On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 02:20:41PM +0100, Ashish Gulhati wrote: > Big corporations as they exist today are to a large extent fostered > by big government in a symbiotic relationship, very often through > violation of individual liberties, so holding up "big corporations" > as poster-boys for capitalism is very misleading and plain wrong.
Sorry, that's a weak excuse. Both the state and the corporation are ruthless opportunists. With the current agent setup, a co-existance of both is a co-evolving state. Remove the state, and you'll get a progression from mobile to stationary bandits, ultimatively landing roughly where we sit right now, with mucho suffering along the way. Sorry, were there, did that, got the (lousy) T-shirt. So don't blame big bad business on big bad government. > There are many flavors of anarchism, some of which are diametrically > opposed, from anarchist-socialism, to individual anarchism and > anarcho-capitalism. Which do you mean? Again, I oppose large-scale inhuman organizations, whether government, or industry. I do not oppose superpersonal organization levels in general, as long as they occur bottom-up, and create no grief to all participants, consenting adults all. I fully realize this is not feasible with the current human agent makeup, which is why am a pragmatic anarchist, and not an idealist. Some of the required characteristics (deep time transaction history tracking and strong authentication) can in principle by provided by symbiotic machinery, but the best wearable exocortex doesn't help with too much vacuum between the ears. So the enhancement has to be a little more invasive, which pushes the horizont by, oh, another 50 linear years at least. > >No, with enough surveillance and enforcement by automation you > >can reach long-term stability, until... > > Funny you reference Vinge below, but forget the bit (from the same > book) about the Larson localizers leading to ubiquitous law enforcement, > and a "quick end to civilization". I don't forget. I like Vinge, despite too much pedagogic moralizing about the ach so great advantages of a libertarian society, which manage to bootstrap advanced civilizations overnight with two libertarians, and a bit of string. Surveillance technology unfortunately shifts the balance of power to centralism (which is why Brin is smoking something funny). > And all wider range abstractions are in the hands of the bureaucracy? > Every > tyrant's wet dream, but that's all it is. Just can't work in > practice. It's not It couldn't work in practice, in the past, but we're slowly getting there. > adaptable, resilient, or distributed. It would stifle innovation and > doom > society to stasis, leading to collapse. It will only collapse if the regime is not global. If the entire world phase-changes, the state is long-term metastable, in absence of external contenders. Due to realtime blanket surveillance and control, and a warping of the human agent into a social organism the phase change is potentially irreversible. > I have, and it is great and dramatic fiction, but fiction it is. A Some of the technology stopped being fiction while still in the press. > collectivist culture > cannot sustain high technology for long. It made for an interesting That's nonsense. You're confusing relative competitiveness long-term with regression. > fantasy, but the > idea of technologically advanced mind-controlled "emergents" is as > fundamentally > absurd as the old fears/propaganda about the Soviet Union's "great > technological > advancement". Neither Nazi Germany nor the Eastern block were technologically backwards for their time. If Nazi Germany wasn't quite so irrational, we would not be able to hold this conversation. > I don't think it will happen. That future has already been out-competed. I also hope it will never happen, but the trends speak a different language, so far. > And in any case, collectivist patterns spiral into full-blown > socialism, as > von Mises has explained very well. A controlled level of fascism is > never > possible. You're still trapped in a low-technology frame of thinking. (Hint: currently we're still living in a low-technology state, and still this conversation is already on-file, already classified, and all participants are tainted, or will be tainted shortly -- even with no teledetonable cranial implant, judge, jury and executioner in one fell swoop, all in realtime). Spatiotemporal cellular tracking, realtime communication pattern datamining and surveillance and execuation UAVs are being deployed and are killing (some very select preview audience) people as we speak. Did I already mention that we're still a ridiculously primitive society still? I believe I did). > Really? What is your evidence for this? Have you ever lived in a > socialist country? Do you really think the state is better able to Yes. > deliver such things as water, electricity, telecommunications and The state can fragment existing monopolies, and deliver some municipal services at a lower price than the free market. Sometimes it even does. > education better than the market? Or anything, for that matter? Yes. Don't bother trying to refute it. This conversation is past positive ROI for me at this point. The arguments are done, and just asserting opinions gets tiring fist. > But I don't know what you mean. The problems with rabid libertarians, particularly Randroids, is that they manage to sink their own ship while still in the harbor by foaming-at-the mount rhetoric alone. That's one hell of a handicap already, but in meatspace they're way worse. Because they're so rabidly individualistic and combative they're sufficiently divided to even being unable to launch a social experiment to validate their dream. There must be some reasonably well-adjusted Libertarians somewhere, but the racket the other idiots are making they're unable to make their voice heard. > By "nuanced" do you mean murder and theft do become OK if $pretext > (which very often will be a lie)? Or that might makes right? Do you think you're helping spreading your point of view by using red-button words (murder, theft, lie)? I personally do have my alien moments with mundanes, and you'll never will see me use such polarizing rhetoric in RL. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
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