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comment by mk
mk  ·  3134 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I, for one, do not welcome our new Neoliberal overlords.

    The West has experienced three hundred years of unprecedented liberty, freedom, and social mobility. I was saying it appears to be ending, at least in the US.

I see what you are saying; but the point I was making is that only recently has that liberty been available (albeit in lesser measure) to woman and non-white men.

    By all evidence, Liberty is an anomaly against nature. Natural Selection creates Plutocracy. Money is power, and the masses fail the Prisoner's Dilemma and are unable to work together against it, excepting rare charismatic leaders, most of whom immediately create another dictatorship after revolution anyway.

I'm not so certain. Economic exclusion is what enables power. I don't know whether or not technology will increase or decrease economic exclusion in the longer term. Technology is changing much too fast, and politics far too slow to make reliable projections at this time.

Human nature varies on scale, and it depends a lot on the possibilities of interaction, and how boundaries are drawn. Aside from the centralized administration of services like Uber and Airbnb, IMO they indicate positive possibilities for granular economic models.





rob05c  ·  3134 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Aside from the centralized administration of services like Uber and Airbnb, IMO they indicate positive possibilities for granular economic models.

I think Distributed Systems might be the next big revolution. I hope it is, actually.

By "distributed systems", I mean any decentralized service, physical or digital. Decentralised transportation, Uber without a company behind it. Decentralised internet, both physical connections—weather balloons, microsatellites, take your pick—and the web servers we connect to. Currency. Everything.

It's a hard problem. It's mathematically hard. But we're just now developing both the mathematics and computational power for it to be possible, for the first time in history.

That might be your Technological → Economic → Political revolution. I'm still skeptical; this is mostly a tangent. But it's possible. Decentralisation will be a big revolution, if it happens.

mk  ·  3134 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's my hope. I just lobbied insomniasexx to be a curator of The DAO, yesterday. :)

b_b  ·  3134 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Aside from the centralized administration of services like Uber and Airbnb, IMO they indicate positive possibilities for granular economic models.

Externalities for everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mk  ·  3134 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm not sure it's going to be worse than what happens now.

b_b  ·  3134 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You really believe that lawlessness is preferable to suboptimal tax and environmental policy?

mk  ·  3134 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't think that there will be lawlessness. Enforcement will have to change, but will still exist I am sure, if not become more effective.

b_b  ·  3134 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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