[p2p-research] The Production Bubble: Why Capitalism Withholds Solutions and Gets Away with It

[Ryan Lanham]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 2:26 PM, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 15:18:19 PM -0400, Ryan Lanham
> (rlanham1963 at gmail.com) wrote:
>
> > Scarcity is a function (always) of incentives.  What most people on
> > this list fail to try to understand is the psychology of incentives.
> > Incentives are why utopian colonies always fail.
>
> Ryan,
>
> _if_ you feel like it, may I ask you to elaborate (separately?) on the
> last two sentences above? I understand (I think) everything else you
> said, but the part above makes me real curious.
>
> TIA,
>        Marco
>
>
Hi Marco,

I will try.

There seems to be increasing evidence that, as apes, we care about caste,
hierarchy, structure, relativity of reward and that these systems of reward
and motivation are not to be reasoned away...they are in the bone.

If this is true...if...then we must somehow come to terms with our own sense
of desire.  We want.  We need.  We hope.  Intellectualize that away, and we
become socialist robots devoid of our human desires...in Star Trek terms, we
abandon our inner Klingon.  It will not be abandoned.

For the Klingon in us is what makes sex power and joy and what makes cities
vibrant and full of despair and dreams.  Kill the animal and AI has won in
all the wrong ways.  The true AI will be emotional, devotional, wanting,
passionate and hungry for experience, emotion, and experience.

It is a strawman (as usual) to posit that the so-called neo-liberal
transhumanist state leads to money-making robots talking to other
accountant-like robots.  No.  The killers need to drink blood.  It is indeed
the equilibrium seekers who expose their fear of their own humanity.  It is
they who seek to be neutered.  To be sexless, emotionless, desireless monks
lost in inner worlds of metaphysics because the real world is too emotional,
too traumatic for them to bear.

And so, we must know our gut.  We have to plumb passion if we are going to
be peers.  We need to understand the tentative nature of our wants and the
delicate balance of peace in a bar full of tail.

Until we do that, until we realize that hierarchy and mud wrestling are in
us like intestines and marrow, we're not on a good path.

It is these passions set loose that kill the idealist and the utopian.  It
is the Amish whore who burns the colony down.  It is the desirous monk who
rises to command an army of Tibetans.  There is no abandoning these
tendencies.  They are us.

R.
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