HI Marc
Me thinks Claude is essentially right. Though I’m not sure equating Claude with Stalin is. Not sure it would have been “exactly” something Stalin would have said either…who knows. Could have been said by any leader of a supposed capitalist democracy (a contradiction in terms), say from JFK to anyone really. But basically if we ever came to the point where we had a participatory economy, there would be no Stalins running the show or any part of it…that’s the whole point, or at least one of them (particularly trying to do away with the coordinator class or any ruling hierarchical class in fact), of a participatory society with a participatory economy.
Of course prior to any implementation of a PE, like now, or currently whatever’s “in the making”, well, it don’t take no genius to figure. But I think, within a PE, any digitalisation and info would be handled openly/transparently (unlike now or in market economies, dictatorships, oligarchies, autocracies, representative pseudo democracies, monarchies, totalitarian regimes…etc…) and in a participatory fashion re decision making in proportion to the degree people are effected, as in, nothing is done in a clandestine fashion, or in a way that is a grab for “control” or power (to the chagrin of all the James Buchanan’s out there still) because, well, power grabs just can’t be done in a PE (talk to Michael Albert about his thought experiment involving Novak Djokovic trying to garner some extra cash and power grab within the tennis industry inside a PE…I wish he had chosen Federer as the protagonist instead), and that’s the one of the reasons for establishing one. And if there is a participatory polity running along side a participatory economy, perhaps that’s where the “white paper” could be found. A paper that an actual meaningful representative WE had something to say about, some input and could access at the tap of a keyboard. I mean, no one person or group of persons would “control” food in a PE, like no one owns the means of production etc…
But first we gotta get a Global Green New Deal up and running…which seems more and more unlikely as the days, weeks, months, and years pass. A far more urgent problem than worrying about technocracies.
I mean what does this even mean…?
“Collectively, Big Tech is thoroughly anti-democratic, anti-nation-state, and pro-authoritarian. Don’t be fooled by accusations of being woke, communist or socialist: Technocracy seeks direct control over every human, every animal, every system and every resource on the planet. If not rejected, it will establish an unbreakable scientific dictatorship. ⁃ TN Editor”
I mean ok, it could happen, like anything I suppose. Can’t rule it out. And it does sound like good stuff for a movie plot or series of futuristic novels. But that’s just because within the current economic paradigm such shit can happen because capitalist laws of motion and market imperatives make it so, partly by hiding shit from everyone so a few can gain at the many’s expense. Sure. And so many just can’t or don’t even try to imagine shit being different and better.
I mean you can call whatever’s happening now anything you want, techno-feudalism, digital colonialism, communicative capitalism, Technocracy, it’s essentially capitalist laws of motion and market imperatives along with a sympathetic captured political system the masters of the universe can manipulate at their whim, that’s driving the stuff that creates such shit. Them’s the institutions that need to be eradicated. I mean, along with seriously psychologically flawed uncaring and selfish people of the James Buchanan/Koch variety (add whoever you want to the list) whose existence certainly does not help matters. And maybe there are Koch types, Night Kings with their White Walker assistants, within Big Tech, but that’s the whole point of trying to establish an alternative way of organising shit, so things like Big Tech, with Night Kings or Lex Luthor at the helm can’t happen.
I mean you could also worry, like Max Tegmark does, about some super intelligent evil AI taking over the world and hope people, rather than trying to stop climate catastrophe, devote their attention to stopping the synchronicity (stop laughing people). I mean Tegmark is really worried about it. I mean, this is assuming, when it happens, there aren’t a whole bunch of other autonomous super intelligent AIs of the nice variety that somehow developed separately from the bad one, trying to stop MR EVIL AI and his minions. Or perhaps it’s just a whole bunch of nasty AIs ruining everything for everyone, whatever everyone means by then.
Of course one just could, should, never never never never ever ever ever ever imagine, in one’s craziest wildest stupidest incoherent nutcase dreams, that a super intelligent AI, by definition, would or could be totally benevolent and go about fixing global warming, all ecological damage, for all robots and humans, and set up a participatory society. No, that would be imaginative lunacy, wouldn’t it? Where’s the fun in that imaginary?
Like we must never imagine that the young hacker person/thing/being running the computer simulation we are in now (not sure if there’s such a thing as a “perfect simulation” as David Chalmers suggests or if such a phrase is even coherent) is so so intelligent that they can do nothing but good (I know, I’m an idiot because that kind of goodness is only reserved for fictional characters like Gods) and exist in a world of as-good-as-you-can-get harmony. A society constantly being attended to like a garden by everyone, all and sundry, robots n’all, so it don’t go bad. No, let’s assume they’re like us now, totally flawed, with mainly bad intent, like the first human to stop listening to the river, with desires to control and own everything, or like the plethora of EVIL shitheads from the past (take your pick). So the only future we can imagine is always full of horrible Hobbesian struggles, stories involving fights between good and bad, over and over again, like way into the future say, 10,000 yrs, like in the series Foundation. Yeah, that’s worth imagining…NOT.
A Participatory Society is worth imagining. It’s worth imagining we CAN do away with bad shit in whatever guise or disguise it’s in, be it Big Tech or Big Tik Tok.
In the words of the great late Frank Zappa,
And let’s imagine and hope in a Participatory Society with a Participatory Economy, Polity, kinship and culture,
“It Can’t Happen here”
