This is an Open Thread / Coffee Hour and all topics of conversation are welcome. What is for dinner? How are you doing? What is on your mind. If you are new to Street Prophets please introduce yourself below in a comment. This Coffee Hour series is brought to you by the Mark Sumner Utopia Challenge.
Mark Sumner in a recent diary reminded Daily Kos readers of a dream he had of rehabilitating Thomas More’s 500 year old idea of Utopia. He refers the readers to his May 29, 2016 Daily Kos Diary, The Good Future: Reclaiming Utopia, where he critiques Thomas More’s Utopia pointing out the good and the bad. And at the end of the diary he outlines a simple three step plan to organize the search for a path to a new utopia.
I think it is fair to say the delivery and detonation of the Russian weapon called Trump on November 8, 2016 is a good reason for a Daily Kos Staff Writer to interrupt the search for Utopia. What is encouraging for me Mark has made a new commitment to spend some time developing the idea and asked for community input for the project.
Remember back in May 29, 2016 when Marc wrote his hopeful utopian diary. We had a well qualified candidate for President running and Trump looked like a long shot. There was an inevitability of incremental progressive progress in the air. Dreamers believed justice would prevail. Under President Obama America still had the respect of much of the world. And, most importantly of all most Progressives and Democrats felt we had a future. Perhaps a future moving toward some utopia or better life.
And then on T-Day, November 8, 2016, everything changed. Overnight we lost the dream of utopia and we got caught up in an eternal rehearsal of disputing the facts and signaling for attention. The national dialog became making America great again.
Forgive me for digressing for a moment but I think that any conversation about creating an utopia should start with understanding the political mood, trends, and language that could help or impede the creating a utopian alternative. In fact the path to a utopia may include a new type of politics, new metaphors, and new language.
Historian, Timothy Snyder, offers two new terms that name the moods referred to above. The first is the Politics of Eternity and it describes the Russian political mood. And it names the direction the Republican party is allowing Trump to lead us in. The second he calls the Politics of Inevitability and it sums up the American mood prior to T-Day.
In the spirit of Snyder’s two neologisms I would like to create a third called The Politics of Structural Stability. It is my belief that building a utopia requires a new politics. And that the current dominate eternity and inevitability politics will not allow any serious development of any type of utopia. It is also my belief that the Democratic Party could adopt many elements of the mechanics of Structural Stability into its party platform.
Simply put the Politics of Structural Stability is applying the science of homeostasis to governance. It is the recognition that all living systems have value and must be maintained within limits. The goal of Structural Stability Politics is to foster and nurture stability, resilience, and predictability in living systems.
Lastly, Sumner’s utopia project mentions that his utopia vision would be built under “post-scarcity” conditions. I must take a different direction on this design parameter. The ideas I’m working with suggest that post-scarcity economics is a form of inevitability politics and thus is not sustainable or necessarily desirable. So my utopian proposal assumes we are crafting an utopia for an age of scarcity.
Jump the fold for a look at the utopian vision I propose. The quickest way for me to convey my idea is to pretend I’m telling the story of the history of the success and compromises of the utopia project from the vantage point of a few hundred years in the future.
Please limit community links to one per user because we want to encourage greater diversity of submissions of community links from different users. In the case of a needed fundraiser, either the member in need will write a diary or someone will do it on their behalf. That diary is then linked to in the comments. Please only post community links in community links comment provided.
The election of Donald Trump, now known as T-Day, was the tipping point in the recognition that the internet (sic) had taken on a life of its own. Yes, it was understood that the Russian Federation used cyberwarfare to deliver Trump as its weapon. And yes “measures” were taken to try and stop the induced social polarization. But, what was not recognized at that time, and should have been, was the unholy linkage of artificial intelligence (AI) with the amoral power of the dollar.
As early as 2017 the filter bubble effect was identified and documented. For example see the graph to the right by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. The study, that was largely ignored, captured the trend of what was paralyzing governance. However interpretation of the causes of the trend were never fully understood until many years later.
The emergent power of the AI to use subtle human behavior modification to accomplish non-human, anti-life, goals was not on anyone's radar accept for a few popular books from the period such as Irresistible and Weapons of Math Destruction. These books hinted of the potential of problems for society but the dysfunctional politics of the time prevented governments from researching the problem and then creating regulations to prevent it. American, Saudi, Turkish and Russian oligarchs used the power of money to cripple legislative and judicial attempts to regulate economic activity
The problem was the American dollar, Russian Ruble, Chinese Renminbi, and European Euro all were linked together in a global system of extraction of natural resources with no regard or concern for living plants, animals, and humans. And no regard for the poisons released by consumption and generation of wealth to sustain the economies of each nation.
A hand full of American, Saudi, Turkish, and Russian oligarchs used the power of money to cripple legislative and judicial attempts to regulate economic activity and corporation behavior.
By the mid 2020s Literally billions of computers were involved in every step of the world economies. Everyone had a personal computer assistant linked to the economy that had AI capabilities. Everyone was dealing with information overload and the paralysis of government. But the most destructive unanticipated emergent behavior of the system was humans directly “managed” by artificial intelligence systems. Some humans spent their whole life connected to the net and were able to avoid all human contact.
Futurologists from that time such as Yuval Noah Harrari almost got it right but overlooked the resilient strength of communities and cities. As things turned out it was pipe in the ground that saved humanity and created our utopia.
City owned property and infrastructure was one of the favorite targets of the oligarchs. Their plan was to use their power to privatize everything. Some lucky cities dreaming of the future in the 1980s received grants from the United States federal government to underground pipes to wire traffic lights together.
Those cities with these networks of pipes then went on in the late 2010s to pull optical fiber through them in order to set up community owned electronic information control and exchange systems. Local nets at they became known as. As distinguished from the global net. Initially the goal was to provide competition for the private internet providers, but as time went on some cities went on to start using the system to deliver locally city controlled content.
Many saw the power of having cities administer and control servers that provided control services for such enterprises such as education, local transportation, water distribution, electrical distribution … etc.
Under the relentless pressure of the world wide web the cities in order to protect themselves invested more and more into their local nets. The defining innovation that catalyzed the “Local Utopia” movement was the introduction of local currencies named the “dukkha.” These local currencies linked to the concept of suffering were the key to stopping the dystopia predicted by Harrari. The local net servers, owned by the cities, authenticated and regulated the dukkha transactions and protected this alternative economy from corruption from the global currency.
In the global economy Moore’s Law continued to produce advances undreamed of in the early 21th century. Advances in storage continued so the all of mankind’s data could be put on smaller and smaller storage systems. And, software became more easily available. Open source “clones” of all the popular software and AI algorithms and data sets became ubiquitous.
All of the above innovations were use by cities to enhance and improve the quality of life for the citizens of the cities. In a few it a citizen would be able to grow up find a job within the city and live out their lives not engaging with the global society. Children benefited most from this system the local net insured that all of their transactions online were of educational and life affirming. The city firewalls and archived libraries protected children from the oligarchs propaganda and necrotic messages.
One of best metaphors that emerged from that time, that described the emergence of the local nets that used the dukkha, is evolutionary emergence of the Eukaryotes. Cities were compared to cells that covered the earth. The local nets were like the mitochondria. And the global world wide web corresponded loosely to the nucleus.
The important point was was the local net protected, sheltered, and nurtured humans from all of the physical and mental chaos of the of the global world wide web and global extraction economies. I child could grow up with a “firewall” between them and the global world wide web. With the standardization of the systems software and the packaging of the of the system in a cheap mass produced device just about every functioning city left on the planet installed one.
The last key piece of the evolution of the local nets was the epiphany of the Untied States Democratic Political Party to re-define politics not as a struggle between left and right but as a struggle between global and local.
Some totally oligarch controlled cities such as New York never adopted local net. Instead it relied on a single global command and control system similar to the internet systems as originally envisioned back in the late 20th century.
Individuals fortunate enough to be born in cities with local net had a kind of dual citizenship. And they could participate in both economies. The global one and the local one. It is this choice that some called utopia. Under local net one could live out their lives with out being controlled by AI. One could find their niche in the community and live stably. For the more adventurously a life of the big cities that had no local net and global economy was the attraction.
The environmental degradation was slowed by the voting power and economic power of local net cities banding to gather to restrain the oligarch’s global hegemonic control. One of the whole attractions of local net was its emphasis on homeostasis and grounding to the earth. Cities prided themselves as being carbon neutral, food self sufficient, and great places for kids to grow up.
The local net “boxed up for deployment” could be used as the seed for a new cities and as massive groups of humans had to move because of water level increase and other environmental changes. The local net seeds could be modified for languages other than English and cultures other than American. True to the normal curve distribution most humans oped to live out their lives in the center of the distribution. Enjoying both the advantages of the local and the global. And some lived out their whole lives out in one system or the other with no blending.
Everyone take care. Spend some time this week appreciating your love ones. And let them know you love them. Do more than just tell them ... give them a hug. Love with action is eternal.
Jonathan
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