541–550 of 592 posts
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It's an accurate summary.
It's accurate? So all the current billionaires are descendants of other billionaires?
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Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naïve "burn it all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing. (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society, but they need a reason , and we've had too many religious extremists: let's make this one an anarchist!"… though maybe this is a false dichotomy? Someone's probably written a…
The link between anarchists and 'burn everything down' comes from the fact that in reality, many anarchists have very much taken the 'shoot first' and then hopefully build something better later path. Those anarchists who didn't do that, were just never politically or socially relevant. So they can write nice pamphlets all they like about what 'real anarchism' actually is. > we need a bad guy who wants to destroy soc…
They still want it.
> one so different that its essentially impossible to get there without destroying the existing one first.
Everything else they say is demagogy, in the end, all they are good for is fomenting strife and wars. After the bloodshed, these fools and their fantasies are quickly disposed of, the little tools they are.
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What ways? I'm curious. Have you written anything about this? I'd be interested in reading more of what you see as possible. If we think about stability from first principles, then when you're talking about aggregating up billions and trillions of transactions, each of which occurs with some characteristic frequency, then the primary factors are coupling strength (how correlated or uncorrelated are those frequencies?…
There are lots of ways… you could back it with a basket of real assets (eg gold, commodities, etc) or multiple currencies (eg to reduce the role any one central bank plays) or create a new process for delegating central bank authority (eg with better transparency). I’m not saying I have the answer but I’m quite confident that in the next few hundred years we will have digital and stable mediums of exchange that are b…
Me too! But I was wondering what might be possible more in the next decade. :-D
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The link between anarchists and 'burn everything down' comes from the fact that in reality, many anarchists have very much taken the 'shoot first' and then hopefully build something better later path. Those anarchists who didn't do that, were just never politically or socially relevant. So they can write nice pamphlets all they like about what 'real anarchism' actually is. > we need a bad guy who wants to destroy soc…
> Anarchist and Communists very much wanted a fundamentally different society, They still want it. > one so different that its essentially impossible to get there without destroying the existing one first. Everything else they say is demagogy, in the end, all they are good for is fomenting strife and wars. After the bloodshed, these fools and their fantasies are quickly disposed of, the little tools they are.
(I really recommend reading Arendt especially regarding how these happen.)
This topic - autonomy - may sound unfamiliar, but it is the essence of democracy and should not be treated as separate from it. They are two sides of the same coin: autonomy is natural small-scale democracy, and democracy is institutionalized large-scale autonomy. While the notion of autonomy is nothing new, revitalizing it in the modern IT era is a bit of an emerging topic. At least that's how I see it.
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As an anthropologist can you sketch out, for us not so blessed, an example of the higher or highest levels of existence an individual lacking any support from any larger organized groups has actually obtained? Thanks.
The point OP is making is that anthropological research has done the hard work of uncovering real insights that the author presumes are learned from works of fiction
I'd suggest it's fair to ask self identified experts what real insights they allude to.
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I am not criticizing your historical explanation or your comment, but I would like to make a footnote: Sometimes narratives like these which lay out a simple cause-and-effect between political decisions and modern outcomes can make people think that reverting the situation is a solution to modern outcomes, but that is rarely the case. Everything evolves, and the solution to modern problems is to find a solution that…
There is more than one possible structure to sustain an active constraint against power grabs, to be sure. But a Senate elected by the state governments was effective in doing it for as long as it was in place. There are other things that could work instead, but sometimes the old thing only stopped working because it stopped happening. And either way you would still need the something else to be used instead rather t…
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In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils? The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporatio…
Overall national wealth and power shrink under monopoly super corporations, that is the reason it is a matter of public policy in the first place. If you go back and review the major antitrust actions of the 20th century, each one was followed by an explosion of market-creating innovation: Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, even Microsoft. Look even further back, and many national economies were organized around a few sta…
Breaking these megacorps benefits little guys like you and me, but I doubt it benefits state power on the global stage
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Exactly — hence the need to deliberately evolve it.
Have you never read any of the many Frankenstein myths? What makes you think we can "evolve" a superintelligence and then keep it bottled up?
And I’m not really as concerned about the super intelligence. I’m more concerned about the impact on our culture as humans.
It seems to me that: - on average, complexity is increasing. - most patterns in how civilization is arranged oscilate over time - what's happening right now is most likely an artifact of right now (economics, power structure, culture, politics, etc). - it seems that a shift back to smaller groups is likely in the future - what I'm not sure about is whether the larger groups need to dissolve or stabilize in order for…
The last point assumes that there is such a thing as sufficient abundance. I wish there was. My experience with human nature tells me there might not be, though.
Our expectations are always rising, so we will always be unsatisfied. Right now it still requires a lot of human labour to meet all people's basic needs (food, housing , safety, etc). Also the US is at the back end of a big (~75-100 year) economic cycle and deleveraging instead of leveraging, which makes it feel like things are going backwards. People have a tendency to assume how things feel now is how they will always feel, ergo it feels like things will keep going backwards forever.
However, as productivity (tech) keeps advancing and the economic and power system reconfigures itself (which might be painful), there is a decent chance that everything winds up significantly better for most people afterwards.
It may be a generation away, and it won't impact everyone equally, but world wide on average people will be more free to spend their time how they want in the future. This may mean wireheading, community building/socializing, art, learning, making things, competing, playing games, etc. In some ways it will be similar to the past and in other ways it will be very different. The main difference is that most people will have more choice in what they do, which is why I think fewer people will choose to do things they find meaningless and unrewarding.
But people will still find a way to be unsatisfied...