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Technology Is Making the World More Unequal; Only Technology Can Fix This (theguardian.com)
mspohr shares an excerpt from an article written by Cory Doctorow via The Guardian: The inequality of badly-run or corrupt states is boosted by the power of technology -- but it's also easier than ever to destabilize these states, thanks to technology. The question is: which future will prevail?" [The article discusses two sides to the issue:] Here's the bad news: technology -- specifically, surveillance technology -- makes it easier to police disaffected populations, and that gives badly run, corrupt states enough stability to get themselves into real trouble. Here's the good news: technology -- specifically, networked technology -- makes it easier for opposition movements to form and mobilize, even under conditions of surveillance, and to topple badly run, corrupt states. Long before the internet radically transformed the way we organize ourselves, theorists were predicting we'd use computers to achieve ambitious goals without traditional hierarchies -- but it was a rare pundit who predicted that the first really successful example of this would be an operating system (GNU/Linux), and then an encyclopedia (Wikipedia). [Cory also has a new novel, Walkaway , which explores these ideas further.] The future will see a monotonic increase in the ambitions that loose-knit groups can achieve. My new novel, Walkaway, tries to signpost a territory in our future in which the catastrophes of the super-rich are transformed into something like triumphs by bohemian, anti-authoritarian "walkaways" who build housing and space programs the way we make encyclopedias today: substituting (sometimes acrimonious) discussion and (sometimes vulnerable) networks for submission to the authority of the ruling elites.
The industry of highly paid programmers working in silos has been decimated by this Open Source software not worth paying for.
Although it only does an half-assed job, the low cost of Open Source software has lowered both the quality and expectations to create a new balance of acceptability.
A new technology, the Public Cloud, remedies to this situation by allowing third parties to charge for open source software and keep the proceeds for themselves. In turn, a new industry of Cloud Architects has been born with the goal of replacing all IT professionals with outsourced services.
The problems of wealth inequality come from economics, not technology.
Allocate an array of reasonably large size, say a million entries, and fill each cell with the value 1.0
Next, choose any cell at random using a probability based on it's normalized value: Add all the cells together (the total) and make the probability of choosing any cell equal to it's cell value divided by the total.
Increment that chosen cell by a portion of its value; for example, increase the chosen cell value by 1%.
Repeat this process (select, increment) many times.
What you will find is that inevitably some cell values will increase exponentially, outstripping all other cells. Eventually one cell will become largest, outstripping all other cells.
Reset the simulation and rerun it, and the same thing will happen, only to different cells.
This is the model of our economic system. Compound interest is exactly this type of exponential increase, and will cause this same behaviour in simulation by itself. Other factors, such as getting better rates the more money you have, paying less in taxes the more money you have, will amplify this effect.
And which cell values get amplified is simply due to chance. In the beginning, it's being in the right place at the right time.
It's a math problem and easy to prove.
The human inability to identify, understand and control exponential increase is what leads to wealth inequality.
Not technology.
The Soviet Union was notorious for paying or otherwise turning huge swathes of the population into agents and informants; social media flagged posts being forwarded directly to the Secret Police can make any movement stillborn. There's an old Russian saying: "When three men sit down to discuss revolution, two are government agents, and the third is a fool." No new surveillance tech is needed for agents and informants to kill uprisings, although the internet makes casually passing info along to the Powers That Be much easier. The internet can make organizing easier, flash mobs for example; I seem to recall some of this happened during the Arab Spring, however look at what happened afterward: how good a job is internet organization doing at stopping ISIS militants in the middle east? So much for toppling badly-run states.
'Open source will create a shadow economy, routing around the existing corruption' is a fancy as well. Sure, if everyone had their own universal constructor and people were downloading pirate designs with cracked DRM, this might be possible. However, barring that, the incumbents can simply lobby for laws to be passed that restrict usage of open source/shadow economy tools. Look at laws that prohibit municipal wifi/fiber, or mandate govt. usage of MS Office/Oracle, or restrict or ban usage of Bitcoin. Doctorow's ideas here remind me of the phrase "The solution to the problems of Democracy, is more Democracy." As in, direct democracy can route around the corruption in a representative democracy. However, with propaganda, and how willingly people will sell their vote, this is arguably not as conclusive a solution as one would think, just a temporary rerouting of the problem. Imagine how many millions of poverty-level people would vote for the USA SAVE PUPPIES Act, because they love puppies right? And because the sponsor loves puppies SO MUCH, they're paying $100 to ensure they make the right choice and don't give in to the immoral temptations of the Act's opponents. Doing the right thing should feel good, ya know? And the act is being fast-tracked through referendum and is 900 pages long and noone has time to pore over it to find the evils it hides; and it's log-rolled so that individual clauses can't be stricken later once discovered without undoing the entire law which contains a myriad of other, actually-desirable things. Propaganda can get people to oppose net neutrality or countless other things that would be to their own benefit, thinking doing so will help them more (indirectly, once it trickles down... any day now...) and thus democracy dies to thunderous applause.
Sure we can get Wikipedia and Linux, but there was LOTS of hubbub at one time about how unreliable Wikipedia is, because it can be edited by anyone, until several studies found it to be as or more reliable on average than respected encyclopedias. Remember the Get The Facts campaign by MS about Linux, and FUD about backdoors being hidden in the Linux source because, again, anyone can edit it, and corporations using Linux being liable to be sued by SCO etc. for patent infringement? Bitcoin has been thoroughly associated with drug trafficking, ransomware, and money laundering in the public eye, not completely unwarranted. The problem is corruption tends to have money, which can buy propaganda, which can fool people into supporting the status quo; about the best I hope for is that principled people will obtain money, then use counter-propaganda. Knowledgeable people who don't fall for the propaganda can use the open-source stuff... but only when the sheeple don't go along with the plot to make it illegal. That's what we should really be afraid of here, and no ad-hoc tech group is going to get around that any better than The Pirate Bay has. How many of its operators are in prison now?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Wikipedia is a very poor example of a non-traditional hierarchy. It has a very traditional and very solid hierarchy upon which it maintains its desired pro-Western establishment bias. Want an example ? Take a look at the cited sources for en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War and try to find a Syrian source among them. This isn't an accident. They want this bias and enforce this bias through their administrative hierarchy by making sure that any source that doesn't conform to the Reuters, BBC, NYT, WSJ etc point of view should be tough to include.
As for Linux, I think it became relevant when IBM and Canonical streamlined it for businesses and the general public but I may be entirely wrong here.