The global village is basically here, courtesy of social media like TikTok (which did not come from California). What we didn't expect was that the village idiots would also come along.
Here's a link to "The Californian Ideology" if you haven't read it:<p><a href="http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology" rel="nofollow">http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideol...</a>
I would have thought that computer scientists would not really fall into debates about "centralisation" or "decentralisation" when we're so busy changing from one strategy to the next in CPU and software designs. At the broadest level first it was mainframes, then client server, now it's all in a kind of giant mainframe again which we just call a cloud service provider and yet it's not exactly monolithic.<p>Why would politics ever be free of debate about what is best with centralised or decentralised human organisation?<p>Lets just say that those who think they know best about everything will be for centralisation at the extreme if they think they can succeed in dominating others or decentralisation in the extreme if they think they cannot.
Everyone agrees socials are the scourge of the net, amplifying the most hyperbolic trash available, but they (seem to) increasingly just accept this to have been inevitable (or more erroneously, they blame human nature itself lol). This is actually worse than wrong because it creates apathy and hopelessness that re-enforce the problem. It's not difficult to find out who funded these virtual gulags or to imagine what motivated them to seek re-centralization.
The amount of people who cannot keep track of their money with a simple Excel sheet is astonishing. Heck, scratch that, people don't even keep track of their money with a calculator or even pen and paper.<p>And yet, keeping an eye on your money and seeing where it flows is an incredible tool to adjust your spending and maybe save up where it matters and afford to step up your game.<p>Technology without education is borderline useless, the liberation will always lie in spreading knowledge.
I'm sure the same promises were made to the Greeks and Romans as their institutions of governance were slowly bought out before their very eyes.<p>Aristotle wrote about this inevitable path of democracy. It's happened before and we've wilfully ignored those lessons.
This is a long-form podcast with Richard Barbrook, the co-author of "The Californian Ideology," a 1995 critique of what later became the dominant ethos of the tech industry.<p>Lots of interesting history, including a discussion of how Minitel, the French precursor to the web, created a more sustainable form of techno-capitalism even though it was created by the state-owned phone company.
Tech is power, but how that power is distributed is not a given.<p>We should not assume the power that tech creates just magically diffuses among the plebes.<p>It's a interesting paradox that consumer surpluses are quite enormous: we live with enormous material wealth: electricity, telephone/mobile device, TV, internet, IoT.<p>(A poor person lives better than any Absolute Monarch from 100 years ago)<p>... and yet the same time power imbalances are still problematic and captial concentration is once again a problem.<p>Russia and China have vastly improved quality of life vis-a-vis 15 years ago and yet they have more limited power and freedoms.
Where is the discussion on incentives in this argument?
Globalization has benefited humanity in many ways but also caused massive climate change, increasing inequality, and a winner-take-all economy.