I went to the same school as Julian Assange, but we learned different lessons | Hacker News Reader

I went to the same school as Julian Assange, but we learned different lessons

vinay.howtolivewiki.com

73 pointsph0rque15 comments

Unfortunately I cannot say I agree with Vinay completely. He himself lays out the premise that most of the political power is held by the old bureaucrats. I would in fact correct him and say that, at least in Western democracies, it's held by powerful lobbies and economical entities.

Neither the lobbies nor the corporations are entities that were ever voted or chosen by the people, and the only thing the last two years of politics in the West have shown us is that it's pretty astounding just how much they can get away with flexing their political muscle without suffering any consequences, even if the power they exert affect the vast, vast majority of the population negatively.

What that would imply is that the democratic process is corrupt to a point where supporting progressives is reduced to being merely a gesture; Obama won the elections because there was a certain expectation of correcting many perceived problems of the "old establishment". He was unable to fix any of them, and in fact contributed to furthering the power of these interests.

At this point, the calculated balance Vinay hints at just falls flat on its face. And while it's true that there are many political powers that are downright illegal and obscure in everything they do (such as the mafias he hints at, and at more contemporary level, some massive drug cartels), the reality is that the institutions that threaten out freedoms act very much legally and partially in the open. And against such institutions, Assange's plan works remarkably well, as evidenced by much of the political action that some of the Wikileaks papers has helped fuel in the past few years. Not only that, but it can still claim a certain level of moral legitimacy that many governments are willing to stand up for, and part of the reason they have to speak openly is because some of the world issues Wikileaks has raised are just too big to keep quiet. I doubt that other, more conventional methods of "working with the system" would have gone that far.

Indeed, I can see how he may need the state, but he has too much faith in the idea that the people running the show are trying to do the best thing for everyone. My inner cynic tells me that the people at the top are acting mostly in the interest of the other wealthy people they have dinner with, who fund their campaigns, who's kids go to the same school, etcetera.

Wikileaks is important because there needs to be more transparency in what the government is actually doing so we can make our own, reasoned decisions, as opposed to ones based on the biased, filtered, partisan commentary of the media. It's by no means perfect, but it's better than the mainstream media.

> He was unable to fix any of them, and in fact contributed to furthering the power of these interests.

the passage of the health reform bill would seem to refute your statement. it's chock full of fixes and attempted fixes to what many people felt was broken with the legacy health system. perfect? no. better than what you've done or I've done? hell yes.

"We don’t suffer from too much governance, we suffer from too little".

It's funny that someone who was an illegal immigrant would support more governance when that's exactly the sort of thing that would have kicked him out of the country and led to him not having much interest in how the US is governed!

Perhaps he means "his sort of governance" is what's needed because I'm fairly sure he wouldn't like the consequences of ramping up regulation of everything. See all the SOPA posts for details.

On the other hand, you need an effective government to have rule of law. If your bureaucrats are too few in numbers to enforce the law, pretty soon you have people giving them arbitrary powers in the hope that that'll let them keep up with their work. The England of 1900 had an order of magnitude more bureaucrats per capita than Tsarist Russia, but I would certainly have preferred to live in England.

Why does "more governance" necessarily mean deportation? I fail to see the connection. Can't "more governance" mean better bureaucracy for documenting immigrants?

If they had been enforcing the law more vigorously he probably wouldn't have had a chance to be an illegal immigrant. He'd have been deported.

Maybe he was willing to allow some self-sacrifice?

So instead of state agents being outed, or secrets being revealed as Assange would sacrifice for his beliefs, Gupta would allow some self sacrifice for his beliefs.

For me the main take-away was the need for a more refined OWS mission. One focused on solutions rather than one focused on venting frustration and fomenting division.

Wow, if you're going to be a wingnut, at least be an interesting one. This guy appears to have employed a lifetime of wingnuttery in order to arrive at neoliberalism. That's a lot of effort in order to be a cheerleader for the status quo.

You can say this and that about Assange, but at least he's done something more than making up interesting sounding titles for himself. This article sounds a lot like "choose your team" to me, and Vinay is very clear about who's team he's on.

If he "goes after" OWS, he will be ignored, although I would expect him to write several papers about how influential he was after the fact. If you try to apply engineering logic to politics, you don't get it.

Hi, I'm Vinay, the author of the piece.

Two points.

A) crazybear, yes, see http://guptaoption.com/2.long_peace.php for more on this question about "what should government be doing, and what should it let go of?"

B) I'm not, remotely, neoliberal. "I do not fear the State, I fear the State will collapse before we have a meaningful alternative." I'm a Gandhian, which means that in Western terms I'm probably closest to Anarchosyndicalism.

But at a pragmatic level, I don't trust decentralization without a clear approach to managing small groups creating global risks, and that's an open question on all fronts right now. Nobody has a clue how to do it effectively, and the clock ticks.

The biggest issue I see with this article is that, like many people, it attempts to break down the issue of governance into one of more vs less:

We don’t suffer from too much governance, we suffer from too little : no effective climate regulation, no effective nanobio risk regulation.

In particular, the author seems to favor government actions when it protects people from violent or unintentionally dangerous acts of others.

But this isn't the same as "more governance". Most of what existing western governments do is not protecting against the mafia, climate change or rogue nanobots. It's redistribution schemes - from the taxpayer to Blackwater/Solyndra/RIAA, from the young to the old or from private sector workers to public sector workers.

In particular, when Vinay mentions the state going bankrupt, it's the redistribution schemes that comprise the bulk of the problem, not protection against men with guns and nanobots.

One could easily increase the governance Vinay wants while dramatically reducing governance overall, or vice versa.

Good point here. I tend to say we need less government, but the size itself is not the issue, rather particular powers.

It is true though, that the bigger a government gets, the more abusive it tends to be.

"WikiLeaks is acting as a marketplace for illicit information, literally a clearing house. This model, with its unconscious capitalist/economics language bias, is the key reason to doubt the long-term effectiveness of this strategy."

I didn't get this. Can somebody explain this to me! How and where did Assange say something that led the OP to infer this?

Shortest version that you would understand without being given a comprehensive education in the last three decades of political philosophy:

"If you use the language of your enemy, you become your enemy."

Also, Megamind and Metroman went to the same school, but learned different lessons.

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