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RealityApologist
Mar 29, 2011

ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS :fuckoff:
Last month, Balaji Srinivasan gave a lecture at Y Combinator's Startup School 2013 entitled "Silicon Valley's ultimate exit strategy". He describes the US as the "Microsoft of nations", and suggests in a calm, reasonable tone that Silicon Valley think seriously about seceding and starting its own (or possibly several) sovereign countries.

You can watch the full lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A

Shortly after the talk, he published this piece in Wired:

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/

quote:

For the first time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents. This is the kind of grim reality that in other times and places spurred young people to look abroad for opportunity. Indeed, it is similar to the factors that once pushed millions of people to emigrate from their home countries to make their home in America. Our nation of immigrants is, tautologically, a nation of emigrants.

These emigrants, our ancestors, didn’t bear enmity towards the countries they left — quite the contrary. They weren’t “Going Galt” or being “unpatriotic” by leaving, as they often left out of sadness and melancholy, not anger. In many cases they remained homesick for the rest of their lives, leaving only because they had to, not because they wanted to.

Yet while our ancestors had America as their ultimate destination, it is not immediately obvious where those seeking opportunity might head today. Every square foot of earth is already spoken for by one (or more) nation states, every physical frontier long since closed.

With our bodies hemmed in, our minds have only the cloud — and it is the cloud that has become the destination for an extraordinary mental exodus. Hundreds of millions of people have now migrated to the cloud, spending hours per day working, playing, chatting, and laughing in real-time HD resolution with people thousands of miles away … without knowing their next-door neighbors.

The concept of migrating our lives to the cloud is much more than a picturesque metaphor, and actually amenable to quantitative study. Though the separation between our bodies is still best characterized by the geographical distance between points on the surface of the earth, the distance between our minds is increasingly characterized by a completely different metric: the geodesic distance, the number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a social network. Importantly, this geodesic distance is just as valid a mathematical metric as the geographical. In fact, there are entire conferences devoted to cloud cartography, in which research groups from Stanford to Carnegie Mellon to MIT present the first maps of online social networks — mapping not nation states but states of mind.

Perhaps the single most important feature of these states of mind is the increasing divergence between our social and geographic neighbors, between the cloud formations of our heads and the physical communities surrounding our bodies. An infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream now blossoms on the Internet — vegans, body modifiers, CrossFitters, Wiccans, DIYers, Pinners, and support groups of all forms. Millions of people are finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or the remote rural location.

Yet this discrepancy between our cloud subculture and our physical surroundings will not endure indefinitely. Because the latest wave of technology is not just connecting us intellectually and emotionally with remote peers: it is also making us ever more mobile, ever more able to meet our peers in person.

And so these cloud formations of mind are beginning to take physical shape, driving the reorganization of bodies. In the technology space, we have already seen this transpire at small scale: a cloud formation of 2 people coming together for 10 years facilitated by Match.com, a formation of 10 people for a year in a hacker house, a formation of 100 people for a few months at a startup incubator, and a formation of 1000 people for a few days at an open-source gathering like RailsConf. More recently we saw the thousands that occupied Wall Street for a month, the ten thousand Redditors involved in Jon Stewart’s Rally, and the tens of thousands that took Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Those trivial photo-sharing apps seem far less trivial in this light.

But while these large rallies command deserved attention, something else of significance is happening more quietly: Cloud formations are starting to take physical shape in the form of long-term friendly communities that are geographically colocated, like Campus, Embassy Network, and the Rainbow Mansion. In some ways this isn’t anything new — the twin ideas of co-living in the same house or co-housing with separate houses in a shared community have been around in Denmark since the 1960s and the U.S. since the 1860s. What is new is the ease of finding compatible peers via web search, online forums, and social networks. And so the concept is spreading around the world, with hundreds of co-living and co-housing locations now accessible through the internet in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, and across Continental Europe.

It is not yet clear how widespread this phenomenon will become, but few humans are truly so solitary that they would shun the very idea of shared communities — and from email to mobile phones, what technologists experiment with on the weekends has frequently foreshadowed what everyone else will be doing during the week in ten years.

And from there?

It is simultaneously straightforward and radical to note that when cloud formations take physical shape, neither their scale nor duration has an upper bound. There is no scientific law that prevents 100 people who find each other on the internet from coming together for a month, or 1,000 such people from coming together for a year. And as that increases to 10,000 and 100,000 and beyond, for longer and longer durations, we may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries materialize out of thin air.

At first this sounds rather implausible. Perhaps the internet will spur a wave of internal migrations as online communities begin gathering in person — but could this process really lead to a new city, or country?

Yet the technical prerequisites are already well underway. Machine translation of signs, text, and speech brings down language barriers and facilitates ever more cross-cultural meetings of like minds. Immersive headsets, input devices, and telepresence robots further collapse space and time, allowing us to instantly be alongside others on the other side of the globe. Mobile technology makes us ever more mobile, increasingly permitting not just easier movement around a home base but permanent international relocation.

Technology is thus enabling arbitrary numbers of people from around the world to assemble in remote locations, without interrupting their ability to work or communicate with existing networks. In this sense, the future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.

But could everything really become that mobile, that portable? What about transportation, infrastructure, food, shelter, the clothes on our backs?

Consider transportation first: Car ownership is already declining, and the combination of Uber, Lyft, their public-transportation analogs, and new shareable car fleets will greatly reduce traffic and emissions. On-demand rental will ultimately become more convenient than the burden of outright ownership, especially in an autonomous car world, and will make us vastly more mobile as a result. And many more things can be transported on-demand once we have the on-demand car.

With respect to infrastructure, projects from neighborhood pothole repairs to bridge changes are being crowdfunded or driven through private-public sector partnerships (in fact, entrepreneurs built roads for most of American history). And with autonomous cars coming, technologists are going to need to reinvent roads again. Google’s Vannevar is moving construction to the cloud, much of shipping logistics and the supply chain is going there as well, and robots can already build small buildings and operate autonomous mines. The net result is that both core infrastructure and many of the mechanisms for building and funding it are becoming computerized, and thus deployable in new locations.

And from the road we turn our eyes to the sky: next up will be a carbon-friendly computerized infrastructure for safer air traffic control, to guide the emerging fleets of drones doing everything from photography to surveying to delivery.

As for the physical items used in daily life — the present, let alone the future, is already a time where everything from food to shelter to clothing to transportation to your very wallet and keychain can be accessed on demand from your mobile phone, in more cities every day.

So when it comes to the constraints on mobility imposed by the physical world, the rule is simple: when goods themselves can’t be digitized, our interface to them will be.

The benefits of such high mobility are much more than convenience to the people who supply these goods. For example, with online food ordering, an owner of a small restaurant is finally able to prepare meals in batch, order ingredients in bulk, and reach repeat customers without wasting valuable, limited resources in guesswork. With the advent of mobile microtasks, we are seeing the emergence of new digital assembly line jobs that offer greater flexibility, less risk of injury, and hourly wages comparable in some cases to those of new hires at GM. And with autonomous mines, workers can extract needed minerals without risking black lung disease.

This is why location is becoming so much less important: technology is enabling us to access everything we need from our mobile phone, to find our true communities in the cloud, and to easily travel to assemble these communities in person. Taken together, we are rapidly approaching a future characterized by a totally new phenomenon, the reverse diaspora: one that starts out internationally distributed, finds each other online, and ends up physically concentrated.

What might these reverse diasporas be like? As a people whose primary bond is through the internet, many of their properties would not fit our pre-existing mental models. Unlike rugged individualists, these emigrants would be moving within or between nation states to become part of a community, not to strike out on their own. Unlike would-be revolutionaries, those migrating in this fashion would be doing so out of humility in their ability to change existing political systems. And unlike so-called secessionists, the specific site of physical concentration would be a matter of convenience, not passion; the geography incidental and not worth fighting over.

Today, one of the first and largest international reverse diasporas has assembled in Silicon Valley, drawn by the internet to the cloud capital of technology; in fact, an incredible 64% of the Valley’s scientists and engineers hail from outside the U.S., with 43.9% of its technology companies founded by emigrants.

But the geocenter of this cloud formation is only positioned over Silicon Valley for historical reasons, as the semiconductor manufacturing that was made easier by the temperate clime of the South Bay has long since moved away. Nothing today binds technologists to the soil besides other people. In this sense Silicon Valley is nothing special; it is best conceptualized as just the most common (x,y) coordinates of a set of highly mobile nodes in a social network whose true existence is in the cloud.

And this global technology cloud truly stretches over the whole earth, touching down at various locales both in the U.S. — at Sendgrid in Boulder, Tumblr in New York, Rackspace in Austin, Snapchat in L.A., Zipcar in Boston, Opscode in Seattle — and outside it — at Skype in Estonia, Tencent in Shenzhen, Soundcloud in Germany, Flipkart in India, Spotify in Sweden, Line in Tokyo, and Waze in Israel. Cultural connections forming between people in this cloud are becoming stronger than the connections between their geographic neighbors. Palo Alto’s Accel invests in India’s Flipkart, Estonia’s Skype is folded into Seattle’s Microsoft, Israel’s Waze is merged into Mountain View’s Google, and the SoundCloud engineer on a laptop in Berlin builds a deeper relationship with the VC in New York than the nearby Bavarian bank.

Today, the geocenter of the global technology cloud is still hovering over Silicon Valley. But in a world where technology is making location increasingly less important, tomorrow the reverse diaspora may well assemble somewhere else.

Of course, it would take some time for a reverse diaspora assembled in a new location to advance from small communities in existing buildings to the infrastructure for towns and cities, let alone to starting new countries. If history is any guide, it took almost 170 years to go from 1607 (Jamestown) to 1776 (America), 90 years to go from 1857 (Sepoy Mutiny) to 1947 (India), and 52 years to go from 1896 (Herzl) to 1948 (Israel) — though at Internet time, things could happen more quickly than that.

And we can’t know from today’s vantage point where that first reverse diaspora might assemble outside the U.S., or what those cloud cities or countries will be like. They could be countries formed by internationally recognized processes similar to the ones that created 26 new countries over the past 25 years, a pattern noted by Marc Andreessen. They could be regions of the world set aside by global agreement for experimentation, as discussed by Larry Page. They could be floating cities in international waters as put forth by Peter Thiel, or one of the more ambitious 80,000 person colonies on Mars desired by Elon Musk. The specific location is still unknown; in a real sense it matters far less than the people there.

What we can say for certain is this: from Occupy Wall Street and YCombinator to co-living in San Francisco and co-housing in the UK, something important is happening. People are meeting like minds in the cloud and traveling to meet each other offline, in the process building community — and tools for community — where none existed before. Those cloud networks where people poke each other, share photos, and find their missing communities are beginning to catalyze waves of physical migration, beginning to reorganize the world.

Will this ultimately end in a cloud country of our own, as Page, Thiel, and Musk propose in different ways? We can set this as a long-term goal, like the kind of dream that propelled so many millions to exit and come to America in the first place, but it’s unclear what the future holds. We do know this, however: as cloud formations take physical shape at steadily greater scales and durations, it shall become ever more feasible to create a new nation of emigrants.

I agree with a lot of this work, but the current of libertarian ideological nonsense runs through the approach (especially from people like Thiel) that needs to be addressed. So I wrote up the following essay in response:

quote:

A few days ago I reshared this talk from Balaji Srinivasan, along with my initial comments defending the position against what I took to be a superficial rejection from David Brin and others. It was my first watching of the lecture, and my comments were borne of the passion that comes from having considered and argued for similar conclusions over the last few years, against those I felt were resisting the alternative framework BSS was suggesting without due consideration.

But there is always room for critical reflection, and now that I've had a few days to digest the talk I'd like to write a more considered response. I am utterly convinced that a world run by software can be more fair, inclusive, and sustainable than any mode of organization the industrial age had to offer. Nevertheless, BSS says precious little in the talk of what such a world would look like, or what reasons we have for believing the conclusion to be true. BSS's argument is largely critical about the problems and constraints of the existing system, with the goal of motivating interest in an alternative. I agree with much of his critique, especially his observation that people are already eagerly fleeing industrial age "paper" technologies in favor of digital alternatives. But the Silicon Valley audience to which the talk is directed might give the impression that a world run by software would benefit primarily those privileged few who are already benefiting from our nascent digital age, as yet another way to widen the gap between the wealthy and the rest. I think this is a misleading impression. A positive story that constructively described how a world run by software would operate would go a long way towards helping people imagine it as a real and plausible alternative, with distinct advantages over the existing order of things. I hear that BSS is planning to publish a more detailed treatment of his views, but while we wait I'd like to add my own thoughts to the discussion.

Because after all, there is lots to say and lots of discussion still to come from many different quarters. We are talking about about a fundamental change of the social order-- a revolution-- that will bring about many changes at many different scales. These changes might manifest in surprising and unpredictable ways, so feedback from everyone is important. The task of integrating diverse perspectives and feedback was not possible (and barely even conceivable) before the advent of digital technologies. We're just beginning to use these tools to organize digital populations at scales that rival nations, and already these digital populations overlap and engage with industrial age political structures in complex and twisted ways. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. There are discussions we must have about how to use the tools and organizations around us to bring about the changes we want, and then there are discussions about what changes we want and what the world will look like when our revolution is complete. There are important things to say about the former, but I want to use this space to speculate on the latter.

Here's what a world run by software looks like:

A world run by software is run on on open-source principles. It is participatory, and encourages experimentation in an open, collaborative development. There's already been a lot written about open source and peer networks. I don't want to just talk about the values of a digital society, I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of how it works. So I'm taking these principles as given. If any Silicon Valley types think a world run by software is a world of tightly controlled walled gardens, I urge you to consider another line of work immediately. (I'll say more about dealing with the libertopian "walled gardens" later in the essay.)

More abstractly, a world run by software is task-oriented. A program performs a function; a world run by software is designed to execute specific functions reliably and on demand. This involves three basic functional parts:

1. Executors, who carry out some specified task,
2. Programmers, who design and optimize the tasks to be carried out
3. Selectors, who select which tasks get carried out

In democracies like the US, the government is typically charged with all three roles, separated somewhat in the three branches, with democratic feedback taking the form of voting for the representatives who ultimately select, program, and execute our political world. Democratic feedback also takes the form of economic and other sociopolitical activity which the representatives consider, but the feedback in both cases is coarse-grained and unreliable. In a world run by software, these roles can all be more widely distributed and participatory to allow individuals a more direct engagement with the the political order.

Consider first, and perhaps most easily, the role of selection. What activities deserve our efforts and attention, and what should should our attitudes towards these topics be? Representative bodies tend to give such questions a very narrow treatment that is susceptible to corruption and divergence from the general will. Digital communities, on the other hand, self-organize into affinity groups and coalitions that regularly broadcast their positions on any number of social issues and policies. This activity can be regularly and automatically harvested for feedback from the community about any topic you'd like, and can be used to represent and anticipate the dynamics of the general consensus of the people. We don't need to set aside time and rituals for voting and participating in a democracy, because every action you take is a vote in a world run by software.

If our policy directions and collective planning is handled automatically by self-organized digital communities, the role of traditional governance looks radically different. In a world run by software, governance is system administration. "Politicians" are no longer elected representatives empowered to make political judgments, they are administrators tasked with maintaining the tools for supporting and maintaining the people's political judgments. This takes the form, on the front end, of maintaining a public and powerful interface for engaging with the machinery of the political system, and on the back end maintaining the protocols and infrastructure that make it all work smoothly together. Politics becomes a form of engineering, of network management, of organizational facilitation. In other words, a digital government consists entirely of open source programmers who contribute to the code bank of governmental procedure.

The last functional role is played by the executors, who carry out the work requested by the people according to the standard procedures instructed by programmers. Thus far the entire system I've described has been horizontal and self-directed, and the executors are no different. They are free to engage with the general will as they see fit, and can use that information to decide what jobs need doing and where their time and skills are best spent. Executors are the "working class" of the traditional caste system, but in a world run by software every worker is guaranteed recognition for the work they do. This will take the form of gamification techniques where people earn "badges" that represent the many dimensions of their skills and mastery. This system of rewards not only motivates work and encourages a competitive atmosphere, but also serves to more efficiently connect requested work with the people in the best position to handle the job. It also frees the executor from any institutional obligations, so they might follow the vocation of their choosing.

A properly implemented system of this sort, where requests are initiated by users and handled by executors and mediated by political facilitators, is sufficient for managing all political and economic activity. Even under improved automation, there will always be human work to do, including physical human labor. But there are more than enough of us to do all that work many times over, including many who want the challenge and recognition of success at even the difficult or "dirty" jobs. This completely obviates the need for paid employment as a means of compensation and distribution of wealth. So in a world run by software we are each free to follow our idle desires. We can pursue our curiosities confident that our needs and requests (including for basic food, shelter, medicine and education) will be provided on request, and that the political infrastructure exists to support any grievances that might arise. There's an opportunity cost to mere idle fantasy in potential badges unearned, but the possibility that our endeavors can bring genuine recognition and success will continue to stimulate innovation and progress.

In a digital world, influence replaces material wealth as the engine of power. The loud voices in strong communities may command disproportionate influence, with no proper authorities to check that power from above. Instead, their power is checked by the wax and wane of digital populations, as they freely settle into the communities of their choosing. This is a power peasants rarely had against their feudal lords, and requires the protections of the people's right to speech and movement. In other words, it means there can be no perfectly walled gardens; all systems must be porous, allowing information to flow in and out in standardized ways. This is the key to understanding the distinction between the libertopian castle doctrine nightmare many people legitimately worry about, and a collectively self-organized digital society. In a world run by software, privacy is a setting not a right. If you aren't providing feedback and aren't transparently documenting your activity and successes, you will not receive recognition from a digital society, and will have difficulty engaging with or accessing any of its benefits. In other words, you are opting out. People should be free to opt out, but at a certain point it means moving off the grid entirely. And given the freedoms of a digitally self-organized society, that's not something people are likely to do.

I've laid out, as briefly as I can manage, some very high-level organizational structures for managing a world run by software, and pointed towards the potential advantages and disadvantaged it might bring. Many people see such a world as a utopian potential in our distant technological future. I don't see anything in the proposal I've offered here that isn't already possible with existing technologies; in fact, many of the ideas suggested here are already in various stages of implementation and discussion in many active online communities already. I'd argue that the theoretical and philosophical dimensions of this proposal are also tractable within existing political and ethical models.

We do not lack for the tools and talent to implement ideas as ambitious and revolutionary as these. We do not lack the political will to seek out and advocate for real alternatives to our political situation. I feel these changes are inevitable and already well underway, whether I advocate for them or not. I hope that the vision of the future that BSS has provoked me to lay out here helps us resolve that future more clearly so we can better prepare for its arrival.

This thread should primarily be about BSS's argument in the lecture and article, and the implications of the ideas presented therein. If you want to insult me or my views, it might be better to just ignore the fact that I started this thread. I hope it is clear from the above that I'm not offering a full-throated endorsement of his view, but I think it deserves some critical engagement nevertheless.

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woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe
Sure, lease me a pod in the arcology I guess. I don't see how "cloud nations" will provide well-being for individuals whose bodies are, regrettably, still yoked to the physical world but let's see what happens.

SMILLENNIALSMILLEN
Jun 26, 2009



That guy has more clouds than mario.

redscare
Aug 14, 2003
What a clever futuristic way of loving over the poor.

Slow News Day
Jul 4, 2007

redscare posted:

What a clever futuristic way of loving over the poor.

Huh?

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich
Oh cool, a guy whose personal wealth problems were solved by technology tells everyone how technology can solve a lot of different problems! Sounds great!

I find the whole west coast startup culture insufferable. It's like great, you can write an app that makes millions of dollars from middle class people. What the gently caress does this have to do with social problems?

Slow News Day
Jul 4, 2007

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Oh cool, a guy whose personal wealth problems were solved by technology tells everyone how technology can solve a lot of different problems! Sounds great!

Jeez, SA can be quite a reactionary place at times!

RealityApologist
Mar 29, 2011

ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS :fuckoff:

redscare posted:

What a clever futuristic way of loving over the poor.

The poors are the ones who by definition get hosed over by society. Why do you think a world run by software would be any worse at handling its least fortunate than the system we have now? Why would a digital world have more poor people in worse shape? It seems implausible to me, and against the trends.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich
Having read the OP article and response, the main thing that jumps out at me is that neither of you consider that all of these wonderful new modes of software driven social organization are explicitly created by rent collectors seeking to collect transaction fees on using their service to cloudconnect with your etherpeers in the meatspace. Maybe I'm just horridly cynical about the impact of entrepeneurs trying to make millions by driving a paywall between the people they tout to connect.

enraged_camel posted:

Jeez, SA can be quite a reactionary place at times!

I just dont trust a guy who made money on niche tech startups telling everyone how niche tech startups will trigger the next social revolution.

RealityApologist posted:

The poors are the ones who by definition get hosed over by society. Why do you think a world run by software would be any worse at handling its least fortunate than the system we have now? Why would a digital world have more poor people in worse shape? It seems implausible to me, and against the trends.

"Why would a system designed by wealthy first world people for wealthy first world people exclude the global poor? I'm really confused by this guys it goes completely against what I expect to be true."

boner confessor fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Nov 30, 2013

RealityApologist
Mar 29, 2011

ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS :fuckoff:
I'm taking for granted that any system will have losers. I'm asking why you think the losers in the system being proposed will be any worse off or greater in number than the people who are left out of the existing system.

Because we're doing a monstrously bad job now, and it's hard to imagine an open system grounded in participation doing significantly worse. You seem to think it will inevitably do worse, but have given no reasons other than mistrusting the source. It's not a convincing objection.

on the left
Nov 2, 2013
I Am A Gigantic Piece Of Shit

Literally poo from a diseased human butt
I think it's a great idea to start a new country that avoids a lot of the legacy costs that other nations have. It's a lot easier to build a strong welfare state if you start off with a bunch of people who don't really need a welfare state in the first place. On top of that, if you start a large country that steals a lot of these people from existing states, it will hurt their competitive position greatly, mostly replicating the white flight phenomenon.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

RealityApologist posted:

I'm taking for granted that any system will have losers. I'm asking why you think the losers in the system being proposed will be any worse off or greater in number than the people who are left out of the existing system.

Because this system presumes that people who don't have electricity will suddenly give a gently caress about open source software.

RealityApologist posted:

Because we're doing a monstrously bad job now, and it's hard to imagine an open system grounded in participation doing significantly worse. You seem to think it will inevitably do worse, but have given no reasons other than mistrusting the source. It's not a convincing objection.

Yo let's bring participation to people first before we worry about what participatory license is being used.

If technocracy was able to substantially improve the lives of the poor in a non-tangential way there would probably be some example from the last hundred years of history one could draw from.

on the left posted:

I think it's a great idea to start a new country that avoids a lot of the legacy costs that other nations have. It's a lot easier to build a strong welfare state if you start off with a bunch of people who don't really need a welfare state in the first place. On top of that, if you start a large country that steals a lot of these people from existing states, it will hurt their competitive position greatly, mostly replicating the white flight phenomenon.

Nude Bog Lurker
Jan 2, 2007
Fun Shoe
He's a neoreactionary piece of poo poo who should be shot out of hand when he and his fascist friends finally rise against democracy, happy to cleat this up.

FilthyImp
Sep 30, 2002

Anime Deviant
His piece is a little messy. He wants to establish that geography is a rapidly vanishing concept when you're in L.A. and can interweb with bronies all over the world. So these CloudCommunities eventually link up and form hardspace communities.

But his rants about transitioning things to on-demand and cloud-ready systems is... shortsighted.

For instance, the poor already have a service here in Los Angeles that functions something like Uber. It's called public transit, and it's entirely on-demand for most of the day. Why, it even allows you to form a temporary hardspace pod with other travelers!
Additionally, it's great that fabrications and companies can be cloud-delivered.... except in an instance where you don't have the necessary infrastructure to support it.
A lot of this presupposes you have means and capacity to take advantage of it. And that's before you get into more basic barriers to entry. I'm not exactly sure how someone that's blind or mentally retarded would integrate into the Cloudspace, for example.

His ideas that CloudCommunities will form a critical mass and just metastasize into working communities is also a bit lame-brained. Have you ever put a bunch of fanfolk together in a room? By the end of the day they're arguing minutia and establishing hierarchies and poo poo. He also overreaches. Match.com people are cloud-members? By that logic, a bunch of Twilight fans waiting in line for a movie become the same if they so much as post on a forum or tweet about it.

Really though, in a world run by software, you just hope no one figures out a way to game the system. Because the financial markets are already run by software, and a few years ago someone gamed them so that a major airline looked to have lost some serious cash (by posting a years-old article) and they made out like bandits.

Ratoslov
Feb 15, 2012

Now prepare yourselves! You're the guests of honor at the Greatest Kung Fu Cannibal BBQ Ever!

How, precisely, is your :sparkles:'world run by software':sparkles: different from that silly 'marble economy' thing you were :words:ing about months ago?

Also, how the heck is it different from a Soviet-style centrally planned economy? Aside from everyone in the Central Planning Committee having a Comp Sci degree from Harvard.

rudatron
May 31, 2011

by Fluffdaddy
He's advocating an anti-democratic political system owned wholesale by telecommunications companies and corporate fiefdoms. This is literally a dystopia and he's a moron if he's does not understand the consequences of this.

I honestly hope he does secede so that American Civil War Mark 2: The Union vs. Neckbeards can get into full swing.

edit: oh wow, should have read the custom title. I given Eripsa attention and therefore made him richer, dammit!

rudatron fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Nov 30, 2013

twerking on the railroad
Jun 23, 2007

Get on my level
I most certainly did not read all of that article but I was surprised when ctrl-f did not find any mentions of the singularity in that mess.

Adar
Jul 27, 2001

rudatron posted:

edit: oh wow, should have read the custom title. I given Eripsa attention and therefore made him richer, dammit!

Attention Deficit Disorder

The afternoon sun angled through a tear in the tent. Ma Bao-Zhi grunted, then shifted his face towards the shade and screwed up his eyes. In the absence of light, the retinal burns from his always-on pupil-tracking HUD-halo danced before his field of vision. He sat up and stretched. It was a new day.

The corner of his visual field that was perpetually occupied by the DistroNet feed blinked. A major announcement was incoming from the most influential association of experts that he had ever been a part of: The Council Of Two Million With A Remit Of Everything.

The upstart replacement of last year's not-hegemon, the Coven of Eight to the Seven; Masters of Knowledge, the Council had, yesterday, consisted of just over 50.3% of the surviving inhabitants of what had once been Taiwan SAR. However, as he scanned the headlines, he noted that an overnight disputation on the meaning of Buddha-nature had resulted in nearly two hundred being purged from the membership roster, and, more importantly, from the Council's ReDistroList. Ma had never posted to any discussion regarding Buddha-nature, for which he was now extremely thankful.

Attention Distribution Cannot Be Gamed, he though, nodding to himself. It was a mantra every child knew, and it was obviously true. 'Gaming' would imply an illegitimate practice, and since the attention economy was inherently legitimate, any practice that arose thereof could not be 'gaming'. The use of randomly-assigned attention redistribution lists to strengthen the network-influence of an association of experts was one of the most powerful practices there was - without it, no modern association of experts could compete.

With the saccadic grace of long practice, his pupils flipped to the updated, slightly smaller ReDistroList, and settled down to start his highly-encouraged ten hours of daily network-reinforcement. Ten hours - ten icons - each one painstakingly designed by the expert it represented. The Coven of Eight to the Seven had highly encouraged eight hours of ReDistroList attention, but the Council's superior attention ethic had led to an expert association network both wider and deeper in links, and thus, far more influential. The Coven defined their area of expertise too narrowly, and left themselves open to a ratio attack. It was a trivial task for the Council to dial down the attention ratio of key knowledge industries overnight, leaving the Coven rudderless and sinking. Ma had been a third-quartile defector, holding out longer than most; his punishment was to enter the Council with six month's half-ratio deficit. Half as likely to be randomly assigned to other experts ReDistroList, he counted himself lucky - the fourth quartile had been exiled entirely. As is, he was comfortably off in a deficit camp outside Taibao.

Ma shook himself; introspection was an audience of one. The first icon belonged to Tracy Liu: 166kg, pink highlights and moderator by acclaim of a yaoi fandom for the ancient classic, Glengarry Glen Ross.

The minutes ticked by, and as the completion bar for the first icon flipped over into green and Tracy's hand-drawn icon faded from sight - young Al Pacino gently cupping young Jack Lemmon's testicles on a bed of index cards - Ma decided that he would treat himself with an hour of free attention. He rucked the covers back from his legs and withdrew his 75MHz future-proofed laptop from its pouch.

Minutes later, halfway through the boot-sequence, Ma heard the unmistakable whirring of a Bother-Gyro. He dug rapidly through the contents of the tent for the thick blanket he'd found the week before, to muffle the fans of the laptop, but the blanket had been redistributed. It was too late anyway: the Bother-Gyro's tracking software had heard the fans.

"Go away!" shouted Ma.

< Hello Friend And How Are You And Woo! >

The Bother-Gyro hovered just out of Ma's reach.

"滚蛋!"

< Would You Like A Comestible?! Marmalade Is In This Week! >

"gently caress off."

Bother-Gyros were increasingly common, flying over the water from the Penghu Collective, and Ma had tangled with them before, when he was a high-ratio member of the Coven: an attractive target. The Collective were Min-speakers, and the language barrier was starving them of culture-based attention, and forcing them to desperate measures. He knew that while they would advertise to any moving object, their main purpose was to gain the attention of the victim. Even compared to the average camp member, Ma's influence ratio was low...

"Hey! Bot! There's a high-ratio family just over that wall! You can bother them all at once! Think of the attention gains!"

Unfortunately for Ma, the Bother-Gyro was also running off a 75MHz chip, which did not support voice recognition. Even more unfortunately, what little resources it did have to bring to bear were mainly concentrated on measuring the direction of gaze of the victim, and Ma's gaze had briefly moved from the Gyro to the wall he was gesturing at. The Gyro aimed a module at the RFID tag on Ma's halo.

*pffffsss*

"gently caress!"

Pepper-spray will catch anyone's attention.

Whilst Ma rolled around in the dirt, the Bother-Gyro gently settled on the ground next to him, conserving battery. Proximity was worth less attention than direct eye-contact, but it was still worth something. After a minute, the database updated the Gyro on Ma's uninspiring attention value, and it buzzed off in search of less deficient prey.


----

The afternoon was nearly over before Ma's eyes stopped watering, and the pupil-tracker started to update correctly. Luckily, his HUD-halo was undamaged - it could still receive and transmit audio, video, pupil-tracking data and, indeed, record everything that Ma did. Nine hours of ReDistroList remained on his schedule, but he had bigger things on his mind. Of all the places, his deficit camp was lucky enough to be in viewing distance of a celebrity battle.

It wasn't entirely by chance, of course. Celebrity Mechas were very power-hungry, and required tethering to the grid network, and deficit camps had the tendency to spring up in unused land along grid lines. While city dwellers might have had the massed influence to force such a destructive event outside their municipal margins, a deficit camp by definition could not face up to even the most minor celebrity's choice of land-resource.

This particular battle was between the gigantic robots piloted by a pornography magnate and a man who was extremely good at making videos of cats. Hovering cameras darted about the provided every possible angle around the machines, while in-cockpit vision was granted by cameras attached to both control modules. There were no adverts - the battle itself drew all the attention the participants needed.

The pornographer had outfitted his mecha with water sprinklers, providing the substrate for projected holograms of noted starlets and their riveting performances. The cat man, showing disdain for the practice of up-attending, had a far more stripped-down mecha, bowing to demand only by having a control module shaped like a cat's head. While his initial surge in influence had been off the back of a pet British Shorthair, his true power came from his decision to breed several thousand of the creatures and lock them in a vast complex filled with pastel colors and assorted common household items. Cuteness, too, can be brute-forced.

As the two machines started to stride towards each other, Ma watched camp-dwellers who sought influence more than health run between the legs of the mechas. Like so much in the attention economy, it was a dual payoff. Simply being near a mecha guaranteed a proportion of the attention that the pilot was constantly exuding, and that was worth the risk of injury in itself. But, if a camera tracked by millions happened to autofocus on a lucky expert? Why, a single second's worth of attention was more than the expert might otherwise see in a lifetime.

The battle was joined, and as the mechas stamped to and fro, they came closer and closer to the western edge of the camp - the edge furthest from Ma. Even those experts in the camp whose lack of attention ethics had placed them dangerously close to exile from their associations could not help but pay heed. Lasers flashed, missiles flew, and clouds of smoke emerged even when not strictly necessary. In fact, the battle, like most battles, was more bark than bite: it was considered bad form to actually kill another celebrity, not least because it tended to alienate part of your potential audience. After all, who didn't enjoy both pornography and cat videos?

The din didn't just attract the attention of experts - from miles around, Bother-Gyros wheeled in, guided by the very human tendency to correlate decibels and attention. Ma gazed in wonder as a two flocks of gyros of different manufacture, bathed in the proximity wash from the mechas, each mistook the other flock as the source of attention. Overriding the normal guideline that led them to disperse for maximal coverage, the gyros spiralled madly in ever decreasing circles as they sought to increase that flow.

As he watched, the gyrating super-flock, consisting of nearly a hundred Bother-Gyros, whirled into the cloud of spray being produced by pornographer's mechanical contraption. A hundred automatic protection circuits flared into action, and the mass of gyros punched in the opposite direction - straight into the air intake ducts of the cat-mecha.

One gyro would have been unfortunate. Five would have led to an emergency shutdown. But no mecha-designer had considered such a freak occurrence as the emergent behaviour so briefly displayed by the gyro-flocks. Admittedly, QA and Safety were neglected disciplines ever since the advent of the attention economy - who would dedicate their lives to a discipline that involved something so unquantifiable as preventing rare occurrences? After all, it's not as though someone might lose their accumulated attention - just their lives.

With a massive crunch, the flywheels at the center of the cat-mecha broke apart, releasing a torrent of kinetic energy, and sending parts of the mecha in every direction. The pornographer tried to backpedal his mecha away from the burning debris, but his attention elsewhere, he stepped directly on one of the experts that had been trailing his footsteps. As his machine overturned, the pornographer clutched at the control panel, seeking the emergency eject key, but by chance also fat-fingering the steam overcharge system. The porn-mecha's control module blasted off the chassis - straight into the side of one of the few fixed-wall buildings in the camp. The steam explosion, while softer, was far more deadly.

Ma had hit the ground as soon as he saw the first gyro sucked into the air-intake - luckily so, as burning debris had taken out several of his neighbours. Now, his view obscured by what remained of the same three foot-wall he had urged the gyro to surmount earlier that day, he flicked his eyes to open a newsline. The events of the past minute had gone viral - his feed was already filling with commentary from the other side of the world. Every last survivor would soon be bombarded with requests for commentary on the death of the celebrities.

Celebrities plural? The feed from the cat-mecha was still active. In fact, the explosion had blown the control module right over the camp, landing to the east, far from the screams of the scalded and poisoned camp dwellers. Ma held a rag over as much of his mouth and nose as he could reach through his HUD-halo, and levered himself to his feet.

The cat man was alive. In fact, he was almost unhurt - a mere fractured collarbone. He was, however, trapped inside his module, and mouthing something - the audio feed from his cockpit had cut out. Ma tore his attention from his HUD-halo and looked out, directly at the smoking module in the distance.

Never mind proximity attention - to be the man who saved a celebrity from almost certain death? To be the only source of an audio feed for the sole celebrity survivor of what the international feeds were calling the Disaster of Taibao?

Ma started to trot towards the control module, avoiding the prone bodies of those less fortunate survivors, around some of whom flames still flickered. He tore his foot away from the grasp of one, whilst muttering thanks for the last few seconds of absolute attention they granted him. He stepped over a corpse, then briefly glanced behind him. The least concussed of the able-bodied camp survivors were already moving after him. Turning his back to the setting sun, Ma broke into a run.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

RealityApologist posted:

I'm taking for granted that any system will have losers.

Well don't loving do that.

SMILLENNIALSMILLEN
Jun 26, 2009



https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl=en
I installed this and op makes a lot more sense now

Mo_Steel
Mar 7, 2008

Let's Clock Into The Sunset Together

Fun Shoe
That written piece is a combination of wishful dreams and technofetishism. Technological advancement can expand possible options and methods, but it's ultimately fixed within the social, economic and political norms of the nations it's part of. One cannot look at Google or Microsoft or Apple without recognizing that they are shaped by capitalism and our modern day culture, and to suppose that individuals similarly influenced are going to break free from the yoke of the world around them because of technology conveys astounding ignorance of the life that billions of people live day to day: not connected to the cloud, but scrabbling to survive and washing clothes by hand and dying to easily treatable diseases or starvation.

It's nothing new though; Popular Mechanics did the same thing in the 1950s:



Where's my waterproof living room with a drain in the middle so my housewife can do all her daily cleaning with a hose? :jerkbag:

nononsense
Feb 28, 2013
The second article in the OP advocates a meritocracy with badges as a reward system:

quote:

Executors are the "working class" of the traditional caste system, but in a world run by software every worker is guaranteed recognition for the work they do. This will take the form of gamification techniques where people earn "badges" that represent the many dimensions of their skills and mastery. This system of rewards not only motivates work and encourages a competitive atmosphere, but also serves to more efficiently connect requested work with the people in the best position to handle the job. It also frees the executor from any institutional obligations, so they might follow the vocation of their choosing.

I would love a system that rewards a garbageman with an achievement pop-up through his Google Glasses as he picked up his first 10 thrash bags. Good job, plep, you'll have enough badges to advance in rank in no time.

The rest of the article is filled with bad IT metaphors and oversimplifications about society, industry, technology, self-organizing systems, and human beings most of all. Perhaps the author of this article should flesh it out all his ideas and expand it with how to transition to this system and what will happen to those on the bottom of this system.

Tofuslob
Jul 9, 2013

I don't really understand this article on how this software revolution would necessarily lead to a better life for everyone else. Ultimately no matter how open sourced the services are going to be the main infrastructure (data center's,automated mines/farms etc.) is going to be owned by the powerful so we are going to end up with the power relations that already exist in capital but much worse if we are going to scrap civil service entirely and simply have it directly administrated by politicians/"executors"

Ocean Book
Sep 27, 2010

:yum: - hi
I would like to know from RealistApologist, in what ways would this society actually be better than the one we currently have? It seems to me that the big advantage your proposed society has is that it sounds cool. There'd are probably other strengths I'm not getting from my cursory reading of the OP however. Feel free to go over hypothetical weaknesses as well.

Big Beef City
Aug 15, 2013

Literally the dumbest article I've seen posted in D&D.
Thanks.

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless
Jumping right into a world run by Helios is a terrible idea, the computers will just be a kabuki mask for unaccountable humans.

If you want to use IT to change society there are more feasible concepts, like a federally mandated central listing for jobs and housing. It makes supply/demand more efficient, simplifies tax collection, and we can start cracking down on scams and MLMs.

Amarkov
Jun 21, 2010

Mo_Steel posted:



Where's my waterproof living room with a drain in the middle so my housewife can do all her daily cleaning with a hose? :jerkbag:

It was never developed, even though it easily could be, because middle class people decided that reducing the number of household chores isn't as cool as paying Mexicans to do them.

Ocean Book
Sep 27, 2010

:yum: - hi

McDowell posted:

Jumping right into a world run by Helios is a terrible idea, the computers will just be a kabuki mask for unaccountable humans.

If you want to use IT to change society there are more feasible concepts, like a federally mandated central listing for jobs and housing. It makes supply/demand more efficient, simplifies tax collection, and we can start cracking down on scams and MLMs.

Yeah I really wish something like this exists. I think about it sometimes and it seems pretty stupid that we don't have it.

Rent-A-Cop
Oct 15, 2004

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

Amarkov posted:

It was never developed, even though it easily could be, because middle class people decided that reducing the number of household chores isn't as cool as paying Mexicans to do them.
Racism is totally the reason we don't wash our living rooms with fire hoses.

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

Ocean Book posted:

Yeah I really wish something like this exists. I think about it sometimes and it seems pretty stupid that we don't have it.

It is something we have to fight for. Right now information technology is only being seriously applied in ways that serve the people at the top (the NSA panopticon being the prime example). We need to start making noise about common sense, populist applications.

shovelbum
Oct 21, 2010

Fun Shoe

Amarkov posted:

It was never developed, even though it easily could be, because middle class people decided that reducing the number of household chores isn't as cool as paying Mexicans to do them.

Who are these middle class Americans with personal servants?

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

nononsense posted:

I would love a system that rewards a garbageman with an achievement pop-up through his Google Glasses as he picked up his first 10 thrash bags. Good job, plep, you'll have enough badges to advance in rank in no time.

This is something that's slowly happening as a way to be more engaged. If after getting an achievement for collecting trash you could turn it in for free pizza drat straight you're keeping count.

bassguitarhero
Feb 29, 2008

I don't understand why software would care about the vast majority of people who, in all likelihood, would have little to "offer" this Libertopia. In the real world, technological advancements have been leading to tremendous amounts of job losses, as technology's benefit is in making interactions more efficient and cutting out the middle-man, which includes bureaucratic positions, communications positions, etc etc.

The more that technology does for us, the less need we have of all these people that we have in the system, so I just don't see where we think people are going to go, or what this software world is going to put together to offer people who don't have much to offer that system. In our current world, we have things like welfare and make-work jobs so that even if people aren't able to produce offerings to get them out of poverty, they can subsist. But I have a strong feeling that a world run by software wouldn't bind itself to these views of morality, especially when technology can provide exact measurements of how little poor people have to offer this system.

In fact, this is the conversation we need to have nominally around the country (and even the world), and I definitely won't be trusting a software bureaucracy until we've had the question answered by humans: What do we do with the poor when we've eliminated even the potential for them to hold jobs? I mean we can put people in micro-apartments and give them highly-efficient commutes to their work-pod, but we have a planet of 7 billion people and the ultimate conclusion of technology will have to include a realization that the vast majority of people will have nothing to put into this system and are instead subsisting for the sake of subsisting.

RIght now inefficiencies in globalization is what gives people room to exist and subsist - if efficient robots in the most fertile parts of the planet could produce all the food we would need, what would we need with farmers? I have a pretty good feeling what people like Balaji Srinivasan would think we should do - which is why I don't think letting silicon valley libertarians design said system would be a very good idea. I do think it's inevitable, but I would push back on it as long as possible to make sure we figure out what to do with all these people when we do get to these issues. Films like Wall-E solved it by only having a few humans living in the spaceships, which is a fine solution for the 1% of us already at the top, but what about those of us who are poor and don't have the kind of skills a software-run world would find useful?

Captain_Maclaine
Sep 30, 2001

Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

McDowell posted:

Jumping right into a world run by Helios is a terrible idea, the computers will just be a kabuki mask for unaccountable humans.


Are you saying that you don't trust The Computer, citizen? The Computer is your friend!

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

bassguitarhero posted:

RIght now inefficiencies in globalization is what gives people room to exist and subsist - if efficient robots in the most fertile parts of the planet could produce all the food we would need, what would we need with farmers? I have a pretty good feeling what people like Balaji Srinivasan would think we should do - which is why I don't think letting silicon valley libertarians design said system would be a very good idea. I do think it's inevitable, but I would push back on it as long as possible to make sure we figure out what to do with all these people when we do get to these issues. Films like Wall-E solved it by only having a few humans living in the spaceships, which is a fine solution for the 1% of us already at the top, but what about those of us who are poor and don't have the kind of skills a software-run world would find useful?

This is the huge issue to me. I don't know why anyone but a 1%er would be cool with a libertarian trying to set up Galt's Gulch. You know what the final result is, (massive class cleansing and the "creative destruction" of existing society to give the few an ivory tower) so why would you do anything but try to subvert this idea?

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

rkajdi posted:

This is the huge issue to me. I don't know why anyone but a 1%er would be cool with a libertarian trying to set up Galt's Gulch. You know what the final result is, (massive class cleansing and the "creative destruction" of existing society to give the few an ivory tower) so why would you do anything but try to subvert this idea?

Because if you flatter our lords enough, they might show favor to you! You might be permitted to co-author a paper with them to lend them gravitas, or you might be invited to speak at TED, or more likely at TED's walled ghetto, TEDx. Putting TEDx on your C.V. would be considered gauche, of course.

"Don't cleanse me! I believe in the Singularity! I'd wear a silk shirt and earpiece too, if my lord allowed it!" This is what you can plead.

Slow News Day
Jul 4, 2007

shovelbum posted:

Who are these middle class Americans with personal servants?

I know of only one couple and they are both doctors. So yeah, definitely not middle class.

Slow News Day
Jul 4, 2007

FilthyImp posted:

For instance, the poor already have a service here in Los Angeles that functions something like Uber. It's called public transit, and it's entirely on-demand for most of the day.

This must be some kind of joke. Do you know what Uber is? Have you used it before?

FilthyImp
Sep 30, 2002

Anime Deviant

enraged_camel posted:

This must be some kind of joke. Do you know what Uber is? Have you used it before?

It's crowdsourced transportation for people that don't like calling Taxis and wouldn't ever consider jumping on a municipal bus.

What the author fails to realize is that it is not a reliable option for the working class. Especially considering the relative volatility of the model (oh it's busy now? Ok, your ride is now $40 kthanx).

But it sure is something swell for yuppies! It's like a charter school for mass transit -- in that it doesn't really do much to solve the underlying issues in the system. But ooh I can track the little cars as they go around and send a geotag that serves as a pickup location. Shiny!!

FilthyImp fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Nov 30, 2013

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Ernie Muppari
Aug 4, 2012

Keep this up G'Bert, and soon you won't have a pigeon to protect!

enraged_camel posted:

This must be some kind of joke. Do you know what Uber is? Have you used it before?

Reading up on it makes it sound almost exactly like a cab company to me (and the fact that they started out as 'UberCab' has surprisingly little to do with that impression). I'm not sure why comparing it to public transit is some sort of laughable joke, I mean, yeah, a taxi service does fill a niche even with good public transit service, but you're making it sound like Uber is some sort of revolutionary idea without precedence when it's just a cab company with an app instead of dispatchers.

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