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US To Release International Cyber Strategy Today
vivIsel writes "Today, the Obama Administration will be releasing its first-ever strategy for 'international cooperation in cyberspace.' Following on Friday's release of the White House domestic cybersecurity proposal, this strategy document will govern how the US behaves on the international stage — including around big issues like internet governance and internet freedom. The strategy's unveiling, which will be keynoted by Hillary Clinton with remarks by Secretaries Holder, Locke and Napolitano, will be streamed live on whitehouse.gov starting at 3:00PM EDT today."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization#Fall_of_civilizations
"Joseph Tainter in "The Collapse of Complex Societies" suggested that there were diminishing returns to complexity, due to which, as states achieved a maximum permissible complexity, they would decline when further increases actually produced a negative return. Tainter suggested that Rome achieved this figure in the 2nd Century AD."
The suggestion is that civilizations tend to refuse to accept going down any path to a more sensible solution than collapse because every move towards better social health would be more painful than just business-as-usual. Of course, ideally, that is what political leadership (not political followership?) is for, to get people to make the hard choices and improve overall social health.
More on social pyramids and economics:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
As long as there is a huge and growing rich/poor divide in this world, driven in part by increasing automation decreasing the value of most human labor, and we fail to do anything about that overall situation (like institute a basic income), our country will be at increasing risk for all sorts of different directions, of which cyber threats are only one set of issues. Here is a document prepared for President Kennedy and delivered to President Johnson in 1964, that is only more and more true in some ways:
"The Triple Revolution Memorandum: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights"
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measure -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.