Category: Uncategorized

Aral Balkan:

Whoever you are, wherever you are, we have a common enemy: the nationalist international.

Heather Marsh:

Most systems are now run by competitive organizations. Competition creates redundancy, is slow and wastes resources on idea protection, advertisement, and more. Competition also requires secrecy which blocks progress and auditing and causes lost opportunities and ideas.

Michael O. Church:

At a nuclear or higher technology level, post-scarcity automated luxury communism is the only economic system that stands a chance, and we should race to it.

Red Mike:

Every job I’ve ever had has required me to do things and behave in ways I am not comfortable doing, and I don’t think this is unique or rare, its just that the Slasher is an extreme case.

The Fool:

A society free of exploitation and extortion means that nobody gets rich.

I long ago gave up on “right livelihood,” concluding that it’s literally an oxymoron. This is of a piece with my conclusion that there is no possibility of monetization without value subtraction. Consquently, I’ve concluded that the least pro-social jobs are probably those dues-paying jobs for people starting out in some hypercompetitive white collar field such as financial trading or biglaw, which basically amount to hazing by sleep deprivation, and even more importantly (I think), systematic elimination of leisure time from waking hours. I think it should probably be considered a form of brainwashing. The effective altruism community mantra about it taking 10,000 hours to level up to an 80,000-hour career, I’m guessing, can only make matters worse.

But I’m a generation X slacker, so what do I know?

It’s (by definition) not labor-saving technology if more jobs are created than destroyed. The problem with “level up” as a strategy for dealing with it is that the jobs to be “leveled up” to are fewer in number, so it takes a much larger GDP to support the same number of jobs. A red queen race, or perhaps a pyramid scheme, to maintain employment levels. Or a constantly raising bar for workers (and race to the bottom for standards) if we don’t.

“It’s really corporatism you’re against” has become quite a cliché talking point. The problem is, “corporatism” being the problem is always a wind-up for a pitch for “laissez-faire” being the solution, whether that means “separation of economy and state” or a “subsidy-free society” or a society free of “rent extraction.” The underlying theory behind “it’s really corporatism you’re against” seems to be that when private actors do bad things, there’s INVARIABLY a public actor subsidizing them, or otherwise shielding them from what otherwise (according to the theory) would be the consequences of their actions.

I simply don’t buy that theory.

I’m quite certain that wealth would tend toward power in the absence of subsidy; in fact that the problem would be even worse. I’m OK with calling out rent seekers as long as I’m “punching up” when doing so, and even then, I can almost always (and prefer to) frame my objection to their conduct as something other than rent seeking. That’s why I’m always suspicious of people using the “corporatism” frame, they’re invariably libertarians whose rhetorical gambit (toward a left audience) is to bait our “anti-corporate” attitudes and switch us to what is nevertheless a pro-business position. I’m anti-business.

Human escape from natural constrains sounds like a worthy project. Destruction of nature seems, well, destructive, but of course so does nature. I’m of two minds on the subject. I try to sleep at night by imagining that self awareness is unique to humans, but remain aware that notions of human exceptionalism, like notions of pie in the sky, are a feature of religion, not science. Consciousness as a result of evolution, where evolution is a result of natural selection, is quite the trap. Cruel enough to tempt me to pendulum swing all the way past atheism to Manichaeism or some other type of demiurgical belief system.

COVID-19’s effects on media (and on the national Zeitgeist) are reminiscent of those of 9/11. The media have gone into full hero-worship mode, and the professions hailed as heroic are precisely the professions whose vetting process is basically hazing—the military, the police, the firefighters, the doctors and the nurses. Put another way, shit hitting fans in dramatic world-changing ways is the diametric opposite of Jesus’ prophecy about the meek inheriting the earth.

As I see it, the job of a HTTP client (browser) is to correctly implement the open standards that define the web, no more and no less.

I’m political enough about open source that I’ll endure a fair amount of inconvenience in order to avoid proprietary (or even commercial) software, but I also disagree on most points with the direction Firefox has been going, especially with UI and extensions. Maybe being political about open source is an empty gesture like fair trade coffee. It certainly seems sometimes like Firefox is an example of openwashing, which is scary, as browsers are basically the key underlying technology of the web, and the HTTP/HTML/CSS/Javascript standard is getting complex enough that only a multigazillion dollar organization can build a web browser (in particular, a rendering engine) from scratch that correctly implements the standards. I used to laud the idea of industry standards, as I saw them as the correct alternative to proprietary kludges becoming de-facto standards, but since the bodies making the standards are basically industry consortia, or organizations whose members are organizations (mostly of the for-profit type), what standards-making has turned into is a conspiracy of the commercial participants against the noncommercial participants.

This post was originally a comment to /u/DarSakhar’s Reddit post, If, for some unknown reason, this subreddit disappeared completely one day, how would you connect with other AnComs?

In general, choose DIY platforms over commercial platforms. Choose blogging over social media, and if possible self-host a blog (or other type of web site) rather than go with a blog-platform-in-a-can like Blogger or WordPress-dot-com.

Admittedly, I still use commercial social media, as evidenced by the present comment. There are some audiences that I’ll never, ever reach except through social media. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend muting your voice just to say you’re boycotting social media. But one practice I have adopted is, if I notice that I’ve put a fair amount of effort into a post or comment on social media, I immediately copypaste it into my now-self-hosted blog. I want the public domain to have my best work.

If you’re an OTA viewer you’re feeding on cultural leftovers, quite literally. If you’re not, your baseline cost of living is poverty line times 1.5 or something. Sure Netflix is somethingteen dollars a month (or is it more by now? I don’t follow such things), but for all practical purposes assumes you have wired Internet access. Figure a hundred a month, or no paywalled programming, back to diet of slop. Even going to the movies once-every-few-months (not cheap, but at least not a monthly commitment) leaves you out of some loops, as parts of the feature films business is going into Netflix-exclusive distribution and the like. I rationalize it as, oh, well, I’m a grownup, I’ve made my own bed, should have known the starving artist life might not be the best way to “feed my head.” But now even children watching Sesame Street on PBS are feeding on the leftovers of the children of HBO subscribers. This may have unforeseen social impact. If you’re out of the pop culture loop, you have less to bring to the water cooler, so to speak. It could in theory even hobble some people’s career development (because networking) for example. I mean, let’s be blunt, almost all the advertising that’s commercially viable on the “simulcast” channels, really any of the OTA channels outside what’s left of the part of network prime time that’s still at least half-a__edly vying for Emmys (targeted by Target), literally shouts “hey loser” at its audence. It’s pretty much down to lawsuit bait and Medicare scams. What else you gonna sell to a penniless audence?

I am not a mutualist. I was first exposed to neo-mutualist ideas via the C4SS blog. I refer to myself as an “anagorist,” a term I coined back in 2010 as my take on agorism; a philosophical designation that, along with mutualism, is popular with the C4SS crowd. My reasons for being anti-market are actually quite visceral. In a market economy one has to market oneself. To say that marketing is my weak suit would be a massive understatement. Virtually every problem I have in life stems either from my tendency to stutter in job interviews or to pay retail because I can’t/won’t haggle over prices. It seems self-evident to me that getting the most out of market exchanges is a skill set, and that skill levels vary between individuals. I see know way around such skill inequalities resulting in social hierarchies.

The C4SS people and other mutualists talk a good game about worker-owned cooperatives, but assume competition between cooperatives. I do understand that competition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive and can co-exist, but I don’t see this as a good thing. In capitalism, workers are expected to cooperate with their co-workers while competing with colleagues in competing firms. I don’t believe the latter competition brings out the best in products or people. It leads to inefficiency, such as when workers in one firm re-invent something the other firm has, possibly without even knowing it, thanks to enforcement of knowledge silos. The abolition of intellectual property (something the mutualists, to their credit, favor) would not eliminate that particular inefficiency. That would require the abolition of competition.

The nuclear option in the mutualists’ arsenal of arguments against anagorism (or the equivalent by another name) is the so-called calculation argument of Mises and Hayek. Which reminds me, another pet peeve I have with C4SS that they love quoting right wing philosophers like Mises, Hayek, Nozick, etc., and linking to websites of pro-business think tanks like Mises Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, etc.

My main philosophical project as an anagorist is to develop a strong rebuttal to the calculation argument. I find this quite challenging, as I find the calculation argument quite compelling, even though of course I’m committed to opposition against it. My thoughts on how to build a non-market, non-command economy are summarized in a two-post series using a rubric I call “angel economics.” The basic idea is to build the new allocation mechanism within the shell of the old (the old one being the market) by reverse engineering the market.

While a strong case can be made for price signals in a market being very information-rich, I don’t buy the claim that prices incorporate all information, or even all information that people need in order to make intelligent economic decisions. A price is a scalar quantity, literally a single number. One simply does not reduce dimensionality (such as from vector to scalar quantities) without loss of information. If scary-smart feats of allocation efficiency can be achieved by revealed preference (and I do buy that claim concerning markets) then certainly far more efficiency can be realized with explicit communication of preferences. Parecon (participatory economics) is an attempt to give people an opportunity to express their producer and consumer utility explicitly. Hopefully angel economics can take that farther.