Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: How to think Page 17 of 22

Is Declining Violence Only A Good Thing?

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On January 28, 2015

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Stephen Pinker, in 2011, for the Wall Street Journal, wrote an article on the decline of violence, arguing that it has been decreasing for thousands of years for a number of reasons, including the rise of states.  Pre-state periods had a lot of violence (15% according to Pinker.)  This sweeps a lot of pre-history into the basket (violence was not that high when humans were far below carrying capacity), but I’m willing to grant the point for the sake of argument.

What I want to say is something different: the decline of violence due to repression has a price.  To be sure, a subject of the Pharoahs was much less likely to be killed by their neighbour.  But they had a vastly increased incidence of disease, worked far longer hours, lost their teeth by the time they were 40, were forced to labor for their overlords and not allowed to keep much of the proceeds of their own labor, almost certainly died more frequently in childbirth, and didn’t live as long if they avoided a death by violence.

The power of the state is, as Pinker notes, used to reduce violence so that assets useful to the state (people) are not destroyed.  But the state’s primary means of reducing violence is that it is much better at violence than individuals or small groups.  People put up with living conditions and political conditions they would not put up with if they had recourse to violence.  (They also don’t get as involved in feuds and so on, which is a good thing.)

This is visible even in very recent history in the United States.  Everyone likes to go on about how violence was reduced in the United States from the 80s on, or so.

So was equality.  This is not unrelated.  The more powerful the means of repression, the less violence there will be

That doesn’t mean that reductions in violence always mean reductions in equality.  But all other things being equal, a reduction in the capacity for non state/government/chieftain violence will generally lead to a reduction of equality, and that loss of equality will lead to an increase in other types of suffering (inequality is correlated with everything bad from heart attacks to depression, even controlling for objective material possessions.)

I will also note two other things, though there is much more one could note about incidental deaths from things like famines and pogroms.

The old Chinese maxim of “too soon to tell” applies.  Our capacity for murder is so great now that all it would take is one world war to erase all the gains.

Second: we have displaced the death to the natural world.  We may not be killing each other, but we are creating a great die-off.  A lot of non-humans are dying for our peace.

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People are very strange: murder edition

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On January 20, 2015

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I have a simple question for those who read this:

Why is it not OK to kill people in the name of a religion, but it is OK to kill people in the name of a nation?

I’ve always had a great deal of trouble with the way most people run their morality and ethics.  Objectively, the Iraqi blockade of the 90s killed vastly more people than 9/11.  I once got to see an Iraki pediatrician writing in real time about all the children who died in the 90s, whom she could have saved, if she had had the medicine the West was denying Iraq.

The Vietnam war killed more people.  The Chechen war killed more people.  The (insert war here) killed more people.

I can run through the intellectual arguments, but on a fundamental level I don’t understand: why is it ok for nations to kill on a mass scale but no one else can? (Well, except some corporations.  See Bhopal, India and Union Carbide).

The true decline of religion in the West is, in fact, indicated exactly by the fact that many people think it isn’t OK to kill in the name of your religion.  The Crusades, and the religious wars of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation would like to chat with you about that.

For that matter, austerity has certainly killed more people in the West than religious-based terrorism has.  Heck, practically everything that does kill people, kills more.

Humans are just very odd.  Very, fundamentally, stupid and foolish.  Barely conscious.

Spend some time thinking about this.  Because it’s a question that is more important than it seems (and it should seem important enough as is.)

Why is Privilege the wrong word?

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On January 14, 2015

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The lesson is not that white men should be treated like African Americans or women, but that they should be treated like white men.

Privilege is the wrong word, the wrong framework because what white males have is what everyone should have.

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Charlie Hebdo and the Moral Moment

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On January 9, 2015

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Everyone has to prove their moral rectitude by acting as horrified as possible and saying things like “there was no excuse”.

Enough.

There are worse things happening around the world every day.  Mass murders, rape, torture, starvation.  A lot of these things are the result of government policy and affect far more people, systematically.

We don’t run around screaming “no excuse” about most of that, we get on with our lives: eating well, having sex, doing our jobs.

(And do we all remember when the US was targeting journalists in Iraq?  Hmmmm?)

There is no excuse for much of what happens in the world, including much graver crimes like, oh, the Iraq war, or jailing non-violent drug offenders, or systematic racism, or shoveling money to the rich causing inequality which has been proven to have devastating effects on people’s health and happiness (and which thus, for the statistically impaired, kills far more people.)

All of these things are far more serious than the Charlie Hebdo attack.  (Moral Moment disclaimer: yes, they were horrible and inexcusable.)

These moments are used to rally us around shit that is not as important as systematic injustice: more people are dying or suffering because of government policies and wars; because of corporate malfeasance, than are dying because of Jihadists in Europe, who kill hardly anyone in comparison. (If you don’t believe this, you don’t understand basic statistics.)

These moments distract people from what matters; from the people who will really kill them or impoverish them or enact policies which will see them raped or tortured: the rulers of their own countries.

As for the Charlie Hebdo attackers, while nothing excuses what they did, note that without the Iraq war (a far more inexcusable act which killed and is still killing far more people), they would probably never have been radicalized and the Charlie cartoonists would still be publishing cartoon sodomy.

(That’s a reason; and a probable cause, not an excuse. But half the people who read this won’t be able to understand the distinction.)

If you want peace, work for Justice.  – Paul VI

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In Light of Charlie Hebdo, are some lives worth more than others?

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On January 8, 2015

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One of the most important ethical questions is what the value of life is.  Are all lives equal, or are some lives worth more?

This seems like an airy-fairy question, but it’s not.  It under-girds how we dole out punishments for crime, how we spend money on healthcare and public services and when and how we go to war.  It is at the heart of the NYPD turning their back on New York’s mayor and in their reaction to the killing of two police officers.

And it is at the heart of our societies reaction to the murders at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

If you haven’t seen any of the Charlie cartoons in question, take a moment to do so.  Or see this cover, if you’re Christian. 

What Charlie was doing was clearly political commentary.  It was also clearly intended to be offensive.

As a result three young Muslims killed twelve people.  And we are having a collective freakout over it.

I note that during the 90s hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died, and we did not freak out this much.

More people die in car accidents, electrocution or by falling from ladders than die due to “terrorism” in Western nations.  Certainly more people die of the flu.  Police kill far far more Americans than are killed by terrorists.  (Though French policemen are far less trigger happy.)  The French led invasion of Libya killed many, and the deaths are ongoing, deaths which quite likely would not have occurred without that invasion.  In Syria the insurrection against Assad led to far more deaths than would have occurred otherwise, and that insurrection was supported materially by many Western nations.

9/11 was a huge tragedy, but the western blockade of Iraq in the 90s had killed far, far more people without anyone in the West getting nearly as worked up over it.

Some lives are clearly worth more than others.  Our lives, the lives of those we identify with are worth more than their lives, the lives of those we don’t identify with.

So one American life is worth, what, fifty Iraqi lives?  A hundred.  What’s the metric?

To the police, and most Americans, a police life is worth more than a civilian life.  Certainly a police life is worth more than an African-American’s life.  And I think it’s clear that to most whites a white life is worth more than a black one.

We are intensely tribal, and we care far more about the deaths of people “like us” than the deaths of people “not like us.”

So, in part, the deaths of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and other workers cause so much outrage because they were white and European.

We spend our time killing brown people and black people and Muslims in large numbers, using paramilitary weapons domestically, and military weapons and economic warfare internationally, killing far more of them than us, then act surprised when, deeply offended, they strike back.  (Yes, yes, this was a symbolic target and they really should have killed French politicians or military, but it’s not like we are discriminate (don’t even pretend we are.))  Somehow our outrage is valid, but we don’t grant them the right to theirs, including their vengeance.  We attacked Afghanistan and Iraq for 9/11, but bin Laden explicitly said that he attacked the US because of American killings of Muslims, including all those dead Iraqi children.

His vengeance is evil.  (It is, actually.)  Ours, not so much apparently.

So let us be clear “our lives are worth more than theirs”.  A lot more.

If you die a “wrongful death”, and the time comes for monetary compensation, how much your relatives receive will be based on what your income was.  The more you made made, the more your relatives have lost in monetary terms, and they will receive more.

People who earn more, are worth more to us, in hard monetary terms.  The life of a minimum wage worker just isn’t as big a deal as the death of someone who makes a lot of money.  This is based on our actions, not our words.

That doesn’t have anything to do with the Charlie dead, they earned virtually nothing.  Apparently the French didn’t feel like paying for the sort of satire they engaged in.  Nonetheless, the lives of those who make more money are worth more to us.

In the old days there used to be the idea of “woman and children first” — that their lives were worth more than male lives.  That may have been honored more in the breach, as with the Titanic, but one can also find occasions where captains of ships did insist that women and children went on the lifeboats first.

We see children as innocent, and we calculate that they lose more years than adults, so we value their lives more highly.  And, perhaps, it also has to do with a parental instinct which most of us have.  As for women, the biological “realists” would claim that those who can create new humans are more valuable, but whatever the reason most societies hate the idea of them being killed in war or raped far more than they dislike the idea of either of those fates happening to men.

Many feminists would argue that there are many ways we show that we value women’s lives less than mens—we certainly pay them less and for most of history we gave them less rights.

But tribalism trumps the women and children exception.  Half a million dead Iraqi children speak loud and clear on this.

Our children are precious and worth anything.  Their children.  Whatever.

Is the value of someone’s life based on what they do?  Or what they were doing?  We would certainly feel more outraged at the death of a search and rescue worker than a gangster.  Large parts of our society value police lives over civilian lives, and certainly our legal system, which almost never tries police for killing civilians does.

The Charlie Hebdo victims were engaged in “free speech”.  Satire.  They were mocking those who values they disagreed with, and doing so in a way intended to offend them as much as possible.  (Take a look at those cartoons and try and argue otherwise.)

We claim to value free speech greatly, and since the Charlie victims were engaged in mocking people who didn’t appreciate it, and since that’s “a fundamental value of Western society” we class their deaths and more tragic than those of Iraqi children who died due to lack of medicine they would have had if the West hadn’t been sanctioning and blockading their country.

One might, however, question our commitment to freedom of speech. Oh, the French themselves are pretty good on free speech these days, but Americans with their Free Speech zones and punitive whistleblower prosecutions; the British with their draconian libel law, Official Secrets Act and anti-terrorism legislation; and Australians with their obscene internet censorship laws (to highlight just a few) seem hardly to be icons of “free speech”.

So, are some lives worth more depending on what people are doing?  To be sure.  But, the French themselves aside, perhaps what the Charlie writers were doing that makes them martyrs wasn’t just “free speech” but the target of their free speech, some of whose members responded violently to the insults: Ilsam.  And that isn’t “free speech”, it is “Us vs. Them.”

And, as wonderful as France is on free speech these days, one remembers the Evo Morales incident, when France denied the Bolivian President’s plane right of way because of suspicion that Edward Snowden might be on board, so that the plane was forced down in Austria in an attempt to apprehend the famous whistleblower.

Some free speech is more important than others.  Cartoons mocking Islam and Christianity are far more important to protect than a man who has revealed wholesale spying on the citizens of
Western nations.

But perhaps it is more simple, Snowden was only going to be locked up in a maximum security American prison after a trial whose result we all know, in effective isolation, till that drove him insane.  The Charlie victims were killed.

And that leads to the final category: are some deaths worse just because of how they happen?  Is being beheaded worse than dying in a car accident? Is being shot by terrorists worse than being shot by police?  Is death from starvation worse than—oh why bother.

Yes, some deaths are clearly worse than others.  I’d rather be shot than tortured to death, or die of starvation.  But really what we mean are “deaths out of their time” or perhaps “deaths by violence”.  The Charlie victims weren’t “due” to die yet.  But then, neither were those Iraqi children, or all the Irakis who died of being shot in a war based lies (no WMD, no ties to 9/11).

But many deaths are preventable: easily preventable, and we fail to do so.  Effective public transportation in the US, reducing the use of cars, would prevent a lot of deaths. But Americans like cars, or something, and so those deaths are considered acceptable.  More effective restrictions on guns meant for killing people (as opposed to hunting rifles, say) and on ammunition would save a lot of American lives, but many Americans value their guns highly and think the deaths are a worthwhile price to pay.

All of this has been about what lives we, demonstrably, value more than others.  It hasn’t been about what lives we should value more.

Perhaps the answer is simple.  All lives have equal value, and in the event we are forced to choose between lives in a situation which doesn’t involve self-defense, we should indeed choose the young over the old.  Or maybe not even that, the old perhaps not being willing to volunteer.

I, myself, don’t know.  But I do know this.  As long as Western lives are valued at something approaching infinity to one versus Muslim lives, Muslims are going to continue to be radicalized.  John Paul VI once said that those who value peace should work for justice.  I believe that.  The Charlie killers appear to have been radicalized by the Iraq war.  No Iraq war, no radicalization, no Charlie victims.

But that’s a pragmatic argument.  The human argument is simpler: those Iraqi children’s lives were worth as much as any white child’s life.  Anyone who believes otherwise is a monster acting on tribalism.  And one day your tribe will be the weak one, because all Empires fall.  And when that day comes, members of your tribe will rail at those who kill your children and don’t care, because your skin is white and theirs isn’t, and they can and you can’t do anything about it.

The only clear justification for killing is self-defense.  More on that, perhaps, in another article.  But if you must kill, let me suggest some old-fashioned mores: kill military not civilians, kill adults not children; kill those who have actually harmed you (politicians who decided on wars which devastated your country), not those who haven’t.

If you want vengeance, shoot at the guilty and shoot at those who can shoot back.

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Thoughts on the Year that Was and the World to Come

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On January 1, 2015

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Looking back, last year’s writing that hit big was mostly about the Ukrainian crisis. The year before had been about ideology.

Though I intend to write about technology and its effect on society this year, I find I’m slightly at sea.

There is a tendency, when writing about society (either analytically or from the viewpoint of improving–not reforming– it), to fall into one of two camps: “Everything Is Specific” OR “One Ring to Rule Them All.”

Once upon a time my stance was that the US, and the world, had very few problems that were conceptually difficult. They might be technically hard, but what to do was well known.

I haven’t come to disagree with that stance: The sardonic comment that everyone knows that the US needs real universal healthcare remain–it produces better health and costs less. Only the corrupt, the stupid, or the propagandized think otherwise. The same is true of many other problems, from climate change to plastic clogging the seas to fracking, to marginal tax rates, and so on.

We know what would produce a world which was better for the vast majority of people (and animals) living on it. We don’t do those things, except when it becomes profitable. (Solar will start replacing coal because it is cheaper, but it should have and could have been cheaper at least fifteen years ago.)

What I have come to understand is that explaining what needs to be done, and why, is brutally difficult. Getting people to a position where they both want to act on it, and will, is nearly impossible.

You explain one thing (climate change), but it means nothing if you do not link it to other things (industrialization, globalization, financial production incentives, the history of post WWII trade, development economics, inequality).  The problems are, in that tired word, “interconnected.”

Most people will never commit to doing the necessary learning to understand how the world works in any meaningful way.

Worse, even if they do, they will likely be mis-educated.  They will go to existing intellectual systems like economics and they will be taught theories that are at best partially true and at worse are outright lies.  Disciplines, especially academic disciplines, exist because someone is willing to fund them, and whoever that someone is, they have expectations.  Business theory; economics; organizational theory, produce what those who are willing to pay for them want.  Most of the time, what they want is rationalizations for why they should have more, and let everyone else rot.

So you spend 10 years studying economics, get your PhD, and then get most of everything wrong.  Your neo-liberal prescriptions make those parts of the world that take them worse off.  (Note, poverty reduction is due to China, China’s success is due to old fashioned mercantalism, not neoliberalism.)

You have an entire discipline based on clearly wrong propositions like humans being utility maximizing machines (and can’t even define utility in a way that doesn’t make it a metaphysical entity).  And, applying these theories, you go wrong.

And looking on this edifice; looking on all the ways that people fool themselves or are fooled, is like looking at a jungle and holding only a machete.  You aren’t going anywhere without a lot of sweat, and the jungle is just going to close in behind you.

So people turn to one off solutions.  If only everyone participates in the gains of an economy it’ll do well. (Well, mostly, but how do you get to that nirvana?  This is saying “the world is good if the world is good”.)  If only everyone obeys contacts freely entered into, life will be good. (Let’s just completely ignore power imbalances).  If only we let markets set prices, the market will produce what we need (but what type of market, we’ve never had free markets setting prices?)  If only we have more and better education everyone will be prosperous (so, if everyone has a PhD the economy will be great?  What about the half of the population who is below-average intelligence?  Fuck’em?  And would it work anyway?  (No.))

Feel free to insert any “one thing” theory above.  They don’t work, or they beg the question.  If we had better people, for example, we’d have a better world.  But how do we get better people, and what does better even mean?

There have been many attempts to get around these issues.  Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Smith, Marx, Keynes and so many many more have tried.

Some have succeeded for a time: Keynesian economics of the type practices after WWII produced about 25 good years for much of the world (even Africa saw better real growth in that period.)  Confucianism, as run by the early Emperors really did make China better till the State co-0pted it.  Christianity was the religion of slaves and foreigners and outcasts for centuries, giving their lives meaning, before it became a regressive scourge used to increase the power of Chieftains who wanted to be Kings, take away the rights of women, and be used for justification of mass murder in Europe and the New World.

The solutions which have been effective (which doesn’t always mean making the world a better place) have all spoken to how people should act.  We don’t recognize that in modern theories like those of economics, but be clear, homo ec0nomicus is a prescription.  The idea that we should act primarily on self interest was not something that was respectable for most of history and the idea that markets should be the primary price setting mechanism and effectively the primary policy mechanism was also considered insane.

The industrial revolution is not old.  A little over a couple centuries, for England, a lot less for most other countries.  In the course of human existence, this is nothing.  The outcome of it, whether it is good or bad, is not yet clear, despite what most believe.  If industry and capitalism kill half the population of the world in avoidable climate crises, hunger and drought, while causing a great die-off of non-human plants and animals, can it be said to be good?  If, as there is some evidence, it leads to material affluence while increasing rates of depression and unhappiness, is it successful?

The hydraulic revolution, and to a lesser extent the first agricultural revolution (which did not occur along the river valleys) lead to shorter more disease ridden lives and a massive rise in chronic disease and afflictions like having your teeth rot out of your mouth by the time you were 40.  In exchange, we received great monuments and lots of things, but I doubt that peasants on the Nile under the Pharoahs were as happy as their ancestors who had lived on the Nile as hunter-gatherers, as close to the Garden of Eden as one can imagine.

I do not believe in going back to technology from before industrialization: it’s not possible or desirable, and if it were, we’d have to reduce our population by two-thirds to three-quarters.  Feel free to volunteer to be among the dead.

Pandora’s box is open, and we must deal with the results.

The irony is that we have, again, produced a cornucopia.  We have the potential to create an abundance society, the world over and eventually off this world.

We have much of the technology necessary, and we could direct our research and development towards the remaining technology we need.

Instead, we rely on markets controlled by oligarchs and central banks captured by oligarchs to make most of our decisions about our future.

We have systematically dis-empowered ourselves. Going from mass conscription armies and industrial warfare and mass markets driven by relatively egalitarian citizen-consumers in democracies, to oligarchies with unrepresentative armies increasingly filled with drones (and effective ground combat drones will be here in 10 to 20 years), surveillance states bordering on police states, and democracies which are hollow, where we can choose from Oligarchical faction one, two or maybe three.  The differences between them, while real, are within the broad agreement to keep giving the rich more.

And so, we come back to, how do we change the direction of our societies?  Our society, for the world is more and more one society.

How do we even explain what is wrong, and present a solution, or solutions?

I will posit here that while we may have problems with Confucius’s solution in terms of specifics, in general he was right.  We create a new society based on a new ethics (not morality, but ethics); and that ethics is attached to a way of creating a people who can create and maintain that society; and a way of picking the people to run that society who will do so in the interests of everyone else, and not mainly in their own interest.

The thousand and one specific solutions to each problem (housing, energy, health care, climate change) are important, but they are technical questions guided by ideology.  A people led by those who do not want to do these things (or not more than they want to do other things), never will.

So is this my “one thing”?

No.  It is backed by an understanding of real world power dynamics; an understanding of human nature and how it is and can be shaped; and it is backed by an understanding of the field of ideas and how those ideas are created by the environment and technology: how that tech and environment creates us.

That grouping of ideas is where I believe a solution lies.

Like all solutions, it will not last.  The best we can hope for from any solution set, so long as human nature remains as it is, is perhaps a hundred and fifty years.  Sixty to eighty is far more typical, and as with the post WWII solution, you may only get two to three decades.

During that time any solution needs to do two things.  It need to fix the environment, and it needs to get us off the planet so we don’t have a single point of failure. Doing so will best be done by a system which produces real prosperity, because both of those projects will require vast productive surpluses.

We have or can reach the technology required for both these projects.  The challenge of mastering our destiny is the challenge of mastering ourselves, and that challenge is, as it has always been, both the hardest thing anyone can do, and the most worthwhile.

In the New Year I will continue the project of discovering how to do it. I hope you’ll join me.

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The Internet Makes Real Organizing Harder (Technology and Prosperity #2)

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On November 3, 2014

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When it comes to communications technologies and their effect on freedom and prosperity we have to remember that income and wealth share is a product of power.

All wage increases are a result of either scarcity of labor, whether labor in general or a shortage of specific skills; or they are a matter of organizing to convince powerful people, whether corporate bosses or politicians, to give you more money.  (There should be no shame in this, the rich spend billions influencing politicians to give them more money and power.)

This means that there are three conditions where wages are good:

1) Labor is scarce and people can easily find a new job.  The job market is, therefore tight, there are really more jobs employers want done than there are people who want work.

2) Wages can be good in specific jobs even if they are lousy elsewhere if there is a shortage of workers in that field: see computer programmers during the late 90s.

3) People can make a good living without working for someone else, or at least a good enough living so that they have to offer a good job for people to stop doing so.

The more fungible labor is, that is the more one person can be replaced by any other, the less it is paid.  If every job is skilled, workers are harder to replace.  The more jobs are Taylorized – easy jobs that anyone can do, as with the de-skilling of fast order cooking by places like McDonalds, the less the workers get paid.  (Short order cooks, before the rise of fast food, were well paid.)

Communications technology influences this in two ways:

1) the ability of management to control workers without being there themselves.

2) the ability of workers to organize, either politically, or in the work place for work stoppages, strikes and so on.

Before the telecom revolution it was very hard to offshore or outsource so much work.  It wasn’t impossible, the telephone and the jet airplane existed, but it was hard.  You couldn’t control the people working for you overseas.  As a result, you tended to want to keep your factories close to hand.  Generally in or near your home town or city; and if you moved to a cheaper locale, it was still in the country.  If you wanted to properly control workers and production in foreign countries you had to send your own executives to do it because you just didn’t have the easy communications we have today.

This was one thing if you were sending them to Canada or Western Europe. It was another thing entirely if it was some third world country where, servants aside, the executives would hate living.

So the telecom revolution makes it much more practicable to offshore production to both lower cost domiciles and to domiciles where you can expect the government to beat, jail, torture, rape and in many cases kill any labor organizers.  Even if you don’t move overseas, you can easily keep your wages cheap by playing domestic workers off against foreign ones: “if you don’t make concessions, we’ll move this factory to China/Bangladesh/Mexico.”

(There are many other factors.  In a very fast moving market there are reasons to keep production at home for the fastest turnover, for example, but in an economy where there are only 3 real smart phone companies, why bother?)

The second question is of organizing ability. In the work place people can organize if they know their fellow workers, if they trust their fellow workers, and if withdrawing their wages will leave their employers unable to produce (which is why scabs are so hated.)  In the days of classic union organizing everyone worked in a few huge factories; they knew each other; and they worked with dangerous machinery and trusted each other.

The internet fragments people.  Instead of grouping people geographically so that they can learn to trust each other even if they have some differences, it finds ways to group us with like minded people.

Worse, it makes real political disruptive political organizing extremely difficult.  The bottom line about the internet is that everything you do can be tracked, and tracked easily. If you use the internet to organize a strike or a demonstration or to shut down a city: whatever it is, the authorities know.   Most of it is public, what isn’t public is spied on.

Worse are cell phones.  Everyone carries one, and it is a bug you carry in your pocket, which can even be turned on remotely to listen in on you.

One result of this is pre-emptive arrests.  You get organized to protest the G20, or whatever, you show up, and the day before the summit, the key organizers are all arrested on trumped up charges.  Even if they beat the rap, they aren’t there for the key days making sure things work.

And if you intend to do any serious work: a strike large enough to shut down a city or a major corporation: something that actually inconveniences the rich and powerful, they will know as well.

If you significantly encrypt and use one-off cell-phones and so on, this sends up a red flag as well, and there are a variety of ways around it. (If your laptop has ever been out of your sight, it is not your laptop.  If you ordered it online and had it shipped, it may well have been intercepted, as with one TOR developer’s laptop (diverted to Richmond, I kid you not.)

Cameras, computer, license plate, and cell phone surveillance mean that it’s almost impossible not to be surveilled.  As routine use of recognition systems is rolled out, as audio pickups are added to cameras in larger numbers, and as drones are added to the domestic surveillance mix, it will become even harder.

Oh sure, if they don’t know you’re organizing they can’t narrow down to you.  But they will know, because to organize most significant actions you have to be visible.

Politics is ultimately where most of distribution is decided.  Absent a vast array of “free trade” treaties and protections, the massive movement of jobs offshore from the late 70s on would not have happened.  Absent the breaking of unions by Reagan and Republicans and Democrats from 80 onward, wages would not have stagnated nearly so much.

If you can’t organize effectively, you are politically mute.  And, by and large, workers are in the US, and increasingly so in almost every other Western country.

A communications technology that actually enables people to organize requires ways of vetting people that can’t be goosed by the government. It needs to bring people together in geographic areas where they can actually work together. It needs to allow the experiences which create solidarity amongst them, and generally that means they must meet and do things together which build trust.

By taking so much of the talk that used to occur in unlistenable, unwatchable ways, and making it visible to the government and any corporation willing to make friends with the right people, the telecom revolution has made actual revolution much, much harder. In the old days you basically had to have spies, and you could never be certain how reliable they were.

Now you can just listen in or watch.  You can see the networks developing in real time, you can identify the leaders, and you can use the information you have to take the leadership out and to be ready for any action before it happens.

The telecom revolution may less about freedom that in it is about control.  It enables the surveillance state revolution: the 24/7 panopticon and rather than putting power into the hands of the people, it puts power into the hands of those who control it.  That’s not to say it has no use: Twitter wasn’t banned in Turkey because it wasn’t making the authorities’ lives harder, after all.

But it is a two-edged sword.  As with most things, it works well only for movements which are so large that taking out the leadership is effectively impossible.  For any movement which isn’t a real mass movement, it is a death trap (and remember, most mass movements start as less.)  And you must have victory if you are a mass movement. If you aren’t, when the mobs die down, and the people go home, well the leaders have been identified, and not just the biggest ones, as in the old days, but the people who are influential without showing up on the podium.

And then the big men come.

Any technology which makes top-down control easier and which makes it easier to replace workers, will reduce prosperity.  The telecom revolution might, one day, make some sort of networked democratic decision-making possible.  But it equally might be used to create a surveillance state that would leave Big Brother in awe.

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On Truth and Burning Bridges

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On September 10, 2014

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Over the last few years, I burned a lot of bridges: first on private e-mail lists and second on twitter (and a little bit with unwelcome posts here.)

After Obama got into office and made it clear that he was going to ramp up drones (which I knew and could not publish); and that he was going to drive the West into permanent depression (which I knew and wrote repeatedly); and my compatriots, by and large, fell to their knees and lauded him, even in places which later turned on him, I became, not angry, but enraged.

There were three camps on this:

1) Those who knew Obama was going to be a disaster and would not say it, because he was popular and speaking against a popular president who had just bought the Netroots and who most netroots citizens believed in, seemed like a way to lose readership or followers.

2) Those who believed that Obama was the Panglossian choice: this is the best we can get, the best of all possible worlds.  That didn’t mean good, that meant bad, but better than terrible, so suck it up.  Billmon falls into this camp on economic policy (the bailouts were the only politically possible policy and this is the best of all actually possible worlds), and I had a huge blowout with him last year about on twitter.  He’s brilliant, but…

3) Those who believed and many of whom still believe that Obama was just swell; FDR reborn, who would (and has) accomplished more than FDR every did!

We all have our own truths and determining truth is a problem. I thought then that Obama might well be a one term president, and was wrong.  But on the economics I was exactly right; and on foreign policy I was generally right: I knew that foreign policy was going to be a fiasco when he put Hilary Clinton in charge, because the one major area Hilary was to his right on was foreign policy.  (Plus the whole drone thing.  The only major candidate to say he didn’t believe in the war on Terror was Edwards, but when the unions decided not to back him (largely from gutlessness, in my opinion) he was done.)

I also predicted, following Stirling Newberry, that on civil liberties and constitutional issues he would institutionalize Bush.  He was not the anti-Bush people imagined, but Bush’s heir, despite being a Democrat.

I got into blogging to, as the terrible cliche goes, change the world. I did not get into blogging to be a courtier to power, kissing the feet of those in power when I knew they were doing or going to do terrible things.

Add to this significant undiagnosed health problems, and I spent years angry.

I’m not someone who thinks that anger is always bad: often it gets people up off their asses.  In the same way that hating your job means you should change jobs, and being unhappy may be a sign that something is wrong with your situation not with you, and you shouldn’t self medicate (you cannot explain the massive increase in depression and many other mental illnesses over the past century using individual factors, it is clearly a social problem, with social causes).

And so, for years, I cut people dead, and cut myself off from much of my old network (though certainly not all.)  I look back now, calmer, and wonder “were these fights I needed to engage in?”  I think—probably not, and yet, and yet: we lost and too many people just wouldn’t admit and made excuses for terrible policy.

We got a president who is worse on civil liberties than George Bush, who is still destroying countries, whose policies in combination with the Fed have lead to more than 100% of all gains going to the top 10% (and really about the top 3%); with a decrease in wealth and income for the majority of Americans and a ton of Europeans.

Obama may have given Americans a shitty version of universal health care (sort of), but in virtually every other way he is an unmitigated disaster.

And it was obvious way back, or it should have been.  And people didn’t say who knew it; or didn’t know who should have because, let us be frank, they wanted the first African American president, no matter what, even if he was a right authoritarian and they wanted to live in a fantasy land where just electing a Democrat, any Democrat would fix things.

The simple truth is that the baby boomers are done.  Their positive legacy is the improvement of women’s rights and gay rights (African American rights were won by the Silent and the GI generations.)  Their negative legacy is an erosion of every other type of civil liberties that matters, right back to the Magna Carta; the vast erosion of America’s real economic power; the end of American egalitarianism and huge numbers of needless wars and deaths that have made America hated in large parts of the world.

As usual, some of my readers will object to this broad brush, but take it another way: old and middle aged people (Gen Xers too, a noxious generation politically); have had their days at bat, and those of us on the left have failed and failed and failed.

So it’s going to be another generation’s job to fix the huge mess that has been created: politically, economically and environmentally.   That doesn’t mean there’s no job for older folks: but the young people will choose which older folks to learn from, follow and emulate.  The job of those of us who are older, who lost, is to prepare the ground for the next war; the next battles.

If we do so, maybe we can keep the death toll from what is coming as low as a billion people.

Maybe.

So be it.

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