, it just tells people it is non-conformant, while the old one _removes_ peoples ability to read what is deemed as bad.
If you are right (and you might be) that people will _choose_ not to see what is non-conformant, humanity is doomed, and there is absolutely nothing we can, and perheaps should, do.
The way to prevent the last concern, which is preventable, is to provide free access att libraries and such places. But that won't help the third world. But what difference will it make from how it is today, for those living there?
The world sucks, and will continue to do so, neither more, nor less. I am sorry, but that's the fact. Some part of it may get a bit better, but the whole thingy will continue to be as bad as it is...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Bloated governments like the U.S. certainly do a fine job of screwing things up and taking away our freedoms. I'd be more than happy to declare myself a sovereignty.
But how do you support civil infrastructures like roads and judiciously process criminals who do harm to others? Expressing authority on these matters could be a power struggle of the week vs. the powerful. I suppose autonomous focus groups, similar to OpenSource projects, could form to specialize in certain areas, but how would they get funded?
How is that likely to change based on any conceivable information revolution?
Well, if you happen to be a person whose living is in creating or processing information, info revolution is probably good news. You can hide your income from the State, perhaps, and escape (some) taxes.
And if you are a consumer of information, it is also good news since info will be cheap, and the State is likely to lose control over the information you consume. This makes little difference for Americans (our State is not much in this business), but for citizens of places without first amendments, it may well be a big deal. At least, it means they will be getting virtual first amendments.
But to the extent that you are a part of the world of physical goods, you will not escape. So this is not going to change anything for all those businesses that make real things. And for that matter, all those people that need physical things to live -- like, say, food -- will also remain subjects. They may be freer. But they will never be free.
This is easily arguable in the sense that the latter was not art in its true sense. The cave paintings were probably one of two things:
1. Communication where there were no words to communicate a given idea, or it was a visual summary. Like a medieval tapestry, or the AIDS quilt.
2. A form of ritual-divination where man would communicate to the spirit world, or a religious icon. Like the many 'mother' figures or a crucifix.
Art needs to step out of these boundaries. Picasso does that.
pronoblem
... soon to be replaced by Corporate-state. The Justice system used to enforce laws created by the state for the good of the public. Now laws are enacted by he-who-has-the-biggest-lobby-group, for the good of the 'corporate citizen'. The (overburdened,underpaid) police just enforces those stupid laws.
---
An entirely new reality will emerge in cyberspace, ruled by a cognitive elite based in cities like Frankfurt, London, San Jose, Singapore and Tokyo. Am I the only one that thinks this sounds like a rotten idea? Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
ANYONE, even the homeless, in many parts of America, can access e-mail and the web free of charge. Perhaps part of what you are warning of is actually a boon to someone like me who tends toward an unmaterialistic and nomadic lifestyle. I don't NEED an address to matter when I can just go to the local library and communicate.
~
And someday soon, when laptops are super cheap, super long life batteries or solar power becomes a cost effective commodity, and when satellite wireless communication is the norm, think of the possibilities! Bouncing around will never have been so easy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Given the amount of time it took for the US to set up the US internet infrastructure, how long would it take the US to restrict access to sites that it didnt want its citizens accessing? I foresee tighter controls, not changes in laws (much less copyright law) to promote freedom of information. "Information wants to be free" was thought up by a PR guy. It's a catchphrase, not dogma.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
...from the Terminator films? If you want a chilling look into the so-called 'information society of the future,' there it is.
Neither the nation-states nor the corporations will rule us: the machines will. Our only hope is that the ragged human resistance from the year 2130 will send someone back in time to take out Jon Katz, and thus change the course of history.
-David Wong
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
In the body there is a statement that basically says there we went from Hunter+gatherers, to argicultural, to industrial, to information. I disagree, I feel that rather than replacing the "lower" level a portion builds itself ontop of the formerly dominant level. Is there still hunter+gatherer cultures? few, but there is. Is there agricultural cultures? By the fact that we still see salad on the menus in many restraunts, I'd have to say there is.
There will always be the various stages of the sociological evolution, if there wasn't the top levels would have a hard time fullfilling thier basic need to survive. Nothing in==Nothing out.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Or, at least, most citizens do. Will nation-states ever go away when millions DEPEND on them for survival? How many people in the USA live on social security and public aid checks? How many families depend on a military paycheck? How many people work at companies with government contracts? How many of us drive on federal highways?
It's a bunch of fun for a crowd of (young) free thinkers to predict the downfall of the huge governments. It's not so easy for the 90% of us who DON'T WANT the government to go away - no matter how much we may complain about it. And as true as that is in the US, it's more true in European countries where even more citizens are dependent on the government.
The government doesn't exist on its own. We put it there, and we keep it there year after year (and keep it growing) by saying 'yes' every time they propose a new payout program.
In other words, there's a reason why Liberterians only get 3% of the vote.
-David
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
An entirely new reality will emerge in cyberspace, ruled by a cognitive elite based in cities like Frankfurt, London, San Jose, Singapore and Tokyo.
This seems like an odd thing to say. Why would the author point out where congnitive elite would exist when it sounds like his theory does away with this type of elitism? I didn't read the book, but from the summary I got the impression of ``utopian world with like minded people living in harmony''.
To answer the author's last question:
Are we the first citizens of a new kind of society? Or simply participants in the ongoing modification of the old one?
One thing wasn't mentioned: marketing. People make up the society, and people are led by the marketeers of monopolistic coroporations. Any ideas of freedom and sovereignty are illusions given to us by the market. Putting on my conspiracy hat, I think there was quite of bit of psychology done in the past half-century, yeilding highly effective tools for mind control. Some military, some corporate. This goes light years beyond Nader's whistle-blowing on shoddy manufacturing.
My point/answer is: now that there has been several decades to observe the effects of this manipulating psychology used to convert people into consumers by the herds, it has been fine-tuned to deadly accuracy. Any discussion about our role as sovereign free agents is moot, Americans are sheep and meme of capitalism and disposable income is spreading to other countries rapidly, soon to engulf the world.
Perhaps the topic of the book is yet another marketing ploy to get us to buy more books on how we can become more sovereign.
The next rulers to supplant fatigued nation states will be invisible. The next rulers will be more user friendly the politicians. They will be virtual machines made by a market driven economy bent on making us spend even more money.
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
If neither splits, then there simply aren't enough truly independent votes to win major office
Right, and to expand that to a larger point, it's that there simply isn't enough dissatisfaction with the way things are to make that kind of a movement. Many, many people depend on the status quo - and I'm not talking about just politicians and big oil companies. Millions of us do. Most of us do.
There's a reason why we vote for the same old thing every four years: it's because we like it. The vocal Rage-Against-The-Machine extremists who want to bring the current system down are very, very small in number. And why not? The overwhelming majority of us are well-fed, have homes to live in, cars to drive, clothes to wear, and cable TV to watch. We may complain, but who wants to mess with all that? Who really?
-David Wong
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Does the above article actually say anything? If it does, I couldn't find it.
In 1948 a guy named Garry Davis decided that the nation-state system had to be abolished if the horrors of World War II were to be avoided in the future. He felt that the logical conclusion to the train of thought that produced the UN Convention on Human Rights was that everyone was sovereign and nation-states had no rights over people.
In Paris, he renounced his citizenship and walked out of the US Embassy stateless. He issued himself a passport and has been going around the world ever since by convincing bureaucrats that his passport is just as good as one issued by a recognized government.
His organization, the World Service Authority, still sell the passports and they claim people have been able to get into almost everywhere using them.
It's kind of a crackpot outfit (I see they're taking banner ads now -- very principled), but it is an interesting demonstration that the nation-state is only as powerful as people believe it is.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Funny you should ask. Al Franken responded to the exact same bit of retoric from Rush Limbaugh by calling up a bunch of major conservatives and asking them to name non-military goverment programs that had achieved their objectives.
Al Franken failed to answer the question. Instead, he tried to turn it into a slam against his political enemy. You have done the same thing.
The governement has done a lot and a lot (if not most) of it has worked.
Like what?
No, welfare has not eliminated all poverty, but no one with an ounce of sense thinks that makes it a failure, any more than the continued existance of sick people makes modern medicine a failure.
If you remember, it was the republicans who pushed for legislation to remove people from the welfare rolls. Bill "The era of big government is over" Clinton oppposed it vehemently, but caved after he received pressure from his own party. Can you provide for me statistics showing how many people are actually "lifed out of poverty" by welfare compared to those who use it as a means of living? Furthermore, you should know by now that welfare is much more about vote buying than it is about helping people. Why do you think the underachievers continue to support those who promise them plundered money? (Hint: probably because they're being promised plundered money.)
You only listed one government program (welfare) and even owned up to that it has, at least, partially failed. What about all the others? I'll give you some others to think about: Social Security, Medicare, The Drug War. Successes or failures? I'm sure you can think of even more.
Its real easy for privileged little brats to sit and talk about how useless the govenment is.
Ad hominem.
(but still expect fire departments and police to be there when they need them)
The fire department is local, not federal. Furthermore the fire department is a valid function of local government.
but for those of us who have lived a while on the harder side of real life, its just more pathetic whining.
You just whined about living "a while on the harder side of real life" and then implied that what I wrote was "pathetic whining." First, your statement is the most stupid and hypocritical thing I've read all day. Second, we all live hard lives. You don't how hard my life was any more or less than I know how hard yours was.
In summation, you attempted to counter my argument by simply stating your position and providing one one shaky example about which can be raised many legitimate and serious objections. Then you tried to slander me, implying that I am "priviledged," a "little brat," and one who engages in "pathetic whining" despite the fact that you and I have never met. You have followed the pattern of, "If you find you aren't able to attack your opponent's position, then attack your opponent." In conclusion, your argument is shit. I am hoping that the next time you post you will be able to generate a more intellegent one.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Just a few things to ponder, and all based on my personal opinions, not facts:
Nation-states are less and less able to maintain a meme-dominance in the minds of their citizenry. People are becoming more concerned about their social/economic lives and their environment/world than they are about notions like "patriotism". When your friends and co-workers are bright people from Canada, France, China, and Brazil, nationalistic diatribes sound more and more hollow. The propaganda only works on people who don't know anything about the subject.
Large corporations WILL be the next "government", taking over the Social Contract from your Country and giving you Bonus Air Miles and letting you vote your money...
There will be a rise of the city-state, which will have to take over from the weaking national power structures. All the services we normally associate with Federal government (taxes, security, diplomacy) will degrade at that level (as talented people leave for MUCH more rewarding work in the private sector). This will leave a service vacuum at the real-world level, opening up competition for people's loyalties and "tax" dollars.
Where you live will still matter, but only what city you live in. It's that way right now, but more subtle. Local services will still be provided, but there will also be an entire universe of non-local services available.
If you are altruistic, you will be able to work with people from around the world with the same values, fighting whatever foes you can commonly identify. If you are a greedy, unethical bastard, the same applies. Corporations already have extensive mercenary armies, paying soldiers, lawyers, and hackers to do their bidding.
Small countries cater to the ultra-rich, and this will become even more important as nation-states seek (under populist regimes)to gather up the resources of the "rich" through taxes. These well-intentioned efforts will drive the mobile rich and their easily-transported wealth to protective enclaves: offshore or in orbit, where "you can't touch it."
Whether you speak of Microsoft or the Hell's Angels, the struggle of corporate vs. state interests has always been an issue. In both cases, choosing the "bad guys" is a pretty safe bet. Corporations will act how they please, and barring a global, United-Nations-esque intiative to make coporations accountable worldwide through some sort of mandatory "covenant", they will get away with it, since there are plenty of places to hide. Playing one nation against another is easy and fun. Politicians and bureacrats have no interest in the global "good", so their self-interest makes them easily manipulated.
Unless nation-states and their armies/lawyers/hackers can take corporate assets offline by lasing satellites, freezing bank accounts, and cracking information systems, this Wild West/Robber Baron scenario will continue pretty much as it has for the last century, accelerated by technology.
So where does that leave us? If you are smart, talented, and curious, with no criminal record and a good market value (not to mention an entrepreneurial motivation), then you will be a winner. If you are a complacent, patriotic, union-loving worker, then you will be the loser. Harsh as that may seem, that is the new Darwinism.
And it aint about being rich. It's about being powerful, and power doesn't come from the barrel of a gun, but from the Machievellian wisdom that guides the hand that holds it.
-thex23
If the nation state goes away, the corporations certainly won't. Without the restrictions that the state can apply, what protection will the individual have? This crap ranks along the frequently-peddled line that the internet gives power to the individual consumer. Corporations don't pay any more attention to individual net shoppers than they do to ones that walk in their doors.
Human beings don't live in glorious isolation. Society is what we do, its our real specialisation (as opposed to intelligence). The Nation State is just another development of that.
By the way, the Nation State has not been ruling us for thousands of years. Its nowhere near that old.
<contrarian rant>
Hopefully, we won't have to listen to too much more drivel like this:
Western governments, the authors say, may be more benign but are also tired. They're losing their governing authority, their leaders void of answers and ideas, mouthing platitudes fewer and fewer people believe or listen to.
Three points:
(1) People in technology often stupidly believe that government is a paper tiger. It's purely wishful thinking, which lasts until somebody like the RIAA outmaneuvers them and they're playing catch up. Government is a very potent force for both good and evil. Our government is relatively benign, so you can ignore it a lot of the time, but it won't stay that way all by itself.
(2) Winston Churchill said that democracy was the absolute worst system of government except for every other one. Freud said that the two areas of endeavor that were doomed to unsatisfactory results were education and government. OOG the caveman probably had some choice things to say back in his day. Acting like there is some new intellectual bankruptcy in government shows distinct lack of historical perspective.
The real problem is tougher -- when you get a good fraction of a billion people together to live together in a civilized society, it is difficult to make the mechanisms that support it user friendly and the policies that govern it clear and understandable. There will be policies and laws whether they're sensible or not and we're going to have to live with them because they will be backed up with police forces and armies. Throwing up your hands because the politicians don't have any good ideas and neither do you is not good enough. Think harder.
(3) There is no technological or economic determinism which dictates a better society, any more than there is a historical determinism that will create the worker's paradise. There is only an accelerated series of dangers and opportunities. Be an honest geek. You've participated in the creation of these opportunities and dangers but have done absolutely nothing to shape what your elected officials are doing with them. Now you're wishing the problem would just go away so you could privately enjoy your cognitive superiority in peace and quiet.
You can't wish the cognitive plebes away. Somebody has to grow your food and collect your trash. You don't shop for a civil society like you would for a pair of shoes. You take part in its creation or you live with its consequences.
A majority of stupid but involved people beat the "cognitive elite" every time. Aristedes was ostracized by the Athenians. All the "cognitive elite" had to toe the line under Hitler's Nazi regime, and not a few of them bought into the baloney. Leaving the hoi polloi to other congitive aristrocrats is worse yet. Lenin took over the Russian government with little more than chutzpah and a great sense of timing -- ironically he had even fewer divisions than the Pope at the time.
In a world awash in punditry and hype, why take The Sovereign Individual more seriously than any other attempt at futuristic navel gazing? One is these authors record: In previous books, they predicted the stock market crash of the late 80s and the fall of Communism.
Doc Smith predicted the fall of communism too, but I'm not waiting for a pan-galactic organization of psychic supermen to solve our problems through benevolent dictatorship.
I'm going to go way out on a limb here. The economy is headed for a downturn sometime in the next decade. Now will you buy my cock-and-bull story about the coming technological utopia?
</contrarian rant>
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If by Sovereign you mean the ability to interact with people in other nations and to do business across international boundaries, I agree.
If by Sovereign you mean we are a freer people, I think you are sadly deluded. In the US our complete existence is regulated. You want to opt out of Social Security, oh I'm sorry your Sovereignness doesn't extend that far. You want to be a car without an airbag, sorry can't do that either. You want to smoke some pot in your own house, yeah right. In the EU, I've read stories of how cheese makers in Italy are being forced to conform to the EU beauracrats in Brussels on how to make their cheese. I also heard about a shopkeeper in the UK they made put away an antique scale because in used imperial units. Doesn't sound freer to me.
My Weblog
Its been kicked around since Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
While I agree that technology's accelerating pace is changing the game, for a very few of us, the players (we,) have not evolved to keep pace.
But until it becomes obvious to the individual that cooperation is a feature of civilization and preferable over competition, you can expect crimes de passion and drunken brawls over unfeeling babes on Saturday nights...
And stupid IP laws, patents by the uncaring against the unknowing and criminals of every stripe and size.
By the way, outlawing file sharing (a la Napster and DeCSS decisions,) makes the entire internet illegal and hyper-linking a criminal offense.
IP law as it now stands is the TRIUMPH of selfishness over cooperative behavior. If its allowed to stand, never mind fester, you can kiss the twenty-first century good bye...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Way back in the beginning, when man was young, there was no goverment. People lived only in traveling family groups (hunter-gatherer societies) and life was good.
Fast forward through the next 25,000 or so years. Man discovers agriculture, sailing, writing, and finally the Modern Standard Legal System (Hammurabi's Code). Is life as good? No. We're crammed into filthy cities, frightened of one another, and to top it all off, here's a dumb bloke telling us what we can and cannot do. Life became unbearable. And why? People forgot how to get along with one another.
The internet won't solve anything if you don't have good interpesonal skills to begin with!
Do you like Japanese imports?
> But in the Information Age, governments chosen by the majority are governments chosen by losers.
Since Mr. Angell isn't here to speak on his own behalf, I'll paraphrase him from a documentary I once saw on his work:
He's not a techno-libertarian, he's an economist. While the future he portrays in his writings has an obvious direct appeal to the hardcore technolibertarian segment, his opinions of the morality of such a society are neutral.
If he were here (and I think he'd make a great slashdot interviewee someday, and I hereby apologize for putting words in his mouth), I think he'd say something like "I'm not a moralist - whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing is not for me to judge. But whether for good or ill, this is what I think the future holds."
The fact that people (such as myself, and presumably such as Snocone) read his writings and think "Wow, cool! The future's gonna be hardass, but at least we're in the lucky small percentage of the population that has a chance at surviving it!" is a reflection of Angell's readers, not on Angell's politics themselves.
Indeed, the thing I like most about reading Angell is that he keeps his personal opinions about the morality of the future to himself; it's up to the reader to decide whether this is:
- Good, and something in which you want to actively participate and help bring about.
- Evil, but inevitable, so you'll swallow your pride for the shiny toyz that come with being part of Dogbert's New Ruling Class (TINDNRC
:)
- Good, but worth opposing because it benefits the few at the expense of many.
- Evil, and worth opposing tooth-and-nail on the same grounds.
It's a matter of considerable philosophical debate whether the middle two items on that list are self-contradictory.I don't know anyone who would argue in favor of the third item on the list ("Good, but worth opposing on moral grounds!"), but I know many who would argue for the second ("Evil, but wotthehell, bring it on!").
I posit that both of these positions are contradictory. The third is more obviously loony than the second - if you believe the needs of the many are greater than the needs of the few/one, how can you say it's "Good"? But the second is no less self-contradictory; it just presumes that the needs of the few/one ought to be subservient to the needs of the many, rather than the other way around.
I say pick one baseline for Goodness or Evilness and stick with it. If your choice makes you "altruistic", or "cyberselfish", so be it. (But then, I have a value system that considers logical inconsistency to be more "evil" than selfishness, so what else would I say? :-)
Angell's money (and Rees-Mogg's, and mine, for what little all three of us are worth in the grand scheme of things) is bet on the selfish side of the battle. Where you put your money - and more importantly, your actions - is up to you.
The whole reason why a lot of the dot coms are failing is because they tried to be an extension of the existing system. It doesn't work that way. Would you use a car to drive up an escalator? No, that would be absurd. It's the same idea as trying to set up a department store strictly on the web. It just won't work. Companies who have adapted to the web and used it's strengths will survive. Take REI for example. They didn't move all their operations over to the web, that would be stupid. They leveraged the web to access a larger audience. ALA Click-And-Mortar.
Though all of human history, there have been three basic stages of economic life: hunting-and-gathering societies; agricultural societies; and industrial societies. Now, sparked by the rise of computing and the growth of the Net and the Web, something entirely new and different may be just over the horizon, something all of us are already a primitive part of, a fourth stage of social organization: information societies.
I take some issue with that because the first three phases of society were all about aquiring resources to live. Information in itself does not put food in the mouth. It can help pay for it, but it does not actually get it to your mouth. Factories still have to churn it out. Now if we start evoloving towards automating anything and everything, then I would agree that we are on the way to the "information age". Until then, I would say that we are still in the industrial age.
--
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
25: ten.knilrevlis@wkcuhc
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I think that it is incorrect to suggest the power is going to the individual. New technologies introduce new capabilities which can be leveraged by any person/organization to their own benefit. For example, television provided power to corporations, politicians, and individuals who understood how to manipulate it. Some learned faster than others, some refined their skills more than others, but I disagree with the notion that technologies (particularly classes of technologies) have a bent in any particular direction.
Sure, the Internet is making it easier for someone to make one's voice heard and to gather information. However, as more and more information becomes digitized (and particularly since digital security is being repressed), it becomes increasingly easy for governments to rewrite history, control access to information, violate someone's privacy, and police a population. Business have unprecedented oppurtunities to control and spy on their employees, manage their public image, collude and organize to maximize how much they grab from customers.
Governments, as always, have been slow to learn the Internet, as they were with television. However, television is a good indicator of how they can eventually become quite skillful. I suspect the ultimate loser will be the general public, who in the long run tend not to master new technologies.
sigs are a waste of space
'One of the major themes in The Sovereign Individual is the notion that the revolution unleashed by digital technologies is liberating individuals at the expense of the nation-states that have governed much of humanity for thousands of years.' Mr. Katz, you misuse the term 'nation-state' (anachronistically), that is, it HAS NOT goverened much of humaity for thousands of years. Normally, I wouldn't correct this sort of error, but it seems fundamental to the authors' argument as you depict it. In fact, the treaty of westphalia is generally recognized, by political scientists and some economists the world around, as being the moment in time that the concept of a 'nation-state' was crystalized. (http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,571 6,78730+3+76697,00.html)
Furthermore, Bizmark and others after him, secured this conception vis-a-vis emperial, feudal, et cetera conceptions of 'state' after that approximate date.
"Though all of human history, there have been three basic stages of economic life: hunting-and-gathering societies; agricultural societies; and industrial societies. "
Here you are surely flattering Hagel, Vico,and above all Marx; all of whom have been seriously contested on the facts by modern historians and anthropologists... even intuitively speaking, one can see the world around that there has not been 3 distinct evolutionary stages/epochs.
They have been able to do that all the time, in principle. IMHO there have always been those who follow the trends, and those who think, question and revolutionize. I doubt the overly hyped technology will suddenly turn every person into the latter group. On the other hand, societies have undergone evolution and revolution thanks to individuals with Score: 1337, Insightful. Those with a strong self-consciousness and fresh ideas have found their ways to change the world, regardless of the absolute level of technology.
I bet something like this book was written around the start of the industrial revolution too..
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Lucky for us geeks, we actually have a chance to win in the upcoming global social catastrophe. Pity about the other poor bastards, though.
You really think that if the serious shit goes down, some techno-elite is going to be in any better shape than the rest? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to think that too, but Sharper Image fantasyland aside, you really think you have a chance without the rest of society?
Who's going to make your Latte and install your DSL?
Prior to the telegraph, innovations in manufacturing and design primarily were created through reverse engineering and individual genius. With the invention of faster forms of travel and better communication mediums, design and manufacturing innovations progressed more rapidly, and spread across greater sections of the world.
Now we have machines that can not only communicate, but can also process data, which helps suggest new innovations to the human operator. The data can also be used to run the machines that create goods, like the factories in Japan that produce industrial robots, which are manufactured 100% by industrial robots - no human intervention.
Better technology begets better technology. The information age is not only about how the information is produced, it's also about how it is used. As information tools produce better information, and communicate it better, the result will be better tools and goods, and cheaper. This will create big changes in society, but at what point they will be easily noticed is beyond me.
Good point, but you miss a possibility: Chaos. Consider water dripping from a faucet. As the flow increases, the dripping changes from a regular rythym to a chaotic one. What has changed? Nothing except the rate of flow. Consider then the flow of information. Fundamentally, the nature of information flow has not changed, but the rate of that flow has. This rate increase could create chaotic effects that were not present before. So, you don't necessarily need a "fundamental material change" to alter the structure of society, or any dynamic system for that matter.
Democracies fail when the politicians realize that they can buy citizens' votes with their own money.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Which at the most fundamental level is impossible. Even in communist countries people have secret papers and there is always the concept of whispers and looks. Human communications will flourish even with the gestapo at the door.
;-P
whah?? this is technically true, but the educated classes in USSR and 1930s Deutschland were firmly in favor of the contemporary political rhetoric. Remember that USSR disbanded for essentially economic reasons (humans are by nature selfish and any system which rewards selfishness will thrive while systems that concentrate selfishness in the hands of a few are instable -- so capitalism works, communism doesn't), and that Deutschland was defeated militarily. In orwellian states it is only the educated classes that matter, and they are usually well-vested in the political mainstream. There will be no revolution from the proles, because they are philosophically ignorant and politically unorganized.
Yes, secret communications will always exist, but as Chinese students found out in Tiananmen Square, knowing glances and covert solidarity do not easily translate into freedom. The government crushed them, literally, and the world looked on -- there is little doubt that the incident would play similarly today.
If 100,000 open protesters could not even create a dent in their system, from where do you obtain this optimism that people are smarter than propaganda and will rise up and smite the evil empire? Nothing could be farther from the truth -- people are simple, ignorant and easily manipulated, as demonstrated by the prevalence of $2 bottled water, $120 blue jeans, everything antibacterial, and censorlegislation.
Every time i go grocery shopping i see products labelled "New Look! Same Great TASTE!!" "Smaller Size for Your CONVENIENCE" and the absolute winner, i kid you not ---- "Now! Made with REAL Ingredients!!!"
and it is this shit that i see flying off the shelves; people just can't get enough of bold fonts, starburst patterns, gratuitous! punctuation!!!, and compelling but semantically vacuous claims.
i salute you for your optimism. and i feel it is totally unfounded.
---
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
[Lyrics] Momus
from Ping Pong
The Age Of Information
This is a public service announcement
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering
The age of information
It's perfectly safe
If we all take a few basic precautions
May I make some observations?
Axiom 1 for the world we've begun:
Your reputation used to depend on
What you concealed
Now it depends on what you reveal
The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact
Is dead: we are all players now in the great game of fact instead
So since you can't keep your cards to your chest
I'd suggest you think a few moves ahead
As one does when playing a game of chess
Axiom 2 to make the world new:
Paranoia's simply a word for seeing things as they are
Act as you wish to be seen to act
Or leave for some other star
Somebody is prying through your files, probably
Somebody's hand is in your tin of Netscape magic cookies
But relax:
If you're an interesting person
Morally good in your acts
You have nothing to fear from facts
Axiom 3 for transparency:
In the age of information the only way to hide facts
Is with interpretations
There is no way to stop the free exchange
Of idle speculations
In the days before communication
Privacy meant staying at home
Sitting in the dark with the curtains shut
Unsure whether to answer the phone
But these are different times, now the bottom line
Is that everyone should prepare to be known
Most of your friends will still like you fine
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an E mail and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming world war three
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
Axiom 4 for this world I adore:
Our loyalties should shift in view according to what we know
And who we are speaking to
Once I was loyal to you, and prepared to be against information
Now I am loyal to information, maybe I'm disloyal to you
My loyalty becomes more complex and cubist
With every new fact I learn
It depends who I'm speaking to
And who they speak to in turn
Axiom 5 for information workers who wish to stay alive:
Supply, never withhold, the information requested
With total disregard for interests personal and vested
Chinese whispers was an analogue game
Where the signal degraded from brain to brain
Digital whispers is the same in reverse
The word we spread gets better, not worse
Better, not Worse
___
"Peasants! Not only are they dying, they're boring!"
With no legal rights or protections, those without large amounts of cash would be returned to the hell of early industrial society, working 16-hour days in factories from the age of 10, with no medical care. When they grew too old or sick to work, they would be left to die. Human rights would disappear. This is in fact what happens today in many countries, which do not have strong governments to provide the kind of protections that most Slashdot readers enjoy.
Think factories are going to disappear because we're leaving the Industrial Age and entering the Information Age? Try living for a while without using anything that was produced or transported using industrial techniques. You'll have to grow all your own food (without tractors or other farm equipment), produce all your own clothing by hand, live in housing that you built yourself, drink unprocessed water, with no sewer system, computers, or factory-made transportation. Oh, and you can forget about modern medicine.
People like Lord Rees-Mogg want the state to be dismantled in order to get rid of nuisances like environmental laws, health and safety laws, child labour laws, and of course taxes. Those of us who can't afford to pay for private health care, let alone private water and sewer systems, and who would like some assurances that we are eating safe food, might disagree.
The scandal of BSE (`mad cow disease') in the UK, a direct result of Margaret Thatcher's deregulation of the agriculture industry, is just a small indication of what can happen, even in wealthy countries, when corporations are allowed to do as they please.
This sort of babbling about the Information Age is simply thinly veiled propaganda, intended to persuade ordinary citizens to give still more power to multinational corporations.
--
On the one hand, there is no point in trying to go back in time and live simpler lives. Any attempt to go backwards instead of forwards is doomed. But on the other hand, to go forwards in the same way we are currently doing will lead to more of the same problems - more environmental pollution, more overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, excessive use of artifical energy sources, and more exploitation. If present trends continue we will find ourselves in Neil Stephenson's world, more or less. But there doesn't seem to be any other choice either; the momentum will play out and either we will find our salvation afterall, or life will suck.
So for these guys (Rees-Mogg and Davidson) to say that somehow we're going to achieve further liberation, seems naive to me too. Nature abhors a vacuum. All of history is occupied by power struggles. Even the animals have them. If we can achieve a temporary state of complete freedom, then out of the ensuing chaos, some kind of power base will emerge. If it's not the government, as Stephenson would surmise, it'll probably be the big corporations (or organized crime... is there really a difference?). I hope that some kind of positive outcome is achieved, but I fear that it won't; we're just exchanging masters and maintaining the same old enslavement. As Roszak theorized (in the article I linked to at the top of this), the "information society" enables the big evil organizations (corporations, the military and other snoops) even more than it enables the individual. Can we keep up with the threats? Will it be possible for the state-of-the-art encryption techniques to outpace the ability of the snoops to crack them? Or will the state-of-the-art continue to be effectively illegal? Will our abilities to colonize space ultimately outstrip our reproductive rates? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile strangely enough it doesn't make me want to be a geek any less than I did before. I must still have a little hope left that technology will save us after all. Or at least, out of habit, I would think that my life was meaningless without doing something to advance the state of the art. Even if I'm ultimately building my own shackles, I don't know what else I could do that would have any long-term meaning.
sir, i believe that you know (in the epistemological sense) very little about what you speak. have you ever really payed attention to advertising? it's a complex art. it's a sort of biological programming.
Corporations communicate with the average individual mainly through advertisement, which you the individual have the option of tuning out, disbelieving, or accepting with no detriment to your health or well-being.
uh, you're wrong. accepting any message can have a detrimental effect on your health or well-being: consider (historically - do you have a concept of what that means?) the advertising for tobacco, soft drinks, milk, alcoholic drinks, herbal remedies, antibiotics... these are a few in a long, long list of examples, and people believed and believe still the advertising for these products.
they [modern corporations] certainly possess almost zero of the features or powers of an organized religion, particularly the one that was extant in Europe in the Middle Ages
i'm not sure you understand the basics of historical analysis. the features and powers of modern international corporations are surprisingly similar to those of the church in europe a few hundred years ago.
2. single corporations can strangle whole regions: Monsanto. end of example.
3. corporation-government controls can be internal or external: "trade groups," lobbies, electorate manipulation, local dependency, and plain old politick dealing.
4. etc.
and please remember this is an analogy, a historical parallel. what's missing? notably, being burned at the stake (or stoned, or whatever) for heresy (most of the time). these days (in most places) you can just be ostracized or discriminated against. sure, that's not a form of torture... and not a vastly more effective one, either. some governments can be convinced to send their armies to help clear the way for oil pipelines - and i'm not talking about some kind of purely environmental tragedy ensuing, either.
learn to think.
thank you very much.
[|]
If the answer is the corporate world, I suggest you read Snow Crash again...
harumph. Techno-utopia-sans-government my ass.
"Most people will die for free for their nation or their god. No one will die for Sony for any amount of money."
this maxim of yours is not true. What is a bodyguard? A mercenary? Even rent-a-cops and 7-11 workers have a signicant risk of death in their jobs. How does reality fit in with your maxim? You don't think it is just a hop skip and jump to private corporate armies? Mark my words friend.
You can label me as a anti-corporate hysterian but the truth is, a corporation is an undying ravenous creature which exists for only ONE purpose: to amass wealth and power and market share. It does not care about the health and well-being of its employees or customers except in context of possible threat to its money diet. Don't ever forget this: corporations are not needed for anything. We should not base laws (IP or otherwise) on what the corporations say they need. Our nation is not dependent on them for our well-being. We as quasi-free individuals in America should realize this!
R A N T O V E R
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> You want to opt out of Social Security, oh I'm sorry your Sovereignness doesn't extend that far.
Actually it does. There is NO LAW that requires a person to have a social security number. You CAN live, work, WITHOUT being numbered.
Believe me, I'd know.
Has anyone read Alvin Toffler's seminal book The Third Wave? That book may have been written nearly twenty years ago, but it also divides history and the future into pretty much the same categories and draws many similar conclusions about the world of the future, although when he names specific technologies he's understandably way off the mark. He also speaks of how information technology, which is the hallmark of the Third Wave, and its demassifying effects, empowering the individual, moving it away from the mass society from which the Second Wave nation state drew much of its power. And so second-wave government is no longer able to deal with it. I take it that Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age is like an updated version of The Third Wave rewritten by people who live in the heart of a newly-born Third Wave as opposed to someone writing from the vantage point of the Third Wave's birth pangs.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
You're a notch above the average pseudo-intellectual if you realize this fact, I agree with you and I like the way you think. Sorry if I said anything to piss you off.
You said :
"Let us not forget that the wonderful
democracy of Athens had put Socrates
to death by poisoning after an entirely
democratic proceedings where he was found
guilty of impiety and corrupting the
minds of young citizens of Athens."
What you have described is known as the Tyranny Of The Majority, and things like this still happens today.
In many places of the world, people are still being punished for "violation" of one kind or another, no matter how "democratic" the society in which this "violation" has taken place is.
And in fact, there is ONE COUNTRY in Asia which has MADE THE TYRANNY OF MAJORITY its OFFICIAL STAND, and that country is Malaysia.
In Malaysia, the majority race GOT ALL KINDS of priviledges, while people from minority races have had their human rights violated AGAIN AND AGAIN, and all that, in Malaysia, is PERFECTLY LEGAL.
While no one is forced to consume poison against their will in Malaysia, everyone from the minority race groups have had suffered TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES because of the OFFICIAL TYRANNY OF THE MANORITY LAWS. Children from the minority groups are NOT permitted to attend university, even if they have scored MUCH HIGHER GRADES in their academic standing, as compared to children of the majority groups. Or, put it in other way, children from the majority race can get into university EVEN IF THEY HAVE FAILED in their academic studies, while children from the minority races are being KEPT OUT, even if they have scored better than those children from the majority races who are enjoying their status as "university educated scholars".
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
i agree with you that the end result is similar.
power wants to accumulate. this is why all systems, despite egalitarian aspirations, become oligarchies within a few generations.
the difference i was highlighting was that there are no large-scale communist systems that work without the aid of a strong military -- because the attempt to equitably distribute resources is resisted by persons, acting upon their selfish nature, who try to accumulate goods not as they NEED them but as they WANT them. Such countries are then trapped into spending huge amounts of resources on maintaining an unnatural equality -- which invariably is accomplished by the threat of militarism. "This is how much you're getting and no more." Some insane ideologues are fully behind this idea. Others just use the system to get whatever petty power they can. And the large majority just try to get by without incurring the wrath of the State while secretly hating its attempts to thwart their consumption. This is a pretty unstable situation.
Capitalism, on the other hand, dangles the carrot in front of everyone's nose. The goal is to accumulate goods as fast as you possibly can. Of course, the first generations to accumulate large amounts of wealth then capitalize on that wealth by using some of it to get more of it while preventing others from getting any of it. However, regardless of the actual fluidity between classes (or lack thereof), most people still operate under the basic assumption that if they are just good, diligent, sexy or smart enough, that they too can pull some of the wealth in their direction. People then want to protect the system because its survival is the guarantor of their promised happiness -- which promotes the long-term stability of that system. It's a kinder, gentler opression.
I mean really, as long as the lady-mantis is getting you off, who cares if she's eating your brains out, right?
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the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine