After I recently moved to India, I was asked to write another blog-article for IEET, this time about the question of India’s role in accelerating change and the technological “Singularity.”
Some folks have heard me beat this drum. But it’s a fresh-enough thought - going to fundamentals that run deep beneath normal politics - so that I am moved to raise it yet again. In part because someone recently asked me, as author of The Transparent Society:“Can transparency and libertarianism complement each other?”
When the Soviet Union divided Berlin in two, US president John Kennedy went to Berlin and shouted “We are all Berliners.” Now that another evil empire has divided the World Wide Web into good and bad websites by shutting down Megaupload, the motto should be “We are all Megaupload users!” even the ones who never used it and don’t even know what exactly it is (was).
As anyone familiar with classical political economy knows, true property rights are rooted in self-ownership. You own yourself, and by extension you own what you make through labor or voluntary transactions thereof. Land, however, is not a fruit of labor.
I’ve spent some time thinking about what the #Occupy movement is really representing. I’ve attended the camps as I’ve traveled, and I’ve interviewed people in the camps, as well as their formidable opponents - the 1% - in the ownership positions of society.
Despite its many failures, “austerity economics” keeps remaking—and unmaking—the global economy. The only disagreement at this weekend’s Republican debate was over which candidate would push austerity more aggressively. And austerity dominated the political agenda last year—“Deficit Commission,” anyone?—until Occupy came along.
Human beings like being part of a tribe. For example, my younger sister refused to go to a school that required school uniforms. Why? Already, she was consistently wearing the same clothes to school everday… the same clothes as every other member of her particular “tribe.” The problem with the school uniform was not the requirement to wear it, but that it belonged to the wrong tribal group.
When I received a summons to appear for jury selection, I dutifully drove to the courthouse on the day in question ready to establish my fitness to serve.
No, that’s not true. I drove to the courthouse on the day in question ready to answer their questions – and curious as to whether one or both of the lawyers would decide they’d rather not have me on the jury.
The name of the deceased was “Austerity Economics,” and it was first glimpsed in a 1921 paper by conservative economist Frank Wright. Austerity died of natural causes brought on by prolonged exposure to reality. But in the nation’s capital, dead things still rule the night.
Both Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Nobel prize winning Keynsian economist Paul Krugman have a trait in common. They grew up fervent science fiction fans, especially transfixed by the future-historical speculations of Isaac Asimov. Gingrich wrote about this influence that helped to shape his life.
Fire all the janitors and make poor kids clean their schools? Zap Korea with an airborne superlaser that’s never worked during testing? Ignore global warming and plan to re-engineer the entire planet with untested technology instead?
This is how simple you are: computers can predict what you are looking for, and what to offer you, with spare cycles to run a search engine on top that.
The Book Killers have always been with us. Before recorded history they were with us, murdering the scholars and storytellers and mystics of every tribe they ever conquered.
A few days ago, the famous comic book writer and illustrator Frank Miller issued a howl of hatred toward the young people in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Well, all right, that’s a bowdlerization. After reading even one randomly-chosen paragraph, I’m sure you’ll agree that “howl” understates the red-hot fury and scatalogical spew of Miller’s lavishly expressed hate: “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.”
‘Occupy Wall Street’ is furious that the nation’s largest banks grossly mismanaged the citizenry’s funds but were rewarded anyway with a bail-out by the government. Today many of those frivolous financiers are thriving with obscene salaries while millions of their victimized clientele have lost their homes to foreclosure and are under-or-unemployed.
The liberation of people through technology, and the liberation of technology from the oppressive forces that want to control it, is part of the pirate DNA. This will be reflected at some point in actual policies of the Pirate Party, the party of the future.
Like the spokesmen for Arab dictators feigning bewilderment over protesters’ demands, mainstream television news reporters finally training their attention on the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement seem determined to cast it as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. They couldn’t be more wrong and, as time will tell, may eventually be forced to accept the inevitability of their own obsolescence.
Even the sympathizers don’t always get it. I’m sure I get a lot of things wrong too, but here’s one thing I do understand: Change doesn’t begin with policy. It begins with perception. And you don’t change things by asking. You change them by acting.
While watching the Occupy Wall Street movement gain momentum and challenge the status quo, we in the transhumanist and technoprogressive communities should take note of differences between this movement and those earlier in the 20th century that were in direct opposition to some set of conservative policies.
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