Re: The Security Übermensch

Sat Sep 7 21:10:06 CEST 2013

Madly busy here (and have allocated next week to doing music not politics,
before diving back into education to get a Masters degree after that), but
I'll throw in some observations...

Political parties are heading into into a larger version of the post
Vietnam problem that America just just about stumbled through: For a period
of time, all potential presidential candidates were either too old, too
young, draft-dodgers or vietnam vets, any one of which made them unsuitable.

The coming problem is that given the pervasiveness of the internet, any
sufficiently advanced surveillance system can blackmail all non
sociopathically boring people ("Nearly 300,000 "attempts to access websites
categorised as pornography" were made from computers within parliament in
the past year, official records show."-
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/03/parliamentary-network-pornography-websites-figures).

This means that spying agencies have the potential to be scarily good at
self-preservation (conspiracy theorists are already attribute Obama's oddly
pro-surveillance state position to exactly this mechanism).

Politics is an odd beast, and like publishing, music making and so many
other fields, computers will probably change it in unpredictable ways over
the coming years. Arguably Arab spring was partially the product of
disaffected people being able to find each other and organise things in
cyberspace.

One of the oddest things in politics is that people ignore actual
candidates and vote instead for parties, even if their local candidate from
that party is hopelessly misaligned with that party, or even just plain
hopeless. I have no idea how this could be changed, but changing it would
lead to a drastic improvement in the quality of candidates from all parties.

Wish I had time to write more...

- Andy_R

On 7 September 2013 19:38, Jay Vaughan <jayv at synth.net> wrote:

> An excellent and composed discourse on your position, Tony .. I respond to
> some points which struck me quite intelligent:
>
> On 06/09/2013, at 3:08 PM, Tony Scharf <entropymagnet at noisetheorem.com>
> wrote:
>
> > By spying on the people from which the power to govern is derived the
> government loses all right to complain when it is in turn spied on.  In
> fact, they leave us little choice but to spy.
>
> I've never considered the fact that I have no clue whatsoever what the
> government is doing on a daily basis, to be very settling at all.  In fact
> from a very young age, I simply abandoned any interest in government due to
> the obscurity and obfuscation of the entire subject.  Its not some added
> feature to our society which I felt I learned about adequately and
> participate in properly, but rather an industry in and of itself, tied very
> much to every single persons' survival, yet at the same time, disconnected
> completely from the individual.
>
> Government is just 'out there', and I sort of trust this 'super-'organism
> to be doing its job. I guess someone is doing their job in the end, and a
> lot of very good government occurs along the way, let us not forget,
> because there are a lot of people out here in the world who are *not*
> killing each other, and who *do* get along just fine with managing their
> resources around them, such that everyone wins.  Somehow.
>
> And this aspect of this super-being/entity is something that I just don't
> perceive, in any technical sense, other than at the tip of the spear.  Must
> I really become a lawyer to be able to keep pace with government, at a
> simple level?  It seems so.
>
> So your suggestion that we spy on the spies rings for me.  Why do we not,
> in fact, just all have free and unwilling access to every single thing that
> someone does, in our names, with ease?
>
> Because government - like all human activities, always and forever - is
> continually being subverted.  Actively.  "Sub-"consciously.  By other,
> 'super-'entities, such as corporations, leagues, religions, countless forms
> of institution, association, and so on..
>
> The Open-Source politics in me suggests that we can actually fix this.
>  Its a technological problem as well as an ethical one.  I'm not sure that
> Liquid Democracy is the solution (Pirate Party), but its a start.
>
>
> >   I tend to believe that this is just an unintended consequence of
> creating what essentially becomes a primitive collective consciousness, an
> oversoul that we all tap into digitally at this point (though in the
> future, that connection may become much more complete and intimate).
>
> These 'collective consciousnesses' that you describe, or 'super-'entities,
> or 'hiveminds', or 'consumer market groups', or whatever we call them .. we
> have a lot of them running the planet right now.  They're all connected.
>  Its going to be very hard to defeat the people running the
> highly-destructive companies such as Monsanto and Raytheon, in an
> ideological sense, because there are a mighty *lot* of people working in
> that industry, and their ideology is *aligned* at the same time there are
> active procedures and methodologies being run on the social stage in order
> to *prevent* other alignment occurring, by other groups.  Witness the
> destruction of the Tea Party.  Witness the undermining of the Occupy
> movement.  Witness countless human-rights groups activities being
> dissembled, in industrial fashion, over the last hundred years - and even
> still today, we will find subversion occurring.
>
> Its a battlefield of ideology versus ideology, a massive sphere of
> interconnected mental activity, all boiling down to just a few small
> things: who has the food, and who has the bomb.  Who gets to sleep safe at
> night, and who simply die, unnoticed.
>
> Government is in the business of answering these questions, and that is
> the problem in my personal opinion.  Humans should never enslave themselves
> as products, but oh boy: we do it.  The mere fact that we are treated as
> consumers is the clue.
>
>
> > There is actually a book I read some time in the 90's by David Brin (?)
> called 'Earth'.
>
> Great recommendation!
>
> ;
> --
> Jay Vaughan
>
>
>
>
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