We lost the war. Welcome to the world of tomorrow (2006)

As is my post.

This entire argument is one of "exaggerate the bad and completely ignore the good". We have companies working on cheap space travel, which opens up asteroid mining (mitigating resource crunches) and allows us to use space-based resources to alleviate problems on Earth (solar shades to reduce warming, etc). Asimov made a great point at the end of I, Robot, where he notes that the intractable problems of one age are rendered moot by the technology of the next. People feared that NYC would be uninhabitable by the year 1950 because there wouldn't be enough place to put all the horse manure - which became a non-issue with the advent of automobile. People feared mass starvation in the 1970's because we couldn't produce enough food - made irrelevant by the green revolution. People fear global warming and totalitarianism today, and it will be made irrelevant by the tech of tomorrow. We already see birth rates falling globally, to the point where we will soon be shrinking in population. This will reduce stresses from unemployment, and paired with a burgeoning space economy we will have more to share with fewer people.

There is no reason to cower from the ills of today; they are only a call to keep moving forward.

I suspect that in a society like that money will no longer be as important as it is in the current one. Social security as 'basic income' is a staple in many countries right now, and those countries would be far worse off if they didn't have it. Expect to see more countries adopting it and the gap between social security and income for work to slowly decrease over time. It's a matter of votes in the long run (assuming democracy).

Aka the libertarian nightmare.

What? That's not basic income.

These are difficult problems and not enough human potential is being thrown at them.

The real issue is that decades of neglect have led to substantial under investment in human capital and so large number of people are unable to contribute where human attention is most required. This brings about suffering for the people involved and slows progress for everyone else.

Charitable payments like basic income or social welfare free up a lot of recipient's time that they'd otherwise need to spend at work. They could use this time to develop useful skills and expertise.

How about gating the level of state support on the recipient's commitment to acquire skills and expertise necessary to solve important problems?

I see violence as a sad, but necessary thing. The history of man is one of warring between to groups. Once the rich/super rich become so powerful that they basically enslave the rest of us, there has to be a war. There is no society in the world that hasn't had a war of some kind.

It is true that one could, in theory, use non cooperation to dismantle the existing apparatus of state. The difficulty lies in the fact that the "refuse" are already disenfranchised. In the techno world of the future, they are not needed on any level. They are not consumers, therefore no one should care. Without a good portion of the elite siding with them, their non-conformism won't help. Even with India, the government of England and its citizenry were tired of empire anyway. India wasn't worth the effort to them. It is unlikely that we'll see the same from the elite anytime soon. They are on the uptick now.

Oddly Marx is right. There will be a class war. A new synthesis will be struct. In the mean time, sadly, people will die or be wounded. The best thing to do is prepare for it and try to mitigate it.

Human progress to a more empathical and overall better society has been constant. At first empathy was reserved only for members of one family and tribe. Then empathy expanded towards people of same nationality and religion. As long of circle of empathy expands to encompass more and more things, we'll be fine.

I won't say there haven't been some really dark blemishes on history, but in spite of all that humanity as a whole moved on.

Humans make mistakes. A lot of mistakes. It comes with the turf.

As for coping, try reading some Terry Pratchet and embrace the ancient philosophy of Discworld - Things happen, what the heck.

How do you cope? That's easy: you just don't bother too much about it, in the larger context there's not much (if anything) you can do about it anyway, so you might just as well enjoy it while it lasts and make the best out of it. I prefer a nihilistic attitude: on the scale of the universe me, or mankind in general, are pretty much a blip on the radar anyway, and there will be a moment we're done for as a species sooner or later no matter what. No need to get depressed about it, I just take it as a fact.

That's me. I hold little hope for the future.

>If so, how do you cope?

Escapism.

The downside of living in a crisis period is that nightmarish things are happening all around you. The upside is that coming out of it, the external-facing institutions of society are completely restructured to address the problems that caused that crisis.

And so I am motivated to do what I can to make sure that what we're working with coming out of this crisis is as good as we can get it.

(Strauss and Howe are unfortunately also responsible for all those "Millenials" articles, but you take the bad with the good.)

If the right to EDIT is only granted to a security elite, who have granted themselves the power to inject false data in any stream, for any reason they want, then the war has indeed been lost, ethically. Or, if there is another war, it is to prevent an elite from being able to INTERCEPT and INJECT, completely and utterly, at massive scales.

Its not a matter of being cynical about it. Its about not having a single iota of TRUST for the people who create and maintain the security state fiction that allows military junta and ultra-elite special interests to make extraordinary, mass-scale Decisions.

By the fact that my life span is limited.

A good part of my hair is already gray and I'm not even 30 yet. That's how.

But I am not optimistic. I think many of those ex-middle-class people will get desperate enough to start killing the people they blame for their misfortune. At that point we start to look like we've fallen out of the First World and everyone with money needs a bulletproof SUV and guards.

So what to do? Embrace the surveillance/security state because it might keep us safe? You see some of that attitude here among the apologists. I don't like that but I have no answers.

There is a lot of evidence it doesn't work, and may not be fixable. What then?

Also, "rules [being] made centrally and applied to diverse populations with different priorities" is a more or less inevitable failure mode of federalism, however administered. (In fact, it's arguably the point of federalism.) As can be seen in the brief but instructive history of the United States, the representative-democratic method of rule is no insulation against this trait of the federal republic; indeed, a federal system offers broader scope than any other for the periodic paroxysms of popular madness which beset any democracy. These produce schisms between sections of the polity, and as these injuries heal, they form keloid plaques of bureaucracy which not only help seal the immediate breach but also help buffer the polity against future democratic spasm.

Such proliferation of nonfunctional tissue is harmful to the organism in the long term, but from the individual point of view, life in a moderately senescent bureaucracy is often preferable to life in a young, agile, athletic democracy, simply because the former offers a vastly reduced likelihood of major upheaval.

True, but they are appointed by governments that are themselves elected by universal suffrage.

I wouldn't even say that's a bad thing. I just think many things that are said about democracy, maybe the be pessimistic or optimistic comes from a perspective that seems extremely distant from reality.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean it like "the bad evil system. There is nothing we can do against it", but more in the sense that we can, say we want, but still don't do so, probably based on erroneous understanding lying deep in history scalping todays society.

In that sense the article mentioning the "doing gardening" and the rejection of it is maybe the wrong way, because I think that the majority, probably even in an anarchistic sense is an extremely strong force. Whatever their reality, their according action is is status quo. That's why oppressive or totalitarian governments are so much into censorship. That's why for most of history objecting someone in a higher rank was punished so hard, even if it was simple words. They could give a direction for many.

Maybe that's a way modern technologies, the very thing that allows this communication also prevents focus. The focus shifts away rather quickly. There is barely a long term view. Everything older than ten to five years is a distant history. In the now however there is too much information to comprehend. The view goes back to the last big event, like 9/11. And that's something the article talks about and seems accurate. It is something that made me wonder too.

So many developments are said to have emerged from 9/11, but barely any actually have. ECHELON was there, the east-west and the middle-least conflicts were there. The NSA and it's mission to surveil the whole world was there. Secret pacts in these directions have emerged from World War 2, maybe even earlier.

If you look back into history, thirty years things don't seem all too different. It reminds me of all the dystopian novells written after or in the time of such events, depicting how one could simply shift the focus of society.

And we in the startup community, often dealing with marketing know that. It's the rapid focus shift, often mixed with surveillance, like when optimizing a registration funnel that creates an often not so real view of reality for the majority, whose reality you usually have to accept.

I'm not sure how to interpret statements like this. Decentralization seems ideal. But some of the most successful services so far either begun or are centralized, not decentralized. If I'm not mistaken, the electric and water utilities, Google, and Facebook are all centralized for example. On the other hand, other services like email and the web (excluding DNS) are decentralized.

Is the intention behind this idea that control over those services shouldn't be centralized, while pooling resources could be ok, depending on the service involved?.

I'm not saying it's possible to remove control in a centralized service, but I am saying that there is a distinction. A blanket statement that "centralized services can't survive" would seem incorrect, and the existing statement of "as little centralized elements" implies that "as little" in the relative sense will be equal to little in the absolute sense, which might not be true. It could be that "little" practically equals centralization.

The reason such a misconception is dangerous is that one might put their efforts in designing a fully decentralized service that isn't adopted. Good design is often hard in that it challenges your assumptions in ways you hadn't originally anticipated.

I can think of one big one, in that the human beings currently running said services have at least some idea of the mechanics of performing the required duties.

That may or may not have been the author's intent. It's what I thought of when I read that sentance

You can't take money out of it.

Basically, you need a better politician, but the selection pressures for best politician are somewhat self defeating.

Either you build one as an AI or you build one out of multitude of people.

At the moment, I think the second is more likely. I guess a detailed examination of competency of people to make decision should be made and based on that a new governmental structure should be made.

There might be things that majority wouldn't be able to make good progressive decisions. For example - the LGBT rights are usually against the will of the majority.

And that comes down to the electorate and the media. Public schooling doesn't result in adults capable of doing the homework necessary to figure out the issues or the candidates. The media does an incredibly shitty job of providing basic facts about candidates and issues. If you want to know the voting history of a candidate the media isn't going to tell you, for them it's a game, a horse race / popularity contest. They're just there for the story.

Add to that the fact that modern government has its fingers in every aspect of life and thus exerting any control over the government by whatever means is often an extreme necessity for many businesses and organizations, so there's a huge incentive to warp the political process. Folks of good intention need their lobbyists so that the government leaves them alone. Folks of bad intention want to twist the government for reward, either through subsidies, procurement programs, services, or regulations or other activity which preferentially hurts their competitors.

Both of these issues have become more and more important through the mid-20th century to today. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates the format was for one person to speak for a solid hour then the other to respond with an hour and a half speech and then the first person following up with another half hour response, and there were 4 such debates. Newspapers printed transcripts of those debates in full and Lincoln published a book based on them, which was were much of his fame came from initially. How different our system is today, and how utterly imbecilic and superficial it is by comparison. Meanwhile, within the last few decades the wealthiest counties in the US have become those counties around DC.

There's simply no way to squeeze money out of politics directly given the way it works now. There is too much incentive and insufficient countervailing forces to keep money out, no matter the laws, there will always be loopholes and through those loopholes the same corruption of the system will seep in. The problem needs to be fixed at its source. With better media and a more informed electorate as well as, in my opinion, a smaller government and saner laws and regulation.

So instead of attempting to scale back the mass surveillance state, the candidate embraces it with open arms and knocks on its door with a vaguely-indicative list of nonviolent alleged criminal code violations of 130,000 people whose metadata he's aggregated?

=> "We had dissenters taken out and shot / sent to Siberia"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlnMWlvw9g