On 27-Jun-06, at 3:47 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
So don't blame big bad business on big bad government.
If the shoe fits...
I could provide tons of examples, but I do have lots of other stuff
to do too.
IAC, big companies violating individual rights are no less criminals
in a
capitalist framework than big governments doing the same.
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).
Of-course. In fact that's exactly what Vinge is saying in the bit
above about
ubiquitous law enforcement. Surveillance leads to centralism, which then
leads to stasis and death (of people, and of the system).
It couldn't work in practice, in the past, but we're slowly getting
there.
I don't see that. The Nazis and reds had as effective surveillance as is
available today (including informants, etc), and it didn't help them
any. How does better surveillance make totalitarianism viable long-term?
It's not the lack of surveillance that's a problem for tyrants, it's
the death of
innovation and dynamism once they've started with their social
engineering.
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.
A lot of assumptions there, that I don't see any evidence for. Where's
the evidence that irreversible "warping of the human agent into a social
organism" is possible? History seems to indicate quite the contrary.
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.
I don't doubt that. But that doesn't prove that tyranny is viable. I
wasn't
saying the tech is fiction. It is the purported ability of
collectivist societies
to sustain advanced technological civilizations that is fiction.
Neither Nazi Germany nor the Eastern block were technologically
backwards for their time.
They were pathetically backward. They couldn't even produce potatoes
or shoes with any level of competence.
If Nazi Germany wasn't quite so irrational,
we would not be able to hold this conversation.
Tyranny is by definition irrational, as it attempts to evade the
reality of
how the human mind and human creativity works.
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.
There are many trends. True, surveillance is increasing. Equally true,
so is the use of privacy tech and the mobility of capital. In the final
analysis, tyrants need money, and they can only rob it, not create
it. If the
victims get smart enough to avoid being robbed, tyrants will starve.
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.
I really doubt that :-)
(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.
Uh, as Schneier has been at pains to point out numerous times,
all that tech is just generating huge amounts of false positives and
useless data that will simply suck up surveillers' time and resources,
while leaving them more exposed to real threats.
The state can fragment existing monopolies, and deliver some
municipal services at a lower price than the free market. Sometimes
it even does.
That's just funny. Even you don't really believe it.
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.
Yes, my sentiments too. If someone can ignore the huge body of evidence
that clearly shows private companies routinely and regularly deliver (at
ever lower prices) tech sufficiently advanced as to be
indistinguishable from
magic, while the state chronically fails to deliver even the most
mundane of
basic goods and services within any reasonable amount of time or on any
halfway sane budget, that's a good time to stop discussing.
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.
Uh, the USA was pretty much a very successful libertarian experiment,
but a handful of bugs in the constitution enabled totalitarian
seizure of
power. I have no doubt a new experiment will learn from the mistakes
of the past and plug those holes next time around.
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.
Anything to keep from answering the simple question, eh? Why exactly
should I refrain from calling a spade a spade? That was indeed the
question I wanted to know an answer to in the first place - Why is it
murder
when one human kills another, but when $tyranny directly or
indirectly kills
millions, it's a noble "social experiment"?
Gah!
#!
