> It occurred to me that governments are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I've been thinking this for quite a few years now.
>the Twitter mob is deciding who to banish. It's a form of democracy, I guess - but one without any checks or balances or regulations.
Or swarms of bots shaping public opinion run by just a few people? As long as Govt's allow encryption, over the telecoms networks in their countries, the sooner govts become irrelevant.
>The mindset that would even produce such an idea is incredibly dangerous.
To be fair, politicians and computer policy has always been poor and the USA just voted someone in who asked a foreign power to find his opponents emails and uses the term "the cyber" frequently. In other words, I suspect its going to get worse before it gets better.
>a Central Authority that somehow dictates what must, and what cannot....
Append "be done" and that's the very definition of government. Typically humans without government is a recipe for failure, so its not the existence of government per-se that's the issue. The larger question is why government in many countries, including the USA, are failing on such an abysmal level for what should be basic tasks like regulating computer issues. The elephant in the room here seems to be a strong anti-intellectual atmosphere and strongman politics taking root and winning elections of late worldwide. Voters are seeking this stuff out. That's the problem.
> Honestly, I don't. I don't want this precedent of government overreach to stand.
Why is it overreach?
It's literally why we invented government! I, the little guy, couldn't find giants like Facebook or Google. That's why I asked my democratically elected government to work on the problem.
> One of the things that I don't understand about libertarianism. You abolish the government. Then what? x) Do they think nobody is going to step up and grab that power vaccum?
I don't think there is a 'vacuum' because people have a need for a boot on their face, that first the King put his boot on people's faces (which is now how it worked, it was a huge mixed bag), and then the govt must do it or else a strongman might do it again.
There is no 'power vacuum', just a need for certain societal order. How that societal order is provided is where all these things happen. Monarchies are 'a' way to provide that societal order (for national defense and other things for that matter). Similarly Democracies are another one of that. Imagine if you went to 900 BC and tried to install a democracy to the people there? Would it really work out? Would people happily rejoice? Or they'd lose their democracy to a King soon enough?
There is an argument that can be made that political systems people embrace, depends upon the weapon systems available to them [1]. That, printing press gave us the age of enlightenment (and Protestantism, which is a reversion of Christianity to the original text, as opposed to the Papal church), but the invention of (widespread) guns gave us the Democracy. Because earlier only a lifetime of trained soldier could fight but now the training of a firearm (to become lethal) can be acquired in a very short amount of time.
As an anarchocapitalist, in 2000s we envisioned private companies providing that societal order which allows us to get away with governments, and this was heavily criticized that this would just cause private companies to just become govts. But in 2010s, I can say that blockchain (and yes I understand the unpopularity of the idea) have the capability to create that societal order. In 2000s we always envisioned [2] that the free market money would look like Amazon Bucks or Walmart Bucks, but now we realize that with cryptocurrencies we don't need a single company but a decentralized network to do the same job.
1. Weapons Systems and Political Stability, by Carrol Quigley
> We seem to have a very authoritarian government in place. I don't understand how we've gotten here, or why people aren't more concerned.
It's the natural tendency of governments. The founders of the USA understood this and tried to create a system of government that was very weak centrally. This has been slowly eroded over the past 250 years, and especially since WWII and the cold war.
> A civilized government or corporation needs in some way cooperative with the people, that how you can attain taxes, profit , stability and trust.
In theory, sure, in practice, strongly disagree, but this would be too long a philosophical and political discussion to be had as a forum comment.
A civilized government doesn't need to be cooperative and nice with people, with their monopoly on force, overwhelming power over the individual, not to say it doesn't really care about you, in a country of tens or hundreds of millions of other people. You literally are just a statistic. Its only problem is if a huge majority of people rebel against it, but there is a very efficient way to avoid that: control of mass media and... psyops. Why would you rebel against the system when you're brainwashed it is efficient, friendly, and you have the power to change it? How would you organise against it, when all our lives are based on the Internet and technology that is easy to monitor?
> I want government run on empirical data with justice and equality at its heart.
You're asking for technocracy, and this is what is lined up already - you might wonder whether you are being engineered. All those cameras, smart phones, smart meters, legislation, facial recognition, etc - this is to allow micro-management at the most granular level. It's all quite far from freedom indeed, which is where this conversation started. The global governance structure is already fascistic (corporation and the state work together). I'm not a fan of the forced tyranny that's in store for us - once we've got it, I suspect you'll change your mind too.
> I think we may have a different view on what the purpose of a government is.
Perhaps. I also suspect that we have a different view on what government actually is.
> Would you be ok with the military forcefully entering a tech company, pointing guns at the employees, and forcing them to do something?
I think representing all actions of government as being the equivalent of this is reductionist to the point of absurdity.
From my point of view, there will always be (and has to be) rules about how we interact with each other. The question is who will develop and implement those rules. Call it a necessary evil if you wish.
I prefer those rules be developed and implemented by us, collectively, because then we have at least some amount of influence over the process. If it's not done that way, it will be done by powerful entities such as corporations (or, in a maximally degenerate situation, warlords or mobs), where we have little to no influence over the process.
> (governments) regulate industries which work in ways they don't understand
Careful. Governments don't (or, at least shouldn't) exist in a vacuum. It's society's failure too if they don't represent or don't have an accurate notion of how things actually work. IIRC, the Office of Technology Assessment had this role since the 70's, but was closed in the mid-90's by decision of elected representatives, again, IIRC, as part of cost-cutting measures.
If you don't have independent non-partisan advisory bodies responsible for representing reality accurately, we leave that space to lobbyists who will certainly fail to present an unbiased picture.
> I think that the only possible solution is a technological one. I think that the only way to to fight them is with technology and disobedience to the very idea that they have the right to restrain speech or control the internet.
Remember, governments also can employ technological solutions to this problem - guns and organized violence - at scales most civilians would be easily overwhelmed.
No. The solution is not to disobey the government, but to fix it.
> I think these days we forget that the gov was never meant to provide a social net.
It absolutely was. Government has grown into this leviathan we have today, and the world's drastically more complicated since the days of living in huts in villages but the underlying principal is we take care of our own.
> > The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane
tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an
oxymoron, doesn't it?)
> It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad
really fast when they have absolute power.
If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.
I don't think a technologically sophisticated government can afford to be non-totalitarian (in the narrow sense I'm
using here: making "total" use of available information technology. Cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness ). I think if
it tried it would be undermined by other governments.
In re: this point, I find it discouraging that the Communists won in
their imperialistic effort to subdue the people of HK. I was hoping that
technology would give the masses the edge over the central government but
it doesn't seem to have played out that way.
> > Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.
> No we can't,
What would prevent it?
> and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in
any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect
enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent
crimes.
I don't agree. I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or
repealed. We can't have perfect enforcement, but technological advancement is exponentially reducing the cost of enforcement, eh?
Is the answer selective enforcement? That doesn't sound right does it?
If there are laws that we believe should be imperfectly enforced then
that should be written into the law.
For example, if you smoke pot, is it better for that to be legal, or
illegal but most of the time cops won't bust you for smoking a joint?
> To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even
with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous
surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams
on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.
Well, I'll say this: the Capital riot is unprecedented in USA history and
I think it will be a while before we can draw reliable conclusions from
it. It does seem to me that the problems with the response to it that
day did not stem from insufficient information.
> It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is
improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that
the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving
additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good
use of the capabilities that they already have.
That's kind of my point: rather than trying to sequester the technology
(which I believe is impossible) we have to use it well, or we'll fall
into some sort of dystopian system.
> > I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.
> I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like
asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a
kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the
bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a
widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of
constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not
a good trade.
I wasn't clear. It's not a trade. You're going to be livestreaming
anyway, whether you like it or not, so do we also stop the kidnapping?
That's the question.
I can't find the news article now, but I was reading a few months ago
about this exact scenario: A young child in China was kidnapped and the
authorities used the system there to locate and rescue the kid within a
few hours.
We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value
our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan
of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.
> I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech
is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce
regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial
research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition
will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the
problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a
problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask
wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it
easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give
people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.
To me that just sounds like closing the barn door after the horse already
bolted. The technology is already deployed and more and more gets
deployed every day. We should be talking about a universal
highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing
cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than
a problem!
That makes more sense to me than fighting it because the laws are crap
and unevenly enforced.
> That's why you cannot ask any government to protect its citizen digital systems, because there are too much interested in to get security holes for their own benefit...
Any government that currently exists maybe, but not necessarily any government that is possible.
The governmental forms we have now are ancient, designed in a period that pales in comparison to the complexity and power currently available to mankind.
The runtime we are in physically supports improvements, but it appears to not support improvements psychologically - you can test this theory by asking questions of agents within the runtime, and you will discover that there is extreme and almost unanimous opposition to improvements, which to me seems highly counter-intuitive but that is what data suggests.
> Citizens who are abstracted from adversity will become disinterested in politics and apathetic towards the inevitable tyrannical government that will ensue.
Sure. That's pretty much what's going to happen. But mind you, I am not seeing things being much better now compared to that future. Democracy to me seems to work only on paper, while politicians, lobbyists, corporations et. al. do whatever the hell they want. But I am not willing to derail on this point, just sharing an opinion.
> ...a society in which everything is produced by machines and the average citizen receives everything he needs to survive from the government sounds like a dystopia to me.
As with everything else, it's a balance. I'd like to not think about utilities and rent and basic food needs, yes; on the other hand, I am okay with the idea that if I want that 75" QLED TV, or a car, or the best chair recliner on the market etc., then I'll have to work a bit for those.
One way to push people into working even with UBI in place is likely to make the places where food is distributed for free inconvenient or not very ergonomic; many people would like to avoid certain inconveniences or even forced social interaction so they're likely to work just to avoid changing their habits. And publicly funded places gaining bad entropy is pretty much a given anyways; nobody has to do anything, it just happens eventually, by itself.
> I don't trust the state to administer this prospective neo-Oceania.
Me neither, but not sure if for the same reasons as you. Governments are, in the end, hugely ineffective. That's basically their defining characteristic. The moment they have to do something mildly responsible they are very happy to outsource to the private sector, and things turn to shit in months. Government is only really concerned with gathering taxes. :(
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Overall, I believe systems like we are discussing can be made to work. But I am not sure I trust people to do it. And of course, there's going to be a world war before anybody remotely influential will allow a machine to call the shots in their place.
> and governments due to lack of vision and political will never would
Governments (US and Soviet) went to the moon. The Internet would not exist without massive military (i.e. government) sponsoring.
But yes, when I am looking at our governments right now, it's hard to find something as progressive as this, except that marijuana is on the rise, Macron has a 50:50 women government and invited scientists from the US to France. The other governments seem to be racing full speed in reverse for me.
> maybe it's time we work harder to put communication infrastructure in the hands of corporations and other non-state non-nation transnational entities that are powerful enough so governments don't have much power over them?
An entity over which no government has effective power is a government, whether it calls itself that or not.
> Under a few big "Unbrella Co."-s you could have a nice pseudo-anarchic libertarian global system.
No, you couldn't. Because if its under a few whatevers, its not any relative of anarchic. Those things its under, that's the -archy.
> It's often a matter of eliminating options that are stupid, illogical, or inconsistent.
But how do you know which options are stupid? Because they sound stupid to you? Are you confident enough in your powers of detecting stupid that you would base denying people basic rights on it? What gives you that enormous confidence?
> if it was only eliminating those who literally have no idea what is going on.
The number of people who have an idea what is going on, when we're talking about things like whole US economy, might be surprisingly small. In fact, sometimes I am tempted to think that number is zero. Of course, for me it makes me think maybe we need less government involvement, since a blind giant with a sledgehammer is worse than a blind giant without one, but some people think that means we need to abandon democracy. OK, but unless you are an anarchist, how do you propose to choose the government then? By instituting a series of exams? Chinese tried that, actually. Not sure it worked that spectacularly well. Check it out.
The thing that is conducive to a surveillance state is the centralization of power and information. In some cases this is a strong federal government, but Facebook is as big a problem as Sabre is as big a problem as Amazon etc.
But democracy is not more prone to the development of centralized power than any other system.
The issue today is large corporations as well. When Take Two can send private investigators to intimidate a youtuber at his home there is no way to have people's rights be secure.
>That being said, the experiment is on-going so we can’t definitively say Democracy is the best system
Whoever said this? It's directly contradicting Churchill's quote, so not really part of a response to what I said.
I've been thinking this for quite a few years now.
>the Twitter mob is deciding who to banish. It's a form of democracy, I guess - but one without any checks or balances or regulations.
Or swarms of bots shaping public opinion run by just a few people? As long as Govt's allow encryption, over the telecoms networks in their countries, the sooner govts become irrelevant.
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