Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Ironically, Napster and DeCSS are both excellent examples of the futility of the tired old men stopping something they cant. Sure there is a very good chance that Napster will die soon, however for gnutella to be stopped, the internet would have to be completely shut down. Suing AOL isn't going to shut it down at all, as they have no control over it. Same with FreeNet. DeCSS may be illegal, but it sure hasn't stopped it from being available on the net. These cases are great examples of how the decentralized nature of the internet makes it impossible to impose an outside order. The genie is out of the bottle, and there isn't anything any government can do to put it back.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
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.
You've got to be kidding me. That's the most understated description of the Internet I've ever read.
The Internet is the closest thing we've developed to realizing a collective consciousness. ANYONE can now be a global publisher of information. The Internet empowers the individual to create and disperse any type of media they can envision.
The printing press? The radio? Television? These are merely one-way broadcast mediums. (I use the term 'broadcast' loosely when applied to the printing press, but you get the point) The internet has ALREADY "created a much bigger shift" than any of these. Why? Because the 'net is interactive, it connects people to each other instead of some central point.
Ahh, but the internet is so much more than just information! Look around you... the whole world is migrating to the net. Millions upon millions of services, offered freely online. Watch a streaming video feed of the news, view a movie trailer, join a chat room with people scattered across the globe, shop online, pay your bills, download more free software than you could EVER hope to use, stock market trading, gaming. People are making friends, enemies, falling in love and getting married over the Net, something they never would have even thought possible merely a decade ago.
The Internet IS the "new dimension [of] human interaction."
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
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.
I think we have a long way to go before the 'net is all that you're making it out to be.
Although those of us who have computers tend to take them for granted, we're still a relatively small subset of the population. For the majority of people, it's probably still easier to get something published in print (via Kinko's, et al) than on the Internet.
And, of course, broadcast media are more powerful for their one-way nature. If the Internet were that great at gaining exposure for ideas, you can be sure that advertisers would be shelling out millions to get their 30 second spot up on Yahoo. AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet. More people will hear an idea that is presented on TV than on the net (although there is a certain leaching effect--a few days after I see something really interesting on the web, someone will mention it on the nightly news--the Survivor website leak, for instance).
You can publish something on the net, but you can't make people read it. You might say this is a good way of sorting the wheat from the chaff, but there are plenty of unattractive or unpopular things in this world that people should see. The Internet allows you to avoid things that don't interest you, and that's fine from an entertainment perspective. But it's not a very good way to stay informed or maintain a breadth of opinion.
The Internet may well come to be everything you say it is, but for most people, that is still in the future.
No relation to Happy Monkey
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.
True, but there are structural changes that encourage free-agentry and are not going away in the next recession. For instance:
--The late80s/early90s corporate restructurings that broke the long-standing social compact between companies and employees. This brought the end of seniority loyalty (last in first out), lifetime employment (to the extent that it still existed) and the implicit promise of corporate responsibility to its employees.
--The fading away of the unions
--The portability of benifits, such as 401Ks. You may not remember, but pensions used to vest like stock options. If you left early, you lost them. Now, they're contribution-based, and you carry them with you.
--Meritocratic business cultures, where skills and performance are valued more highly than loyalty and years of service. Those that thrive in such cultures will have portable talents, regardless of the economy.
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.
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...
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.
... 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.
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Actually I would agree with you on the caveman question.
My real disagreement is with what you presented as examples of "REAL" shifts... allow me to elaborate:
But look at what you're advocating...
Do you see where I'm going with this? Information has always existed. These 3 inventions simply made information distribution more efficient, and they transformed society as we know it forever... and they weren't even interactive. Now look at the power of the Internet. It's going to be an interesting future. :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
...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
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
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.
<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.
> 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
Cool, thanks for the insight!
AHAHA! "Sparked by a pig????" HAHA! Damn you! Now I'm definetly going to have to look that one up! Reminds me of that Simpson's episode with Smither's and his assistant are in their office and he says he'd cut a check for a $1mill to some charity if "pigs flew". HAHAH..
Sig it.
Democracies fail when the politicians realize that they can buy citizens' votes with their own money.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Sure, Yahoo gets a lot of eyeballs, but how many of them are the eyeballs *you* want to sell to?
As for the content filtering mechanism of the Net, you are absolutely correct. But don't think for a second this is a bad thing. I happen to think I'm *more* informed now than I was in the past. It's simply a matter of what I choose to expose myself, and what those exposures leave to. Anyone can live in a vacuum. I actually think it's harder to maintain a firm wall on your preferred views on the Net than, say, Talk Radio.
As for breadth of opinion, I find the Net to be far vaster than what is available to me on Network broadcasts, or indeed, from my own employer. They have concerns with presenting what is a *balance* of coverage at the expense of everything but what they know has a resonable response from their audience.
The Net knows no limitations. A newspaper is limited by the costs of production and distribution offset by what people are willing to pay in for advertising and in subscriptions. Network news is limited by ratings tied to advertising dollars, which generally limits most stations to 2 hours of news per night, with at least an hour of that, largely repetition.
Now, it could be argued the Net is also subject to economic forces. I'll agree, but suggest that economics is not nearly the limitation online as it is off. Anyone can put a site online with no capital investment. It would be very difficult to get a minority view expressed offline without spending money. Now, whether or not anyone will see that viewpoint is another matter. But it is out there, and very feasible for me to see it.
So what does this all come down to? Largely a matter of choices and who makes them. Offline, a group of learned editors make decisions based on what's been covered previously, how it could affect the audience, and also (rightly or wrongly) their perception of knowledge among themselves, the reporter and the audience about a particular subject.
The Net need not have any of these restrictions. Thus, the experience is (and will be) largely what we make of it ourselves, not what we are currently limited to by others.
The key, i believe, is to let the medium live as it evolves, without adjustment or compensation to make it more acceptible to the status quo. The key is forcing the status quo to catch up.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!