[p2p-research] gotta read this

Mon Oct 5 07:44:12 CEST 2009

thanks to Ryan, Paul, and Edward, I have read your contributions with great
interest ...

As a european I'm only piqued by the claim that the US gives most foreign
aid ... it's actually one of the lowest (relatively speaking) of the western
world ... I'll have to look it up though

and the other thing, that the US pioneered the social welfare net? hmmm we
had paid holidays since the thirties in france ... again, I want to check
that, seems like US myth-making of being the best in the world ..<g>

Michel

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Edward Miller <embraceunity at gmail.com>wrote:

> Michel,
>
> While I would agree with Ryan's general take on the matter, namely, his
> disappointment with the apparent schizophrenia of the US, which has been the
> primary driver for technological, social, and economic innovation for most
> of the past century. However, I do have some differences other certain
> points.
>
> First, I would disagree that the US is different on a state-by-state basis.
> The world is a much smaller place because of communications technology and
> in my extensive travels around the US, including such out of the way places
> as Alaska, the striking thing I have noticed is the homogeneity of our daily
> life. The cultural differences are mainly superficial. Alaska might use
> snowmobiles to use McDonald's drive thru, but that isn't exactly a
> qualitative change. We Americanize everything. We have Taco Bell and Panda
> Express and the Washington Redskins, but they all use the same models that
> Ray Kroc developed 50 years ago.
>
> I think the core-periphery model applies very well to the US in the sense
> that the rich and the poor, the "liberal" and the "conservative," tend to be
> diffuse and often in very close proximity to each other in a scattered sort
> of way. If you look at detailed electoral maps and income maps of the US,
> the variation is striking. Hyde Park, where Obama is from, and where the
> University of Chicago is located (the institution which claims more Nobel
> Laureates than any other in the world), is just blocks away from Englewood,
> famous for having higher murder rates than Iraq.
>
> Another piece of the puzzle is cyberbalkanization, a term coined by one of
> Obama's most hated (read: best) "czars," is to blame for much of it. Even
> Glenn Beck commented on this, though without using the term. Because of the
> exponential increase in media outlets and discussion groups, including this
> one, there are now thousands of mini echo chambers each talking past one
> another and becoming further and further estranged from one another. We pick
> and choose exactly which sources we want to view, and filter out anything we
> don't wish to see.... with RSS and tagging we can even filter out stuff from
> within our preferred sources. One of the effects is all the loony conspiracy
> theories now gaining traction. Yet the geographical locations of each of
> these cyberbalkanized groups look about the same as those electoral maps,
> income maps, etc. They are diffuse.
>
> I notice after watching extended amounts of MSNBC, CNN, and FOX that I
> become terrified of the sorts of things which David Michael Green is talking
> about. However, this week I haven't watched television at all and merely
> used my narrow online media sources and RSS feeds, and my attitude is
> entirely changed. I no longer feel an urgent desire to stock up on guns at
> least.In fact, my thoughts on a lot of these types of things have been all
> over the map lately, and while I wouldn't want to project this onto my
> fellow countrymen, I do tend to think this is part of our current zeitgeist,
> or collective consciousness, or what have you. We are at the brink of deep
> structural change.
>
> Yet, one fact which remains is the astonishingly low amount of political
> interest and participation on the part of the general public, and it seems
> the political hysteria may in fact be only in intellectual circles. Voting
> rates are very low. While cable news generally gets a couple million viewers
> per night in total, our nation's population is close to 300 million. We are
> very distracted and deluged by media, video games, facebook quizzes,
> twittering, texting, and such.
>
> Of course this is both a natural flaw of human beings and a creation of our
> educational system which, as The Big Crunch article which Paul linked to
> argues, is structured to polish the "gems" and discard the vast majority of
> the "dirt."  It is a good example of one of the many tipping points which
> are happening simultaneously, along with structural unemployment, the
> unenforceability of intellectual property, skyrocketing healthcare costs,
> Open Source, etc etc etc. In systems-theoretic terms, we are at the cusp of
> bifurcation.
>
> It seems that the 2 Party System, unless some truly outstanding Republican
> figures arise, will simply have to crumble, and we may end up as a
> single-party system or multi-party, but this is the least of the changes
> which will be occurring simultaneously.
>
> I think the educational system described by the Big Crunch paper explains a
> lot about why the US is where it is, and since an informed electorate is the
> most crucial aspect of any functioning democracy, we are going to be in big
> trouble if we can't come up with a radically new educational paradigm.
> Intellectual self-defense is the most crucial skill in the age of
> cyberbalkanization. We need critical, reflexive people to make informed
> decisions as citizens, consumers, and entrepreneurs.
>
> My generation, the Millenials, were raised in those strange years between
> the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 when our nation was completely
> unmatched on every possible measure, and there appeared to be absolutely no
> existential threats. Politics consisted of endless play-by-play coverage of
> the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Yet, my generation was also forced into
> political awareness with the shock of 9/11. Relatively speaking, we have a
> keen social consciousness according to most statistics (volunteerism, public
> service, etc), and were the first generation to grow up with computers.
>
> Perhaps there is some hope in this generation, and the growing alternatives
> to both markets and governments, as embodied by the P2P movement. Perhaps
> the paradigm shift to this will be as bloodless as the overthrow of
> Encyclopedia Britannica by Wikipedia. Not too many molotovs in that
> revolution, from what I hear.
>
> Yet, it isn't inconceivable that the nation could fracture or collapse, but
> considering the statistics, I can't imagine many geographical borders larger
> than a few square blocks that would contain homogenous
> cultural/political/social views. I really think what we are seeing will be
> unprecedented, and likely very strange.
>
> If Factor e Farm or something similar takes off, perhaps Panarchy will take
> off, as they seem to be hoping. Though I doubt it could remain an
> evolutionarily stable state for long. Natural Selection will continue to
> select for virulent systems and actually think Alexander Wendt's recent work
> arguing that World Government is inevitable makes a strong point... or at
> least elucidates the structural properties which make higher levels of
> organization likely (and even desirable).
>
> The EU seems like it may be closer to adopting the Lisbon Treaty, but even
> this model isn't really the future we seem to be heading toward. We will
> likely see more distributed non-state actors, global guerillas, open source
> revolutionaries, resilient communities, and so forth, but they will also
> almost certainly form transnational coalitions to create mutually agreed
> upon organizational apparatuses and alliances at both regional and global
> levels.
>
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>

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