What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...

We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It’s embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.

The truth is, functioning markets are not “free” at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.

The job of market regulation - fundamentally a restriction on your freedom - is to prevent all that bad stuff. Markets work well as long as they’re in, as we call it in engineering, the “continuous control region,” that is, the part far away from any weird outliers. You need no participant in the market to have too much power. You need downside protection (bankruptcy, social safety net, insurance). You need fair enforcement of contracts (which is different from literal enforcement of contracts).

The major rework we need isn’t some math theory, some kind of Paxos for Capitalism, or Paxos for Government. The sad, boring fact is that no fundamental advances in math or computer science are needed to solve these problems.

  • southerntofuOP
    2·
    3 years ago

    I posted this here because there’s some relevant bits, but also some parts i disagree with. I’d be glad to hear your thoughts as well, and maybe some of you would like to start an anarchist answer to this article?

    The article points to the tyranny of structurelessness as a critique of informal power structures: i think that’s a very fair critique although i must also link to the tyranny of tyranny which has some great answers to that article. [0]

    However, Jo Freeman does not advocate for centralized control in her piece (though she was an authoritarian communist), but rather for process transparency as a means of power distribution. Think about it: when the rules aren’t explicit, does it mean there are no rules or social codes to follow? By making our expectations explicit, we can empower people to ponder whether they’d belong and to explore new approaches to their ideas and projects. Take for example a self-organized political space: if there is no rules on what kind of behavior we reject, then it means the people running it become police and judges of unwritten rules. If the rules of the space are presented on the frontdoor, then everyone is welcome either to consent to them, to confront them, or to walk away.

    The conclusion of apenwarr’s article is more or less:

    All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.

    This conclusion is valid given the current political/economic system. Free markets can’t regulate themselves. However, is a free market our ideal society? (No.) Could self-organization (autogestion) be an alternative scheme to centralized regulation? Think about it: if workers and users (eg. of a public transport system) were the ones deciding for it, would we end up with such user-hostile, worker-hostile, and nature-hostile outcomes?

    I personally think self-organization as a horizontal regulation mechanism is interesting to explore. I’m not saying a self-organized collectives can’t be wrong or make mistakes, but i’m saying there would be much less incentives to do so. I think this article from 2003 called Destructive production asks some fair questions about the feasibility of modern destructive tech (eg. micro-electronics) in a free society:

    Computer manufacturers generate millions of pounds of toxic waste each year – manufacturing one computer chip creates 90 pounds of waste and uses nearly 3000 gallons of water alone! And the process of refining copper used to create chips contributes to acid rain. (…) A lot of manufacturing-generated pollution, such as contaminated groundwater and acid rain, can’t be limited to one location either. What will the non-computer-users do when their drinking water is ruined by the computer-makers upstream? (…) It also seems unlikely that people would be willing to jump through all these hoops (copper and gold mining, exposure to dangerous chemicals, painstaking factory-line assembly, etc.) in order to have their own personal computer

    If people are interested we can open a pad to throw ideas on :)

    [0] Both have very valid points because they don’t talk about the same kind of group/structure. The affinity group can be very horizontal because it’s very small, while the broader movement/collective is much wider.