I am pretty certain, if our society manages to survive the current times, our attitude to centralization and globalization will change.
On the surface, it increases efficiency through central management and automation, lowering the prices and making products more affordable.
One layer deeper, it commoditizes people's time, making them more replaceable and lowering what one's salary can buy even longer.
If you look even deeper, you see that when people are not spending their passion trading, making deals, and creating things others would want to buy, they instead turn on each other. If your work doesn't keep your mind busy, it finds a different outlet, that seems to be driven by some primal tribal instincts. Team up with the ones of your kind and go against the neighboring tribe.
Call me paranoid, but we might see another Fall of Rome in our lifetimes.
> we might see another Fall of Rome in our lifetimes.
The Western Roman empire took around 80 years to fall. From 395 to 476.
The Eastern Roman empire lasted for several hundred years more.
It's sometimes thought of as a quick obvious event, but it wasn't, it lasted a lifetime. We may already be in the period of time that future historians will refer to as 'the fall'. It may not be obvious from within what stage we are at, or when thee start was.
Western Rome had pretty bad 3rd century as well. Luckily there were no serious contenders around. [1]
As for Eastern Roman Empire it lasted for several centuries but after VII/VIII century and loss of Africa, Egypt, Syria (main sources of manpower and grain) it became only local power at best.
The word "capitalism," in our lifetime has two fairly distinct meanings.
One meaning is marxist. Marx popularised the term and he implicitly defined it as an economic-political system and "that which we are fighting against." Most of his writing and communist contemporaries was about corruption and cruelty of this newly described system. In marxist capitalism, when a monopolist bribes a government official this is capitalism par excellence. The premise of the term is that "capital rules," so regulatory capture is assumed
The other meaning is pro-capitalist. These mostly riff on Adam Smith. David Ricardo responded directly to marx and provides some technical ammo. By Ayn Rand, "capitalism" it has a full blown utopian definition like communism. Regulatory capture is seen as a corruption of "true" capitalism.
Anyway... the two frames are highly related to eachother.
Das Kapital was published in full form only in 1883, long after Ricardo's Principles which was published in 1817. Das Kapital spends its entire contents defining and analyzing capitalism and starts from Ricardian economics. Principles is actually a good prerequisite to reading Das Kapital for someone unfamiliar with classical economics.
I generally see people who describes themselves as capitalists in the “good” sense, act in accordance or in support of capitalism in the bad sense. They claim to like “the invisible hand” of the market etc, but don’t complain about monopolistic behavior or ever agree that healthy capitalism and efficient markets require regulation (as Smith, for example, was clear about.)
Hypocrisy is ever present. One thing in common to all ruling communist parties was establishing party members as a full-frills ruling class with their own schools, institutions, culture, etc.
For my own "philosophy," I make a distinction between ideology and idealism. "Ideology" (in my personal lexicon) is to ideology as Orwell's "nationalism" was to nationalism.
An ideal (a capitalist one) is Adam Smith's pin factory or village economy. Maybe Ayn Rand's dissenting heros like Howard Roark or Hank Rearden.
An ideological take is to justify a fb or a google by insisting these are like a Smithian pin factory. Explaining good stuff in those term. Explaining bad stuff in terms of government (looters) involvement. Facebook's profits and market cap are reflective of the immense value that they provide society.
An idealistic take is criticising fb because the aren't like a Smithian pin factory at all. In fact, they prevent such pin factories from existing.
It's notable that an idealistic posture is easier and more common from a dissenting position. A ideological posture tends to be easier and more common in a defensive, incumbent position. That's probably why Ayn Rand reads as idealistic (despite being formulaically ideological) while modern
pro-capitalists tend to come off as more ideological. Rosa Luxemburg the idealist vs Leon Trotsky, the ideologue.
IMO, you can't deal in absolutes. FB is easy to pick on because they are so unimpressive technically or operationally. FB could literally be done on 1% of its budget. Google is a mixed bag, because they do have technical achievements. But, what makes google their money is search and adware.
Tesla/Musk are an even more complex example. Musk is as close to a Randian hero as reality can offer. Obvious technical and operational achievements. Real, genuine risk taking. So far so good. The ideal does not appear to be trampled.
But... what happens if recent investors are right? What if Tesla's data is giving them an unassailable edge in self driving cars for a generation. Does that give us a capitalist ideal of innovation, competition and efficiency or a capitalist antipattern of control, monopoly and lock-in?
Reality is complex ideals are simple. Ideology is an attempt to square the circle by insisting on its squareness.
One difference between centralisation due to monopolies and centralization due to other things (government planning, industry-scale unions, etc.) is that monopolies are highly profitable regardless of efficiency.
Going broke is what usually kills things.
The macrofinancial situation, currently, is telling. We are obviously in the midst of a recession. Huge industries are in meltdown: hospitality, air travel, physical retail, etc. They are literally producing far fewer goods and services... stuff that people normally consume.
OTOH indexes are up. Why, because the profits of H&M or RyanAir are miniscule compared to fb or amzn regardless.
Consider what "increases efficiency .., lowering the prices and making products more affordable" means for fb or google. There are no prices, except ad prices. We can't even think about consumer benefits (more, better goods) in a meaningful way. What does more facebook even mean? Is it beneficial to anyone?
This matters because "more resources to fb, less to Ryanair" is the market working normally. Since fb doesn't consumer capital, all that happens is a stock price change.
Indexes are up because the wealthy were bailed out with the “stimulus”, which was free money printed by the fed and given to people who don’t need it, lead them to just put it in the “market” since again there’s nothing to spend your money on currently other than stocks and real estate, this only leads to higher assets prices.
The fact that the us government took zero equity positions despite bailing out the wealthy will be discussed for decades.
This cycle has definitely a proven point now about how asset prices are a fungible for currency inflation. Every flavour is different though... with this kind of inflation, what what government y prints, government y receives. A central bank handles the deficit, but the asset inflation is global, not limited to a national currency. Probably destabilizing in a game theory sense.
That said, there's also the fact that for amzn, 2020 has really made prospects X% better. X% of amzn makes up for a lot of Y% worse in companies that do worse in a pandemic. There's a definite correlation between company size and prospects in this crisis year.
On government equity, I agree. Macroeconomics needs a do over. I think norway proves the principle of governments owning equity stakes pretty handily.
Incidentally, Norway would probably have been (could still be) an even bigger success case if they adjusted even more boldly. A lot gets lost on regular price inflation.
As they don't say in the asteroid Belt: Da Rom na decho dewe im wang diye. (Rome didn't fall in a day)
Edit: why even use earth days in the belt? maybe they'd count in shifts, maybe they'd use watches (of which there are many varieties, where the US submariners' reduce to shifts)?
Fall of Rome is more of a literary trope than an actual reference.
Arguably, Rome didn't even fall when Rome fell. A Roman emperor continued to rule over a roman empire from constantinople (which had already been the capital for a long time) for another millenium.
Western intellectuals just had an obsession with "the fall of rome" as a concept. Lots of historians studied tomes of the stuff. Everything can be projected onto it: social puritanism, christian puritanism, anti-christianity (they abandoned jupiter), anti-immigration sentiment, anti-german sentiment, etc.
Some say it fell in the 1400s when Constantinople fell, if you ask the Russian orthodox church, russia is the old rome or something. Then there's that whole catholic thing...in rome, sorta.
In fact, even Rome built its public buildings and spaces to make it seem like the "new Rome," except that Rome to them was Athens or Mycenae.
There's a very direct line of descent from the White House to bronze age greek public architecture. That template for a building has meant "power" forever, and that's the symbolism everyone always goes for.
I'd like to draw that line further back to ancient Egypt, a wellspring of inspiration for Greek and Roman civilizations.
In my mind, the line goes forward, reflects and refracts through Europe, the Catholic church, the Renaissance; the Freemasons, whose first lodges in America were in Philadelphia; the "Sons of Liberty" gathering at the Green Dragon tavern - among them Paul Revere; Ben Franklin, who commissioned the design of the Great Seal of the United States, with the pyramid symbolism; and reaches George Washington, the first U.S. President and Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge in Virginia. And who were masons but builders and architects?
The morsels trace an admittedly sinuous and questionable lineage, lost and found across time and place, revived through myth and homage, and, I believe, still feeding some mad dreams of an empire.
(Then again, assuming attacks these days are more likely economic than kinetic, it looks like it took two months, May-July 1997, to take down THB. The longest market manipulation of which I am aware lasted 5 years, but those were only a pair of billionaires, so presumably trillionaires' poker played between nation states might go longer until someone folds.)
>If your work doesn't keep your mind busy, it finds a different outlet, that seems to be driven by some primal tribal instincts. Team up with the ones of your kind and go against the neighboring tribe.
You followed this statement with "call me paranoid, but we might see my tribe (presumably) fall out of dominance in our lifetime." The end of US hegemony is not some terrifying future, it's the US living like the rest of the world.
> The end of US hegemony is not some terrifying future, it's the US living like the rest of the world
The issue most of the world (outside the US) worries about is not the end of their hegemony but the power vacuum that they leave behind.
Despite the near plutocratic state of the current US, they at least make an attempt at having core democratic values with checks and balances and a respect for rule of Law.
It is unclear if those who crave to take that soft-power away from the US will share the same ideals.
>Despite the near plutocratic state of the current US, they at least make an attempt at having core democratic values with checks and balances and a respect for rule of Law.
Why the hell would the rest of the world care about these things that only matter inside the United States? The US has never made it their goal to spread these "core democratic values," has no real checks or balances internationally, and shows a complete disregard for international law.
Except for the half a century after WWII where the US shaped international law and democratic values, and heavily shaded modern international trade and its norms and values.
Except they never consider themselves subject to that law, just use it to punish those they don't like.
> democratic values
When have they ever spread this? The amount of democratic governments we've overthrown vastly outnumbers the successful ones we've created. And that's ignoring things like Operation Gladio.
>heavily shaded modern international trade
Which has enriched them far more than anyone else.
I'm a first generation immigrant who moved to North America because I didn't like living "like the rest of the world".
Mind you, most of the world lives in poverty fueled by endless tribal fights. Shia-vs-Sunni Muslims, Mexican drug cartels, endless tribal wars in Africa. Sponsored by the local "top ladder" successfully running the "divide and conquer" strategy. I don't see anything good in bringing that standard of living to the 1st World countries.
And, mind you, China is completely unaffected by the processes tearing the U.S. apart. They are more than ready to take the place, and also they don't give a slightest damn about human rights, freedom of association and many other Western virtues. Read about Uighur camps if you have any doubts. Be careful for what you wish for.
Every example of the "divide and conquer" strategy you mention has the US at least assisting the "top ladder." Mexican drug cartels only exist because of America's "War on Drugs," and beyond that you run into people like Pablo Escobar deliberations propped up by the US to further their interests.
>And, mind you, China is completely unaffected by the processes tearing the U.S. apart
Isn't this the exact same " divide and conquer " strategy you just mentions? If we don't continue supporting our tribe, ignoring it's many faults, that other tribe will make things much worse.
Europe has been living like this for centuries during Medieval times. Inquisition, witch hunts, heretic burning, wars, plague... African tribes have been at war with each other for as long as we know them. It's a human fallacy and not some evil plan hatched by U.S. billionaires.
Besides, the billionaires will be fine, it's the middle class that will find themselves living in ghettos.
Fall of Rome, a long running process that for the outskirts of the empire meant people lived and were fed better based on the increased bone density of their remains.
So we have a metric of resources you need to keep people under control vs resources you would need to release to people if you did not control them.
This number is currently very low through automation, fake news optimisation etc.
So elites get all the resources secondly they give out to affiliates (Roman's debts forgiven, discount wheat for Romans, land to 75k Romans) then it becomes unsustainable because it has giveaways have no solid economic foundation, then affiliates become strong, then make everyone Roman so as to dilute power and then the former affiliated secondary elites stop helping and/or revolt and through their organizational capability also everybody else joins them, sometimes through unrelated incidents.
But Rome has already fallen years ago, and after the actual rubber stamp, most people except those at the center of empire are better off. What is missed, is products of economies of scale, but people have already learnt to hate them along the insurmountable accompanying taxes.
>So elites get all the resources secondly they give out to affiliates (Roman's debts forgiven, discount wheat for Romans, land to 75k Romans) then it becomes unsustainable because it has giveaways have no solid economic foundation, then affiliates become strong, then make everyone Roman so as to dilute power and then the former affiliated secondary elites
All of these events happened around the end of the Roman Republic. Blaming them for the "Fall of Rome" that happened around five hundred years later is just ridiculous. A rough equivalent would be blaming Columbus for America's current problems.
While this is broadly true, it's like saying Alexander Graham Bell is responsible for me dropping my cell phone. Yes, if Columbus had acted differently we might not have these problems, but there are countless other situations since then where a different choice may have alleviated though problems.
The point being that it was a long process that took centuries during the last few of them was irreversible. That long process and its subsequent conclusion was perceived as positive event for most of its subjects, and in some important aspect it really was.
Rome didn't just collapse, it was sacked. The US is incapable of suffering a fall of Rome. America's geography makes that impossible. At the very worse you would see a return to a more insular America like it was before WW1. But even without American hegemony, the nation would still be a major power being the world's largest oil producer, the world's largest agricultural producer, and the world's largest consumer economy.
The problem with any loss of American power is that potential great powers that could replace it, such as China, are deathly reliant on American lead order. China is neither energy nor food secure. How will they manage when their shipping isn't defended by the USN? How will they manage when climate change strains available resources? Especially when they are so geographically isolated from potential sources of those resources, and rivals are closer to those resources.
>The US is incapable of suffering a fall of Rome. America's geography makes that impossible.
That’s true if you look at America’s rivals on the world stage, i.e. Russia or China. But Rome wasn’t sacked by the Persians, or the Egyptians, or another Great Power of the time. It was sacked by tribal Gauls and migrating tribes of Visigoths.
By that time, the gauls and the visigoths had gotten to be a greater military force than the romans. A few hundred years of battle against the romans had allowed the germanic barbarians to organize and weaponize to parity and beyond. Not too long after, the huns arrived and proved to be even more powerful and that pretty much ended the roman empire. For the last decades, the romans were pretty much paying the germanic tribes and the huns to stay away from rome.
Certainly the germanic tribes as a whole can be considered a local "great power" and the huns certainly qualify as a great power.
Why would you be paranoid? If the US is Rome then the “Fall” has been happening for multiple decades now. No Rome stays “Rome” forever so I don’t know why people work themselves into a tizzy over the fact that it’s happening.
Past history shows that when an empire falls, there is more violence, followed by the rise of a new empire itself, as you say, based on the triumphs of its violence.
Anyone who calls calls for the fall of empire, without explaining how we avoid the normal consequnces, is calling for more violence.
Let’s take a different view, America has periods of chaos before and it seems common, maybe this is just another period of change where we get to grips with technological change and nationalism and racism and come out the other side a more integrated, just and thoughtful society. One hopefully with better restraints for demagoguery.
I always find it interesting when people think we're living in unique times. I don't know if it's just the human tendency to view the past with rose colored glasses or an opinion of younger folks who weren't around when things got crazy in the past.
The US has been through periods like (and much worse) in the last 60 years:
- 60's race riots across most major cities that resulted in the deaths of hundreds & Vietnam War where every opinion article lamented about "America's global leadership is over"
- Watergate where a sitting president was forced from office due to truly breathtaking corruption and law breaking
- The 80's when Japan was on the rise and people talked about the US falling behind and no longer being a major economic player (I remember people smashing Japan electronics on the Whitehouse lawn)
- Gulf War, LA Riots, Clinton scandals, pre-9/11 terror attacks in the 90's
- In the 2000's, 9/11, the financial crisis (aka "The End of Capitalism")
Welcome to the consequences of a world where history education has been underemphasized in favor of technology and ‘practicality.’ The world is always ending, the future is always impossible to predict, and everything is original, cutting-edge and new. Except...it isn’t. It’s all happened before, but we didn’t bother reading those books.
"It’s all happened before" doesn't imply "will be fine". For instance, the Civil War happened but I wouldn't call that being fine. And survivorship bias being what it is, just because the country survived certain major crises in the past doesn't mean it will survive them in the future.
The comparisons to the Civil War make no sense and just illustrate my point that historical education is deeply lacking. As someone else already pointed out, the issues today are still nothing compared to the 60s.
Current domestic issues have nothing to do with the Civil War. There is no state-like military complex ready to secede. There is no geographic division that lends itself to secession. Etc. etc. The only reason this is invoked is because it's the only meme that most people are aware of, not because it's even remotely accurate. Even something like the 90s Balkan Wars is so far from the contemporary American situation, it's absurd to compare it.
The only thing that's truly new is the media's profit motive for creating a perception of chaos.
Of course, the fact that things have worked out in the past doesn't mean they will always work out in the future. But people who compare contemporary America to the Fall of the Roman Empire or the American Civil War really don't know much about either.
While there are parallels to Weimar Germany, again I don't think this is actually a useful comparison and it's mostly used as a fascist boogeyman. Major factors in Weimar that don't exist in America/the West today:
- Immediately after a massively destructive war that affected all levels of society
- Populace of young men with PTSD and military experience
- Little/no social safety nets
- No history of democracy - remember that prior to Weimar, Germany was governed by Prussia and basically had no democratic traditions
IMO the real actual historical comparison to use in 2020 is the Printing Press and Protestant Reformation; i.e. established power structure (the Catholic Church) dealing with new information-propagation technologies and factions. I'd bet that 2050 is going to look a lot like 1550.
I mean, I don’t really have a narrative here. I just find the comparison to Weimar unconvincing. Modern culture, in its inability to generate new futures (see Baudrillard, Deleuze, etc.) constantly looks backwards. The popular trend now seems to be reframing the 2020s as a 1920s redux, but again, I think this is mostly lazy ignorance.
Sorry but I don't see that as new. Just off of the top of my head the Age of Aquarius new age nonsense, the belief that war would end with World War 1, and fascists believing that democracy was obsoleted with industrialization, heck even the French Revolution and the Enlightenment had similiar lines of thought. There have long been beliefs along those lines about how this time is different.
You could argue that it means that we aren't sufficently historically literate but I don't see how it stands out as worse given ample precedent.
“This time it’s different” comes up again and again (tech bubble, housing bubble) and it turns out, no, it’s not different.
The latest is MMT, in which people say “you can print as much money as you want without fears of inflation because this time it’s different”. And maybe it is? But there is a good chance that, no, it’s not different this time.
Or thinking that this time, a constantly growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor won't lead to a revolution if major reformation doesn't happen first.
Also, pretty sure MMT knows that printing money leads to inflation. Thats why the theory has taxes to remove money as well, if you want to tax someone other then those who hold capital evenly (which is inflation).
As a big history nerd, that’s what I love about digging into the details of these events. What is taught in school makes it seem very “clean” (I understand there is no time to really cover it in detail).
Take the Vietnam War for example - what’s taught in school is the Domino theory, support for a corrupt Southern government, quagmire, withdrawal and fall of the South. But, if you read through a bit of the Pentagon Papers you pretty quickly get a sense of how nuanced it was and how it wasn’t a single decision to support South Vietnam, it was a complex web of global geopolitics with messy arguments, fears, overconfidence, “fake news”, etc. And the people making those decisions were not dumb, in fact, they were pretty damn smart and considered a lot of different options and the risks that went with them. It just didn’t turn out how they thought it would.
And then it dawns on you just how much history is repeated over and over. Sure it’s a little different each time (and those small differences have a big impact), but the same types of things happen again and again.
The person's deleted their tweets since then but it read something like
> Thinking about how agricultural subsidies are like this classic example of inefficiency but also a big part of the reason the US still has a strong agricultural base.
That’s what 2020 has felt like to me. The fall of Rome. It’s like we had every single advantage we could have wanted and blundered it all. Maybe we just aren’t meant to be this connected, thus aware, this effective. We’re just not responsible enough to be so efficient at changing our world.
Actually I think the global side of things has held up remarkably well. There were brief shortages in supermarkets early on but when you consider the changes in our eating habits it wasn't much. The doomsayers would have had us eating each other by now.
> One layer deeper, it commoditizes people's time, making them more replaceable and lowering what one's salary can buy even longer.
More or less you have summarized Karl Marx's conclusions in Das Kapital. "as capital accumulates the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse". The commoditization of peoples time is the way the capitalism extracts value from work.
And yes, this last stage of capitalism will be the toughest for the people..
IMO globalization is dangerous because it's putting all our eggs in one basket. We have it beyond good on the US compared to most places in the world.. And we still managed to have Trump, Hillary, and Biden be our presidential choices in these 2 elections. All it takes is one bad idea or leadership that takes the helm of an entire world government instead of several countries keeping each other in check and having different ideas/philosophies. I worry people actually want to be ruled by a king/monarch/dictator. I wish people would stop putting so much emphasis on the federal government and focus on local community politics. Higher level government should do less, not more.
On the other hand the wheat harvest is down by 40% in the UK this year but that has barely warranted a mention in the media because there is a global market for grains.
I'm still for global, open markets; just not central government. Competition and differing views/ideas are extremely beneficial and this highlights an example of why.
I'm noodling on notions, and some recent commentary by Cory Doctorow sparked much of this, or rather, gave cause to expand a recent HN comment.
This is quite possibly wrong in parts or whole. Critiques welcomed.
Though it seems fairly clear that the ills dominating recent discussions of the Internet and media aren't merely incidental to monopoly but integral to it. And that monopoly itself is a control structure.
The question's been raised in discussion elsewhere about whether or not smaller / cloistered discussions might also give rise to propaganda. My thinking is "possibly, but likely to a lesser degree'.
> The question's been raised in discussion elsewhere about whether or not smaller / cloistered discussions might also give rise to propaganda. My thinking is "possibly, but likely to a lesser degree'.
I'm convinced that if some developer had sought to replace svn by thinking directly in your terms-- i.e., how can I seek to decentralize this thing-- they would have ended up with a complicated mess of a system which would be even worse at handling issues of data integrity for the end user.
I don't understand the fetish for decentralization. Why isn't the focus instead on finding the low hanging fruit of simple, centralized software which can be easily tested and quickly deployed to defend against the dark patterns we know are used to manipulate people online?
With all the (duplicated) effort to build decentralized systems that necessarily rely on gold being found at the end of open research rainbows, we could instead already have a deep set of contingencies for, say, the impending milestone when Google finally defeats the ad blockers that keep HN in its cush little bubble.
I don't understand the fetish for decentralization.
I have a love-hate relationship with the centralisation-decentralisation debate. Much radical decentralisation advocacy seems to embody little more than wishful thinking. Centralisation affords efficiencies, but at a cost of resilience, as has been widely realised of late, and of power control, if my notions here are accurate.
One possible resolution is to accept necessary, or inevitable, network control points / monopolies, but to ensure that control is shared, distributed, democratic, and/or principled. Public utlities, multiple stakeholders, public input, and the like.
Capture, corruption, apathy, mismanagement, incentives alignment, and the like, remain risks.
I feel the same way and it might be we have a love hate relationship with these ideas because there is probably neither a perfect centralized or decentralized system, but rather there is goodness in the middle somewhere, and it's easy for said systems to shift to far to one side for various reasons.
Largely agreed, which makes for accord but lousy debate ;-)
In light of the monopoly-power-control dynamic, though, I see frames for analysing and room for thinking about how federated systems should be structured to avoid creating cryptic control loci.
As an example, Mastodon (on which part of this discussion is occurring) saw a remarkably bad interactiion two hears ago when a set of griefers followed Wil Wheaton from Twitter and swamped Mastodon's feeble harassment and abuse detection-and-mitigation systems (they've been improved, I'm given to understand).
Diaspora, where I'd posted this article, has a nagging (though unclear if growing or just persisting) issue with disinformation and propaganda dissemination. On the one hand, effects are pretty limited without algorithmic amplification. On the other, blocking, reporting, and content- or account-removal seem ...underpowered.
The worse forms of abuse seem infrequent, though, which is a good sign.
Experiments with building voting into normal usage (like 'choosing mods' mechanisms) seem to be addressing some of those issues, although not without costs.
Maybe I’m saying obvious things among people smarter than me, but I think the best world we can aim for is a federated solution. The benefits of centralization and the benefits of openness and competition.
Propaganda is not dependent on the speaker. If you look at historic propaganda of the german third reich, it's still propaganda, despite it possibly being a digital copy in a school book.
Propaganda is information or media that is purposefully designed to mislead, misinform or misdirect the reader and/or cause them to spread it to more readers, willfully.
When Bernays brought the propaganda techniques of Hitler into the world of US commerce, he invented the term "public relations" to avoid the negative associations with Nazi Germany.
Nitpick: it was the Nazi's who adopted Bernays' work, and not the other way around -
>According to Bernays’ own account he was informed by Karl von Wiegand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, that in 1933 Goebbels was using his PR classic Crystallizing Public Opinion ‘as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany’.
Not all propaganda is misleading though; have a browse of https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/, you'll see anti-war/racism/capitalism posters, PSAs, etc. Your definition is too narrow (it's almost like it's propaganda against propaganda, very meta).
The ones I've seen are often one political ideology being positioned against another.
> "Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of public or mass-produced communication designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific public purpose, whether military, economic, or political."
>you'll see anti-war/racism/capitalism posters, PSAs, etc.
Just because you like the misleading message, does not make it less misleading.
Just because you are anti something that you consider bad, does not make you good, and more important than that, does not make you better than what you denounce.
Hitler was anti-comunist and Stalin anti-fascism. They used the anti "something horrible" as an excuse to grab all power without supervision.
I collect propaganda posters, and have lots of Russian communist ones. I study those. Communist has always been experts on propaganda and giving misleading messages.
I agree with the core thesis, and have had multiple discussions/debates about the importance of decentralization for promoting robustness through diversity (avoiding monocultures).
A common complaint against federated structures (whenever I’m involved in this debate) is the claim that it’s much harder to fight spam & malicious actors than centralized systems operating at scale (which can afford to devote resources to this problem).
I find that claim quite unconvincing, and believe that the problem is manufactured by the existence of centralized systems. In decentralized systems, effects of malicious action (be it spam or misinformation of any kind) are localized and controlled — and cannot scale to have large impact (thus also providing some disincentives for malicious action).
The abuse-countermeasures argument is fairly persuasive, but possibly not entirely so. Not the least because scale also seems to greatly amplify that problems themselves.
Most forms of communications/informational abuse also seem to follow the propaganda / censorship / surveillance framework. Certainly spam, various forms of devoicing, and targeted harassment (bullying, brigading, doxxing, swatting).
Countermeasures fall into what I term hygiene factors, and much of my current thinking runs very strongly along epidemiological lines (and did so well before our recent viral symbiote emerged): addressing breeding reservoirs, transmission vectors, surveillance (of dysfunctional/toxic behaviours), susceptibility, treatment, isolation, and the like.
Distributed and decentralised approaches can work, and there are examples of these. From the world of spam: DNSBLs, SpamHaus, IronPort, pg's own Bayesian classifiers, and the like. How much added gain GD AI ML offers, and how much that relies of exclusive data monopolies, I'm not sure.
One further point that's going to be lost here, but what the hell: it's not entirely necessary of even possible to dismantle all informational (or other) monopolies. My key point has been to join the three ills which seem to be the subject of much present discussion as having a common enabling factor. And that discussing the issues separately or without consideration of etiology has little value. Sometimes the answer will be dismantling sometimes it will be to modify governance, ensuring public, social, and or commonweal orientation; sometimes to create counterveilling power blocs to balance forces.
i'd suggest some more fleshing out to be meaty and coherent enough to comment substantially. but a general critique would be that the term "monopoly control" seems constraining, when what you seem to be talking about more generally is centralization (vs. decentralization).
the connection to the economic concept of monopoly (which, for that one commenter who will otherwise insist, is not one company crowding out all others in a market, but rather a company having effective control of a market regardless of relative size) seems tenuous at best. how is propaganda, censorship, and surveillance inherent properties of an entity controlling the friend social network market (i.e., facebook) rather than an inherent property of the centralization of social networks (for instance)?
Can you think of an example of monopoly which does not entail centralisation?
For regulatory purposes in the US, "monopoly" does not match either your definition nor the one I was taught in my intermediate microeconomics coursework.
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
Propaganda, censorsship, and surveillance are not the only concerns regarding monopoly. But within the media and communications domain, it seems that the problems and market-power structure are inherently linked.
If there are any other points needing addressing I'd be happy to hear them.
It would have been a lot more fun if capital M Monopoly as you wrote it actually meant the game Monopoly.
Anyway all I can really offer is to flame and stress less, if there’s something exciting about economics and journalism to you just focus on that. Don’t shoehorn the wonky excitement into something sideways-adjacent to FAAMG companies.
It seems like the way author uses them, propaganda, censorship and surveillance are just versions of propagation, filtering and signal acquistion with a corrupt intent attributed. They are just basic elements of any information processing system.
> Speakers and Audiences — a public — divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, from different distribution networks, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to propaganda, censorship, or surveillance. Epistemic diversity resists control.
One downside is if factions can’t reconcile their views we get into heavy information warfare between little echo chambers like we do today, and we haven’t seem the downstream consequences of this in full effect. The AIs of the “non-mainstream” information channels we use, twitter, youtube, facebook, reddit, instagram etc, are very good at diverisfying their information streams to micro-target individuals, but with absolutely the wrong objective function; to increase engagement, not to increase sensemaking. The result is more stratified cultural factions with little hope of reconciliation and conversation in between.
And for certain things, the reality has the monopoly we strive to converge to. Scientific process doesn’t necessarily reward diversity, but it reliably rewards relevance and approaching to reality. For matters like how covid spread, whether masks worked etc, we would have loved to subjected ourselves to the monopoly of what it really was in itself, but instead we made another information warfare out of it, heavily politicized every bit of data, causing tons of unnecessary human death suffering in between.
Therefore the problem is not the topology of the information network, but the incentive scheme driving the network. Today we all answer to the normativity of markets, not patriotism, not religion, not intellectual honesty, merely markets, so changing the shape of the network would achieve so little to change the downstream consequences.
I clicked on the link assuming it was about the board game :)
Maybe the title (which I assume was clipped for HN length) might be more of a draw for some here using the plural ("Monopolies") or "Monopoly Control" as used in the article a few times?
I don't know why we need to attribute these properties to monopolies when a monopoly is in itself a bad thing. Also, I don't see concrete measures to end monopolies being mentioned. Maybe it's time to realize that our industry has left the innovation phase, and is into consolidation. In this environment, legislation is well advised to look into mechanisms for a regulated market given the extreme importance of digital platforms and markets (which are the only ones having growth). And perhaps states should also play a much stronger role in setting standards rather than leaving that in a mixture of naivite and corruption to failed initiatives of market participants (such as the wannabe standard bodies W3C and WHATWG with disastrous results). After all, if "national security" (of the US, that is) is an argument to block market participants, and the web being monopolized, there's no point in pretending international trade or other fair trading rules apply.
My key point has been to join the three ills which seem to be the subject of much present discussion as having a common enabling factor. And that discussing the issues separately or without consideration of etiology has little value. Sometimes the answer will be dismantling sometimes it will be to modify governance, ensuring public, social, and or commonweal orientation; sometimes to create counterveilling power blocs to balance forces.
Monopoly may be inevitable in many cases. The question then is where control and/or benefit lie / accrue.
And yes, some monopolies may be useful, or have useful attributes.
Key point I'm making are that:
1. Censorship / propaganda / surveillance / manipulation (CPSM if you will), are integral capabilities and attributes of informational monopoly.
2. All monopoly is inherently a control and power structure.
Government represents both attributes, and may be broadly beneficial, representing the people and promoting commonweal, or tyrannical, representing and benefitting an oligarchic minority.
So do business structures, cults, religions, military groups, mafia / organised crime syndicates, broadcast networks, online social media networks, newspaper publishers, film studios, transport networks, retail marketing networks, ...
There is no monopoly on violence because the state is non monolithic, and because much of the violence is outsourced to subcontractors with limited oversight.
More importantly, monopoly on violence by the state is only good if the control of the state is distributed democratically to all affected by it, ie, if the control over violence is redistributed to all people equally. If violence is held in a monopoly by a small group of individuals for their personal benefit... then civil war is a better option.
And corporations are structurrd exactly like that sort of despotism.
It feels like the entire current deal about monopolies is instead about massive centralization even if it's not technically monopolies. Specifically:
- the post really talks about cohesive platforms of all sizes: a topical forum can easily have the same aspects even though members may migrate at any time.
- countries might come out of the current ruckus with an understanding that massive centralization and platforms is something to worry about, in a lawmaking and enforcing way, even if it's not monopolies. Because it's a centralization of power, albeit indirect power so far. Of course, this problem is just what cyberpunk prophesized, so it's interesting to see how countries deal with expanding rule of corporations: namely if the US rethinks or confirms its position that corporations are just fine.
I suspect that desire for decentralization is motivated by wanting Facebook without Facebook. I've never have an account, I don't tweet, I don't care about centralization. So I guess there could be a connection.
About propaganda, there are some kinds of person that never miss the opportunity to tell you what they think about their pet topic. Any community that doesn't allow to ignore them is bad for mental health. It used to work for thematic forums, with rules about off-topic. If the topic is more open, politics creep in.
I dropped my Facebook account, only interact with Twitter and mastodon from time to time and can see your point.
But the thing is, once you are in Facebook you get to see that most of the world propaganda is there and the whole platform is conditioned (and monetized, but not on your interest).
So you get to see the benefits of a platform like Facebook and the evil of facebook (the platform) being Facebook (the company).
Government has a monopoly on the claim to legitimate use of force. All elements of this statement are crucial. The Libertarian objection neglects to consider "claim", "legitimate", and most aspects of "monopoly".
> Government has a monopoly on the claim to legitimate use of force. All elements of this statement are crucial.
I do agree and understand that, and I'm not a libertarian. My main issue here is that big governments has the same issues than big companies. We must break then all, not only big companies. My provocation was about that, not the use of force per si, so I may use the wrong words in the previous post.
The EU really need to look at the nexus between competition law and data protection regulations. There is already Article 20 of the GDPR[0] which enshrines a "Right to data portability", including a requirement for data to be automatically transmitted from one provider to another, in some cases.
It seems to me that mandating federation between social network platforms, using proven open standards, falls within (or very close to) the requirements that such a law already puts onto large data controllers, which should make it an uncontroversial remedy for the EU anti-trust authorities to demand.
What you're essentially asking for is the ability of someone to create an account on a service that isn't Facebook, but still be added as a friend by someone on Facebook, view content only available to their friends, share content with Facebook users, send and receive DMs etc.
That has the potential to be extremely effective. Anyone using a service solely for the network effect could switch to another one, which could be a large fraction of the users and reintroduce meaningful competition.
The biggest problem is protocol complexity. If Facebook adds some kind of timeline feature or anything like that, do they have to add it to the protocol other providers interface with Facebook using? If so, they can stamp out competition by adding so much complexity to the protocol that challengers can't keep up with it. If not, they can add features that challengers can't interface with. And expecting technologically-sideways regulators to arbitrate that sort of thing is a big ask.
Cell service providers had to do it. It wasn't that long ago in the US when you couldn't take your cell phone number to a different provider.
Facebook, et al, could provide restricted APIs that let another authorized service gain access to your information via your user identifier. I imagine they provide partial access for favored partners already.
Cell service is a commodity, though. They effectively act as dumb pipes for sound and data, and although they would like very much to not be that anymore, that is the reason they have customers. Also, there aren't many value-adds to be had at the protocol level. Everything else was already fairly standardized, so adding the number porting stuff on top of that was comparatively easy.
What we're talking about here is pure software interop. There is no standard, and any standard that would be devised would become a quickly-outdated albatross around the neck of the developers. Imagine writing code to interface with someone else's crap API, except now you're required to do it by law, and any new feature you come up with has to be either shoehorned into it, or more likely, go through a long and bureaucratic approval process, or even more likely, simply never shipped.
Now pretend instead of Facebook, it's your instance of Mastodon that you want to hack on. HN doesn't have the requisite font face options for the magnitude of NO F'ING WAY that is my reaction to getting the government this deep into the nuts and bolts.
I am confident that an interface standard could be developed to allow some level of identity portability. Supporting such an interface would be rolled into the myriad other compliance requirements that tech service providers have to deal with these days. (A natural part of being in a maturing consumer facing industry.)
Cellphone carriers argued that number portability was too hard or too expensive.
"But cell phone companies argue counter that the idea of portability should be scrapped because customers aren’t demanding it. They argue that implementing portability, which involves retooling the software of each carrier’s computerized call-routing system, would be expensive and technically complicated.
“The cost to be able to move numbers from one carrier to the other is significant, and it would be significant for the customer too,” said John Scott, deputy general counsel for Verizon Wireless. “Our argument is that it’s not necessary to promote competition.”
A superficial analysis would say that there is a balance between the two dynamics of "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" and "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link".
A slightly deeper analysis would ask first "What are the incentive structures in a system where people can seamlessly migrate from one provider to another?".
We have already seen that Facebook, as a monopolistic provider, is too big to fail, and it can keep paying the meagre fines for its non-compliance with the rules, while lobbying and threatening[0] and exploiting its election-influencing power to ensure the regulations don't significantly limit its assault on users' privacy.
It's not hard to imagine that if 20 different companies were competing for users, they might act in ways that better protect users' privacy. In fact the competitive pressure on them would be twofold, since not only could users move to different providers, but users could also refuse to connect to a friend on a network whose policies they do not trust.
> But some researchers dispute that ad-targeting is any different than selling data.
> "As a data scientist, I am shocked that anyone continues to believe this claim," wrote Michael Kosinski, assistant professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, in a New York Times opinion piece. "Every time you click on a Facebook ad, Facebook sells data on you to that advertiser."
> "This is such a basic property of online targeted advertising that it would be impossible to avoid, even if Facebook somehow wanted to."
Article 20 portability is always initiated by the user who owns the data. Federation between social network platforms is very different, because it means swapping personal data not initiated by the user - when a friend loads my profile page, my node sends my personal data to her node. In fact, I'd argue that's simply a GDPR violation unless all of the federated nodes have mutually verified each others' compliance.
If federated nodes have to mutually verify each others' compliance, then every email server in the EU is breaking the law.
Presumably the reason email servers can operate legally is that the sender of each email is deemed to be the data controller or is otherwise giving explicit consent to their private data being sent to each recipient's mail provider.
Social networking is roughly equivalent to the sending of emails BCCed to everyone in your address book. In the case of something like Twitter-style microblogging, the GDPR is even less relevant since the user is deliberately trying to make information publicly available.
I think the sender of each email is definitely giving explicit consent. When I type out "To: foo@example.com", I'm directing my email provider to send my email to the example.com server. That's fundamentally different than the Facebook model, where some information is public and anyone at all can request it, even if they're not in my address book.
I agree that you could probably make Facebook with no public pages work, or something like Twitter where there's minimal public information in the first place.
I'll copy parts of my response to the dear Doctor when (initial draft of?) it was posted on Mastodon:
1:
Propaganda is not (no longer?) limited to centralized control. Advertising is an example of fully decentralized propaganda, where the actors don't have any kind of real central control, but if their goals align, they'll amplify a single message to the level much larger than a monopoly ever could.
Perhaps we could call it mob-style propaganda. Mobaganda?
2:
The way I feel it, propaganda is about making a large group of people believe things that aren't true, but benefit some other group of people. Said beneficiaries of the propaganda may be the original source of the message - but even historically, propaganda only works if some of the audience believes it and starts convincing/socially pressuring others into believing it too.
So the core operational element here is just a meme that spreads. Centralization is orthogonal.
--
Basically, I feel that old school propaganda was just a way to forcefully spread a selected meme. It happened in an era where most media was unidirectional - from a small group of people operating newspapers, radio and television, to a large group of people who could only view it and perhaps comment between each other, but their response wasn't broadcast to a wide audience. These days, with our hyperconnected social media where everyone is a publisher of thoughts, memes can spread without much effort. You don't need force of a central power anymore for an idea to travel; memes amplify themselves now, as they spread through our bidirectional media.
And this means not only that propaganda isn't restricted to a central power, but also that it doesn't have to have any intent behind it. All it takes is for someone to accidentally craft a meme that resonates with people, and it'll get amplified. If it incidentally benefits a group of people, that group will ensure it gets amplified further.
The problem is, said meme doesn't have to be in any way correct, reasonable, or corresponding to observable reality.
The distinction between macro- and micro-propaganda gets to a few elements:
- Mass propaganda, let's call it Goebbellian propaganda, relies on targeting the same message to a very large audience. Often a Big Lie, but always simple, clear, and heavily repeated.
- Targeted propaganda pits individuals (or identifiable, but small, market segments, against an extensive data store (past behaviours, activities, and behavioural models), and machine intelligence. The individual is pitted against trillion-dollar corporations or state actors, yottabyte-sized data stores, and predictive and AI behavioural models.
With macropropaganda at least the message is publicly evident. With micropropaganda it may be impossible to determine what is or isn't manipulation as well as what manipulations are targeted as which individuals or groups.
The targeting element of micropropaganda still pressumes some sort of targeting. To take an example, Cambridge Analytica would have been much less successful if it had to, say, pull data from 100s of individual ISPs' personal home pages, email and chat logs, and inconsistent data formats and standards. Facebook's one-stop shopping of users, activity logs, data standards, and integrated activity across a wide range of services and third-party site integration, created CA's opportunity.
The messaging may not be centralised, but the enabling infrastructure must be.
The observation that medium shapes messaging isn't new (see McLuhan), but is worthwhile. Network topology, scale, directedness, and other characteristics, drive and dictate possible interactions. It's not accidental that radio pioneers borrowed both the name and business model of farmers; broad-casting seeds into a fertile medium and harvesting the returns through bulk and undifferentiated mechanical processes.
As I've noted elsewhere, the specific defining property of propaganda is intent serving a cause. Accidental memes are viral, but unless coopted, not themselves propagantistic. In Dawkins' conception, such memes selfishly serve only themselves.
> Advertising is an example of fully decentralized propaganda
Not at all. Centralization is absolutely crucial to deliver advertising.
Getting a bigger audience to attract larger advertisers is what pushed newspapers, radios, television channels and finally web services to become behemoths.
While there are certainly economies of scale that may allow others to do better anyone can engage in some sort of advertising, guerilla marketing is definetly a decentralized advertising tactic.
If monopoly is defined solely in terms of dominance it is ironically possible for there to be a decentralized monopoly as technically anyone can enter by any means but there is one big fish in the pond. I dislike that definition of monopoly personally because a monopoly with no concrete barriers to entry feels like an absurd abuse of the term.
human life will persist as long as the environment permits it but what future form it will take remains unknown and perhaps would not please our common current cultural tastes
How is diaspora compared to a federating solution like Mastodon or Plemora? Both are powered by ActivityPub, a W3C standard. I've used Mastodon and it works well.
First and foremost, it's about the only organisation with monopoly on violence: the government. No commercial monopoly could maintain it's position without regulation. Solving the problem by giving even more power to the government is a completely backwards solution that will only bring even more of all this in the long run.
I think ancaps have very compelling arguments and I tend to agree with them.
Corporations privatize their profits (to themselves) and socialize their risk (to government). Eliminate the ability to socialize their risk and it's incumbent upon corporations to respond to market forces, creating competition, reducing barriers of entry, etc. This all makes sense to me from a free-market perspective.
From my experience the ancap positions are the most philosophically consistent, taking into account the large majority of economic and ethical variables. The only problem I have with ancaps is that they usually fail to acknowledge the third rail of politics and as such fall into the same trap as the libertarians.
It's one thing to envision a system which minimizes authoritarianism and maximizes personal liberty. It's another thing to actually implement that system from where we are, not where we would like to be.
For example, if we minimize (or abolish) government too early, we create a vacuum which invariably will be filled by existing corporate combines. I'll add this argument has been made before by ancaps against libertarianism, so the problem isn't exactly foreign to them. In contrast, break up the corporate combines without also reducing the power and authority of the state and we temporarily fix the monopoly problem while leaving the door wide open for the exact same thing to repeat (as we are seeing today).
There are undoubtedly smarter people than me working on this problem but in my estimation it's absolutely critical for ancaps to outline incremental steps (in the correct order) towards the solution and not fall on their swords because those incremental steps may not represent the most philosophically pure end result from the outset (like what's happened with libertarians).
the ancient base of Greek and Roman civilization persists to this day in the West even if the major empires have changed hands many times! The West is still studying Plato and Aristotle...
A depressing aspect of this is that our toolbag is mostly empty. The few rusty old tools we have are not very good.
On the antitrust side... Courts and antitrust law are completely ill equipped to deal with modern monopoly. Everything must be funneled through a 19th century lens.
On the regulatory side... it might be even worse. We need to keep in mind that regulators are usually monopoly enforcing. Look at banks, traditional media, etc. The difference between a regulated fb and an unregulated one may be that fb can blame the regulator for censorship. This is how it works in a bank. Whatever mindless bureaucracy exists, everyone can just claim it's mandated. Meanwhile, it makes competition less likely. A "privacy preferences" popup approach will not help us with our monopoly problem.
Courts: The recent EU adwords case is a great example. They found unequivocally that adwords monopolises search ads, and use this monopoly to suppress competing search engines who have to sell ads on the adwords network. Google got a $1.5bn fine. Similar cases against amazon marketplace. To Google, it's a cost of doing business, and google would have undoubtedly paid that much just to get the narrow benefits proven in court. Monopolies are not a narrow phenomenon though. Whatever can be proved in court is the tip of an iceberg, almost by definition. If courts focus on the narrow (they are), then maneuvering around court decisions is trivial.
Meanwhile, consider this: If Toyota (workers, machines.. everything) fell of the disc tomorrow, the world would have less auto manufacturing capacity. It would take time and resources to rebuild. If facebook fell off the disc, the social media vacuum would be filled near instantly. There would be no social media supply issues.
This is where modern monopolies depart from 19th century monopolies. Courts may have wanted to liberalize (eg) the market for steel, but they didn't want to crash it. We still needed their steel. We don't really need facebook's "steel." Whether fb makes $100bn on ads or 1% of that, we will have plenty of social media. There is no (public interest) reason to step (on fb) lightly, but courts can't really make these distinctions.
IMO, the only answer is to act against size itself, and make decisions on a case-by-case basis. Also IP. Say Tesla does get to self driving years ahead of everyone because data... do they now get a monopoly forever? The poverty of our public domain is going to become increasingly relevant.
Given, for example, that AMZN "are the market" in a meaningful sense, why not make their sales data disclosable. That data is being proven in court to be a monopolistically potent. Give other market participants access. Advertising even moreso. This data is of major public interest
I agree with this. And would like to extend it a bit further.
In the instances where each of these 3 attributes (Propaganda, censorship & surveillance) -- are also essential part of a business model -- I would call those specific large businesses as Super-Monopolies.
If we look at any large and successful business that has the above, plus is in the business of end-user Advertisement (that is in the business of promoting one thing over another .. that's advertisement for end consumers).
It fits into a 'super-monopoly' bucket.
It must surveil (to understand the target audience), and it must do it covertly.
It must censor (remove, downplay, gray-out content that does not fit the business model, or, as we see lately, the political bias of the org's leadership)
It has to monopolize the market place, so that every end-user 'walks through a single door'.
It will use propaganda to pacify critical thinkers, and to mislead folks with less developed 'critical thinking' -- that they are 'not a monopoly by any stretch', that they are just and fair, and hard working... As that's a necessary function to survive in a system with anti-trust laws.
- - -
What is, of course, very notable about these 3 attributes -- that they are also a must for Dictatorships and Monarchy style of government.
- - -
If the above is an accepted analogy. There are 2 positions about it ( a) -- that's good, continue on (b) no, that's bad, we need to have constitutional checks that this cannot happen, even if most powerful people try to do it.
- - -
So what could constitution (assuming that it cannot be changed) could look like to prevent a 'country-wide' analogy of a monopoly - a Dictatorship?
- - -
Well, the first thing, is to agree, that no matter how fair-minded, or 'saint' a person is -- given enough power, he/she will get corrupt.
That applies for groups of people as well as for individual.
- - -
Therefore, the first solution -- is power distribution. Under no circumstances political, economic and military power can be concentrated within the power of the same group of people.
That means 'de-centralization', and more practically 'de-urbanization'. Meaning that having small geographical areas and their elected representative wielding most power is good for Dictatorship. So a Constitution must prevent that.
The nuance there is what is 'economic power'. Well that's mostly means, control of tax revenue, and control of within country trade.
Therefore, a good constitution, to avoid corruption would:
- Prohibit same group of people to control tax revenue, to control laws of intra-country trades
- Prohibit same group of people (as above) from having control of military force. And prevent military from interfering within the border.
- Prohibit same group of from forcing a 'single choice' of any article of commerce, education, health.
- Prohibit same group from enforcing any emigration choices (meaning if the person wants to leave the country, they can).
--
Other thing that a good Constitution would do, is to enable the voting citizens to be the 'final backstop', the final judge to decide if actions of elected officials are constitutional or not,.. the final police police, acting as a threat with force, speaking allegorically.
With regard to comment
> I am pretty certain, if our society manages to survive the current times, our attitude to centralization and globalization will change
I think it may be more nuance. Or at least, I am trying to come up with the framework that will let me understand if the country will change and how...
I am speculating, that has to do with 'critical thinking' abilities of voting public...
I have came to read somewhere, that critical thinking is more like an 'immune system'.
We are not born with it, instead ,it develops over time, by experience. When meeting with bad, malignant information, manipulation and lies.
Just like immune system that gets stronger when surviving infections deceases.
Critical thinking does not directly correlate to our cognitive gifts, just like immune system may not be a reflection of visible physiological gifts.
With that analogy, we can say there always be a portion of voting population (due to
age, particular environment that they were brought up, fear, etc.) -- that will have somewhat reduced critical thinking (or have in decline) compared to others.
That is, those folks have reduced cognitive immunity to being manipulated. And that deficiency can change (improve or get worse) over time... (it is not static).
Depending on how string & aggressive the malignant manipulation of people is in a particular period -- and depending on the percentage of folks with delayed development of critical thinking at that same period -- we will have different outcomes.
It is that ratio of how virulent manipulative malignancy is, divided by percent of voting population with underdeveloped critical thinking, that will decide the outcome for a country in a particular time period.
- - -
Without claiming an affinity to a particular side in the current US politics, I would say that it appears (at least to me ), that percentage of voting public with underdeveloped critical thinking, is higher now than was say 35 years ago or so.
If we can agree on the percentage of underdeveloped critical thinkers in the current voting population.
Then if we can agree on the measure of malignant manipulation (that, underneath reflects stakes)
Then if we agree and find these ratios in other consequential historical periods. We will be able to 'predict' what will happen, with, hopefully, better certainty.
I know this may easily fall into confirmation bias, as we start picking and choosing the percentages, etc. But nevertheless, I hope the above represents a 'framework' to apply.
They're generally promoted and amplified by systems optimising for something other than epistemic validity: advertising, engagement, political interest, interest marketing, etc., etc.
Yes, Evola. The first few chapters about nihilism are probably the most relevant. Keep in mind that if you want to strawman this on, it's very easy. Filter out the Kali Yuga, etc. stuff if this is not to your liking and the rest is still pretty informative.
TIL that's at least a paraphrase, possibly even a direct quote. To be charitable, even to someone who loved hierarchy and hated raves, I'm guessing he probably meant "superfascist" not as in "supercomputer" but as in "supersonic."
There is nothing more than one can say about Evola that wasn't said before. You can pretty much go to his page on Wikipedia and the first few paragraphs sound like a hit piece. I will say that everything is true, even the things that I know for sure are not. It does not matter, in the end there he is, popular as never before. "The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."
inb4 > Churchill was a fascist, let's tear down his statues.
Evola's program (insofar as I, only 8 chapters in, have had any of it yet disclosed) reminds me somewhat of Dreher's. What did you take away as the more important positive parts of his program?
Would Toole's Ignatius J. Reilly count as one of his positive nihilists?
How can a [assumingly benevolent] state survive without using propaganda, censorship, and surveillance today, when all the other states, as well as malicious parties within itself would inevitably deploy propaganda, censorship, and surveillance against it?
This is a genuine question. I would love propaganda, censorship, and surveillance to be non-existent but I can't really see a viable alternative. That would be cool if we could make the people immune to propaganda by means of education but I'm sure there will always be plenty of people who would remain easy to manipulate.
I'd suggest that this is a separate though related question.
My essay concerns the fact that propaganda (and other activities, often but not at all exclusively the domain of state actors) rely on and exploit monopoly structures.
One fairly obvious corollary is that "if you build it", where "it" os a communications or information network exhibiting monopoly control points, "they will come", they being propagandists, censors, and surveillors.
Which is pretty much what Shoshana Zuboff was writing in the 1980s, see her eponymous laws.
That states and other large organisations (see: Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the IBM songbook, etc.) rely on propaganda, censorship, and surveillance (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State), means that yes, they effectively operate in a competitive and selective landscaape in which if they don't develop such capabilities, or countermeasures against them, their adversaries will. This will happen through the most monopolistic communications structures available, whhich is my point.
Having recently read a translation of the Rule of Benedict, I'll note that when Benedict disparages people coming together with like-minded others to form faith communities (Sarabaites, Ch. 1), he says "They live ... without a shepherd, in their own sheepfolds and not in the Lord’s," which I believe may be interpreted as a complaint about the lack of propaganda, censorship, and surveillance in their living arrangements.
I think setting an example and keeping to your principles is the right approach. Naivety won't go away, but things will continue to improve in the long run.
It's terrible that a lot of investors are now being told to diversify their portfolio. Diversification is the root of all evil and creates hidden oligopolies.
If the same investors own shares of all major corporations, then it creates a strong incentive for those corporations to collaborate with each other instead of competing.
This is probably why we ended up with companies like Google and Apple making employee non-poaching agreements with each other - There is enough shareholder overlap between the two companies that these illegal agreements benefit the majority shareholders of both companies.
Isn't it obvious? Diversification leads to monopolization which leads to surveillance, which leads to propaganda and censorship and loss of civil liberties.
Until we understand the root causes, we are headed towards either mass censorship or revolution.
My comment could not be more useful or relevant.
If most people think like this and don't see the obvious link, then we are surely headed for disaster.
Stock ownership is already sufficiently concentrated among the ultra-wealthy that diversification --- a highly-effective risk-management strategy --- likely has limited further effect. "84 percent of all stocks owned by Americans belong to the wealthiest 10 percent of households" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/economy/stocks-e...), and the top 1% of households represent 50% of household stock ownership (by Goldman Sachs, see https://financialpost.com/investing/how-americas-1-came-to-d...).
There are numerous other issues in corporate governance, ranging from the disastrous policy of "shareholder value" to vampirous corpprate raiders, to concentration and cross interests among boards of directors, to cross-ownership cartels as with South Korea's chaebol and Japan's keiretsu.
A small part of the problem, possibly, but not the principle cause.
The great irony of this is that even people who think that they're on the winning side of this trend and who are benefiting from monopolization right now are going to be in for a big shock when they realize that they no longer have the freedom to sell their own company shares or use their own money as they please.
The employee and the passive shareholder will always get screwed over in the end. Always.
Surveillance and control will extend to absolutely everyone. Even the top 1%. Freedom and control will be in the hands of a tiny number of people. You can already see signs of this today.
Now they manipulate people through thought leadership and the media, but once people have given up their basic freedoms, corporations will be able to coerce people at will. It will not be your shares or your money anymore because what you will be able to do with them will be severely restricted. It will all be done in the name of financial stability and safety.
This is a great analysis. I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.
Warren Buffet is known for an investment strategy that diminished diversification and instead encouraged investing in businesses that you actually understand. The argument is essentially that diversification is an investment tool for the ignorant who lack the time or inclination to research what it is they are actually investing in.
Combining that investment strategy with your argument: selective and informed investing is not only the safe bet but also the ethical one.
Essentially all of my comments get downvoted on HN these days. It is a form of incentivized censorship which actually illustrates my point very well since I'm probably upper-middle class and the current trend has mostly benefited me. Opportunities for free speech seem to be running out so I'm trying to make the most of it.
The scary thing is that diversification is done on auto-pilot these days. Superannuation funds, 401K funds and other pension funds take a share of each person's income and diversify it into a number of large corporate monopolies/stocks by default without their knowledge.
So the system is turning people's own money against them.
I'm probably preaching to the choir here but personally I find the act of downvoting a legitimate argument as opposed to providing a counter-argument distasteful. Downvoting ought to be limited to a particular subset of comments that does not include simply ones you disagree with. It honestly does smell like censorship. I read some of your other comments, and I don't even agree with all of them, but they didn't strike me as worthy of minimization.
Back on topic, the institutional investors having a diversification default also occurred to me when I read your comments. It raised a lot of questions in my mind that I don't have the answers to. What percentage of the market is represented by institutional investment versus non-institutional investment where at least the investors have the option of selective investment over diversification? Can institutional investors break from the diversification strategy without being seen as picking winners, anti-competitive, or gambling with the money? More fundamentally, how do you take a system which operates on 0% information and transform it into something that has at least 1% or 2% information?
Anyway, I don't expect you to answer those questions. Thanks for the food for thought.
On the surface, it increases efficiency through central management and automation, lowering the prices and making products more affordable.
One layer deeper, it commoditizes people's time, making them more replaceable and lowering what one's salary can buy even longer.
If you look even deeper, you see that when people are not spending their passion trading, making deals, and creating things others would want to buy, they instead turn on each other. If your work doesn't keep your mind busy, it finds a different outlet, that seems to be driven by some primal tribal instincts. Team up with the ones of your kind and go against the neighboring tribe.
Call me paranoid, but we might see another Fall of Rome in our lifetimes.