Encouraging individual sovereignty and a healthy commons

We&#x27;re really moving into the strange cyberpunk dystopian future when CEOs start writing bizarre manifestos about how they want to reshape the world like this. Really just a few years out from private corporate armies I think (Zuckerberg already has a small private army protecting him with heavy weaponry) and cyber wars and espionage and open defiance of governments.<p>Like we all knew this was an option of where we were going but to see it actually happening is kind of surreal.

The mainstream view is that for the world to be sustainable and stable, it needs to be more centralized and governed from the top.<p>That doesn&#x27;t work, because the world is a complex system. It needs to be more functional, not more centralized.<p>The NNTaleb view is that to be sustainable and stable, the world needs to be decentralized and antifragile. In other words: not 1 government, but 100 well designed, functional governments with small, local democratic governance.<p>This seems necessary since societies are changing more rapidly, dealing with more problems and crises than before that just can&#x27;t be effectively solved by bloated entities (see the EU), can&#x27;t adapt quickly enough to various changes (see all the places in the US without fast internet), and aren&#x27;t future-oriented enough because of inertia (see Singapore as a counterexample). It also seems more realistic than the article.<p>Edit: I didn&#x27;t expect this response to blow up, so let me address more of the article:<p>1) Completely disagree that technology is &quot;part of us&quot;. Amazon isn&#x27;t a part of me, just a company I shop at. The closest thing we have to &quot;explants&quot; are the <i>platforms</i> we use, like Facebook or WhatsApp. The article seems heavy on buzzwords and light on common-sense. Encrypted messaging is the best solution, to maintain freedom of communication and reduce corporations&#x27; influence. That only requires installing Signal or WhatsApp, not &quot;creating a new world&quot;.<p>2) People are not &quot;property&quot;. You are free to share what you want. Others are free, too. If you want to work (Naval-style) towards decentralized, encrypted platforms, that&#x27;s a step in the right direction. Doesn&#x27;t require buzzwords either.<p>3) It seems like the article&#x27;s worldview is based in an even greater influence of technology over our lives (as if the author realized that technology isn&#x27;t really part of us, but wanted to make it so). The personal cloud would be hosted by &quot;individual organizations&quot;, but what makes you think that 1 or 2 orgs won&#x27;t emerge on top, and cause the exact same problem again?

I made a few tangential points regard globalization in a similar discussion. Basically wondering how globalization which was a very right wing corporatist idea (Sanders calls it a Koch brothers proposal here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0</a> basically) became a favorite of the new left. And conversely anti-globalization was a top issue for the left along with TPP, NAFTA and other such stuff.<p>I think it is rather ironic that the new &quot;left&quot; love them globalization all of the sudden, even when their younger brothers were tear-gassed protesting it, just a decade ago or so protesting against it.<p>(More discussion here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13682260" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13682260</a> along with a promising book on the subject, &#x27;The Technological Society&#x27; by Jacques Ellul suggested by Drumlin. Still waiting for it to come from Amazon)

Preface: I might be too influenced by Adam Curtis.<p>But what I find most interesting about this reply&#x2F;rant, is that it - like most of left, always seems to envision a world without power. And you can&#x27;t confront entrenched power, without seizing power, and using it to transform society.

What&#x27;s boring here is there&#x27;s no suggestion as to how this utopia of digital parks can come to be. Even if we have the resources to invest in development and operations, who without a profit motive, will devise the marketing campaign for privacy and common good?<p>This guy wants a world like Craigslist, but Airbnb already taught us that free and p2p is easily subsumed by slick and centralized.<p>In BitTorrent and Usenet we&#x27;ve had great, free p2p media distribution for years. How does iTunes, Netflix and the rest compete? By doing all the evil, centralized, corporate stuff -- like advertising -- the pirates won&#x27;t do because pirates have morals.

FTA: <i>&quot;Where Mark asks you to trust him to be a benevolent king, I say let us build a world without kings.&quot;</i><p>I&#x27;d also submit that even if you trust Zuckerberg to be a benevolent king, he won&#x27;t be king forever. He may grow bored of Facebook and move on, have an untimely accident or a poor diagnosis...these are all events that can put all things Facebook in the hands of somebody far less (presumably) benevolent.<p>Imagine it in the hands of a Larry Ellison. Or Martin Shkreli. Or Keith Alexander. Or Dick Cheney, if you will.

Actually the manifesto should be written with current FB users in mind, and how their use of the platform is (over?)empowering a select few into driving their own agenda.<p>Mark Zuckerberg and others like him do what they do best, it&#x27;s up to the &#x27;masses&#x27; to develop critical thinking about their everyday actions and impacts. It&#x27;s easy to blame the Emperor, much more difficult to admit our part in putting him into power.

Not a bad rebuttal, I have to agree that Zuckerberg is trying to position Facebook as the end all be all of social contact in the future. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a good solution.<p>But in reference to this quote:<p>&gt;The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.<p>That&#x27;s going a little far, filter bubbles and propaganda have existed since forever. The public sphere was never a panacea for these problems. Certainly with facebook and social media it&#x27;s changed the whole landscape, and perhaps made it worse given what happened during the last election. But returning social interactions to the public sphere isn&#x27;t going to entirely fix the dissemination of fake news or suddenly pop the filter bubbles we live in.<p>If social media were outlawed tomorrow it might weaken filter bubbles, but a suburban upper middle class republican from Kansas is still going to be getting way different info and building a much different world view than a barista in Brooklyn would.

When will the Bond villains that run the largest tech companies realize that they can&#x27;t own the Internet? Zuckerberg, your algorithms turned half my relatives into crazy Trump supporters that don&#x27;t talk to the other half, is that your idea of bringing families together?

I feel like we&#x27;re living in <i>The Circle</i> to some degree.<p>I hadn&#x27;t read Zuck&#x27;s manifesto until now. I literally laughed out loud reading it. It makes me wonder if he ever actually looks at the news feeds regular people see.<p>The reason I quit Facebook was precisely because its uninformed and non-inclusive. From what my wife tells me, nothing has changed. Like-minded people reinforce each other and people with conflicting viewpoints just argue.<p>I hope Zuck at least has good intentions with his post and he&#x27;s just slightly short-sighted.

I like this idea of technical organs, that are enmeshed with notions of self-hood.<p>Another person who has been talking in this way is the philosopher Bernard Steigler, he uses this term &#x27;general organology&#x27; in an attempt to rehabilitate our technological entanglements from the skeptical cul-de-sac demonstrated by the OP and supported by most recent philosophy (e.g. Adorno, Debord, although crucially not Walter Benjamin)<p>Although I am sure he would be equally vitriolic about FB the general overview of Steigler&#x27;s thought here is a neat compliment to the POV of the OP.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nootechnics.org&#x2F;general-organology-the-co-individuation-of-minds-bodies-social-organizations-and-techne&#x2F;bernard-stiegler&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nootechnics.org&#x2F;general-organology-the-co-individuati...</a><p>I have corrupted this angle a little bit and tried to treat Facebook with kid gloves here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iainmait.land&#x2F;posts&#x2F;20170201-transitional-object.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iainmait.land&#x2F;posts&#x2F;20170201-transitional-object.htm...</a>

I appreciate Aral&#x27;s general issues with Facebook. Privacy rights in the digital age are issues we face not just with SV, but with every corporation we interact with. I appreciate the EU&#x27;s interest in this sphere and I worry the rights of US citizens will be co-opted by corporate lobbying, not to mention other parts of the world.

This is what services like urbit are after. If you don&#x27;t understand urbit, think of it as a step towards what this post is advocating. Whether they can escape from the gravity well of their own obfuscation is, however, another matter.

Let me recommend Carr&#x27;s take on the manifest: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.roughtype.com&#x2F;?p=7651" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.roughtype.com&#x2F;?p=7651</a>

Im not sure what mark expects his user base to accomplish given that he believes they are &quot;dumb fucks.&quot; I know people like mark so i know that he still thinks ordinary people are dumb fucks and that the only reason behind any action he takes is the advancement of his own position in life and business.

A righteous rant.

Heartening to see this on HN.

Uh.<p>This is Urbit.

Am i the only one here that doesnt use facebook? I think i logged in once eight or so years ago. My clients dont use it. My friends do ... well <i>did</i>. But it was never an issue. My students avoid it due to the &quot;creep factor&quot;. I still live life via email and telephone and that isnt unussual. Even my tech clients, some in downtown SF, expect email to be the norm.<p>So when I see zuck going on about revolutions I have to wonder where he gets his information. Does he really think a large and growing percentage of the planet uses his website for everyday tasks? That&#x27;s marketing spin. I think reality is much more humble.