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RealityApologist posted:For one thing, it would empower humanitarian and other interest groups to step in on the behalf of those people. Imagine a world where no one had to work, but everyone had tools to help monitor the health and rights of the underrepresented. I imagine significantly more people would volunteer for these duties than can manage to do it now. Why would nobody have to work? How will google glass make food and clean up turds? "Imagine a world where nobody can die. Wouldn't that be a better place to live? What if we could just put our brains in triple-donged robot dragon bodies? I imagine a lot more underrepresented people would be healthier and happier once they are transplanted to ageless robot bodies. The technology is there! It has some problems, but they are not major problems. Yes, it will require some novel technological approaches, but none of them are insurmountable challenges. They are all within the realm of possibility using today's technology (or at least most of them)." Out of the way guys, I'm busy dreaming up the post-death economy. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 05:01
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SedanChair posted:Why not? Ignoring and oppressing them has worked pretty well so far. In fact you could say that the present system has organized itself out of all of the structures of existing power. Why won't humans be "adaptively successful" unless the underrepresented gain representation? Most societies throughout history have prospered for centuries or millenia while continuing to have subject populations. I mean by successful "resilience under changing conditions", which include things like climate change, but more immediately in keeping the social order stable and predictable and within certain constraints. Perhaps its worth mentioning here that we aren't doing so hot in these categories, with our persistent political instability and economic imbalance. Now a stable system might not be providing well for the least of its members, sure. Traditional hierarchies historically gain stability through exclusion and restricting political power to a very few. But a digital systems are user-generated, and requires levels of feedback from the user base that is unprecedented in the history of human civilization. For facebook to operate, you need vastly more people cooperating than have ever been members of any political structure. These systems don't work like traditional organizations, because they get better with use. Its a logic that is utterly unlike those historical structures, and completely undermines conventional wisdom on the "tragedy of the commons". So I'm arguing that in these systems in particular, exclusion doesn't have the same advantages that it had for traditional hierarchies, and that there is a countervailing incentive for inclusion and participation. Google doesn't care who you are, it wants you online. If you are from a niche community all the better, because your presence here will help attract other members of your community, and maintaining that use means cultivating and respecting your community to at least some minor degree. Again, that doesn't mean all suffering will end, or that all human rights problems are solved. But it is a strong reason to think that the systemic abuses of power are different in a digital world.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:26
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Aren't we already living in an economy run by computers? Like , one where we choose an idiot manbaby every 4 years to run the country based on a bunch of stated principles which are then in various, usually disapointing, ways plugged into a giant bureacracy of departments who then write software to implement those directives with humans hanging off terminals bashing in data which in turn beeps and boops stuff at other humans and electronic fund transferals and stuff. I mean, implicitely, we already built our Forbin project, except we just don't let it decide policy, because thats probably a really loving bad idea.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:43
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RealityApologist posted:Actually, the imposition of many traffic laws (especially speed limits) has statistically insignificant effect on the speed and flow of traffic. I wish you could sit outside my office at 6pm on the days when the traffic light goes out.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:44
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What? No, for a village to bring in a harvest you need every able-bodied person in the village working together. For Facebook to function you need a handful of computer janitors to keep the servers running. You think Facebook users have any real say over the policies and practices of facebook? Facebook is run in an entirely top-down manner. Technology means a single person can press a few buttons and force behaviors on Facebook users by changing policies or adding/disabling features. Their need to listen to their users is no different than a liege lord needing to listen to peasants so they don't revolt or run away while unilaterally demanding behaviors and imposing taxes. Google and Facebook are inclusive to the poing where they can extract money from you. Beyond that you are worthless and will be ignored. This doesn't strike me as particularly wonderful or in any way different from the way our society works. People of limited economic value will still be ignored where its convenient.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:44
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Cream_Filling posted:What? No, for a village to bring in a harvest you need every able-bodied person in the village working together. For Facebook to function you need a handful of computer janitors to keep the servers running. Code is law, and coders are the lawmakers in any system organized purely on a code basis. (And coders, as a group, are assholes who don't know half the things they think they do and have severe social, gender, and race issues.)
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Dec 3, 2013 05:47
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Ok Glass, immanentize the eschaton.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:50
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Kalman posted:Code is law, and coders are the lawmakers in any system organized purely on a code basis. What does this have to do with the quoted post
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Dec 3, 2013 05:51
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RealityApologist posted:I mean by successful "resilience under changing conditions", which include things like climate change, but more immediately in keeping the social order stable and predictable and within certain constraints. Perhaps its worth mentioning here that we aren't doing so hot in these categories, with our persistent political instability and economic imbalance. The U.S. is a marvel of political stability. Don't confuse brinkmanship in Congress or libertarian rhetoric approaching the mainstream for instability. For all the polarizing rhetoric that gets thrown around elections have remarkably little impact on the functioning of government and society. What could be more stable than that? quote:Now a stable system might not be providing well for the least of its members, sure. Traditional hierarchies historically gain stability through exclusion and restricting political power to a very few. But a digital systems are user-generated, and requires levels of feedback from the user base that is unprecedented in the history of human civilization. Uh it's happening faster, and there are more of us, but what exactly is unprecedented about digital systems of communication? It's certainly not the conceptual leap that the telegraph was. For that matter, what is it about a digital system that makes it user-generated by definition? How are those systems any different from the "user-creation" of landowners getting drunk in a tavern, formulating demands and tromping off to their elected representative? quote:For facebook to operate, you need vastly more people cooperating than have ever been members of any political structure. For facebook to operate, you need more people than the entire government?? Last time I checked there were not millions of people working for facebook. Wait, do you mean the users? How is what users do organization? quote:These systems don't work like traditional organizations, because they get better with use. Its a logic that is utterly unlike those historical structures, and completely undermines conventional wisdom on the "tragedy of the commons". They get better with use? Why, because you say so? Besides, political systems get better with use too; they gain strength with increasing user participation. Political systems are created by their users. The question is who showed up to be a user. And the tragedy of the commons was bullshit to begin with, it's propaganda to make us forget a time when the land was held in common. quote:So I'm arguing that in these systems in particular, exclusion doesn't have the same advantages that it had for traditional hierarchies, and that there is a countervailing incentive for inclusion and participation. Google doesn't care who you are, it wants you online. If you are from a niche community all the better, because your presence here will help attract other members of your community, and maintaining that use means cultivating and respecting your community to at least some minor degree. Yes, that works very well for Google because they are a company that sells advertising. Google arose from a motive of profit. Where is the motive for the creation of a political model that "doesn't care who you are"? Politics is literally about who you are. What environmental pressures will lead to the introduction and success of such a political model? quote:Again, that doesn't mean all suffering will end, or that all human rights problems are solved. But it is a strong reason to think that the systemic abuses of power are different in a digital world. They're always different. They're different every time. It ends up not mattering.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:52
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SedanChair posted:Wait, do you mean the users? How is what users do organization? They are the ones actually forming the links that make the service have any value. If FB had no active members it would be utterly useless.
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Dec 3, 2013 06:02
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RealityApologist posted:They are the ones actually forming the links that make the service have any value. If FB had no active members it would be utterly useless. Yes and without serfs, feudalism wouldn't have much value either. The connections users form give them an incentive to continue participating, and they provide value to the company, but how are they "organization"? How are they power? Facebook could delete the account of every political activist on Facebook tomorrow and their stock price would probably go up.
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Dec 3, 2013 06:06
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RealityApologist posted:They are the ones actually forming the links that make the service have any value. If FB had no active members it would be utterly useless. If a fief had no peasants to work the land and serve as levies it would be utterly worthless, too. If a company had no workers to actually do the work it would be worthelss. This says nothing about who holds more power in the relationship or how it's organized. In Facebook the users aren't the customers, they're the product.
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Dec 3, 2013 06:07
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Cream_Filling posted:What does this have to do with the quoted post It's a generalization of your point regarding Facebook engineers being able to force behaviors on users without user input due to changes in code. The whole concept of "code is law" is also a useful shorthand for a set of arguments initially developed as an argument against DRM by Lessig but more generally applicable in any situation where people assert that technology produces a neutral environment which allows freedom.
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Dec 3, 2013 06:09
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Kalman posted:It's a generalization of your point regarding Facebook engineers being able to force behaviors on users without user input due to changes in code. The whole concept of "code is law" is also a useful shorthand for a set of arguments initially developed as an argument against DRM by Lessig but more generally applicable in any situation where people assert that technology produces a neutral environment which allows freedom. I know the term but it's a little confusing since most of teh examples I give aren't strict formalized systems. Also if you liked those points I recommend Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. He also has a new book, which I haven't read yet, called To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism but which sounds entirely appropriate to this thread. edit: yuuup quote:Evgeny Morozov calls himself a ‘digital heretic,’ and he is right to do so. Against the reigning consensus—that there is a digital fix for every social and political problem, and that thanks to the technologies that we group together for convenience’s sake as the Internet, the brave new world of the future will be one of endless, limitless improvement in every realm of life—Morozov offers a sophisticated, eloquent, and definitive rebuttal. Technological ‘solutionism,’ he argues, is the romantic utopia of our age, and, like Communism or the free market fantasies of Reagan and Thatcher before it, it is one more god doomed to fail. In our ahistorical, gadget obsessed, and self-regarding age, Morozov’s skeptical, modest humanism will doubtless engender fierce resistance. But then, that is the tribute that self-delusion has always paid to reason. quote:He derides an ideology he calls “Internet-centrism,” which defines the network not as a tool created by fallible human beings but as a creed to live by. The chief promoters of this ideology have projected upon the Internet certain values they imagine to be intrinsic, among them the imperatives to be open and transparent and efficient and digitally “social”; to believe that knowledge is created through data collection and algorithmic analysis; to believe that the minute quantification of existence is the path to self-awareness. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 06:13
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Kalman posted:Code is law, and coders are the lawmakers in any system organized purely on a code basis. Code is not law. A law governs at a high level of abstraction. "Murder will be punished by death!" it says. This doesn't actually stop any murders directly, but makes people think about the consequences and puts pressure on their decision indirectly. It also makes room for a legitimate process of justice to take place should the law be violated. The point is to judge whether a rule has been followed or broken; a broken law is a violation that demands some response. Code is not like this. My computer isn't obeying some abstraction that indirectly informes it's behavior, and nor does the code operate as a kind of institutional cover for the operation of some other process. The code my computer runs is an exact description of its states over time; it says at each step what each of the parts do. Following that code directly will result in the completion of some computing task: in other words, following code gets something done. Laws aren't like that. Following a law might not get anything done; it might prevent things from getting done, or it might not do anything at all. Laws aren't about ensuring that anything in particular gets accomplished, they are just about imposing a standard and enforcing violations. Furthermore, my computer can't break its code. I mean, it can glitch and not execute its code, but if is operating properly at all it is operating according to some code, and that code describes exactly the state of the computer as it does the task. It isn't some abstraction apart from the operation of the computer, but it describes that operation directly. There's no sense in which a (non-buggy) computer is in "violation" of any code. These are fundamental conceptual differences that make a difference to this conversation.
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Dec 3, 2013 06:30
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Cream_Filling posted:I know the term but it's a little confusing since most of teh examples I give aren't strict formalized systems. Evgeny Morozov is wrong about a lot of things, and is contrarian mostly because he thinks its cool. http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2013/02/social-media-is-fact-of-life-for-social.html It figures you'd like him. You're both completely obnoxious dicks.
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Dec 3, 2013 06:34
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This is from five pages ago, but it brings up a question about the attention economy that I don't think has been well addressed in this thread.RealityApologist posted:That importance is value-neutral, as in the case of the car crash and the rubber necks. The mere fact that attention has been attracted to the crash doesn't say anything about whether people like crashes or what more or less of them. What it does do is demonstrate where attention is being directed, and that change in the flow of attention is, I claim, sufficient for mobilizing resources. The fact that attention is being directed towards the crash suggests that something needs to be done. Amplifying that signal in a functioning economy of attention ensures that the persons most appropriate for handling the event are made aware so they can be dispatched properly. Reality, I believe that what you're saying in the above quote is that the attention economy that you're proposing emergency response personnel would use the attention paid to an accident as a means of identifying emergencies that require their response. Please let me know if I've misunderstood you, and if I have, please clarify what you meant. Assuming that I correctly understand your claim, how would the attention economy respond to two accidents. To keep things simple let's limit the our measurements of severity to the injury to the driver and the risk of further injury or death to the driver while waiting for the emergency responders to arrive. The driver is the only person injured in the accident. We will consider all other damages, such as economic damage to society at large, to be equal. And let's assume that the emergency responds can arrive at the scene of either accident in equal time. Further, both drivers would be able to call emergency services and provide a detailed description of their injuries if such an emergency service number existed, like it does in our current economy. And finally, at the time of the accidents the emergency services only have the resources to respond to one accident at a time. The first accident happens on a busy road and so a lot of attention is paid to it, amplifying the signal under the attention economy. The second accident happens on a deserted road, and so the only attention paid to is that of the driver himself. Assuming both drivers are equally injured which accident will the attention economy respond to first, how and why does the attention economy make that decision? Assuming the second driver is significantly more injured than the first driver which accident will the attention economy respond to first, how and why does the attention economy make that decision?
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Dec 3, 2013 06:49
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RealityApologist posted:Code is not law. That's not what the phrase means. Go read Lessig before you respond to it, or at least a cliff notes version.
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Dec 3, 2013 06:57
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Kalman posted:That's not what the phrase means. Go read Lessig before you respond to it, or at least a cliff notes version. I've studied Lessig for a long time. I know what the phrase means, and I disagree. I think it's an important distinction to be clear about.
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Dec 3, 2013 07:15
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Hairy Marionette posted:This is from five pages ago, but it brings up a question about the attention economy that I don't think has been well addressed in this thread. First of all, I'm not about to tell emergency responders the best way to do their job. The whole system is set up to that no one has to tell anyone else how to do a job. Emergency services usually have special methods of amplifying their signals (like 911) that can get around a lot of the clutter of the normal infrastructure and get response fast. And the system seems to work pretty well as it is, so I'm not sure it needs any methodological changes, but I honestly have no idea. But anyway, the situation you describe is one where the events are equal in all ways other than the amount of attention being paid to the issue. That's fine, and here's how it would manifest, just as it manifests now: the crash on the busy street is accompanied by a lot of 911 calls reporting the crash, and the one on the deserted highway is accompanied by the driver himself calling for help. The response team is obviously going to be judging these cases by their severity and urgency, and not how many calls they've received. In an attention economy the situation is not different at all. Let me say this again, clearly: the attention economy is a way of propagating important social signals to connect them with the agents most suited to dealing with it. The fact that more people see the first crash just means that signal will propagate faster and louder. But once it is connected with the emergency services, it is their call to make about how best to handle the situation given the resources at their disposal. So if they get word that the urgency is equal, they might treat them equally, but if they judge that one is more important they might focus more on that one. But that's their call to make. The attention management systems aren't making the decision, they are propagating the signals in order to reach the people who can.
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Dec 3, 2013 07:26
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RealityApologist posted:But that's their call to make. When I say "that's their call to make", I mean in that particular case, given their operating procedures. Undoubtedly there needs to be discussion at a higher level of analysis, about what the proper procedures for emergency services to make, and what resources they should have at their disposal and so on, and those decisions must be made in conjunction with other interested parties at that level, including local citizens and medical ethicists and city planners and whatever. It is these escalating levels of embedded community that represent the clearest distinction between this story and the libertopian alternative. When libertarians say "that's their call to make", they mean it in the sense of "they are sovereign on their own property". I'm denying this ideological principle, and individualism more generally. No man is an island; we are all part of densely nested communities at many levels of abstraction. What is properly the call of a community to make at one level can be tested and questioned at another. If emergency services isn't doing a good job responding to emergencies, it might require a public inquiry to gather the facts and review the procedures. But again this is all self-organized (instead of institutionally structured) where interested parties from all corners are encouraged to participate along the way.
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Dec 3, 2013 07:32
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RealityApologist posted:I've studied Lessig for a long time. I know what the phrase means, and I disagree. I think it's an important distinction to be clear about. If your takeaway from Code is that the phrase "code is law" is supposed to mean that code behaves like a law in the sense of being manipulable or fuzzy, you took away entirely the wrong lesson from him. I mean seriously. Chapter 1: Lessig posted:Lawyers and legal theorists get bothered, however, when I echo this slogan. There are differences, they insist, between the regulatory effects produced by code and the regulatory effects produced by law, not the least of which is the difference in the “internal perspective” that runs with each kind of regulation. We understand the internal perspective of legal regulation—for example, that the restrictions the law might impose on a company’s freedom to pollute are a product of self-conscious regulation, reflecting values of the society imposing that regulation. That perspective is harder to recognize with code. It could be there, but it need not. And no doubt this is just one of many important differences between “code” and “law.” Your criticism is addressed right up front - as irrelevant. The point Lessig is drawing out is that code is not and never can be neutral, and that code has essential characteristics regarding behaviors which will always and ever be determined by the coder. He is less suspicious of this fact than I am, but he is suspicious. Lessig posted:The central lesson of this book is that cyberspace requires choices. Some of these are, and should be, private: Whether an author wants to enforce her copyright; how a citizen wants to protect his privacy. But some of these choices involve values that are collective. I end by asking whether we—meaning Americans—are up to the challenge that these choices present. Are we able to respond rationally—meaning both (1) are we able to respond without undue or irrational passion, and (2) do we have institutions capable of understanding and responding to these choices? Code is law does not mean that code is fuzzy; it means that the architectures of the systems we use represent regulatory choices made by those who design those systems. Code isn't fuzzy, but it is a form of law, and one with some particularly pernicious effects because it isn't fuzzy.
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Dec 3, 2013 07:40
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Kalman posted:Code is law does not mean that code is fuzzy; it means that the architectures of the systems we use represent regulatory choices made by those who design those systems. Code isn't fuzzy, but it is a form of law, and one with some particularly pernicious effects because it isn't fuzzy. My complaint isn't that law is fuzzy, it's that law is disconnected from the actual procedures being undergone by the system being governed, whereas code describe the relevant states of the system as it is being governed. It's a prescriptive/descriptive distinction. I'm entirely in agreement with Lessig that code should be regulated, and more generally that we should think about the regulation and maintenance of code as an alternative to the existing legislative processes.
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Dec 3, 2013 08:23
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Ratoslov posted:Ehhh, not so much as you'd think. The Autonomous Cartopia would need to have enough cars to operate at peak capacity, which is actually a fair number of cars. You're better off using public autocars as a supplement for effective public transit, rather than a replacement. * number completely made up
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Dec 3, 2013 08:31
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RealityApologist posted:My complaint isn't that law is fuzzy, it's that law is disconnected from the actual procedures being undergone by the system being governed, whereas code describe the relevant states of the system as it is being governed. It's a prescriptive/descriptive distinction. So, do you think murder should be illegal?
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Dec 3, 2013 08:48
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RealityApologist posted:First of all, I'm not about to tell emergency responders the best way to do their job. The whole system is set up to that no one has to tell anyone else how to do a job. Emergency services usually have special methods of amplifying their signals (like 911) that can get around a lot of the clutter of the normal infrastructure and get response fast. And the system seems to work pretty well as it is, so I'm not sure it needs any methodological changes, but I honestly have no idea. I'm not saying this to be mean, but you're doing that thing that a lot of philosophers do where you use far more words than needed to make your point. I've been guilty of the same thing many times. I only bring it up because you've mentioned that you have difficulty writing well and avoiding this type of verbosity is an important part of writing clearly. Let me summarize what I think you're saying. The attention economy is an adjunct to our current economy/social system(s) that can provide useful information and can fill in some information gaps that currently exist. It's not meant to replace the parts of our current system that are already working well, or at least are working better than we expect the attention economy to work. This means that I was mistaken in my previous interpretation of the point you were making. I had thought that you were proposing the attention economy replace existing methods of contacting emergency services, as opposed to augmenting them. If I haven't correctly summarized what you're saying then please let me know where I've gotten it wrong. If I have correctly summarized what you're saying then that strikes me as a reasonable proposal for how the expansion of information technology can be used for the good of society. But I don't yet see how it can be used as a replacement for existing social structures. Can you take me one, and just one, more step down the path to societal revolution? We now have what is, more or less, the existing economic and social structures augmented with some amount of data coming out of our smart phones/cars/etc that is then analyzed by some entity and is then being passed onto other entities. Accident info passed onto emergency services being one example of this. For the sake of argument let's not worry about who is collecting the info and why or how they're passing it onto entities. I'm just trying to understand how the system works, not if it's politically feasible.
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Dec 3, 2013 09:07
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RealityApologist posted:I'm entirely in agreement with Lessig that code should be regulated, and more generally that we should think about the regulation and maintenance of code as an alternative to the existing legislative processes. The people who write the code are completely and totally different from the people that use it. You are under this delusion that the users of facebook are anything more than customers.
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Dec 3, 2013 09:33
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RealityApologist posted:My complaint isn't that law is fuzzy, it's that law is disconnected from the actual procedures being undergone by the system being governed, whereas code describe the relevant states of the system as it is being governed. It's a prescriptive/descriptive distinction. That's still not Lessig's point. His book isn't about regulating code - it's about code as an anti-democratic form of regulation.
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Dec 3, 2013 15:54
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iFederico posted:You are under this delusion that the users of facebook are anything more than customers. The users of facebook are the product, advertisers and data miners are the customers.
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Dec 3, 2013 15:57
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iFederico posted:The people who write the code are completely and totally different from the people that use it. You are under this delusion that the users of facebook are anything more than customers. No I'm not, any more than I think that the drivers on the road also built them. The databases mentioned in the study above are of the friend structure of the network. The facebook employees didn't build that, the users did. And that's where almost all the value of FB lies. The engineers who built facebook design the interface to and graphical presentation of that database, but the content of the database is built by the users. FB users don't have much control over interface design, and that's a problem. But it doesn't mean they are just inactive consumers; they are actively engaged in the construction of the network itself. This is radically unlike, say, a feudal lord. Although the wealth of the lord might be generated by the peasants, the lord has their authority and power not in virtue of the peasants, but in virtue of birthright or designation by a king or something. In other words, they achieve their power from the top. Contrast that with the popular kids on facebook. No one designates who those people are, including the people who built the interface. Those people emerge naturally from the activity of the users. Of course the design of the interface constrains the kids of relations people can form, and that might have some influence over who is deemed popular and what influence they might have on the network. Similarly, the design of the roadway will have some influence over how the traffic flows across it. Nevertheless, the activity of users within those constraints are self-organized and self-directed, and that's where the value of the network lies.
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Dec 3, 2013 16:12
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RealityApologist posted:GPS location and RFID is plenty. Let users tag all the important items they might be attending to with little RFID tags, and then monitor how close I am to anything that is tagged during the day. So everyone has to wear a GPS locator and tag all of their possessions with RFID tags, and then have their location and proximity to various items constantly reported to a central database in near-real-time? Aside from the obvious privacy issues, and the overwhelming task of handling all that data from 300 million people, and the inconsistencies introduced by letting users do the tagging, who the gently caress is paying to provide all this stuff to every person? How many tags is each person allowed, and what will they do when they run out? What happens if someone takes off their GPS locator, or forgets to charge it, or loses it? Even ignoring the technological and social problems with your idea, the logistics are beyond overwhelming and I don't think you understand that because you handwave any and all practical issues away with "technology or society will handle it". RealityApologist posted:And it's not hard to see that self-organization has a much more impressive track record than lynch mobs and distributed genocide. You left out Al Qaeda terrorist cells, btw. Here's a better example: the flow of traffic. It is a self-organized system. Yeah, it kills thousands of people every year. But given the billions of hours of driving we use, it is an incredibly effective system, and most people use have no problem using it safely. Traffic isn't self-organized. Road design is an incredibly complex science developed by traffic engineers for the purpose of top-down controlling traffic's characteristics by taking into account human behavior to guide traffic patterns in a planned way. Traffic lights and stop signs are the very opposite of self-organized, but even when no speed limit signs are there, traffic engineers can still design the road so that people will naturally be inclined to drive at a certain speed. RealityApologist posted:Code is not law. Aside from being ridiculous (do you think your digital utopia would equip everyone with shock collars so that the mega-AI could execute us immediately upon detection of a crime?), this is also flawed in basically every technical detail. I thought you had a comp sci degree. To say that code doesn't have any sort of abstraction and always automatically executes itself is silly, and it's perfectly possible for a computer to "break" its code and enter an unintended state.
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Dec 3, 2013 16:42
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RealityApologist posted:No I'm not, any more than I think that the drivers on the road also built them. Village headmen were usually not appointed by their lords but emerged through internal social processes among the peasants. The feudal lord has their authority and power due to birthright and designation, just like the owners of facebook receive their authority and power from corporate and property law. If the headmen ever caused trouble it was pretty easy for the lords to silence or cow them, just like if you're considered a bad influence on the community facebook can ban your rear end with zero fuss. The design of the interface and allowed behaviors in the network exerts an enormous amount of influence and control over what sorts of interactions people have in the network. This is top-down control. The fact that you don't seem to understand this is laughable considering you claim to be interested in systems yet somehow don't get this most basic element ever. Seriously, it's as retarded as free market zealots who insist that a free market with zero influence or control from the structure and rules of the market is possible. Also you're so utterly ignorant that you don't seem to understand that there is a thing called the legal code separate from the higher-level abstraction of the laws themselves. Have you seriously never seen a citation to the USC or similar? OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 16:57
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Cream_Filling posted:The design of the interface and allowed behaviors in the network exerts an enormous amount of influence and control over what sorts of interactions people have in the network. This is top-down control. I agree with this. I also agree that the design of the road is a kind of top down control. In general, the design of infrastructure will have a lot of influence over how individuals organize within the system. I've never denied this. If you are reading me as having denied it, you are reading me wrong. Your misunderstanding does not make me an idiot. Seriously this thread would be much better if y'all stopped insulting me and just dealt with the topic. Calling me stupid for every objection you raise is boring as gently caress. I never said there would be no top-down control, I only said this control would be self-organized like any other system. A biological cell has bottom-up organization and top-down control, and balancing the two is what keeps the system in a homeostatic state despite changing internal and external conditions. The difference is that the top down control in these situations does not need to be institutionally centralized, but can be distributed and designed by the crowd. It doesn't matter whether a King or a democractic legislature or a consensus of reddit users builds the roads, the traffic will flow the same either way, because the flow of traffic is the immediate result of drivers interacting with the road. We can anticipate and direct that flow by designing better roads, but the organization of traffic happens when those designs meet the users action. So on my reading, the traffic is still self-organized; its the infrastructure that, in this case, isn't. The road infrastructure is, instead usually designed by an appointed committee at the state level, by engineers and policy makes there. Although those policy makers will likely appeal to data they acquire from the users of the roads to decide their planning strategies, they receive little other input in the decision making process from the users themselves, and there are typically no standard methods by which the communities of drivers can weigh in on those design decisions. If twitter were managing these decisions, we might expect to see even self-organized infrastructure supporting the self-organized traffic. Similarly, if Facebook were open source and built in the same way that Wikipedia is built (by its users), then the infrastructure of the network would reflect more directly the organizational dynamics of the community, instead of merely constraining them from the outside. quote:Also you're so utterly ignorant that you don't seem to understand that there is a thing called the legal code separate from the higher-level abstraction of the laws themselves. Have you seriously never seen a citation to the USC or similar? I'm pretty sure you aren't actually reading anything I'm writing, and your just responding to whatever funhouse mirror version of this thread is playing out in your head. A legal code is not a description of the state of the system, it is a prescription for how the system should be. A program is an exact description of the state of the system. Prescriptive norms can be written into programming code, but then that code gets executed by the computer and it ceases being prescriptive and becomes descriptive. A law can prescribe whatever it wants (drugs are illegal) without doing anything to describe the actual state of the system (drugs are everywhere).
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Dec 3, 2013 17:28
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Cream_Filling posted:Also you're so utterly ignorant that you don't seem to understand that there is a thing called the legal code separate from the higher-level abstraction of the laws themselves. Have you seriously never seen a citation to the USC or similar? I think Eripsa would count that as "laws" rather than "code", because it merely threatens a punishment that another system could potentially carry out, rather than being an absolute prohibition that either can't be violated or will immediately and automatically be punished immediately upon violation with 100% reliability.
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Dec 3, 2013 17:29
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Cicero posted:Peak capacity is still way less than the total number of usable cars in America. Plus with fewer parking lots, you'd be able to reclaim city space to make urban areas more walking and bike-friendly. Please take a look at this PDF on zoning in Denver. Page 7 shows the "box on a pad". Page 14 mentions the 1967 parking code that pushed architecture towards "box on a pad". "Main Street Zoning" is a style of zoning that Denver started which is trying to return to older architectures that are more friendly towards pedestrians, bicyclists and rapid transit. Changing the zoning is what it takes to make a city more bike-friendly. And even with the changes, it takes decades for the buildings to change. Path dependence dragged us down a path we'd rather not be today.
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Dec 3, 2013 17:31
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Hairy Marionette posted:If I have correctly summarized what you're saying then that strikes me as a reasonable proposal for how the expansion of information technology can be used for the good of society. But I don't yet see how it can be used as a replacement for existing social structures. Can you take me one, and just one, more step down the path to societal revolution? We now have what is, more or less, the existing economic and social structures augmented with some amount of data coming out of our smart phones/cars/etc that is then analyzed by some entity and is then being passed onto other entities. Accident info passed onto emergency services being one example of this. For the sake of argument let's not worry about who is collecting the info and why or how they're passing it onto entities. I'm just trying to understand how the system works, not if it's politically feasible. I'm not sure exactly what you are asking for. Emergency services is probably a bad example, because the functional requirements of the job don't really change no matter who is in charge. What would change is simply the authority under which they act, but that probably wouldn't manifest itself in the situation we're working with. A better example for "replacing social structures" would be cases where institutionalized services can be replaced by public open models. I like the example of voting best; we can predict election results from watching twitter behavior. I'd love to see a small town somewhere experiment with dissolving the city council in favor of some directly democratic system run online, where major decisions are made through the facilitation of debate and discussion by community members on a public and open website. But many that's too many steps. I'm not sure what you are looking for with your question.
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Dec 3, 2013 17:34
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Main Paineframe posted:I think Eripsa would count that as "laws" rather than "code", because it merely threatens a punishment that another system could potentially carry out, rather than being an absolute prohibition that either can't be violated or will immediately and automatically be punished immediately upon violation with 100% reliability. His argument is that law is not code. Except that the statement is that code is law. Also a program is not "an exact description of the state of a system" without some very odd definitions for those terms. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 17:38
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Cream_Filling posted:His argument is that law is not code. Except that the statement is that code is law. If I know the program you are running and I know the input, then I know in a stepwise fashion exactly what states your system will be going through. The code is the procedure that describes your development on that input through the statespace. If I know the law that governs the land, I know gently caress all about what the people are doing in it. All I know is when the state as the authority to step in and say otherwise. Again, I agree entirely with Lessig that code will embody values, and that we must be vigilant in ensuring that the code that our world runs on is the code we want running. The mere fact that it is code doesn't make it any more trustworthy. But that doesn't mean that code is law. Turing describes a distinction between the "laws of conduct" and the "rules of behavior", and the latter is code.
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Dec 3, 2013 17:48
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RealityApologist posted:I agree with this. I also agree that the design of the road is a kind of top down control. In general, the design of infrastructure will have a lot of influence over how individuals organize within the system. I've never denied this. If you are reading me as having denied it, you are reading me wrong. Your misunderstanding does not make me an idiot. Seriously this thread would be much better if y'all stopped insulting me and just dealt with the topic. Calling me stupid for every objection you raise is boring as gently caress. If it's self organizing "like every other system" then why bother even saying so, if every single system can be described as such? Why do you insist on wasting time on things that don't matter? You also don't seem to get that traffic in the US isn't really very self-organized at all. It's organized according to traffic laws which every driver is supposed to know and which are enforced. If you want to see actual self-organized traffic with minimal outside planning, again, go to China or India. In most cases, it's a shitshow. Seriously, you just spent a couple hundred words saying nothing of note. Your conclusions are "If twitter were managing these decisions, we might expect to see even self-organized infrastructure supporting the self-organized traffic." as well as "Similarly, if Facebook were open source and built in the same way that Wikipedia is built (by its users), then the infrastructure of the network would reflect more directly the organizational dynamics of the community, instead of merely constraining them from the outside." What the hell does this mean and why would anyone care? It's so vague as to be utterly meaningless nonsense.
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Dec 3, 2013 17:48
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Would anyone be interested in participating in a live, broadcasted youtube hangout on this topic? I'd be happy to field questions live. It'll probably help with a lot of the miscommunication, and it might be interesting. Any takers?
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Dec 3, 2013 17:50
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