We lost the war. Welcome to the world of tomorrow (2006)

Eh, I&#x27;m amazed at the ignorance of the obvious by authors like this. This is chickenlittleism on full throttle.<p>The tone is vaguely ellegaic, harkening back to that time when freedom and democracy was the law of the land. Let&#x27;s see, looking at the 20th century: totalitarianism, the industrialization of genocide, nonstop global warfare (hot and cold), institutionalized tacism and other forms of oppression, CIA trained death squads, pitiful consumer protection stsnfatds , union busting, riots, high profile political assasinstions, colonialisms of all types.<p>It&#x27;s hard to see a some kind of serious decline in the progress of civilization ushered in by pervasive surveillance technology.<p>Furthermore, to the extent that the author is persuasive that technologically advanced and ubiquitous surveillance will be used to maintain the social order, he highlights a weakness in his thesis.<p>The coming challenges he enumerates, climate disasters, energy problems, migration pressure are not the result of insecure communications. They will come anyway.<p>IMO he rightly guesses that selling increased surveillance to the public will be easy, as very few people in the developed world want society to fall apart.<p>Electronic communication infrastructure cannot be ignored by the power structure. Suppose these horrible changes were stopped by our idealistic hackers from being easily used for social control. What would take their place? I shudder to think.<p>Somehow a world where power can be consolidated by unaffiliated creation of dark networks doesn&#x27;t sound like much of an improvement.<p>The quality of a society will be progressed through cultural means. Technology is just part of the fabric of this human world.

<i>&gt; paid manual labor will be eaten away further by technology</i><p>As labor continues to be automated, we&#x27;ll need a minimum income for &quot;unproductive&quot; members of society. In reality, they&#x27;re not really unproductive as long as they can engage in consumer behavior, which is something we absolutely need them to do. We simply can&#x27;t afford an underclass without access to our new high tech quality of life. So we&#x27;ll subsidize them.<p>Of course, this will come with restrictions. To be eligible, you won&#x27;t be allowed to own your house, a part of that income will most likely be added to your &quot;debt&quot;, and you&#x27;ll have to take part in certain mandatory activities.<p>But in essence, basic income will <i>have to</i> be introduced.

While we, the techno intelligencia, discuss how to manage technological change against the powerful security state, it is probably the case that the more desperate will just start shooting oligarchs despite the vast security apparatus designed to protect them. Once they realize they&#x27;re not secure, they&#x27;ll decide to cede power. The question is who will be able to negotiate this transition in a transparent and positive way when politicians are already corrupted by them?<p>I in no way advocate violence, (except occasional lapses of thought on the hockey rink). I just think that these events will occur: If there are millions of people that the state believes are refuse, many will turn to crime to eat and as the social contract is broken, some of these people will tend towards violence against those who run (what were once democratic) countries. The oligarchs are a natural enemy to the &quot;refuse&quot; of society because they do have a large hand in their plight. Consider: They generally advocate for trade pacts which lower the wages of low skill workers. They extract high rents for education so many cannot better themselves. They pay as little and hire as few as humanly possible. The only aspect of their operations that they would have in a first world country are point where they receive customers&#x27; money. To many of them, their ideal is that both the production and the profits are off shore. None of this endears them to millions of the poor. So that, unfortunately is how things change. Please prove me wrong.

There&#x27;s a prevailing sentiment amongst hackers here and everywhere that things are and can be moved forward in an ethical, and positive ways in the future.<p>I was always interested - are there cynics or at least pessimists amongst us that don&#x27;t see all this progress (even humanity in general) anything but highway to hell?<p>If so, how do you cope?

If you think there is any truth in this article, then real democracy becomes ever more important as a check on the power afforded the elite.<p>I note that the European Project (i.e. the slow but relentless move towards a United States of Europe) is a step away from democracy in that the European Commission is not elected by universal suffrage, but appointed, and that rules are made centrally and applied to diverse populations with different priorities.

&quot;Decentralized infrastructure is needed. &quot;<p>There is absolutely nothing I can think of more important than this.<p>There&#x27;s room for companies, there&#x27;s room for restricted centralised services - but in my humble opinion the core services should be managed and run by the people.<p>We are capable of doing it, if we&#x27;re not - it&#x27;s time to learn.<p>Interesting place to start: <a href="http://maidsafe.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;maidsafe.net&#x2F;</a>

&gt; <i>&quot;Genetic engineering and other biotechnology as well as nanotechnology (and potentially _free energy_ technologies if they exist)...&quot;</i><p>Somehow this part makes me think the whole article lacks a healthy dose of skepticism and manages to hide it well.<p>For what Frank seems to be talking about here is stuff like &#x27;zero point energy&#x27; or other such misconceptions.<p>(Apologies if he means things like cold fusion on a tabletop device, which is _slightly_ less crazy.)

It&#x27;s from 2006, but it&#x27;s more relevant than ever.

Technology is a lever that can be used to amplify power. Surveillance is the example du jour, but there are plenty of others.<p>We are social beings, (vertices in the social graph) and we have relationships with (edges that connect us to) other individuals and groups of individuals. Some of these relationships are characterized by asymmetric power (influence &amp; coercion) attributes.<p>The aggregate effect of these relationships on us as individuals is sometimes beneficial, sometimes deleterious; an effect characterized in terms of personal liberty; economic utility, and perhaps other factors too.<p>We naturally have an interest in understanding the benefits and risks inherent in this network of relationships; and in understanding the factors that maximize the aggregate benefit whilst reducing the aggregate risk.<p>I am idly pondering what it would take to build a statistical model of the network of power relationships between individuals and groups, and explore how various types of technological power amplification change the distribution of reward and risk across individuals.<p>I.e. does the amplification of existing power relationships through technological change increase the risk that personal liberty will be restricted? What about the economic impact? Is there a risk that the distribution of &quot;personal liberty&quot; will become more concentrated? How big is that risk, and what is the spread? What about economic wealth?<p>Of course, this is just a silly thought experiment ... but I am sure that some of the readers here have access to both the computational resources and the raw data (graphs of interlocutors with power&#x2F;influence attributes decorating the edges) to do this experiment ... if you haven&#x27;t already done it.<p>I&#x27;d be interested to know if any unclassified &amp; publicly available results exist?

I think we should go back to a real democracy, not a representative republic.<p>Why can&#x27;t all citizens vote online?<p>We bank online, we pay our taxes online. We could develop a system that is more secure than the local polling stations we have now and vote on laws, regulations and budgets all online.<p>We don&#x27;t need congress. We would vote on laws ourselves. We would vote on the budget ourselves. We could even vote on budget proposals line by line. Voting out any projects that only favor local communities. We could approve or disprove going to war. The president would answer to us directly.<p>Some would this is would be chaos, but it could be implemented on the local level first and then scaled bigger.<p>Others say that the common person can&#x27;t understand laws. I say it&#x27;s imperative that everyone be able to understand our laws. If a law is too complicated, then it shouldn&#x27;t be a law.<p>Anyways, just my thoughts.

Great analysis. Reminds me of an updated, &quot;Why the Future Doesn&#x27;t Need Us&quot;, by Bill Joy.

&gt; So what now?<p>On the political level, the meta problem causing most of other problems is money.<p>Take money out of politics.<p>No political advertising allowed, no &quot;donations&quot;, no lobbying. 1 official website (or print brochure) as the only means for voters to get political information (or brainwash) from.

In Spain, having all this in mind we have created a citizens network in 2013 to force in a short time a real democracy in our country. We are common people, hackers, lawyers, engineers with our jobs but we are very well organized, we have learnt a lot from open source development organizations, we have no investors but we have the best people with us.<p>We created the party to lobby our institutions and in just 1 year we are growing much faster than expected. This article in NYT was right after we were born <a href="http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/is-spains-newest-political-party-party-x-too-idealistic/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;latitude.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;11&#x2F;is-spains-newes...</a><p>We may be wrong but certainly our are proposal for a new democracy is one of the most advanced in the world after years studying examples all around <a href="http://partidox.org/basic-information/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;partidox.org&#x2F;basic-information&#x2F;</a> (sorry but the information in English is very reduced)<p>On Monday 25th of May there are European elections and for the first time we will be in the list of candidate parties.<p>Our fisrt candidate is a &quot;hacker&quot;, he is Herve Falciani who since 2009 has been collaborating with numerous European nations by providing information relating to more than 130,000 suspected tax evaders with Swiss bank accounts.<p>We have very exciting times ahead and thanks to technology we have new ways of organizations and new ways for pushing changes

This article nails several realities dead on. The premise of a pervasive electronic panopticon is a modern fatal charade, that we&#x27;ve unwittingly cast ourselves in. There&#x27;s an enourmous power differential at play now, in everything we do. Even buying a pack of gum at the gas station with pocket change can be readily transformed into permanent public record.<p>On the other hand, it&#x27;s important to bear in mind that the problems highlighted here are social. Between human beings. The manner in which we share the world we live on, and whether we reduce it to ashes by fighting with each other.<p>It&#x27;s not a problem that can&#x27;t be solved. It&#x27;s a problem that can only be sabotaged.

typical alarmist sensationalism, let alone dates because of its reliance on doom and gloom global warming scenarios that amazingly don&#x27;t occur and whose model predict such dire fates cannot even be used to show how we are now compared to forty years ago.<p>Will give them points on robotics, robotics will change the world so significantly I doubt we can exaggerate it. We literally will have to find something to do.

What is painful for me about this is that while we might sensibilize a handful of (A) talented hackers here and there that (B) are in good shape to do anything about it, there are legions of lobbists and bureaucrats with big budgets daily working to expand the State, some of those legions are tax minions who&#x27;s &quot;added value&quot; is bite yours

I believe in fundamentals. Just don&#x27;t post anything online, unless you&#x27;re certain you want to. Do not post pictures. Don&#x27;t use social networks and cloud services. Your life won&#x27;t get THAT much harder if Google Maps cannot guess which coffee shop you mean immediately.

From H.G. Wells interview with Joseph Stalin, which made the charts on HN a week or two ago:<p>-----<p>The capitalist is riveted to profit; and no power on earth can tear him away from it. Capitalism will be abolished, not by &quot;organisers&quot; of production not by the technical intelligentsia, but by the working class, because the aforementioned strata do not play an independent role. The engineer, the organiser of production does not work as he would like to, but as he is ordered, in such a way as to serve the interests of his employers. There are exceptions of course; there are people in this stratum who have awakened from the intoxication of capitalism. The technical intelligentsia can, under certain conditions, perform miracles and greatly benefit mankind. But it can also cause great harm. We Soviet people have not a little experience of the technical intelligentsia.<p>After the October Revolution, a certain section of the technical intelligentsia refused to take part in the work of constructing the new society; they opposed this work of construction and sabotaged it.<p>We did all we possibly could to bring the technical intelligentsia into this work of construction; we tried this way and that. Not a little time passed before our technical intelligentsia agreed actively to assist the new system. Today the best section of this technical intelligentsia are in the front rank of the builders of socialist society. Having this experience we are far from underestimating the good and the bad sides of the technical intelligentsia and we know that on the one hand it can do harm, and on the other hand, it can perform &quot;miracles.&quot; Of course, things would be different if it were possible, at one stroke, spiritually to tear the technical intelligentsia away from the capitalist world. But that is utopia.<p>Are there many of the technical intelligentsia who would dare break away from the bourgeois world and set to work reconstructing society? Do you think there are many people of this kind, say, in England or in France? No, there are few who would be willing to break away from their employers and begin reconstructing the world.<p>Besides, can we lose sight of the fact that in order to transform the world it is necessary to have political power? It seems to me, Mr. Wells, that you greatly underestimate the question of political power, that it entirely drops out of your conception.<p>What can those, even with the best intentions in the world, do if they are unable to raise the question of seizing power, and do not possess power? At best they can help the class which takes power, but they cannot change the world themselves. This can only be done by a great class which will take the place of the capitalist class and become the sovereign master as the latter was before. This class is the working class. Of course, the assistance of the technical intelligentsia must be accepted; and the latter in turn, must be assisted. But it must not be thought that the technical intelligentsia can play an independent historical role. The transformation of the world is a great, complicated and painful process. For this task a great class is required. Big ships go on long voyages.

&#x27;We have it in our power to begin the world over again.&#x27;