Continuing from where my last post,
"Dimensions of Government", left off...
To what extent is a person "responsible" for partaking in society?
Fifty years ago, even twenty years ago, we might have started
with the expectation that people are inherently "active" in
society. The basic state of a person is to be doing something
that connects to the system around them. This is not true anymore
if we focus on the legally most relevant system, namely the
nation state.
People have been separated from the nation state quite deeply.
Partly this is due to the americanization of culture. I mostly
think in English even though it is not an official language in
my country. I am using digital services developed by Americans.
I am more aware of cultural movements in the US than those in
the EU. Most of the propaganda I consume is produced by
multi-national corporations. To what extent I can be said to
be a part of the legal frame provided by my country?
At the same time, the definition of "being active" has changed
a lot from the "innocent" days of post-WW2. People's muscles
stopped being important and increasingly their brains are being
obsoleted by scalability of solutions. When something is highly
scalable, it doesn't need many people to run it, compared to
the previous, hierarchic system that needed secretaries, aides,
coffee makers, cleaners, etc.
As people were phased off, they were turned into information
consumers and an abstract frontier of memetic control. They became
a medium through which money and other resources could be
siphoned. Some of these resources are votes, public opinion and
so on. At the moment the social medias are quite untethered from
physical reality, while excercising incredible mob force that
has large effects on the noosphere.
A result of these changes is that while an individual is clearly
more empowered to deliver a message to a larger amount of people
than ever before, at the same time their economic value first as
a worker and now as a customer has gone down.
A person's basic state of existance is not one of economic
activity any more. The power is still being dealt within the
economic sphere and the classical political sphere, though. The
people have been baited into the memetic landscape while the
real power stays largely immune to it. Furthermore, the
noospheric control by the mob is not a regenerative force, but
a censoring force, further stifling and confusing the landscape.
It is no surprise that universal basic income seems to be coming
a reality fast. For the megacorporations this is a way to funnel
the government money through the people into the corporations.
If people are not making money by their activity, they have to
be given money, so that the corporations can keep competing.
This has to stop somehow, though. I doubt that the memetic fist
will be able to gather enough momentum to mortally damage any
big corporation. If it did, that would mark an end of an era.
It seems that the corporations are fighting back hard at the
moment, with all the talk about getting rid of encryption in
private messaging. If I had to guess which of the above is more
likely, it is the latter.
The elevator pitch is that the power symmetry is so skewed that
there would have to be an enormous revamping to keep nation states
relevant at all. Why do they have to stay relevant? Because of
law. Law as it relates to individuals is the weakest link, since
it is being bypassed by basically all the big forces. The mob is
cancelling people with no process whatsoever. The corporations
will not even pick up the phone when a small country comes
complaining. While torrents were pushed down into obscurity,
youtube keeps offering content it has no rights to. There have
been countries that "banned" content on youtube, but it never
had any effects. I think Denmark tried to protect Danish copyright
holders on youtube.
To bring the symmetry more equal, a private person of limited
means should be considered an anarchic component, while a
multi-national corporation should be considered as responsible
to the planetary future as the UN or WHO. With power should come
responsibility, but obviously the more lawyers you have the more
freedom from responsibility you can buy.
As the digital technologies are especially prone to turn to
monopolies due to scalability, it would make sense to create
intentional loopholes, or anarchic wormholes to suck the
usability of technology into public space. Copyright should allow
for siphoning the most relevant innovation back to the public.
As implied before, the separation of private, government and
public is crumbling, but only the largest players have the
capability of using the law to their advantage. Copyright should
have a cannibilizing feature for the biggest successess. What can
be gained as far as the civilization is concerned by letting
facebook get bigger? All the advantages are already gained while
the company will actively stifle any new advantages at this point
of it's life cycle. It should be eaten up by smaller companies.
Just add a protocol that allows intermessaging to and from
facebook and let's see who comes up with the best UI.
Anarchy is never going to work in the way hierarchy sometimes can
work. There should be protected spaces for anarchy. At the moment
people are kept in consumer mode in relation to information.
They are not encouraged to think, they are disencouraged from
connecting with others unless it is in the confrontational way.
We need areas where people can be productive without hierarchies,
and we need people right next to these spaces collecting solutions
that will be tested and built into the public domain. Most
desperately we need some social technologies comparable to the
laws that we are losing fast.
