July 1. So what happened with Obama? How far back would you have to go to find an administration worse on civil liberties? Could anyone have predicted this? And I mean for a good reason, not the knee-jerk cynicism that drove Obama's opponents in 2008. If you think every new president is going to be terrible, you will not be disappointed, but your opinion is meaningless. What I'm wondering is: in hindsight, can we come up with testable principles that will help us predict the behavior of political candidates and choose them better?
I see three stories. One is that Obama was a secret authoritarian all along. So when he spent years as a community activist, he was thinking, "Man, I hate these losers. They need to shut up because the government knows better. But my evil timelord masters have told me that this will get me elected president in 2008." Or, when he singlehandedly pushed a bill through the Illinois legislature to make cops videotape interrogations, he was thinking, "Bwa ha ha, now they will never guess, when I run for president, that I want the power of the police to be completely unchecked!" This story is funny but not helpful.
The second story is more realistic, and more cynical: that even if you yourself were president, you could not stop secret assassinations of American citizens, or a million-fold increase in violations of the Fourth Amendment. John Dean famously said "There is a cancer growing on the presidency." But suppose there's a cancer growing above the presidency, an alliance of high technology and central control that is now politically unstoppable. I don't see an Orwellian future, but a blend of Kafka and Huxley, where the control system is incomprehensible and you do not have a shred of freedom or power outside the world of entertainment.
The third story is that Obama was corrupted by power. But here we need to distinguish different things that are called "corruption". One of them I call third world corruption: the purpose of any political office is to channel money and power to yourself and your friends and family. Bush was somewhat third-world corrupt, and Obama is not at all. Instead he might be suffering from two other overlapping corruption syndromes.
One I call strategy game corruption, inspired by this article, Seeing like a state: Why strategy games make us think and behave like brutal psychopaths. Now, I don't think games make us behave that way outside the game, but they can help us understand it. I recommend Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. In a hard game, if you want to win, sometimes your best move is to nerve-staple your drones. And Obama has two traits that would make him more susceptible to strategy game corruption. First, he has high "intelligence", which is mostly the ability to narrrowly focus on abstractions, which makes it easy to see human beings as pawns in a game. Second, like every other high-level politician, he is highly competitive. Maybe we need to recruit slacker leaders who don't really want the job.
The other way Obama could be corrupt, I'll call framing corruption: you take on the world-view and the values of whatever people are around you. Obama could be especially vulnerable to this, and I wonder if anyone called this in 2008. It seems like a virtue that he's a consensus-builder and not an ideologue, but he could be a consensus-builder to the point of being morally empty. So when he was surrounded by the poor and powerless, he fought hard for their interests, and as president he fought hard for the interests of medical insurance companies, and now, people who use technology to crush humanity in the name of security. To prevent this in the future, we need to look for leaders who have set an example of being surrounded by the rich and powerful, and turning against them.
Anne comments:
Arguably, there's a fourth narrative that scares me shitless... there is something totally implausible and unsupportable about the American way of life -- maybe it's the grand marquee of moralistic issues, like debt and overconsumption, maybe it's more subtle, like we're fucking over the global futures markets for food commodities or we're this close to losing our control of the international currency markets for reasons that have nothing to do with quantitative easing or gold standards. Maybe there's an alien invasion underway and that's why we had to bomb the moon, I don't know. The point is, we're vulnerable in some awful, creepy way, and even talking about it publicly would tear out the supports that hold up the world's trust in "America" -- maybe even Americans' trust in "America." Obama is actually making rational decisions, of a sort -- if the government weren't constantly saber-rattling, grabbing up data, validating "free speech zones" at home and free-fire zones abroad, something we all take for granted would be revealed as a potemkin village and great Cthulhu rises from the depths.
July 18. I've decided to go ahead and comment on the George Zimmerman spectacle. If you've done the wise thing and completely ignored it, here's a good long reddit comment summarizing the legal issues in the trial. My main question is: why has this particular case drawn so much public attention?
I don't think it's race. There must be hundreds of other cases where a black guy and a hispanic guy got in a fight, one of them died, and it was uncertain whether the other one acted in legitimate self-defense. And it happens all the time that a non-black cop kills a black guy with questionable justification. I think this case blew up because Zimmerman was neither an ordinary citizen nor a police officer. As an armed neighborhood watchman, he was in a grey area between them. So the big issue is not race or class or guns -- it's vigilantism. People who are only mildly troubled by abuses of police power, are terrified of mistakes made by ordinary citizens trying to do the work of police.
Here's the subreddit thread on this subject.
July 22. Concise article, The Eye of Sauron Is the Modern Surveillance State, arguing that Tolkien understood surveillance better than Orwell. All three points are important: 1) A system that lacks empathy can see everything but fail to understand motivations. 2) Surveillance is reactive and clumsy. 3) The more raw data the system collects, the harder it is to pick out the important stuff.
July 24. A few days ago, after my prediction that technology will seduce us into lifeless comfort and safety, a reader asked how I reconcile this with peak oil and so on. I haven't written about collapse in a while so it's a good time to go through my latest thinking. I expect global economic collapse and decades of poverty while we switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Extreme poverty will cause political upheavals, but not such a deep political collapse that you won't have to pay taxes. And I expect little or no technological collapse. Even energy-intensive technologies like cars will not disappear, just shrink to serve the elite. And I think information technology will continue its present course, so people with gadgets out of Star Trek will be digging up cattail roots for food.
After a few decades, renewable energy will catch up to where fossil fuels are now... and then continue to grow! At this point, if other technologies haven't destabilized the world in some other way, there is a danger that we'll try to go back to an exponential growth economy based on increase in planetary surface area covered by solar panels or artificial photosynthesis nodes or something. I don't know what small percent of the earth's surface can meet the whole world's present consumption, but whatever it is, under exponential growth, eventually the whole planet won't be enough. And as Kevin Scott Polk calculated in his book Gaiome, even if we expand into space at light speed in all directions, that's merely polynomial expansion, and cannot keep up with human demands that grow exponentially. So in the long term the economy must either abandon exponential growth or suffer endless repetition of growth and collapse.
Now that I think about it, cycles of growth and collapse might be preferable to permanent zero growth, because that stability would enable ever-increasing infantilization, where we're more and more sensitive to pain and permit less and less taking of physical risks. Thinking about one of my favorite depressing articles, How children lost the right to roam in four generations, it's hard to imagine how the roaming ranges could grow back, but if human life can only get more safe and never more dangerous, it's hard to imagine how we won't go extinct, either from boredom or by veering off into artificial worlds.
July 31. I recently read Lee Smolin's new book Time Reborn. That link goes to a review by James Gleick. My favorite idea in the book is not something Smolin believes, but something he mentions and then rejects with a weak argument: the Boltzmann brain hypothesis. It's basically the hard science version of solipsism. That link goes to a recent blog post on the subject, and this stuff has led me to begin exploring hybrids between philosophical idealism, materialism, and animism. I'm not going to get into details on this page because I hate having philosophical discussions over email. If you want to talk about this stuff, you have to come visit me.
August 5. Evgeny Morozov interview, What's Wrong with Technological Fixes? A repeating theme is that we're designing technologies to make a better world even if everyone is stupid, and we could choose instead to design technologies to challenge us and make us more mature and aware. I think the best test of any tool is not to compare life when we have it, with life before we had it; the best test is to imagine that the tool comes and then goes away, and compare life before it with life after it.
September 11. From three months ago, a well written reddit comment on the creepiness of the word "homeland". I would add: the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) was the main division of the Nazi SS, and the parent organization of the Gestapo. While the German word "Reich" is not translatable into English, a reasonable translation of "Reichssicherheitshauptamt" would be "Department of Homeland Security". My prediction: The "war on terror" will be defined more and more broadly as a war on anyone who attempts to break the state monopoly on politically effective physical action -- which will eventually include a majority of Americans as more wealth is concentrated at the top.