4 ms·

Uhm, maybe it's time we work harder to put communication infrastructure in the hands of corporations and other non-state non-nation transnational entities that

by nnq 7y ago

Uhm, maybe it's time we work harder to put communication infrastructure in the hands of corporations and other non-state non-nation transnational entities that are powerful enough so governments don't have much power over them? Maybe monopolies and tech giants could be a good thing you know... Under a few big "Unbrella Co."-s you could have a nice pseudo-anarchic libertarian global system. Whatever happened with the idea of a future where corporations would be truly transnational and would have private armies and police forces and such and really dwarf governments in power? ...it sounded like a dystopia back then, but nowadays I'd really wish we'd be in that variant of the future instead of the current one!

ErrantX 7y ago
I mean. In case the downvotes arent clear, you are aware of the history of e.g. the British East India Company?
- twherw4234 7y ago
  Ah yes, 'we need to go there, steal all their money, and then teach those pagan devils that we're doing this to civilize them!'.
- nnq 7y ago
  ...wasn't that familiar with the gritty details this part of history, but from a simple skimming, I see that things sort of worked-out fine until BEIC shifted its focus from trade and profit to territory grabbing, waring around, and administration. And it started behaving as a nation, probably because it was... all its owners where British nobility, right? That seems to be also when things turned bad for them - they practically went bankrupt but were still artificially kept a float by the then British Empire? Probably a good lesson to be learned from BEIC for future transnational megacorps: (1) keep your focus on making profit and growing (growing in the do-lots-of-R&D to increase your technological supremacy sense - you probably can't grow marketshare after you're already a monopoly), (2) let governments do the "drawing borders" and maintaining local civil order part, and (3) diversity, diversity, diversity - if all your owners are from one nation and one social-class / race / whatever, you'll be phagocytized or subverted by that nation and/or sub-group.
molteanu 7y ago
That means subverting the sovereignty of nations, right? Or I am missing something from this argument? If so, who are the ones with authoritarian views here?
- nnq 7y ago
  Uhm, no, not at all. Nothing about subverting, only diverting a bit maybe, or reallocating resources - let nations do what they are great at, keep their subscribers alive, sane and healthy (yeah, core healthcare should probably be left to nations, not the private sector). And the government structures of mega-corporations will by necessity dilute into some techno-algorithmic-cyber-socio-capitalism thingy that would likely be uncomprehensible to us from our current view point. Authoritarian regimes as you can see in the world today rise mainly in small nation states! Also in places with low-information-bandwidth! You can dilute autocracy out of existence in a big enough entity where the decision making is technical by necessity because it needs to optimize a numeric output: profit. (Reason: the complexity of technical decision goes beyond the computing capacities of one mind, so you get dilution by technical necessity... true, not "democracy" by any means, but something that could be mathematically similar enough to it.) Anyway, if other ways to keep communication and transport infrastructure out of the hands of nations could be seen maybe they'd work better. The point would be to enact "separation of powers" at the next scale/level of humanity - separate "communication, transport/mobility and trade powers" from "government and administration powers". (Separating mobility part would also "open the market" and create healthy competition between governments as some people start moving around and "shopping" for a better nation. Over time, you'd end up with better products in the "states & nations" aisle of the world supermarket.) The end game is increased freedom and prosperity opportunities for all. It's just that I don't think that we're going to get this by looking at what worked or didn't work in the past - the future will not be at all like the past, we may not have reached "the singularity" or whatever, but we're staring at a big dark wall of unpredictibility regarding the future, and our previous experience is mostly worthless at seeing through it, we need to really really think far outside the box at how we can get what we want.
jdashg 7y ago
You can't vote out a corporation.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  If voting changed anything it would already be illegal.
horomeme 7y ago
Please tell us this is just a bad joke.
cat199 7y ago
feeding the trolls, but: > pseudo-anarchic libertarian a feudal warlord system is neither 'anarchic' nor 'libertarian'
- nnq 7y ago
  A feudal warlord system is geographically local by nature, and culturally local by accident. Corporations strong enough to out-power governments would be by necessity global and trans-cultural. This would be a very very different power and freedom dynamic, closer probably to that of large empires or current interior of mega-states, only projected globally so all can benefit from it. You'd get the freedom & liberty that you'd get in a loosely managed empire at the bottom of it's power pyramid, because the "top of the pyramid" would focus on profit and growth, not bother imposing strict rules towards the bottom, and would favor open borders and open trade for reasons of efficiency optimization. States would keep their power functioning as "providers of order" and "regulators of religion, culture etc.", but whenever they'd try to restrict the flow of goods or information, the "outer gods" would come down and give them a good whooping. Also, the natural tendency would be to have the decision making of these corporations more and more automated and diluted/distributed (the media-focusing founders' power would eventually dilute in big corporate cauldrons), until step by step they'd actually become non-human, half-biological AGIs in effect, using humans inside them as components, solving the annoying problem of having "other humans" ordering you from the top of the pyramid. Sure, the power transition needs to be gradual to avoid violence, but this is the road towards "crafting our gods". Nation states, as you'll start to see more and more, will try to restrict, regulate and slow down technological progress, even at the cost of their own (and of all of us) economic impoverishment.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> maybe it's time we work harder to put communication infrastructure in the hands of corporations and other non-state non-nation transnational entities that are powerful enough so governments don't have much power over them? An entity over which no government has effective power is a government, whether it calls itself that or not. > Under a few big "Unbrella Co."-s you could have a nice pseudo-anarchic libertarian global system. No, you couldn't. Because if its under a few whatevers, its not any relative of anarchic. Those things its under, that's the -archy.
- nnq 7y ago
  If you "own" 10 people, you call them slaves and call yourself their master, and you exploit them harshly by necessity, afraid that other slave owners will out-compete you and you'll go bankrupt. If, collectively with other 1000 board members, "own" 1 billion people, you're part of an "elite power structure", and you can do a lot of things to make the lives of those people better - you'll still want your profits, but by having a monopoly on some things you know that no rival can put you out of business so you can relax a bit... -archy's nature is changed by scale just like everything else, we're not fractals!
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > If, collectively with other 1000 board members, "own" 1 billion people, you're part of an "elite power structure", and you can do a lot of things to make the lives of those people better - you'll still want your profits, but by having a monopoly on some things you know that no rival can put you out of business so you can relax a bit... We have a couple elite power structures that rule over ~ a billion people, they don't seem all that relaxed and pseudo-anarchic. I don't see how them having a formal profit interest and being named “corporation” rather than “state” is likely to change that.
    - nnq 7y ago
      Well, look at things in another way: Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning. Maybe drop the "corporations" name, just call them "global orgs", since a few of them could also be not-for-profit (but allowed to self-finance, and to maintain forces of self-defense) and handle "global responsibility" issues like oceans pollution, climate issues etc. Other would be for-profit could focus on providing communications infrastructure, people transit security services etc. In the end the total amount of power could end up even more split up, or maybe a little bit more concentrated but across different borders at different layers (mostly avoiding overlapping the borders of the state level below to the ones of the layers above), some even completely non-physical/non-geographical, maybe "bordered" by different purposefully-non-trivial-to-exchange crypto-currencies. Sorry if I wasn't clear, the core idea was not "corporations" as we know them, neither concentration of power - just that we'd need self-financing and self-defense-capable trans-national organisms that would be better fitted for providing naturally-global services like communications.

by nnq 7y ago

ErrantX 7y ago

I mean. In case the downvotes arent clear, you are aware of the history of e.g. the British East India Company?

twherw4234 7y ago
Ah yes, 'we need to go there, steal all their money, and then teach those pagan devils that we're doing this to civilize them!'.
nnq 7y ago
...wasn't that familiar with the gritty details this part of history, but from a simple skimming, I see that things sort of worked-out fine until BEIC shifted its focus from trade and profit to territory grabbing, waring around, and administration. And it started behaving as a nation, probably because it was... all its owners where British nobility, right? That seems to be also when things turned bad for them - they practically went bankrupt but were still artificially kept a float by the then British Empire? Probably a good lesson to be learned from BEIC for future transnational megacorps: (1) keep your focus on making profit and growing (growing in the do-lots-of-R&D to increase your technological supremacy sense - you probably can't grow marketshare after you're already a monopoly), (2) let governments do the "drawing borders" and maintaining local civil order part, and (3) diversity, diversity, diversity - if all your owners are from one nation and one social-class / race / whatever, you'll be phagocytized or subverted by that nation and/or sub-group.

molteanu 7y ago

That means subverting the sovereignty of nations, right? Or I am missing something from this argument? If so, who are the ones with authoritarian views here?

nnq 7y ago
Uhm, no, not at all. Nothing about subverting, only diverting a bit maybe, or reallocating resources - let nations do what they are great at, keep their subscribers alive, sane and healthy (yeah, core healthcare should probably be left to nations, not the private sector). And the government structures of mega-corporations will by necessity dilute into some techno-algorithmic-cyber-socio-capitalism thingy that would likely be uncomprehensible to us from our current view point. Authoritarian regimes as you can see in the world today rise mainly in small nation states! Also in places with low-information-bandwidth! You can dilute autocracy out of existence in a big enough entity where the decision making is technical by necessity because it needs to optimize a numeric output: profit. (Reason: the complexity of technical decision goes beyond the computing capacities of one mind, so you get dilution by technical necessity... true, not "democracy" by any means, but something that could be mathematically similar enough to it.) Anyway, if other ways to keep communication and transport infrastructure out of the hands of nations could be seen maybe they'd work better. The point would be to enact "separation of powers" at the next scale/level of humanity - separate "communication, transport/mobility and trade powers" from "government and administration powers". (Separating mobility part would also "open the market" and create healthy competition between governments as some people start moving around and "shopping" for a better nation. Over time, you'd end up with better products in the "states & nations" aisle of the world supermarket.) The end game is increased freedom and prosperity opportunities for all. It's just that I don't think that we're going to get this by looking at what worked or didn't work in the past - the future will not be at all like the past, we may not have reached "the singularity" or whatever, but we're staring at a big dark wall of unpredictibility regarding the future, and our previous experience is mostly worthless at seeing through it, we need to really really think far outside the box at how we can get what we want.

jdashg 7y ago

You can't vote out a corporation.

brokenmachine 7y ago
If voting changed anything it would already be illegal.

horomeme 7y ago

Please tell us this is just a bad joke.

cat199 7y ago

feeding the trolls, but: > pseudo-anarchic libertarian a feudal warlord system is neither 'anarchic' nor 'libertarian'

nnq 7y ago
A feudal warlord system is geographically local by nature, and culturally local by accident. Corporations strong enough to out-power governments would be by necessity global and trans-cultural. This would be a very very different power and freedom dynamic, closer probably to that of large empires or current interior of mega-states, only projected globally so all can benefit from it. You'd get the freedom & liberty that you'd get in a loosely managed empire at the bottom of it's power pyramid, because the "top of the pyramid" would focus on profit and growth, not bother imposing strict rules towards the bottom, and would favor open borders and open trade for reasons of efficiency optimization. States would keep their power functioning as "providers of order" and "regulators of religion, culture etc.", but whenever they'd try to restrict the flow of goods or information, the "outer gods" would come down and give them a good whooping. Also, the natural tendency would be to have the decision making of these corporations more and more automated and diluted/distributed (the media-focusing founders' power would eventually dilute in big corporate cauldrons), until step by step they'd actually become non-human, half-biological AGIs in effect, using humans inside them as components, solving the annoying problem of having "other humans" ordering you from the top of the pyramid. Sure, the power transition needs to be gradual to avoid violence, but this is the road towards "crafting our gods". Nation states, as you'll start to see more and more, will try to restrict, regulate and slow down technological progress, even at the cost of their own (and of all of us) economic impoverishment.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> maybe it's time we work harder to put communication infrastructure in the hands of corporations and other non-state non-nation transnational entities that are powerful enough so governments don't have much power over them? An entity over which no government has effective power is a government, whether it calls itself that or not. > Under a few big "Unbrella Co."-s you could have a nice pseudo-anarchic libertarian global system. No, you couldn't. Because if its under a few whatevers, its not any relative of anarchic. Those things its under, that's the -archy.

nnq 7y ago
If you "own" 10 people, you call them slaves and call yourself their master, and you exploit them harshly by necessity, afraid that other slave owners will out-compete you and you'll go bankrupt. If, collectively with other 1000 board members, "own" 1 billion people, you're part of an "elite power structure", and you can do a lot of things to make the lives of those people better - you'll still want your profits, but by having a monopoly on some things you know that no rival can put you out of business so you can relax a bit... -archy's nature is changed by scale just like everything else, we're not fractals!
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > If, collectively with other 1000 board members, "own" 1 billion people, you're part of an "elite power structure", and you can do a lot of things to make the lives of those people better - you'll still want your profits, but by having a monopoly on some things you know that no rival can put you out of business so you can relax a bit... We have a couple elite power structures that rule over ~ a billion people, they don't seem all that relaxed and pseudo-anarchic. I don't see how them having a formal profit interest and being named “corporation” rather than “state” is likely to change that.
  - nnq 7y ago
    Well, look at things in another way: Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning. Maybe drop the "corporations" name, just call them "global orgs", since a few of them could also be not-for-profit (but allowed to self-finance, and to maintain forces of self-defense) and handle "global responsibility" issues like oceans pollution, climate issues etc. Other would be for-profit could focus on providing communications infrastructure, people transit security services etc. In the end the total amount of power could end up even more split up, or maybe a little bit more concentrated but across different borders at different layers (mostly avoiding overlapping the borders of the state level below to the ones of the layers above), some even completely non-physical/non-geographical, maybe "bordered" by different purposefully-non-trivial-to-exchange crypto-currencies. Sorry if I wasn't clear, the core idea was not "corporations" as we know them, neither concentration of power - just that we'd need self-financing and self-defense-capable trans-national organisms that would be better fitted for providing naturally-global services like communications.