Skynet or rebranded Janissaries?
It seems that pattern recognition is not in vogue among the commentariat. Our species is not really that creative when it comes to social phenomena. All one has to do is take a look at the relatively recent history (600 years) to spot remarkable similarities between the new techno class and Ottoman Janissaries ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissaries ) : - Both present about 0.01% of the (then) current world population (making a wild assumption that today there are 5-700,000 techies on the planet making 6-digit salaries); - Both are recruited from the unsuspecting population into the realm that sets them wide apart in their future lives, socially above the originating environment; - The recruitment criteria was not related to their social attributes, but to their innate qualities (able bodied in the impressionable young age then, high IQ today); - Both started as 'tools' (see below) to become a grave danger for the system that created their class. There are differences, though - for example, smart phones instead of spoons. -- Today’s Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons ( http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/11/today-s-tech-oligarchs-are-worse-than-the-robber-barons.html ) Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians in their pockets. Joel Kotkin 08.11.16 5:00 AM ET A decade ago these guys—and they are mostly guys—were folk heroes, and for many people, they remain so. They represented everything traditional business, from Wall Street and Hollywood to the auto industry, in their pursuit of sure profits and golden parachutes, was not—hip, daring, risk-taking folk seeking to change the world for the better. Now from San Francisco to Washington and Brussels, the tech oligarchs are something less attractive: a fearsome threat whose ambitions to control our future politics, media, and commerce seem without limits. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Uber may be improving our lives in many ways, but they also are disrupting old industries—and the lives of the many thousands of people employed by them. And as the tech boom has expanded, these individuals and companies have gathered economic resources to match their ambitions. And as their fortunes have ballooned, so has their hubris. They see themselves as somehow better than the scum of Wall Street or the trolls in Houston or Detroit. It’s their intelligence, not just their money, that makes them the proper global rulers. In their contempt for the less cognitively gifted, they are waging what The Atlantic recently called “a war on stupid people.” I had friends of mine who attended MIT back in the 1970s tell me they used to call themselves “tools,” which told us us something about how they regarded themselves and were regarded. Technologists were clearly bright people whom others used to solve problems or make money. Divorced from any mystical value, their technical innovations, in the words of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, constituted “a traditional action made effective.” Their skills could be applied to agriculture, metallurgy, commerce, and energy. In recent years, like Skynet in the Terminator, the tools have achieved consciousness, imbuing themselves with something of a society-altering mission. To a large extent, they have created what the sociologist Alvin Gouldner called “the new class” of highly educated professionals who would remake society. Initially they made life better—making spaceflight possible, creating advanced medical devices and improving communications (the internet); they built machines that were more efficient and created great research tools for both business and individuals. Yet they did not seek to disrupt all industries—such as energy, food, automobiles—that still employed millions of people. They remained “tools” rather than rulers. With the massive wealth they have now acquired, the tools at the top now aim to dominate those they used to serve. Netflix is gradually undermining Hollywood, just as iTunes essentially murdered the music industry. Uber is wiping out the old order of cabbies, and Google, Facebook, and the social media people are gradually supplanting newspapers. Amazon has already undermined the book industry and is seeking to do the same to apparel, supermarkets, and electronics. Past economic revolutions—from the steam engine to the jet engine and the internet—created in their wake a productivity revolution. To be sure, as brute force or slower technologies lost out, so did some companies and classes of people. But generally the economy got stronger and more productive. People got places sooner, information flows quickened, and new jobs were created, many of them paying middle- and working-class people a living wage. This is largely not the case today. As numerous scholars including Robert Gordon have
Vice > Jason Koebler > Startup automating Peter Thiel's legal strategy
< https://motherboard.vice.com/read/legalist-is-automating-the-lawsuit-strategy-peter-thiel-used-to-kill-gawker > A Startup Is Automating the Lawsuit Strategy Peter Thiel Used to Kill Gawker Written by JASON KOEBLER August 24, 2016 // 03:00 PM EST Did you look at Peter Thiel's systematic destruction of Gawker via the American legal system and think "Wow, it's too difficult to extract money from corporations and people using the courts?" Did you think, "Why don't I try that?" If you answered yes to either question, there's a startup you should meet. Legalist is a Silicon Valley startup that was developed in the Y Combinator incubator offering "data-backed litigation financing" using algorithms to "analyze millions of court cases to source, vet, and finance commercial litigation." It's the latest in a series of companies that allow third parties to "invest" in the success of a lawsuit, by funding said lawsuit. The idea is that, using historical lawsuit data, the outcome of a lawsuit can be predicted before it's even filed. If you can predict which lawsuits will succeed, you can ensure big financial returns for people who invest in litigation. Similarly, to increase the probability of a lawsuit's success, would-be litigants should file their cases in districts with judges who are notoriously favorable to that type of case. For example, one-fourth of all American patent cases are heard in one small district in Texas because it's easy to win patent cases with the judge there. Legalist believes that it can similarly Moneyball its way to competitive advantages for all sorts of cases. "One of the biggest predictors of case outcome is the presiding judge and one of the biggest predictors of length is the number of cases that judge is concurrently working on," Eva Shang, one of the company's cofounders, told the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Shang noted that currently, lawsuit investors return about $1.40 for each dollar they invest; she thinks Legalist can improve upon that figure. The company did not immediately respond to Motherboard's request for comment. In other words, the company is determined to disrupt the annoying unpredictability of the American justice system. I say disrupt, because it's planning on weaponizing weaknesses in the courts system using historical lawsuit data as an investing opportunity. In a sane world, an idea this crazy would either: A) Democratize the frivolous lawsuits that rich people, patent trolls, and other litigious types use all the time to extract wealth via the justice system. or B) Force Congress to reckon with a court system that is highly broken and inefficient. This being a not-so-sane world, perhaps a third thing will happen, where more companies will, like Gawker, lose existentially threatening court cases in a rigged legal system that are funded by what are essentially uninterested parties. If this is the outcome, then Legalist and its investors will get fabulously wealthy in automating the third-party litigation financing industry, which two senators recently called "largely unregulated and operates with no licensing or oversight." For a real-world example of how venue, judge, and third-party funding can ruin someone's proverbial day, take a look at what billionaire Peter Thiel just did to Gawker. Thiel, stricken with a vendetta against the publication either because it outed him as gay or because he didn't like Gawker's reporting on the insular world of Silicon Valley, sought to destroy the company by drowning it in litigation. To increase his odds of success, Thiel's lawyer filed the case in Florida, in a district that is notably favorable to Hogan and in a district with a judge that has a history of getting decisions wrong (many legal experts believe Gawker will eventually win its case on appeal, which will be too late to save the company). Making these decisions presumably required careful consideration by a talented lawyer, a luxury few can afford. Legalist proposes to automate these decisions with its algorithm. The company said it doesn't want to enable lots of would-be-Peter-Thiels, but even if the company's endgame is focused on earning money and not personal vendettas, the machinations and legal strategy are the same. The underlying technology is interesting and potentially useful -- founded by two Harvard undergrads, the company's original plan was to scrape and upload state court records to a central database, making it possible for lawyers, journalists, and the public to search state court records, which are notoriously hidden behind paywalls, are difficult to access, and are often stored on hard-to-search websites. As recently as last month, the startup was content to become the "Lexis Nexis for state records," a service that would make fragmented state court records "more accessible and transparent." Instead, its chosen a course of action that's far more anarchic than I would have believed possible, given its
Degrowth Conference, Budapest
The 5th International Degrowth Conference will take place in Budapest from 30 August to 3 September 2016. For the first time, in parallel to the conference, an open festival "Budapest Degrowth Week" will feature practical workshops, panel and participatory discussions, and also concerts, artistic performances and interactive tours throughout the city. http://budapest.degrowth.org/?page_id=638 fyi: http://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1303/msg00023.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
