Jewel Blossom is a good friend of mine.

Apropos thick contractarianism, contract hacking!

I have published quite a few scholarly papers, and with each one I am invited to sign a copyright form. This is a contract between author and publisher, which which I hand over certain rights and the give me $0 (plus they publish my paper). These contracts (and my signature) is in dead-tree form, on real paper (though in recent years it follows the print/sign/fax or print/sign/scan/e-mail model).

I usually read these contracts, and from time to time I find some clause objectionable. My solution is to cross out the objectionable clause and write in my own words. After all, a contract is freely entered into between two parties, right? Since the publisher never reads these contracts after I fax them in, this has worked beautifully for years.

Reading the rest of the post, it becomes clear that they’re onto his game, but “it was fun while it lasted.”

Fourth in a series. See thick libertarianism, thick individualism and thick voluntarism.

I’m generally skeptical of contractarianism. I simply can’t imagine non-feudal contractual arrangements. Perhaps I’m not thinking far enough outside the box, or maybe I’m just too bogged down with surviving in the world as we know it. One idea that might make me more open-minded about the idea of contract is a social convention (not legislation, of course, for anarchy’s sake) that only publicly disclosed contracts need be honored. I’d probably go farther and not honor contracts between institutions and individuals; ‘boilerplate’ if you will. The trouble with boilerplate contracts is that they tend to be drafted by professional lawyers, often in a spooky “computer aided drafting” way, to maximize the intricacy of the interlocking implications and inferences, and signed by people not represented by lawyers. As Elizabeth Warren tells us:

Underestimating the intelligence of the American consumer because I think that they can’t read a contract that I’ve got to tell you I can’t read? I teach contract law at Harvard Law School, and [also] commercial law and bankruptcy … but if you put me under oath right now, I tell you, I don’t know what the effective interest rate will be on my credit card next month, because I can’t read it in my contract.

Perhaps the principle of American criminal law that accused persons are entitled to legal services should apply to contracts. Either both parties are represented or both parties aren’t. I refuse to allow liberty and equality to be played off against each other, so in terms of the types of contractarian ideology that frame contracts as voluntary limitations of one’s freedoms, I’m inclined to think that in a legitimate contract, the other party (especially if a business entity) is also making some sacrifices that “hurt.” This is the central reason I’m skeptical about contractarianism.  It seems to be a clever (i.e. sophistic) way of framing the freedom issue as voluntarism instead of anti-authoritarianism; paving the way for private sector fiefdoms.  I can’t imagine an objective standard of equitability, but transparency should go a long way toward building an informed public that knows the going rate for not having various strings attached to one’s life.

“If you remain neutral in a battle between a lion and a gazelle, you’ve effectively sided with the lion, and the gazelle isn’t going to appreciate it.”—Natalie Reed

“If there’s a chance for the wealthy to capture a social instrument, they will. If there’s an opportunity to use it to dump on the despised, it will be taken.”—Jack Crow

“The human resources folk who do this judging should somehow have to answer to the people they are nosing into.”—David Brin

“Getting a lousy public education, then being played against your fellow workers in Darwinian fashion by the free market economy does not make for optimism or open mindedness. It makes for a kind of bleak meanness nobody is openly talking about in the American political dialogue today.”—Joe Bageant (1946–2011), h/t Jack Saturday

“The legal and cultural norms of the U.S. are based around the notion that it is a middle class nation. It isn’t.”—Purple

“If, in the present chaotic and shameful struggle for existence, when organized society offers a premium on greed, cruelty, and deceit, men can be found who stand aloof and almost alone in their determination to work for good rather than gold, who suffer want and persecution rather than desert principle, who can bravely walk to the scaffold for the good they can do humanity, what may we expect from men when freed from the grinding necessity of selling the better part of themselves for bread?”—Lucy Parsons

“Instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.”—Henry David Thoreau

“Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.”—Ernesto “Che” Guevara

“‘Market value’ means the amount that would be paid in cash by a willing buyer who desires to buy, but is not required to buy, to a willing seller who desires to sell, but is under no necessity of selling.”—Jeff Hamilton

“One of the reasons it’s so easy to condemn the public sector is that it is so, well, public. Government makes decisions in front of everyone. Even a cub reporter can easily uncover problems. The private sector, on the other hand, acts in secret.”—David Morris

“I figure governments and corporations alike will seek to bottle of the genie of superintelligence. Expect very bad things if they succeed.”—Summerspeaker

“Homework: Think about ways that land based drones (air/ground) can maintain operation in a built up area for a year or more while remaining mobile and independent.”—John Robb

“Forget any notion that the ‘sharp elbows’ of the middle classes will be employed to make room for less privileged families; they bond, network and move within their class, there is scarcely any cross-class ‘bridging’.”—Stuart Weir (h/t Michel Bauwens)

“Does one have to have a PhD or be in the process of getting a PhD to be a considered an expert? This is the framework of the bourgeoisie, not a way to empower or give voice to a working class.”—Purple

“I am almost totally adult, but the child that used to be me has not committed suicide. He is still here inside me.”—Giulio Prisco

“Gayhoods and girlhoods are significant…

… even the erased ones.”—Valerie Keefe

“It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.”—Dale Carrico

“As a physicist, I will tell you one thing: no matter how afraid you are of nuclear war, you are not afraid enough.”—voxcorvegis

“The minority* of white, comfortable motherfuckers with vacation homes and private land lecturing the victims, the poor, the damaged, the abused, the raped, the herded, the harassed, the imprisoned, the exploited, the evicted, the institutionalized, the penalized and the discarded on what are and are not appropriate responses to victimization — that shit is rich. Literally. It takes a comparatively rich motherfucker to confuse the play-acting, submission rituals and lying of ‘civilized’ society with any end to institutional depravity, inequity and the hierarchies which profit from the same.”—Jack Crow

As you may know, my conception of equality is not so much equality of opportunity or the (IMHO straw-man) equality of results, but equality of footing. I fear there may be reality-based reasons to believe that equality in this sense and personal freedom may be conflicting goals. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there are inequalities in individuals’ level of ability that cannot readily be overcome. Let’s also assume that each individual carries a portfolio of skills, characterized by the familiar expressions “strong suits” and “weak suits.”

It is hoped that every individual, at least some of the time, will be in a situation which plays to their strengths. To mitigate the setbacks due to time one is not fortunate enough to spend in such environments, I propose centers of domain-specific equality in which earnest attempt is made to neutralize one or a few gradients of inequality; leaving others in play.

To conjure up an example, consider my stance that civil-service bureaucracy as an organizational form is not entirely without merit. This partial admiration of a type of institution that should be anathema to my anarchist sympathies is an expression of the fact (or at least self-perception) that negotiating skill is one of my very weakest skills. All other things being equal, I tend to accomplish more in an environment in which the rules, and more importantly the criteria (of merit, for advancement, of acceptability, etc.), are stated explicitly. I flounder when there are unwritten rules about which everyone is assumed to be aware. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I’d like to think that in a condition of anarchy (or at least of polyarchy), there can be affinity groups that emulate some features of a civil service bureaucracy, without implementing the key feature, of course, that being government. If one or two cooperative undertakings have a policy that stated prices are firm (i.e. not haggled over), or that the criteria for the privilege of producer-side participation (assuming here, of course, that the Hypostasis of the Agora cannot be overcome) are “as advertised.”

Enough about my weaknesses. This isn’t intended to be about me. While not a problem for me, some people’s weak suit is mathematics. Some refer to this as innumeracy. Whatever you call it, it get ruthlessly exploited in the existing economy. It isn’t hard to demonstrate that exploitation of naïveté about, say, exponential functions and their implications (e.g. compound interest), is central design feature of many down-market financial products. It should be possible to create spaces within polycentric or polyarchic society for, if not a math-free zone, at least a math-trickery-free zone, in which the more quantitative aspects of the terms of the deal are stated in terms of simple arithmetic or plain English.

Everyone deserves a chance to fly, or at least, to spend part of their life in an environment that downplays their weaknesses.

“Well, I am not convinced that Agorism is revolutionary at all. Except the fact that most agorists I’ve seen are simply some strain of ‘Anarcho’-Capitalist (or at the very least, support private property and the allow for wage labou[r]), Agorism itself [is] based on the idea that Black Markets can destabilize a society enough to topple the state.”—db0

“If the G8 want to hide themselves as far away from protesters as possible, I propose we shoot them off into space and leave them there.”—Broadsnark

“The big problem is that the elites pull their ‘divide and conquer’ shit. So they have the conservatives attack academia, and then the proggies feel that it’s ‘liberal’ to support academia in turn. Why that unbelievably obvious trick continues to work, I have no idea. Then again, maybe none of this stuff works.”—Roseanne

“A key flaw of capitalism is that in its search for profit, it preferentially creates products for those with disposable incomes to the detriment of adequate levels of necessary goods. Freedom to make a profit means the freedom to not produce necessities.”—Radical Progress

“A movement to Occupy, from my perspective, has to avoid the temptation to be about expanding the ranks of the winners, or changing the composition of the winners. It has to subvert the contest altogether.”—Freddie

“Many threats to freedom come from capitalists. The story is no longer capitalism and freedom, but capitalism against freedom. Two of the world’s largest economies — China and Russia — show that capitalism can exist quite happily without political freedom.”—Norman Geras

“For those with some political and historical knowledge, those who carefully file their definitions, an anarchist is someone that doesn’t believe state power is the object of struggle with the dominant social order but, a socially responsible and autonomous humanity — is — the object of struggle.”—Larry Giddings

“We will never get anything but the proverbial table scraps by begging from the rich or appealing to their better nature.”—Purple

“I don’t believe there is a class of lazy people who deserve to starve, rather such a class of people who cannot find work is the creation of capitalism itself, through its profit system.”—radicalprogress