FTA: "Where Mark asks you to trust him to be a benevolent king, I say let us build a world without kings."
I'd also submit that even if you trust Zuckerberg to be a benevolent king, he won't be king forever. He may grow bored of Facebook and move on, have an untimely accident or a poor diagnosis...these are all events that can put all things Facebook in the hands of somebody far less (presumably) benevolent.
Imagine it in the hands of a Larry Ellison. Or Martin Shkreli. Or Keith Alexander. Or Dick Cheney, if you will.
Mark is just the last incarnation of people that scratched the social itch. If Facebook failed, we'd still have G+ or MySpace. At this point, he seems like an inevitability.
Well, don't count me among those who trust Zuck. I stopped using Facebook years ago when I opened my eyes to what a massive intelligence-gathering operation it is.
And the names I listed are just examples; my point remains that one cannot predict who will hold the reins in the future. We can debate how much of a monster Zuckerberg may be, but I'm convinced that there can be somebody much worse in charge.
I think the most productive thing most of us can do in the short term is to convince everyone we know to stop using that platform.
I appreciate Aral's general issues with Facebook. Privacy rights in the digital age are issues we face not just with SV, but with every corporation we interact with. I appreciate the EU's interest in this sphere and I worry the rights of US citizens will be co-opted by corporate lobbying, not to mention other parts of the world.
The EU's interest in this sphere is bizarre to say the least. It's very much a fan of surveillance. It pays lipservice to privacy, while actively engaging in dragnet surveillance.
We're really moving into the strange cyberpunk dystopian future when CEOs start writing bizarre manifestos about how they want to reshape the world like this. Really just a few years out from private corporate armies I think (Zuckerberg already has a small private army protecting him with heavy weaponry) and cyber wars and espionage and open defiance of governments.
Like we all knew this was an option of where we were going but to see it actually happening is kind of surreal.
Kinda BS, to be honest. The CEO of Canada Goose Jackets has full time protection. If you're worth a lot of money you need to be careful with your security.
Maybe most of the time King Zuck only has 4 people guarding him personally, but if you think that facebook security staff that he controls is just those 4 guys, you're crazy.
Very wealthy individuals hire private security to protect themselves because they are targets for a class of crime (kidnapping, extortion, etc) that average people have a negligible chance of being targeted for. Private army is a stretch of the terms but technically accurate.
Musk and Bezos both have access to the rocketry tech necessary to produce ballistic missiles, along with autonomous machines which are starting to rival the sort of things usually produced by DARPA. Meanwhile, Facebook is tinkering with the best ways to influence masses of people and journalism/propaganda channels.
So I'm not necessarily saying that we're living out a mashup between Shadowrun and that Simpsons episode where Homer starts working for a supervillain, but I'm also not ruling it out.
DARPA is a funding agency, the only thing they produce are power points. They fund labs and companies that make things. The people that own those labs have this same power too but since they're not as cool as Bezos I guess we don't talk about them?
If they loose DARPA funding they go away or re-organise e.g. innumerable research Depts at universities they constantly have to hustle for funding and follow the grant money, Musk and Bezos are independent, their income streams are not going away.
This is not a new phenomenon. Wes Bush (who?) literally makes long-range strategic bombers. The industrial capacity at Musk's or Bezos's disposal only acquires a sinister Shadowrun tint when the institutional structures constraining their ability to act begin to dissolve. If we slide into a cyberpunk dystopia, the catalyst will be political, not technological.
It's not new, though. The phenomenon of business leaders wanting to build cloistered utopias is at least a hundred years old. Henry Ford had "Fordlandia" in Brazil, and Walt Disney was planning to make EPCOT, before the company canned the project after his death.
Private armies for the wealthy aren't new either: see the Pinkerton Agency.
Note that Fordlandia fell apart and the Pinkertons were outlawed when people realized what a terrible idea that was. But I guess those who don't learn their history are doomed to repeat it.
>Really just a few years out from private corporate armies
This has been a thing for over a decade now. Blackwater/Xe/Academi. The guy who founded this company (and got the US kicked out of Iraq), is our Education Secretary's brother. He is being consulted to provide extra security for Trump outside of the Secret Service.
Actually the manifesto should be written with current FB users in mind, and how their use of the platform is (over?)empowering a select few into driving their own agenda.
Mark Zuckerberg and others like him do what they do best, it's up to the 'masses' to develop critical thinking about their everyday actions and impacts. It's easy to blame the Emperor, much more difficult to admit our part in putting him into power.
It's not up to the masses. There is so much going on in the world, that it became impossible to deal with everything and have an opinion on everything. So it's actually up to a as large and diverse group as possible, to oppose movements like this. Which ultimately results in just a few making decisions for the masses. You can try to solve this problem before or just demand that the once/few in charge right now do the right thing. But it's not up to the masses and it has never been.
If everyone stopped using FB (not saying they should), what do you think would happen? As individuals we have a choice in certain actions and their impacts. I agree with you that having an opinion on everything and boycotting this and that can lead down a rabbit hole ... but we did bring this upon 'ourselves'. (I am not a FB user, but I do respect peoples use of it)
If "everyone" did something, we'd have all the unicorn hides we could ever want. Expecting "everyone" to do anything is silly and is frequently used--not saying you are, but it's a thing that happens--to delegitimize concerns by whatabouting them to death.
OK, here's my last stab at making this small point: The only reason FB is successful is because 'we' CHOOSE to use it. No one is coercing FB users physically into it's usage.
Thus, once we acknowledge this simple fact, we can also CHOOSE not to use it anymore.
That's the core of my point I tried to make originally.
I understood your point. You were not unclear. You're just not talking about anything meaningful. That we can "choose" to do something is irrelevant when the choice is not impactful. You aren't turning two billion people. You aren't going to make them choose. If a million people left Facebook tomorrow, Facebook would not notice nor be materially weakened. Your "choice" is noise.
And the harping on that choice is, by people much more malicious than you, designed to disempower movements to rein in organizations like Facebook, because--hey, people can just not use it. (Even though choosing to not use it doesn't do anything.)
You're providing cover for a narrative that wants to hurt you.
Glad to see my point was clear, so I guess we agree to disagree. In the meantime, I choose (and have done so ever since it first launched) to not use such platforms as FB.
Masses don't do anything. If you want to do something you need a different set of elite with a different set of ideas and/or ideology. That usually leads to conflict and wars though. So be warned. But we do I think need a different way to run society in an automated world rather than strap on the new technological reality to the old paradigm of shareholders and owners of capital who get people to work. We honestly will soon not need owners of capital/shareholders.
Preface: I might be too influenced by Adam Curtis.
But what I find most interesting about this reply/rant, is that it - like most of left, always seems to envision a world without power. And you can't confront entrenched power, without seizing power, and using it to transform society.
It's worse than that. Fundamentally, the problem is that people are not angels.
The left recognizes, correctly, that the people in power - the leaders - are not angels. So the left wants them gone - wants there to be nobody in power.
The problem is that the people who are not in power also are not angels. Left to themselves, a fair number of them will find ways to harm (economically or even physically) people around them. They need someone with power to restrain them.
But then you're back to having people in power, and they're not angels...
People might not be angels, but they aren't devils either.
The way I see it, left doesn't want people to have power. So it limits politician's power. And then, the financial/corporate interest seize all powers, and use it as they will.
Funny thing is: corporations really don't have ANY power. If the government doesn't like a corporation, they can simply pull the corporate charter. Corporate personhood is a legal fiction, allowed by law. There are some tortured legal arguments that it becomes "personal property" which can not be deprived without due-process - and in practice, this simply is never done anymore.
But any legal fiction can be simply signed-away into non-existence. There is no technical reason this can't happen. In theory.
The problem is, there is no political will to ever actually do it, even when it's necessary. Our entire facade of legality rests on political willpower.
I take this pretty literally and I not ironically see Buddhism or something like it as a leverage mechanism to make people closer to angels. But gnostic religions don't scale well unless one intends to be a cult leader. So...
I'm not sure that's right. I mean, if we replace the word "power" with the word "agency", then maybe it's clearer. The goal isn't so much a world without power, but a world where agency is more evenly distributed, and far less coupled with wealth/capital.
This isn't to say that such a world is easy to imagine, or easy to bring about.
As soon as I saw it was Aral, I knew the direction that the article was headed. He has good intentions, but humans are naturally hierarchical - from the family upwards. Fighting against hierarchical power is a losing battle.
Am i the only one here that doesnt use facebook? I think i logged in once eight or so years ago. My clients dont use it. My friends do ... well did. But it was never an issue. My students avoid it due to the "creep factor". I still live life via email and telephone and that isnt unussual. Even my tech clients, some in downtown SF, expect email to be the norm.
So when I see zuck going on about revolutions I have to wonder where he gets his information. Does he really think a large and growing percentage of the planet uses his website for everyday tasks? That's marketing spin. I think reality is much more humble.
What does it matter? A large percentage doesn't mean more than 50%, or more than competing services. And remember that those are just systems, not single companies.
Frankly, if something I made had reached even 5% of the whole human population, I'd consider that freaking huge! Hell, I can't even imagine what it's like to have that much influence.
Don't get me wrong: I dislike FB too, I don't use it, and I lobby against it when it comes up. But it is, unfortunately, rather big.
But do they? Do they really? I once setup a facebook account for a company (I have never had a personal account). They send that account an e-mail every day (and an SMS). Every day. If I had the e-mail account set to actually load images in the text of the e-mail, would they count those logged hits as an "active user". I suspect (albeit with no actual concrete evidence) that their "user" numbers are significantly over stated via mechanisms such as this.
1.8 billion DAU's. They must be getting something out of it. You're definitely in the minority (even on HN, but I'm sure there are a sizeable number of people here not using it). I think every B2B scenario would expect tel/email. I have never encountered any that asked me to interact over Facebook and I'd be shocked if they did. Is it possible your view of Facebook is skewed by not using it in the last 8 years? A lot of people I know seem to be using it more and more for everyday tasks, for example:
1. Address book, messaging (FB & Whatsapp)
2. News
3. Buying/selling through a newish marketplace feature
4. Event organisation (events & groups)
5. Promoting business and communicating with customers (B2C and vice versa through enabling messenger feature for a page)
1. My phone.
2. Websites (bbc.co.uk/news for a start).
3. Amazon.
4. I use eventbright for public things, email for private functions.
5. That isnt people. Thats the corporate facebook account. And it has never generated a real client, but has created much busywork and false leads.
My point wasn't that there aren't alternatives, it was that people are using Facebook for more and more day to day tasks. As for point 5 I was referencing the fact that instead of calling businesses people are able to message them through Facebook. Nothing to do with leads or generating clients (which again leads back to my point - having not used Facebook in 8 years your idea of what it is and what it is used for is highly skewed).
I made a few tangential points regard globalization in a similar discussion. Basically wondering how globalization which was a very right wing corporatist idea (Sanders calls it a Koch brothers proposal here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0 basically) became a favorite of the new left. And conversely anti-globalization was a top issue for the left along with TPP, NAFTA and other such stuff.
I think it is rather ironic that the new "left" love them globalization all of the sudden, even when their younger brothers were tear-gassed protesting it, just a decade ago or so protesting against it.
(More discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682260 along with a promising book on the subject, 'The Technological Society' by Jacques Ellul suggested by Drumlin. Still waiting for it to come from Amazon)
Think of the poor and how much they have been helped by the globalization of the world is how they were won over. See how many people we've lifted out of poverty because of globalization.
That's not really something people typically argue against when criticizing globalization - the issue is that these people are often helped at the expense of citizens of other countries that pursue a globalist agenda, and that people believe their government has a duty to protect the interests of its citizens above all others.
The countries don't pursue globalist agendas. Their corporations do. And they have benefited immensely because of that. The poor being helped is just a side-effect of that. In the end they care about profits, the side effects are irrelevant to them. It's just a peripheral side effect used for its marketing value, to turn the attention away from self-interest of the people negatively impacted.
Disagree completely. I grew up in pretty "elite", mostly left-wing circles, who were heavily pro-globalization. The reason in a nutshell is "freedom". When your friends growing up come from all over the world, and you understand that with anti-migrant policies, you wouldn't have ever met any of them, you'll be pro-freedom of movement. If you grew up in Alabama, and still live close to where you were born, you won't be.
Maybe none of this is in the interest of factory workers, but that's not what the left is about anymore, and it's not the left's fault either. The world moved on. You will never get the "old left" back. Weakening the influence of corporations will still be popular on the left, but reversing globalization and freedom of movement will hopefully never be a left-wing position again.
The factory-worker type who complains that his job moved to China, while he only buys the cheapest Chinese crap at Walmart, is not the future of the left.
> The factory-worker type who complains that his job moved to China, while he only buys the cheapest Chinese crap at Walmart, is not the future of the left.
What about the poor Mexican farmer who couldn't make a profit because NAFTA stripped away tariffs of import and he now has little chance except to pay a smuggler to take him up north so he can wash toilets or pick cotton away from his family. Is he the future of the left.
> I grew up in pretty "elite", mostly left-wing circles, who were heavily pro-globalization.
I think it is fair to say that "elite" left-wing circles are probably also not the future of the left either.
> The reason in a nutshell is "freedom".
When were elite's freedom ever restricted? Even in the most restrictive dictatorships elites can fly and spend the weekend in New York shopping.
> you'll be pro-freedom of movement.
That's exactly what the left has been fighting for. The PR twisting of the concept of "freedom". Elites and corporations always talk "but don't you want to be friends with everyone and hold hands and trade". What they mean is they want to be able to move without restriction and tariffs and exploit labor or resources in any country they want. The poor and disenfranchised are precisely even more restricted in the new "globalization". The more companies and elites more around, the more inequality they create and the more restriction, passport controls, visas and the poor get.
> What about the poor Mexican farmer who couldn't make a profit because NAFTA stripped away tariffs of import and he now has little chance except to pay a smuggler to take him up north so he can wash toilets or pick cotton away from his family. Is he the future of the left.
That's what welfare and unions are for. Free trade deals are, overall, better for everybody.
The solution is education and retraining, not protectionism. You can see this in South-East Asia, where various countries progressively went from agriculture, to low-tech manufacturing, to high tech, over a few decades. Manufacturing jobs won't come back. Making labor more expensive will just make automation come quicker.
Furthermore, restricting trade will just hurt the US, from a game theory standpoint, since other countries will just compensate by trading more.
> What they mean is they want to be able to move without restriction and tariffs and exploit labor or resources in any country they want.
Globalization doesn't mean letting companies evade taxes. That's a problem that precisely can't be solved individually, and has to be solved on a global level. It can be solved, and is being solved, worldwide.
> When were elite's freedom ever restricted? Even in the most restrictive dictatorships elites can fly and spend the weekend in New York shopping.
That's precisely why the elites are pro-freedom of movement. They couldn't imagine life without it.
I'm having a difficult time squaring your comments here in this line with your comment elsewhere on the thread about Taleb's ideas of anti-fragility and complex systems. Are you making a normative argument about how these "well designed, functional governments" should behave? Because if you are I'm having a hard time parsing how these governments behaving this way would be sufficiently different from how we got here (manifested by Trump, Brexit, FN, AfD) which seems to have exposed the world to some pretty serious systemic risk. Forgive me if I sound obtuse.
> Globalization doesn't mean letting companies evade taxes. That's a problem that precisely can't be solved individually, and has to be solved on a global level. It can be solved, and is being solved, worldwide.
I don't see this as being true at all, and it seem at odds with your earlier point about things "that just can't effectively be solved by bloated entities." There's elements of what you are saying that I agree with (anti-fragility, industrial inertia leading to stagnant workforces, the importance of retraining/education), but on the whole it seems a little one-foot-in-one-foot-out (which may have been intentional, if you're making a subtle point about hedging strategies.)
You're not, I was thinking of how to reconcile the two comments while writing the second one actually. I see globalization as driven by a) inevitable and b) irreversible trends. Like increasing ease of movement, ease of communication, ease of money transfer (Bitcoin). That doesn't exclude decentralization.
For your first point:
"Decentralization" doesn't necessarily entail every country breaking up into a billion tiny Singapores. It just means decisions being made locally, from the bottom up. In the US, it could look like increased states rights. Want to try libertarianism? Want more refugees? Legal drugs? Go ahead. There wouldn't be half the hysteria if willing states could just opt out of welcoming refugees. They'd keep them out, but that would be that, and there wouldn't be much fuss beyond that. The attitude on the right just would be: "glad we avoided that, why go through the trouble?", instead of moral outrage and self-preservation instincts. In complex governmental systems, you inevitably have coercion, which leads to instability.
Someone in the Northern UK might not meet many immigrants, but he doesn't like the idea of someone from migrant-heavy London voting to bring migrants into his little town, if he views it as a threat. It breeds resentment. Democracies, especially complex ones, have to compromise between millions of voters that each want different things. The more people that want different things from official government policy, the more unrest. If you're in a political minority, there's functionally no difference between a government being democratically elected by a majority that is nothing like you, and an authoritarian regime that's accountable to nobody. In both cases, you're (effectively) not represented (how many Clinton supporters feel represented by Trump?). The larger the scale, the more disparate the population, the more important it is to favor local power structures over national ones.
You know the argument that goes "democracy is just war by another name", and is a very nice thing because it allows for "bloodless revolutions"? That's not the case if the country is too complex (population too disparate) and the government represents only 30% of the country rather than 80% (pretty sure only a quarter of the country voted for Trump, the earlier figure is a reference to that, everyone else probably dislikes him to some extent; and in a functional, ideal country, you may not have voted for the current government, but still don't mind them too much, that's what the 80% refers to).
Not sure you mean by "how we got here". Low growth and economic uncertainty seem necessary for populism. In the EU, the euro is the main cause of that (not an optimal currency area, preventing there from being true freedom of movement for labor, as well as messing up the exchange rates and screwing any country that isn't Germany). I'm very pro-EU (and live there) but there's little doubt in my mind that the euro is responsible for much of the rise in populism here, and it's the quintessential example of something done for small incremental efficiency gains while disregarding the systemic aspects. The Greece situation is already worse than the US Great Depression, and resembles the one between creditors and Germany before WW2. It isn't that bad yet, but the only reason is that they had the euro, so inflation and capital flight couldn't destroy the value of their currency. Yet, in all of history, every multinational currency has eventually collapsed. Greece may not have the euro forever. The current debt loads aren't the only problem: if any country leaves, the destruction of wealth caused by inability to settle TARGET-2 balances might cause a cataclysm. In other words, we increased systemic complexity, and vastly increased systemic risk.
For your second point: you can coordinate to solve global problems, without ...
The freedom of movement for capital without the freedom for movement of humans is the problem here—you seem to be indicating that without directly pointing at it.
Exactly. When corporations sell "globalization" they mean something other really than "we can all freely travel and be friends" unless "we" must means elites and other corporations.
Chomsky interestingly also predicted the influx of immigrants from Mexico after NAFTA years back: https://chomsky.info/secrets03/
For example he mentions:
---
In addition, cheap US agricultural exports are expected to drive several million people off the land. That’s going to mean a substantial increase in the unemployed workforce in Mexico, which of course will drive down wages.
---
I think there definitely was an influx of poor farmers being displaced looking for work. That didn't happen as an act of God or just randomly as it may seem. It was predicted and expected.
Neoliberal globalization is precisely the free movement of capital and goods and services to exploit opportunities created by restrictions on the movement of people (whether as consumers or as labor).
Movement of people (labor) at the behest of capital (but not freely on their own)—e.g., various employer-sponsored work visas—is often part of that.
No offense, but I think you're swallowing a lot of right-wing lies about what "the left" believes. "The left" is as opposed to the plutocratic tendencies of globalization as it always has been. Believing in freedom of movement, and that immigration does not lead to the downfall of a society, does not mean having to believe in, for instance, corporate sovereignty.
I am quoting Sanders here not some fringe anarchist nobody has heard of. Chomsky also wrote about it.
> Believing in freedom of movement,
I believe in equality of freedom. So far I haven't seen a lot of poor and disenfranchised being able to move freely. Are you saying Facebook here represents or is a proxy for them and so when it talks about globalization it means anything other than getting more clicks and users who log into it.
> but I think you're swallowing a lot of right-wing lies about what "the left" believes.
I don't listen to much to right wing lies but I don't listen to left wing ones as well. I am happy to not be in either camp. I've always been an outsider. Quite used to it. But here I am trying to even see what left even means anymore. I just made a point that in what "left" means has changed, and I think it is an interesting change.
Chomsky and Sanders are very different from the democratic party. The democratic party is to the left of the GOP but to the right of anything else, including the American people.
Elections have become an us vs them thing focusing on a few issues that will divide us, but mostly the population are significantly to the left of both parties in the US on actual issues.
If you described something exactly like Obamacare, but called it Trumpcare it would be super popular with GOP voters and maybe hated by democrat voters.
Alright good point. Heck Sanders and Chomsky might be centrists in Europe as well probably.
> The democratic party is to the left of the GOP but to the right of anything else,
I think at least in the PR domain they don't shy away from calling themselves "the left". Which I think it is interesting. And the left (if there is one, and that's separate point to talk) hasn't exactly disavowed or pushed against it too much.
> but called it Trumpcare it would be super popular with GOP voters and maybe hated by democrat voters.
The fascinating thing is Trump has picked up "the concern for the workers", NAFTA and TPP as central talking points and ran with it. That was Democrat's bread-and-butter in the past. I am not sure if it was is sincere or pure opportunism (he did pull out of TPP, so that's something...). But I can't deny that it was a good strategy for him.
Even more interesting to me is to see that as soon as he did those things, the new "left" almost immediately reverted to talk about "how TPP is great" and "NAFTA is a good thing" and workers are just idiots brainwashed by fake news and such.
I was watching Reddit's /r/politics and after TPP pull-out and there were posts explicitly saying "we have to support TPP because Trump is against". There is something fascinating there, I think. Remembering the DNC primaries with TPP signs everywhere. And then few months later "what do you mean, we love the TPP".
Trump is running on "the concern for the voters", but in my humble opinion none of his solutions are going to be good for workers.
There will be less healthcare, less worker protections and less taxes paid by rich people.
The TPP is interesting in that as I understand it was meant to be a big political bargain to fence in China with a lot of concessions give to large cooperations.
Another thing is that free trade in general is good for poor workers somewhere, but unless it comes with some agreement on worker protections they will all be eroded in the long run.
Both left wing and right wing people can find something to like there, it depends on how it is implemented. Kind of like UBI which the far right and the far left in theory agree to, they just use the same name for widely different things.
The democratic party is to the left of the GOP but to the right of anything else, including the American people.
I'm assuming you mean big-D Democratic Party. When you say American people, what do you mean? A majority? How much of one? What are you basing this on? Polls? If so, which ones? Something else?
I'm pushing a little because the statement seems to lack nuance, which is something I think we so desperately need in American political discourse.
I agree, I am basing it on things I vaguely remember having read and a tiny bit out of my ass. Chomsky uses this a consistent talking point, sorry again no reference, that the polls are consistently to the left of the Democrats.
I wish I could give you a better answer, and will concede my documentation is lacking. I do believe this is true based on my conversations with Democrat and GOP voters when living here. Most people are fairly leftist when it comes to specifics, well except paying taxes.
Thanks for providing your source. Having lived on both coasts and the Midwest, I've met a lot of people of a variety of political stripes, and wouldn't agree with this unqualified assessment.
Ideas very similar to globalization have a long history in socialist thought. L'Internationale is a left-wing anthem for a reason. See also the conservative conspiracy theories about the New World Order.
I'm not sure it's even true that the left wing anti-globalization movement is actually smaller rather than better dealt with at events like the G20 and/or perhaps less reported on.
>Ideas very similar to globalization have a long history in socialist thought.
Yes, it's important to note that Hitler started out as a Socialist, at the dawn of Socialist thought. He differed with them on the idea of globalization and multiculturalism. As it turns out that's a pretty huge ideological split, and in Hitler's case, it became a violent one. He basically said: "screw you guys, I'm going to start my own Socialist Party - with blackjack, and hookers. And racial purity, global war, and genocide."
That's why you get rightwingers accusing the Left of being "Nazis" because the "Z" in the NAZI acronym stood for the German word for Socialism.
As the Nazis began to gain ground in Germany; they used propaganda tools to tell Germans what they wanted to hear: "you're a 'master race', and all others are inferior", and "We'll get rid of these foreign influences, and degenerates of other races, who are the cause of all your problems!"
At the time, REAL socialists ran counter protests, and would even riot at Nazi meetings and demonstrations, and there was a lot of civil violence over this issue. (Which is today, romanticized heavily by the far-left, anarchist, and 'antifa' movements). In their minds, WWII was a large-scale playing out of this conflict, between Soviet Socialists, and German Nazis, who lost. The result was the bombing of much of Europe (and especially Berlin) to Rubble. Millions dead.
The rise of America's free-enterprise system was seen as a repudiation of these two extremes of thought (Socialism vs Nazism). And became an extreme viewpoint all it's own. It became what the Socialists, and Nazis were rebelling against, and now we're repeating the whole thing all over again.
I think anyone who thinks they are "left wing" AND anti-globalist, is ignorant of history, and quite confused. Part of that is due to the anti-globalist propaganda, which mostly uses the argument: "these foreigners are causing all your problems - let's build a wall and get rid of them". (can't really argue for 'racial superiority'; because it's so easily disproven - very nearly nobody who thinks they're "Aryan" can actually trace their ancestry back long enough to make a case that they're not a mongrel just like the rest of us - the only way they can accept this ideology is to be in denial).
When will the Bond villains that run the largest tech companies realize that they can't own the Internet? Zuckerberg, your algorithms turned half my relatives into crazy Trump supporters that don't talk to the other half, is that your idea of bringing families together?
I like this idea of technical organs, that are enmeshed with notions of self-hood.
Another person who has been talking in this way is the philosopher Bernard Steigler, he uses this term 'general organology' in an attempt to rehabilitate our technological entanglements from the skeptical cul-de-sac demonstrated by the OP and supported by most recent philosophy (e.g. Adorno, Debord, although crucially not Walter Benjamin)
Although I am sure he would be equally vitriolic about FB the general overview of Steigler's thought here is a neat compliment to the POV of the OP.
This is what services like urbit are after. If you don't understand urbit, think of it as a step towards what this post is advocating. Whether they can escape from the gravity well of their own obfuscation is, however, another matter.
The mainstream view is that for the world to be sustainable and stable, it needs to be more centralized and governed from the top.
That doesn't work, because the world is a complex system. It needs to be more functional, not more centralized.
The NNTaleb view is that to be sustainable and stable, the world needs to be decentralized and antifragile. In other words: not 1 government, but 100 well designed, functional governments with small, local democratic governance.
This seems necessary since societies are changing more rapidly, dealing with more problems and crises than before that just can't be effectively solved by bloated entities (see the EU), can't adapt quickly enough to various changes (see all the places in the US without fast internet), and aren't future-oriented enough because of inertia (see Singapore as a counterexample). It also seems more realistic than the article.
Edit: I didn't expect this response to blow up, so let me address more of the article:
1) Completely disagree that technology is "part of us". Amazon isn't a part of me, just a company I shop at. The closest thing we have to "explants" are the platforms we use, like Facebook or WhatsApp. The article seems heavy on buzzwords and light on common-sense. Encrypted messaging is the best solution, to maintain freedom of communication and reduce corporations' influence. That only requires installing Signal or WhatsApp, not "creating a new world".
2) People are not "property". You are free to share what you want. Others are free, too. If you want to work (Naval-style) towards decentralized, encrypted platforms, that's a step in the right direction. Doesn't require buzzwords either.
3) It seems like the article's worldview is based in an even greater influence of technology over our lives (as if the author realized that technology isn't really part of us, but wanted to make it so). The personal cloud would be hosted by "individual organizations", but what makes you think that 1 or 2 orgs won't emerge on top, and cause the exact same problem again?
> That doesn't work, because the world is a complex system.
You've buried an awful lot in that sentence without justifying any of it. I could just as easily say "decentralization and local governance don't work because the world is a complex system" and sound just as correct.
The bigger the banks, the more centralized the banks, the more fragile the banking system. Same for governments. Systemic risk increases as you increase the system's complexity, and you increase its complexity when you centralize it.
I think we need some kind of arbiter of last resort when there is contention for resources or other things which do not respect borders (like climate, resource depletion, pollution, disease, etc).
Ok, but by your same logic it also means not a few monopolistic multinational silicon valley companies dominating our digital lives. These companies are already more powerful than many governments.
The underlying issue is that while decentralization makes one more stable and less susceptible to unexpected crises in the long term, centralization is almost always stronger and more efficient in the short term. Diverse food supplies, separate cultures, multiple governments may be necessary for long term human survival, but historically, the monoculture gobbled those up as soon as it has the technology. That, and you could argue that for some problems, large scale cooperation is always going to be needed, and these problems could surface on the very, very long term; i.e., a decentralized world might be antifragile for most problems, but if a meteor hits the Earth, you'd wish it had been coordinated enough to colonize Mars.
The question is how we maintain decentralization even as all short-term goals push us towards monoculture, and without completely destroying the long-term benefits of large civilization (i.e., I'm not an anarcho-primitivist.) And the only answers I can think of are bizarre and science-fictional, but I suppose that doesn't mean they can't come true.
Not a bad rebuttal, I have to agree that Zuckerberg is trying to position Facebook as the end all be all of social contact in the future. I don't think that's a good solution.
But in reference to this quote:
>The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.
That's going a little far, filter bubbles and propaganda have existed since forever. The public sphere was never a panacea for these problems. Certainly with facebook and social media it's changed the whole landscape, and perhaps made it worse given what happened during the last election. But returning social interactions to the public sphere isn't going to entirely fix the dissemination of fake news or suddenly pop the filter bubbles we live in.
If social media were outlawed tomorrow it might weaken filter bubbles, but a suburban upper middle class republican from Kansas is still going to be getting way different info and building a much different world view than a barista in Brooklyn would.
> That's going a little far, filter bubbles and propaganda have existed since forever. The public sphere was never a panacea for these problems.
I'm not sure the kinds of bubbles we have aren't brand new. The bubbles used to map pretty closely to geography and political structures. The bubbles now are oriented around where our information lives, not where we physically are.
Also, I think you're overstepping with 'panacea'. I don't think anyone who believes in decentralized life thinks universal panaceas even necessarily exist. But it can still be true that central planning has displaced local living without fulfilling all the same purposes. And if so, the result could be a net negative.
But returning social interactions to the public sphere isn't going to entirely fix the dissemination of fake news or suddenly pop the filter bubbles we live in.
It doesn't need to be entirely fixed. There's no need to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I think that the "private infrastructure posing as public space" is a real and serious problem. When all complaints of censorship/manipulation/etc on a social media site of any reasonable size is thoughtlessly brushed aside with "their site, their rules", that is a very unhealthy environment being created.
What's boring here is there's no suggestion as to how this utopia of digital parks can come to be. Even if we have the resources to invest in development and operations, who without a profit motive, will devise the marketing campaign for privacy and common good?
This guy wants a world like Craigslist, but Airbnb already taught us that free and p2p is easily subsumed by slick and centralized.
In BitTorrent and Usenet we've had great, free p2p media distribution for years. How does iTunes, Netflix and the rest compete? By doing all the evil, centralized, corporate stuff -- like advertising -- the pirates won't do because pirates have morals.
I feel like we're living in The Circle to some degree.
I hadn't read Zuck's manifesto until now. I literally laughed out loud reading it. It makes me wonder if he ever actually looks at the news feeds regular people see.
The reason I quit Facebook was precisely because its uninformed and non-inclusive. From what my wife tells me, nothing has changed. Like-minded people reinforce each other and people with conflicting viewpoints just argue.
I hope Zuck at least has good intentions with his post and he's just slightly short-sighted.
Im not sure what mark expects his user base to accomplish given that he believes they are "dumb fucks." I know people like mark so i know that he still thinks ordinary people are dumb fucks and that the only reason behind any action he takes is the advancement of his own position in life and business.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadI'd also submit that even if you trust Zuckerberg to be a benevolent king, he won't be king forever. He may grow bored of Facebook and move on, have an untimely accident or a poor diagnosis...these are all events that can put all things Facebook in the hands of somebody far less (presumably) benevolent.
Imagine it in the hands of a Larry Ellison. Or Martin Shkreli. Or Keith Alexander. Or Dick Cheney, if you will.
facebook needs to be torn down. It is a toxic apparatus, being used against the population.
Just saying.
Mark is just the last incarnation of people that scratched the social itch. If Facebook failed, we'd still have G+ or MySpace. At this point, he seems like an inevitability.
And the names I listed are just examples; my point remains that one cannot predict who will hold the reins in the future. We can debate how much of a monster Zuckerberg may be, but I'm convinced that there can be somebody much worse in charge.
I think the most productive thing most of us can do in the short term is to convince everyone we know to stop using that platform.
Like we all knew this was an option of where we were going but to see it actually happening is kind of surreal.
Source? I agree with your ideas overall but I'm genuinely interested in this aspect.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/facebook-...
I think calling four full time guards a "small private army" is a little hyperbolic, but it is safe to say he is heavily protected.
So I'm not necessarily saying that we're living out a mashup between Shadowrun and that Simpsons episode where Homer starts working for a supervillain, but I'm also not ruling it out.
Private armies for the wealthy aren't new either: see the Pinkerton Agency.
Note that Fordlandia fell apart and the Pinkertons were outlawed when people realized what a terrible idea that was. But I guess those who don't learn their history are doomed to repeat it.
This has been a thing for over a decade now. Blackwater/Xe/Academi. The guy who founded this company (and got the US kicked out of Iraq), is our Education Secretary's brother. He is being consulted to provide extra security for Trump outside of the Secret Service.
Mark Zuckerberg and others like him do what they do best, it's up to the 'masses' to develop critical thinking about their everyday actions and impacts. It's easy to blame the Emperor, much more difficult to admit our part in putting him into power.
Thus, once we acknowledge this simple fact, we can also CHOOSE not to use it anymore.
That's the core of my point I tried to make originally.
Thanks for your patience and feedback.
And the harping on that choice is, by people much more malicious than you, designed to disempower movements to rein in organizations like Facebook, because--hey, people can just not use it. (Even though choosing to not use it doesn't do anything.)
You're providing cover for a narrative that wants to hurt you.
But what I find most interesting about this reply/rant, is that it - like most of left, always seems to envision a world without power. And you can't confront entrenched power, without seizing power, and using it to transform society.
The left recognizes, correctly, that the people in power - the leaders - are not angels. So the left wants them gone - wants there to be nobody in power.
The problem is that the people who are not in power also are not angels. Left to themselves, a fair number of them will find ways to harm (economically or even physically) people around them. They need someone with power to restrain them.
But then you're back to having people in power, and they're not angels...
The way I see it, left doesn't want people to have power. So it limits politician's power. And then, the financial/corporate interest seize all powers, and use it as they will.
But any legal fiction can be simply signed-away into non-existence. There is no technical reason this can't happen. In theory.
The problem is, there is no political will to ever actually do it, even when it's necessary. Our entire facade of legality rests on political willpower.
This isn't to say that such a world is easy to imagine, or easy to bring about.
Fuck that.
So when I see zuck going on about revolutions I have to wonder where he gets his information. Does he really think a large and growing percentage of the planet uses his website for everyday tasks? That's marketing spin. I think reality is much more humble.
Yes. Because it's true. Facebook has more than a BILLION active users. Let that sink in for a minute.
Frankly, if something I made had reached even 5% of the whole human population, I'd consider that freaking huge! Hell, I can't even imagine what it's like to have that much influence.
Don't get me wrong: I dislike FB too, I don't use it, and I lobby against it when it comes up. But it is, unfortunately, rather big.
1. Address book, messaging (FB & Whatsapp)
2. News
3. Buying/selling through a newish marketplace feature
4. Event organisation (events & groups)
5. Promoting business and communicating with customers (B2C and vice versa through enabling messenger feature for a page)
I think it is rather ironic that the new "left" love them globalization all of the sudden, even when their younger brothers were tear-gassed protesting it, just a decade ago or so protesting against it.
(More discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682260 along with a promising book on the subject, 'The Technological Society' by Jacques Ellul suggested by Drumlin. Still waiting for it to come from Amazon)
The best thing we can do is make sure that whatever power structures we guide into place during that process serve the largest coalition possible.
Maybe none of this is in the interest of factory workers, but that's not what the left is about anymore, and it's not the left's fault either. The world moved on. You will never get the "old left" back. Weakening the influence of corporations will still be popular on the left, but reversing globalization and freedom of movement will hopefully never be a left-wing position again.
The factory-worker type who complains that his job moved to China, while he only buys the cheapest Chinese crap at Walmart, is not the future of the left.
What about the poor Mexican farmer who couldn't make a profit because NAFTA stripped away tariffs of import and he now has little chance except to pay a smuggler to take him up north so he can wash toilets or pick cotton away from his family. Is he the future of the left.
> I grew up in pretty "elite", mostly left-wing circles, who were heavily pro-globalization.
I think it is fair to say that "elite" left-wing circles are probably also not the future of the left either.
> The reason in a nutshell is "freedom".
When were elite's freedom ever restricted? Even in the most restrictive dictatorships elites can fly and spend the weekend in New York shopping.
> you'll be pro-freedom of movement.
That's exactly what the left has been fighting for. The PR twisting of the concept of "freedom". Elites and corporations always talk "but don't you want to be friends with everyone and hold hands and trade". What they mean is they want to be able to move without restriction and tariffs and exploit labor or resources in any country they want. The poor and disenfranchised are precisely even more restricted in the new "globalization". The more companies and elites more around, the more inequality they create and the more restriction, passport controls, visas and the poor get.
That's what welfare and unions are for. Free trade deals are, overall, better for everybody.
The solution is education and retraining, not protectionism. You can see this in South-East Asia, where various countries progressively went from agriculture, to low-tech manufacturing, to high tech, over a few decades. Manufacturing jobs won't come back. Making labor more expensive will just make automation come quicker.
Furthermore, restricting trade will just hurt the US, from a game theory standpoint, since other countries will just compensate by trading more.
> What they mean is they want to be able to move without restriction and tariffs and exploit labor or resources in any country they want.
Globalization doesn't mean letting companies evade taxes. That's a problem that precisely can't be solved individually, and has to be solved on a global level. It can be solved, and is being solved, worldwide.
> When were elite's freedom ever restricted? Even in the most restrictive dictatorships elites can fly and spend the weekend in New York shopping.
That's precisely why the elites are pro-freedom of movement. They couldn't imagine life without it.
> Globalization doesn't mean letting companies evade taxes. That's a problem that precisely can't be solved individually, and has to be solved on a global level. It can be solved, and is being solved, worldwide.
I don't see this as being true at all, and it seem at odds with your earlier point about things "that just can't effectively be solved by bloated entities." There's elements of what you are saying that I agree with (anti-fragility, industrial inertia leading to stagnant workforces, the importance of retraining/education), but on the whole it seems a little one-foot-in-one-foot-out (which may have been intentional, if you're making a subtle point about hedging strategies.)
Again, apologies if I sound obtuse.
You're not, I was thinking of how to reconcile the two comments while writing the second one actually. I see globalization as driven by a) inevitable and b) irreversible trends. Like increasing ease of movement, ease of communication, ease of money transfer (Bitcoin). That doesn't exclude decentralization.
For your first point:
"Decentralization" doesn't necessarily entail every country breaking up into a billion tiny Singapores. It just means decisions being made locally, from the bottom up. In the US, it could look like increased states rights. Want to try libertarianism? Want more refugees? Legal drugs? Go ahead. There wouldn't be half the hysteria if willing states could just opt out of welcoming refugees. They'd keep them out, but that would be that, and there wouldn't be much fuss beyond that. The attitude on the right just would be: "glad we avoided that, why go through the trouble?", instead of moral outrage and self-preservation instincts. In complex governmental systems, you inevitably have coercion, which leads to instability.
Someone in the Northern UK might not meet many immigrants, but he doesn't like the idea of someone from migrant-heavy London voting to bring migrants into his little town, if he views it as a threat. It breeds resentment. Democracies, especially complex ones, have to compromise between millions of voters that each want different things. The more people that want different things from official government policy, the more unrest. If you're in a political minority, there's functionally no difference between a government being democratically elected by a majority that is nothing like you, and an authoritarian regime that's accountable to nobody. In both cases, you're (effectively) not represented (how many Clinton supporters feel represented by Trump?). The larger the scale, the more disparate the population, the more important it is to favor local power structures over national ones.
You know the argument that goes "democracy is just war by another name", and is a very nice thing because it allows for "bloodless revolutions"? That's not the case if the country is too complex (population too disparate) and the government represents only 30% of the country rather than 80% (pretty sure only a quarter of the country voted for Trump, the earlier figure is a reference to that, everyone else probably dislikes him to some extent; and in a functional, ideal country, you may not have voted for the current government, but still don't mind them too much, that's what the 80% refers to).
Not sure you mean by "how we got here". Low growth and economic uncertainty seem necessary for populism. In the EU, the euro is the main cause of that (not an optimal currency area, preventing there from being true freedom of movement for labor, as well as messing up the exchange rates and screwing any country that isn't Germany). I'm very pro-EU (and live there) but there's little doubt in my mind that the euro is responsible for much of the rise in populism here, and it's the quintessential example of something done for small incremental efficiency gains while disregarding the systemic aspects. The Greece situation is already worse than the US Great Depression, and resembles the one between creditors and Germany before WW2. It isn't that bad yet, but the only reason is that they had the euro, so inflation and capital flight couldn't destroy the value of their currency. Yet, in all of history, every multinational currency has eventually collapsed. Greece may not have the euro forever. The current debt loads aren't the only problem: if any country leaves, the destruction of wealth caused by inability to settle TARGET-2 balances might cause a cataclysm. In other words, we increased systemic complexity, and vastly increased systemic risk.
For your second point: you can coordinate to solve global problems, without ...
Chomsky interestingly also predicted the influx of immigrants from Mexico after NAFTA years back: https://chomsky.info/secrets03/
For example he mentions:
---
In addition, cheap US agricultural exports are expected to drive several million people off the land. That’s going to mean a substantial increase in the unemployed workforce in Mexico, which of course will drive down wages.
---
I think there definitely was an influx of poor farmers being displaced looking for work. That didn't happen as an act of God or just randomly as it may seem. It was predicted and expected.
Movement of people (labor) at the behest of capital (but not freely on their own)—e.g., various employer-sponsored work visas—is often part of that.
> Believing in freedom of movement,
I believe in equality of freedom. So far I haven't seen a lot of poor and disenfranchised being able to move freely. Are you saying Facebook here represents or is a proxy for them and so when it talks about globalization it means anything other than getting more clicks and users who log into it.
> but I think you're swallowing a lot of right-wing lies about what "the left" believes.
I don't listen to much to right wing lies but I don't listen to left wing ones as well. I am happy to not be in either camp. I've always been an outsider. Quite used to it. But here I am trying to even see what left even means anymore. I just made a point that in what "left" means has changed, and I think it is an interesting change.
Elections have become an us vs them thing focusing on a few issues that will divide us, but mostly the population are significantly to the left of both parties in the US on actual issues.
If you described something exactly like Obamacare, but called it Trumpcare it would be super popular with GOP voters and maybe hated by democrat voters.
> The democratic party is to the left of the GOP but to the right of anything else,
I think at least in the PR domain they don't shy away from calling themselves "the left". Which I think it is interesting. And the left (if there is one, and that's separate point to talk) hasn't exactly disavowed or pushed against it too much.
> but called it Trumpcare it would be super popular with GOP voters and maybe hated by democrat voters.
The fascinating thing is Trump has picked up "the concern for the workers", NAFTA and TPP as central talking points and ran with it. That was Democrat's bread-and-butter in the past. I am not sure if it was is sincere or pure opportunism (he did pull out of TPP, so that's something...). But I can't deny that it was a good strategy for him.
Even more interesting to me is to see that as soon as he did those things, the new "left" almost immediately reverted to talk about "how TPP is great" and "NAFTA is a good thing" and workers are just idiots brainwashed by fake news and such.
I was watching Reddit's /r/politics and after TPP pull-out and there were posts explicitly saying "we have to support TPP because Trump is against". There is something fascinating there, I think. Remembering the DNC primaries with TPP signs everywhere. And then few months later "what do you mean, we love the TPP".
There will be less healthcare, less worker protections and less taxes paid by rich people.
The TPP is interesting in that as I understand it was meant to be a big political bargain to fence in China with a lot of concessions give to large cooperations.
Another thing is that free trade in general is good for poor workers somewhere, but unless it comes with some agreement on worker protections they will all be eroded in the long run.
Both left wing and right wing people can find something to like there, it depends on how it is implemented. Kind of like UBI which the far right and the far left in theory agree to, they just use the same name for widely different things.
I'm assuming you mean big-D Democratic Party. When you say American people, what do you mean? A majority? How much of one? What are you basing this on? Polls? If so, which ones? Something else?
I'm pushing a little because the statement seems to lack nuance, which is something I think we so desperately need in American political discourse.
I wish I could give you a better answer, and will concede my documentation is lacking. I do believe this is true based on my conversations with Democrat and GOP voters when living here. Most people are fairly leftist when it comes to specifics, well except paying taxes.
I'm not sure it's even true that the left wing anti-globalization movement is actually smaller rather than better dealt with at events like the G20 and/or perhaps less reported on.
Yes, it's important to note that Hitler started out as a Socialist, at the dawn of Socialist thought. He differed with them on the idea of globalization and multiculturalism. As it turns out that's a pretty huge ideological split, and in Hitler's case, it became a violent one. He basically said: "screw you guys, I'm going to start my own Socialist Party - with blackjack, and hookers. And racial purity, global war, and genocide."
That's why you get rightwingers accusing the Left of being "Nazis" because the "Z" in the NAZI acronym stood for the German word for Socialism.
As the Nazis began to gain ground in Germany; they used propaganda tools to tell Germans what they wanted to hear: "you're a 'master race', and all others are inferior", and "We'll get rid of these foreign influences, and degenerates of other races, who are the cause of all your problems!"
At the time, REAL socialists ran counter protests, and would even riot at Nazi meetings and demonstrations, and there was a lot of civil violence over this issue. (Which is today, romanticized heavily by the far-left, anarchist, and 'antifa' movements). In their minds, WWII was a large-scale playing out of this conflict, between Soviet Socialists, and German Nazis, who lost. The result was the bombing of much of Europe (and especially Berlin) to Rubble. Millions dead.
The rise of America's free-enterprise system was seen as a repudiation of these two extremes of thought (Socialism vs Nazism). And became an extreme viewpoint all it's own. It became what the Socialists, and Nazis were rebelling against, and now we're repeating the whole thing all over again.
I think anyone who thinks they are "left wing" AND anti-globalist, is ignorant of history, and quite confused. Part of that is due to the anti-globalist propaganda, which mostly uses the argument: "these foreigners are causing all your problems - let's build a wall and get rid of them". (can't really argue for 'racial superiority'; because it's so easily disproven - very nearly nobody who thinks they're "Aryan" can actually trace their ancestry back long enough to make a case that they're not a mongrel just like the rest of us - the only way they can accept this ideology is to be in denial).
Another person who has been talking in this way is the philosopher Bernard Steigler, he uses this term 'general organology' in an attempt to rehabilitate our technological entanglements from the skeptical cul-de-sac demonstrated by the OP and supported by most recent philosophy (e.g. Adorno, Debord, although crucially not Walter Benjamin)
Although I am sure he would be equally vitriolic about FB the general overview of Steigler's thought here is a neat compliment to the POV of the OP.
http://nootechnics.org/general-organology-the-co-individuati...
I have corrupted this angle a little bit and tried to treat Facebook with kid gloves here:
https://iainmait.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.htm...
That doesn't work, because the world is a complex system. It needs to be more functional, not more centralized.
The NNTaleb view is that to be sustainable and stable, the world needs to be decentralized and antifragile. In other words: not 1 government, but 100 well designed, functional governments with small, local democratic governance.
This seems necessary since societies are changing more rapidly, dealing with more problems and crises than before that just can't be effectively solved by bloated entities (see the EU), can't adapt quickly enough to various changes (see all the places in the US without fast internet), and aren't future-oriented enough because of inertia (see Singapore as a counterexample). It also seems more realistic than the article.
Edit: I didn't expect this response to blow up, so let me address more of the article:
1) Completely disagree that technology is "part of us". Amazon isn't a part of me, just a company I shop at. The closest thing we have to "explants" are the platforms we use, like Facebook or WhatsApp. The article seems heavy on buzzwords and light on common-sense. Encrypted messaging is the best solution, to maintain freedom of communication and reduce corporations' influence. That only requires installing Signal or WhatsApp, not "creating a new world".
2) People are not "property". You are free to share what you want. Others are free, too. If you want to work (Naval-style) towards decentralized, encrypted platforms, that's a step in the right direction. Doesn't require buzzwords either.
3) It seems like the article's worldview is based in an even greater influence of technology over our lives (as if the author realized that technology isn't really part of us, but wanted to make it so). The personal cloud would be hosted by "individual organizations", but what makes you think that 1 or 2 orgs won't emerge on top, and cause the exact same problem again?
You've buried an awful lot in that sentence without justifying any of it. I could just as easily say "decentralization and local governance don't work because the world is a complex system" and sound just as correct.
The bigger the banks, the more centralized the banks, the more fragile the banking system. Same for governments. Systemic risk increases as you increase the system's complexity, and you increase its complexity when you centralize it.
Explain what's missing then.
The question is how we maintain decentralization even as all short-term goals push us towards monoculture, and without completely destroying the long-term benefits of large civilization (i.e., I'm not an anarcho-primitivist.) And the only answers I can think of are bizarre and science-fictional, but I suppose that doesn't mean they can't come true.
But in reference to this quote:
>The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.
That's going a little far, filter bubbles and propaganda have existed since forever. The public sphere was never a panacea for these problems. Certainly with facebook and social media it's changed the whole landscape, and perhaps made it worse given what happened during the last election. But returning social interactions to the public sphere isn't going to entirely fix the dissemination of fake news or suddenly pop the filter bubbles we live in.
If social media were outlawed tomorrow it might weaken filter bubbles, but a suburban upper middle class republican from Kansas is still going to be getting way different info and building a much different world view than a barista in Brooklyn would.
I'm not sure the kinds of bubbles we have aren't brand new. The bubbles used to map pretty closely to geography and political structures. The bubbles now are oriented around where our information lives, not where we physically are.
Also, I think you're overstepping with 'panacea'. I don't think anyone who believes in decentralized life thinks universal panaceas even necessarily exist. But it can still be true that central planning has displaced local living without fulfilling all the same purposes. And if so, the result could be a net negative.
It doesn't need to be entirely fixed. There's no need to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I think that the "private infrastructure posing as public space" is a real and serious problem. When all complaints of censorship/manipulation/etc on a social media site of any reasonable size is thoughtlessly brushed aside with "their site, their rules", that is a very unhealthy environment being created.
This guy wants a world like Craigslist, but Airbnb already taught us that free and p2p is easily subsumed by slick and centralized.
In BitTorrent and Usenet we've had great, free p2p media distribution for years. How does iTunes, Netflix and the rest compete? By doing all the evil, centralized, corporate stuff -- like advertising -- the pirates won't do because pirates have morals.
I hadn't read Zuck's manifesto until now. I literally laughed out loud reading it. It makes me wonder if he ever actually looks at the news feeds regular people see.
The reason I quit Facebook was precisely because its uninformed and non-inclusive. From what my wife tells me, nothing has changed. Like-minded people reinforce each other and people with conflicting viewpoints just argue.
I hope Zuck at least has good intentions with his post and he's just slightly short-sighted.
This is Urbit.