Dark Enlightenment

[AnonyMint]

From private message:

Ok - so I read your post on Demise of Finance/Rise of Knowledge, branched off from there and read esr's Premises of the Dark Enlightenment.

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how do you compensate for the economy of force? 

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We improve our economies of scale by a thousand fold by specializing.  A farmer grows food for 10,000 people.  A city of 10,000 people has three cops.  Those three cops are inherently better (just like the farmer) at dealing with stupid people hopped up on meth.  And are as much more efficient at it vs the normal citizen.

How does this fit into prosperous anarchy?

In maximum division-of-labor no one person is omnipotent, because he/she doesn't have the specialized knowledge in every field. In open source we work together because doing otherwise fails in competition with others who adhere to open source. Because given enough specialized eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

So in short, the 3 cops won't get very far if they are doing harm to society, because there is too much specialized knowledge they don't have that will battle them in varying scenarios.

The power gets spread around. Top-down controllers become impotent because the holders of specialized knowledge withdraw their support, e.g. as we are doing now with crypto-currency to the fiat controllers. We have more specialized knowledge than they do.

[1713882528]

1713882528

[herzmeister]

On the subject of a theory of contentionism:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/03/11/marxism-is-a-dead-idea-but-capitalism-freedom-has-never-truly-existed/

Marxists would usually argue that this kind of "Capitalism (freedom)" actually can't exist. It would always concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and if the Bourgeoisie had no state to protect their interests and their property, it would create one (which would be a concise summary of history, hence the Marx/Engels theory of Dialectical Materialism, with the Synthesis being the natural and inevitable outcome at some point in the future of society's evolution: the classless society, i.e. (stateless) communism).

[AnonyMint]

On the subject of a theory of contentionism:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/03/11/marxism-is-a-dead-idea-but-capitalism-freedom-has-never-truly-existed/

Marxists would usually argue that this kind of "Capitalism (freedom)" actually can't exist. It would always concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and if the Bourgeoisie had no state to protect their interests and their property, it would create one (which would be a concise summary of history, hence the Marx/Engels theory of Dialectical Materialism, with the Synthesis being the natural and inevitable outcome at some point in the future of society's evolution: the classless society, i.e. (stateless) communism).

And they were correct until Satoshi invented a solution the Byzantine General's problem with proof-of-work. But unfortunately without anonymity, that solution won't stand.

Btw, I see as I expected the globalists are pitching their NWO solution in the guise of discrediting their nation-state central banking:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=522050.msg5784742#msg5784742

[herzmeister]

And they were correct until Satoshi invented a solution the Byzantine General's problem with proof-of-work.

  Non sequitur for me. Crypto-currencies are many things but they won't annul the theories and efforts of Marxists, even with proper anonymity, quite the contrary in fact, as they strive for equality (in the results! "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs") and total(itarian?) transparency.

[AnonyMint]

And they were correct until Satoshi invented a solution the Byzantine General's problem with proof-of-work.

  Non sequitur for me. Crypto-currencies are many things but they won't annul the theories and efforts of Marxists (even with proper anonymity, quite the contrary in fact), as they strive for equality (as a result! "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs") and total(itarian?) transparency.

Autonomous actors in an economy is not the same equal actors. There is no force to keep them equal.

The reason anonymity is important is because it enables that autonomy to stand up against those vested interests that want to capture the money creation process and use it to aggregate capital. Without that power, smaller capital grows faster than larger capital.

Sorry i can't explain this in depth right now. Either that summary makes sense, or it needs to wait for a future time when i can expound.

[herzmeister]

That's fine with me, as this is quite an anarchistic viewpoint, but not Marxist. Ultimately they want to model the whole of society in the most reasonable and scientific (materialistic) advanced way. At best they might acknowledge your point (and other anarchistic concepts) as a possible viable strategy in the on-going class struggle. (The whole discussion on the ultra-left is ultimately only about the strategy of how to get there, how to reach the classless society. The idea with the temporary dictatorship of the proletariat was a failure.  )

[MadridReal]

I haven't heard about the Dark Englightment. Where I can read more info about it?

[CoinCube]

I haven't heard about the Dark Englightment. Where I can read more info about it?

What I like about the Dark Enlightenment (which I had actually never heard of prior to a month ago) is that it has given me a ton of outside the box thinking to look through. Each of those little dots on the map above is a blog of some sort. I am sure some of it will be garbage but there will also be gems. I have started with the political philosophy of Menicus Moldbug since he is described as the founder of the neoreactionaries (the purple section of the map). His Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations is essentially a detailed walk-through of Complaint the Third: Democracy is a failure. It's a very long but fascinating read.

[AnonyMint]

Must read.

[AnonyMint]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/03/will-emerging-markets-come-back/#comment-22623

I can dream about a solution to eliminate the ability of government to tax virtual knowledge. They would still be able to tax tangible commerce which is being replaced any way by virtual knowledge production.

We are moving towards maximum division-of-labor wherein the individual is his own company and call sell his knowledge production anonymously. This requires a different implementation than Bitcoin's design.

The government won't be able to tax that (if it comes to fruition and works as envisioned), thus the backstop for public debt won't be possible. The tangible commerce world is orders-of-magnitude less productive than the intangible knowledge work, e.g. look what the laser printer did for decentralized publishing, then the internet did to decentralized publishing, and now the 3D printer will do to decentralized manufacturing.

The key is the anonymous money has to become a unit-of-account via decentralized exchange and mining. This requires certain technical feats, which have yet to be demonstrated.

P.S. I would have preferred to have written "one of the more prolific and astute". There is no way to edit posts here and I'm in a rush and don't proof read.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/03/will-emerging-markets-come-back/#comment-22888

DVD, the keyword phrase that I wanted to changed was from "the most" to "one of the more".

My suggestion should be real before the end of 2014, then we can judge if it is practical and workeable.

Note by definition, it is impossible to save that part of the economy which is uneconomic, i.e. all those who didn't and won't obtain the correct skills and who will fight for more government aid and debt instead. You proposal will simply allow them to continue longer.

We stand at a crossroads. I chose to the individualism, decentralized, bottom-up fork in the road. You choose the double-down on more top-down management while stomping on decentralized annealing fork.

Btw, I think both forks will be enacted and run in parallel. And I am confident which fork dominates over time as it gains size and the other withers.

[AnonyMint]

For those who think there is no global conspiracy, you are apparently not aware of Anthony Sutton:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVWXmZB1wc

[AnonyMint]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/03/economic-consequences-of-income-inequality/#comment-22896

I would argue that your model of income inequality is antiquated because savings is now expressed in knowledge and not in stored claims on labor, i.e. fiat money.

So we would have to entirely recalibrate the basis and rework the model. I don't have the spare time at the moment to dig into such an endeavor.

[AnonyMint]

Example of philosophy of whom I admire and the genre of generative essence insight we share. You should recognize him as the co-author of the selfish mining attack which shows mathematically that Satoshi's proof-of-work is vulnerable to attack by a pool possessing only 25% of the hash rate.

I see we come from nearly the same generation as I started on the TRS-80 in 1978 at age 13 and obtained a Commodore 64 at age 18. Other than the difference in age of obtaining a C-64 I could have written the following word-for-word about myself.

My background is quite straightforward: I saw a computer for the first time when I was 13 and knew right then and there that these devices would revolutionize the world. I got my own Commodore-64 at 14 and have been writing software systems since then. I initially thought I'd study artificial intelligence and build über-intelligent robots that would take over the world, then I realized...

Probably add Linus Torvalds, although I'm paled as an ant compared to him as a do-er although I reckon this load prevents him from making some genre of generative essence insights. You can add the higher IQ Eric S. Raymond as my elder, although we appear to have somewhat conflicting generational outlook of the introspective kind.

[AnonyMint]

Cross posting because I think this is indicative of Dark Enlightenment philosophy on the utility of government (or more generally any top-down authority)...

It'd definitely be good if we insured there were no new species come in and take over and flourish while old species died.

Wait....none of us would be around then...

I'm awaiting a CO2 tax effectively banning breathing and a consumer protection law banning death.

Heck let's just ban everything. Let's ban banning. Let's ban banning banning. And ban banning banning banning banning banning. Do you see now my theory of everything w.r.t. unbounded recursion.

[AnonyMint]

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/04/02/constitutional-convention-2016/

Constitutional Convention 2016?

A very interesting political development has taken place, but you can bet the Democrats will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent it. This week the state legislature of Michigan became the 34th state to demand a “Constitutional Convention” in the United States.  Pursuant to Article 5 of the US Constitution, if 2/3rds of the states call for such a convention, (meaning 34 states)  it MUST take place. We will see if this is actually honored. At the very least, there is no time requirement so this could be dragged out for years.

Nevertheless, in such a convention, the ENTIRE Constitution is subject to review and can be altered and changed. This could be everything from installing “social justice” to the dissolution of the federal government. Everything is on the table as if we were back in 1776 Philadelphia.

This is an unprecedented event to amend the U.S. Constitution emerging from the states. Normally, Congress proposes a bill to amend the Constitution as was the case with income tax. Keep this one on your radar – we are looking at the potential for real change good or bad.

[bryant.coleman]

I'm awaiting a CO2 tax effectively banning breathing and a consumer protection law banning death.

Tax on breathing fresh air? In Spain there is a tax for sunlight.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.in/2013/07/spain-levies-consumption-tax-on-sunlight.html

[AnonyMint]

I am quite flabbergast that Eric S. Raymond (self-professed to have 150 - 170IQ, the creator of the "open source" movement) could get the logic so wrong on the coming Knowledge Age.

In his critique of Jeremy Rifkin's book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, he misses the key generative model of open source, which is that the source is always changing. The enslavement of knowledge by capital is due to the transactional cost of the propagation of creations. As we lower that friction, knowledge takes over.

And he apparently fails to comprehend capital can't buy knowledge because thought isn't fungible, and this becomes more evident as the diversity of innovation becomes more fine-grained.

The claim that the material input costs will be significant relative to the marginal cost of distributing more copies of intellectual property is wrong because the only costs in material production that can't be reduced asymptotically to 0 at economy-of-scale and automation are the knowledge inputs. Thus knowledge is infinitely more valuable than material production at the asymptote. The only reason that capital has been able to enslave the knowledge portion of the cost in the material cost is due to inability of fine-grain, autonomous knowledge to control the creative outputs of material production. The 3D printer changes this because the printer will be in every person's home. The commodity value relative to knowledge value of raw material inputs will fall asymptotically to 0.

What Eric misses is that many types of intellectual creations and creative processes can be incrementally fluid and shared, including music, video production, medical processes, etc.. People can take the designs of others and refine them. This is precisely open source. It is not that we won't possibly use fungible money (micro payments perhaps) to pay each other for creations, but that money won't be in control of the startup costs. Individuals will choose what they want to work spontaneously. This destroys the power of stored capital to enslave knowledge.

We will still use this money to buy those non-creative things that drop near to 0 in price, such as raw materials and food.

This is what I was trying to explain to Eric a long time ago, but it just flew right over his (and his readers') cuckoo head(s) so he banned me.

Note this doesn't mean I am agreeing with Rifkin's Marxist conclusions about the end of private property rights.

All the indicia of cod-Marxism are present. False identification of capitalism with vertical integration and industrial centralization: check.

Vertical integration enslaves knowledge and will fall away. Capital will increasingly become knowledge instead of stored fungible claims on labor.

Writing about human supercooperative behavior as though it falsifies classical and neoclassical economics

Supercooperative doesn't have to mean Communism. It can mean more finely-grained, autonomy of work. Eric is conflating here, even though Rifkin was also apparently erroneously introducing Marxism. They both got it wrong.

the concept of “the commons” is not a magic wand that banishes questions about self-determination, power relationships, and the perils of majoritarianism. Nor is it a universal solvent against actual scarcity problems

Wrong! The commons means knowledge takes control. For example, physics assures us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so it is only the lack of knowledge production that makes energy finite or scarce. And I am not referring to perpetual motion machines, rather to more efficiency and automation of extraction of energy through greater innovation due to faster propagation of knowledge.

Nobody ever says that “the commons” requires behavior that individuals themselves would not freely choose, and if anyone ever tried to do so they would be driven out with scorn.

Correct. Rifkin doesn't understand fine-grained, autonomy is the key element of the commons.

>So @esr, how do you align the long tail of maintenance into the sunk v marginal cost framework?

Er, simply by observing that it is neither of those things and can’t be jammed into that framework.

He makes it clear that he didn't even consider that the lower transactional propagation cost of digital distribution of editable creations increases the frequency, granularity, and autonomy of those maintenance edits. He apparently doesn't remember that Metcalfe's or Reed's Law says that as the number of those editing nodes increases, then the value of the knowledge network increases squared.

When people speak of “capitalism” and “free markets” as being separable ideas, and I inquire into that, I generally find that they’re identifying capitalism with the way free-market economies behave in the presence of high communication and transaction costs – big firms with lots of vertical integration, deskilled employees treated like cogs in Taylorized processes, and elaborate hierarchical management structures designed to manage the largest possible lumps of capital to collect economies of scale.

Economies mostly stop looking like that as the costs of transaction and communication drop and technological leverage increases revenue per employee. But it’s still capitalism because specialists in capital accumulation drive most of the productive activity.

Ah he was so close to getting the point, then he screwed it up on the last sentence. Yes Eric, but what capital are they accumulating? Stored capital or knowledge capital. He just hasn't quite had the epiphany yet on how the relative value of stored capital can plummet.

Oil is food, Oil is materials, Oil is Energy, Oil is what backs USD
Oil is what you can't print. Oil is your Tax.

You can't seem to agree that knowledge will 1000X more valuable than those raw materials.

You have entirely missed the point of my post here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6065144#msg6065144

So I think we will stop the discussion now. I don't have more time.

Let them raise the price of oil to $1 million per liter. Our knowledge value will rise proportionally. Then I (and others) will be earning $1 trillion per day.

It is the value-added to raw inputs that is relevant. With mass production, the value-added of knowledge was amortized over the capital cost of the factory and millions of xerox copies.

Now the creations will change 1000s of variants per day or minute. The value-added is unfathomable.

It is the speed of the propagation of creation of product innovation that destroys (devalues) their control.

[AnonyMint]

Also Eric screws up the logic on anonymity.

It is not personal identity that is important, but rather reputation. Reputation can be separate from personal identity so that we can't be enslaved by totalitarianism, debt rating agencies, etc.. We can be reborn and creative at will. He is trying to say that reputation is a corner case. No it is the case.

Good to read that he at least understands anonymity for programmers can become entirely necessary.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5640&cpage=1#comment-471894

Is Satoshi Nakamoto a “hacker”?

And Eric's completely uninformed reply:

>Is Satoshi Nakamoto a “hacker”?

Yes. And that’s his real name, too – everybody thought it was a concealing pseudo, but it turns out not.

Winter makes the type of post I would if I wasn't banned:

This sounds relevant to the discussion:

Write Gambling Software, Go to Prison
http://www.wired.com/2013/01/coder-charged-for-gambling-software/

Eric cuts to the meat of his authoritarian culture:

>Also how exactly would you define a Concealing Handle?

One that is designed to be easily repudiated so that the user can avoid the legal or reputational consequences of behaviors performed under that identity.

[zolace]

One connection between some of these nodes in the chart are Christian Reconstructionism aka dominionism. see google.

[AnonyMint]

A lot of discussion about my prior two posts proceed at the following new thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=557732.0