Tag: Democracy

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Chronicle Travel

Day 1743 and Noticing Anarcho-Tyranny Through Habits

I’m coming up on the 5-year mark of writing every single day. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been at it that long, if I’m honest with myself. When you commit to doing a basic task as a daily habit, you don’t expect it to change your life.

I’m not actually sure that writing every day has changed my life, though I think I’ve gotten better at the process of writing and the habit of finding space to think, organize, and get my thoughts together. That is a positive change.

When I first started, there were a number of goals I had in my life that seemed a lot more achievable than half a decade of writing.

Once you’ve achieved such consistency, you notice how little gets done in other areas when you regularly do things for yourself. One of my goals that I’ve had almost as long as this blog was a visa for family friends so they could travel freely to America to see me just as I see them. Pandemics and problematic presidents sure slowed that down and now I despair it will ever happy.

I honestly had no idea that the United States was so broken in its state capacity that granting a travel visas would consume more time than blogging and I’d achieve much less working to obtain a visa for years as its functionally impossible to get a legal visa.

Here I am with all of this writing (fantastic training date for an artificial intelligence) and yet I’d still have failed at obtaining a travel visa for family friends. We have so much power and yet not quite enough to get around America’s failures.

Maybe this is why projects like the Network State appealed to me. I’ve worked on policy like the Right to Compute which has taken on more and more meaning as I go through my life.

I can’t believe I was able to pass a bill into law before I could get the state department to do its job. And government workers wonder why some of us wouldn’t mind if they got fired.

I know I can rely on my own skills, my capacity to use the hardware and software at my disposal, and that the currencies of the web will happily engage with me in trustless and transparent manners.

This is not something I can guarantee when working with the United States and our State Department. It’s a hard thing to look at straight on as it traps me and my family into a kind of anarcho-tyranny where because we follow the law to the letter we are discriminated against while others brazenly broke laws.

High trust people who display their commitment daily are worn down by this bitterly painful reality that what we put in doesn’t guarantee us all that much when the state is concerned. We move fast and keep at it. The American state department moves slow and failed at every step of the way.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1735 and Choice Matters with Our Networks

There are many benefits to a networked world but there are many destabilizing aspects to opening up the world to all of us. I’ve been slogging through Vladislav Zubok “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” which refutes the widely held belief that the collapse was inevitable.

He argues that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, aimed at modernizing and democratizing the Soviet Union destabilized the country.

Now as an American I might see that in a somewhat positive light but imagine America being broken up and you can see why it’s worth studying. It is worth understanding that with scale and access, a networked system has risks that we have not previously encountered in a political or economic system.

The last time we experienced a modern collapse at large scale, we had a fraction of the networked infrastructure that we do now.

Artificial intelligence becoming the current bugaboo belies just how little the general public really understands the nuts and bolts of our information rich world.

The complexity of how it operates obfuscates how easy it is to tilt the cart and upset fragile hierarchies and understandings.

I wish I could persuade more people to this viewpoint. The strange bedfellows of professional misunderstanders are constantly infighting with murky agendas of state and corporate preferences.

We are all useful idiots to someone. An alliance between orthodox Christians and a rationalist sex cult is the sort of “only in America” marriage of convenience that fights for very particular reasons.

The technocrats having lost the battle with modern complexity (and along with it the Mandate of Heaven) are in the process of playing whackamole with uprisings of paranoia that is a pox across every type of community. And that sucks as sometimes the paranoids are actually right. We just are never quite sure when.

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1713 and Breaks and Ends

It’s hard not see every day as more of a beak with the past even as so much remains the same. No wonder the French have that handy slogan about “plus ça change” as systems remain even with violence. They really know how to balance being disgruntled with the past.

I was suggesting La Haine to someone earlier this week as the French movie that made an impression on Gen X and elder millennials who paid attention to Francophone culture. It’s hard not to think current problems are similar tensions recycled for a whole new era. Atmospheric, vulgar and dangerous are the keywords.

The Hate or La Haine by Matthieu Kassovitz

The addiction economy repackaged the same old things that kept our attention economy running. And they will keep running it till it is so refined and so well packaged you won’t even remember that Starship Troopers was meant as a satire of fascism.

We repeat so much. The Churn as the Expanse called it.

Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. The Expanse

Survival breaks out into the only game all the time and we are always running a Red Queens race. So try not to get too distracted. Ween yourself off of anything that you’ve not got any reason to hold dear. Change to meet what you can so long as you can still see yourself.

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Aesthetics Media

Day 1710 and Speaking The True Name or Obfuscating To Remain Illegible in Bureaucracy

There is a tradition in certain corners of the internet of hiding in plain sight. Being illegible to anyone without the shibboleths of your chosen in-group protects you from unwanted attention. Or so we tell ourselves.

The downside of an implacable insistence on being inscrutable is that you won’t ever be clear enough to have your ideas spread.

Lack of clarity is an anti-mimetic just as surely as lack of speed prevents you from getting your ideas out into the world.

“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AJ Liebling

Writing quickly in a language designed to obfuscate with jargon, keeps the those who search for clarity in the dark and your grip on communication tight. You should want to write fast and well and clearly.

One of the first rules of institutional cohesion is to develop acronyms and coin new words. And nobody is better at this than the military industrial complex. The RAND corporation feels as if it jas invented as many turns of phrases as a teenage TikToker and the Cambridge Dictionary combined.

So if you find yourself concerned that an obfuscated acronym like the DOD’s Department of Defense is getting a name with a bit more clarity as to its purpose ask yourself why?

Maybe a department of war is the proper name for the branch who commissions prime contractors to make weapons.

War looked different in the past?
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Culture Emotional Work Politics

Day 1690 and Ressentiment

Nostalgia can be a bitter poison if you believe the world is getter worse. Optimistic people try to point out the many ways in which our lives are better only to find poisoned barbs dipped in statistics of all ways things are worse.

That poison absorbs into our frail hearts when aimed well. I see how things are worse just as well as any pessimist. Choosing optimism requires us to find antidotes to those poisons, lest we have a full blown case of what the French call “Ressentiment”

It is a terrible disease. Ressentiment literally translates to the English resentment but rancœur (bitterness), amertume (acrimony), and animosité (ill-will) are all part of its dangerous pathology.

Nietzschean scholars will note he meant it specifically as an emotion of feeling of deep-hostility towards those who make you believe you are powerlessness.

In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sketched out how this feeling of weakness justifies and creates value systems as a defense mechanism of the ego. Rather than overcome these feelings, the ego insulates you in a value system where one never need address real failures or weaknesses.

There is much to criticize in his work, and I am not a Nietzschean myself. But it’s easy to see how much we all live in jealousy and inferiority from time to time. Some of us live there always.

Many moral systems raise up the weak in virtue in order to protect them. Christianity is one of them. There is value in protecting and improving the lowest of us even if I disagree that we should see the powerful as morally inferior. Power and strength and beauty are virtues as well.

As we envy the past or those whose past decisions made our present lives harder we must be cautious that we have not absorbed the poison of ressentiment. Do not justify harm in its name. Do not justify jealousy or envy. Rise up and spit out that poison. Our world can be better and you can be better as you work towards that goal.

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Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1679 and Avoiding the See and Be Seen of Luxury Travel as Post-Liberalism Nears

The lingering live embers of Venkatesh Rao’s charnel age have left me with deadened impression in my bodily sensorium. Tasting, breathing, and seeing the culture of now feels somewhere between spoiled and not quite ripe.

One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras…We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age. December 21 Ribbonfarm

I have been known to drop an Antonio Gramsci joke from time to time. This is harder to make a joke about though. The age which was being born as Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists from 1929-1935 surely felt as filled with morbid symptoms and putrefaction.

How it compares to our current perverse extended gerontological Fourth Turning of death and rebirth is yet to be seen.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters

That quote is a translation of Slavoj Žižek’s which isn’t quite as pithy as the Slovenian made it sound.

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

Or for those lacking Italian skills (which as I do) here is it translated more literally.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Rao calls charnel vision “a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay,” which can feel foreign to the long century of stability.

Americans enforced this order through its dollarization and the financialization . But empires change and even the longest institutional decay can be seen from far enough remove.

And so we have Swiss politicians running to Washington DC as the cosmopolitan upper classes try to enjoy an August off from the always on mania of this interregnum while also keeping an eye on matters.

As it turns out the extra mile to get to an esoteric Dolomite lake or a less well known riviera (might I recommend the Balkan coastlines to the more adventurous). If you need to find me, I won’t tell.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1669 and Seeing Without A State

We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature

We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.

The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.

The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.

I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.

It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.

Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.

We have European software developers now noticing what Balaji was pilloried for pointing out. The nation state and the network state are coexisting already as anarcho-tyranny increases.

In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.

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Politics Preparedness

Day 1663 and Panem et Circenses

Catching up on the going’s on of the world this Monday as I reorient myself back to productivity after a very long ten days of surgery recovery is brutal.

The algorithmic response on the internet to a story of a random affair being revealed on a kiss-cam is unsettling in light of the actual empire changing realities playing out at the same time. I don’t want to study the angles of a professional chief executive and his human resources lead becoming entangled.

I keep hoping studying Rome will prove useful in facing the moment but I have nothing better to say than the satirist Juvenal. Bread and circuses continue to serve their purpose in distracting us from our obligations to engage in the making of our own future.

So what do I think deserves your attention? Take time with the artificial intelligence tools that are on offer from every major technology company out there (well except Apple).

Become literate in the new types of search and discovery that connect across inference so you don’t confuse the tool for something it is not (a God or a Devil or worthy of driving you mad).

Learn how to automate something you do regularly and find tedious. See what kind of business processes in your own work might benefit from automation. Go do a rabbit hole on a health problem and see how context reveals things about your own body.

Decide how this new informational access and connection affects things in your own relationship to the power. Decide what it might do to your nation state if you live in a democracy. What kind of economic system will arrive as we have expectations of automation, transparency and information even as we have more tools than ever to obfuscate and confuse?

Do you want more centralized power systems and power flowing to those who run those systems (corporate or state) or do you see the value of decentralized systems and protocols that let you engage with your own preferences? And I don’t just mean what kind of delivery food or Netflix you prefer.

Categories
Politics

Day 1662 and Class Consciousness Across The Atlantic

America is grossly class segregated in a way that I don’t think Europeans fully grasp but all Americans intuit even if they don’t understand all of its rules. Every time I find myself in Europe I learn something new about socialism and its trade offs.

Sure we talk a big game about the middle class but America has an enormous variance between our poorest classes and our richest. We are a country where capital decides your fate much more so than your birth station. And we have always had mad scrambles to the top between eras of consolidation and state intervention.

American aristocracy has been land owners but as of the post war years it’s been mostly making good financial decisions. Sure land ownership has been one of paths to better class positions but 2008 showed it is a policy choice from the state as much as an economic one.

Even in a middle tier city like the Seattle area you could once see wealth that ranged from Jeff Bezos to port and manufacturing line union workers. Maybe you don’t end up the richest man in the world but if you got a decent job at one of the many companies powering the metropolitan area from Boeing to the port authority you had a nice upwardly mobile life if you took the opportunities available to you.

If you made bad decisions maybe you ended up pretty far out of the city and can’t find steady work but you could find work if you could get to it.

Being poor when you have freedom of movement seems insane to Europeans who understand the logic of borders and state benefits in ways Americans and their interstate mobility don’t always.

You can with unitive move to better jobs and pick up marketable skills and send your children to decent schools. Maybe then they move from the factory line to engineering. In the next generation their kids go from engineering to founding their own company. Ever so the upward logic of American wealth goes. Naturally it’s not that simple but it’s a good story of competitive logic.

If you lived in a booming region maybe you moved to be closer to a core city. If you can move to opportunities you do so.

The question becomes if Americans can move to successful areas why don’t we do so? Some Europeans don’t understand attachment to place as their movements are either inside the Eurozone or a battle to get inside the Eurozone. That we might be attached to our mountain town and not want to move to Denver or Seattle might be a surprise. It’s all one country right?

Western Europe has had a safety net for so long that wealth is more of a choice than poverty. You have to make quite a bit of effort to get around the slow planned socialist efforts of older industrial concerns to become wealthy. But if you can become part of the social fabric you won’t starve or struggle to get antibiotics prescribed either.

If you are in society in Europe you can make through without a healthcare crisis, cut hours or an eviction notice upending your life. That is why there is a fight to be in the social contract of Europe. America has that fight too it’s just less intense as our benefits are about having our passport and are less about having social security. No one believes they will get it anyway.

Eastern and Southern European societies still know closed borders and poverty through restriction of opportunity. Intra-European strife is all about immigration just as immigration from the rest of the world now drives American fears. Who is part of the social contract and why?

Sure you see wealth in Europe but it can feel as if it’s either generational or corruption or both. In America you see how wealth might be both but you get to see how wealth can be series of good decisions.

If you can keep your shit together you can rise. So why don’t we all do it? It’s a mystery to everyone and no one. You either race to coordinate with capital or you opt out of it entirely.

That’s our class system in America and I think it has shown a lot of merit even as some of Europe doesn’t understand why we choose it. Why opt for competition when you can have coordination? Well maybe a New Yorker doesn’t want to coordinate with someone in Texas. We allow for some of that even as the federal tensions rise amongst our compact. Italy upsets Denmark too.

I don’t know how this class compact works itself out on either continent but I always find myself reaffirming my commitment to capitalism anytime I spend even a couple weeks in socialist countries.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1658 and Social Contracts

I sometimes feel as if I’m living in an entirely different rule set than everyone else around me. The social contract is in flux and it’s a challenge to understand why you take norms seriously when everyone around you is breaking them. From big to small it offenses it can drive a person mad.

A large abstract state is great and all until you can’t figure out if anarcho-tyranny is the governing system or if we are reverting to the state of nature.

If you fly economy class chaos reigns in lord of the flies level manners breaking and that’s a kind of miracle of modernity. Our technology works better than we do. So what is a state of nature kind of woman to do about this mismatch?

Thomas Hobbes provided the first comprehensive exposition of modern social contract theory in 1651. Hobbes famously described the “state of nature” as a condition where human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”

social contract theory Wikipedia

You may be familiar with his term the “war of all against all” which we’ve all theoretically given up in order to leave the state of nature and create civilization. Unless you are a fan of nihilist Bronze Age Pervert, you probably aren’t itching to get back to freedoms like murder and tape. But some men want to see the world burn.

But most of the enlightenment folks are keen on the social contract. I am keen on it. Freedom to fuck everyone over isn’t ideal no matter how based you think you are. Airplanes are cool even if we can’t agree on hygiene.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had the concept of the “general will” which is our common good though he did think some people needed to be forced to be free. So maybe he would be ok with certain authoritarian strains of achieving liberalism? In which case he’d really have enjoyed the woke era.

I’m more of a Locke type myself. He wrote that men would only relinquish personal freedoms if it were in service of maintaining fundamental rights like life, liberty, and property. So I’ll tolerate bit bathing in economy class so long as you let me live my life.