Because that older implementation's GUI is a lttle hard to follow as it consistes of multiple windows, and since it is also less true to the original idea in terms of arbitrary trail building (which could include cycles or other complex webs of segments), I put together this one window version of Memex in Jython (Pyhon on Java): http://pointrel.org/projects/memex/ That page includes a screenshot and a link to a source file (memex.py) licensed under the GPL. Note: unlike the previous version, this one does not use the Pointrel system and it does not currently save and load (which would require generating unique IDs for each item to allow them to be merged properly when trails are imported). But is should be enough to get a feel for what the original Memex could have done. I did take the liberty in it of having left and right links -- otherwise it is not clear to me how you could go forward and backward through a trail (other possibilities exist, they just seem confusing).
See also John Taylor Gatto's related writings on-line: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.... The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior.""
Python implementation of Memex
on
Sixty Years of Memex
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Here is a Python implementation of Memex I wrote, built on top of my Pointrel data repository system. It was tested under Debian GNU/Linux and Python 2.3 with TK.
It isn't an exact match (it is a little more general in some ways, including multiple item viewer windows), but it covers the basic functionality of adding text items, making trails of them, and marking indexes on the trails.
To use the demo, after untarring and so on, type "python tkPointrelMemex.py" and when you get the GUI up, in the "Pointrel Memex Item Viewer" window, select the "Long Bow" trail in the panel beneath the "Update Annotation" button, and then you can use the navigation buttons (first, previous, index, next, last) to move through the trail.
You can also look at a view of trails in the "Pointrel Memex Trail Viewer" windows.
There is only one current trail at a time, shown in the Trail Viewer window. To add a new item, edit the text in the top panel in the Item Viewer window and click "Add from edit". The item is now added to the "ALL ITEMS" trail (which is everything in the system), and that "All ITEMS" trail will show up in the list of all trails the item is in near the bottom of the window. Assuming you are the "Long Bow" trail is the current trail indicated in the Trail Viewer window, you can then click on "Add to current trail" in the Item Viewer window and it will be added to the end of the "Long Bow" trail.
One difference in this program from the real Memex concept Bush describes is that trails are more first class objects in the implementation, whereas in what is described in Memex what he calls trails are more named links and a trail is essentially following identically named links. I think when I first implemented (back around 2001) an issue came up with the Memex description allowing trails to branch in a way that seemed counter to the rest of what he described for trails. Anyway, this implementation is a basis for improvements or changes, at least. It would not be that hard to remove some functionality (making it a single window with two viewers) and change the trail following slightly to be even closer to what he describes.
For fun, I also included some source code (including for the program itself) for it in the sample archive loaded by Memex on startup, so you can see Memex's (limited) potential to be an IDE with integrated versioning. It would take another button to actually launch the viewed Python code though.
In theory, it should also be multi-user on a system where the repository has appropriate shared permissions (supported by the underling Pointrel data repository system, and having to manually click on "Reload trails list"), but I have not tested that functionality much.
According to Julian Jaynes: http://www.cs.umu.se/kurser/TDBC12/HT99/jaynes.htm l "Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began. And each age has described consciousness in terms of its own theme and concerns. In the golden age of Greece, when men traveled about in freedom while slaves did the work, consciousness was as free as that. Heraclitus, in particular, called it an enormous space whose boundaries, even by traveling along every path, could never be found out. A millennium later, Augustine among the caverned hills of Carthage was astonished at the "mountains and hills of my high imaginations," "the plains and caves and caverns of my memory" with its recesses of "manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with unnumberable stores." Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives.
The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth's crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers which recorded the past of the individual, there being deeper and deeper layers until the record could no longer be read. This emphasis on the unconscious grew until by 1875 most psychologists were insisting that consciousness was but a small part of mental life, and that unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes.
In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness from James Mill to Wundt and his students, such as Titchener, was the compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings.
And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday life toward the end of the nineteenth century, so they too worked their way into the consciousness of consciousness, the subconscious becoming a boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behavior and the spindling camouflaged fulfillments of going-nowhere dreams.
There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that that is precisely what they are...."
In Lofti Zadeh's Fuzzy Logic http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zadeh/ multiple variables (high & low; near & far; cold, warm & hot) describing some state can be true at the same time to various amounts. So, a fuzzy logic system for running a washing machine might make a decision based on the water both being cool and warm and hot but to varying degrees. There might be multiple rules like, if the water is warm, spin the drum, and if the water is cold, add some hot water, and what actually happens related to these potentials. Fuzzy Logic provides a way to take rules of thumb which refer to fuzzy distinctions and quantify them to some extent and use current state to make decisions. In the case of the article, dynamically the state of "candle" and "candy" are both some value for a while and the person responding curves the mouse accordingly (until they hear enough of the word and process it enough to commit more fully to one interpretation).
Forgot to include this link in the above on the alternative of opting out of schooling (K-12 or college) entirely: http://www.unconventionalideas.com/wizard.html From that link: "Furthermore, I often question whether the "doors of opportunity" which college supposedly unlocks, actually lead to places where people truly want to go. Maybe the "doors of opportunity" are just the passageway into an adulthood of Babbittry.
Could college attendance be a sign of cowardice? Could it be a way to duck from the scary thought of being who we really are inside? Could we do the college thing mainly because that's what's expected of us, or what everyone else is doing, not because it's what we truly should do?
At one time, I bought into the conventional wisdom that although college wasn't the only option, most young people should aim for it. Then I met my wife, Mandy. She grew up in Canada and England. Her father's military career gave her the advantage of living in a variety of places. She is well-read, writes better than most college graduates I know, and is well-informed on a variety of subjects. And, she has never completed a college course."
Excerpt: "Pyramid scheme-- There is a curious parallel to the policies of academe and the recruitment of junior associates in the private sectors of law and accounting. In major accounting firms, newly hired junior associates are worked very hard for a number of years, but only about one in ten makes partner. At major law firms a similar pyramid scheme is employed. James Stewart explains in his book The Partners: Inside America's Most Powerful Law Firms (1983):
The key to profitability in such firms is the partner/associate ratio and "pyramid" staffing of client matters. There must be more associates than partners -- the bigger the disparity the better -- since the firms make money from associates by billing their clients for their work at rates which more than compensate for the associate salaries and overhead (376).
This is the same pyramid staffing common in universities. Graduate student assistants, part-time faculty, and junior faculty cost far less than tenured faculty, but bring in the same tuition fees and state allocations (based on student head-count). Untenured junior faculty "do exactly what the senior faculty does, only for half the pay, less status, fewer amenities, and an uncertain future" (Rosovsky). This generates a "profit" for the senior faculty and administration and enables them to support the superstructure of graduate education and research (Mayhew 1972, 2).
This pyramid staffing pattern recalls an old joke: how do you transport a ton of canaries in a half ton truck? Answer: you beat on the side of the truck and keep half the canaries in flight. The university's problem is: How do you get years of teaching work out of people without paying them very much? Answer: you promise them a future and then beat on the side of the truck with tenure."
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I've also been reading the online book: _The Underground History of American Education_ relating to K-12 by a New York State "Teacher of the Year". http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m It begins: "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real... The Way It Used To Be. Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh.... The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior."... Something strange has been going on in government schools, especially where the matter of reading is concerned. Abundant data exist to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United St
Gatto argues schools are functioning perfectly to accomplish what they were designed for about 150 years ago by industrialists -- dumbing down the masses so they become compliant factory workers and consumers, with any initiative to press for change alone or through unions long since beaten (psychically) out of them.
So is it any surprise real wages per worker (adjusted for inflation) have dropped since the 1950s, but news articles frequently misleadingly trumpet that family incomes have risen -- yet ignore the fact that is only because now both parents work and the kids are left unsupervised to be brainwashed by school and television and dumbed-down peers?
Gatto argues schools need to be completely dismantled, a big project as at the same time other aspects of our society need to be rethought as well. Because, as W and continued oil dependency and unsafe SUVs show, the current system has failed the US and the world. Neither more money, better teachers, or better blackboards will make much of a difference without changing the rest -- the compulsory aspect being the worst part.
It's been my experience that education is mostly about producing good workers.
And John Taylor Gatto would agree with that if you change the word "education" to "schooling" (which is what you really seem to be referring to, as the two are not the same). See: Underground History of American Education
Further, Gatto argues schools are functioning perfectly to accomplish what they were designed for about 150 years ago by industrialists -- dumbing down the masses so they become compliant factory workers and consumers, with any initiative to press for change alone or through unions long since beaten (psychically) out of them.
So is it any surprise real wages per worker (adjusted for inflation) have dropped since the 1950s, but news articles frequently misleadingly trumpet that family incomes have risen -- yet ignore the fact that is only because now both parents work and the kids are left unsupervised to be brainwashed by school and television and dumbed-down peers?
Gatto argues schools need to be completely dismantled, a big project as at the same time other aspects of our society need to be rethought as well. Because, as W's reelection despite Iraq, our collective continued oil dependency, and the popularity of unsafe SUVs all show -- as just a few related examples -- the current system has failed the US and the world.
Someone like John Taylor Gatto would agree that a conformist and obedient sort of person is exactly what mainstream schools were designed to turn out. From: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/8e.htm "The first exhibit for your perusal is the U.S. Bureau of Education's Circular of Information for April 1872, which centers around what it calls the "problem of educational schooling." With whose interests in mind did the bureau view education as a problem? The amazing answer is: from a big business perspective. By 1872, this still feeble arm of the federal government is seen filled with concern for large industrial employers at a time when those were still a modest fraction of the total economy. According to this Circular of Information, "inculcating knowledge" teaches workers to be able to "perceive and calculate their grievances," thus making them "more redoubtable foes" in labor struggles. Indeed, this was one important reason for Thomas Jefferson's own tentative support of a system of universal schooling, but something had been lost between Monticello and the Capital. "Such an enabling is bound to retard the growth of industry," continues the Circular. There is nothing ambiguous about that statement at all, and the writer is correct, of course. Sixteen years later (1888), we can trace the growth in this attitude from the much more candid language in the Report of the Senate Committee on Education. Its gigantic bulk might be summarized in this single sentence taken from page 1,382: "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes." Once we acknowledge that planned economies of nation or corporation are systems with their own operating integrity, quite sensibly antagonistic to the risks educated minds pose, much of formal schooling's role in the transformation that came is predictable. If education is indeed "one of the principal causes of discontent," it performs that subversive function innocently by developing intellect and character in such a way as to resist absorption into impersonal systems: Here is the crux of the difference between education and schooling-- the former turns on independence, knowledge, ability, comprehension, and integrity; the latter upon obedience."
I can't wait for the society that exists to pursue its own interests with the zeal that comes from self-determination.
For a taste of that future, check out the writings of James P. Hogan, especially his novel _Voyage from Yesteryear_, http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/voyage/baen99/tit lepage.shtml as well as his latests works like _Cradle of Saturn_ and _The Anguished Dawn_.
I imagine this future-vision might be true, if so, for all intents and purposes, there will be no reason, unless one chooses, to work/create again. I think scenarios like this really urge us to deeply look inside ourselves (as creative, artistic beings) and ask: Why do I create? Why do I invent?
Maybe for the answer to this question about the future, we need to look into our hunter/gatherer past.
The Original Affluent Society -by Marshall Sahlins http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognize that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
What did hunter/gatherers spend their time on? Well, there was "work" in the sense of knowing what they wanted to gain from the machinery of nature around them, and then actually getting it. So, the equivalent of going shopping at the grocery store and then going to the fridge for a beer. Even with matter replicators, there will be the issue of what to replicate and what to do with it -- and matters of taste and aesthetics may play a big role. There was the work of child rearing -- something that takes a lot of time and attention. There was the work of singing and dancing and sharing joy and culture and storytelling -- something that will still be needed. There was art and expression. And there was impressing the opposite sex and various status contests. So, there is still a lot of things to occupy time. So I am not worried about that aspect of finding things to do -- because humanity was originally adapted to those conditions of abundance anyway.
A few related issues: agriculture likely arose with increasing population pressures and the invention of the militaristic bureaucracy based in cities -- and anthropologists now recognize that healthwise this was a step backwards for most people as skeletal remains show a decrease in stature with the transition to agriculture resulting from a less varied dies and related famines from depending on one or two major crops which could fail. So, advanced technology can in theory let us go full circle back to the old ways. And a related point -- the "garden of eden" story is present across many cultures -- perhaps reflecting this universal history of being forced to abandon more desirable hunter/gatherer ways for the toil of agricultural either because of increased population or at the spear point of the imperial tax man. Head taxes forced much of Africa into starvation in the last few hundred years, as European powers imposed taxes on the native populations (or else they faced imprisonment or death) and these taxes could only paid by working on European-owned plantations for low wages instead of keeping to their usual subsistence lifestyle. Thus was Africa turned from a continent of hunter/gatherer affluence to one of Agricultural/Industrial poverty through (among other things) taxation without representation. http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch02.htm
So, I have no real worries people will have unresolveable problems with affluence -- it is the crushed life of industry and agriculture that seems to be causing more of the problems, with parents not having enough time for their children, and citizens not having enough time to engage in civic duties and neighborhood activities, and people turning to drugs or television to escape for a while the horror and meaninglessness and pain and humiliation of it all.
So regardless of future reasons, I'd say one reason to invent right now is to try to bring back the better part of those times (and there were bad parts of those times too of course, superstition, infanticide, parasites, so let's hope for doing better the second time around).
And Lessig misses this point, as he is trying for compromise.
Some related issues:
If copyrights impose a burden on society (like real estate), why not tax them annually at some self-assessed buyout value (the cost the copyright holder would be content with to have the work in the public domain)?
Oh, but copyright holders might protest they can not fairly evaluate the copyright as some copyrights make a lot of money, and most do not. But there we have it -- the notion of copyright as a lottery ticket which the essay touches on. Do we want creative works funded as lotteries?
Also, with the increasing use of automation and robotics, people are less and less needed to produce things, so ultimately most people will become out of work in our society -- unless they get a guaranteed income in terms of a part of the production of the automated systems. If people had such a guaranteed income, then they would not need an incentive to create digital works, and they would not need to receive royalties from copyrights just to get the basics of food, water, shelter, education, manufactured goods, and medical care for themselves and their children.
So the future you are talking about is bound up into issues like a guaranteed income or fair share of rapidly increasing industrial productivity. So essentially a "Star Trek" like society, with matter replicators -- which are at most ten or twenty years away, as people are using limited prototypes of them now. Remember, thirty years ago, for most people there was no such thing as desktop publishing or local printing. Now you typically get a printer bundled for "free" with a computer. Thirty years from now, it may seem as ludicrous to get something other than raw materials delivered or to go out to shop for an object as it would seem now to have one-off printing done at some remote computer center (as was typical thirty years ago).
US BIG: The basic income guarantee (BIG) is a government insured guarantee that no citizen's income will fall below some minimal level for any reason. All citizens would receive a BIG without means test or work requirement. BIG is an efficient and effective solution to poverty that preserves individual autonomy and work incentives while simplifying government social policy. Some researchers estimate that a small BIG, sufficient to cut the poverty rate in half could be financed without an increase in taxes by redirecting funds from spending programs and tax deductions aimed at maintaining incomes. http://www.usbig.net/
That essay is posted in other places on the web, and I expect (though am not certain) that the italics and bolding were added by the web page creator not the original author. Here is one without the typographical fluff you object to, and here is another (the second is on a site devoted to the larger topic of "why work?"). And, for balance, this essay is a more mainstream counterpoint to Black's essay, though it suggests some concrete short term approaches individuals can do to address work dissatisfactions.
On the particular part you quoted, check out the writings by John Taylor Gatto (a New York State Teacher of the Year) on all the things schools and prisons share in common, and how much damage conventional age segregated schooling with a fixed curriculum and standardized testing does to developing minds. You can find a book he wrote online here: The Underground History of American Education.
By the way, I agree with you some on the sweeping generalization on feminism (which in some variants is more liberational) but I think his point still stands -- that reconstructing the nature of work is to my (perhaps incomplete) understanding not typically an aspect of mainstream feminism -- especially when that was written (1985?) -- just deciding who does the work or who supervises it or who benefits from it monetarily or otherwise. But as a piece of rhetoric, I still think that paragraph is compelling in showing how people refuse to think systematically about what work needs to be done in society and how best to do it from various points of view.
E.F. Schumacher made similar points in his essay on Buddhist Economics if you want to read an author who is more well known.
Check out: THE ABOLITION OF WORK
by Bob Black for a glimpse of the best hope I see for the future empowering people in ways other than through Stalinist type "work" settings. In that essay, Bob Black suggests eliminating needless work (90%+ of it), making much of the rest into play, and then automating the small remainder. That goes way beyond just tinkering with economic policy or trade agreements.
From his essay:
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
Actually, the experts I have heard on this suggest that any event (like the OBL videotape release) that gets the US electorate to focus on terrorism or fear works to Bush's benefit, so actually one could argue OBL's recent video tape is actually in that sense intended to boost Bush's reelection prospects. And it makes sense when you think about -- no one will ruin the US faster or alienate more people outside the US than someone continuing the misguided policies of the past few years -- so Bush is very much the terrorists' choice. In a weird way Bush and the terrorists are co-dependant. And after all, Kerry might even catch OBL (unlike Bush's misdirection into Iraq and failures in Afghanistan), so why should they risk change?
People keep trotting this issue out (cheaper long distance rates since the breakup), but I have to wonder. The breakup of AT&T was about twenty years ago. Who is to say that prices would not have dropped and regulations changed if the monopoly had been kept? Aren't most of the decreases in rates due to better / faster / cheaper technology based on better computer chips (including now, voice over IP?) Perhaps we are paying more for phone service and having less broadband and less unified (3G) cell phone service in the USA because there is not one highly regulated monopoly like in most other developed countries? Clearly most everyone agrees the USA is way behind of the rest of the advanced industrialized world in Broadband and Cell Phone access. And, after all, we have also lost the crown jewel of basic research (AT&T Bell Labs) which devolved into Lucent and Bellcore and now who knows what, resulting in a big loss for humanity. As someone once told me, AT&T Bell labs was a remarkable basic research institute (think the transistor and the solar cell) funded by people dropping dimes into boxes all across the US.
The deeper issue is there are many ways to organize societies, and many have been tried in the past, with different level of success for different people in them. For example, for a lot (not all) of the Native Peoples Of The Americas, they lived in resonable peace and prosperity before the occupation and biological warfare etc. used against them to impose European corporatism/fuedalism on the land and impose a "work" oriented social model instead of an abundance oriented one. See:
The Abolition of Work by Bob Black or: How the Constitution of the United States Came to Be. In general, look at the writings of Manual de Landa on the importance of both Meshworks and Hierarchies and how they are present in any social system. But a big issue is balance and specific forms as well as who pays the costs and who gets the benefits (Global Justice).
You say a lot of sensible sounding things here, but I think the general issue is you are now redefining capitalism as a moral ideal as you want to see it and not how it is in practice (a system driven by greed, where money then corrupts the legislative system). As the USA is the main capitalist promoter currently, I do not think you can separate the USA domestic and foreign policy (including militarism) from "capitalism" in practice. This is similar to how people refuse to separate the Soviet experience from the notion of "Communism" (even though, logically, Stalinist dictatorship and Communism are different things, and some Native Peoples of the Americas had far more successful and humane "communist" lifestyles in terms of sharing hunting grounds and long houses among tribes or extended families, etc.).
When you acknowledge something is a flaw (e.g. barter tax) you say it's a flaw of something else that capitalism. But perhaps, like H1B visas, or L1 visas, or Spectrum auctioning, or the 1099 independent contractor rules pushed for by a small set of companies that make it hard for contractors to not go through brokers or be paid W2, perhaps all these laws are the result of greed spawned by capitalism to keep alternatives at bay (including by high barriers to entry)? Langdon Winner, in his book _Autonomous Technology_ talks about "reverse adaptation" when an organization reverse adapts its environment to suit its needs for survival and growth (independent of its original purpose), which is exactly what is happening with corporations out of control in the USA and beyond.
The bottom line is that capitalism is becoming just a code word in some ways for "social darwinism" and "corporate feudalism", see for example:
Mythology of wealth
and without regulation, taxation, and charity, the results are horrendous. When capitalism was invented in some sense by the Dutch centuries ago it was (slave trade apart) tempered by strong moral values and charity in its application at home, and so the country of Holland overall prospered; with the loss of all these aspects over the centuries that surround greed and make it useful for society as an ambition to excel and prosper within a broader social context, the result is just what you would expect from rampant unchecked greed, and that is ultimately war and corruption and disaster.
Some specific points in passing (and running out of time for this interesting discussion, sadly), when I said "reasonable" I meant reasonable in the context of hunter/gatherer society accepting its strengths and weaknesses (not to keep the TVs running). And why should we be talking about "eeking out" a life? The issue is how we all can live better (even those getting ulcers from being in charge or being financially obese like Bill Gates).
A deeper point is that one can't leave the political system or the biosphere (yet). Nukes are targeted almost everywhere (or their fallout is) and if capitalism or some other-ism pulls everything down with radiation or plagues or an intrusive police state, then everyone is hit. So, the only realistic choice is to engage in social reform, not run away and wait for the poison dust clouds or whatever else it could be to show up.
Actually, much (not all) of the USSR's arms race side was driven by continued US escalation and rhetoric (even look at the newspapers around the time of the Sputnik launches where the Russians say they would share the space technology with all humankind). Even now, any country looking at the example of the US invading Iraq is going to conclude that, unlike in North Korea, this is what happens to a country when they do not have WMD, one of the reasons the Iraq war has destabilized the entire political landscape for WMD.
You write: "I like the goods of capitalism like fresh produce, health care, and interesting web sites." Much produce is shipped from far away and is produced in an unsustainable way drawing down water aquifers and poisoning illeg
It seems to me that you don't have an answer for my reply that Java and XML were both examples of highly hyped systems not as good as long standing alternatives, so you are resorting to name calling.
FYI, Java's Swing is derived from VisualWorks Smalltalk (and designed by people hired away from the related company at the time). Sun actually tried to license VisualWorks for their settop box project (which Oak, Java's precursor was developed for); ParcPlace would not provide what Sun thought a reasonable licensing fee structure, so they continued with Oak and which was ultimately renamed Java. And if you look at the history of Java, senior developers knew it was missing essentials like closures but pushed it out the door anyway. So there you have it -- we got stuck with Java and all its failed promises because of capitalist infighting among corporations with little care for what was the best technical solution even when everyone recognized what it was. Another reason Java fails is Sun's refusal to freely share one unified codebase, unlike, say Squeak Smalltalk or Python or various free Common Lisps, which lead to write once, debug everywhere for Java, which is what relegated it mainly to server use (although many years later it is now passably stable for some applications).
While derived from SGML, XML is still essentially just a dumbed down version of Lisp S-expressions (admittedly with some namespace and other additions easily handled by various Lisp additions). XML fails at its primary mission (easy data exchange) for two reasons -- one is that any sufficiently large document realistically can't be encoded by hand as oposed to using a structured editor of some sort (so human readable doesn't matter much, and s-expressions would have been good enough), and secondly because the big issue is agreement on the detailed shared meaning of terms and XML by itself has nothing to say about that (as opposed to, say, all the Lisp based AI work which has thought a lot about representation and meaning). Now, the XML community as a broader culture has begun making some headway at shared meaning over the years given all the investment in it, but these points still stand as far as it being originally a poor choice of standard for textual data exchange and a unneeded and hyped approach which by itself ignores the real issues (agreed on meanings for terms) even if those issues can be addressed by other means (which could have applied equally to S-expressions). The biggest advantage to S-expressions prior to years of XML development would have been the triviality to read them with existing free packages (various embeddable Lisp-like systems) and the further long standing already developed ways to then mix data and code for dynamic systems generating dynamic web pages or reports. XML also has some ambiguities in practice as regards authors' handling of whitespace which can drive people up the wall when writing related parsers or formatters (I know this from first hand experience; I helped develop an XSL-FO system to help define that standard (for transforming and displaying XML documents), and I have the hair loss to prove it.:-) See for example: XFC
In any case, unlike Java, XML has become quite a useful standard as it has become broadly adopted (like HTML), so I don't mean to scare anyone away from it at this point, many years of hype and investment down the road. But my original point on it being unneeded given Lisp S-expressions still stands.
Actually, for reference Python is my preferred practical language these days, much as I like Python and Lisp, however in the case of Smalltalk that is also mainly for corporate licensing reasons (the greatest Smalltalk IMHO , VisualWorks, is not free). Personally, I think there are some issues I have with Common Lisp in practice (I generally don't like languages with Macros for various reasons), but I don't want to go into them here.
Slashdot is a technical forum; I would expect most people he
Your Slashdot handle of "MoralHazard" suggests this way to look at it: limited liability for investors, no flow through bankruptcy for investors, and no criminal liability for investors, all create a "moral hazard" allowing investors to do less than proper dilligence and provide less than complete oversight for their investments. If equity investors' personal butts were on the line for each investment, one could hope investors would ensure corporate behavior met higher moral standards, or would otherwise find alternate investments they could be more sure of.
Current legalities aside, your point doesn't quite hold together morally IMHO. If someone gives money to an organization that repeatedly does immoral or illegal things, they almost surely should know how it is going to be used. Same of someone who buys stock in any corporation. If they invest money in a profit making organization in an equity position (part-owner) not knowing these things, then they are at least guilty of gross negligence. I think loans without equity or return in any way tied to corporate profits might have a slightly different moral flavor perhaps.
Any equity investor in any venture should (in theory, IMHO) have a moral obligation to oversee that venture. "I didn't know" IMHO really should not be an excuse in a world trying to hold people accountable for their deeds. If that would make certain ventures of various sizes impractical, so be it. If that makes corporate secrecy impossible, so be it. If that means many people should not prudently be stockholding corporate investors and should instead invest in other ways they can more easily monitor closer to home, so be it. Now it may be, as you suggest, that law outside of corporate law may excuse investors of criminal conduct, but nonetheless one could argue those laws are bad laws, and that people supporting profitmaking organizations that do criminal acts are guilty of at the very least gross negligence and should be held criminally liable, just like someone who puts in a pool without a fence is often held liable for gross negligence in creating an attractive nusiance if a toddler drowns there. And if that leads to a set of economic problems and then solutions (like an end to secrecy with transparent corporations and an end to passivity with active investors providing oversight lest they end up in jail) then so be it.
Just google on "corporate charter revocation" to see how active some of these ideas are becoming. See for example the links from: FreedomOrCapitalism
Or see: Corporate Feudalims. It's not "guilt by association"; it is guilt by providing "aid and comfort" to people with immoral policies (even if they may or may not be illegal). From that last link: "Corporate feudalism is decidedly "unAmerican", and is a gross departure from American values. It represents the seizure of American government to serve a new purpose -- the promotion of corporate wealth and power. Opposing this corrosive new form of "privitized tyranny" is not "unAmerican". Neither is publicizing the abuses of the corporate lords around the world in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Iran or Vietnam. America didn't do those things. You didn't do those things. An American government subverted by corporate oligarchs did those things, and lied to you about their true purpose.
The "traitors" are the corporate "feudal lords" who stole our government and committed oppression and exploitation in our name. The 'traitors" are the one's who now seek to use debt and "free trade" to do to the US, what they have already done to Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The traitors are the one's -- in the name of "liberty" no less -- who seek a government they say can do nothing for the people who live under it, but can only serve the interests of corporate fiefdoms. Patriots expose these corporate potentates. Patriots seek to restore democracy, subverted by
You wrote: "I think anyone who assumes that we can get rid of all of those roles in a society, and still have a functioning society, can be properly classified as an anarchist."
Why? That 5% could be organized in any way from forced labor to volunteers to ration-unit-based (money-based) capitalism.
The article I linked to by Black (as well as the Buddhist Economics one by Schumacher) makes clear that even without automation much that 5% could be made much more enriching experiences by rethinking how it is done. Is it done alone or in a pair or in a team? Is it done with a supervisor with a whip (real or metaphorical) or is it done on a volunteer basis? Is it done in a spirit of joy and community or is it done in a spirit of forced labor or grudging acceptance? And then, of what remains, then, yes, whatever no people really want to do under any circumstances can be automated or re-engineered out of the system.
And to have a small bit of automation supported by perhaps 0.01% of the population part-time is not the same as reinventing the entire economy.
It is true Marx did talk about post-industrial society and capitalism's self-destructive tendencies, but I still don't think Black's concept could be called Marxism (as people commonly think of it) without classes. It's a total rethinking of the nature of labor and what sort of society we want to live in.
It is true people may have a freedom of choice and movement they do not have now, but in the end the results will probably be the same as in the free software and open source movements -- some projects acquire a certain critical mass and take off. So, some people would, for example, get really excited about producing IC chips and they would do that, and if someone else started a competing project, and people thought it was a whole lot better, many people might move on to it (after some reflection). For sci-fi stories of how this might work out in practice, see James P. Hogan's sci-fi novels like _Voyage From Yesteryear_ or _The Anguished Dawn_.
First off, it takes a village to live reasonably well in the wilderness. And these have to be people with appropriate skills and tools. So, your suggestion is a non-starter because those communties (apart from some Native Peoples of the Americas) are pretty much nonexistant. Also, land does not cost near nothing -- I actually live in a wilderness area (largest in the Eastern US) and land is still $2000 an acre or more in small quantities. Also, most of that wilderness is already owned by occupiers who essentially stole it from the natives. And, unlike the tropics, you would need a hundred or so acres per person in these northern lattitudes. In the tropics the need is more like one acre or less per person. (With agriculture, one can get higher densities, but that is more labor intensive, and requires more equipment, and produces less health and poorer nutrition.) Even what you propose is not possible in the USA without lots of money and likely running afoul of many zoning and other laws (including barter taxes) -- so it is not true people are not forced to participate. Having said all that, I do practice some aspects of voluntary simplicity -- including having a well insulated house and driving less.
In any case, why when someone suggests our society could be different do you then demand that person live in isolation or move? Capitalism (as it is in practice in the USA as part of a militaristic empire, such as leading to the Iraq was) may have produced a lot of things you like, but if you really think of it I'm sure you'll find it had produced a lot of things you don't like, such as nuclear and biological weapons, taxes, prisons, schooling (instead of education), pollution, destruction of a sense of community, and so on.
The Native Peoples of the Americas had no need for prisons or schoolhouses or taxes, and many of them did quite well (although this is now supressed in the indoctrination given in most US schools). In fact, pretty much no Natives ever willingly joined the occupiers, but many occupiers went over to Native ways and joined Native tribes (and if the occupiers caught them, they usually killed them). So, which way is really better if that is the truth? See books like _Lies my Teacher Taught Me_ or _A People's History of the United States_ for more details.
As Iraq shows, capitalism is often not an opt-in system. If you don't want "capitalism" in the form it is in the USA, and dominated primarily by the same families and individuals, you are likely to be attacked overtly or covertly. (Cuba is a good example of continuous covert attacks.)
And there are other non-opt-in aspects. If advertising didn't work to make you think you need so many things because it also makes you mainly feel disatisfied with your life, then why would people pay so much to advertise? Granted, TV is opt-in partially in your own home, but you are still stuck in a society where almost all children are raised on a steady diet of consumerism and thousands of murders and other violent acts viewed per year -- so instead of being precious for their own sake under capitalism, children are just markets to be exploited. Is this the kind of thing about capitalism you wish to defend?
Slashdot Mirror
Because that older implementation's GUI is a lttle hard to follow as it consistes of multiple windows, and since it is also less true to the original idea in terms of arbitrary trail building (which could include cycles or other complex webs of segments), I put together this one window version of Memex in Jython (Pyhon on Java): http://pointrel.org/projects/memex/
That page includes a screenshot and a link to a source file (memex.py) licensed under the GPL. Note: unlike the previous version, this one does not use the Pointrel system and it does not currently save and load (which would require generating unique IDs for each item to allow them to be merged properly when trails are imported). But is should be enough to get a feel for what the original Memex could have done. I did take the liberty in it of having left and right links -- otherwise it is not clear to me how you could go forward and backward through a trail (other possibilities exist, they just seem confusing).
See also John Taylor Gatto's related writings on-line:t m ... The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior.""
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.
Here is a Python implementation of Memex I wrote, built on top of my Pointrel data repository system.
It was tested under Debian GNU/Linux and Python 2.3 with TK.
Download "Pointrel20030812.2 For Py" from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
The implementation is in the included sample file "tkPointrelMemex.py".
It isn't an exact match (it is a little more general in some ways, including multiple item viewer windows), but it covers the basic functionality of adding text items, making trails of them, and marking indexes on the trails.
To use the demo, after untarring and so on, type "python tkPointrelMemex.py" and when you get the GUI up, in the "Pointrel Memex Item Viewer" window, select the "Long Bow" trail in the panel beneath the "Update Annotation" button, and then you can use the navigation buttons (first, previous, index, next, last) to move through the trail.
You can also look at a view of trails in the "Pointrel Memex Trail Viewer" windows.
There is only one current trail at a time, shown in the Trail Viewer window. To add a new item, edit the text in the top panel in the Item Viewer window and click "Add from edit". The item is now added to the "ALL ITEMS" trail (which is everything in the system), and that "All ITEMS" trail will show up in the list of all trails the item is in near the bottom of the window. Assuming you are the "Long Bow" trail is the current trail indicated in the Trail Viewer window, you can then click on "Add to current trail" in the Item Viewer window and it will be added to the end of the "Long Bow" trail.
One difference in this program from the real Memex concept Bush describes is that trails are more first class objects in the implementation, whereas in what is described in Memex what he calls trails are more named links and a trail is essentially following identically named links. I think when I first implemented (back around 2001) an issue came up with the Memex description allowing trails to branch in a way that seemed counter to the rest of what he described for trails. Anyway, this implementation is a basis for improvements or changes, at least. It would not be that hard to remove some functionality (making it a single window with two viewers) and change the trail following slightly to be even closer to what he describes.
For fun, I also included some source code (including for the program itself) for it in the sample archive loaded by Memex on startup, so you can see Memex's (limited) potential to be an IDE with integrated versioning. It would take another button to actually launch the viewed Python code though.
In theory, it should also be multi-user on a system where the repository has appropriate shared permissions (supported by the underling Pointrel data repository system, and having to manually click on "Reload trails list"), but I have not tested that functionality much.
According to Julian Jaynes:m l
..."
http://www.cs.umu.se/kurser/TDBC12/HT99/jaynes.ht
"Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began. And each age has described consciousness in terms of its own theme and concerns. In the golden age of Greece, when men traveled about in freedom while slaves did the work, consciousness was as free as that. Heraclitus, in particular, called it an enormous space whose boundaries, even by traveling along every path, could never be found out. A millennium later, Augustine among the caverned hills of Carthage was astonished at the "mountains and hills of my high imaginations," "the plains and caves and caverns of my memory" with its recesses of "manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with unnumberable stores." Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives.
The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth's crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers which recorded the past of the individual, there being deeper and deeper layers until the record could no longer be read. This emphasis on the unconscious grew until by 1875 most psychologists were insisting that consciousness was but a small part of mental life, and that unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes.
In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness from James Mill to Wundt and his students, such as Titchener, was the compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings.
And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday life toward the end of the nineteenth century, so they too worked their way into the consciousness of consciousness, the subconscious becoming a boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behavior and the spindling camouflaged fulfillments of going-nowhere dreams.
There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that that is precisely what they are.
In Lofti Zadeh's Fuzzy Logic
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zadeh/
multiple variables (high & low; near & far; cold, warm & hot) describing some state can be true at the same time to various amounts. So, a fuzzy logic system for running a washing machine might make a decision based on the water both being cool and warm and hot but to varying degrees. There might be multiple rules like, if the water is warm, spin the drum, and if the water is cold, add some hot water, and what actually happens related to these potentials. Fuzzy Logic provides a way to take rules of thumb which refer to fuzzy distinctions and quantify them to some extent and use current state to make decisions. In the case of the article, dynamically the state of "candle" and "candy" are both some value for a while and the person responding curves the mouse accordingly (until they hear enough of the word and process it enough to commit more fully to one interpretation).
Forgot to include this link in the above on the alternative of opting out of schooling (K-12 or college) entirely:
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/wizard.html
From that link: "Furthermore, I often question whether the "doors of opportunity" which college supposedly unlocks, actually lead to places where people truly want to go. Maybe the "doors of opportunity" are just the passageway into an adulthood of Babbittry.
Could college attendance be a sign of cowardice? Could it be a way to duck from the scary thought of being who we really are inside? Could we do the college thing mainly because that's what's expected of us, or what everyone else is doing, not because it's what we truly should do?
At one time, I bought into the conventional wisdom that although college wasn't the only option, most young people should aim for it. Then I met my wife, Mandy. She grew up in Canada and England. Her father's military career gave her the advantage of living in a variety of places. She is well-read, writes better than most college graduates I know, and is well-informed on a variety of subjects. And, she has never completed a college course."
You said it. Check out an on-line book which I came across today:
.. The Way It Used To Be. Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. ... The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior." ... Something strange has been going on in government schools, especially where the matter of reading is concerned. Abundant data exist to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United St
_University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education_
by Robert D. Honigman
http://www.universitysecrets.com/table.htm
especially, for example:
http://www.universitysecrets.com/ch11.htm
Excerpt: "Pyramid scheme-- There is a curious parallel to the policies of academe and the recruitment of junior associates in the private sectors of law and accounting. In major accounting firms, newly hired junior associates are worked very hard for a number of years, but only about one in ten makes partner. At major law firms a similar pyramid scheme is employed. James Stewart explains in his book The Partners: Inside America's Most Powerful Law Firms (1983):
The key to profitability in such firms is the partner/associate ratio and "pyramid" staffing of client matters. There must be more associates than partners -- the bigger the disparity the better -- since the firms make money from associates by billing their clients for their work at rates which more than compensate for the associate salaries and overhead (376).
This is the same pyramid staffing common in universities. Graduate student assistants, part-time faculty, and junior faculty cost far less than tenured faculty, but bring in the same tuition fees and state allocations (based on student head-count). Untenured junior faculty "do exactly what the senior faculty does, only for half the pay, less status, fewer amenities, and an uncertain future" (Rosovsky). This generates a "profit" for the senior faculty and administration and enables them to support the superstructure of graduate education and research (Mayhew 1972, 2).
This pyramid staffing pattern recalls an old joke: how do you transport a ton of canaries in a half ton truck? Answer: you beat on the side of the truck and keep half the canaries in flight. The university's problem is: How do you get years of teaching work out of people without paying them very much? Answer: you promise them a future and then beat on the side of the truck with tenure."
====
I've also been reading the online book: _The Underground History of American Education_ relating to K-12 by a New York State "Teacher of the Year".
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
It begins: "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.
Gatto argues schools are functioning perfectly to accomplish what they were designed for about 150 years ago by industrialists -- dumbing down the masses so they become compliant factory workers and consumers, with any initiative to press for change alone or through unions long since beaten (psychically) out of them.
So is it any surprise real wages per worker (adjusted for inflation) have dropped since the 1950s, but news articles frequently misleadingly trumpet that family incomes have risen -- yet ignore the fact that is only because now both parents work and the kids are left unsupervised to be brainwashed by school and television and dumbed-down peers?
Gatto argues schools need to be completely dismantled, a big project as at the same time other aspects of our society need to be rethought as well. Because, as W and continued oil dependency and unsafe SUVs show, the current system has failed the US and the world. Neither more money, better teachers, or better blackboards will make much of a difference without changing the rest -- the compulsory aspect being the worst part.
If you lived in some third world nations, one dollar a day might be a good salary (sadly).
And John Taylor Gatto would agree with that if you change the word "education" to "schooling" (which is what you really seem to be referring to, as the two are not the same). See: Underground History of American Education
Further, Gatto argues schools are functioning perfectly to accomplish what they were designed for about 150 years ago by industrialists -- dumbing down the masses so they become compliant factory workers and consumers, with any initiative to press for change alone or through unions long since beaten (psychically) out of them.
So is it any surprise real wages per worker (adjusted for inflation) have dropped since the 1950s, but news articles frequently misleadingly trumpet that family incomes have risen -- yet ignore the fact that is only because now both parents work and the kids are left unsupervised to be brainwashed by school and television and dumbed-down peers?
Gatto argues schools need to be completely dismantled, a big project as at the same time other aspects of our society need to be rethought as well. Because, as W's reelection despite Iraq, our collective continued oil dependency, and the popularity of unsafe SUVs all show -- as just a few related examples -- the current system has failed the US and the world.
Someone like John Taylor Gatto would agree that a conformist
and obedient sort of person is exactly what mainstream schools were
designed to turn out. From:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/8e.htm
"The first exhibit for your perusal is the U.S. Bureau of Education's
Circular of Information for April 1872, which centers around what it
calls the "problem of educational schooling." With whose interests in
mind did the bureau view education as a problem? The amazing answer is:
from a big business perspective. By 1872, this still feeble arm of the
federal government is seen filled with concern for large industrial
employers at a time when those were still a modest fraction of the total
economy. According to this Circular of Information, "inculcating
knowledge" teaches workers to be able to "perceive and calculate their
grievances," thus making them "more redoubtable foes" in labor
struggles. Indeed, this was one important reason for Thomas Jefferson's
own tentative support of a system of universal schooling, but something
had been lost between Monticello and the Capital. "Such an enabling is
bound to retard the growth of industry," continues the Circular. There
is nothing ambiguous about that statement at all, and the writer is
correct, of course. Sixteen years later (1888), we can trace the growth
in this attitude from the much more candid language in the Report of the
Senate Committee on Education. Its gigantic bulk might be summarized in
this single sentence taken from page 1,382: "We believe that education
is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting
itself among the laboring classes." Once we acknowledge that planned
economies of nation or corporation are systems with their own operating
integrity, quite sensibly antagonistic to the risks educated minds pose,
much of formal schooling's role in the transformation that came is
predictable. If education is indeed "one of the principal causes of
discontent," it performs that subversive function innocently by
developing intellect and character in such a way as to resist absorption
into impersonal systems: Here is the crux of the difference between
education and schooling-- the former turns on independence, knowledge,
ability, comprehension, and integrity; the latter upon obedience."
I can't wait for the society that exists to pursue its own interests with the zeal that comes from self-determination.
t lepage.shtml
For a taste of that future, check out the writings of James P. Hogan, especially his novel _Voyage from Yesteryear_, http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/voyage/baen99/ti
as well as his latests works like _Cradle of Saturn_ and _The Anguished Dawn_.
I imagine this future-vision might be true, if so, for all intents and purposes, there will be no reason, unless one chooses, to work/create again. I think scenarios like this really urge us to deeply look inside ourselves (as creative, artistic beings) and ask: Why do I create? Why do I invent?
Maybe for the answer to this question about the future, we need to look into our hunter/gatherer past.
The Original Affluent Society -by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognize that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
What did hunter/gatherers spend their time on? Well, there was "work" in the sense of knowing what they wanted to gain from the machinery of nature around them, and then actually getting it. So, the equivalent of going shopping at the grocery store and then going to the fridge for a beer. Even with matter replicators, there will be the issue of what to replicate and what to do with it -- and matters of taste and aesthetics may play a big role. There was the work of child rearing -- something that takes a lot of time and attention. There was the work of singing and dancing and sharing joy and culture and storytelling -- something that will still be needed. There was art and expression. And there was impressing the opposite sex and various status contests. So, there is still a lot of things to occupy time. So I am not worried about that aspect of finding things to do -- because humanity was originally adapted to those conditions of abundance anyway.
A few related issues: agriculture likely arose with increasing population pressures and the invention of the militaristic bureaucracy based in cities -- and anthropologists now recognize that healthwise this was a step backwards for most people as skeletal remains show a decrease in stature with the transition to agriculture resulting from a less varied dies and related famines from depending on one or two major crops which could fail. So, advanced technology can in theory let us go full circle back to the old ways. And a related point -- the "garden of eden" story is present across many cultures -- perhaps reflecting this universal history of being forced to abandon more desirable hunter/gatherer ways for the toil of agricultural either because of increased population or at the spear point of the imperial tax man. Head taxes forced much of Africa into starvation in the last few hundred years, as European powers imposed taxes on the native populations (or else they faced imprisonment or death) and these taxes could only paid by working on European-owned plantations for low wages instead of keeping to their usual subsistence lifestyle. Thus was Africa turned from a continent of hunter/gatherer affluence to one of Agricultural/Industrial poverty through (among other things) taxation without representation. http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch02.htm
So, I have no real worries people will have unresolveable problems with affluence -- it is the crushed life of industry and agriculture that seems to be causing more of the problems, with parents not having enough time for their children, and citizens not having enough time to engage in civic duties and neighborhood activities, and people turning to drugs or television to escape for a while the horror and meaninglessness and pain and humiliation of it all.
So regardless of future reasons, I'd say one reason to invent right now is to try to bring back the better part of those times (and there were bad parts of those times too of course, superstition, infanticide, parasites, so let's hope for doing better the second time around).
And Lessig misses this point, as he is trying for compromise.
l ?pg=4
u rfing/column.aspx?articleID=2003-09-22-1
t hreadid=79208
Some related issues:
If copyrights impose a burden on society (like real estate), why not tax them annually at some self-assessed buyout value (the cost the copyright holder would be content with to have the work in the public domain)?
Oh, but copyright holders might protest they can not fairly evaluate the copyright as some copyrights make a lot of money, and most do not. But there we have it -- the notion of copyright as a lottery ticket which the essay touches on. Do we want creative works funded as lotteries?
Also, with the increasing use of automation and robotics, people are less and less needed to produce things, so ultimately most people will become out of work in our society -- unless they get a guaranteed income in terms of a part of the production of the automated systems. If people had such a guaranteed income, then they would not need an incentive to create digital works, and they would not need to receive royalties from copyrights just to get the basics of food, water, shelter, education, manufactured goods, and medical care for themselves and their children.
So the future you are talking about is bound up into issues like a guaranteed income or fair share of rapidly increasing industrial productivity. So essentially a "Star Trek" like society, with matter replicators -- which are at most ten or twenty years away, as people are using limited prototypes of them now. Remember, thirty years ago, for most people there was no such thing as desktop publishing or local printing. Now you typically get a printer bundled for "free" with a computer. Thirty years from now, it may seem as ludicrous to get something other than raw materials delivered or to go out to shop for an object as it would seem now to have one-off printing done at some remote computer center (as was typical thirty years ago).
Related links:
The Abolition of Work
http://www.deoxy.org/endwork.htm
Robot Nation
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
The Dream Factory: Any product, any shape, any size - manufactured on your desktop!
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/view.htm
Getting Paid in Our Jobless Future: Only a guaranteed basic income can ensure economic growth, technological innovation and social welfare
http://betterhumans.com/Features/Columns/Change_S
US BIG: The basic income guarantee (BIG) is a government insured guarantee that no citizen's income will fall below some minimal level for any reason. All citizens would receive a BIG without means test or work requirement. BIG is an efficient and effective solution to poverty that preserves individual autonomy and work incentives while simplifying government social policy. Some researchers estimate that a small BIG, sufficient to cut the poverty rate in half could be financed without an increase in taxes by redirecting funds from spending programs and tax deductions aimed at maintaining incomes.
http://www.usbig.net/
More discussion of "BIG" - Basic Income Guarantee (source of some links)
http://novogate.com/exco/thread.php?forumid=5374&
On the particular part you quoted, check out the writings by John Taylor Gatto (a New York State Teacher of the Year) on all the things schools and prisons share in common, and how much damage conventional age segregated schooling with a fixed curriculum and standardized testing does to developing minds. You can find a book he wrote online here: The Underground History of American Education.
By the way, I agree with you some on the sweeping generalization on feminism (which in some variants is more liberational) but I think his point still stands -- that reconstructing the nature of work is to my (perhaps incomplete) understanding not typically an aspect of mainstream feminism -- especially when that was written (1985?) -- just deciding who does the work or who supervises it or who benefits from it monetarily or otherwise. But as a piece of rhetoric, I still think that paragraph is compelling in showing how people refuse to think systematically about what work needs to be done in society and how best to do it from various points of view.
E.F. Schumacher made similar points in his essay on Buddhist Economics if you want to read an author who is more well known.
From his essay:
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
Much agreement, and take a look at this for some more issues: Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
Actually, the experts I have heard on this suggest that any event (like the OBL videotape release) that gets the US electorate to focus on terrorism or fear works to Bush's benefit, so actually one could argue OBL's recent video tape is actually in that sense intended to boost Bush's reelection prospects. And it makes sense when you think about -- no one will ruin the US faster or alienate more people outside the US than someone continuing the misguided policies of the past few years -- so Bush is very much the terrorists' choice. In a weird way Bush and the terrorists are co-dependant. And after all, Kerry might even catch OBL (unlike Bush's misdirection into Iraq and failures in Afghanistan), so why should they risk change?
People keep trotting this issue out (cheaper long distance rates since the breakup), but I have to wonder. The breakup of AT&T was about twenty years ago. Who is to say that prices would not have dropped and regulations changed if the monopoly had been kept? Aren't most of the decreases in rates due to better / faster / cheaper technology based on better computer chips (including now, voice over IP?) Perhaps we are paying more for phone service and having less broadband and less unified (3G) cell phone service in the USA because there is not one highly regulated monopoly like in most other developed countries? Clearly most everyone agrees the USA is way behind of the rest of the advanced industrialized world in Broadband and Cell Phone access. And, after all, we have also lost the crown jewel of basic research (AT&T Bell Labs) which devolved into Lucent and Bellcore and now who knows what, resulting in a big loss for humanity. As someone once told me, AT&T Bell labs was a remarkable basic research institute (think the transistor and the solar cell) funded by people dropping dimes into boxes all across the US.
AoT, you might also want to check out: Conceptual Guerilla
On Rankism
Voyage from Yesteryear
Or my essay: how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society
When you acknowledge something is a flaw (e.g. barter tax) you say it's a flaw of something else that capitalism. But perhaps, like H1B visas, or L1 visas, or Spectrum auctioning, or the 1099 independent contractor rules pushed for by a small set of companies that make it hard for contractors to not go through brokers or be paid W2, perhaps all these laws are the result of greed spawned by capitalism to keep alternatives at bay (including by high barriers to entry)? Langdon Winner, in his book _Autonomous Technology_ talks about "reverse adaptation" when an organization reverse adapts its environment to suit its needs for survival and growth (independent of its original purpose), which is exactly what is happening with corporations out of control in the USA and beyond.
The bottom line is that capitalism is becoming just a code word in some ways for "social darwinism" and "corporate feudalism", see for example: Mythology of wealth and without regulation, taxation, and charity, the results are horrendous. When capitalism was invented in some sense by the Dutch centuries ago it was (slave trade apart) tempered by strong moral values and charity in its application at home, and so the country of Holland overall prospered; with the loss of all these aspects over the centuries that surround greed and make it useful for society as an ambition to excel and prosper within a broader social context, the result is just what you would expect from rampant unchecked greed, and that is ultimately war and corruption and disaster.
Some specific points in passing (and running out of time for this interesting discussion, sadly), when I said "reasonable" I meant reasonable in the context of hunter/gatherer society accepting its strengths and weaknesses (not to keep the TVs running). And why should we be talking about "eeking out" a life? The issue is how we all can live better (even those getting ulcers from being in charge or being financially obese like Bill Gates).
A deeper point is that one can't leave the political system or the biosphere (yet). Nukes are targeted almost everywhere (or their fallout is) and if capitalism or some other-ism pulls everything down with radiation or plagues or an intrusive police state, then everyone is hit. So, the only realistic choice is to engage in social reform, not run away and wait for the poison dust clouds or whatever else it could be to show up.
Actually, much (not all) of the USSR's arms race side was driven by continued US escalation and rhetoric (even look at the newspapers around the time of the Sputnik launches where the Russians say they would share the space technology with all humankind). Even now, any country looking at the example of the US invading Iraq is going to conclude that, unlike in North Korea, this is what happens to a country when they do not have WMD, one of the reasons the Iraq war has destabilized the entire political landscape for WMD.
You write: "I like the goods of capitalism like fresh produce, health care, and interesting web sites." Much produce is shipped from far away and is produced in an unsustainable way drawing down water aquifers and poisoning illeg
FYI, Java's Swing is derived from VisualWorks Smalltalk (and designed by people hired away from the related company at the time). Sun actually tried to license VisualWorks for their settop box project (which Oak, Java's precursor was developed for); ParcPlace would not provide what Sun thought a reasonable licensing fee structure, so they continued with Oak and which was ultimately renamed Java. And if you look at the history of Java, senior developers knew it was missing essentials like closures but pushed it out the door anyway. So there you have it -- we got stuck with Java and all its failed promises because of capitalist infighting among corporations with little care for what was the best technical solution even when everyone recognized what it was. Another reason Java fails is Sun's refusal to freely share one unified codebase, unlike, say Squeak Smalltalk or Python or various free Common Lisps, which lead to write once, debug everywhere for Java, which is what relegated it mainly to server use (although many years later it is now passably stable for some applications).
While derived from SGML, XML is still essentially just a dumbed down version of Lisp S-expressions (admittedly with some namespace and other additions easily handled by various Lisp additions). XML fails at its primary mission (easy data exchange) for two reasons -- one is that any sufficiently large document realistically can't be encoded by hand as oposed to using a structured editor of some sort (so human readable doesn't matter much, and s-expressions would have been good enough), and secondly because the big issue is agreement on the detailed shared meaning of terms and XML by itself has nothing to say about that (as opposed to, say, all the Lisp based AI work which has thought a lot about representation and meaning). Now, the XML community as a broader culture has begun making some headway at shared meaning over the years given all the investment in it, but these points still stand as far as it being originally a poor choice of standard for textual data exchange and a unneeded and hyped approach which by itself ignores the real issues (agreed on meanings for terms) even if those issues can be addressed by other means (which could have applied equally to S-expressions). The biggest advantage to S-expressions prior to years of XML development would have been the triviality to read them with existing free packages (various embeddable Lisp-like systems) and the further long standing already developed ways to then mix data and code for dynamic systems generating dynamic web pages or reports. XML also has some ambiguities in practice as regards authors' handling of whitespace which can drive people up the wall when writing related parsers or formatters (I know this from first hand experience; I helped develop an XSL-FO system to help define that standard (for transforming and displaying XML documents), and I have the hair loss to prove it. :-) See for example: XFC
In any case, unlike Java, XML has become quite a useful standard as it has become broadly adopted (like HTML), so I don't mean to scare anyone away from it at this point, many years of hype and investment down the road. But my original point on it being unneeded given Lisp S-expressions still stands.
Actually, for reference Python is my preferred practical language these days, much as I like Python and Lisp, however in the case of Smalltalk that is also mainly for corporate licensing reasons (the greatest Smalltalk IMHO , VisualWorks, is not free). Personally, I think there are some issues I have with Common Lisp in practice (I generally don't like languages with Macros for various reasons), but I don't want to go into them here.
Slashdot is a technical forum; I would expect most people he
Your Slashdot handle of "MoralHazard" suggests this way to look at it: limited liability for investors, no flow through bankruptcy for investors, and no criminal liability for investors, all create a "moral hazard" allowing investors to do less than proper dilligence and provide less than complete oversight for their investments. If equity investors' personal butts were on the line for each investment, one could hope investors would ensure corporate behavior met higher moral standards, or would otherwise find alternate investments they could be more sure of.
Current legalities aside, your point doesn't quite hold together morally IMHO. If someone gives money to an organization that repeatedly does immoral or illegal things, they almost surely should know how it is going to be used. Same of someone who buys stock in any corporation. If they invest money in a profit making organization in an equity position (part-owner) not knowing these things, then they are at least guilty of gross negligence. I think loans without equity or return in any way tied to corporate profits might have a slightly different moral flavor perhaps.
Any equity investor in any venture should (in theory, IMHO) have a moral obligation to oversee that venture. "I didn't know" IMHO really should not be an excuse in a world trying to hold people accountable for their deeds. If that would make certain ventures of various sizes impractical, so be it. If that makes corporate secrecy impossible, so be it. If that means many people should not prudently be stockholding corporate investors and should instead invest in other ways they can more easily monitor closer to home, so be it. Now it may be, as you suggest, that law outside of corporate law may excuse investors of criminal conduct, but nonetheless one could argue those laws are bad laws, and that people supporting profitmaking organizations that do criminal acts are guilty of at the very least gross negligence and should be held criminally liable, just like someone who puts in a pool without a fence is often held liable for gross negligence in creating an attractive nusiance if a toddler drowns there. And if that leads to a set of economic problems and then solutions (like an end to secrecy with transparent corporations and an end to passivity with active investors providing oversight lest they end up in jail) then so be it.
Just google on "corporate charter revocation" to see how active some of these ideas are becoming. See for example the links from: FreedomOrCapitalism Or see: Corporate Feudalims. It's not "guilt by association"; it is guilt by providing "aid and comfort" to people with immoral policies (even if they may or may not be illegal). From that last link: "Corporate feudalism is decidedly "unAmerican", and is a gross departure from American values. It represents the seizure of American government to serve a new purpose -- the promotion of corporate wealth and power. Opposing this corrosive new form of "privitized tyranny" is not "unAmerican". Neither is publicizing the abuses of the corporate lords around the world in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Iran or Vietnam. America didn't do those things. You didn't do those things. An American government subverted by corporate oligarchs did those things, and lied to you about their true purpose. The "traitors" are the corporate "feudal lords" who stole our government and committed oppression and exploitation in our name. The 'traitors" are the one's who now seek to use debt and "free trade" to do to the US, what they have already done to Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The traitors are the one's -- in the name of "liberty" no less -- who seek a government they say can do nothing for the people who live under it, but can only serve the interests of corporate fiefdoms. Patriots expose these corporate potentates. Patriots seek to restore democracy, subverted by
You wrote: "I think anyone who assumes that we can get rid of all of those roles in a society, and still have a functioning society, can be properly classified as an anarchist."
Why? That 5% could be organized in any way from forced labor to volunteers to ration-unit-based (money-based) capitalism.
The article I linked to by Black (as well as the Buddhist Economics one by Schumacher) makes clear that even without automation much that 5% could be made much more enriching experiences by rethinking how it is done. Is it done alone or in a pair or in a team? Is it done with a supervisor with a whip (real or metaphorical) or is it done on a volunteer basis? Is it done in a spirit of joy and community or is it done in a spirit of forced labor or grudging acceptance? And then, of what remains, then, yes, whatever no people really want to do under any circumstances can be automated or re-engineered out of the system.
And to have a small bit of automation supported by perhaps 0.01% of the population part-time is not the same as reinventing the entire economy.
It is true Marx did talk about post-industrial society and capitalism's self-destructive tendencies, but I still don't think Black's concept could be called Marxism (as people commonly think of it) without classes. It's a total rethinking of the nature of labor and what sort of society we want to live in.
It is true people may have a freedom of choice and movement they do not have now, but in the end the results will probably be the same as in the free software and open source movements -- some projects acquire a certain critical mass and take off. So, some people would, for example, get really excited about producing IC chips and they would do that, and if someone else started a competing project, and people thought it was a whole lot better, many people might move on to it (after some reflection). For sci-fi stories of how this might work out in practice, see James P. Hogan's sci-fi novels like _Voyage From Yesteryear_ or _The Anguished Dawn_.
First off, it takes a village to live reasonably well in the wilderness. And these have to be people with appropriate skills and tools. So, your suggestion is a non-starter because those communties (apart from some Native Peoples of the Americas) are pretty much nonexistant. Also, land does not cost near nothing -- I actually live in a wilderness area (largest in the Eastern US) and land is still $2000 an acre or more in small quantities. Also, most of that wilderness is already owned by occupiers who essentially stole it from the natives. And, unlike the tropics, you would need a hundred or so acres per person in these northern lattitudes. In the tropics the need is more like one acre or less per person. (With agriculture, one can get higher densities, but that is more labor intensive, and requires more equipment, and produces less health and poorer nutrition.) Even what you propose is not possible in the USA without lots of money and likely running afoul of many zoning and other laws (including barter taxes) -- so it is not true people are not forced to participate. Having said all that, I do practice some aspects of voluntary simplicity -- including having a well insulated house and driving less.
In any case, why when someone suggests our society could be different do you then demand that person live in isolation or move? Capitalism (as it is in practice in the USA as part of a militaristic empire, such as leading to the Iraq was) may have produced a lot of things you like, but if you really think of it I'm sure you'll find it had produced a lot of things you don't like, such as nuclear and biological weapons, taxes, prisons, schooling (instead of education), pollution, destruction of a sense of community, and so on.
The Native Peoples of the Americas had no need for prisons or schoolhouses or taxes, and many of them did quite well (although this is now supressed in the indoctrination given in most US schools). In fact, pretty much no Natives ever willingly joined the occupiers, but many occupiers went over to Native ways and joined Native tribes (and if the occupiers caught them, they usually killed them). So, which way is really better if that is the truth? See books like _Lies my Teacher Taught Me_ or _A People's History of the United States_ for more details.
As Iraq shows, capitalism is often not an opt-in system. If you don't want "capitalism" in the form it is in the USA, and dominated primarily by the same families and individuals, you are likely to be attacked overtly or covertly. (Cuba is a good example of continuous covert attacks.)
And there are other non-opt-in aspects. If advertising didn't work to make you think you need so many things because it also makes you mainly feel disatisfied with your life, then why would people pay so much to advertise? Granted, TV is opt-in partially in your own home, but you are still stuck in a society where almost all children are raised on a steady diet of consumerism and thousands of murders and other violent acts viewed per year -- so instead of being precious for their own sake under capitalism, children are just markets to be exploited. Is this the kind of thing about capitalism you wish to defend?