A good article, but missing one very important word: trust.
Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustworthy without consequence to ruin a good thing.
So no you can't build a system that's meets all of the article's criteria because almost all of them rely on the unspoken rule of trust in civil society. Everything built for good can be abused for evil.
But we have built so many enduring systems that rely on bad apples to function the way the do. See "insurance pricing", "private prisons", and "justice enforcement". In the real world, the ideal number of jails or homeless people is neither zero nor "all of them".
In the real world the jails are for holding, the prisons are for convicted criminals and the homeless people (most of them anyway, because not everybody that is homeless is derelict, and the addicts) get whatever help they need. Because we actually can afford it.
I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything.
And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises.
And even in a society that forces those people into attempted treatment programs, there will still be a bit of time in between their issues manifesting and them going into treatment/therapy/confinement.
To have “zero homeless” you’d need to preventatively intercept these people before they become homeless and force them into confinement in treatment facilities and mental hospitals essentially. And that’s a dangerous game because you’re essentially taking away someone’s freedom preemptively before they become homeless
This is along the lines I mean. Or when shared households break up, and some stay, some leave, which one should you send to the asylum forever and why not both? Or to jail for the fights they both participated in? What of the deaths by a thousand cuts and no one at fault for the murder?
But the idea that jails are an unadulterated societal good, or that they are the natural only option to police, is a crazy religion. Why on earth do we have no timely resolutions but through handcuffs and jail? There is expediency, and then there is externalizing the whole of the troubles to the smallest number of people, who could never overturn a majority, even if they had the vote.
I suggest the ability to put certain people in a metal box, at least partially for losing their grasp of a better role in the world, is a big, boldface moral hazard, and self-perpetuating, but with leering cheerleaders.
Some people are wild and out of control sometimes. Treating them all as permanent bad apples is just as animalistic.
>I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything
So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?
I think the ideal number of _prisons_ (as distinct from jails / pretrial confinement) is zero.
This whole charade in the USA of dressing up slavery (without even a single day of interruption on January 31, 1865) as "correction" is absurd. It's obviously a way to continue an economy that relies on a supply of involuntary labor, and has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety.
There are plenty of ways to implement restorative justice which are superior to forcing convicts to make starbucks uniforms (start here if you've never delved into this, but there are great books on the topic which you can find from here: https://harvardpolitics.com/restorative-justice-abolition/).
Some crimes are bad enough that the perpetrators don’t deserve second chances. I’m ok with punishment for its own sake in some cases even if it would be more “cost effective” or “productive” for society to rehabilitate.
Sure, again bad apples, but one size fits sentences to the same institution? They are not all of the people ever arrested, or all of the time, or even most, and still the fundamentally medieval violence we orient by.
I’d guess the downvotes are an aberration of today’s politics, because your account of the history is factually and legally valid. (keyword “restorative”)
To me, the idea that incarceration and police use of force is wrong because it is racist is backwards. It’s racist because it is wrong.
Yes good point and in theory that's how it should work and mostly does. The interesting thing we're seeing is how it's playing out at a societal level with regards to the manipulation, gaslighting, cheating and bullying. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in individual interpersonal relationships, it sometimes takes a while for the victim to fully understand what's being done to them because the abuser is not only doing harmful things but then they also gaslight, manipulate, lie, etc. There's usually a lag effect for first time victims to fully understand what's being done to them, and now at a societal level it's taking a while for groups to understand the same pattern. The most unfortunate part of it all though is how many people and institutions are 'in on it' perse and continously prop up horrible behavior because it also suits them or in the case of bullying, they go along with the bullying so as to shield themselves from being the target.
Trust is a Continuum. I have relatives who grew up in places where you didn't need to lock the door at night and those who have to lock the door at night but that's enough and those for who that is not enough.
I am reminded of a story I read lately of a woman who was shocked when her passport and purse were stolen from the beach while she was swimming. Somehow she had the perception that she was in a high trust worthy zone even though she had been doing her doctoral thesis work in a low trust society.
Beautifully said. I feel as if the society that we are living in does have a lot of implicit trust and if I may, I would like to add onto it with a few things.
Trust works in a society when incentives are aligned with trust ie. you trust the society, the society trusts you back and you do the work with these principles and you are rewarded. Even this belief is something that you must trust that the society is fair. This trust creates your beliefs which sets your base-line incentives.
If your society is trustworthy and you are taught to be trustworthy and you see that the rewards are fairly distributed being trustworthy. It creates an incentives to be trustworthy yourself and a society is made by people like you and so everyone else does so too and the society becomes trustworthy and the cycle continues.
You would trust the society because you think your goals are aligned. Both you and society want the same thing.
BUT, the second the average individual works that the society or system is untrustworthy, that the incentives aren't aligned and I can't trust it.
The thing now is that the incentives are so misaligned with the reality of trustworthiness and it has become apparently clear. The incentives have also become unpredictable and questionable sometimes within the society and yet we see society tolerate, dare I say celebrate it sometimes. This makes us question if my personal incentives are aligned with society or not and if I am getting screwed or not by being so trustworthy of society and doing things fairly.
This in turns creates a vicious loop.
As such, fairness, trust and incentives play a very cyclical dependency on each other. You only trust if you feel like its fair and if the incentives prefer you to be fair as well.
I would sadly say that although our society is trending towards unfairness,untrustworthiness and perverse incentives. I do have a glimmer of hope that this too shall pass.
People have given up on the very concept of society. Everyone is racing to shred the Social Contract and revert society back to Do What You Can Get Away With lawlessness. We're replacing institutions with individualism. We're replacing "We're all in it together" with "We're in it for ourselves." We're replacing collective stewardship of shared resources with "I got mine, fuck everyone else!" One's Community has stopped being the fundamental atomic unit we organize around, in favor of their Tribe, their Family, or themselves as an individual. We no longer are capable of coordinated, collective action that benefits society.
What distinction are you making between a community and a tribe or family? What is it about a community that makes it more worthy of individuals organizing around it than their families or tribes?
Technology cannot solve social problems. Societies can solve social problems using technology, just as they can without using technology, but ultimately it is the society that solves the problem.
Hmm... technology sure seems to create, or at least to expose, a lot of societal problems, and does solve a lot of problems in exchange for a lot of money. Not sure the true rule is as stated.
> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in?
Legally, to the rules of the country. That is not even a question.
But if we talk about morality, the answer is to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what it implies.
There is no moral nor legal reason to follow the parent company when it in conflict with the rule of law. People are starting to attribute to corporations a power that they do not have, and that is very dangerous.
(The article is good, thou, and opens a lot of interesting questions)
> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:
> Rapid sending of messages
> Careful checking of the content of messages
> Ability to quickly target a specific geographic area
> Inability to mistakenly send a test message
> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before
sending
> Resilient enough to work after significant damage to
infrastructure
> That networks have the ability to vet and ignore
> That networks are compelled to send
> Which can only be used for good
> And cannot be used for evil.
Considering the last two, I'm assuming this must be tongue-in-cheek.
I think that the best approach for public utilities is to design them in such a way as to minimize, or preclude if possible, their ability to choose their customers or level of service. We want them to have a set of rules/instructions, written beforehand and publicly available, that everyone can point to after an event that says, "well, those were the things they were supposed to do, so they did them." The entities that write the set of rules are separate from the utility: the utility solely exists to implement the rules/instructions as efficiently as possible.
There's obviously a reasonableness factor here: it's impossible to foresee all situations. The effort spent on specifying exactly what should be done should be proportional to the potential impact of that possible decision.
I heard stories from friends where such a system is used to broadcast ads to wide areas in South Korea, never had to deal with it myself but the way they described it made it sound like they were sent using that very same emergency message system.
We have treated government with a startling glibness, a deep unseriousness. At the end of the day, the government can kill you and your entire family, and the only thing that can stop them from doing that are the laws of civil society. It is incredibly serious.
Unfortunately, we have been unserious going on several decades. They have realized that the front door is unlocked and the gleaming glowing beating heart of civic power is sitting right there completely unprotected. There were warnings after 9/11, with the patriot act and the GWOT. People who raised these concerns were dismissed as cranks but in fact they were the only serious people in the room. The unseriousness has increasingly accelerated in the last 10 years.
Now we are seeing the consequences. There's a timely acronym for this I think. FAFO?
Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity.
It is not obvious to me that society would keep on going without change if it were not for the technology that we are all exposed to and expected to use.
Last week I had boarded a flight at LHR and the crew were just starting their safety briefing when everyone's phones went off with that wildfires 'emergency' alert message.
I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.
A few days ago I submitted what may have been the largest data breach in history. It got 1 upvote and vanished. I haven't even seen people MENTION the breach here.
I agree that there's no difference in principle between the government of the land you live on ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to everyone about wildfire danger; and ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country. This is simply what it means for a national government to exist at all - a local monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in order to enforce the law. Everything a government does, from laws regulating food ingredient labeling to collecting the social security tax from paychecks to organizing a formal military to fight a rebellion, is ultimately backed up by men with guns telling people what to do.
> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:
There is an obvious solution that achieves all of these, that, on 1000 year timescales, seems inevitable: deprecation of the nation-state.
The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. For example, the very real problem of coordination, eloquently and convincingly outlined in the federalist papers (tldr: we need a central republic structure because it's too difficult to coordinate disparate statehouses via horseback with every little intrastate decision) is solved by dint of instant communication and long-term data retention. So it is with every other claim in favor of these huge legacy state structures.
In this age, there is no longer any state needs to be larger than say, 1500 square km - about the size of a large county. This way, people can flee on foot to an adjacent state if needed, and no state can possibly control enough infrastructure to force Vodaphone to send such nauseating propaganda.
We need the elder statesmen in the room to read the writing on the wall and begin this process.
What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates? What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B?
So you propose to replace the nation states with corporate governments. Okay, two questions: who gets to make the laws, including the property laws? and who gets to enforce those laws?
Given the vacuum left by pinhole-sized states, Vodafone could become the issuer of propaganda itself as it would have the airwaves and the power of a large state.
Well, I suppose my argument does turn on the scope on which you consider each of these 10 points.
My presumption is that, as nation-states are deprecated, coordination between them will have to take the shape of sufficiently decentralized technology that the "networks have the ability to vet and ignore" portion becomes a local and voluntary process.
And - probably an area where reasonable people disagree - it's the (real or perceived) authority that makes it possible to "be used for evil"; if there is no badge and gun, and each message (broadly considered) is to be considered on its own merits (both for its truth and its persuasiveness), then I think that corporate propaganda just lands in the 'ignore' (or even 'spam') pile.
A good article, but missing one very important word: trust.
Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustworthy without consequence to ruin a good thing.
So no you can't build a system that's meets all of the article's criteria because almost all of them rely on the unspoken rule of trust in civil society. Everything built for good can be abused for evil.
But we have built so many enduring systems that rely on bad apples to function the way the do. See "insurance pricing", "private prisons", and "justice enforcement". In the real world, the ideal number of jails or homeless people is neither zero nor "all of them".
In the real world the jails are for holding, the prisons are for convicted criminals and the homeless people (most of them anyway, because not everybody that is homeless is derelict, and the addicts) get whatever help they need. Because we actually can afford it.
Obviously the ideal number of jails is not zero, but why wouldn't the ideal number of homeless people be zero?
I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything.
And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises.
And even in a society that forces those people into attempted treatment programs, there will still be a bit of time in between their issues manifesting and them going into treatment/therapy/confinement.
To have “zero homeless” you’d need to preventatively intercept these people before they become homeless and force them into confinement in treatment facilities and mental hospitals essentially. And that’s a dangerous game because you’re essentially taking away someone’s freedom preemptively before they become homeless
This is along the lines I mean. Or when shared households break up, and some stay, some leave, which one should you send to the asylum forever and why not both? Or to jail for the fights they both participated in? What of the deaths by a thousand cuts and no one at fault for the murder?
But the idea that jails are an unadulterated societal good, or that they are the natural only option to police, is a crazy religion. Why on earth do we have no timely resolutions but through handcuffs and jail? There is expediency, and then there is externalizing the whole of the troubles to the smallest number of people, who could never overturn a majority, even if they had the vote.
I suggest the ability to put certain people in a metal box, at least partially for losing their grasp of a better role in the world, is a big, boldface moral hazard, and self-perpetuating, but with leering cheerleaders.
Some people are wild and out of control sometimes. Treating them all as permanent bad apples is just as animalistic.
Just make sure after each politician serves their term they get a year in prison.
>I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything
So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?
Depends on your definition, but not everyone is necessarily happy (or at least, happiest) living under a particular roof.
Housing is a privilege, not a right, and not a requirement. Except, being a free country, in jail.
What is the ideal number of unhoused people? And how do you arrive at that number?
Probably "fewer", and probably by providing step-up housing for more people to whom it is out of reach.
I think the ideal number of _prisons_ (as distinct from jails / pretrial confinement) is zero.
This whole charade in the USA of dressing up slavery (without even a single day of interruption on January 31, 1865) as "correction" is absurd. It's obviously a way to continue an economy that relies on a supply of involuntary labor, and has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety.
There are plenty of ways to implement restorative justice which are superior to forcing convicts to make starbucks uniforms (start here if you've never delved into this, but there are great books on the topic which you can find from here: https://harvardpolitics.com/restorative-justice-abolition/).
Some crimes are bad enough that the perpetrators don’t deserve second chances. I’m ok with punishment for its own sake in some cases even if it would be more “cost effective” or “productive” for society to rehabilitate.
Sure, again bad apples, but one size fits sentences to the same institution? They are not all of the people ever arrested, or all of the time, or even most, and still the fundamentally medieval violence we orient by.
I’d guess the downvotes are an aberration of today’s politics, because your account of the history is factually and legally valid. (keyword “restorative”)
To me, the idea that incarceration and police use of force is wrong because it is racist is backwards. It’s racist because it is wrong.
That too. The check of "without due process" did not undo that rebranding or its many modern forms.
Yes good point and in theory that's how it should work and mostly does. The interesting thing we're seeing is how it's playing out at a societal level with regards to the manipulation, gaslighting, cheating and bullying. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in individual interpersonal relationships, it sometimes takes a while for the victim to fully understand what's being done to them because the abuser is not only doing harmful things but then they also gaslight, manipulate, lie, etc. There's usually a lag effect for first time victims to fully understand what's being done to them, and now at a societal level it's taking a while for groups to understand the same pattern. The most unfortunate part of it all though is how many people and institutions are 'in on it' perse and continously prop up horrible behavior because it also suits them or in the case of bullying, they go along with the bullying so as to shield themselves from being the target.
Trust is a Continuum. I have relatives who grew up in places where you didn't need to lock the door at night and those who have to lock the door at night but that's enough and those for who that is not enough.
I am reminded of a story I read lately of a woman who was shocked when her passport and purse were stolen from the beach while she was swimming. Somehow she had the perception that she was in a high trust worthy zone even though she had been doing her doctoral thesis work in a low trust society.
Sounds very binary, I don’t see the continuum. More like a steep cliff of shocking betrayal.
Beautifully said. I feel as if the society that we are living in does have a lot of implicit trust and if I may, I would like to add onto it with a few things.
Trust works in a society when incentives are aligned with trust ie. you trust the society, the society trusts you back and you do the work with these principles and you are rewarded. Even this belief is something that you must trust that the society is fair. This trust creates your beliefs which sets your base-line incentives.
If your society is trustworthy and you are taught to be trustworthy and you see that the rewards are fairly distributed being trustworthy. It creates an incentives to be trustworthy yourself and a society is made by people like you and so everyone else does so too and the society becomes trustworthy and the cycle continues.
You would trust the society because you think your goals are aligned. Both you and society want the same thing.
BUT, the second the average individual works that the society or system is untrustworthy, that the incentives aren't aligned and I can't trust it.
The thing now is that the incentives are so misaligned with the reality of trustworthiness and it has become apparently clear. The incentives have also become unpredictable and questionable sometimes within the society and yet we see society tolerate, dare I say celebrate it sometimes. This makes us question if my personal incentives are aligned with society or not and if I am getting screwed or not by being so trustworthy of society and doing things fairly.
This in turns creates a vicious loop.
As such, fairness, trust and incentives play a very cyclical dependency on each other. You only trust if you feel like its fair and if the incentives prefer you to be fair as well.
I would sadly say that although our society is trending towards unfairness,untrustworthiness and perverse incentives. I do have a glimmer of hope that this too shall pass.
People have given up on the very concept of society. Everyone is racing to shred the Social Contract and revert society back to Do What You Can Get Away With lawlessness. We're replacing institutions with individualism. We're replacing "We're all in it together" with "We're in it for ourselves." We're replacing collective stewardship of shared resources with "I got mine, fuck everyone else!" One's Community has stopped being the fundamental atomic unit we organize around, in favor of their Tribe, their Family, or themselves as an individual. We no longer are capable of coordinated, collective action that benefits society.
The part I think people have given up on is the contract. There are no rights without obligations and there are no obligations with repercussions.
Side rant… every time I’ve heard "We're all in it together" it’s been from someone who believes the opposite. That phrase just grates now.
Who, specifically, is "we" in this sentence?
What distinction are you making between a community and a tribe or family? What is it about a community that makes it more worthy of individuals organizing around it than their families or tribes?
Technology cannot solve social problems. Societies can solve social problems using technology, just as they can without using technology, but ultimately it is the society that solves the problem.
Hmm... technology sure seems to create, or at least to expose, a lot of societal problems, and does solve a lot of problems in exchange for a lot of money. Not sure the true rule is as stated.
care to provide examples?
> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in?
Legally, to the rules of the country. That is not even a question.
But if we talk about morality, the answer is to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what it implies.
There is no moral nor legal reason to follow the parent company when it in conflict with the rule of law. People are starting to attribute to corporations a power that they do not have, and that is very dangerous.
(The article is good, thou, and opens a lot of interesting questions)
> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:
> Rapid sending of messages
> Careful checking of the content of messages
> Ability to quickly target a specific geographic area
> Inability to mistakenly send a test message
> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending
> Resilient enough to work after significant damage to infrastructure
> That networks have the ability to vet and ignore
> That networks are compelled to send
> Which can only be used for good
> And cannot be used for evil.
Considering the last two, I'm assuming this must be tongue-in-cheek.
I think that the best approach for public utilities is to design them in such a way as to minimize, or preclude if possible, their ability to choose their customers or level of service. We want them to have a set of rules/instructions, written beforehand and publicly available, that everyone can point to after an event that says, "well, those were the things they were supposed to do, so they did them." The entities that write the set of rules are separate from the utility: the utility solely exists to implement the rules/instructions as efficiently as possible.
There's obviously a reasonableness factor here: it's impossible to foresee all situations. The effort spent on specifying exactly what should be done should be proportional to the potential impact of that possible decision.
I heard stories from friends where such a system is used to broadcast ads to wide areas in South Korea, never had to deal with it myself but the way they described it made it sound like they were sent using that very same emergency message system.
Technology is, of course, downstream of society.
We have treated government with a startling glibness, a deep unseriousness. At the end of the day, the government can kill you and your entire family, and the only thing that can stop them from doing that are the laws of civil society. It is incredibly serious.
Unfortunately, we have been unserious going on several decades. They have realized that the front door is unlocked and the gleaming glowing beating heart of civic power is sitting right there completely unprotected. There were warnings after 9/11, with the patriot act and the GWOT. People who raised these concerns were dismissed as cranks but in fact they were the only serious people in the room. The unseriousness has increasingly accelerated in the last 10 years.
Now we are seeing the consequences. There's a timely acronym for this I think. FAFO?
Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity.
It is not obvious to me that society would keep on going without change if it were not for the technology that we are all exposed to and expected to use.
Last week I had boarded a flight at LHR and the crew were just starting their safety briefing when everyone's phones went off with that wildfires 'emergency' alert message.
I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.
Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329384
Submitted many hours earlier, fewer upvotes, one comment, sank without trace.
A few days ago I submitted what may have been the largest data breach in history. It got 1 upvote and vanished. I haven't even seen people MENTION the breach here.
What's the breach/link you tried to share?
I agree that there's no difference in principle between the government of the land you live on ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to everyone about wildfire danger; and ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country. This is simply what it means for a national government to exist at all - a local monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in order to enforce the law. Everything a government does, from laws regulating food ingredient labeling to collecting the social security tax from paychecks to organizing a formal military to fight a rebellion, is ultimately backed up by men with guns telling people what to do.
> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:
There is an obvious solution that achieves all of these, that, on 1000 year timescales, seems inevitable: deprecation of the nation-state.
The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. For example, the very real problem of coordination, eloquently and convincingly outlined in the federalist papers (tldr: we need a central republic structure because it's too difficult to coordinate disparate statehouses via horseback with every little intrastate decision) is solved by dint of instant communication and long-term data retention. So it is with every other claim in favor of these huge legacy state structures.
In this age, there is no longer any state needs to be larger than say, 1500 square km - about the size of a large county. This way, people can flee on foot to an adjacent state if needed, and no state can possibly control enough infrastructure to force Vodaphone to send such nauseating propaganda.
We need the elder statesmen in the room to read the writing on the wall and begin this process.
What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates? What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B?
So you propose to replace the nation states with corporate governments. Okay, two questions: who gets to make the laws, including the property laws? and who gets to enforce those laws?
Given the vacuum left by pinhole-sized states, Vodafone could become the issuer of propaganda itself as it would have the airwaves and the power of a large state.
Well, I suppose my argument does turn on the scope on which you consider each of these 10 points.
My presumption is that, as nation-states are deprecated, coordination between them will have to take the shape of sufficiently decentralized technology that the "networks have the ability to vet and ignore" portion becomes a local and voluntary process.
And - probably an area where reasonable people disagree - it's the (real or perceived) authority that makes it possible to "be used for evil"; if there is no badge and gun, and each message (broadly considered) is to be considered on its own merits (both for its truth and its persuasiveness), then I think that corporate propaganda just lands in the 'ignore' (or even 'spam') pile.