That's an excellent question, and it really is something for all of us to think about. In the 1890's people understood monopolies in terms of products. One suggestion might be that information can also be monopolized. Any company that acts as the sole gatekeeper of information should be regulated. Ironically, monopoly over information is infinitely more dangerous than over products. Monopoly over words and ideas is the definition of thought control. We need to find an answer to this problem with the tech monopolies quickly or we are all in serious trouble, not just in the West, but in every country around the globe!!
I think there ought to be a data/interface divide. Social media companies that service more than 50 million Americans should be subject to this divide. Therefore, split Facebook in twain: one of its halves shall be Face, which is the web UI we currently interact with; the other half shall be Book, more akin to a data utility provider.
The monopoly that Facebook, Google, etc. have is a monopoly over how their data is presented. Google is the only entity with access to the data that Google collates, etc.; except that this isn't data they generate. It's data they capture, pieces of the commons that they sequester from the commons.
I think we should handle social media like we do smoking. They must print a giant warning warning it's addictive and dangerous and they must pay for advertising campaigns against their product.
I also used to think that the dystopia of the future was corporations use money, power, convenience, and AI brainwashing to control people in a democracy.
Now I am afraid, it will be something far older and far worse: just straight up state autocracy enforced by people with guns/weapons.
Look at Texas. Who cares about using differential targeting of voters when you can just disenfranchise groups that are likely to vote against you. And as January 6, came so close to showing, who care who people actually vote if you can cry “fraud” and physically intimidate the people in charge of certifying the votes.
The Chinese government isn’t intimidated by the market reach of Alibaba when they can physically threaten Jack Ma and makes sure he only does what he is supposed to.
Analogous to the xkcd cartoon and the $5 wrench, many times the tool of coercion is not some multimillion dollar GPU cluster running advanced AI, it is a 50 cent bullet.
I'd say that's the reasoning for states and countries to begin with; the group with the bigger stick.
What you're witnessing is people desiring to be outside of what is acceptable to those inside. The basis of that whole Jan6 debacle was that they felt the state (is: vote counting) did them wrong, and so they don't want to be in that group.
One group, state, country, splits into many others, where each now feel protected better by their in-group. It's a common thread throughout history.
That the behavior that FiveThirtyEight themselves said to expect actually happened? The Republican state legislatures engineered it to happen this way and then acted with mock surprise when their system functioned as expected.
The Republican base was taken for a ride and they didn't even realize it.
> But Wisconsin law requires that the results of those absentee votes be reported all at once, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe explained Wednesday.
If that graph didn't have a big spike for Milwaukee's absentee ballots, it would be a sign of something nefarious.
You can look at the charts and there are spikes for Trump as well depending on area.
Urban cores vote overwhelmingly democrat and it takes longer to tally those votes than podunk villages. Somehow, in 2020, people thought this was a controversy.
Most of the comments here read like the worst of Facebook and /pol/ "experts" came together. Jesus.
Agreed, except that companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are orders of magnitude more powerful than traditional media companies. Keep in mind that Google and Facebook are the gateway to the internet for the vast majority of users. If Facebook erases news, a vast majority of people may never know it happened.
If Google orders search results that highlight whatever it likes on the first page, and buries what it does not on the 10th page, people's understanding of the issues will be severely skewed. We are talking about companies that have the power to manipulate ideas and information orders of magnitude greater than anything in human history.
Curious how you define “top 4 biggest media networks.” If you mean the traditional big 4 US networks (NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox) they’re mostly part of pretty large media conglomerates (i.e Disney, Comcast, Viacom) that are each smaller than FB by market cap, but by less than 1 order of magnitude.
I don’t agree with that. The media isn’t a violent arm of government. They, and the greater intelligentsia, are more like a priesthood. They indoctrinate us regular folk with state-approved myths to give context and framing for our world view and in so doing a veneer of legitimacy to rulers. Similarly, they are almost completely dependent on wealthy patrons. Egyptian priests, the Roman Imperial cults, the Medieval church, Communist Dialecticians and their modern progressive successors all do about the same thing. I think the police are just the police and whether or not they’re illegitimate depends on what you think about the Mandate of Heaven, Divine Right of Kings, or Trusting the Science.
I find Chomsky’s critique of his fellows amusing, given that he is a member of that population he considers illegitimate.
If the 50 cent bullet was the tool of coercion for the future the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War. The Soviets lost not because they could not produce enough bullets, but because they could not keep up with the rapid advance of information technology, computer chips, processors, and supercomputers.
China leverages its vast market power to coerce American high tech companies to provide it with the latest technology if they want to conduct business in the People's Republic. China's power is market power, it is the power to request that Google censor news that is harmful to the Communist Party. It is the power to ask Hollywood studios not put the small flag of Taiwan on Tom Cruise's bomber jacket in the new Top Gun movie. The Chinese now have more supercomputers than the United States (188 to 122), and for a few years, they had the fastest supercomputer in the world. These computers allow nations to simulate everything from the weather to nuclear detonations.
At the end of the day, China understands better than anyone that control in the future is control over information, not tanks, aircraft carriers, or nuclear tipped ICBMs.
For the first three decades of China’s “opening up”, what they had was not coercive market power but incredibly cheap labor on a huge scale and a stable, pro-business government. And what that government did was to play the long game of requiring all foreign businesses wishing to take advantage of the huge, cheap labor force to do so through joint ventures with domestic companies. For the Chinese people, this was exactly the right move, because foreign businesses would never have voluntarily enriched the Chinese labor force and thus driven up their own costs. China is where it is today because, while the Western companies were planning on the scale of quarters, they were looking decades down the road. However, the rest of the world is finally waking up, and China still has tremendous internal structural challenges to sustaining its growth. So whether China will become a dominant force globally still remains to be seen.
Accepting the premise of the article, one can only respond...
And YOU did it.
YOU yearned to work for these companies and were prepared to sell your gonads and even your soul to do so for the ostensible prestige, the salary, the tech, the "interesting problems", the 30 pieces of silver, helping the oligarchic overlords establish this technocratic world order.
YOU!
You claim to care about the common good, but that is mere posturing, mere pretense, mere cover for your real motives. You might even rationalize your behavior in various transparent ways. At least have the decency to be honest. Double down and say "I don't care. I'm doing it anyway."
Alas, the cunning of reason, providence, will always press even evil acts into its service. The evil man shall lose by defiling himself through his deeds, but these evil deeds shall be used to bring about a greater good despite his efforts. Thus the use of these technologies by those whom the oligarchic class despises and the shattering of the false narrative they were previously able to and hoping to continue to control.
This sort of lost my attention at the notion that all police were defunded, guns were banned, and millions of people were brutally murdered. Those ideas were propoganda. Defunding the police was never a sincerely held belief save the ideas that institutional racism be addressed and militarization of police disrupted. The most ardent municipalities replaced leadership and adapted their policing models. Its hard to take a piece about dystopia seriously after that is the premise.
Aside from that, a commercial dystopia is so anglo-centric it hurts my teeth. In that scenario, the have-nots have more freedom? Consumption is slavery? The disconnected have more connection? Okay that last part rings true, the rest feels like a paradox of privilege. We are uniquely entitled to compute as we please using whatever devices and service we see fit, to block and disable telemetry at will, to sue and win when things get bad. I appreciate what the author is trying to highlight, but maybe they should go back to 1984 and see what they miss.
In Minneapolis they want to dismantle the existing police force and replace it with another. A big reason for wanting to do this is to get rid of the problem cops. Police in the U.S. do a horrible job in solving even major crimes. They currently commit a large number of acts of violence without accountability. They system definitely needs to be dismantled and rebuilt.
> In Minneapolis they want to dismantle the existing police force and replace it with another. A big reason for wanting to do this is to get rid of the problem cops.
So throw out the whole bunch because of a few bad apples? And what happens when the replacements have problem cops? Do it over again?
"Bad apples" should lose their jobs before more shit happens under their watch. Instead, they become a symptom of something bigger: the police is unable to police itself.
Five police officers in Miami recently attacked two men while thirteen of their fellow officers watched. [1] The idiom "bad apples" comes from the saying, "A few bad apples spoil the whole bunch," so it's an appropriate term here.
And only charged with misdemeanor "battery" without any enhancements. Had the perps not been police it would be multiple felonies + enhancements for things like gang activity and firearm possession. Looks to me like the DA does not want to upset the police and their unions and is only doing the very minimum to make an impression that he is working.
Presumably the so called good apples will get hired by the newly formed police force. Though I would argue there are very few good apples. You aren’t a good cop when you allow and fail to report on your fellow officers meting out non judicial punishments.
There are lots of things stopping the DFL from doing what it wants with the police force. I suggest you look into how police forces hold cities hostage when city government acts in a way they don’t approve of.
“In that scenario, the have-nots have more freedom? Consumption is slavery? The disconnected have more connection?”
I think we’re more likely to see commercial dystopia expressed in ways like California’s Prop 22. The have-nots and disconnected are just more likely to be exploited due to their lack of ability to organize against massive lobbying powers.
One of my friends recently had her car damaged in a hit and run accident while it was parked. The cop who came to take the report bitched about how "the laws" make it hard to catch criminals, but pointedly didn't do anything about actually trying to gather evidence other than take a report.
This is typical of most police reactions to crime: they'll fill out some paperwork so you can file an insurance claim but they won't bother to do any actual investigation. We don't need armed people roaming the streets to do that, it's a clerical job.
After watching cops openly ignoring mask mandates over the last year and a half while they take their half-hour coffee breaks (drinking coffee for which they don't pay), I think that yes, we should literally abolish the police and replace them with something better. Right now, we're giving guns to the guys who were bullies and jerks in high school and acting surprised when they continue to bullies and jerks.
>I think that yes, we should literally abolish the police and replace them with something better.
It’s really easy to say that but I have heard of no viable proposals to actually replace the police with “something better”. Nor do such proposals ever elaborate on how the new system would operate without vagaries and wonderful nice-to-haves like unconditional free housing for the homeless and UBI. It’s extraordinary easy to say a hypothetical system would be better. But how do you actually implement it?
I also think those brutish types you mentioned from high school might be the only kind of people willing to accept the dangers and anti-social elements that officers have to put up with. If you thought working in retail was bad, the kinds of people the police have to deal with are in a league of their own.
Some of the models I’ve seen involve staffing social workers to accompany officers on calls with the charge of defuse situations and connecting people with services. It sounds promising. In any case, they both frequently interact with the same usual suspects- might as well be from the same car.
Furthermore, that kind of partnership may diffuse some of the sort of macho banter between cops that seems to lead to embarrassing headlines.
I understand the thought behind this but in practice it is a bad idea.
You put the social worker in dangerous situation by putting them on the frontline before the situation can be assessed. The social worker feels unsafe and needs to rely in the armed police. This dependency creates a bond and they become part of the thin blueline family. In the end you are back in the same situation.
The other thing to consider is a social worker is many parent's worst nightmare. If they find the smallest issue during a police call your kids could be taken away. Many people are afraid to call the police because they will call a social worker. I see this policy affecting single poor mothers in a much worse way compared to now.
The other issue is a social worker isn't a hostage / crisis manager. They are trained to do very different things.
I’ll concede that advocates for defunding don’t have a great answer to violent criminals (although for some reason, the poor track record of our existing police is never called into question).
But by even the most generous of estimates, only around 4% of police time is actually spent on violent crime [1]. Surely we can start by defunding the 96% of situations that don’t require paramilitary personnel, and figure out how to deal with violence if and when we get to that last 4%.
I say get them out of looking for speeders and light-runners, first off. That can be a whole other job.
Boom, you now need... what, 1/3 as many cops? Even that many? Might even help at least a bit with the whole "driving while black" thing if the people tasked with this are just looking for traffic violations and aren't fishing for other things (unless you're dumb enough to offer them up, and they'll be recording, obviously)
Interesting dichotomy. Red-light cameras are a sort of proto form of surveillance policing. It’s an interesting case study, where you have some celebrating the safety they purportedly provide, others accusing them of being a corrupt cash grab, and several states outright banning them. For many, driving is a form of negotiation between themselves, other drivers, pedestrians, and the roads. The cameras don’t play fair; they throw away all context (it was 4am with nobody around, it was icy and a sudden stop would have endangered somebody etc). They have ended marriages when cheaters are caught with the wrong person or in the wrong place. They subvert established norms. They work, but we don’t want them to. Are they better than paying a police officer to do that job? Better than no enforcement? The jury seems to be still out on this topic, but it could prove instructive to future automated enforcement initiatives.
> The cameras don’t play fair; they throw away all context (it was 4am with nobody around, it was icy and a sudden stop would have endangered somebody etc).
How is this less fair? One of the biggest criticisms of the police apparatus is discretionary enforcement of the law. I bet Black motorists would overwhelmingly support a system blind to the "context" of the driver's skin color.
>It’s really easy to say that but I have heard of no viable proposals to actually replace the police with “something better”. Nor do such proposals ever elaborate on how the new system would operate without vagaries and wonderful nice-to-haves like unconditional free housing for the homeless and UBI.
Police should only be involved when an armed person is needed. Things like filling out police reports of crimes, noise complaints, and traffic violations can be handled by social workers who can call in cops when needed. That will allow for a huge reduction in the police force.
The proper approach is not to replace the police, but to transform the police, by implementing systems to systematically weed out any crooked, violent, lazy, and unprofessional officers. Such systems have already been implemented for many other professions, just not for the police, due to police unions and their huge influence on politicians. So the progress is very slow.
Progress may not be as slow as you think. Proliferation of body cameras on officers has done a lot to prevent bad behavior. Cops can't plant drugs/gun on someone, or lie about the facts of what happened very easily anymore. It also protects good cops from false allegations.
They sure have time to write marginal/dubious traffic violations?
I live in Marin County, and they wonder why voters won't pass their bond initiatives.
My father's best friend was a lieutenant in Oakland PD. They were so close he gave my father a "Get out of jail free card". It was just a business card which was signed on the back. If you commited a crime, you pulled out the card; you were let go. My father got out of a DUI with it. (I don't think they are handed out anymore?)
His friend was a level headed cop, a bit liberal for a cop even.
My father always wanted to hear about the big cases, or criminals they caught.
He finally told my father the truth. He told him we play chess in the basement for a good part of the day. He wasen't a beat cop. He was up their in rank.
My father was incredulous. He just didn't like the idea of government employees not out fighting crime.
I remember telling my father, I'd rather have a cop by a landline, rather than zooming around irritating citizens with pesky driving citations.
A cop that lets people drive drunk without consequences is not level headed to me. Nor is one that specifically lets their friends be above the law, especially for offenses that endanger others.
I would rather have cops ticketing motorists with excessively noisy vehicles, excessively bright lights, and who are not paying their vehicle taxes.
> A cop that lets people drive drunk without consequences is not level headed to me. Nor is one that specifically lets their friends be above the law
The cop that let him drive drunk wasn't the "level headed" one, but a different one who pulled him over and decided to give him a pass based on the "get out of jail free" card.
Those cards are not uncommon. They won't get you out of everything (it is up to the discretion of the cop you show it too) but they will get you out of a lot. [0]
I think such obvious corruption and double standards should be illegal, but hey, what do I know?
Yes! I think a lot of people would get behind "Fix The Police" over "Fuck the Police".
Both partisan sides have this weird cognitive dissonance where liberals support all unions except police unions while the right backs police unions unquestionably.
I'm independent because the party I wish we had would not be fighting for more or less government, it would be fighting for high quality efficient government!
Yes! There is such a thing as good government, and to me that means good people with a well-defined purpose and adequate resources. Not everyone can agree on exactly what that should look like, but I take umbrage with the notion that good government doesn’t and can’t exist.
Fix the Police has produced many feel-good policies that have not had an impact. Defund the Police at least gets people's attention. It may be opening the conversation to a range of options, but I’m afraid it may be also reflexively hardening some opinions.
This might not be the right place, but I wonder if there is a parallel "Defund the Schools" argument to be made that goes along with the logic of the "Defund the Police".
In another thread, some were lamenting how schools now have the responsibilities that extend well beyond simple education; should that even be part of an education system? Are we taxing it too much? Considering some of the things i have heard and seen in my own school days, it isn't hard to believe that there are issues with racism in schools. I don't think giving any institution that much power (education / future career prospects, food, etc..) is a healthy way to go about things.
This is hyperbole. The situation is intentionally exaggerated to make a point.
I also don't buy the argument that because other people have (or had) it worse than us, we should be content and not hope for something better. Imagine if the 13 colonies had had that attitude.
I stand corrected about some of the more extreme positions that some have taken on police reform. Thanks for those who provided sources. I took it as ‘mild reforms haven’t changed anything, we have to go big’ - some seem to imagine that crime will disappear if all basic needs are met, and will happen without the threat of violence. I’d like to see some prior art for that.
Also, though nobody really called me out I regret using the word anglo because I really didn't want to respond with a racial tone. I was intending to target wealthy western sensibilities more generally. While I resonated with the author’s concept of an almost hypnotic loop of endless media and product consumption, reality has afforded a lot more color and choice to us, and far less to many others.
“It’s not quite right and I worry it will get worse” is a privileged sentiment coming from people who have the freedom to worship, work, think, communicate, and play as they see fit.
My version of an ideal path would probably entail either consuming and producing less information as individuals, or expanding our capacity for it. We are among the first generations of our species to experience chronic information overload, and it does seem to insidiously assault our human will. However, if our liberties are materially curtained, I believe we still have the capacity to act with strength and unity. Just as a frog actually does leap out of the pot even if it’s a slowly boiled (fact), humans can break free of the attention-consumption complex when it threatens their more basic needs. That’s my theory anyhow.
Have been here from the future for the last 25 years. It doesn't matter, you can't tell anyone anything that changes their minds or what happens, you can only watch it play out and maybe help a few people feel less alone. The only people who can affect its course are the ones whose existence is endogenous to this timeline, and the outcome is the aggregate effect of their desires.
You all seem like nice people. The future will belong to those who own a pair of dry shoes and avoid boxcars. This will be funny in 2050.
I refuse to believe this. There is a way to fight deception, by using democratic approaches built into the tools that gather information. The only way to fight deception is through more transparency.
Information has to be more easy to understand, and the tools we (as the people) have right now pale in comparison to the tools that disinformation campaign managers have.
The only way to fight deception is through education, and a certain political party within the U.S. has spent the last 40-50 years completely butchering the public education system to a point near beyond repair.
Our last secretary of education was the heir to the most pervasive MLM pyramid scheme in the U.S., and is also part of a cult that believes a certain pre-determined number of cult members (very small percentage of them) go to heaven and every other human on Earth is condemned to eternal purgatory.
Now, maybe call me a crazy bigot, but I don't exactly see how such a person might have strengthening our public school system as part of their best interests.
The thing is: We have the internet, the most influential technology to spread information and educate people that has ever been created. It's time to use it again like it was in the MIT OpenCourseWare kind of days, before deceivers got their platforms where they can "buy-in" their opinions.
And I personally think that a Web Browser could be so much more than just a dumb tool to download things and forget about them afterwards. It could be an assistant, a teacher, a ledger, a librarian, a historian.
> The thing is: We have the internet, the most influential technology to spread information and educate people that has ever been created.
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. The internet accelerates lies at least as much as the truth.
I don't think the problem is education, it's a lack of strong shared commitments. It doesn't matter how clearly you explain something if the other party isn't interested in understanding it. I don't think that problem will be solved as long as all factions are more focused on defeating each other at all costs.
I do not care what you saw in social media being talked about by 0.1% of the US populace.
There is however a long recorded history of a significant amount of the Republican party attempting to insist that science is wrong/the devil and that faith in God is all one needs to make it through life in our modern world, whatever that's supposed to encompass.
Agreed it’s not as bad but neutering Math education was up for vote in the state of California until they delayed - after hundreds of Math professors from Stanford and Berkeley wrote an open letter.
I just think that it’s not as small as you think it is. Left wing identity politics is already being taught to kids today. I’m a Democrat but it’s getting harder for me to understand extreme left wing agenda.
This probably doesn't matter very much, but I found it very interesting. If you watch some old 80s movies, you'll find they had a very naive sense of information, deception, and revolution. I'm thinking particularly of movies or shows like Pump Up the Volume or Max Headroom. "The People" (ie, a few extras and the main characters) were presented with "the truth" (ie, a few sentences about some minor corruption.) and this led to a deus ex machina revolution where those powers were somehow "defeated." Even if this didn't happen on screen, it was sort of implied "everything is ok now."
I think these sorts of cultural ideas hearken back to the cold war, and refer directly to the USSR. Real, specific coverups occurred, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_cover-ups) and were perpetrated directly by specific government officials, and these specific government officials sat atop a very fragile and vulnerable government structure. Furthermore, the government truly attempted to cover things up, usually successfully.
Obviously we're in a much different world now, and the propagation of information has forced an evil government to move from coverup to disinformation. (or at least spin and messaging.) It sometimes feels like the culture has not quite caught up to this yet. I still see people shouting that people need to know "the truth," and there seems to be an expectation that once "the people" know "the truth," then everything will be alright, just like we saw on TV so many times.
Hah, easier. Well into a sci-fi meta-comment here. Think of how self-similarity emerges as a property of systems of energy and 'information,' and then consider what popping out and traversing pools of those self-similar equillibria might look like. The universe doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. While it won't make a difference, think of time as a fractal dimension of space (it's all there for 3D, in your constant, pi), where creating turbulence on the space 'side' can let you traverse and hop between islands in these self similar pools of 'time.' We can encode and transmit DNA across these pools using quantum computation ahead of ourselves, and by the time we arrive physically, the civilization is mostly baked and ready to join us. I happen to occupy this body to help prime this civ for the arrival and quick sort. You've got the moral criteria for working with others, and everything you need. As your people say, "Don't Panic."
Anyway, be kind, this next part is always a hard one.
Wait until the time traveler learns about a pandemic that has killed 15 million people by a virus that leaked from a lab, rather than trivial tech monopoly stuff that at most has killed a few hundred people.
It's politically incorrect to blame anyone for this virus. I hated the way Trump politicized it, but let's not deny accountability because we had an absolute head banging idiot for a president.
Let's just act like that Chinese lab was a top notch research facility, with strict safety protocols in place?
I wish more people read Brave New World. It's a more fitting comparison [0], even if it's a little more "distant" feeling than 1984. The tyranny in it is born from convenience and complacence, not violent compulsion. Comparing it to our current environment requires no awkward contortions around violence and control.
85 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward
The monopoly that Facebook, Google, etc. have is a monopoly over how their data is presented. Google is the only entity with access to the data that Google collates, etc.; except that this isn't data they generate. It's data they capture, pieces of the commons that they sequester from the commons.
Now I am afraid, it will be something far older and far worse: just straight up state autocracy enforced by people with guns/weapons.
Look at Texas. Who cares about using differential targeting of voters when you can just disenfranchise groups that are likely to vote against you. And as January 6, came so close to showing, who care who people actually vote if you can cry “fraud” and physically intimidate the people in charge of certifying the votes.
The Chinese government isn’t intimidated by the market reach of Alibaba when they can physically threaten Jack Ma and makes sure he only does what he is supposed to.
Analogous to the xkcd cartoon and the $5 wrench, many times the tool of coercion is not some multimillion dollar GPU cluster running advanced AI, it is a 50 cent bullet.
What you're witnessing is people desiring to be outside of what is acceptable to those inside. The basis of that whole Jan6 debacle was that they felt the state (is: vote counting) did them wrong, and so they don't want to be in that group.
One group, state, country, splits into many others, where each now feel protected better by their in-group. It's a common thread throughout history.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9647421...
The Republican base was taken for a ride and they didn't even realize it.
If that graph didn't have a big spike for Milwaukee's absentee ballots, it would be a sign of something nefarious.
Urban cores vote overwhelmingly democrat and it takes longer to tally those votes than podunk villages. Somehow, in 2020, people thought this was a controversy.
Most of the comments here read like the worst of Facebook and /pol/ "experts" came together. Jesus.
If Google orders search results that highlight whatever it likes on the first page, and buries what it does not on the 10th page, people's understanding of the issues will be severely skewed. We are talking about companies that have the power to manipulate ideas and information orders of magnitude greater than anything in human history.
I find Chomsky’s critique of his fellows amusing, given that he is a member of that population he considers illegitimate.
China leverages its vast market power to coerce American high tech companies to provide it with the latest technology if they want to conduct business in the People's Republic. China's power is market power, it is the power to request that Google censor news that is harmful to the Communist Party. It is the power to ask Hollywood studios not put the small flag of Taiwan on Tom Cruise's bomber jacket in the new Top Gun movie. The Chinese now have more supercomputers than the United States (188 to 122), and for a few years, they had the fastest supercomputer in the world. These computers allow nations to simulate everything from the weather to nuclear detonations.
At the end of the day, China understands better than anyone that control in the future is control over information, not tanks, aircraft carriers, or nuclear tipped ICBMs.
And YOU did it.
YOU yearned to work for these companies and were prepared to sell your gonads and even your soul to do so for the ostensible prestige, the salary, the tech, the "interesting problems", the 30 pieces of silver, helping the oligarchic overlords establish this technocratic world order.
YOU!
You claim to care about the common good, but that is mere posturing, mere pretense, mere cover for your real motives. You might even rationalize your behavior in various transparent ways. At least have the decency to be honest. Double down and say "I don't care. I'm doing it anyway."
Alas, the cunning of reason, providence, will always press even evil acts into its service. The evil man shall lose by defiling himself through his deeds, but these evil deeds shall be used to bring about a greater good despite his efforts. Thus the use of these technologies by those whom the oligarchic class despises and the shattering of the false narrative they were previously able to and hoping to continue to control.
Aside from that, a commercial dystopia is so anglo-centric it hurts my teeth. In that scenario, the have-nots have more freedom? Consumption is slavery? The disconnected have more connection? Okay that last part rings true, the rest feels like a paradox of privilege. We are uniquely entitled to compute as we please using whatever devices and service we see fit, to block and disable telemetry at will, to sue and win when things get bad. I appreciate what the author is trying to highlight, but maybe they should go back to 1984 and see what they miss.
It certainly was in some circles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
So throw out the whole bunch because of a few bad apples? And what happens when the replacements have problem cops? Do it over again?
There are times for both expressions, but police funding is probably a more local issue than can be solved in the comments of HN.
[1] Video footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF4ze5VCY1c
Who are "they"?
Minneapolis has been a one-party city for decades.
There's nothing stopping that party from doing what it wants with the police force.
For bonus points, guess the party.
I think we’re more likely to see commercial dystopia expressed in ways like California’s Prop 22. The have-nots and disconnected are just more likely to be exploited due to their lack of ability to organize against massive lobbying powers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
New York Times: “Yes, we mean Literally abolish the police”
This is typical of most police reactions to crime: they'll fill out some paperwork so you can file an insurance claim but they won't bother to do any actual investigation. We don't need armed people roaming the streets to do that, it's a clerical job.
After watching cops openly ignoring mask mandates over the last year and a half while they take their half-hour coffee breaks (drinking coffee for which they don't pay), I think that yes, we should literally abolish the police and replace them with something better. Right now, we're giving guns to the guys who were bullies and jerks in high school and acting surprised when they continue to bullies and jerks.
It’s really easy to say that but I have heard of no viable proposals to actually replace the police with “something better”. Nor do such proposals ever elaborate on how the new system would operate without vagaries and wonderful nice-to-haves like unconditional free housing for the homeless and UBI. It’s extraordinary easy to say a hypothetical system would be better. But how do you actually implement it?
I also think those brutish types you mentioned from high school might be the only kind of people willing to accept the dangers and anti-social elements that officers have to put up with. If you thought working in retail was bad, the kinds of people the police have to deal with are in a league of their own.
Furthermore, that kind of partnership may diffuse some of the sort of macho banter between cops that seems to lead to embarrassing headlines.
You put the social worker in dangerous situation by putting them on the frontline before the situation can be assessed. The social worker feels unsafe and needs to rely in the armed police. This dependency creates a bond and they become part of the thin blueline family. In the end you are back in the same situation.
The other thing to consider is a social worker is many parent's worst nightmare. If they find the smallest issue during a police call your kids could be taken away. Many people are afraid to call the police because they will call a social worker. I see this policy affecting single poor mothers in a much worse way compared to now.
The other issue is a social worker isn't a hostage / crisis manager. They are trained to do very different things.
So far it is turning out to be a rather good idea, and every claim you make regarding why this would be a problem is, in fact, untrue.
But by even the most generous of estimates, only around 4% of police time is actually spent on violent crime [1]. Surely we can start by defunding the 96% of situations that don’t require paramilitary personnel, and figure out how to deal with violence if and when we get to that last 4%.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time...
Boom, you now need... what, 1/3 as many cops? Even that many? Might even help at least a bit with the whole "driving while black" thing if the people tasked with this are just looking for traffic violations and aren't fishing for other things (unless you're dumb enough to offer them up, and they'll be recording, obviously)
Massive surveillance or pull-overs: pick at least one.
Pull-overs? That person better be prepared for shots fired in America.
How is this less fair? One of the biggest criticisms of the police apparatus is discretionary enforcement of the law. I bet Black motorists would overwhelmingly support a system blind to the "context" of the driver's skin color.
Police should only be involved when an armed person is needed. Things like filling out police reports of crimes, noise complaints, and traffic violations can be handled by social workers who can call in cops when needed. That will allow for a huge reduction in the police force.
I live in Marin County, and they wonder why voters won't pass their bond initiatives.
My father's best friend was a lieutenant in Oakland PD. They were so close he gave my father a "Get out of jail free card". It was just a business card which was signed on the back. If you commited a crime, you pulled out the card; you were let go. My father got out of a DUI with it. (I don't think they are handed out anymore?)
His friend was a level headed cop, a bit liberal for a cop even.
My father always wanted to hear about the big cases, or criminals they caught.
He finally told my father the truth. He told him we play chess in the basement for a good part of the day. He wasen't a beat cop. He was up their in rank.
My father was incredulous. He just didn't like the idea of government employees not out fighting crime.
I remember telling my father, I'd rather have a cop by a landline, rather than zooming around irritating citizens with pesky driving citations.
We finally agreed on something.
A cop that lets people drive drunk without consequences is not level headed to me. Nor is one that specifically lets their friends be above the law, especially for offenses that endanger others.
I would rather have cops ticketing motorists with excessively noisy vehicles, excessively bright lights, and who are not paying their vehicle taxes.
The cop that let him drive drunk wasn't the "level headed" one, but a different one who pulled him over and decided to give him a pass based on the "get out of jail free" card.
Those cards are not uncommon. They won't get you out of everything (it is up to the discretion of the cop you show it too) but they will get you out of a lot. [0]
I think such obvious corruption and double standards should be illegal, but hey, what do I know?
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-court...
Both partisan sides have this weird cognitive dissonance where liberals support all unions except police unions while the right backs police unions unquestionably.
I'm independent because the party I wish we had would not be fighting for more or less government, it would be fighting for high quality efficient government!
How do you define efficient government?
In another thread, some were lamenting how schools now have the responsibilities that extend well beyond simple education; should that even be part of an education system? Are we taxing it too much? Considering some of the things i have heard and seen in my own school days, it isn't hard to believe that there are issues with racism in schools. I don't think giving any institution that much power (education / future career prospects, food, etc..) is a healthy way to go about things.
You are lying.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-i-beca...
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/02/12/We-Actually-Mean-Aboli...
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/the-abolition-mov...
I also don't buy the argument that because other people have (or had) it worse than us, we should be content and not hope for something better. Imagine if the 13 colonies had had that attitude.
I stand corrected about some of the more extreme positions that some have taken on police reform. Thanks for those who provided sources. I took it as ‘mild reforms haven’t changed anything, we have to go big’ - some seem to imagine that crime will disappear if all basic needs are met, and will happen without the threat of violence. I’d like to see some prior art for that.
Also, though nobody really called me out I regret using the word anglo because I really didn't want to respond with a racial tone. I was intending to target wealthy western sensibilities more generally. While I resonated with the author’s concept of an almost hypnotic loop of endless media and product consumption, reality has afforded a lot more color and choice to us, and far less to many others.
“It’s not quite right and I worry it will get worse” is a privileged sentiment coming from people who have the freedom to worship, work, think, communicate, and play as they see fit.
My version of an ideal path would probably entail either consuming and producing less information as individuals, or expanding our capacity for it. We are among the first generations of our species to experience chronic information overload, and it does seem to insidiously assault our human will. However, if our liberties are materially curtained, I believe we still have the capacity to act with strength and unity. Just as a frog actually does leap out of the pot even if it’s a slowly boiled (fact), humans can break free of the attention-consumption complex when it threatens their more basic needs. That’s my theory anyhow.
You all seem like nice people. The future will belong to those who own a pair of dry shoes and avoid boxcars. This will be funny in 2050.
Information has to be more easy to understand, and the tools we (as the people) have right now pale in comparison to the tools that disinformation campaign managers have.
We need to even out their strategical advantage.
Our last secretary of education was the heir to the most pervasive MLM pyramid scheme in the U.S., and is also part of a cult that believes a certain pre-determined number of cult members (very small percentage of them) go to heaven and every other human on Earth is condemned to eternal purgatory.
Now, maybe call me a crazy bigot, but I don't exactly see how such a person might have strengthening our public school system as part of their best interests.
MLM products don't buy themselves, you know.
The thing is: We have the internet, the most influential technology to spread information and educate people that has ever been created. It's time to use it again like it was in the MIT OpenCourseWare kind of days, before deceivers got their platforms where they can "buy-in" their opinions.
And I personally think that a Web Browser could be so much more than just a dumb tool to download things and forget about them afterwards. It could be an assistant, a teacher, a ledger, a librarian, a historian.
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. The internet accelerates lies at least as much as the truth.
I don't think the problem is education, it's a lack of strong shared commitments. It doesn't matter how clearly you explain something if the other party isn't interested in understanding it. I don't think that problem will be solved as long as all factions are more focused on defeating each other at all costs.
I do not care what you saw in social media being talked about by 0.1% of the US populace.
There is however a long recorded history of a significant amount of the Republican party attempting to insist that science is wrong/the devil and that faith in God is all one needs to make it through life in our modern world, whatever that's supposed to encompass.
I just think that it’s not as small as you think it is. Left wing identity politics is already being taught to kids today. I’m a Democrat but it’s getting harder for me to understand extreme left wing agenda.
I think these sorts of cultural ideas hearken back to the cold war, and refer directly to the USSR. Real, specific coverups occurred, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_cover-ups) and were perpetrated directly by specific government officials, and these specific government officials sat atop a very fragile and vulnerable government structure. Furthermore, the government truly attempted to cover things up, usually successfully.
Obviously we're in a much different world now, and the propagation of information has forced an evil government to move from coverup to disinformation. (or at least spin and messaging.) It sometimes feels like the culture has not quite caught up to this yet. I still see people shouting that people need to know "the truth," and there seems to be an expectation that once "the people" know "the truth," then everything will be alright, just like we saw on TV so many times.
Anyway, be kind, this next part is always a hard one.
Let's just act like that Chinese lab was a top notch research facility, with strict safety protocols in place?
And it's available for free online! https://www.huxley.net/bnw/
[0]: https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...