Comments on: Dale Carrico responds to Cory Doctorow: “Technology” Is Not a Force for Either Liberation or Oppression https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/dale-carrico-responds-to-cory-doctorow-%e2%80%9ctechnology%e2%80%9d-is-not-a-force-for-either-liberation-or-oppression/2010/07/22 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Sat, 05 May 2012 23:08:41 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Poor Richard https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/dale-carrico-responds-to-cory-doctorow-%e2%80%9ctechnology%e2%80%9d-is-not-a-force-for-either-liberation-or-oppression/2010/07/22/comment-page-1#comment-491599 Sat, 05 May 2012 23:08:41 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=9831#comment-491599 We don’t have a crisis of innovation. We have a crisis of human nature and social psychology. The Great Pirates grab every good idea we come up with and turn it against us. We even know how, theoretically, to stand up to them, but with a few transitory exceptions we don’t. This dynamic has changed little in the past 50,000 years because the wiring of our brains has changed little in that time.

Technology, as with most other kinds of innovation, often has a temporary beneficial socioeconomic impact for early adopters. In the long run, the benefits of new knowledge are always taken over and rationed by the powers that be. In the way that getting money out of politics is a precondition for many other changes, getting the authoritarian (dominance/submission) bias out of our cognitive wiring is a precondition for lasting socioeconomic progress. I think there may be ways to begin to do that, but I am not aware of any groups yet taking full advantage of existing cognitive neuroscience and social psychology for that purpose.

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