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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.
Here's to technology: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
#DeleteFacebook
Cory Doctrow is not a soothsayer but a two-bit charlatan hack riding on the coat tails of others like Linux or Richard Stallman and passes it off as his own insight.
The facts of the matter are that socialists have been using the same techniques for years in modern media and in traditional (brick and mortar sense) ways and merely expanded the same techniques from letter writing into on board commentary systems.
The ONLY thing that makes social media even work is Facebook's omnipresent existence on the internet that you CANNOT avoid and intentionally used to sway public opinion for the highest dollar or power.
That Cory Doctrow calls this "progressive" is an entirely (and dangerously) clueless misunderstanding of the concept. This way leads to fascism and dictatorship (witness Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter censoring content they dislike based on their "rules" but surreptitiously ignoring similarly ignoring content that breaks the same rules they like...because...)
Thought control is not progression. Firing people for wrongthink is not progression and all of these are used to increase government control of the populace in increasingly bolder moves.
Bad times for all - But hey Cory's getting paid... buy his book to get his thoughts on it!
A broad base, low rate, progressive tax structure also helps fight inequality.
The lesson to be learned here is that tools empower people be they good or evil. The more you understand the tools the more powerful and dangerous you are to established systems of power.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The sad thing is that I actually now believe these type of people you allude to really do exist; The type of people who see no math error in the notion that you can replace IT professionals by outsourcing to ... something that isn't just some other country's IT professionals??
1) 3rd world dictator uses technology to oppress and slaughter millions of dissidents
2) Terrorists/Freedom Fighters (depending on whose side America is on) use snapchat to organize a revolution.
3) Country erupts into civil war, killing millions.
4) Terrorists/Freedom Fighters install their own oppressive dictator, perhaps with the masquerade of a rigged election.
5) If new dictator is smarter than the old one and bans or heavily restricts private internet use, then break; else goto 1;
All that's really changed is that all the assorted terribleness is much more efficient now.
There is no escape from the human condition. Technology merely amplifies it.
The internet was supposed to break down barriers and make the world a global village. But instead, for better or worse, we now have virtual enclaves of like-minded people who would never have found each other without the internet and social media.
The future is uncertain. Will it turns out to be an utopia, or dystopia? Your answer reflects your own worldview.
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.
Humanity was unequal for the vast majority of its history. The current fad for equality is, for the most part, a historical blip.
Catastrophes tend to improve equality, because the rich have lot more to lose than the poor. One of the biggest levelers in history was the Black Death of the 14th century. The elite had most of their wealth in land, which collapsed in value because there was no one left to till it, while the poor saw their incomes soar since labor was scarce and valued.
The 20th century had 3 catastrophes in row: WW1, the Great Depression, and WW2. These all served as levelers, and by 1945, Western society was more level than ever. So people that grew up during the decades that followed, came to view the prevailing equality as "normal". Things are now regressing to the mean.
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.
You don't get out much, do you?
Apathetic populaces arise from wealth. It's a positive feedback loop.
Minum wage laws are an attempt to establish gross salary inequities, not its cause.
Corrupt dictators and their fiscal abuses are unavoidable in general. Preventing them requires consistent policies by their political and fiscal sponsors, which is incredibly difficult to avoid.
Local banks inflate at will, too.
Laws that make investing money difficult are balances against potlach, and founded in attempts to take money *out* of inequitable reserves and get it back into the economy.
The list goes on, and on.
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.
We could all be equal by being destitute. By having short, brutish, lives that end violently, in childbirth or starvation. That would be highly "equal", but extremely unpleasant.
We could also engineer a society where everyone had equal opportunities. But that would still give us people with great wealth and others who had nothing. Simply because some are driven (whether that is healthy, or not - a different issue) to attain power, wealth, knowledge, whatever and others are happy to sit around all day doing the bare minimum. Some people make good decisions - short term vs. long term, while others are impulsive, gullible and easily led.
We cold also have a society where everyone does the same sort of job and earns the same sort of money. (Since "equality" only seems to be about what you earn.) That would score highly on most measures of equality, like the Gini coefficient. But if a trillionaire moved to that "equal" country, the measure of equality would immediately be skewed and the country would show up as being highly unequal - even though none of the non-trillionaires were any worse off than before.
What technology has done is given us all more opportunities. Some seize them, others are too lazy or uneducated, or don't recognise it, or are looking the wrong way, or value other things. Some people just happen to be in the right place at the right time and buy into the right startup. Others are unlucky and go bust. But for the average individual, technology gives us all more. Whether you are a high-speed trader making millions (but who will soon be out of a job when an AI takes your seat), or a farmer in Kenya who gets up-to-date produce prices on their phone - you benefit from technology. You might have less equality, but you are better off, healthier, will live longer and be better educated.
In the end, that is what matters. Not whether the guy next door has a $1m yacht and you don't. That is just greed and envy, not equality.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The distinction between equality and equality of opportunity is a relatively false one, unfortunately. The idea is that inequality is okay, so long as it distinguishes between individuals on the basis of their merit.
That's fine, but how do we define merit, in a way that is not tautological or otherwise meaningless. If, for example, we leave in an environment where personal income is largely defined by your access to capital, rather than your labour, then this is a meritocracy, so long as you define "merit" as having lots of cash. This is largely the society we live in now. If you look back 200 years ago, then we leaved in a meritocracy, so long as you defined merit in terms of having lots of land (at least in Europe, it was less true in the US because there were fewer people and lots of land). If you go back 1000 years, then being good with hacking and slaying was more the thing.
We often see this problem when we look at CEOs with very large salaries. Well, it's said, we have to pay them that because its the market rate. Or, in short, they have merit because they get paid a lot, and we pay them a lot because they have merit.
At heart, we have to strive for some level of equality, and equality of opportunity just clouds the issue. The levels of inequality that we have now are, I think, not sustainable. In the past, the main mechanisms for solving this problem have been the union or other social movements. Or war. Let's hope it's not the latter again.
"People are making the world more unequal; Only people can fix this".
Technology is inherently neutral. It's the person or people that wield it that give it colour.
Personally, I aspire for "too cheap to steal".
Why do you expect someone who writes about what others are doing to be original? Where is he passing it off as his own insight instead of something that he has observed others doing?
As for his fiction - is he supposed to actually invent the things he writes about instead of just loosely describing them?