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there isn't really any meat in this essay. it's lazy, vague, and abstract. the reader is left still not really understanding what a network society is

by rohan_ 2y ago

big-green-man 2y ago
It's entirely a critique of a person and less so of the concept. And a weak critique as you point out, current american partisan talking points and "evil by association" insinuations via bringing up the political tribe of the article author's boogymen of the day. If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology. The ideas of the critiqued person in this piece draw heavily from these ideas, and their writings are less so "one commandment states" and more so an exploration of the types of nation-like organizations that can emerge from some of the new technologies enabled by global networking and Turing complete computation. The critiqued individual predicts the collapse of the state as we know it today, where people are "owned" from birth and resources are owned and managed primarily for the continuation of state power. He sees this as a good thing, a thing that will finally empower human beings to choose their tribe, to form tribes as they see fit, to explore the merits of any and all ideas without taboo, to live their lives autonomously and ultimately live up to each of their own full potential. I generally agree with the premise and related concepts.
- davidgay 2y ago
  I wonder how many proponents of this idea know that it's been done before? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_of_Glarus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_of_Glarus - Protestants and Catholics had separate governments and tribunals in the same (rather small...) canton in the 17th century. The summary I read also mentioned that the death penalty required agreement from both groups - highlighting one of the obvious complexities of such a scheme. edit: a bit more detail
  - gsf_emergency 2y ago
    A link to the summary? This sounds interesting. While it sounds anachronistically enlightened (and very close to an actual historical example of what the TFA intended-- it's not very often that we harvest anything from "truth is stranger than [especially science] fiction")-- --the death penalty was applied against witchcraft in 1782?? On the whole Switzerland is (today) sort of a Heinleinian (but regrettably (or unsurprisingly?) not Stephensonian) SF setting: peak humanity in hillbilly country
    - davidgay 2y ago
      > A link to the summary? Sorry, it was in a museum - https://www.freulerpalast.ch/ https://www.freulerpalast.ch/, which doesn't look like it has that much information online.
      - gsf_emergency 2y ago
        Gotta wait for our residential citation-fu master to dig that one out, then. A necessary but maybe not sufficient condition for the emergence of such governing structures would be that people grow up rejecting zero-sum status games (including) at the level of tribes. The stopgap solution, constitutional monarchy, fails, because,---? So, I'd say in Gladrus, you already had protestants living in close proximity to Catholics for a handful of centuries .. but the clincher v-a-v the asiatic cases eludes me. Ime the asiatic cases the "jesus nut" of the system (sovereign, policemen, yeomen, lawyers, judges, etc) are drawn from a single caste. Pace Manu. Makeup of the branches of government then becomes a emergent symptom. (Compare to western based systems of law.) Who formed the peacekeeping contingent in Gladrus?
        082349872349872 2y ago
        Low B/W ATM, may be a while... In the meantime, note that CH had a catholic/proddy civil war mid-XIX (Glarus* on the protestant side) but as proof of that humanity it was resolved with only ~100 total deaths, both sides included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Sonderbund_War_Map_English.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Son... compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Religion_map_of_Switzerland_in_1800_-_en.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Rel... * for some reason, only cantons with non-human animals on their flags have visible genitalia, so the flag of Glarus is penis-free. EDIT: note also that in "modern federal" CH, almost all the tax burden is canton and commune, not confederation.
- glitchc 2y ago
  > If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology. Kudos to Stephenson for inventing a new word that sounds better than the original. Phyles are no different from cliques and suffer from the same problems that cliques do, from an unclear power structure to unwritten rules that are arbitrarily enforced by a capricious "royalty," and in-crowds and out-crowds. Cliques are great for those inside and terrible for those outside (everyone else). That we have managed to diminish their importance in core pillars of societal function is one of modern civilization's greatest achievements. Going back would not be progress.
  - nopinsight 2y ago
    Freedom of association means that a clique does not have absolute power over you, right? Competition implies that cliques incompatible with most people’s values will wither. You can possibly live in the same house. It’s a bit like changing your insurance company or gym membership but with much larger consequences, if I understand the concept correctly (I’ve never read the novels mentioned).
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      In practice cliques have the same benefits to agglomeration that e.g. corporations and proto-governments do. So freedom of association can’t exist in practice for very long, at least not freedom to associate with multiple effectively-equal cliques.
      - nopinsight 2y ago
        Cliques will certainly differ from one another and are likely to be unequal, much like “soft cliques” already exist today in larger cities. The question is more about how much power a clique should have and how exclusive and encompassing its membership should be, e.g., whether a person can belong to multiple cliques.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  You know Snow Crash was a dystopia, right? He wasn't suggesting we should actually do this , he was pointing out the dire consequences of heading in the direction we were/are travelling. Diamond Age was presented as less of a dystopia, all those Vickies living in nice places. But the early part of Nell's story is bleak af. Is this really what we want for our future? This is the Torment Nexus that we were supposed to not be building. It's kinda worrying that serious people are trying to build it.
  - johnny22 2y ago
    > It's kinda worrying that serious people are trying to build it. Yeah it's really scary to me that people are taking all this fiction with bad lessons and trying to make it happen. It feels like they wanna make even more explicit panopticon and call it the eye of sauron. Reminds me of: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
    - marcus_holmes 2y ago
      Thanks for the link to The Torment Nexus talk :) I forgot who came up with that
  - big-green-man 2y ago
    I didn't get that reading from it at all, just that it was the state of the world in the story and it had it's benefits and downsides like anything else. It wasn't so much a dystopia than a prediction of where our networking, compute and cryptography technology would take the international power structure. I think a part of the depiction was that power structures and hierarchies are emergent and are not symptoms of a dysfunctional social system, and that no matter what the structure of a society is, hierarchies form and injustice still occurs. The reality I want for humanity is one where we aren't born partially enslaved, which almost all human beings are currently. A world of power structures, but where people can choose their tribe, where we aren't subject to the dictates of others as a consequence of the coordinates where we are born, would be a much more free world.

there isn't really any meat in this essay. it's lazy, vague, and abstract. the reader is left still not really understanding what a network society is

by rohan_ 2y ago

there isn't really any meat in this essay. it's lazy, vague, and abstract. the reader is left still not really understanding what a network society is

big-green-man 2y ago

It's entirely a critique of a person and less so of the concept. And a weak critique as you point out, current american partisan talking points and "evil by association" insinuations via bringing up the political tribe of the article author's boogymen of the day. If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology. The ideas of the critiqued person in this piece draw heavily from these ideas, and their writings are less so "one commandment states" and more so an exploration of the types of nation-like organizations that can emerge from some of the new technologies enabled by global networking and Turing complete computation. The critiqued individual predicts the collapse of the state as we know it today, where people are "owned" from birth and resources are owned and managed primarily for the continuation of state power. He sees this as a good thing, a thing that will finally empower human beings to choose their tribe, to form tribes as they see fit, to explore the merits of any and all ideas without taboo, to live their lives autonomously and ultimately live up to each of their own full potential. I generally agree with the premise and related concepts.

davidgay 2y ago
I wonder how many proponents of this idea know that it's been done before? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_of_Glarus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_of_Glarus - Protestants and Catholics had separate governments and tribunals in the same (rather small...) canton in the 17th century. The summary I read also mentioned that the death penalty required agreement from both groups - highlighting one of the obvious complexities of such a scheme. edit: a bit more detail
- gsf_emergency 2y ago
  A link to the summary? This sounds interesting. While it sounds anachronistically enlightened (and very close to an actual historical example of what the TFA intended-- it's not very often that we harvest anything from "truth is stranger than [especially science] fiction")-- --the death penalty was applied against witchcraft in 1782?? On the whole Switzerland is (today) sort of a Heinleinian (but regrettably (or unsurprisingly?) not Stephensonian) SF setting: peak humanity in hillbilly country
  - davidgay 2y ago
    > A link to the summary? Sorry, it was in a museum - https://www.freulerpalast.ch/ https://www.freulerpalast.ch/, which doesn't look like it has that much information online.
    - gsf_emergency 2y ago
      Gotta wait for our residential citation-fu master to dig that one out, then. A necessary but maybe not sufficient condition for the emergence of such governing structures would be that people grow up rejecting zero-sum status games (including) at the level of tribes. The stopgap solution, constitutional monarchy, fails, because,---? So, I'd say in Gladrus, you already had protestants living in close proximity to Catholics for a handful of centuries .. but the clincher v-a-v the asiatic cases eludes me. Ime the asiatic cases the "jesus nut" of the system (sovereign, policemen, yeomen, lawyers, judges, etc) are drawn from a single caste. Pace Manu. Makeup of the branches of government then becomes a emergent symptom. (Compare to western based systems of law.) Who formed the peacekeeping contingent in Gladrus?
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        Low B/W ATM, may be a while... In the meantime, note that CH had a catholic/proddy civil war mid-XIX (Glarus* on the protestant side) but as proof of that humanity it was resolved with only ~100 total deaths, both sides included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Sonderbund_War_Map_English.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Son... compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Religion_map_of_Switzerland_in_1800_-_en.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War#/media/File:Rel... * for some reason, only cantons with non-human animals on their flags have visible genitalia, so the flag of Glarus is penis-free. EDIT: note also that in "modern federal" CH, almost all the tax burden is canton and commune, not confederation.
glitchc 2y ago
> If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology. Kudos to Stephenson for inventing a new word that sounds better than the original. Phyles are no different from cliques and suffer from the same problems that cliques do, from an unclear power structure to unwritten rules that are arbitrarily enforced by a capricious "royalty," and in-crowds and out-crowds. Cliques are great for those inside and terrible for those outside (everyone else). That we have managed to diminish their importance in core pillars of societal function is one of modern civilization's greatest achievements. Going back would not be progress.
- nopinsight 2y ago
  Freedom of association means that a clique does not have absolute power over you, right? Competition implies that cliques incompatible with most people’s values will wither. You can possibly live in the same house. It’s a bit like changing your insurance company or gym membership but with much larger consequences, if I understand the concept correctly (I’ve never read the novels mentioned).
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    In practice cliques have the same benefits to agglomeration that e.g. corporations and proto-governments do. So freedom of association can’t exist in practice for very long, at least not freedom to associate with multiple effectively-equal cliques.
    - nopinsight 2y ago
      Cliques will certainly differ from one another and are likely to be unequal, much like “soft cliques” already exist today in larger cities. The question is more about how much power a clique should have and how exclusive and encompassing its membership should be, e.g., whether a person can belong to multiple cliques.
marcus_holmes 2y ago
You know Snow Crash was a dystopia, right? He wasn't suggesting we should actually do this , he was pointing out the dire consequences of heading in the direction we were/are travelling. Diamond Age was presented as less of a dystopia, all those Vickies living in nice places. But the early part of Nell's story is bleak af. Is this really what we want for our future? This is the Torment Nexus that we were supposed to not be building. It's kinda worrying that serious people are trying to build it.
- johnny22 2y ago
  > It's kinda worrying that serious people are trying to build it. Yeah it's really scary to me that people are taking all this fiction with bad lessons and trying to make it happen. It feels like they wanna make even more explicit panopticon and call it the eye of sauron. Reminds me of: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    Thanks for the link to The Torment Nexus talk :) I forgot who came up with that
- big-green-man 2y ago
  I didn't get that reading from it at all, just that it was the state of the world in the story and it had it's benefits and downsides like anything else. It wasn't so much a dystopia than a prediction of where our networking, compute and cryptography technology would take the international power structure. I think a part of the depiction was that power structures and hierarchies are emergent and are not symptoms of a dysfunctional social system, and that no matter what the structure of a society is, hierarchies form and injustice still occurs. The reality I want for humanity is one where we aren't born partially enslaved, which almost all human beings are currently. A world of power structures, but where people can choose their tribe, where we aren't subject to the dictates of others as a consequence of the coordinates where we are born, would be a much more free world.