Category: Uncategorized

Specifically, to mention When did you join the IndieWeb? by Neil Mather. The present post is a supposed to be a reply to the same. Hope everything works as intended.

I’d prefer not to live in a meritocratic order, because meritocratic ends in -cratic; I don’t really need any other reason. Certainly I consider meritocracy a lesser evil than nepotism. In practice, though, systems said to be designed as meritocratic as often as not amount to nepotism-washing. I’m very cynical about the prospects for meritocracy as an antidote for nepotism. Meritocracy in practice is too often something like: we have scholarship funds for people of modest means (or better yet, from deep poverty), but it takes two legacy admits to pay for each one.

It’s like in the ancient TV show “LA Law,” some young associate got into law because of its potential to help people, but are alarmed about the amount of billable business they have to drum up to be afforded the privilege of a little pro bono work. Whatever pro-social things are instituted are set up as negative sum games; the house always wins.

I’ve stated on the record many times that I’d ditch anagorism in favor of agorism if it could be shown that the market mechanism (with or without some “tweaking”) would be able to perform the astoundingly efficient calculation of optimal allocation of resources if the criteria of efficiency were person weighted rather than dollar weighted. In other words, my question is whether it’s possible to add (or subtract?) zero or more tweaks (these could be anything from basic income payments, cultural changes, regulations, incentives, contrived currencies, etc.), let the people commence grubbing and hustling in the world of commerce, each according to their own self interest, and at the end of the day the market outcomes (prices, supplied and demanded quantities for the various product categories, and the capital composition of the various industries) would be roughly what they would be if everyone had started the day with an equal amount of wealth.

I’m skeptical as to whether such a portfolio of tweaks is possible, as market transactions themselves are predicated on a quantitative equilibrium of the value flows each way. I’m inclined to believe that the atomic-level structure of markets, transactions, are where money equals power. Dangling money can get people to jump. I don’t see any possibility of neutralizing that, and I can’t imagine market outcomes being determined on anything other than a one-dollar-one-vote basis.

A Redditor by the name of /u/Unfilter41 posted this comment about this video:

The Hated One is one of the few non-far-right alt tech people on YouTube.
Un-feeding Google is a good idea.

I’m still scratching my head about how the left managed to get so computer illiterate. Or did it happen the other way around by all the programmer types getting infected by some kind of malevolent Snow Crash type pathogen? If so, how did I escape? Maybe it’s because I’m not the programmer I think I am. But maybe, just maybe, I’m truly gifted at code and my lack of career progress is 100% due to the fact that I hate monetization of data with the heat of a thousand suns, and 0% for lack of coding skills. I will probably never know.

It puzzles me to no end. More and more with each passing day it seems like everyone who takes privacy or independent computer usage even half seriously is part of some kind of alt right cult. It leads me to wonder whether I’m on the wrong side of some issues. Maybe proprietary treatment of data and systems actually serves the cause of social justice (or the public domain as I understand it is hostile to that cause) and my brain is just too “stem-oriented” to see the obvious. I wish someone could explain it to me in terms I can understand.

goal: lose amateur status (in my case, in software development)

what’s holding me back: I suspect, my belief/attitude that all strategies for monetizing software or data products are deeply cynical and ethically questionable.

the other thing holding me back: the fact that the field I’m interested in has systematically and intentionally eliminated the very concept of an entry level position.

But anyhoo, shameless plug in case anyone might know someone who knows someone:
https://codeberg.org/n8chz

They need to be disassembled, in the assembly language sense. The root of the problem is commercializing the Internet in the first place. I don’t know what if anything can be done at this stage. Maybe create a whole new internet from scratch, and hopefully leapfrog some key mistakes that went into the development of the one we have. Being an ancom, I deeply distrust both business and government. I think the Internet had some promise as a positive technological development back when much of it was concentrated in academia, but of course I don’t very much trust academia, either. I do think the replacement for the Internet should be explicitly monetization-hostile by design.

For now, rear guard defensive action to preserve (or if necessary, restore) what’s still good about the Internet such as the fact that it runs on a nonproprietary stack of protocols, while creating and promoting nonproprietary (necessarily, noncommercial) and decentralized alternatives to the “platforms.” Also, reverse-engineering at least a modicum of interoperability into the damn platforms by licit means or otherwise.

To me, the ultimate luxury is the luxury of not being in it (whatever ‘it’ is) for the money.

I don’t think there’s anything in socialism that rejects (material) luxury, but there are many flavors of socialism. Environmentalism might have something to say about it. My personal ism (aside from anagorism) is negative utilitarianism, so I go by the logic that nobody should get luxuries until everybody gets necessities.

I’m absolutely sick of lines of argument (either way) constructed within the “socialism equals public sector” framework. It erases the authentic socialist movement (for better or for worse) from the history of ideas, and supplies fuel to those who would redbait anything that deviates from the most ruthlessly darwinian conception of “laissez-faire” capitalism.

I tend to place blame for most of the predatory practices of Silicon Valley not on computing itself, but on proprietary computing itself, or on monetization, if you will. The problem is not so much surveillance as information asymmetry, or unfair informational advantage. This is a direct consequence of the fact that the technologies are being implemented in the for-profit sector. A modern website or mobile app is very intentionally designed to transmit signal (direct observations of behavior, and other actionable data) in one direction and noise (basically bloat) in the other. To forego any monetization opportunity is to leave money on the table, and of course that is a literal sin against the principal-agent principle. If we wanted search to be a utility, content to be a library, communication to be person-to-person, or platforms to come without vendor lock-in, we should have left the Internet in mostly academic hands, as it was in the early 1990s.

If by democracy we mean majority rule, then I can’t entirely say I believe in it. Even there, my objection to majority rule is to the rule part, not the majority part. If by democracy we mean “control from the bottom up” (and I think that is a correct understanding of democracy) then yes, I’m explicitly pro-democratic. Also, I’m not so doctrinaire in my anti-statism that I don’t perceive degrees of evil among statist forms. It is entirely without indecision that I consider democratic forms of government an unambiguously lesser evil than nondemocratic ones. I also have a decided preference for direct democracy over representative democracy. Also, I’m intensely anti-antidemocratic. The rightist slogan “America is (supposed to be) a republic, not a democracy” is something I hate with the heat of a thousand suns.

Some objections to direct democracy portray everyone voting on every issue as a burden. I should certainly hope that everyone could vote on every issue if they wanted to. In practice it would be good to be able to delegate some of those decisions, but not to have to do so.

Bootmakers voting on issues concerning bootmaking is good. Hopefully bootmakers can have the luxury of regarding each other as colleagues instead of competitors, but cooperation vs. competition is perhaps a separate question from democracy. I don’t know whether end consumers of boots are morally entitled to a say in the manufacture of boots, but I do think they’re entitled to detailed and accurate information about the supply chain. This is why collegiality is so important to me. Colleagues share knowledge with each other, and hopefully with the larger world, perhaps as published research. Competitors hoard trade secrets. One effect of that proprietary treatment of knowledge is a consumer public kept in the dark and pretty much flying blind when it comes to consumer decisions, and decisions in general.