Nearly everyone who witnessed WW2 is dead. It's harder to sell nationalism or strong men politicians when you have a segment of the population who understand the dangers. Learning about WW1 or WW2 through a book or a video doesn't cut it. Not like living it.
That's an oversimplification. You really can't overstate how great the pacifist sentiment was after WW1. That's one reason why the rest of Europe allowed the Germans to illegally rebuild their military (not to mention, to annex/invade). European politicians didn't dare to do anything because most Europeans demanded peace (eg: "peace for our time")
Another opinion on this is that both the West and the Soviet Union were hoping to use Germany's growing military might against each other. Everyone ended up paying dearly for that.
Right, but the key point is there were people alive who remembered WWI, and yet Nazis and Fascists came to power. The details are complicated, but the key point is that remembering the horror of WWI did not stop it from happening.
Everybody loves to trash Nazi Germany yet barely make a peep when presented Bolshevist thought. Could it be that those you can't openly question are such because they hold immense power in our society?
Could it be that...
... Hitler was right all along?
Nevermind the down revisions in "victims" at Auschwitz and others were never reflected in the 6 million trope constantly flaunted around. Nevermind the fact 6 million was thrown around in jewish publications for decades before Hitler took power. Nevermind the supposed drop in jewish numbers isn't reflected in worldwide census numbers through the before, during, and after periods. Adolf Hitler is Emmanuel Goldstein, and must be suppressed for the good of Oceania! He must be brought out and tarred everytime a European opposes a globalist future.
Watch this comment be deleted and this account possibly banned. Won't matter, I browse and post over Tor anyhow and can easily create another. Rule 1) of the internet: never put your real info in the boxes.
The rest of us that sees the world a tad more nuanced than whatever CNN spoonfeeds us realizes that there have been numerous conflict, ethnical-cleansing and wars since WWII.
You can make the same comment on why Marxist thought is on an apparent upswing among young Internet users, now that it's 25+ years since the USSR fell.
Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been far more common modes of human governance.
I don't disagree with the point, but there's a blindness it.
It's kind of like saying paganism and heathenism have been far more common modes of spirituality than religion.
In reality, there have been a very large number of "modes of governance" that you (or they) can classify lots of different ways. The way the author chose to categorise them is "our sytem" and "bad systems."
To a Marxist, liberal democracy goes into the "Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule" bucket.
A current Chinese cultural narrative is thousands of years of empire, until the ccp.
It could actually be argued that many monarchies were a rough form of democracy for the nobility, where the king only got to reign as long as he didn't make himself so unpopular as to make the aristocracy band together and depose him.
Well... Revolutionariea are always interested in revolutions.
The word "Democracy" is tricky because people with radically different politics generally disagree about what is democratic.
Allowing for that... I wonder what gave Malcolm the impression that democratic revolutions involve less blood? The French and American Revolutions were very bloody (especially th french).
The American civil war was a revolution in some sense, democratic in some sense too (in that black suffrage was on the line).
You might call the 1989 revolutions democratic. Maybe even the revolutions of 1848. If you're not of the "liberal-demicratic" persuasion maybe you think Mao or Castro were the true democrats. Both of their revolutions were bloody.
Elsewhere in that speech Malcolm (famously) addresses the African decolonisation revolutions, pointing out the bloodshed.
Revolting against monarchy to establish democracy is not a 'democratic revolution', that is a term used to describe a revolution that occurs within a democracy. The American civil war might qualify, but none of the rest of your examples come close.
> I wonder what gave Malcolm the impression that democratic revolutions involve less blood?
It sounds like he intended to use the term "revolution" to simply describe a transfer of power, against the will of the previously ruling party.
Democratic transfers of power are unique in that they generally occur without violence. We might take this for granted today, but it is in fact something that must be cherished.
> Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been far more common modes of human governance.
Maybe the statement would read better as:
> Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been far more effective modes of human governance.
You can't deny the monarchies/democracies of Europe and the oligarchies of Russia/USA have kept a relative peace for developed countries in the last 70 years.
It's also worth noting on this note that of the systems that proceeded democracy, there also was not uniformity. There were many times and places where the "king" was relatively weak, and relied on nobles for support. There were times and places where the authoritarian that mattered to an individual wasn't something like a centralized government, but rather more of a clan leader (and so someone he/she would know personally). It is extremely common in human history that people were citizens of a city-state rather than a larger nation or empire. So even if one claims that the nation-state-based-liberal-democracy is on its way out, it's not like there's only one thing that could replace it.
Technology offers power, and power rewards those that use it. This applies as equally to modern tech as it did to older tech like literacy, so there isnt much point in focusing on that aspect.
The meritocracy dream is that everyone unites to use power not only for themselves, but in support of a degree of equality (some versions want equal results, others strive for equal opportunity, but for this argument those are the same basic goal). After all, it is in our each of own interests to avoid a concentration of power in others that could harm us.
But in reality, people are lazy. We want to be comfortable. Governments (or other social bodies) exist to exercise our power so we dont have to worry about every detail. Power concentration is the easiest result, regardless of system of governance.
Power concentration isnt inherently bad, but it is ripe to be exploited, because the ultimate watchdogs over it - us, the common people - dont want that job.
I read a great statement here a few months ago, that went something like "modern democracy isnt the people deciding what govt does, it is the people deciding the boundaries within which govt operates."
I've been pondering that a ton lately. It shows how I, a US liberal, the many libertarians here, authoritarian conservatives, fiscal conservatives, European-style liberals, and most everyone else can all be so baffled by each others' views. We evaluate not the rules we want, but how we expect the govt to behave within those boundaries.
Unfortunately, while this eases my mind on how otherwise intelligent people want "dumb" things, it also suggests that there is no reliable system: we require a system as a matter of scale, be it loose or rigid. Any system exists because of a degree of trust that the system will not be manipulated or abused. ("System" here includes any interactions as simple as expecting contracts to be followed, so minimal govt is just a different system) You are rewarded for abusing the system. After the abuse is painful enough, people will demand a new system. Advocates for any given system will argue they have protections ("minimal government", "oversight", etc) but those rely on people being informed and active enough to repel abuse...and we're not.
Great points, and thanks for recapping others' illuminating points about government.
I recently attended Ethereum DevCon and heard a succinct definition of decentralization from Prof. David Lee Kuo Chuen that I've been pondering in the week since: "Decentralization is dynamic, continuous distribution of trust."
This may be the core of why people are excited about new consensus algorithms like blockchain: we've seen how static, centralized systems of trust distribution eventually break, and the discontinuity of trust that results is very harmful to societies (e.g. bad kings, bad presidents, corruption in parties, collusion of central banks, hacked central servers, etc.)
I think we are still in very early days (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVZxjVJz4ds haha) but "blockchain" is the beginning of something new that has to do with helping solve social issues in a new way, with dynamic distribution of trust at the center of that solution.
Except "blockchain" doesn't decentralize anything. It's decentralized in the sense that none of the big powers of the world care to try and take over things like Bitcoin, but it is fundamentally based on rewarding those who can gather the most autonomous resources.
Blockchains are one of the worst methods to decentralize anything, because they don't require any consensus from the "governed" - they do exactly what whoever has ansible/puppet/chef connected to the most computers wants them to do.
EDIT: Let's put a very real example on this - if blockchains controlled anything powerful, then there becomes two superpowers - nvidia and AMD. All they do is retool their business cycle so GPUs coming off the line go into N-months of burn-in doing blockchain things in an air-conditioned warehouse, and then get on-sold to consumers.
Blockchains reward compute capacity, and nothing else.
I was careful to avoid the use of the term "blockchain" as a final achievement because I agree with you regarding current limitations of our technology as a means of decentralized consensus. I see a future where more efficient algorithms supplant the current (very costly) blockchain BFT architecture.
It's interesting that Mr. Harai's analysis is almost exactly like what you might typically find from a typical right-wing person except for the proposed solutions. Among people who support various nationalist causes around the world, fear of the centralization of power through technology is a primary motivator for devolution of power from centralized authorities to more local governments. However, instead of increased decentralization of political power, Mr. Harai proposes increased centralization of regulation on data collection as the most likely solution to the problem of centralized power, while acknowledging the dangers of the regulation regime becoming a danger in itself. He doesn't seem to have a clear answer to this problem, and I wonder what types of proposals might fix it. AI assistants that are completely transparent and loyal to their individual owners might be one part of the solution.
>It's interesting that Mr. Harai's analysis is almost exactly like what you might typically find from a typical right-wing person except for the proposed solutions. Among people who support various nationalist causes around the world, fear of the centralization of power through technology is a primary motivator for devolution of power from centralized authorities to more local governments.
You say it like it's a bad thing, when it's just a different political opinion (centralized vs decentralized government etc).
In many case these "nationalist" causes are not nationalist in the sense of "let's invade Poland" or "our nation is some superior race", but in what used to be called "national independence", "isolationism", "anti-colonialism", "anti-neocolonialism" and so on.
And you don't have to be "right wing" to be for it, although indeed as of late "left wing" has been increasingly getting synonymous with "left wing lite", which is just global corporatist business as usual + identity politics.
I actually agree with you that it's just a different political opinion, and I had meant to convey it in a neutral way here. Both Mr. Harai and many nationalists seem to agree that the decentralization of power is important, but they disagree on how best to accomplish it. I also agree that centralized power is a growing threat, and I think that if we want to make progress in reducing potential harms, we should focus on effective solutions together.
Personally, I'm skeptical that centralized regulation is a long-term solution, and I think that we need more free and open source hardware and software or at least trustworthy technology that can be independently audited to verify that it protects the interests for individual owners rather than serving at the pleasure of someone else. I think most major technology companies, regardless of current policies, acknowledge that there is an increasing need for accountability and that people are beginning to distrust technology monetized by harvesting data and directing behavior.
the article talks about a lot of different topics, about history and society in general, but to be fair, it doesn't seem very accurate when actually talking about technology. in my opinion it looks more like just another part of the digression, although I didn't read it entirely
Tangentially related, this reminds me of the spy recordings[1] between incarcerated German nuclear physicists and their reactions to the atomic bomb dropping.
At first they were incredulous and thought it must be a bluff. The bomb should be "impossible", with Germany failing at their own nuclear project a few years earlier. Then they slowly worked out how it could have been done, and realized that the americans must've had hundreds of thousands of people working on it. "Which is a hundred times more than we had" This was follow by a lot of regret over what they could've done better and the various implications of a world where such a bomb now exists.
I originally found that link from a tweet[2] by someone working at OpenAI. I am sure AI scientists are feeling similar anxiety about their research.
It's easier than ever for someone with a hundred times your computation resources to achieve things that are supposed to be "impossible", at least to the unsuspecting public who haven't grasp the rate of progress in AI.
And I am not even talking about some massmurdering AGI. It's the boring stuff like astroturfing chatbots whose sole purpose is to psychoanalyze individuals to manipulate voting behavior that scares me. This asymmetric power might already be available to those who are willing to throw a few hundred GPU years at the problem and I am not sure how the common man can defend against it.
> The emergence of liberal democracies is associated with ideals of liberty and equality that may seem self-evident and irreversible.
> In the second decade of the 21st century, liberalism has begun to lose credibility. Questions about the ability of liberal democracy to provide for the middle class have grown louder;
Right off the bat, it sounds to me like the author is conflating the idea of democracy with economic liberalism. Democracy didn't fail the middle class-- economic neo-liberalism did. But democracy can and does exist without economic liberalism, and by the looks of Scandinavia, it is better for the middle class that way.
> politics have grown more tribal; and in more and more countries, leaders are showing a penchant for demagoguery and autocracy. The causes of this political shift are complex, but they appear to be intertwined with current technological developments.
I see this narrative a lot, but I have to wonder if this (which the author seems to just assume is the case) is this really true. 10 years ago, the narrative was "technology has given us democracy". The Arab Spring had Twitter and Facebook stamped all over it. This open forum was the ultimate expression of freedom.
It seems to me that big political changes have people looking for explanations, pointing fingers, and the internet with all its new developments is a natural player to point to.
I don't know if the Arab Spring wouldn't have happened --much like I don't know if Trump hadn't had happened-- were it not for Facebook, Twitter, etc. But I do believe that ultimately, from an outsiders perspective, the USA got a very American president that fits the ideas and attitudes of a large swath of the population. After years of being failed at by "establishment politicians", is it that surprising Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both whom were anti-NAFTA, anti-establishment, had a hard stance against the state of things, etc. exploded in popularity? Is it that surprising that Hilary Clinton's campaign was weak, when the message that most resonated with a lot of its supporters was that it was a vote "against Trump"?
Has it been a newsfeed, or neo-liberalist policies that have failed the people and put us in this situation? IMO claiming it's the former is irresponsible and will just perpetuate a broken system, that will keep on corrupting all aspects of the economic machine of the world.
I think he's using the word liberal in the classic sense, not in the more narrowly defined terms of US political discourse where it means progressive. And the term neoliberal relates to economic liberalism, not classical liberalism.
This seems like a pretty shallow analysis. Plenty of thinkers who have preceded Harai have offered views on the political qualities of technology that strike me as more nuanced, potent, and true.
Lewis Mumford, writing in the 30s and 60s, conceived of two broad politico-technic tendencies throughout history--authoritarian and democratic--both could exist and certain forms of technology fell in one bucket or the other. Langdon Winner, working off the ideas of Mumford and many others (stretching far back as Plato) developed a very sophisticated look at technics and the ways in which political structures favor or disfavor certain technologies, and the ways in which technological systems collide with political, economic, and social systems to result in a deep integration between technology and politics.
Mr. Harai's article, contrarily, seems to be little more than an untempered reaction to current events, without requisite incorporation of the prior development and analysis of concepts in the fields of the history and philosophy of technology. I more or less think Harai's conclusion is sound--our current technical configurations and over-reliance on centralized information technologies does trend toward a more authoritarian, rather than democratic, political state of affairs. However, I think his argumentation is incredibly weak and speculative. It could have been rendered a lot stronger, and more useful, by engaging with the prior developments in the field. Perhaps this judgement is a little unfair--this is a book excerpt converted into a digestible Atlantic article--but I can't help but wonder if part of our lack of control over technological growth and our lack of full consideration of the ways in which our technological developments intersect with politics is due to too many taking a stance like Harai's—one that is unduly speculative and seems to forget the many warning flags and conceptual tools the tradition has equipped us with, which, if properly employed, may help us correct our unfortunate trajectories.
This is a very difficult topic to address well, in a way that's not so soaked in zeitgeist that it would be nonsensical if read in 30 years.
I think a big part of the problem is the key terms. Democracy, liberty, equality. These are undefined.
They may sound simple and self evident, but the way we use them is as rich and subtle abstractions, bundles of associations with all sort of philosophical positions and institutions.
Remember that the liberals who invented the term as we now use it... some of them were slavers. How is this consistent with liberty? Somehow it was, to them.
Anyway... I think Harari is mostly addressing what he sees as the employment consequences of current technology. He buys the techno-unemployment argument, and the argument goes from here.
I don't think it's fair to accuse Harari of lacking historical perspective. He's a great teacher of historical perspective. He's responsible for a lot of my historical perspective, personally.
I disagree with a lot of this essay. The point about propoganda posters is a solid one though.
The gradual return of self-hosting and federated data networks (as evidenced by a top-ranking submission today about a federated blog platform) is where I put much of my hope in countering this doomsday scenario.
I feel the natural modern protest action is to starve ravenous information collectors as much as feasible. But as with others in the self-hosting movement, I've always been part of it, haven't stopped hosting the things I care about myself. Many of us never got into the habit of feeding the insatiable information machines. Why post photos to Facebook or Instagram when you can just put them on a web server; why involve a third party at all?
But the user interfaces of self-hosting and decentralization as a broader concept are way behind centralization. There's a lot of ground to cover. Still, I am happy to see gradual growth in interest. Gradually, even for novice self-hosters, it's going to get simpler to post photos onto that personal web server and let friends know where to find them without involving a data-hungry third party.
> Why post photos to Facebook or Instagram when you can just put them on a web server
Because push-out services like Facebook actually work, while doing a lot to capture people's attention? Grandma isn't going to your web server without coaching and a lot of repetition and then when she gets Facebook she's going to forget.
It doesn't have to be this way, but it is this way, and the people who self-host and decentralize (and I do host a good chunk of my stuff myself so I include myself in this) mostly do it for themselves. The UX for normal people sucks.
If you get your family on something like Diaspora (or other self-hosted social network platform of choice), though, Grandma doesn't need to check Facebook. All the photos and discussions she wants to see are on your Diaspora server.
Who maintains this server in a family with no IT people? Who fixes it when it's down? Who maintains it when you are busy? What happens when its attacked and you're too busy to respond?
I made the assumption that anyone reading this would be or know at least one IT person.
To the other questions, nobody will beat Facebook at convenience and availability. Any self-hosted solution loses out of the gate if those are the criteria. But if you see using Facebook as making a deal with the devil, maybe you're willing to put up with some downtime and inconvenience to avoid the alternative.
Giving up some convenience is pretty much the tradeoff for any security-conscious decision. TOR will always be slower than a direct connection, but you get anonymity (as long as you use it smartly).
Ideally any hosing provider selected from a robust market of hosting services competing on cost/bandwidth, cost/server-{storage,cpu}, uptime/support guarantees, and any other actual recurring or per-use costs.
Any software running on the server (a database, HTTP service, etc) should be a separate concern. Maybe you roll your own. Maybe a small fee to license a software package that includes updates/fixes. Most people ideally should be able to a community maintained package. The point is that someone needs to be able to select a hosting service like they select other common services (e.g. utilities, cable TV), plug in the URL of any other services they want to use (or select a suggested option), and be free to change their mind at any time.
If data storage and software is packaged in an interoperable plug-in style, it would be easy to, for example, move your comment database to another provider by retaining their services and notifying your main hosting service of the change.
Of course, this will never happen in our current environment of businesses that prioritize trapping people into walled gardens and view interoperability as a threat to their surveillance-based revenue.
Rolling out "grandma" as a reason to not do N is a tired chestnut that is growing less relevant with every passing day. It's ageist. It also ignores the fact that all of the people you're casually dismissing lived through the creation of the web and remember a time when going to someone's web server to view their particular content was the norm. You also appear to overlook the utility of post-it notes in your claim that coaching and repetition are a required ingredient for success.
My dude. Most of those people who grew up during the rise of the internet did not experience it. The time when "going to someone's web server was the norm" was outside their lived experience. Your average sixty-year-old probably got a computer when they were forty (because that would be 1998) and what they did with it was generally minimal, modulo company intranets and the like. Of course there are fantastic technologists of that age and I've been privileged to work with some--but they're neither the mean nor the median. Grandma or Grandpa get less relevant as demographics change. But it's still a pretty huge obstacle to doing anything. That'll get worse, too, given the upward collection of wealth.
But here's the other problem: it's changed on the bottom end, too. If you're between about 25 and 50 right now and are nontechnical, you might have gotten deep enough into the internet at a formative period to not feel weird about having to deal with a decentralized web. (I am one of those people, I stress.) But that window? it's smaller than you think!
O RLY. So you claim your average sixty year old with (in your example) 20 years of experience owning a personal computer, is somehow so technologically illiterate as to be unable to utilize browser bookmarks, desktop links, or write down a URL on a post-it note? Alternately, are we pretending that smartphones aren't utterly pervasive in all demographics, including people's grandparents? I mean, yeah, if you absolutely had to you could probably cruise the local K&R cafeteria for the odd outlier who is totally technologically illiterate, but that group is also unable to utilize social media to any extent either and so aren't particularly germane to the conversation. So no, outside of the minds of a handful of programmers, there is no real obstacle.
It's not grandma that's the problem it's your kids.
Are you telling me you're going to convince your teenage kids / college students to abandon Instagram / Snapchat / etc.. In order to join some social network Dad wants you to be on where none of their friends are and everyone at school is going to make fun of them for being disconnected and weird? Because they should be worried that Mark Zuckerberg et al are harvesting data about their school drama of what kid has a crush on who and which teachers are the worst?
There's no way.
I leave as an exercise to the reader to prove that if the grandkids are on Facebook, Grandma will be also. Hell, if the grandkids are on FB and the only way to access Facebook was command line ssh, Grandma would learn how to do it.
There's a wonderful way of sharing photos which denies information brokers entirely and is very secure if you make it so. It's called a photo album, the kind you put paper pictures in and give to your friends when you visit them and talk about your vacation.
If this doesn't work for you, think on how much of that is because of the anomie and alienation of modern life. Network effects have arisen in part to counteract this. People demand real-time idea and moment sharing on servers because they do not live anywhere near close to friends or loved ones, and because the individual person is increasingly alienated and alone, demanding instant actions from a virtual network due to the withering of a physical one.
The rediscovery of the physical is the only solution. You buy books from a local bookseller and discuss them in a physical book club. You cannot buy them from Amazon and discuss them via Goodreads without providing information freely in collectable format.
probably too luddite for this place, but information collecting will find a way.
There is some very flawed thinking here. One thing is that technology has seesawed the centralization of power between "elite" and masses. Bronze Age armies were elite and superior with professional armies supported by underclasses in a palace economy. Except in addition to the probable famine related bronze age collapse iron won out as quantity having a quality of its own. Horsemen whether heavily armored as in the west or horse archery in the east were the elite that miltia rabble were at a huge disadvantage towards although they faced various setbacks that were slightly democratized like longbowmen or well drilled pikemen (still pretty professional). The reason the French Chevaliers never had their men adopt longbow training was authoritarian - while the English were by no means a bastion of absolute liberty or democracy for anything beyond things to petty to care about like hamlet leading they still had to keep peasants happy enough to not turn their longbows on them. That was unacceptable to the French. Firearms were ultimately their end in relevance as men with guns could be mustered in weeks not months or years. Longbows were technically better in many ways but muskets were cheap. However technology has marched on. If you look at comparable battle reports of a first world professional army they look statistically superhuman in comparison. Apparently the intense training is such that desert locals thought that their body armor had to have air conditioning in it instead of just hydrating up frequently and plenty of PT.
This is a bit of a tangent but the point is that technology goes all over the damn place in terms of what it favors and suppression won't work well.
Also it seems very destroy the village to save it to propose government data gathering as a solution to lack of liberty. Not to mention suspiciously like self justification in both cases.
>For starters, we need to place a much higher priority on understanding how the human mind works—particularly how our own wisdom and compassion can be cultivated.
Here, be dragons.
Our analysis of the human brain allows us to better hack the human brain. Someone will use it to improve their RoI.
There’s no such thing as learning “compassion” without also learning other adjacent things as well. Perhaps withholding compassion, or selective compassion. Perhaps alienation is a close neuronal cousin.
Opening up one set of pathways also opens up other pathways for manipulation, good or ill.
I thought the same thing when he went to "let's regulate for privacy". How is piling laws on not building an authoritarian state (regardless of the kind)? Regulations over time tend to favor those with the money and power to influence politics, so this is not a solution.
I think the only real answer is to educate people. Educate them about the value of their personal information, what can happen if it gets into the wrong hands, and how to practice infosec self defense.
1) there’s a never ending list of things to educate people about, from climate change to personal finance, cyber security, fake news, hoaxes - and those are the flavors of the current cycle. There’s already too much to teach people
2) it doesn’t always take- and people are often too busy to sit and absorb more info. Especially that which is not directly linked to their immediate goals.
Finally - I think fixing learning is a proxy for making society work properly in the first place. Educating people is not the solution, but a side effect of getting things working correctly - meaning affordable education, nutrition, healthcare, safety, good teachers, available jobs- these are all pre reqs for teaching people, and having them be able to learn and absorb information.
"there’s a never ending list of things to educate people about"
I think you kind of hit on the problem. How do you trust "the expert" not to manipulate their status/authority/credentials without becoming an expert in everything. Rankings and rating are being gamed, scientists manipulate data, government is being corrupted by special interest/big money, corporate owned marketplaces are poor solutions, media is biased and manipulated. trust is failing everywhere.
I thought the popular target was 'deplorables'. Or maybe internet trolls and fake news. Note the steady march away from elites and corporations as the enemy towards bullies on Twitter and social media being the 'issue of the day'. Seems like a very convenient way to shift the ire from those with power to those without. A way to make left wing politics from an economic battle into a meaningless circle of virtual signalling.
"In 1938 the common man’s condition in the Soviet Union, Germany, or the United States may have been grim, but he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the world"
That might have been the case in the United States, but in Nazi Germany and especially in Soviet Union, the common man was told that he was worth nothing, and that the state was everything.
There's good material in that article, but it's not the AI part. This is the important part:
"In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. ...
In the 20th century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. ... Perhaps in the 21st century, populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore. This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation."
That's not about the future. That's already happened. The US has a huge population that's just not economically relevant. They used to matter, but they were left behind. Hence Trump.
Two big trends in the US - a huge useless population, and economic centralization.
There are many towns and small cities in the US that have no reason to go on existing. They were built as service centers for a farming population that shrank decades ago. Many are limping along on retirees that don't leave. But the old people die off and that money source stops. Nobody moves in, and anybody with any ambition left for the big city long ago. The average age in rural America is 51. US farm workers are under 2% of the workforce. (90% before the industrial revolution.)
Economic centralization. Since banking deregulation, the US is down to four big banks. WalMart ate most small-town retail, and Amazon is eating the rest. (A sidelight: social activities have moved online. To massive centralized online services. Tinder and Facebook aren't running on the town's little server in the back room of the drugstore, like an 80s BBS. Teens don't go into town, or to malls, to hang out much any more. Another killer for small towns.) Most little stuff is coming from abroad, knocking out little factories that used to make spoons and toasters.
Sorry no. ACTUAL tech is already a tyranny but that's not "technology", that's only a kind of possible evolution, mostly finance not tech.
We have had plenty and we still have technology that are free, that enforce freedom, they are always attacked in various forms, from "legal fight" against phenomenon we formally want to fight but with a second not-so-disguised target, they are pushed to oblivion with colorful (web)interfaces, locked down because of hw evolution etc but they exist, they are still tech.
Do NEVER think that what we have today is the sole possible, most advanced, less ugly possible society/world.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadNow compare to average life-expectancy.
Almost everyone old enough to have a shred of memory regarding the last time global politics went this way has passed away.
Also, I don't believe the pacifist sentiment is was as great as you say.
Perhaps politicians and those in the know perhaps but not amongst everyday people.
Anyway, conflicts are rarely rational but territorial and will express themselves in many different ways.
What we learn from history is not that we shouldn't fight wars but that there are many ways to win them.
"Perhaps" is not an argument.
The first and only way to win a war is not to start it.
Most people didn't experience the front line, instead, they experienced poverty.
So it depends on what the purpose is. Many if not most wars are about territory which is about access to resources.
Not anymore. As said the parent post, those that said "never again" from their own experience are just a little few today.
Could it be that...
... Hitler was right all along?
Nevermind the down revisions in "victims" at Auschwitz and others were never reflected in the 6 million trope constantly flaunted around. Nevermind the fact 6 million was thrown around in jewish publications for decades before Hitler took power. Nevermind the supposed drop in jewish numbers isn't reflected in worldwide census numbers through the before, during, and after periods. Adolf Hitler is Emmanuel Goldstein, and must be suppressed for the good of Oceania! He must be brought out and tarred everytime a European opposes a globalist future.
Watch this comment be deleted and this account possibly banned. Won't matter, I browse and post over Tor anyhow and can easily create another. Rule 1) of the internet: never put your real info in the boxes.
You can make the same comment on why Marxist thought is on an apparent upswing among young Internet users, now that it's 25+ years since the USSR fell.
I don't disagree with the point, but there's a blindness it.
It's kind of like saying paganism and heathenism have been far more common modes of spirituality than religion.
In reality, there have been a very large number of "modes of governance" that you (or they) can classify lots of different ways. The way the author chose to categorise them is "our sytem" and "bad systems."
To a Marxist, liberal democracy goes into the "Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule" bucket.
A current Chinese cultural narrative is thousands of years of empire, until the ccp.
All forms of government have periodic changes of power.
Democratic revolutions involve considerably less blood.
All forms of government are eventually subject to public backlash. Democracy is just generally less violent.
The word "Democracy" is tricky because people with radically different politics generally disagree about what is democratic.
Allowing for that... I wonder what gave Malcolm the impression that democratic revolutions involve less blood? The French and American Revolutions were very bloody (especially th french).
The American civil war was a revolution in some sense, democratic in some sense too (in that black suffrage was on the line).
You might call the 1989 revolutions democratic. Maybe even the revolutions of 1848. If you're not of the "liberal-demicratic" persuasion maybe you think Mao or Castro were the true democrats. Both of their revolutions were bloody.
Elsewhere in that speech Malcolm (famously) addresses the African decolonisation revolutions, pointing out the bloodshed.
It sounds like he intended to use the term "revolution" to simply describe a transfer of power, against the will of the previously ruling party.
Democratic transfers of power are unique in that they generally occur without violence. We might take this for granted today, but it is in fact something that must be cherished.
Maybe the statement would read better as:
> Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been far more effective modes of human governance.
You can't deny the monarchies/democracies of Europe and the oligarchies of Russia/USA have kept a relative peace for developed countries in the last 70 years.
It's also worth noting on this note that of the systems that proceeded democracy, there also was not uniformity. There were many times and places where the "king" was relatively weak, and relied on nobles for support. There were times and places where the authoritarian that mattered to an individual wasn't something like a centralized government, but rather more of a clan leader (and so someone he/she would know personally). It is extremely common in human history that people were citizens of a city-state rather than a larger nation or empire. So even if one claims that the nation-state-based-liberal-democracy is on its way out, it's not like there's only one thing that could replace it.
The meritocracy dream is that everyone unites to use power not only for themselves, but in support of a degree of equality (some versions want equal results, others strive for equal opportunity, but for this argument those are the same basic goal). After all, it is in our each of own interests to avoid a concentration of power in others that could harm us.
But in reality, people are lazy. We want to be comfortable. Governments (or other social bodies) exist to exercise our power so we dont have to worry about every detail. Power concentration is the easiest result, regardless of system of governance.
Power concentration isnt inherently bad, but it is ripe to be exploited, because the ultimate watchdogs over it - us, the common people - dont want that job.
I read a great statement here a few months ago, that went something like "modern democracy isnt the people deciding what govt does, it is the people deciding the boundaries within which govt operates."
I've been pondering that a ton lately. It shows how I, a US liberal, the many libertarians here, authoritarian conservatives, fiscal conservatives, European-style liberals, and most everyone else can all be so baffled by each others' views. We evaluate not the rules we want, but how we expect the govt to behave within those boundaries.
Unfortunately, while this eases my mind on how otherwise intelligent people want "dumb" things, it also suggests that there is no reliable system: we require a system as a matter of scale, be it loose or rigid. Any system exists because of a degree of trust that the system will not be manipulated or abused. ("System" here includes any interactions as simple as expecting contracts to be followed, so minimal govt is just a different system) You are rewarded for abusing the system. After the abuse is painful enough, people will demand a new system. Advocates for any given system will argue they have protections ("minimal government", "oversight", etc) but those rely on people being informed and active enough to repel abuse...and we're not.
I recently attended Ethereum DevCon and heard a succinct definition of decentralization from Prof. David Lee Kuo Chuen that I've been pondering in the week since: "Decentralization is dynamic, continuous distribution of trust."
This may be the core of why people are excited about new consensus algorithms like blockchain: we've seen how static, centralized systems of trust distribution eventually break, and the discontinuity of trust that results is very harmful to societies (e.g. bad kings, bad presidents, corruption in parties, collusion of central banks, hacked central servers, etc.)
I think we are still in very early days (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVZxjVJz4ds haha) but "blockchain" is the beginning of something new that has to do with helping solve social issues in a new way, with dynamic distribution of trust at the center of that solution.
Blockchains are one of the worst methods to decentralize anything, because they don't require any consensus from the "governed" - they do exactly what whoever has ansible/puppet/chef connected to the most computers wants them to do.
EDIT: Let's put a very real example on this - if blockchains controlled anything powerful, then there becomes two superpowers - nvidia and AMD. All they do is retool their business cycle so GPUs coming off the line go into N-months of burn-in doing blockchain things in an air-conditioned warehouse, and then get on-sold to consumers.
Blockchains reward compute capacity, and nothing else.
You say it like it's a bad thing, when it's just a different political opinion (centralized vs decentralized government etc).
In many case these "nationalist" causes are not nationalist in the sense of "let's invade Poland" or "our nation is some superior race", but in what used to be called "national independence", "isolationism", "anti-colonialism", "anti-neocolonialism" and so on.
And you don't have to be "right wing" to be for it, although indeed as of late "left wing" has been increasingly getting synonymous with "left wing lite", which is just global corporatist business as usual + identity politics.
Personally, I'm skeptical that centralized regulation is a long-term solution, and I think that we need more free and open source hardware and software or at least trustworthy technology that can be independently audited to verify that it protects the interests for individual owners rather than serving at the pleasure of someone else. I think most major technology companies, regardless of current policies, acknowledge that there is an increasing need for accountability and that people are beginning to distrust technology monetized by harvesting data and directing behavior.
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb
At first they were incredulous and thought it must be a bluff. The bomb should be "impossible", with Germany failing at their own nuclear project a few years earlier. Then they slowly worked out how it could have been done, and realized that the americans must've had hundreds of thousands of people working on it. "Which is a hundred times more than we had" This was follow by a lot of regret over what they could've done better and the various implications of a world where such a bomb now exists.
I originally found that link from a tweet[2] by someone working at OpenAI. I am sure AI scientists are feeling similar anxiety about their research.
It's easier than ever for someone with a hundred times your computation resources to achieve things that are supposed to be "impossible", at least to the unsuspecting public who haven't grasp the rate of progress in AI.
And I am not even talking about some massmurdering AGI. It's the boring stuff like astroturfing chatbots whose sole purpose is to psychoanalyze individuals to manipulate voting behavior that scares me. This asymmetric power might already be available to those who are willing to throw a few hundred GPU years at the problem and I am not sure how the common man can defend against it.
[1] "Transcript of Surreptitiously Taped Conversations among German Nuclear Physicists at Farm Hall, August 1945" http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf
[2] https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/778286393441169408
> In the second decade of the 21st century, liberalism has begun to lose credibility. Questions about the ability of liberal democracy to provide for the middle class have grown louder;
Right off the bat, it sounds to me like the author is conflating the idea of democracy with economic liberalism. Democracy didn't fail the middle class-- economic neo-liberalism did. But democracy can and does exist without economic liberalism, and by the looks of Scandinavia, it is better for the middle class that way.
> politics have grown more tribal; and in more and more countries, leaders are showing a penchant for demagoguery and autocracy. The causes of this political shift are complex, but they appear to be intertwined with current technological developments.
I see this narrative a lot, but I have to wonder if this (which the author seems to just assume is the case) is this really true. 10 years ago, the narrative was "technology has given us democracy". The Arab Spring had Twitter and Facebook stamped all over it. This open forum was the ultimate expression of freedom.
It seems to me that big political changes have people looking for explanations, pointing fingers, and the internet with all its new developments is a natural player to point to.
I don't know if the Arab Spring wouldn't have happened --much like I don't know if Trump hadn't had happened-- were it not for Facebook, Twitter, etc. But I do believe that ultimately, from an outsiders perspective, the USA got a very American president that fits the ideas and attitudes of a large swath of the population. After years of being failed at by "establishment politicians", is it that surprising Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both whom were anti-NAFTA, anti-establishment, had a hard stance against the state of things, etc. exploded in popularity? Is it that surprising that Hilary Clinton's campaign was weak, when the message that most resonated with a lot of its supporters was that it was a vote "against Trump"?
Has it been a newsfeed, or neo-liberalist policies that have failed the people and put us in this situation? IMO claiming it's the former is irresponsible and will just perpetuate a broken system, that will keep on corrupting all aspects of the economic machine of the world.
Lewis Mumford, writing in the 30s and 60s, conceived of two broad politico-technic tendencies throughout history--authoritarian and democratic--both could exist and certain forms of technology fell in one bucket or the other. Langdon Winner, working off the ideas of Mumford and many others (stretching far back as Plato) developed a very sophisticated look at technics and the ways in which political structures favor or disfavor certain technologies, and the ways in which technological systems collide with political, economic, and social systems to result in a deep integration between technology and politics.
Mr. Harai's article, contrarily, seems to be little more than an untempered reaction to current events, without requisite incorporation of the prior development and analysis of concepts in the fields of the history and philosophy of technology. I more or less think Harai's conclusion is sound--our current technical configurations and over-reliance on centralized information technologies does trend toward a more authoritarian, rather than democratic, political state of affairs. However, I think his argumentation is incredibly weak and speculative. It could have been rendered a lot stronger, and more useful, by engaging with the prior developments in the field. Perhaps this judgement is a little unfair--this is a book excerpt converted into a digestible Atlantic article--but I can't help but wonder if part of our lack of control over technological growth and our lack of full consideration of the ways in which our technological developments intersect with politics is due to too many taking a stance like Harai's—one that is unduly speculative and seems to forget the many warning flags and conceptual tools the tradition has equipped us with, which, if properly employed, may help us correct our unfortunate trajectories.
I think a big part of the problem is the key terms. Democracy, liberty, equality. These are undefined.
They may sound simple and self evident, but the way we use them is as rich and subtle abstractions, bundles of associations with all sort of philosophical positions and institutions.
Remember that the liberals who invented the term as we now use it... some of them were slavers. How is this consistent with liberty? Somehow it was, to them.
Anyway... I think Harari is mostly addressing what he sees as the employment consequences of current technology. He buys the techno-unemployment argument, and the argument goes from here.
I don't think it's fair to accuse Harari of lacking historical perspective. He's a great teacher of historical perspective. He's responsible for a lot of my historical perspective, personally.
I disagree with a lot of this essay. The point about propoganda posters is a solid one though.
I feel the natural modern protest action is to starve ravenous information collectors as much as feasible. But as with others in the self-hosting movement, I've always been part of it, haven't stopped hosting the things I care about myself. Many of us never got into the habit of feeding the insatiable information machines. Why post photos to Facebook or Instagram when you can just put them on a web server; why involve a third party at all?
But the user interfaces of self-hosting and decentralization as a broader concept are way behind centralization. There's a lot of ground to cover. Still, I am happy to see gradual growth in interest. Gradually, even for novice self-hosters, it's going to get simpler to post photos onto that personal web server and let friends know where to find them without involving a data-hungry third party.
Because push-out services like Facebook actually work, while doing a lot to capture people's attention? Grandma isn't going to your web server without coaching and a lot of repetition and then when she gets Facebook she's going to forget.
It doesn't have to be this way, but it is this way, and the people who self-host and decentralize (and I do host a good chunk of my stuff myself so I include myself in this) mostly do it for themselves. The UX for normal people sucks.
To the other questions, nobody will beat Facebook at convenience and availability. Any self-hosted solution loses out of the gate if those are the criteria. But if you see using Facebook as making a deal with the devil, maybe you're willing to put up with some downtime and inconvenience to avoid the alternative.
Giving up some convenience is pretty much the tradeoff for any security-conscious decision. TOR will always be slower than a direct connection, but you get anonymity (as long as you use it smartly).
Ideally any hosing provider selected from a robust market of hosting services competing on cost/bandwidth, cost/server-{storage,cpu}, uptime/support guarantees, and any other actual recurring or per-use costs.
Any software running on the server (a database, HTTP service, etc) should be a separate concern. Maybe you roll your own. Maybe a small fee to license a software package that includes updates/fixes. Most people ideally should be able to a community maintained package. The point is that someone needs to be able to select a hosting service like they select other common services (e.g. utilities, cable TV), plug in the URL of any other services they want to use (or select a suggested option), and be free to change their mind at any time.
If data storage and software is packaged in an interoperable plug-in style, it would be easy to, for example, move your comment database to another provider by retaining their services and notifying your main hosting service of the change.
Of course, this will never happen in our current environment of businesses that prioritize trapping people into walled gardens and view interoperability as a threat to their surveillance-based revenue.
But here's the other problem: it's changed on the bottom end, too. If you're between about 25 and 50 right now and are nontechnical, you might have gotten deep enough into the internet at a formative period to not feel weird about having to deal with a decentralized web. (I am one of those people, I stress.) But that window? it's smaller than you think!
Are you telling me you're going to convince your teenage kids / college students to abandon Instagram / Snapchat / etc.. In order to join some social network Dad wants you to be on where none of their friends are and everyone at school is going to make fun of them for being disconnected and weird? Because they should be worried that Mark Zuckerberg et al are harvesting data about their school drama of what kid has a crush on who and which teachers are the worst?
There's no way.
I leave as an exercise to the reader to prove that if the grandkids are on Facebook, Grandma will be also. Hell, if the grandkids are on FB and the only way to access Facebook was command line ssh, Grandma would learn how to do it.
If this doesn't work for you, think on how much of that is because of the anomie and alienation of modern life. Network effects have arisen in part to counteract this. People demand real-time idea and moment sharing on servers because they do not live anywhere near close to friends or loved ones, and because the individual person is increasingly alienated and alone, demanding instant actions from a virtual network due to the withering of a physical one.
The rediscovery of the physical is the only solution. You buy books from a local bookseller and discuss them in a physical book club. You cannot buy them from Amazon and discuss them via Goodreads without providing information freely in collectable format.
probably too luddite for this place, but information collecting will find a way.
(I have some relatives who force people to sit while they narrate slideshows of holiday snaps on a laptop; new technology, same old pathology.)
This is a bit of a tangent but the point is that technology goes all over the damn place in terms of what it favors and suppression won't work well.
Also it seems very destroy the village to save it to propose government data gathering as a solution to lack of liberty. Not to mention suspiciously like self justification in both cases.
Here, be dragons.
Our analysis of the human brain allows us to better hack the human brain. Someone will use it to improve their RoI.
There’s no such thing as learning “compassion” without also learning other adjacent things as well. Perhaps withholding compassion, or selective compassion. Perhaps alienation is a close neuronal cousin.
Opening up one set of pathways also opens up other pathways for manipulation, good or ill.
I think the only real answer is to educate people. Educate them about the value of their personal information, what can happen if it gets into the wrong hands, and how to practice infosec self defense.
By all means educate, but don’t forget that
1) there’s a never ending list of things to educate people about, from climate change to personal finance, cyber security, fake news, hoaxes - and those are the flavors of the current cycle. There’s already too much to teach people
2) it doesn’t always take- and people are often too busy to sit and absorb more info. Especially that which is not directly linked to their immediate goals.
Finally - I think fixing learning is a proxy for making society work properly in the first place. Educating people is not the solution, but a side effect of getting things working correctly - meaning affordable education, nutrition, healthcare, safety, good teachers, available jobs- these are all pre reqs for teaching people, and having them be able to learn and absorb information.
I think you kind of hit on the problem. How do you trust "the expert" not to manipulate their status/authority/credentials without becoming an expert in everything. Rankings and rating are being gamed, scientists manipulate data, government is being corrupted by special interest/big money, corporate owned marketplaces are poor solutions, media is biased and manipulated. trust is failing everywhere.
It appears elites are on the hunt for a popular scapegoat again. Immigrants, Muslims and now technology.
It has as much to do with technology as it has to do with muslims.
Statistics and data analysis existed for centuries but never caused collapse of civilization.
That might have been the case in the United States, but in Nazi Germany and especially in Soviet Union, the common man was told that he was worth nothing, and that the state was everything.
"In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. ... In the 20th century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. ... Perhaps in the 21st century, populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore. This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation."
That's not about the future. That's already happened. The US has a huge population that's just not economically relevant. They used to matter, but they were left behind. Hence Trump.
Two big trends in the US - a huge useless population, and economic centralization.
There are many towns and small cities in the US that have no reason to go on existing. They were built as service centers for a farming population that shrank decades ago. Many are limping along on retirees that don't leave. But the old people die off and that money source stops. Nobody moves in, and anybody with any ambition left for the big city long ago. The average age in rural America is 51. US farm workers are under 2% of the workforce. (90% before the industrial revolution.)
Economic centralization. Since banking deregulation, the US is down to four big banks. WalMart ate most small-town retail, and Amazon is eating the rest. (A sidelight: social activities have moved online. To massive centralized online services. Tinder and Facebook aren't running on the town's little server in the back room of the drugstore, like an 80s BBS. Teens don't go into town, or to malls, to hang out much any more. Another killer for small towns.) Most little stuff is coming from abroad, knocking out little factories that used to make spoons and toasters.
This is nos.
A common misconception; those who were 'left behind' tended to vote Democratic: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...
We have had plenty and we still have technology that are free, that enforce freedom, they are always attacked in various forms, from "legal fight" against phenomenon we formally want to fight but with a second not-so-disguised target, they are pushed to oblivion with colorful (web)interfaces, locked down because of hw evolution etc but they exist, they are still tech.
Do NEVER think that what we have today is the sole possible, most advanced, less ugly possible society/world.