Individualism is a very Western Anglo framing. Most of the World has in group preference. Mankind is tribal. White people are finding this out the hard way.
Interesting perspective, I definitely see that, maybe in certain demographics like progressive Americans in the 90s-2000s.
At the same time, white Americans are particularly aware of their own country's history with one of the most extreme forms of tribalism and in-group preference: slavery. And white people in general haven't been shielded from tribalism: the Yugoslav wars, which included ethnic cleansing and systematic mass rape, are the only example anyone needs that white people are just as prone to tribalism as any other group.
To me, it seems natural that eventually some segments of humanity would move toward philosophies like individualism after experiencing and understanding the destruction borne of tribalism and collectivism. That doesn't mean it's easy or inevitable. Some people live their entire lives making the same mistakes. But that only makes the advances other people make all the more important.
You had me at "...the dire future freedom faces..."
Please take a look at this essay. Freedom has never been under more threat, in the whole of human existence. This proposal is all about preserving human freedom, putting free human beings at the centre of every structure, every system, every platform, every time.
Well, libertarianism, like that sucked doge was a terrible idea. You can't trust government to trim its own fat. And it ended up cutting in the programs that were critical.
Libertarianism would be neat on paper if it wasn't just a stepping stone to neo serfdom . Institutions still have some value
🤦 I never use Gemini, but my other subscription ended and needed something new. Not used to getting a watermark in my outputs and didn’t catch it… Thanks for flagging and will edit it to remove.
Eloquently written essay, however, at least in the specific case of the USA, the following sentence is wrong and it was the opposite: "The lever that has actually changed incentive structures at a civilizational scale is not politics. It is technology". Historically and structurally the deployment, scaling, ownership, and functional integration of every major technology have been decisively shaped by political economy, institutional design, and legal-regulatory frameworks. For example, the printing press did not “liberate” all of Europe and the places where it did it effectively rolled out very differently due to those places having wide and deep federating of political authority and jurisdictional discretion, industrialization’s effects varied radically across differently organized states and legal regimes, and the internet itself, which emerged just after the multidecadal post Global Centralization project was nearing completion, was rapidly centralized through coordinated regulatory, financial, and infrastructural consolidation
Technological affordances are always filtered through institutional architectures. Also, I think the essay’s dichotomy between “state-controlled” and “decentralized” technology is a very risky one, this shallow because meaningful decentralization is not a output of tools but of systems; serious decentralization requires federated governance, serious policy variability, diffused and plural capital structures, accessible decision-making, etc
I agree with your definition of decentralization, and that is what I intended to imply with the word.
As for the regulatory power of the state to clamp down on technology, I also certainly agree, but I think the technology comes first and the political response generally comes second, albeit effected by existing institutional frameworks.
It is vital we out speed the political response, and when possible, create technological incentives that require political actors to bend more towards it than they can bend it towards them.
I was more referring to law/regulations in regards to its shaping effects on the technology, its design, its implementation, the methods of its deployment, the architecture of its embeddings in the economic and social worlds, and by extension, ultimately its technological-evolutionary pathways.
And its truly impossible for it to out speed politics as institutional frameworks are the manifestation of a system's true dominant or at least pre-dominant politics and from before it even arrives institutional frameworks are already shaping it as the technology is arriving into a structured field of ownership, capital structures and financial decision making architectures, infrastructural designs and controls, legal categories, jurisdictional architecture, and other important institutional dimensions (Jackson, 1832).
Politics will have already bent it before it was even born (Polk, 1845).
I think this is a chicken & egg problem. You are right about most of that (all except "truly impossible" I think), but it is also certainly true that technological advances have forced policy adaptation from government with the technologies I listed and many others. The effects go in both directions.
I agree that any time any one says anything related to the social sphere (and AI, including the details of its implementations and forms of usages is firmly within the social sphere ) is "truly impossible" they should, as an operative assumption, be assumed to be wrong on that specific count. But I think you get my point.
I hope I am not coming cross as acerbic, I truly dont mean to be and I really do think your work is intelligent.
But, respectfully, I do think "chicken & egg" is a bit of a cop out.
Individualism is a very Western Anglo framing. Most of the World has in group preference. Mankind is tribal. White people are finding this out the hard way.
Interesting perspective, I definitely see that, maybe in certain demographics like progressive Americans in the 90s-2000s.
At the same time, white Americans are particularly aware of their own country's history with one of the most extreme forms of tribalism and in-group preference: slavery. And white people in general haven't been shielded from tribalism: the Yugoslav wars, which included ethnic cleansing and systematic mass rape, are the only example anyone needs that white people are just as prone to tribalism as any other group.
To me, it seems natural that eventually some segments of humanity would move toward philosophies like individualism after experiencing and understanding the destruction borne of tribalism and collectivism. That doesn't mean it's easy or inevitable. Some people live their entire lives making the same mistakes. But that only makes the advances other people make all the more important.
You had me at "...the dire future freedom faces..."
Please take a look at this essay. Freedom has never been under more threat, in the whole of human existence. This proposal is all about preserving human freedom, putting free human beings at the centre of every structure, every system, every platform, every time.
https://systemshaywire.substack.com/p/the-threefold-social-platform-truly
Well, libertarianism, like that sucked doge was a terrible idea. You can't trust government to trim its own fat. And it ended up cutting in the programs that were critical.
Libertarianism would be neat on paper if it wasn't just a stepping stone to neo serfdom . Institutions still have some value
I realize it's fairly superficial, but it's extremely easy to remove that Gemini watermark.
🤦 I never use Gemini, but my other subscription ended and needed something new. Not used to getting a watermark in my outputs and didn’t catch it… Thanks for flagging and will edit it to remove.
Eloquently written essay, however, at least in the specific case of the USA, the following sentence is wrong and it was the opposite: "The lever that has actually changed incentive structures at a civilizational scale is not politics. It is technology". Historically and structurally the deployment, scaling, ownership, and functional integration of every major technology have been decisively shaped by political economy, institutional design, and legal-regulatory frameworks. For example, the printing press did not “liberate” all of Europe and the places where it did it effectively rolled out very differently due to those places having wide and deep federating of political authority and jurisdictional discretion, industrialization’s effects varied radically across differently organized states and legal regimes, and the internet itself, which emerged just after the multidecadal post Global Centralization project was nearing completion, was rapidly centralized through coordinated regulatory, financial, and infrastructural consolidation
Technological affordances are always filtered through institutional architectures. Also, I think the essay’s dichotomy between “state-controlled” and “decentralized” technology is a very risky one, this shallow because meaningful decentralization is not a output of tools but of systems; serious decentralization requires federated governance, serious policy variability, diffused and plural capital structures, accessible decision-making, etc
I agree with your definition of decentralization, and that is what I intended to imply with the word.
As for the regulatory power of the state to clamp down on technology, I also certainly agree, but I think the technology comes first and the political response generally comes second, albeit effected by existing institutional frameworks.
It is vital we out speed the political response, and when possible, create technological incentives that require political actors to bend more towards it than they can bend it towards them.
I was more referring to law/regulations in regards to its shaping effects on the technology, its design, its implementation, the methods of its deployment, the architecture of its embeddings in the economic and social worlds, and by extension, ultimately its technological-evolutionary pathways.
And its truly impossible for it to out speed politics as institutional frameworks are the manifestation of a system's true dominant or at least pre-dominant politics and from before it even arrives institutional frameworks are already shaping it as the technology is arriving into a structured field of ownership, capital structures and financial decision making architectures, infrastructural designs and controls, legal categories, jurisdictional architecture, and other important institutional dimensions (Jackson, 1832).
Politics will have already bent it before it was even born (Polk, 1845).
I think this is a chicken & egg problem. You are right about most of that (all except "truly impossible" I think), but it is also certainly true that technological advances have forced policy adaptation from government with the technologies I listed and many others. The effects go in both directions.
I agree that any time any one says anything related to the social sphere (and AI, including the details of its implementations and forms of usages is firmly within the social sphere ) is "truly impossible" they should, as an operative assumption, be assumed to be wrong on that specific count. But I think you get my point.
I hope I am not coming cross as acerbic, I truly dont mean to be and I really do think your work is intelligent.
But, respectfully, I do think "chicken & egg" is a bit of a cop out.