Mark Zuckerberg: Building Global Community

A way I'd prefer: quit letting people share news on facebook.

Heck, let's go back to text-only status updates and I can go back to reading what my acquaintances are eating. That would be much more pleasant than today's facebook.

I really don't believe that's realistic, and if you think that it's possible I would encourage you to broaden your social groups. The idea of a private company holding an election to choose my representatives is completely unacceptable - much less the concept that it would be global and not tied to the places I care about.

People go to war over that kind of thing.

I guess one possibility is if you think there's something very good or important about your society, culture, or economy, that you don't want to see change. Globalization means all sorts of pressures to change. People elsewhere who become aware of some aspect of your ways that upsets them may start political campaigns against it, or people in your own community may become interested in moving elsewhere or adopting values or practices that are unfamiliar or previously disfavored in your community. Let's think of a few possible complaints:

"I want my indigenous community to keep speaking our language and practising our religion, but outsiders want us to stop."

"I want to keep having a local community based on farming, but outsiders are tempting our children to move away."

"I want to have the skills I grew up with stay economically relevant, but connecting to the wider economy is making it hard to compete because outsiders are selling similar things cheaper, and making us want new things we don't have an easy way to trade for."

"I want to keep my family learning the things that I think are important but outsiders are trying to teach them skills that are more relevant to a different way of life or set of professions, and trying to teach them a new set of tastes and cravings."

"I want to keep hunting baby seals/whaling/participating in blood sports/practising female circumcision/using corporal punishment on my children/performing animal sacrifices, but outsiders think that's backwards and barbaric and want to stigmatize or outlaw it."

"I want my children to stay in my religion, but other people are trying to evangelize them or deconvert them or expose them to media that mocks or argues against my religion."

"Attracting the attention of outsiders for how great our culture or land is brings all kinds of problems, like tourists who behave badly and inappropriately, or are violent to us, or want to move here and drive up land prices, or want to increase the level of economic activity or bring in extractive industries, or different governments fighting wars over our territory."

"I think my people have an important connection to our land, in a way that we don't have to other places and other people don't have to this place, for example because we know how and why the places here are holy, and that connection or awareness means it's important that we live here and that other people don't."

"My people aren't really that good at interacting with outsiders; our culture or education means that others take advantage of us easily by proposing bargains that aren't really good deals for us, and we don't know how to cope with the disruptions of rapid change, and we tend to get addicted to the drugs that other people bring us that we don't have a prior history with."

"These people say they like and care about us, but then they want to change everything about how we live!"

"My language is stigmatized as a 'dialect' and is useless anywhere else outside of my community. When other people come here they all want us to speak French/Chinese/Russian/English, yet when I go elsewhere people laugh at my attempts to use my own language. This asymmetry makes me feel cheated."

"My community has values I think are really important, like the way we think about family, but now that we're seeing all of these contrary examples in foreign media, people seem less sure of the importance of those values and less willing to act on them. The foreign media don't even always directly engage with our values; they may just subtly suggest that they're just not a big deal."

"We used to have lots of jobs here but at some point they all seemed to disappear. I don't even understand exactly how, but it must have to do with the larger economy. People are telling me that I have an opportunity to move somewhere else and find lots of work, but I was happier with how it was before when I didn't have to move elsewhere to find work."

"It feels like outsiders are manufacturing ethnic conflicts in my community and trying to divide us. In the past, we didn't have conflicts along the lines we do now."

As much as this sounds as a defence of people who want to build walls, I have to agree with it to some degree. I don't agree with the "violence from a sudden influx of refugees" claim, but here's an interesting anecdote on the issue.

When NAFTA was originally signed in 1994, with the intention of opening borders to big businesses, there were some unfortunate side effects.

A lot of Mexican farmers used to operate in smaller scales. Many worked on communal lands that grew food in smaller scale.

Now, fast forward to NAFTA. Part of the deal phased out tariffs that were protecting and helping these small farmers keep in place. With the market open, American corn started flooding Mexico, bringing many of these millions of small farmers out of business or severely hurting their economic prospects.

What was left for them to do? Mexico didn't have a supply of alternative jobs for all these people, so illegal migration to the United States picked up. Lots of illegal immigrants didn't move to the US because things are just "better" there; they were willing to leave their home land, their families, cross a desert, risk not only decoration but their lives and move into an unknown country that speaks another language because they were desperate. They didn't have a choice, since they lost their land and source of income. It was, and still is, a big risk and sacrifice.

That's largely why we saw that 20 year hump in Mexicans coming illegally into the United States (Mexican migration to the US has been falling these last few years though).

It's interesting, because now the US wants to close their borders. Effectively the consequence of this development is that big food corporations greatly benefited from the open borders, but the average person did not.

This is not black and white, about opening borders always, or having nothing go through. Globalization and open borders needs to be to the interest of the people, and it's not always good. Building physical walls is incredibly stupid and childish, but there do need to be some hurdles in place so the big fish doesn't eat the small, specifically, so the big corporation doesn't destroy local economies all of a sudden.

A few interesting reads.

http://www.npr.org/2013/12/26/257255787/wave-of-illegal-immi...

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/10/11/globalization-an...

But the point is that the tables flipped entirely. Go back to 1990's and you'll find GOP senators decrying Rage Against The Machine as communist radicals for their opposition to NAFTA. A big chunk of the GOP is still pro-free-markets.

If core parts of what "left" and "right" mean are subject to re-definition every 4 years, maybe the polarized tail is wagging the dog.