A whack on the side of the head that might wake some folks up.
I don’t necessarily agree with the “Gee whiz” and optimism in Bartlett’s article. The technology is still hard to pull off, and BitCoin still depends on “foreign exchange” with other currencies. The exchanges are the current profit centers driving the currency forward.
Moreover radical libertarianism has its own problems unless creativity is benignly focused, which it might be in some projects and not in others.
Networks have nodes; nodes gain power as they gain traffic, as any blog owner recognizes. Monetizing nodes is no different from monetizing blogs. And nodes arrange themselves, all things being equal, in hierarchies of salience to the network.
So what to make of Parallel Polis and its visions of future global politics?
What to make when there are independent essentially free networks offering open source encrypted access for all sorts of apps?
My key question: Who pays that huge electric bill for all those servers? Who buys the servers? Who mines the minerals that go into those servers? Yes, they have to do with resource and energy constraints.
But those natural resource constraints are much less exacting than the constraints facing the world’s militaries. One way or the other environmental limits will end war, probably long before the Parallel Polis new financial society arrives.
What is clear is that capitalist society in its pure form cannot survive its own disruptions, wars, and destruction of the planet.
What is not clear is the new form of post-capitalist civilization. It is a difficult to predict as post-feudal society was able to predict the consequences of its religious collapse and religious wars. Or the effects that would ripple out during the Enlightenment from Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press.
Just finished reading Joyce Chaplin’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. Today I discovered she tangled with Ted Cruz over the fact that it was the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that granted the US sovereignty, no matter how much legitimacy the Battle of Yorktown gave to the individual states. Franklin was a big player in the emergence of the new capitalist civilization. From the advice of Poor Richard and The Way to Wealth of self-advancement, creating the entrepreneurial frame of mind to the research into electricity that in the 1900s allowed the fractional-horsepower electric motor to drive manufacturing and electric waves and pulses to drive communication. Franklin’s research into the Gulf Stream created reliable and shipping in the 19th century that took advantage of knowledge of the weather and ocean currents. His advocacy of abolition of slavery created cheap wage labor after the Civil War, but paid enough to form a consumer base when coupled with fossil-fuel driven transportation and energy generation that subsidized manufacturing costs.
What he didn’t touch was the beginnings of management theory, worked out in the sugar-to-rum slave plantations of Barbados and Jamaica, transferred to cotton plantations, and then to the cotton mills of the British Midlands. (Engels owned one of them. Marx was subsidized from manufacturing income. That’s how they knew whereof they spoke. Not workers at all.) Franklin was an apprentice for his brother, ran away, then had his own apprentices. Then his own slaves, who became “servants” in France. Changing civilizations make complicated situations. Do the folks at Parallel Polis understand the ins and outs of the consequences of their technology?
The Treaty of Paris gave legal independence. Yorktown granted practical independence.
The Treaty of Paris was weasel-worded enough that the British could claim that it granted the Continental Congress independence under the authority of the king, justifying the abuses that lead to the war of 1812. This situation eerily echoed the treaty between the Eastern Roman Emperor and the Gothic King (too early to remember their names, no coffee yet) granting the Gothic King authority over the Roman peninsula. Emperor Justinian later claimed the right to take over direct administration and sent Belisarius to reconquer Italy.
The Goths saw it differently and the result was a long war that destroyed much of Italy’s cities and population.
Late Capitalism seems clearly to be hurtling itself towards its own destruction, now that it has been basically universally proclaimed the “victor” in the battle of ideas. Hard to see it as anything other than an elaborate house of cards, but it does seem able to withstand quite a bit of table-shaking, haha.
I enjoy the novels of Frenchman Michel Houellebecq, who categorizes western civilization into (so far) the Heroic, Religious and Materialist Ages, at least that’s my take on him. He hasn’t (so far) predicted the Age that will follow the current “materialist” one–which is powered by science and our technology, from Gutenberg’s printing press to today’s goddam smart phone. The world’s plutocrats now seem intent on undermining science as well as representative democracy. Houellebecq’s latest work “Submission” sees nothing left at the core/center of western civilization.
The transformation of the world as a result of digitization and internet is simply astounding, and frankly has ruined so many past stories/films of science fiction. It seems to me that essentially no one imagined it! Watching a film or TV program from, say, 1995 seems like a presentation of Mayberry RFD. Perhaps this is the coming new Age, the Digital Age?
And with such a radical change in social organization and behavior comes a raft of unintended consequences, such as this one you ruminate on. I can’t keep up with all of them, and wouldn’t want to even if I could. As one of Houellebecq’s characters observes, “I do not like this world, I definitely do not like it.”
There will be blood, Tarheel. Bet on it.
“The Center” creates its own form of gravity, pulling all masses (and all mass movements) towards itself. All of them, not just a two-dimnsional left and right…360 degrees of movements. These info-age hippies…’cuz that’s who they are, really, getting high primarily on the digital shit instead of weed and psychedelics…will encounter their own Kent States, their own Altamonts.
That little house on the digital Czech pairie pictured in that article?
As soon as i saw the pic I envisioned how easy it would be to wait until this movement really begins to bother the big fellas, wait until another convention and then just make it disappear, along with most of its major practitioners.
I can hear the official pronouncements now.
Especially if the center can manage to get its claws on those wild-eyed revolutionaries, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. An example for all techno-hippies. You will long for the good old days of Hell’s Angels beatings and National Guard shootings.
Bet on that as well.
What?
You think Putin would continue to shield Snowden once he was convinced that the crypto-anarchist movement truly threatens his own interests?
That Ecuador will not eventually pull the plug on Assange when it feels the full thrust of the center’s wrath?
Please!!!
Compared to destabilizing Venezuela, Ecuador would be child’s play.
This article…probably written by a very honest, well-meaning reporter…reminds me of all of those articles about a “New Age” about to dawn on the world during the Flower Power years.
50 years later?
The bombs still fall, people are still dying and the center remains, even stronger than before.
Blood will tell, Tarheel.
It always does,
AG