Here's the really insidious thing about the whole situation, and something that I don't think has gotten enough airtime:
We are all at the mercy of the people in our social graphs who don't keep things secret. I might stay off of Facebook, encrypt all my email, and avoid using smart phones, but anybody I'm in contact with who doesn't is being continually mined. Shadow profiles of me are showing up on services I'd never use willingly because my friend shared their address book with Facebook.
We really only have three groups to hold responsible: ourselves (for developing these technologies), our government (for using these technologies to oppress us), and every other citizen (for voting the government into power and playing along when we ask to mine their data).
The core issue we're seeing is that it is no longer really possible to ignore the fact that most consumers are liabilities to our privacy, and that they'll gladly sell out their fellow man for the dullest of shiny trinkets.
Honestly, the most insidious part of all this isn't our loss of privacy or our trust in some beneficial Big Brother: it's the distressing fact that we can't trust anyone else anymore, and that we've shown that democracy is impossible with such an unworthy populace.
We really only have three groups to hold responsible: ourselves (for developing these technologies), our government (for using these technologies to oppress us), and every other citizen (for voting the government into power and playing along when we ask to mine their data).
Oh nonsense. Technologies like Facebook were developed by people who wanted to make money out of them. On a practical level the huge amount of data held by private industry - over which I have no real control in the US - affects me far more on a day-to-day basis. There are huge information asymmetries between consumers and businesses, and many businesses which depend on exploiting those asymmetries.
I've said before that the US needs an explicit Constitutional amendment to create a right to privacy and control over one's data. If I want to know what data the government has on me, I can make an FOIA request - the response may be evasive in the case of some agencies, or redacted, and as such the mechanism is imperfect - but it exists, and is useful enough to be a first resort in many legal cases. Americans in general enjoy no such right with regard to data held by private firms, which they can disclose or not at their whim.
democracy is impossible with such an unworthy populace.
It has always been like this. IT's a consistent theme of the Federalist Papers that men are not, in fact, angels and need to be governed because they do such a poor job of governing themselves.
Jacob Appelbaum likes to call this to the attention of people by comparing it to safe sex practices.
When you engage someone online, you'd like to know a few things about how that person with handle your personal data. If you know someone to be incapable/unwilling to secure your data (analogous to someone indulging in risky sexual behaviour), then you can refrain from interacting with that person on a deeper level (i.e. don't have sex with them).
Pretty hard to do in practice, but if everyone understood this concept it'd be easier to make it work.
A fantastic analogy, but unfortunately it fails to capture the secondary effects of people you know volunteering information that is "yours" by accident or on-purpose.
I think you're trying really hard to find a reason why you aren't responsible for yourself.
You're on Facebook because you put yourself on Facebook. If there's a problem why are you still there?
The core issue we're seeing is that it is no longer really possible to ignore the fact that most consumers are liabilities to our privacy, and that they'll gladly sell out their fellow man for the dullest of shiny trinkets.
I think you have this backward. You can take yourself out of the relationship or you can work towards changes in government. what you're feeling here is the breakdown in society. People think they're fighting alone. They're not. You're not.
The biggest fault I'm seeing in discussions is that the blame isn't being placed where it belongs: the government. We have a right to privacy. The US Constitution says we have the right to privacy, It's not something that the government provides or can take away. If they do take it away it is our collective fault.
Honestly, the most insidious part of all this isn't our loss of privacy or our trust in some beneficial Big Brother: it's the distressing fact that we can't trust anyone else anymore, and that we've shown that democracy is impossible with such an unworthy populace.
That's what being brutalized does to you. It takes away your hope. People without hope can't support a society. If people aren't organized in a society it is much easier for an authoritarian government to take over.
"You're on Facebook because you put yourself on Facebook."
We know that that's not true.
As for the rest, again, as tempting as it is to blame the evil gubberment for this, the problem at the end of the day is that our own friends and family are ratting us out, because companies make it so goddamn easy and attractive to do so.
Look, we've all genuflected at the altar of lean growth and advertising and all the rest, and the price for that is the complete loss of our privacy. You don't get large viral coefficients without targeted advertising and email collection and exploitation--you don't become sticky by being anti-social.
This is the naked truth of it, and that's what's so goddamn depressing. The government didn't do this to us by itself, or even mostly itself--it's been done by our friends, families, and founders.
Exactly. Want to hide that tag? You have to register as a user.
And, some of your friends hit OK and lets the FB app upload their address book with your contact info in it.
I presume that's how they managed to mine my unlisted cell phone number and suggested it ti me.
I've seen "tagged in picture by friend" lead to "massive avalanche of rage from christian conservative relatives".
The recipient of said avalanche is far from technically inept, albeit not technical for a living - although I deleted my facebook account some time ago so I can't tell you if there was/is a way to limit things so that wouldn't've spread across the graph.
And even if you can turn off the link between the photo and your FB account, your name (suitable for text mining) and your face (suitable for facial recognition) are both still in there.
The US Constitution says we have the right to privacy
No it doesn't. There is no right to privacy in the original document nor any amendment to it. The closest we come to it is The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures As far as mail goes sealed mail is considered covered but only because of the relationship between the USPS and the government.
It's rather more complex than that; the right to privayc is (judicially) considered to emanate from other rights, if you go back and look at key decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut.
But your basic point is correct, there is no explicit right to privacy. This is a problem, because where judicial interpretation 'discerned' one in the Waren Court, a more conservative Supreme Court might at some point decide otherwise. Even liberal jurists consider that the Warren Court was on rather thin ice with many of their decisions, and of course a 'culture war' still rages in American politics with both sides delegitimizing judicial opinions that they don't like.
>This is a problem, because where judicial interpretation 'discerned' one in the Waren Court, a more conservative Supreme Court might at some point decide otherwise.
That is pretty much the point I was going for, it isn't explicit so all it would take is a different legal interpretation for it to go away. With the FISA court and all the NSA stuff it seems to already have gone.
> Shadow profiles of me are showing up on services I'd never use willingly because my friend shared their address book with Facebook.
Is that really so bad? The worst I've seen is "this is a picture of John" which is not an abuse that's limited to social networks. And if this happens really often, you can complain to your friend about it. And if you can't complain to your friend, you can complain to abuse. And if abuse doesn't do anything (not likely) you can send a legal notice.
To jump from "a friend can mention me, talk about me, etc." to "there is no privacy anymore" is...well, I just can't get there, sorry.
Do we have privacy problems? Yes. Are these examples really selling that? No. I can't remember any case in which a friend sold me out for a trinket; if you do have a common example, cite it. That would really help us all here.
Is that really so bad? The worst I've seen is "this is a picture of John"
Yes, it is - when there are a bunch of "this is a picture of John" posts mostly by identifiably pro-1st/2nd/4th/10th Amendment[1] types, facilitated by face recognition software confirming it's the same John, whereby data mining can determine that there is an un-tracked person named John who is most likely a pro-1st/2nd/4th/10th Amendment type and, because of his pointed absence from social media, likely rather hardcore about it and worth tracking with particular interest.
Tom Brown (famous tracker) tells a story of his tutor telling him "go to the grandfather tree." He scoured the woods for the curious plant, and found nothing. Standing in a clearing wondering what was meant, he realized that the space he was standing in - an unusually empty space in an otherwise dense forest - must have been created by a very large and very old tree that had subsequently fallen and rotted away, leaving a space other trees had been unable to grow in. Moral: an apparent absence can, coupled with identifiable effects, be indicative of something very interesting; to wit if there's a lot of pictures of someone but nothing from that someone he's probably hiding something.
[1] - terms for various passionately-defended civil rights here
It's really scary that we're at a point where not using social media can reveal something about you.
If they somehow manage to get an IP address associated with the shadow profile, they can use XKeyScore to see which websites you've visited. If they see you've been reading a lot of articles about the NSA ordeal, browsing wikipedia a lot, visiting websites related to cryptography and visiting a website called hacker news, they'll target you as 'politically dangerous' and you'll be put in the 'nihilist, anarchist, hasn't talked to the opposite sex in 5 years'-list.
Right...because with all their super-surveillance powers, they're going to be blinded by that title and miss the fact that HN is a fairly pedestrian community consisting mostly of entrepreneurs, technologists on the make, and few artists and oddballs. This reading of things requires us to believe that government is both omnipotent and incompetent, neither of which are true to the extent that people like to imagine.
It's a community where people regularly talk about ways to limit the NSA's power and who are actively encouraging people to use encryption to weaken their data mining capabilities. Do you think that doesn't raise any red flags?
We already know they're more likely to target encrypted connections, so what does mean for those who enable encrypted communication?
You can go ahead and make fun of this like you did a few comments below, but if you believe this couldn't happen then I think you've been living under a rock the past few weeks.
It's a community where people regularly talk about ways to limit the NSA's power and who are actively encouraging people to use encryption to weaken their data mining capabilities. Do you think that doesn't raise any red flags?
To be frank I don't; Hacker News is a very tame community. There are lots and lots of internet communities ranging from fringe politics to neo-nazi groups that rank way higher in the 'potential domestic threat' category.
During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who they believed to be enemies of the state or spies or to have the potential to undermine the new state. People who they perceived to be intellectuals or even those that had stereotypical signs of learning, such as glasses, would also be killed. - Wikipedia
Of course they do! We nerds are the smartest people in society and frankly everything would fall apart if it wasn't for our intellectual heroism. Naturally this makes us the #1 threat to the Evil Overlords, with whom we shall soon have a final showdown on the fields of Nerdageddon.
You're missing the point. The fact is, even if you decide to not use any online accounts, host your own email, run your own server and VPN, etc. profiles of you are being created of you anyway AS IF you had an account! These are called "shadow profiles".. Facebook is the easiest example because it's already been demonstrated to do this. I'm sure most other online services work similarly.
Just assume each one of your friends is a raving moron until you observe evidence that contradicts that fact.
Half jokingly, my alibi for getting out of FB was "On moral grounds, I cannot offer my support to a company that was started through borderline fraud and is known to change its privacy-policies/terms-of-use without notice".
Trello asks for your friend's emails so you can recommend the service, even going so far as to have a friendly little puppy you can 'feed' the emails to.
Facebook is well-documented in scraping your address book on your phone if you use their app, and many other games will do the same. I get LinkedIn spam all the time from friends who gave them my email account so I could join.
This is really common, least of all because of the push for high viral coefficients in startups.
The reason I find it so repugnant is that I want to trust my friends and family, and I want to be able to enjoy my privacy (such as it is). That these companies go out of their way to make it so so easy for my friends to betray that trust is unforgivable.
How is the populace unworthy because they haven't immediately caught up to the tech community - who ourselves have not caught up to the privacy experts - in solving a problem nobody has ever seen before?
It is heartening to read that a small percentage of the technical community is now willing to admit that the majority of the developed world's problems are political. Specifically, the metastasising bureaucracy which is emboldened with each successful power grab is becoming increasingly difficult to dislodge since they've built up so much momentum.
This is an excellent start, but a mere tip of the iceberg. The political malady is more malignant than most imagine [1].
The sad thing is that even among the people willing to admit that the majority of the developed world's problems are political, most of them are under the delusion that more/better/different politics is the solution.
The choice to go full anarchist/minarchist is also a political choice. Any sort of (non-)governance/agreement of/with other people is a political choice.
It's a political choice in the sense that it's the choice to refrain from politics. It's analogous to atheism being the choice to refrain from believing in theism. Anarchism isn't politics, and atheism isn't religion.
Politics is how people agree between them (or are forced by others) to go about their lives.
You cannot "refrain from politics" anymore that you can "refrain from life" or "refrain from society".
As long as you are subject to law, for example, you are participating in politics (as a passive subject at least).
Or as long as you need to use any common infrastructure, from roads to water, you are participating in politics.
Anarchism itself is very much politics, and has a long history of political involvement that takes 200 volumes to recount, from the International to the Spanish Civil War and on.
The only alternative to politics is to go to some cabin in the woods and hunt for your food, but I don't think that's what you have in mind.
> Politics is how people agree between them (or are forced by others) to go about their lives.
I want to be clear about my definitions to avoid semantic arguments. Sure, in a casual context the word is used that way (e.g. "office politics"). I mean to use the more specific definition, which refers to the organization of government, so I don't refer to all social organization as "politics." For another usage similar to mine, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-politics.
The point others are trying to make here is that it's completely self-serving to call one's political thought as Non-Politics.
Libertarian/anarcho-capitalist thought and agorism is political in nature, making large (debatable) assumptions about how societal relations ought to be organized.
But you're still making a semantic argument, which is what I'm trying to avoid. I'm not arguing over what the "true meaning" of the word is. I have given my definition, and I would prefer that my statements be evaluated using those definitions.
You're claiming that having different politics (left-wing, right-wing, etc.) isn't a viable solution, only non-politics is a solution. And everyone else is saying that non-politics is still politics. But in order to be consistent with your claim that all politics are bad whereas anarchy is good, you have to claim that anarchy is not politics.
At any rate, with non-politics everyone still governs their own body, so it's not unreasonable to view absolute anarchy as 7 billion different totalitarian nations.
> You're claiming that having different politics (left-wing, right-wing, etc.) isn't a viable solution, only non-politics is a solution.
It depends what you mean by "left-wing" and "right-wing." There are certainly a lot of differing beliefs which can be held without approving of politics.
> But in order to be consistent with your claim that all politics are bad whereas anarchy is good, you have to claim that anarchy is not politics.
You're still phrasing this like a semantic argument. I am not trying to argue what the "true meanings" of words are, because that's useless (although it's clearly a very attractive style of argument to many people in this thread). I have told you what definitions I am using, and clearly, anarchism is not politics according to my definitions. I would prefer you address the actual ideas I have expressed, rather than argue over "true meanings" of words. Also, I am not saying that all discussion of political philosophy is bad, because that field inevitably concerns itself with beliefs which advocate refraining from political activity.
> so it's not unreasonable to view absolute anarchy as 7 billion different totalitarian nations.
It is unreasonable if you want to have intelligent discussions using concise terms. That's why, if the members of a discussion are unable or unwilling to agree upon a few basic definitions, the only arguments available are semantic arguments. Thus, discussions involving the concept of "nations" or "states" should be based on an agreement of terms, and the only conceivable useful definitions for those terms would exclude individual humans.
As far as I can tell, reading upwards, your ideas are simply that politics are bad and non-politics are good. Are there any other ideas?
The problem is precisely that you're defining terms to suit your arguments. All colors are bad, white is especially bad, therefore only the absence of color is good. But in many respects black functions just like the other colors. You can't say, well I'm defining terms like this, and it happens to suit me, so let's just discuss my ideas, namely that black is incredible, because it isn't a color. I don't agree with your axioms, so none of the claims in your system make logical sense.
You're doing the same thing when you deny that an individual under absolute anarchy is equivalent to a state - presumably a state requires two or more people for you. Defending "your" land by yourself in the wilderness with a gun is still government.
It's fine to discuss the form of government you like most - maybe anarchy is great - but it's intellectually dishonest to portray it as superior to all other governments because for some magical reason it is not a government and therefore does not contain any of the supposedly evil properties of governments, namely submission to the authority of another which inevitably gets abused. What you propose entails one of the most sinister consequences, namely that an individual's own authority, strength, and material wealth will be the final arbiter of power.
My ideal is the exact opposite of global anarchy: one government, one currency, one set of rights, and no borders.
But we can't have a reasonable discussion if my ideal is a priori terrible because it's political, and your ideal is wonderful because it's non-political / apolitical / whatever.
> The problem is precisely that you're defining terms to suit your arguments.
No, I'm not. The problem is that you are dead set on your perceived "true meaning" of the word, and you cannot get past anyone using a different definition regardless of how explicit they are about it. My argument is not that the string of letters "politics" is bad, which would then require me to set a precise definition of the word to make my argument fit my other beliefs. My argument is that government is bad, and that participation in government, even with good intentions, is bad. "Politics" is the perfect word to use when referring to "participation in government," so I used that term. When people brought up a potential different definition of "politics," I immediately gave the definition I was using in my first claim. That should be the end of the semantic argument, but people persist, many ignoring my actual claim.
> All colors are bad, white is especially bad, therefore only the absence of color is good.
Nothing I said is remotely of this form. I said politics are bad, then I defined politics as precisely as I could, period.
> You're doing the same thing when you deny that an individual under absolute anarchy is equivalent to a state - presumably a state requires two or more people for you.
Wrong again. If you desire to enter into a discussion about states using a definition of "state" that includes individuals, then so be it. We could have that discussion without having any semantic arguments. You still cannot get past the idea of "true meanings." The point is to speak and discuss things given an agreed upon set of definitions. In theory, all the words you use could be pure gibberish, provided that all participants were aware of their definitions in that discussion. Obviously, that's not the easiest way to have a discussion, but then again, neither is this thread.
> It's fine to discuss the form of government you like most - maybe anarchy is great - but it's intellectually dishonest to portray it as superior to all other governments because for some magical reason it is not a government and therefore does not contain any of the supposedly evil properties of governments, namely submission to the authority of another which inevitably gets abused.
This is another disagreement on the definition of terms, and we cannot continue this discussion until we agree on a definition. My definition of "government" does not include voluntary organizations. If you present your definition, then I could agree to use it (just for this discussion, of course), and then we could talk about whatever you actually want to talk about. Again, in this paragraph, you are appealing to your perceived "true meaning" of the word "government," and until you provide that definition, you haven't really presented any ideas that can be intelligently discussed.
> What you propose entails one of the most sinister consequences, namely that an individual's own authority, strength, and material wealth will be the final arbiter of power.
Here, you depart from making semantic arguments and instead make a simple straw man argument. I never claimed to advocate that, and I do not advocate that.
> My ideal is the exact opposite of global anarchy: one government, one currency, one set of rights, and no borders.
> But we can't have a reasonable discussion if my ideal is a priori terrible because it's political, and your ideal is wonderful because it's non-political / apolitical / whatever.
But as I have pointed out numerous times, I'm the one not making a priori arguments based on a string of characters like "political" or "government." I'm providing definitions and using those to construct actual ideas, rather than appealing to "true meanings." I have not and will not design an argument by placing a label on your proposal containing the string of characters "political," then pointing and saying "See! It's political therefore it's bad." Nor do I place a label on my proposals then argue that they are good because of what the label says. Those would be semantic arguments, and I seem to be one of few people in this thread not making semantic arguments.
I actually think you're caricaturing the problems people are having with your argument.
The issue is not being dead set on a "true meaning", it's that you have rejected the term "politics" in the meaning others here have attributed to it (i.e. the process of resolving power relations among individuals - not necessarily about governments or states), but have not replaced it with a suitable alternative that we can use to move the discussion forward.
In so doing, it comes across (at least earlier in the thread) that you're claiming that such a process is not required in an anarchy.
But I have presented the definition I was using in my first comment. At that point, disagreeing with my definition is pointless, and no longer addresses my first comment.
Besides, I have shown repeatedly that my usage is indeed standard. The Wikipedia articles on politics and political science both overwhelmingly show this. Only in casual language, like "office politics," is the term used to refer to non-government interactions.
You have not shown that your usage is entirely standard - myself and others have repeatedly pointed to aspects of Wikipedia articles that contradict your use of the term.
"Office politics" is not casual language, it actually is using the term "politics" as most refer to it in modern times: the process of determining power arrangements among beings.
But this is still semantics. I can accept your definition of politics as being the activities within the state. Lets call "the process of determining power arrangements among beings" as "power struggles".
I've claimed there are a number of thinkers that have varying views on "power struggles", some of which presume a state, others of which do not. One thing that seems to be clear is that there will always be power struggles in any community of beings: no system will eliminate them. So the question is, on what basis do we agree to contain power?
As far as I can tell, you haven't said anything besides politics and government, as you define them, are categorically bad. You haven't provided any reasons why.
My claim is that non-politics and non-government, as you define them, are not a solution. The reason is that they are exactly circumscribed by politics and government, as you define them. The definition of X provides the definition of !X. Thus, they do not ultimately differ. This is a really important point: loyalty and rebellion are very closely related in that they are two sides of the same coin, both dictating your behavior. You don't need permission to sail in international waters (non-politics), but there's lots of places you can't go (politics) if you're going to stay in them. To be clear, I do understand what you mean when you say non-politics and non-government.
My definitions are as follows: to govern is to marshal force in the establishment of rights. To marshal force in the establishment of rights is to govern. This includes your definition of government and your definition of non-government.
> My definition of "government" does not include voluntary organizations.
Even if you join a voluntary non-governmental organization that provides you rights by marshaling force, regardless of whether or not I join your organization, I am still governed by it, in so far as the protections you have been promised by that organization will apply to me. If you pay for damage to your property to be illegal, I am going to be in trouble if I damage it, so I must obey the law that you have created with your wealth, or face the consequences.
My questions about your ideal form of government (or shall we say "protection" for your sake) are as follows: how does such a system restrain the power of the most rich? How does such a system prevent the abuse of the most poor?
It seems to me to be some kind of nightmare world where material wealth and social connections end up being the final arbiters of justice.
We effectively have anarchy at the international level today since the UN has no real power. Why is this a good thing? The US, with its vast amounts of power, is able to bully many of the other countries into submission, and there is no oversight. I fail to see how anarchy at the individual level would be substantially different.
>No, I'm not. The problem is that you are dead set on your perceived "true meaning" of the word, and you cannot get past anyone using a different definition regardless of how explicit they are about it. My argument is not that the string of letters "politics" is bad, which would then require me to set a precise definition of the word to make my argument fit my other beliefs. My argument is that government is bad, and that participation in government, even with good intentions, is bad. "Politics" is the perfect word to use when referring to "participation in government," so I used that term. When people brought up a potential different definition of "politics," I immediately gave the definition I was using in my first claim. That should be the end of the semantic argument, but people persist, many ignoring my actual claim.
Well, if you have ANOTHER MEANING for the word, why do you feel the need to use the same word, and not another one, even a made-up one?
I'd say it's because, however you might want to define your own definitions, you cannot escape the overall reach of the terms.
You argue against semantics, but semantics is all you're doing: you're not putting forward a different description of politics (explaining how it will work, etc), you're just redifining the word to mean something else.
If we were allowed to do that, no discussion could ever take place. For one, now other persons in the discussion cannot use the same word in their argumentation, because you just redefined the term.
>My argument is that government is bad, and that participation in government, even with good intentions, is bad.
OK, that's something we can work with. How is that solved by prefering "anarchy" or "non politics"? Might as well say "I'm against gravity". You still are subject to government and it's laws. And the only way to change that is:
1) Go to some remote area and start a commune.
2) Convince people to abolish government (which necessitates entering into the political sphere).
>Again, in this paragraph, you are appealing to your perceived "true meaning" of the word "government," and until you provide that definition, you haven't really presented any ideas that can be intelligently discussed.
Notice how "his perceived true meaning" is actually the true dictionary meaning everybody agrees upon. You substituted your own definition, and now you act as he is using some weird meaning of his own.
It's vastly better to avoid redefining any term, and just DESCRIBE (with many words, instead of using a token redefined by you term) what you want to say.
That is 'I'm providing definitions and using those to construct actual ideas, rather than appealing to "true meanings"' is the worst thing you could possibly do in a coversation. Stop with the redefinitions, and work with descriptions and arguments.
>Those would be semantic arguments, and I seem to be one of few people in this thread not making semantic arguments.
On the contrary, you are the one person in this thread that fucked up semantics, by coming with your own definitions of words. That's semantics work per se.
Well, your definition above is that politics "refers to the organization of government". So you want to be non-political with respect to that, ie. don't care about Washington, etc.
Here is where the the problems arise:
1) Government is not just the one in Washington, but all kinds of government, ie. all kinds of collective decision making. You cannot avoid those. Any time you want to get to a decision some kind of government will emerge -- and as the decisions get more complicated or involve more people (and have to be enforced or else are nullified), it will have most of the regular government traits.
2) You cannot even avoid the regular government just because you prefer to be non political. If you want to do without "politics" (as defined in your definition) you still need to enter the political field (ie. you could face adverse action from Washington, you have to abide by their laws, etc). So even to be "non-political" you first have to abolish politics somehow, or you are still subject to them.
May be I am ignorant, but anarchism doesn't appear to be very different from tribal societies. No large concentrations of power, no permanent authority, minimal rules and localized politics. It is definitely a political choice about choosing a small but (all) powerful association than a large but weak association. and not analogous to atheism, unless you want to force that association.
Anarchism is a very broad term. While specific forms of anarchy may contain one or more of the attributes you listed, none of those attributes are inherent to the idea of anarchy.
> Anarchism isn't politics, and atheism isn't religion.
Form is emptiness;
Emptiness is form.
Form is nothing but emptiness;
Emptiness is nothing but form.
-- Heart Sutra
The opposite of something contains all the elements of the thing it is opposed to, much as a footprint in the sand can be cast with plaster. Neither dependence nor independence is interdependence. Your actions and beliefs cannot escape from the continua of political and religious actions and beliefs that describe them; you can only end up highly polarized at one end.
In this thread I am desperately trying to be very clear about my definitions so as to avoid semantic arguments, but it seems futile. Your comment is an interesting claim about the nature of meaning, but I'm trying to talk about very specific ideas as best I can.
I'm simply claiming that black and white are not so different from each other, despite appearances. You are just as bound by the strictures of philosophy X when you endorse !X as your philosophy. We might not disagree about this, it's difficult to tell. If I've made a distracting argument, my apologies.
> Anarchism isn't politics, and atheism isn't religion.
Anarchism is political even if anrachists generally do not favor organized government. Anarchism doesn't require that communities and people dissolve their relationships with each other.
I already said "proprietarian". Please use the proper terminology rather than Applause Light words like "libertarian", which imply that "liberty" and "This Specific Ideology" are equivalent.
pessimizer's point is that he believes the very institution of property requires something he calls a state. I would disagree, and point to the fact that territorialism in the animal kingdom is an institution of private property without anything most people would call a state.
There's no point in arguing semantics without being clear on the definitions I'm using. I use "politics" to refer to the practice of participating in an organization that governs. By "governs," I mean has the legal authority to exercise physical control over a region or group of people. In the context of modern Western nation-states, I use "politics" to refer only to participation which is condoned by the government. So I consider voting, running for office, helping with election campaigns, lobbying, etc. to be political acts. I don't consider other attempts to influence governments to be inherently political acts, like civil disobedience, participating in black markets, and other forms of counter-economics.
Obviously, in the broadest sense, anarchism is relevant to political philosophy because it is the suggestion that governments and therefore politics shouldn't exist. Analogously, atheism is relevant to religion because it is the suggestion that religion is incorrect. And yet, with the definitions I'm explicitly using, anarchism is not politics and atheism is not religion.
And to be clear, there are certainly anarchists (and, much more commonly, minarchists) who blatantly use political methods to achieve their desired results. A prominent example would be Ron Paul, who is arguably an anarchist, but seems to believe that using the condoned political methods to move the USA toward a smaller and more constitutional government is useful. I disagree with these people.
> I don't consider other attempts to influence governments to be inherently political acts, like civil disobedience, participating in black markets, and other forms of counter-economics.
Then your definition of politics satisfies you assumption of what politics means but that doesn't mean that those acts are not political as understood by many if not most others. By your understanding of politics, only governments and those participating to elect/support them are political entities. Even if we take that definition, whatever system theoretical (or in some parallel universe, practical) society you envision there are going to be small pockets of political governance that sets rules and enforces them. It could be as small as a family or a pack of 15 travelers, or as large as a village. There will be pack leaders who will enforce the minimal rules that you have set up, probably using physical force and there will be rules to avoid physical force unless necessary. There will be clashes between packs, which is just going to be a decentralized version of current international politics and there is going to be protection money taken from the physically weak likes of me, so that I don't get killed in such clashes.
I prefer better politics (your definition of politics) than no politics.
> Then your definition of politics satisfies you assumption of what politics means but that doesn't mean that those acts are not political as understood by many if not most others.
I believed that it was quite clear from context what I meant by "politics." It should be obvious that I was not talking about all forms of social organization, as in "office politics." I don't believe it's reasonable to believe I meant that all social interaction should be avoided, but when several people claimed to take this interpretation, I was very clear about the definitions I was using.
> By your understanding of politics, only governments and those participating to elect/support them are political entities.
Yes, that is correct. This is also, to my knowledge, the standard definition of the term outside of obvious casual adaptations of the term like "office politics."
Actually, I think I understand what the root issue of this semantic disparity may be. Some dictionary definitions of politics relegate it to government / state organization.
Others, particularly political scientists, view it as the universal process of resolving power interrelationships among individuals.
To an anarcho-capitalist, most (all?) individual interactions that involve transfer of power are voluntary market exchanges. That implies a social structure that is non-political in the sense that no state need be involved in society. But to a political scientist it is just one of many potential political systems to be debated and evaluated, with its own power structures, etc.
Communists didn't feel their preferred system was political either but rather a scientific inevitability. This is often why some half-joke that Libertarianism is the Marxism of the rich...
As I understand it, the field of political science deals almost exclusively with the state. The fact that political scientists can often provide useful insights to other organizations like companies is obvious, but I would call that an inevitable extension of the field rather than a primary concern.
> As I understand it, the field of political science deals almost exclusively with the state. The fact that political scientists can often provide useful insights to other organizations like companies is obvious, but I would call that an inevitable extension of the field rather than a primary concern.
Corporations are exercises of state power, as well as being structurally somewhat similar to "ministates", so I wouldn't exactly see insight from political science (if viewed as being "the study of the state") into corporations as outside of the primary concern.
There is a significant branch of study in political science (often overlapping with economics, history, and philosophy) called political theory or philosophy that is not specific to the study of the state. It is this area where academics inquire into political first principles that don't necessarily presume a state.
John Rawls and Robert Nozick's works, or Edmund Burke, and MIchael Oakeshott fall into this area of inquiry, along with some of the works of Peter Drucker, Murray Rothbard, Fredric Bastiat, etc.
Yes, I have mentioned this before in this thread. Of course the ideas of refraining from political action are relevant to the field that studies political workings, in the same way that atheism and other forms of religious skepticism are relevant to religious studies.
> the standard definition of the term outside of obvious casual adaptations of the term like "office politics."
From my limited reading about the topic, that is not the case. According to wikipedia, politics is the practice and theory of influencing other people on a civic or individual level[1]. I have taken just one, very 101 like course on Governance and the most prominent theories that were discussed used politics in the broader sense (but detailed from a narrower perspective due to the scope of the class). Group theory[2], for instance, calls nearly all interactions between interest groups as political. Elite Theory [3], also used similar connotations.
I previously skimmed the Wikipedia article on politics, and it does mention companies once and "individual level" once. And yet, everything else I can find in the article assumes that the state is the topic of discussion.
That's absolutely true. Although I find myself a agreeing with many normal people that government is riddled with problems in practice, they get hostile when I suggest that maybe there shouldn't be an organization with a monopoly on force that is funded by theft.
For argument's sake let's consider me normal. Also for the sake of argument let's assume I will _not_ get hostile ;-)
1) It appears that there is a reduction in violence when one entity (usually the state) achieves a monopoly on law and force. This is because a) individuals when wronged (victims) have an avenue of redress and no longer can take matters into their own hands and perpetuate cycles of violence and b) if an individual trangresses against another's person or property they can be assured of at least some response from a well-resourced state rather than a weak individual. That's the theory anyway but it appears borne out by the stats. I would direct you to read the very excellent Better Angels of Our Natures[1] by Stephen Pinker which changed my thinking on this issue. There's a ton of convincing researched data to back up my position contained within its pages.
2) With 'funded by theft' you of course mean taxation. This is probably where you encounter most hostility. Most people will obviously prefer less taxes (for them) as opposed to more because they'll have more money in their pocket, right? Never mind the fact that barring corruption their taxes go into a common pool to be used for public services and infrastructure and that a higher rate of taxation might improve their lot -- witness the oft touted Scandinavian model. Now to the logical conclusion of this train of thought is, "why not desire zero taxes!" (ie. less and less and less taxes until you reach zero.) You could argue for this. It's quite _another_ thing to argue that taxation is thus theft. That, frankly, makes you sound like an extremist and usually signifies that arguing with you will be a futile experience. Like it or not you live in a society that has public services and infrastructure, money is a consensual public tool -- you gain enormous benefit from this system, you wouldn't even have money to steal if there wasn't the agreement that we'll use this money thing is a exchange mechanism in the first place. I'll be honest, this position exasperates me -- I see it often on HN but rarely respond because what's the point, you won't change your mind. But I'm putting it out there this time, I _strongly_ disagree with your position and I would _not_ like to live in the society you envisage. Over to you :)
> It appears that there is a reduction in violence when one entity (usually the state) achieves a monopoly on law and force.
Does the data you're hinting at include wars? Does it attempt to control for other variables which may be somewhat orthogonal to the existence of a state, like technology, medicine, wealth, types of weaponry in existence, etc.?
It does include wars. Remarkably, even though WW2 was the most bloody conflict known to man when viewed from the perspective of the totality of deaths when viewed from the perspective of per capita deaths there have been far more bloody conflicts in history. Go to
and sort by Percentage of the world population. Five conflicts: Mongol conquests, Late Yuan warfare and transition to Ming Dynasty, An Lushan Rebellion, Qing dynasty conquest of the Ming Dynasty, Conquests of Timur-e-Lang all were more bloody as far as we can tell (per capita) than WW2.
It does not attempt to control for other variables. This is a deeply complex caveat. It is not like for like because societies move on in terms of, as you say, technology and so on. Our medicine is better now and our weapons are more lethal.
Violence is taken to include person on person violence, state violence towards persons and state on state violence (wars). Read the book! Hope that helps :)
It's true that wars have gotten less violent per capita over time, but all the earlier wars you listed were state endeavors as well. I was talking about comparing human violence before states to human violence after states.
Yes, I addressed that didn't I? Before states there is tit-for-tat killing, blood feuds, taking justice into your own hands, raids on ones property ... after states, plus property rights plus trade there is a reduction. It seems that property rights plus trade would lead to a decrease in violence also but there would be a power vacuum and you would still need some entity to enforce the rules (consistently, fairly and not punitively) and it is difficult to imagine a non-state structure filling that role. A volunteer police force and judiciary? Free market militia?
I mean, we all see what can happen when a police state goes bad so that prompts some to imagine a utopian world without the 'evil' cops but unfortunately we had that world in the past and it was, in fact, worse. This is not comparing like with like though. It would be difficult to definitively know without, I think, accurate computational modeling of societies and that's a toughie, I don't know if anyone has tried that. Stephen Pinker does provide data on societies that haven't integrated into the modern world (hint: more per capita violence than our own, including the US which is far more violent than any other developed country) and also there is archaeological and historical evidence from societies of the past (seems to indicate they were more violent as well: homicide, torture, theft, rape, ...)
I agree. Attacking politics directly (i.e. more politics) will do what it always did - that is, nothing.
Politics of all kind has two ultimate goals - to keep (and gain more) power and to keep (and gain more) riches. In western democracies this corresponds to being popular (thus maximizing the chance of reelection) and passing laws in favour of those with money, respectively. All the political discussion on top of it seems to be nothing more than something to keep people busy.
I think that's why many here think about technological solutions first - they have direct effects and are bullshit free. But as many noted, just technological is not enough. Technology is just a tool. What we need to do is to hit the popularity and the money angle, which means a) PR solutions and b) business solutions.
I have a feeling that people want to see only purely technological and political solutions because neither cost that people money personally. It's one thing to run away from Google services; it's another to say to client, "we won't work with you because of your privacy practices". It's hard to notice financial decisions we could make, because they'll hurt us personally in short term.
No political change will be introduced by few individuals; that's why we are all encouraged to take action. But I propose that if, instead or along with, we all take the business angle and refuse to give money to people destroying the Internet and our civilization, much more will be achieved.
ETA: there's a quote from pg's "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" [0] I particularly like:
As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.
Politics does achieve positive change. We are witnessing the gradual collapse in support for legal discrimination against gay people. The civil rights revolution did happen. Women did get suffrage. Prohibition was repealed.
Many of these things take a lot longer than we seem to be patient for.
How is this defeatist? Politics is mostly shouting, elections, and even more shouting, and then, maybe, some highly inefficient process of introducing some changes. Instead it would be better if people went and actually did something.
I don't know much about prohibition, but the other things are, from what I can see, results of years (sometimes decades) long PR campaigns - in books, movies, on the streets, and now on the Internet. Especially women and gay rights are examples of this - constantly on the media; the topic is pretty much shoved down our throats, every time, all the time[0]. Legislation follows social change, not the other way around, and social change is made by media.
[0] - you can notice this even on HN recently. Just pretty much in every other thread somebody starts talking about gender, even if it's completely irrelevant and off-topic.
You've just described the political process that's existed in the West for centuries. Decades of PR campaigns (even before there was a mass media), steady protests and changing of minds, and then the politicians noticing and introducing legislation. Women's suffrage took almost 100 years in the UK and USA. Prohibition took about 50-60 years to enact and another 10-13 to repeal.
That IS doing something, even if it is frustratingly slow.
Social change is made by people, the media just is an amplifier that seeks controversial topics that garner attention (and thus revenue).
Though, the reason you hear about gender on places like HN is not the media.... it is because this forum has been a nexus of controversy on gender issues in tech, with thousands of posts on a variety of incidents. People are fed up with the status quo and arguing about it. It is no different from how pretty much every thread on HN brings up the NSA and Snowden these days even if it too is irrelevant or mostly off-topic. Online communities have meta-threads that last years, Slashdot had at least 4 or 5 in the 90's to early 2000's.
Not exactly. I use the term "politics" to refer to participation in government. I don't consider opposition to governance to be inherently "politics" even though it is obviously relevant to politics, in the same way that I don't consider atheism to be a religion even though atheism is obviously relevant to religion.
Sort of like how ordering a pizza is not "making dinner", though obviously it is operating in the same space on the same thing (hunger in the evening). The approaches are related through shared objective, but have substantially different methodologies.
You literally reposted one article that was posted here days ago and used that as a citation to make a sweeping generalization about the "technical community" at large. Alright, that's cool...
I would guess that most who pay attention realize that the problems of the world are political on the surface. Like always, most people flock elsewhere because they feel powerless to change a political issue with direct political action. Plus, questioning authority is scary.
However, it all ends up being more sociological than political. The ideal behind the US involved the citizenry being able and willing to regulate the government, by whatever means, when the time came. This was done with the knowledge that power can corrupt and turn people into abusers, coming from people who were living under an abusive power. This hasn't been realized on a large scale in any recent event.
Now we're staring down 10 years of really, really bad ideas that have stripped us of even more rights and have destroyed many literal and implicit ideals of the Constitution, and only now does a sizable portion of the population look back and say, "Well, shit!"
If you fixed the government with the snap of your fingers, the problems would reinvent themselves given enough time. Since the state is by definition the body which has a monopoly on "force", if you got rid of the government, you will never convince me in a million years that another one wouldn't rise up in its place. I believe whole-heartedly that the state is inevitable.
Thus, the majority of the developed world's problems are humans. We've had the same problems with a revolution bringing enlightened ideals that are slowly corrupted and taken away by a bloated, crumbling empire many times over. History is one giant, depressing cycle.
I think the most realistic hope is to keep finding ways to build a state that insure as much independence and individuality as possible, while protecting given rights from the wills of those in power or those others in the said state.
An enlightened society of individualists able to get along from day to day using only voluntary interactions, who don't care about stepping on others for power (and don't have any sanctioned way to do so) is a nice ideal, but one I don't see coming true without some drastic level of human evolution.
Absolutely, the problems are political. But there's a technological component as well.
A combined approach will, I think, have the best chance of success. We fight like hell to fix the political problem, while at the same time making sure that people have, and know how to use, the technological tools that can protect them.
It is naive to assume that just one aspect will do the job.
Admittedly, sometimes the two kinds of problem combine into just-plain-silliness.
For instance, I got my first paycheck from my internship yesterday. As in, I got a physical check, because in the middle of Silicon Valley, a high-tech start-up's third-party payroll contractor is so damn backwards that they simply can't issue a direct deposit for at least one pay period if not more.
Problem being, my bank accounts are on the American East Coast and in Haifa, Israel respectively. I now have a nice, healthy paycheck and have to call the other side of the country to figure out how to deposit it, because the damn payroll system is too backwards and stupid to do an electronic transfer like the entire rest of the developed world.
And no, my bank doesn't have a mobile app that lets me deposit checks through my phone. I checked.
Agreed. I also believe there is a sociological component. A situation such as we have is only possible when a critical mass of engineers/scientists/creatives/technicians consciously choose to work on anti-human technology. The political assholes could not develop this anti-human technology on their own.
I remember Penn Jillette describing government as a ratcheting mechanism: a situation where once a bolt is tightened, the tool only recoils to tighten it further.
This isn't an issue of expansive bureaucracy. In fact, it's the opposite. The lack of controls on the executive, and the national security apparatus in particular. There's nothing about this case that goes beyond 1 or 2 agencies that have existed for decades and do a lot of legitimately useful things. They just need to stop issuing blanket warrants. That's it.
Well, I don't trust these agencies. Worse, I have no way to verify that they are doing what they claim and that they are not doing things that they aren't claiming. We need to fix a lot more than just "issuing blanket warrants". We need to fix other things before we can even attempt to fix that.
We need to fix a lot more than just "issuing blanket warrants".
Thing is, "issuing blanket warrants" is flatly illegal. In particular, "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." A warrant to the effect of "drift-net fishing expedition" is not acceptable.
Of course it is flatly illegal. The problem is that we are not in a position to verify a fix. We would have to take their word that the problem has been fixed, but obviously they cannot be trusted.
The problem with all of this "make the gov't own up and stop the spying" thing is you can't prove what is hidden. The NSA could make a statement tomorrow saying "ok, you win, we'll stop" without really stopping. They could even give an actual compelling argument about stopping, without really doing it. There's no way to prove they aren't doing it (though I suppose that ties into the fact that the big tech companies are also allowing them to do it).
If we also established laws requiring service providers to encrypt private data and did away with the gag orders (made them unconstitutional), then we would at least know when they were spying.
There is actually a huge vacuum right now and it's in the "country" space.
There is an opening in the market for a well-run nation-state that offers (1) independence, particularly from US influence, (2) pro-entrepreneurship, pro-technology, pro-science, extremely nimble governance, (3) accessibility to all of the world's educated people (hand-selected individuals chosen based on their skills), (4) safety, (5) low, efficient taxation, (6) communication privacy (7) banking and transaction privacy, (8) high quality education.
Basically, just as global banking has its Switzerland, its Hong Kong, its Singapore, global internet/cloud and the tech community needs its own haven.
Not only that, this country could also fill in the banking privacy niche as well. Read up on FATCA and how it's violating the privacy of millions of Americans living overseas.
I wish this country could be a New Zealand or Australia but unfortunately they are completely beholden to US interests and would never be able to be independent. I really believe there is huge demand for an "elite" city-state that fills the needs I've described above but there's absolutely a market failure.
This new country would likely not be democratic but run by a powerful technocrat, probably a Jobs or Musk type, perhaps with a Board of Directors. The corporate model seems to work.
Problem is, you have to sell the idea of accepting a perceived risk.
We have to ask the public if it is OK that every now and again really bad stuff may happen, and NOT to blame the politicians for it. Because, in the end, that is why politicians want to do everything in their power to remove risk. Why? Because we demand it. Something goes wrong, we blame them. We find any way possible to blame them, and demand to know why they didn't stop it.
Now, I am happy and always have been happy to trade freedom for risk. Question is, is any one else?
I've been feeling very similarly recently. Most people here in the UK don't understand or care about the privacy issues being revealed. I'm just one very small fish in a big ocean of ignorance. And frankly; I'd like to be ignorant too.
Maybe I should chuck it all in, buy a canal boat, and carve wooden spoons for a living.
There is, in Birmingham UK, a chap who regularly ties up to the mooring on the Selly Oak canal, near the Vale University residence, who makes and sells wooden owl sculptures and stools for your garden.
He has an iPhone, and I think I saw him on facebook last time I walked past.
Perhaps what we are seeing is the 'normalisation' of the Internet/Web? It is no longer 'special' or a 'new world' but just a part of everyday. That means the balance of privacy/disclosure will have to be negotiated again. In the street, I can be stopped by a police constable and asked my name, date of birth and address. My bag can be searched, and I can be asked to turn out my pockets. The police would need a search warrant signed by a magistrate to enter my house. Magistrates are trained, they will only sign warrants under certain circumstances.
Is Facebook the street or your house?
I'm still thinking all this through... but yes, I think you will see a shift away from splurging everything over the Web. Of course, the people GCHQ are supposed to be trying to catch will already have adopted other communications methods...
Yeah Birmingham seems to have become quite trendy, especially around the Jewellery Quarter too. Cardiff hasn't quite hit the expensive end yet, and there are a number of decent little galleries cropping up with craft work, which is great to see.
Hehe, about 0.21 BTC at current prices (£15). I need to get around to making a little online shop at some point; I'm currently trying to increase my speed to make that price at least slightly profitable. I make them a lot in my spare time so it'd be nice to be able to have a little side business out of them :D
Examples and links to other people who are much better than me (if you fancy learning to make them yourself!) are on my newish hobby blog: http://good.afternoonrobot.co.uk
It's a great break from programming. You get to destroy something (which is stress relieving after dealing with client work ;) ) and create something (which is satisfying) at the same time. Plus a spoon is a practical object, and it certainly saves you money when sorting out birthday presents.
I suspect there is a maximum amount of spoons a person needs, however. Then maybe I'll branch out (hurr) into bowls!
"Friends don't let friends use cleartext," my friend Marcus Povey writes. I'd argue that friends don't let friends put their trust in algorithms that can be backdoored, socially engineered and compromised without our knowledge.
Somehow I feel too that technology cannot be anymore the only answer to the problem of global surveillance. I think there is a growing need for change of our social consciousness about the values that we want to survive.
Absolutely it's not the only answer. But it's still and always will be a critical component. It's illegal to trespass, but we still use fences and gates and locks to keep unwanted people out of our property.
The difference is that we don't erect fences to keep the government out of our yards, because the government is supposed to be us and the government is not supposed to be trespassing. This, as opposed to bad guys who break the law.
In other words, the government is supposed to enforce the law when someone hops your fence. But where do you go for justice when the government is the one hopping your fence?
This is not being pedantic. I believe it is the wrong posture to advocate for a technology-based response. We should not be building fences against our government. It implies that a continuing adversarial relationship between the people and our government is on some level acceptable. And, it sends the message that whatever the government can access is fair game.
Instead, we should demand that the government be brought back into the will of the people and Constitutional principles by law. And it should be backed by not only true whistleblower protection, but obligation for fear of conviction by complicity.
Government can never be trusted on an individual level, because it very often acts against individuals. Collectively, it may represent a majority of the public, but those individuals who it does not represent are screwed. Political changes are good and important, but individuals should absolutely build a fence between themselves and their governments because those governments inevitably trespass wherever people don't make it clear they want them to keep out.
I would say that the degree to which we defend ourselves with fences is the degree to which we are "losing". The very need for fences is born of government encroachment. If we constantly need more, better, and bigger fences, then it can only be a measure of the degree of this encroachment.
And, ultimately, this cat and mouse game is one that we will lose. The government has unlimited resources, including those which we ourselves contribute, ironically. And, of course, the government has the law on its side. Therefore, it is only by changes to this law and subsequent real enforcement that we have a hope. Otherwise, they will use the force of law, including these very powers that we are trying to curtail.
There is no "winning" against this, save for a reclamation of the law.
You have a very valid point. But until the law is changed significantly so that you say "we, the people" have our freedom, do you think technology should be used to protect against government? Or do you recommend citizens abandoning their fences and working to change the law?
All it takes is for the government to make 'concealed communication' illegal in order to make any current or future privacy technology illegal. This has already happened in other countries, how can you prevent it from happening in yours?
I'd like to hear what others are doing. This events of the past few days have prompted me to a few measures. What is everyone else doing (or have done)?
Since the NSA story broke up until today I have done (or in the process of doing): Pidgin XMPP + OTR. Switched to DuckDuckGo + StartPage for searches. Email hosted on my own server. File backup off the cloud and on to a SSH/SFTP server in house. Thunderbird + Enigmail (PGP): sending emails out signed only at the moment and explaining why. Firefox + many privacy add-ons. No private communications over social media networks.
>We have to learn how to play politics. There will be voices who call for revolution, or who publicly declare that playing this game is tantamount to aligning ourselves with government. I don't believe that these are productive discussions.
It's not aligning yourself with government, it's begging your masters to throw you a bone. What kind of incentive do you think a protest creates? Would politicians suddenly shut down all surveillance programs simply because people on the streets are protesting? If you were a politician, would you? Not likely. You're already elected, you're paid and you have private interests at your back who DO pay you money that directly depend on your ability to pass laws in favor of those interests. The best a protest can do is to incentivize government to create an appearance of change.
Look at history. Protest rarely solved anything. They either transformed into bloody revolutions (which didn't do any good either) or were largely ignored. No, you don't need to protest. You need to ignore the government as much as you can and tell others to. Use Bitcoin instead of govt currency and don't pay them a cut in the form of taxes, use Bitmessage instead of email, use VPN and TOR, don't send your children to school where they are indoctrinated. And never ever vote. Voting is begging your masters. Have some pride.
And who enforces the value of Gold, or Silver, or Bitcoin? And why is it impossible to enforce property rights without a monopolistic protection service, which is government police force?
>Why do you believe the entire society you know and like will run with government cut out?
Why do you believe the demand for safety, property rights and anything else government currently provides, would vanish in the absence of government? And why do you believe the market cannot satisfy this demand?
Property rights are enforced through violence, ultimately. Whatever group provides the property rights is a government. To govern is to create rights, to create rights is to govern. Even if it's you with a shotgun next to your nation state of a cabin in the woods.
The point is, that when it's me with a shotgun or a hired private protection agency, we enforce property rights at the expense of property owners. When it's government, it takes someone else's money by force to provide this service. Thus, with government, you have double violence and a lot less accountability, because you simply can't stop paying if you dislike the service.
> The point is, that when it's me with a shotgun or a hired private protection agency, we enforce property rights at the expense of property owners.
Same thing with the government.
> you simply can't stop paying if you dislike the service.
You can do that to governments, too. Of course, many governmens don't like it if you do that, and retaliate. Of course, individual actors who assume defense of their own property rights and become governments (whether they acknowledge the name or not) by getting others to sign on with them also do that, and, unlike modern representative governments, tend not to have even theoretically available constraints to limit the extent of their retaliation.
Of course you can stop paying the IRS if you dislike the service. You just end up in jail or with your wages garnished. Similarly, if you dislike the service of your private protection agency (which is still a government, just not monopolistic), then if you stop paying you'll just end up dead, unless you can pay for equivalent protection from someone else. This is how mafia protection works, for example. Currently, we don't kill people for running out of money, and debtor's prisons are illegal.
Furthermore, in such a system if you have more money than the guy next to you, you can pay to have more rights than the guy next to you. A philosophy of a la carte rights to the highest bidder is absolutely materialistic and denies the fundamental equality of all humans. Why revert to being animals? Why do you believe that some humans are more valuable than other humans?
Yes, abuse of government authority is unpleasant, but if like me you find it distasteful that the US can abuse its economic power to trample people in other nations around the world, how do you tolerate the idea of billionaires doing whatever the hell they please, including bribing all the "private protection agencies" of the people that get in their way? All that happens in the canonical libertarian ideal is that there are even less restrictions on the behavior of the very rich than we have today.
Thanks, I think your questions are important, because those are the exact questions people often ask when presented the idea of private protection agencies and other libertarian ideas. So I'd like to address them and maybe try to demonstrate that those ideas would indeed work (so please let me know if I managed to convince you at least a little bit).
>Similarly, if you dislike the service of your private protection agency (which is still a government, just not monopolistic), then if you stop paying you'll just end up dead, unless you can pay for equivalent protection from someone else.
So, at the very least I already have a choice between one protection agency and another. If one promises to kill me if I cancel my subscription, I simply go to another agency that will be happy to have my money and ask them to protect me against the one I dislike. Because both agencies are in the business to make money, they realize that violence is more expensive and nothing happens.
Then people would usually say "But what if two agencies form a cartel"? Well, in that case, nothing really prevents a third agency to spring up as a competition and take customers away. Historically, cartels break down very fast without any intervention because one of the cartel members usually breaks the rules or an outside competitor emerges. Also, intimidating even one customer because he decides to unsubscribe is very likely to cause a chain reaction where a company simply loses its business.
A cartel, though, is still a better situation than a government. If a cartel decides to kill or detain anyone who's not paying, it cannot actually claim, like government does, that it's a legitimate action, because people would take it for what it is - a violent action by a criminal gang. A great majority of people would be very likely to at least stop paying the cartel as soon as they realize it doesn't do them any good and some violent resistance is also very likely. A cartel is in the business of making money, thus it is in its interest to make more money and attract more customers. They can't print money, nor can they steal without losing a lot of customers.
>if like me you find it distasteful that the US can abuse its economic power to trample people in other nations around the world, how do you tolerate the idea of billionaires doing whatever the hell they please
Billionaires can't really do what they please to the extent a government can. First of all, any violence that is likely to happen would be paid for out of this billionaires pockets. Governments, on the other hand, don't pay for violence. They steal money from taxpayers, then use these money to finance wars, steal more money and indoctrinate people, convincing them that what they do is not actually theft.
I don't really see rich people starting wars or intimidating other people. Why? Because it's a costly activity. Creating actual value is profitable. Inducing violence to steal money is only profitable when you can steal more than you spend in the long run.
Look, I believe that the proposed system could work for people on average. The mafia works well for the people it protects, on average. Ask your average Sicilian shop owner if they are happy to pay the mafia for protection and they will tell you that yes they are, otherwise their store would surely get broken into.
My problem is with the edge cases. What happens if I don't have any money, insurance, friends, family, or employment prospects? For example, if I'm schizophrenic, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and on the street? Outside of charitable giving, there's no guarantee that other customers will care about me, no company cares about me, so who goes to jail when I get murdered because I defecated on your lawn last night?
As far as rich people go, basically they tend to run corporations and history shows that they abuse their power as much as possible to drive prices down. We see this with oil, diamonds, running shoes, electronics, etc. etc. etc. Corporations would be even more able to buy laws than they already are. Want to dump some nuclear waste in the river in China? Well, if it's going to make your profits go up enough in the US, you can probably afford to buy the regulations you need. To some extent this already happens. I want less of this, not more.
It's strange, I'm having the same argument in a related thread concurrently, but basically my ideal is the opposite of yours: one government, one currency, one set of laws, no borders, no passports. I think they're about as likely as each other though, that is to say not at all anytime soon.
What happens if a government starts abusing its power, spying on its own citizens, starting wars at their expense and detaining and killing innocent people all over the world? Or what if a person receiving a welfare check drinks and gambles on it? Because if we are to play the "what if" game, we should play it both ways.
You can't completely avoid edge cases in any system. But you can minimize them and you can also be moral. Edge cases are no justification for the existence of government and legalized theft. If you really care about those unfortunate people, convince me to donate to a charity! Don't come to me with some IRS officers and steal my money because you think it's the right thing to do.
Also a note about mafia.
> Ask your average Sicilian shop owner if they are happy to pay the mafia for protection and they will tell you that yes they are, otherwise their store would surely get broken into.
In this case, the situation is also distorted by the existence of a government. Government collects taxes and it doesn't care that much about the actual protection of people from mafia. It also controls tightly any possible market-solutions, making it prohibitively expensive for private companies to enter the protection market. Mafia knows it and exploits the situation, basically establishing a monopoly in one particular region.
> What happens if a government starts abusing its power, spying on its own citizens, starting wars at their expense and detaining and killing innocent people all over the world?
You mean like the US? This is why I like the idea of one world government.
Let's treat each country in the world like a single individual, such that we have about 200 people on the planet. To me, this approximates how an anarcho-capitalist society would function, since there is (basically) no governing body. Yet the rich individuals in this system quite clearly abuse the poor individuals. Life is very nice though if you're a rich individual. I cannot see any guarantee that this won't happen with true anarchy.
If we had one world government, everybody would be subject to the same laws, there would be no outsourcing of torture and environmental destruction, there would be no military, and there would be no war. Importantly, your lot in life would not depend on where you were born, since there would be no immigration barriers. And there would be the full spectrum of political choices available.
Why is it such a problem that the US government collects taxes from a population earning fiat currency in an economy that the government provides? I like paying taxes, it keeps the country running. It also means that those people less fortunate than me are guaranteed some level of basic protection.
Your misconception is that it's government who creates property titles. That's not true at all. Even in the animal world, territorial rights are enforced by animals themselves or groups of animals. They don't have any kind of government.
Now what government does is it provides a service of protecting that property. Indeed, it's much better than having to protect your own property yourself all the time, but it's much worse than hiring private protection agencies. Two reasons: 1) you can't stop paying for the government service if you dislike it 2) customers who may need various levels of protection cannot subscribe to various service plans, thus some customers get inadequate levels or protection, while some subsidize protection of others.
Again, enforcing property rights != government. Government is just one way of doing it.
> Your misconception is that it's government who creates property titles.
Because it is.
> Even in the animal world, territorial rights are enforced by animals themselves or groups of animals.
The power of the each individual, or collaborating group, to claim as much territory as they can effectively defend, independent of who held it before, is pretty much the opposite of what "property" and "property titles" are.
> Now what government does is it provides a service of protecting that property. Indeed, it's much better than having to protect your own property yourself all the time, but it's much worse than hiring private protection agencies. Two reasons: 1) you can't stop paying for the government service if you dislike it
Yes, you can.
Now, there may be negative consequences to this, but, in the absence of a government to constrain the action of "private protection agencies" (which are, de facto, governments) exercising force to defend property, the same can be expected. In fact, where such private protection agencies have played a major role in protecting property (with or without the consent of whatever de jure government nominally operated in the area), retaliation against those who attempt to opt-out of their "protection" has been a frequent feature of their operation.
> 2) customers who may need various levels of protection cannot subscribe to various service plans, thus some customers get inadequate levels or protection, while some subsidize protection of others.
I find it interesting that you posit "the rich can't buy better protection of their property rights than the poor" as a problem with government, but I think you'll find considerable disagreement on two grounds with that claim:
* First, disagreement that the absence of equal protection is a problem, and
* Second, disagreement that the absence of an ability for the rich to buy better protection is, in fact, a feature of government in the real world (however much it might be in some theoretical models.)
Then you would have to give me your definition of what property is, because I think we might have a crucial disagreement on that and should start from there.
I see. So by that definition guardian journalists should have their hard-drives in tact now.
The problem with this assumption is that, while a nice idea, it is completely detached from reality and it obscures the truth. If I tell you that yes, I support equality for all, while at the same time I covertly abuse my power, it doesn't make everyone equal. It actually makes people more unequal, because it distorts their understanding of reality, which is that a more powerful player wins. If they falsely believe the promises of government that it wants more equality for all, they set themselves up. If, however, they understand that under any circumstances, the more powerful is gonna win, they will strive to compete, not to rely and beg.
Well yeah, but if you're talking about property as "might makes right", then there's no reason for the working class not to just rise up and take what's ours, ie: everything.
It's been tried before. What happens when the working class rises and takes what's theirs is that after some time, a new elite emerges thanks to this working class, pretending to have the same values, while actually screwing this very same class even more.
The crucial distinction to make here is what's yours and what's not. If people agree that one billionaire made his money honestly, by creating companies where people work voluntarily and that provide products and services people really need, thus actually creating value - then there can be no justification for anyone to go and take part or all of this billionaire's money. If they agree he stole his money or extracted them by force, then he's a criminal and all of the money he made in this way should be confiscated. But there's no middle ground here. You can't make a person kinda-guilty because he's rich.
But back to "might makes right". The collective might of the people is always greater than the might of any organization, be it government or a corporation. If people understood the distinction of two ways to get rich I described above, they could easily support protection agencies that would prosecute criminals, but leave alone and protect rich people who made their money honestly. This kind of arrangement would promote a greater degree of equality. And we've seen this historically too: the great rises in standards of living for the poor happened where markets flourished and regulations were minimal (scandinavian countries including, read their policies throughout the 20th century). Yes, rich people became richer. But so did the poor.
I certainly wouldn't advocate tax evasion, it would be immoral to ask people to risk the leftovers of their freedom and confront IRS. What I meant was, don't give them a cut unless your transactins can be effectively tracked. When you tip someone in cash, most likely they're not paying any taxes from that. And there's currently no law requiring you to pay taxes in Bitcoin unless you previously converted it to fiat. Also keeping your savings in gold, silver or Bitcoin saves them from another tax - inflation.
> Hey, everyone! I live in California, my email is hosted by Google, I keep documents on Dropbox, and my server is hosted in Dallas, Texas.
I like it. I'd add the last sentence below:
I live in California, my e-mail is hosted by my server located at a data center in Los Angeles, I keep documents on my personal servers, and those servers are hosted in my data center and at my home. I use GPG, and my key is...
In addition to the other problems mass surveillance has done, it has done something akin to spreading toxic waste in a playground. Who would want to play in that?
A big part of technology is playful. A big part of playfulness is pushing boundaries: What if everyone had everyone's genome? What if we injected computers into our bodies? In a surveillance state that is as appetizing as bathing in industrial effluent.
The technology industry is poisoned, and the only enthusiasts left are enthusiastic authoritarian snoops, and those people are disgusting sickos. It's like waking up and finding you work for the TSA and fondle balls for a living. Ick.
It would be interesting to start applying filters on email based on recipient MX. i.e. if I see your MX is @yahoo.com, I don't send the mail (or send a mail suggesting you move to a better mail provider). Depending on who I am, I may or may not send mail to gmail. If I see it's a self-hosted well configured MX, I probably will send mail and trust in starttls.
(You can't just rely on domain extensions due to things like Google Apps for your Domain which lets you customize the domain.)
I like the idea of stating your communication preferences but it seems strange to put that right in your bio like he's done at http://werd.io as if where you keep your documents says a lot about you as a person.
Unrelated, this was difficult to read with that blog styling. "font-size: .9em" for body text seems like a bad idea. Raising the font-size and line-height makes this whole site look much cleaner.
THAT would be great. Some poor intern gets flooded with email until the entire WH server infrastructure melts. Of course, you'd definitely be packed off to Gitmo for your act of terrorism.
These incidents seem like coming straight out of "Atlas Shrugged". different circumstances, similar outcome and government is the reason for the events.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
I think most of the outrage is about two things, which are missed by people who point out the problem is political and that snooping is technically "legal":
1) The disconnect between policymakers / lawmakers and the general population, that built up over time. While in some areas people are content to look away, or don't care that much about, in the area of civil rights and privacy apparently enough people care to keep raising a stink about this. It's not that something is technically illegal. It's a question of how did we get to the point where it's not. Where you don't need a warrant to read anyone's email, or demand any US company hand over pretty much any info on anyone. Where are the 3-branch checks and balances for things like National Security Letters, for example?
2) The natural people's reaction to advancing technology. Since recording everything everywhere is now becoming possible, we should get used to it. We are unlikely to successfully outlaw this anymore than we can successfully police pirating of songs. If governments aren't going to record you, corporations will. Facebook keeps a "shadow profile" on everyone including people who didn't sign up. They use this data for various corporate purposes. All we can do is perhaps regulate what purposes they cannot use the data for, but it's extremely hard to prevent them from collecting it. So organizations will collect data, because it's in their interest -- stores, for example, will soon track your shopping habits as you move around the store, and optimize their sales for this. They might do facial recognition or some other biometric thing.
#2 is the more interesting issue and I think it falls into the bigger issue of people coping with advances in technology. Google glasses on everyone's head? Cameras everywhere giving you a ticket as soon as you speed over the limit for 10 seconds? (Don't laugh, we already have many tollbooths implementing speeding tickets by simply timing how long it took you to get from one to the next.) Cameras in every parking lot signaling the tow truck as soon as you leave? 3d printing guns from models? Anyone able to release a virus on a subway? Etc etc.
I've always said that terrorism is a problem of technology. 1000 years ago it was literally impossible for 5 people to kill 1000, but nowadays our society will begin more and more to watch everyone. As it becomes easier, surveillance (and, what's more unnerving, automatic curation and analysis by computers!!) will become an accepted part of life. Remember how you felt when you thought you could upload copyrighted stuff to YouTube and get away with it?
Here we have a case of "big brother" copyright enforcement being made possible through cross referencing the fingerprint of EVERYTHING uploaded into YouTube. We learned to live with it, and few people complain. But this is just the beginning :(
10 years from now, your children may get taken away by the state because you have been caught surfing the wrong sites or saying stuff to siri (uploaded to Apple servers) that has been proven to correlate highly to child molestation or neglect. It won't happen right away, but instead an indexed archive of your activities will be retrieved and analyzed and a case built.
And if a government doesn't do it, then an insurance company might do it to raise your rates, etc. If you park your car in a parking lot and do not enter the diner within 5 mins, as determined by the computer, you'll get an automatic ticket. And so forth.
Thankfully many of these problems will be eliminated before they even become issues. You won't have to park your car because self-driving cars will make owning a car a luxury. You won't need to worry about your kids' college future because education will be delivered via the internet to every home. Etc.
You seem to be conflating a few things here. The "expectation of privacy" is what really matters. The technological advances are a means to an end. If you expect privacy in filming your family gathering in your private residence, then Google Glass or no Google Glass, you would not expect the world to see. In fact, one could argue that the idea of "circles" in G+ creates the expectation of privacy by giving you a (false) sense of control over who has access to it.
The 4th amendment language is really quite amazing: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
When I think "papers, and effects" in today's world, that includes my smartphone, computer and all "papers" that are handled by Google and any other provider or stored on any medium I can possess. Just like people of 200 years ago did not expect others to read their mail, I don't expect it now. (Though I understand that it is now common practice.) Unfortunately, because such concepts have been abused and twisted in the court of law, Google now finds itself compelled to argue that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when using email[1]. Do you expect your postman to read your letters too? Are these that different from an email?
If we, as the society (or the people), establish clear boundaries on what we expect and demand it, all will be fine with the world. A "shadow" profile on Facebook aimed at selling ads is a far cry from contents of my private correspondence. In fact, I welcome more relevant ads - they are less annoying. But that does not mean I will expect that there is no boundary between my private and public persona.
We are all at the mercy of the people in our social graphs who don't keep things secret. I might stay off of Facebook, encrypt all my email, and avoid using smart phones, but anybody I'm in contact with who doesn't is being continually mined. Shadow profiles of me are showing up on services I'd never use willingly because my friend shared their address book with Facebook.
We really only have three groups to hold responsible: ourselves (for developing these technologies), our government (for using these technologies to oppress us), and every other citizen (for voting the government into power and playing along when we ask to mine their data).
The core issue we're seeing is that it is no longer really possible to ignore the fact that most consumers are liabilities to our privacy, and that they'll gladly sell out their fellow man for the dullest of shiny trinkets.
Honestly, the most insidious part of all this isn't our loss of privacy or our trust in some beneficial Big Brother: it's the distressing fact that we can't trust anyone else anymore, and that we've shown that democracy is impossible with such an unworthy populace.
Make no mistake--that's the real tragedy here.