Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Morlock Elloi]

Don't forget the mine shaft gap, which seems to motivate most of the 
crypto currency frenzy.


On 1/10/18, 08:24, byfield wrote:

genealogy, from the 1957 Gaither Report's 'bomber gap' to Stiglitz's
'knowledge gap,' says a lot about how deeply militarism has pervaded

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Re: Quit Facebook: Open letter to Yann LeCun

[Frederic Neyrat]

Dear Olivier,

Really, people don't know what Facebook is? Holy cow!

Happy new year out of FB!  :)

Frederic Neyrat

2018-01-10 11:49 GMT-06:00 olivier auber :

> Open letter to Yann LeCun, former Professor at College de France, Head of
> Research in Artificial Intelligence at Facebook.
>
> From Olivier Auber, researcher, Free University of Brussels (VUB)
>
> Dear Yann
>
> as a researcher as you are too, but in another area, that is Natural
> Intelligence (NI), I would like to address you publicly to let you know
> that I'm leaving Facebook, probably definitely.
>
> The reason is simple. Facebook is obviously a powerful tool of
> communication. Many researchers I work with have become accustomed to using
> it without asking too much questions for their informal exchanges. The
> conversations that are conducted there are sometimes futile, but often also
> of the greatest interest.
>
> But I realize that these conversations, in a way, no longer belong to us
> when they are conducted on Facebook!
>
> The proof is that when you want to leave Facebook, the platform offers to
> bring with you a summary archive. But this archive does not contain:
>
> - links included in your personal posts (just that!)
> - discussions following your personal posts.
> - Comments left on other posts
> - the links of posts that you republish.
> - your address book (you get the names, not the mails or other coordinates
> theoretically shared with you)
>
> In short, it's a real hostage taking!
>
> In other words, Facebook looks like a sort of Far West saloon in which
> alcohol would be free. If you go in, not to drink, but to simply chat with
> your friends, you realize when you go out that your conversations and your
> address book no longer belong to you. They belong to the boss of the
> saloon! To top it off, the boss forbids you to say goodbye one by one to
> your friends and retrieve their details. Personal messages are indeed
> blocked after a few hundred!
>
> In short, by this open letter, I wish to alert my colleagues and more
> generally all professional or independent intellectual workers. Do not post
> your ideas on Facebook! Do not lead any interesting conversation on
> Facebook! Instead, choose to chat on free distributed social networks such
> as Diaspora or Mastodon. Choose shared intelligence platforms like
> Seenthis. In particular, my friends, independent researchers or independent
> artists, do not wait until Mark Zuckerberg, enriched to the extreme by your
> free work, wants to pay you a basic income. He has no legitimacy to do
> that! Instead, experiment with distributed free money creation networks
> such as Duniter.
>
> Dear Yann, to conclude, I do not doubt that thanks to your talent and that
> of the researchers you have gathered, Facebook can one day realize the most
> beautiful Artificial Intelligence. On this day, however, by behaving like
> this, Facebook is likely to be emptied of its users. Gone!
>
> Cheers
>
> Olivier Auber
>
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Quit Facebook: Open letter to Yann LeCun

[olivier auber]

Open letter to Yann LeCun, former Professor at College de France, Head of
Research in Artificial Intelligence at Facebook.

>From Olivier Auber, researcher, Free University of Brussels (VUB)

Dear Yann

as a researcher as you are too, but in another area, that is Natural
Intelligence (NI), I would like to address you publicly to let you know
that I'm leaving Facebook, probably definitely.

The reason is simple. Facebook is obviously a powerful tool of
communication. Many researchers I work with have become accustomed to using
it without asking too much questions for their informal exchanges. The
conversations that are conducted there are sometimes futile, but often also
of the greatest interest.

But I realize that these conversations, in a way, no longer belong to us
when they are conducted on Facebook!

The proof is that when you want to leave Facebook, the platform offers to
bring with you a summary archive. But this archive does not contain:

- links included in your personal posts (just that!)
- discussions following your personal posts.
- Comments left on other posts
- the links of posts that you republish.
- your address book (you get the names, not the mails or other coordinates
theoretically shared with you)

In short, it's a real hostage taking!

In other words, Facebook looks like a sort of Far West saloon in which
alcohol would be free. If you go in, not to drink, but to simply chat with
your friends, you realize when you go out that your conversations and your
address book no longer belong to you. They belong to the boss of the
saloon! To top it off, the boss forbids you to say goodbye one by one to
your friends and retrieve their details. Personal messages are indeed
blocked after a few hundred!

In short, by this open letter, I wish to alert my colleagues and more
generally all professional or independent intellectual workers. Do not post
your ideas on Facebook! Do not lead any interesting conversation on
Facebook! Instead, choose to chat on free distributed social networks such
as Diaspora or Mastodon. Choose shared intelligence platforms like
Seenthis. In particular, my friends, independent researchers or independent
artists, do not wait until Mark Zuckerberg, enriched to the extreme by your
free work, wants to pay you a basic income. He has no legitimacy to do
that! Instead, experiment with distributed free money creation networks
such as Duniter.

Dear Yann, to conclude, I do not doubt that thanks to your talent and that
of the researchers you have gathered, Facebook can one day realize the most
beautiful Artificial Intelligence. On this day, however, by behaving like
this, Facebook is likely to be emptied of its users. Gone!

Cheers

Olivier Auber
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Re: managerialism

[Richard Barbrook]

Hiya,

I traced the different versions of the intermediate
class from Henri Saint-Simon's early-19th century
Industrials  to Charlie Leadbeater and Paul Miller's
1990s Pro-Ams on page 28 onwards in 
The Class of the New (OpenMute, London 2006).

You can download the pdf from the link at the top
of this page.
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/other-works/

Richard

===

Dr. Richard Barbrook
Dept of Politics and IR,
University of Westminster
32-38 Wells Street
LONDON W1T 3UW
England

+44 (0)7879 441873

Skype: richard.barbrook
Facebook: Richard Barbrook
Twitter: @richardbarbrook

http://www.gamesforthemany.org
http://www.cybersalon.org
http://www.classwargames.net
http://www.politicsandmediafreedom.net
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/other-works

'Clause 5: That as the laws ought to be equal, so 
they must be good, and not evidently destructive 
to the safety and well-being of the people.' 

The Levellers, The 1647 Agreement of the People 
for a Firm and  Present Peace Upon Grounds of 
Common Right.

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Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[byfield]

On 10 Jan 2018, at 5:18, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

The move from an underdeveloped to developed economy is described as a 
gap in resources, but it is much more of a gap in knowledge
Free markets are praised as being efficient.  However, markets are not 
efficient in promoting innovation and learning.  For example, in the 
field of drug discovery, markets direct more effort and resources into 
fighting hair loss than into combating malaria.


This lines up with Morlock's argument that another renaissance of 
literacy is in the offing, but this time around it's technical rather 
than textual literacy. We have no idea what it will entail, but let's 
say it's on the order of what the written word did — which, if you go 
with people like Eric Havelock, led to a profound rupture in 
subjectivity, of which 'philosophy' was just one byproduct. That general 
line of thought should pretty familiar to anyone who's dabbled in media 
theories of the last ~50 years: basically, that what we think and how we 
think it is inseparable from how we record and disseminate it. In that 
case, a lot of this pop hand-wringing about how [computation | digital | 
networks | mobile | screens] are producing new kinds of [people | 
organizations | societies | spectacles] — which are almost 
[incomprehensible | schizophrenic | psychotic] — is vaguely accurate. 
The problem is how we evaluate these changes. OT1H there are the 
nostalgists, who lament that technology is leading us astray and argue 
that we need to 'go back' somehow: parenting, education, law, 
regulation, etc. OT0H there are the futurists, from Arlington to Silicon 
Valley to Beijing to Moscow, who think the real challenge lies in 
figuring out how to exploit these new forms. Their styles differ, but 
one thing they share is a commitment to dissolving the boundaries of the 
self.


And then there's Keith, who refuses to get dragged into this pessimism 
and argues, more or less, that these debates are just quibbling about 
what kind of wreath we should send to the west's funeral — and that 
broad statistical trends in the distribution of the world's population 
tell us much of we need to know. I admire his optimism, and I think the 
left needs to start looking much more widely for promising realities, 
rather than dwelling on threatening possibilities. Some of this dilemma 
is neatly summed up in a New Yorker–ish cartoon that's been doing the 
rounds for some years, of a few ragged people huddled around a campfire 
(in a  cave, appropriately enough): "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But 
for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for 
shareholders."


https://economicsociology.org/2014/10/07/yes-the-planet-got-destroyed-but-for-a-beautiful-moment-in-time-we-created-a-lot-of-value-for-shareholders/

This all is a roundabout way of approaching the question what exactly 
would fill this 'gap in knowledge' that Joseph Stiglitz diagnoses. We 
should keep in mind the origins of this kind of 'gap' idea. As far as I 
know, the first one was the 'bomber gap' of the mid-'50s, followed 
quickly by the 'missile gap' of the late '50s on; but even if those 
aren't the first gaps, they played a decisive role in this kind of 
'global' rhetoric with all its quantish-sounding comparisons — between 
the US and the USSR, between under- and over-developed economies, 
between the global south and north, etc. Both of those two gaps were 
mostly imaginary: they were shrill gambits made by the emerging security 
apparatus to justify vast expansions in the scale and scope of military 
R budgets, which Brian and I were talking about. This genealogy, from 
the 1957 Gaither Report's 'bomber gap' to Stiglitz's 'knowledge gap,' 
says a lot about how deeply militarism has pervaded intellectual 
cultures: even Marxoids and enviro-economists rely heavily on this 'gap' 
metaphor. I wonder how much power this idea of a gap exerts in the 
African social settings that Keith describes so lovingly. My guess is 
not much — not because Africans are unaware of the force of globalism 
(on the contrary), but maybe because their myriad cultures, coming from 
very different historical perspectives, don't see it as necessarily 
opposed to immediate sociability. Pessimism, and its attended sense of 
hopelessness, are learned.


But, really, what is this gap? It's a differential — between an 
'actually existing' state of affairs and an imagined anti/ideal. I think 
the gap metaphor has been widely successful in large part because it can 
be applied to almost anything: bombers or missiles, vocational or 
critical education, resources, income and savings, philanthropic 
funding, pharma R, trivial business plans, whatever. It's a neatly 
quasi-visual way of sidestepping philosophy (not a bad thing, IMO): 
instead of lying around on couches and praising Eros, as in Plato's 
Symposium, we construct more or less statistical models of a narrowly 
defined problem then debate what kinds of policies might get from 

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Just looked up my notes from a lecture by Joseph Stiglitz which I attended in 
July 2016.  Some key points:
Sustained economic development requires a learning society
Western economies started the transition into a learning society in the 1800’s. 
 However, this has flattened out towards the end of the 20th century
Schumpeter (and others after him) have shown that technological change has 
substantively more impact on economic growth than the accumulation of capital
The move from an underdeveloped to developed economy is described as a gap in 
resources, but it is much more of a gap in knowledge
Free markets are praised as being efficient.  However, markets are not 
efficient in promoting innovation and learning.  For example, in the field of 
drug discovery, markets direct more effort and resources into fighting hair 
loss than into combating malaria.
Adam Smith’s invisible hand argues that the pursuit of private interests leads 
to the well being of society.  However, although Smith recognised it, 
insufficient attention is given to the fact that free markets underproduce 
public goods.
Unfortunately most governments follow the Washington Consensus which believes 
that development can be best promoted by improving the static efficiency of 
resource allocation and the accumulation of capital.  This policy has gained 
public traction just when economists have proven it to be wrong.
These policies are counterproductive for creating a learning society.
Knowledge is a non-rivalrous public good.  Its equitable distribution should be 
a major factor of public policy, since this will not be ensured by the market.
Education can no longer focus on the transfer of specific skills and knowledge, 
and should be aimed at “learning to learn”.

To this, I feel one has to factor in recent developments in digitalisation of 
the economy which has had the following impacts:
Exponentially scaled up the high-capital speculative section of the economy, 
which means that for most people the cost of survival is determined by other 
factors and has nothing to do with the value they provide.
Empowered the aggregation of individualised services by corporate capital, 
which pushes more and more people into a gig economy that offers neither 
economic stability nor social benefits like health insurance
Used big data to move the political economy from public negotiations of 
causation to opaque value extraction through correlation, and overturned the 
equation between the private and public realm.  The value of what one does is 
realised by others.



> On 10-Jan-2018, at 2:41 PM, Patrice Riemens  wrote:
> 
> On 2018-01-09 22:25, Joseph Rabie wrote:
> 
>> Their is a blind belief that capitalism and the market are one and the
>> same, but this is not so. Markets have existed for as long as there
>> has been specialization of labour. Capitalism is a modern mechanism,
>> invented to enable certain forms of development, frequently of a
>> predatory and corrosive nature. The time has come to uninvent
>> capitalism, to return the market to its cooperative vocation.
> 
> Why does this 'self-evident truth' need to be repeated over again while it is 
> being forgotten over and again?
> Puzzling.
> Ciaoui,
> p+7D!
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Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Patrice Riemens]

On 2018-01-09 22:25, Joseph Rabie wrote:


Their is a blind belief that capitalism and the market are one and the
same, but this is not so. Markets have existed for as long as there
has been specialization of labour. Capitalism is a modern mechanism,
invented to enable certain forms of development, frequently of a
predatory and corrosive nature. The time has come to uninvent
capitalism, to return the market to its cooperative vocation.




Why does this 'self-evident truth' need to be repeated over again while 
it is being forgotten over and again?

Puzzling.
Ciaoui,
p+7D!
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Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[Joseph Rabie]

> Where there’s a funder, there’s necessarily a shareholder.  Otherwise there’s 
> no accountability.

The problem with shareholder accountability is that it is, in principle, 
uniquely concerned with profitability. The eventual taking into account of all 
other issues, such as working conditions, product quality or suitability, 
environmental effects, depend solely upon their impact upon profitability, and 
not upon their general effects upon society or the environment.

Accountability should concern all stakeholders, be it all workers in the 
company, clients, suppliers, society and the environment at large. Profits 
“earned” by shareholders, who have a parasitic relationship with the company, 
should be abolished.


> I guess this makes me an apologist for the status quo, but I’m still not 
> seeing how these proposed alternatives would be superior in practice.

Superior according to which criteria? Certainly capitalism has been a boon for 
bringing extraordinary living conditions to the privileged classes, but at a 
criminal cost to all others and the environment.
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