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by openrisk
702 days ago
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> there’s this new class of people who don’t grow the food and just take stuff Pretty good summary of the latest "tech" business models as well :-) The question is: why does this happen? Why do the many typically fail to limit how exploitative the few? People usually seek answers in morality (or the lack thereof) but morality is a complex emergent phenomenon that is always "too little, too late". One fundamental factor seems to be the difficulty of communicating and coordinating large numbers of people: The slow diffusion of technical knowledge means a gang of bandits with superior weapons can control an empire. Ineffective general education means vast human potential is wasted and accepts being raw material for stratified societies. Controlling message transmission and obfuscating the state of the world means people live in ignorance and manufactured realities which in turn makes them much easier to exploit. An interesting question is whether digital technology with its various extraordinary efficiencies and exponential capacities will ever help mitigate the fundamental flaws of large human societies. Idealistic hopes in this direction by tech visionaries have been promptly crushed, but what is important is indeed the long run effect. |
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My personal theory regarding morality is that since we did not spend long time evolving to world where writing is a technology, there is no emotional reaction to contract that will allow a factory to pollute killing humans, compare to woman who sees a man to stab a baby with a fork.
Human society has three classes: owners, hermits, and pets. The owners have assets, do not need to work for money, and have means of influencing the public opinion. Hermits do not work for money, but also do not have assets or influence. Pets are 99%
Same as you train a dog to sit and run, you train a pet to BUY and VOTE. Then you laugh in the room with your fellow owners because you've bought all the representatives, won the election, and can now use legislation to crush your opponents. Kropotkin was right one hundred years ago:
"We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferrule of a law, which regulates every event in life — our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship — that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of law, elaborated by a representative government and administered by a handful of rulers. And even when it has gone so far as to emancipate itself from the thralldom, its first care has been to reconstitute it immediately. "The Year I of Liberty" has never lasted more than a day, for after proclaiming it men put themselves the very next morning under the yoke of law and authority."
Were I to re-establish a society in an empty land with no worries about existing nations coming after us militaristically: (1) Supply of money would be limited, tied to gold (export controls), have demurrage (except for government accounts), be cryptocurrency so that one can near infinitely move it to smaller denominations (eliminating deflation). I have quite sepcific system for this, where even all property will be demurraged algorithmically—based on ∆ market value! (2) Direct democracy, EG everything would be directly elected. If you cant participate, that is ok, but the elections will keep flowing. The voting system will be tied to prediction markets, EG vote for a thing that fails to perform as predicted and you may have less votes for the next election. (3) System that connects the prediction markets somehow to how public is informed / educated, probably involving censorship or at least having news outlets that are recommenmded by state because no state that allows CIA type propaganda to flow in survives.
These are only the policies that would affect the problem you brought to surface the most.