[p2p-research] Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Ryan Lanham wrote:
> On 12/9/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>> On your point: "As absurd as it would have seemed to me just last year, I
>> am with you." While everyone is different, could you mention if there were
>> any one big thing or a few specific things you saw (robot videos?) that were
>> most persuasive in changing your thinking on this? Was there any particular
>> facts or lines of argument or articles you saw that seemed more persuasive
>> than others? Or was it more a gestalt from an overall rain of facts or
>> examples?
> 
> It is definitely gestalt-ish.  But if there was one overriding factor, it is
> the fact that pools of labor are starting to develop in very libertarian
> nations (e.g. the US) where there is little or no hope of economically
> meaninful use of their skills.  That is, the system cannot find a way to do
> something useful with these folks (in systemic terms of useful).
> 
> I expect that number to reach 20-40% of most industrialized societies fairly
> shortly.  If capitalism continues, they'll either become a state burden or
> will be somehow disposed of.  This has been the case with the 3rd world
> where bodies have largely been warehoused.  Now it is happening even when
> people have an attractive passport.
> 
> In my opinion, much of the current housing and consumption bubble is driven
> by segments of society who realize, in the long run, they have no economic
> meaning to the system.  That number will increase...I watch it increase all
> the time.  We simply cannot keep pace with the skill demands of the modern
> world.  We don't wish to be poor.  Therefore, you either need new rules or
> mass slaughters.  I'm not convinced mass slaughter isn't the outcome...it
> often has been in the past, but we've reached a point where we are going to
> have large and growing classes who cannot participate meaningfully in the
> economy.

I just want to reply differently on this point. There is an alternative to 
slaughters that keeps the system going. As outlined here: :-)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"""
Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult 
choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current 
scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of 
abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to 
use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded 
prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any 
amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as 
well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That 
seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going 
down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of 
other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a 
resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local 
communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries 
have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. 
Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either 
by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves 
political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, 
identities, and aspirations.
"""

So, while I'd prefer a basic income or those other more positive 
alternatives, a status-quo thing like endless schooling might be preferable 
to mass slaughter (it's at least not a slaughter of the body even if it may 
be a slaughter of the mind or imagination the way much of it is done now, 
and where there is life there is hope). Still, I'm not sure that low-level 
war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and 
excessive bureaucracy are really going to be very stable in the information 
age of cheap communications and as we get other things like nanotech 3D 
printers eventually. To build on Daniel Quinn's insights, and Bob Black's, 
these sorts of things let people have the option of walking away from wasted 
lives and wasted work hours.

Maybe that will be how our current system ends. It might not change, but 
more and more people just walk away to alternative communities, to more 
progressive cities and states, to a few progressive countries, and 
eventually to seasteads or space habitats, until the countries being 
abandoned collapse in some way internally and reorganize themselves out of 
desperation. That's part of the Voyage from Yesteryear Gandhian theme -- 
encouraging people to just walk away (assuming there is something better to 
walk to). Although it is always hard for the connected individual to walk 
away by themselves, or just one family, because you sever social links to an 
extended family and community. The history of immigration to the USA in the 
past is a guide to what this might be like.

And that's the big issue to have something better (like the USA was a better 
option for many in the past, compared to poverty or war in countries of 
birth). Not having a coherent positive vision is where much theory in 
relation to alternatives falls down, and where G. William Domhoff makes a 
good point.
"#1. The People Are Not Bamboozled"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_freshstart.html
"""
Faced with their many failures to convince even a significant minority of 
the American population to act in ways that they assume are in the best 
interests of the overwhelming majority, many leftists tend to blame this 
lack of success on the fact that most people do not understand the nature of 
the social system or their class interests. ...
   Contrary to the theorists of consciousness who explain away left 
failures, many studies in social psychology and sociology demonstrate that 
what people do makes sense in terms of the situation in which they find 
themselves. They may not understand all the details of the close working 
relationship between big business and government, or how and why markets 
currently work to the great advantage of capitalists, but they know full 
well they are being ripped off, and they fully believe that the 
circumstances they find themselves in are not fair. Numerous polls reveal 
that they would like to see a wide range of changes, including government 
guarantees of a job, a higher minimum wage, better health and safety 
provisions, and a government-supported health care system, all of which 
would "reduce the rate of exploitation," to borrow a term from Marxism.
   Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt 
for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to 
accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that 
make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head 
to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their 
false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem 
to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all 
the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many 
positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence 
more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a 
revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have 
hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they 
like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy 
their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. 
(And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year 
describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have 
some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that 
are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to 
see those positive aspects messed up.
"""

A lot of people might just walk away if they had something they were 
confident they could walk to that was better. So, some few need to help 
build that better place. And it doesn't even have to be a physical place, it 
can be a mental place at first -- ideas, stories, media, digital files on 
websites or virtual realities, and so on. And people are doing that in 
various ways (like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux). But eventually things 
like 3D printers and other local productive technologies (renewables) may 
bridge between the mental place and the physical place. Already, P2P advice 
about personal health care, about how to make things, and about how to do 
things like garden or fix cars, is bridging some of that gap.

Still, one reason for haste is always risk. There may be obviously 
inequities in the current system, and many individuals suffering (a moral 
evil), but the biggest issue, to me, remains the risk of nuclear war, or 
plague, or military robots, or some other aspect of competition out of 
control that destroys things for most people. One thing about being poor is 
you often have to run big risks, like driving a car that is not very safe in 
an accident or by not being able to visit a medical person for preventive 
care. Like the risk of nuclear war, these risks may not affect most poor 
people day-to-day, since there are risks, not certainties. (Psychologically, 
they may be day-to-day things, but people get good at putting things out of 
mind they don't think they can do anything about.) So, only one poor person 
in a hundred might die each year in a car accident where injury could have 
been prevented by a safer (more expensive) car, but to the other 99 poor 
people, the risk did not affect them (although they might have lost a family 
member, friend, or neighbor, of course -- like when a fellow grad student 
had to deal with his wife being killed in a car accident where she was 
driving a cheap old car and the other person was driving a Mercedes and ran 
a light on his way to his job as a dentist). But risk is something that just 
is not so obvious because it is, after all, just a risk. So, our current 
social system has created all sorts of risks (GMOs, emerging nanotech, 
widespread vitamin D deficiency, widespread endocrine disruptors, CO2 
pollution, nuclear weapons, internet dependency on centralized DNS, etc.), 
that so far, fortunately, have not caused widespread disasters for all 
people (even if, say, many in China are now dying of cancers that were 
easily preventable by US standards of manufacturing safety and each of those 
other things has caused local problems in the past).

Another tick-tock related item:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
"""
The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face, maintained since 1947 by the 
board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the 
University of Chicago, that uses the analogy of the human species being at a 
time that is "minutes to midnight", wherein midnight represents 
"catastrophic destruction". Originally, the analogy represented the threat 
of global nuclear war, but since includes climate-changing technologies and 
"new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology that could inflict 
irrevocable harm".[1] The closer the clock is to midnight, the closer the 
world is estimated to be to global disaster. ... The number of minutes 
before midnight – measuring the degree of nuclear, environmental, and 
technological threats to mankind – is periodically corrected; currently, the 
clock reads five minutes to midnight, having advanced two minutes on 17 
January 2007.
"""

Anyway, the two reasons for action now are to deal with inequity (and 
avoidable suffering) and also to deal with systemic risk. (And there are 
additional risks like riots from inequity itself, of course.) When I started 
looking into these sorts of issues a long time ago I was focused on the risk 
side. For me, over the decades, the social inequity and avoidable suffering 
side has grown in importance. I wonder if there are people who start out on 
the inequity side and grow more into worrying about the risks? :-)

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/