Category: Uncategorized

Big thank you to Jeremy Weiland for including this blog in the aggregation called leftlibertarian.org. I will try to keep the content worthy. Must confess last night threw in another quotebag due to writer’s block. My sympathies are more with social anarchism than left libertarianism, whose tone strikes me as a mixture of 1% left and 99% libertarianism. I have no quarrels with the libertarian left; as I understand their definition of ‘market’ almost perfectly matches the laissez-faire enthusiasts’ definition of ‘capitalism.’ My definition of capitalism is distinct from both; being simply another word for ‘business.’ My head is 100% on their side, while my heart has qualms with the bulletproof case of both camps to the effect that voluntarism implies agorism—with all that that implies—in particular price signals. The purpose of this blog is the search for end-runs around the Iron Laws of Economics. Lately I’ve been looking mainly at gift economy (gift paradigm as an alternative to exchange paradigm) and extreme transparency (visible hand as an alternative to invisible hand). I’m not sure my content is appropriate in a left libertarian venue, but I can promise to be nice, even when doing the devil’s advocate thing. And I appreciate the analytical acumen of the left libertarians. Those who are closer to my most passionate views, unfortunately tend to be either interested in talking about no subject other than demonstrations, or are hopelessly mystical and therefore speak gibberish. This project is, as much as anything else, an exploration of my own head…

At the Crossroads of Civilization, wiredsisters inform us that “[w]e know, from centuries of observation, that the market economy is basic to human nature.” Unfortunately for my purposes, that article is presented in religious terms. In other words, no attempt is made to challenge the positivists on positive grounds on the inevitability of markets. According to observable human nature, perhaps nothing is more unnatural than equality. In nature social groups are always hierarchical, and in mammals there is most always an alpha male to whom other individuals defer. Parrots may be a partial exception to the rule, in that at least their hierarchies appear to be “tangled,” or nonlinear, but even with them there is still the overall pattern of male dominance. Individualism, like egalitarianism, is unnatural. “Survival of the fittest” contributes to the increase in sophistication of species, not of individuals, which are the sacrificial element in that mode of development.

I find that treating everyone I meet as an equal takes a certain amount of willpower. Maybe that’s just a symptom that I’m more of a nebbish than the average human (and badly in need of some self-directed re-imprinting, perhaps), but dominance and submission does seem to be a more typical dynamic in group behavior. Needless to say, nowhere is my practice of forced equality more risky than in the workplace, which is why I insist that the workplace is a political place, quite independently of the formal construct called the state.

One person credited with bringing psychology into the natural sciences is B. F. Skinner. Is it any coincidence that the popularizer of the naturalistic approach to psychology is the author of a book titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity? I think not. Freedom and dignity (and importantly, equality) entail a relentless struggle against nature; a deliberate effort to do what does not come naturally. Therefore, I announce another component mental widget to add to my worldview-in-progress: unnaturalism. So far, the list of mental widgets reads as follows:

• thick libertarianism
• thick individualism
• thick voluntarism (a.k.a. feasibilism)
• unnaturalism

One of the many unkind side effects of living under a market economy is the fact that everyone is out to sell you something. My pet theory on this is that there is some Iron Law of Economics to the effect that Information Does Not Want To Be Free; so noise will inevitably trump signal. Market economics guarantees that many people will find a market niche only in promotion—salescrittership, marketing and advertising—in a word—spam. In the last three days there seems to have blossomed an epidemic of a form of blogspam they call “referrer spam” here at WordPress. A spambot of this type references its spam (or java exploit or malware or virus) page as the ‘referrer’ in the http headers. The fake referrer page is inevitably wrapped in a shortened URL. A sort of master decoder ring to shortened URL’s is the invaluable LongURL website. Domains associated with the current spamwave include statisticscounters.com, xtrmzone.net, maxfos.com—all of which should be considered spam domains, along with rogue link shortener domains pendek.in and ilnk.me and migre.me.

Via Liberation Frequency:

Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God. Try it, if you don’t believe it. Seek through the legislative halls of America and find, if you can, the Government. In the end you will be doomed to confer with the agent, as before. An agent is usually held accountable to his principals. If you do not know the individuals who voted for you, then you do not know for whom you are acting, nor to whom you are accountable. If any body of persons has delegated to you any authority, the disposal of any right or part of a right (supposing a right to be transferable), you must have received it from the individuals composing that body; and you must have some means of learning who those individuals are, or you cannot know for whom you act, and you are utterly irresponsible as an agent.

Voltairine de Cleyre

I guess this is the unintended [?] consequence of separation of powers. The “government” itself is a diffuse organization with no official, identifiable center, sort of like Al Qaeda. But is this impossibility of identifying agency not also characteristic of the Invisible Hand? The Invisible Hand is said to be an agent, whose actions are the “aggregate” of certain actions of the “individuals composing that body” (or that hand, anyway), but seek through the executive suites of businesses, the day-books of the merchants or even the grocery lists of the millions, and find, if you can, the Invisible Hand. I have always said the Invisible Hand is amoral. Perhaps I should also describe it as irresponsible and unaccountable.

At the intersection of autism and economics there have been some unfortunate choices of terminology. Happily, the people behind that have changed the name of their house organ from “Post-autistic Economic Review” to “Real-World Economic Review.” [A post in a now-defunct blog], tells us the following:

Most stick to their positions, even in the face of intense social pressure, and their values aren’t shaped by financial, social, or political influences.

“Aren’t” sounds like it might be an over-generalization; even something that could be inferred as a guarantee. A flattering stereotype is still a stereotype. I would nevertheless be willing to stick my neck out far enough to suggest that autistic persons, on average, are harder to buy off. This seems counterintuitive given some estimates of an autistic adult unemployment rate north of 90%. If autistic people are under more financial pressure than most people, perhaps it is reasonable to believe they are more likely to be able to be bought off. This may be the case, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be the case. Wondering out loud, could it be that a certain relative guilelessness that might be associated with autistic folk, might be a large contributor to the shocking employment statistics? It seems a reasonable guess that companies choose employees not just for what they’re able to do, but what they’re willing to do. Could it be that having values that “aren’t [generally] shaped by financial, social, or political influences” makes one somewhat unemployable? It raises questions, like what percentage of employed people were hired specifically for what they’re willing to do? What percentage were hired mainly for that tendency, or partially, etc.—and how could one go about empirically testing such a hypothesis?

I first encountered the term “aikido activism” years ago in a post at tribe.net by one Spidey. Aikido activism is basically the idea that for-profit forms of organization might be better suited to activist goals than non-profit ones. Being, as I am, a knee-jerk (or maybe just a jerk of an) anticapitalist, of course, I thoroughly panned the concept. I was starkly reminded of the aikido activism concept when I encountered the CureTogether Blog. In their “who we are” statement, I found them to be an collaborative, information-sharing platform, which is the type of thing I’m always interested in. One the one hand, CureTogether is non-competitive and “not in it for the money.” On the other hand,

We chose carefully to be a for-profit company because we can do much more good as a business than if we had to constantly ask for donations.

I have made non-profit status part of the very definition of pubwan, my proposed suite of techniques for collaborative data mining of the consumer marketplace. Of course, pubwan as a project has attracted almost no interest and accomplished nothing of importance, and of course I’ve suspected that my resistance to what I perceive to be the tyranny of the business model may be a large part of the reason why. Pubwan supporter Poor Richard informs us:

…However, the simple corporate charter IS the most robust, bulletproof, legal instrument. The 501(c)3 corporation is subject… to many rules and legal challenges. Trusts, co-operatives, and even condo agreements are more specialized and legally assailable on more technical grounds. At the same time, the plain, simple corporation can do anything any of the more specialized forms can do except for tax exemption. Tax exemption you don’t want because it makes you more vulnerable to the state and to your enemies. All you have to do to avoid paying taxes is to break even, which is easy to arrange. The single disadvantage is that charitable donations to your corporation are not tax deductible to the giver.…

and, importantly

Note: the place to embed all your alternative, egalitarian principles and methods is in the corporate bylaws rather than in the charter. This makes them practically invisible to the external legal environment.

Getting back to CureTogether, the business model, as usual rests on the leveraging (though admirably in this case not merchandising) of its aggregate data holdings, constrained by the usual privacy policy boilerplate (emphasis mine):

Your data is your data, totally private for only you to see. Aggregate statistics are made available on our website – for free. Occasionally, we will work with reputable research organizations to get more brilliant minds working on improving everyone’s health, and they sometimes make donations to support our work. In these cases, we may share some of the data we gather, but always take numerous steps to protect our members — both technical (such as removing any potentially identifying data prior to sharing), and legal (requiring researchers to legally bind themselves to not even attempt to personally identify any of our members). Sometimes, we will do custom research studies for companies and get paid for it. In these cases, we never share raw data with them. We only generate reports based on abstracted findings, similar to what we publish openly on our website.

There are important similarities and important differences with the data model proposed for pubwan. I’ve already discussed the most important similarities; namely that it is a collaboration engine and information-sharing platform. The main difference is the first sentence above, and the reason I emphasized it. Pubwan, if implemented, would treat all data (particularly meta data, raw data, aggregate data) as “informational non-property,” which is to say, strictly copyleft. But if it can’t be implemented as a nonprofit, the next question becomes, is there a way to generate exchange value (CureTogether even views donations as “a reflection that we’ve built something useful”) while refusing to use the contents of an informational black box as a strategic asset? This question has important implications for anagorism as well as for pubwan.

For what it’s worth, hat tips are in order: I found the CureTogether Blog via Quantified Self, which it co-sponsors. The phrase “quantified self” I picked up from the KurzweilAI newsletter.

Is there some Iron Law of Economics to the effect that a walkable neighborhood in the U.S.A. has to be either a college town or a ridiculously gentrified east or west coast city?

h/t the admirable Nominatissima

On the previous blog I installed the free-as-in-beer version of the ClustrMaps gadget. They recently enhanced the quality of the data provided to the users of the free version of the product. Before, the “Current Country Totals” table listed the countries from which the site had been visited, and the number of hits for each country. Now, each countries count is expandable, and tallied by state or province for the United States and Canada, and city for the rest of the countries. The table itself (and the red dots on the map) still only reflect visits prior to the most recent update. One doesn’t get an update unless/until the total hit count is 5% (if I’m not mistaken) above what it was at the previous update, until it tops 1,000, and then it’s 10%. Another added feature is that the ten most recent hits are listed by city/state/province and country just below the map, and represented by yellow dots on the map. I suppose at this point someone could do an end run around the update policy by writing a screen scraper to look at the “yellow dot” entries at periodic intervals. Of course universities, who have a long tradition of operating their own physical servers, routinely dump far higher resolution server stats directly into the public domain. Ownership has its privileges, as they say—as does “server side netizenship.”

At first glance, this appears to be an example of free enterprise, or making an enterprise of what used to be free. During the mid-1990’s migration of the Internet from the .edu domains to the .com domains, finger and talk were replaced by instant messaging, IRC was replaced by chat rooms, USENET by message boards, blogs and eventually social network-type websites. All the relevant technology was in place before the commercialization of the Internet. Apparently what was needed to take it to the next level was the necessity of hanging a business model on it. So today, I still check my email, still check what people are posting online, still live chat once in a blue moon, only now I’m using 200 times as much bandwidth, 3,000 times as much memory and 400 times the clock speed.