David Ronfeldt: How and why four cardinal forms of organization — tribes, hierarchical institutions, markets, and networks (TIMN) — explain social evolution. How and why space-time-action cognitions (STA:C) explain people’s mindsets.

For a theoretical framework to be worthy of a political manifesto, it must offer something new and better than alternative frameworks. TIMN can do that, by proclaiming quadriformism.

I suppose a manifesto should also mention those alternatives — but not at length. Yet, a good comparative analysis should exist somewhere for back-up purposes. This note starts to serve as that back-up analysis.

For indeed, TIMN is not the only theoretical framework about past, present, and future societal evolution that is built atop four cardinal elements, with the fourth anticipating the emergence of a new sector in the decades ahead. Three others are vying for attention (actually, it’s TIMN trying to vie, for the others are already rather well-known). They’re from:

• Kate Raworth, a British “renegade economist” based at Oxford — her analysis is based on four “means of provisioning”.

• Michel Bauwens, a Belgium-born social activist-theorist who heads the P2P Foundation, lives mostly in Thailand and Belgium — his theory sits atop four “relational modalities”.

• Kojin Karatani, a Japanese Marxist philosopher and literary theorist who has taught at various Japanese and American universities — his framework depends on four “modes of exchange”.

What’s striking is that, working separately, we have all come up with similar frameworks, and we’ve done so at different times without knowing about each other’s frameworks at the time (though Raworth had some knowledge of Bauwens’ views). My first publication on TIMN was in 1996, Bauwens’ on P2P in 2005, Karatani’s on “modes of exchange” in 2014, and Raworth’s on “doughnut economics” in 2017. The similarities begin with the fact that all our frameworks rest on four fundamental forms of organization and/or interaction. The four that each of us identify, though differently conceived, match up impressively. Moreover, we all argue that our four are always present, always necessary, in any society, and that societies vary according to how the four forms are combined and which one dominates at the time.

Furthermore, the three of us most interested in social evolution across the ages — Bauwens, Karatani, and myself — all argue that our respective sets of forms have existed since ancient times, and that each form has grown most powerful in a particular era, thus coming to define the nature of societies in that era. Indeed, the evolutionary progressions each of us identifies correlate very well, despite some disparities. Moreover, in looking ahead, three of us — Bauwens, Raworth, and more qualifiedly, myself — explicitly foresee that a commons sector will arise alongside the established public and private sectors, vastly transforming the design of societies. Karatani is less explicit about the emergence of a commons sector, but his vision of future transformations implies something similar.

Another parallel to notice: The four-form frameworks that Bauwens, Karatani, and I advance may seem simple at first, perhaps too simple — but actually they enable plenty of complexity. To varying degrees, we each recognize that our respective forms (or modes) are both material and ideational in nature. That each embodies different standards about how people should behave and society should function. That each enables people to do something — to address some problem — better than they could by using another form. And that each form has bright and dark sides, making each useful for doing ill as well as good. Furthermore, we all recognize that the forms co-exist, interact, and vary in strength over time, making for great variations in how the forms may be combined and emphasized in particular societies. All of which amounts to plenty of complexity; these are not simplistic frameworks. Which is why I groaned inwardly when, years ago, a friendly contact who was genuinely interested in TIMN and its potential, nonetheless quipped, “Of course, you can’t sum all of human history in four letters.” More about these matters later.

In the next posts, I will review Raworth’s, Bauwens’, and Karatani’s frameworks — in that order because it proceeds from the least sweeping and abstract of the three, to the most. Then I turn to pointing out TIMN’s comparative advantages for theory and practice.

One advantage I’d mention right now: TIMN is not based on or committed to any ideology. It leaves room for the endurance of conservative as well as progressive positions along a new quadriformist spectrum. The other three frameworks all belong, to varying degrees, on the Left, even aspiring to a final future triumph of the Left over the Right. So far, to my disappointment, I’ve found no theorists on the Right who are pondering the future within anything like a quadriform framework.

SOURCES:

David Ronfeldt, Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks — A Framework About Societal Evolution, RAND, P-7967, 1996.

Michel Bauwens, P2P and Human Evolution: Peer to peer as the premise of a new mode of civilization, draft book manuscript, 2005.

Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, Duke University Press, 2014

Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.

TO BE CONTINUED: THIS IS THE FIRST OF FIVE POSTS ON THE TOPIC

Reposted from the author’s blog

Photo by TonZ

The post Materials for Two Theories: TIMN and STA:C appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this article, Shukaitis surveys “the particular role outer space and extraterrestrial voyage play within the radical imagination.” In particular, he sees , and a way to construct utopian worlds that give meaning to our struggles for justice in this world here and now. In autonomist Marxist terms, it presents fictional scenarios of what autonomists call “recomposition” — rebuilding, under our own hegemony, the social spaces and institutions that have been destroyed and atomized by capitalism — in an outer space setting. It was “a forward projection of an outside to capitalism enabling a space of possibility in the present.”

Leftist social criticism has displayed an ambivalent set of attitudes towards outer space — attitudes that mirror the dichotomy between the techno-utopian and primitivist or technophobic strands of the Left. Although many see outer space (whether in fictional scenarios or real agenda) as an arena for building post-capitalism and lifting the earth itself out of its current state, some quarters see it as a frivolous diversion of resources from fixing poverty and inequality here on earth.

Perhaps an interesting question… is not so much a question of whether there is a presence of outer space imagery and extraterrestrial travel residing within the workings of the social imaginary, but of their function. Their presence is felt both when the poet and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron complains that he can’t pay his doctor bills or rent and wonders what could be done with all the resources that would be available if they weren’t being spent on getting ‘Whitey on the Moon’ (1971), and when Stevie Wonder contrasts the utopian conditions of ‘Saturn’ (1976), which are peaceful and free from capitalist exchange, with conditions and problems of the urban ghettos.

Outer space is a favorite setting for radical treatment, Shukaitis argues, because “the unknown and the mysterious are almost by definition of particular fascination to those crafting mythopoetic narratives and imagery.”

This has long been true of imaginary settings other than outer space, I would note, going back to ancient festivals (recounted by James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance) in which the world was turned upside-down for a day and the social order inverted, medieval peasant utopias like Cockaigne, the 20th century hobo utopia of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Jimi Hendrix’s vision of an Atlantean escape from the ugliness of war and capitalism in the “1983” suite.

The ruling classes have been aware of the subversive potential of such speculation, Shukaitis writes, as demonstrated by the post-WWII wave of repression against utopian collectivism in fiction and the corresponding popularity of anti-collectivist themes in works like 1984 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers that treat any alternative to “our free enterprise system” and the American model of individualism as a totalitarian dystopia. And as the latter example indicates, themes of alien invasion have been used to play up xenophobia against other nations of our own species.

This does not mean, of course, that technological utopianism as such has not been used in the dominant narrative. As Shukaitis points out, American-style “rugged individualism” and the export of the “pioneer spirit” to the frontiers of space were recurring theme in Golden Age science fiction.

At the same time, libertarian socialist techno-utopian themes were seen as a threat not just to corporate capitalism as a system of power, but to authoritarian state communism. Although “early efforts towards cybernetic communism were initially developed within the Soviet Union,” they were ultimately repressed because the party “feared, rightly, that they could not control it.” (Actually, if I recall correctly, it was the Soviet military leadership that vetoed conversion of the military’s computer network into the backbone of a civilian Internet as was done with Arpanet in the United States.)

Shukaitis can’t let the theme of radically utopian treatments of outer space pass without mentioning one of the most bizarre examples, that of the dissident Trotskyite Juan Posadas, who not only hoped advanced aliens would export communism to the earth, but looked forward to a devastating nuclear war as the trigger for revolution and post-capitalist transformation.

Getting back to our earlier dichotomy between positive and negative views of technology on the Left, anarcho-primitivism “does not find much considered redeemable” in the space travel genre, any more than it does in technology in general. This determinist view of technological development, Shukaitis says, is a form of mystification that reflects their unfamiliarity with it, and ignores the radically divergent alternatives presented by technology depending on the nature of the structural power framework into which it is integrated.

In language that echoes David Graeber, Shukaitis notes that the actual development of technology under late capitalism has been a considerable disappointment, compared to the utopian predictions in popular fiction. Technological development has been disproportionately diverted into servicing institutional needs like the Military-Industrial Complex, waste consumption to overcome the crisis of overaccumulation and idle production capacity, and the control and distribution infrastructures required by corporate globalization, and not to reducing hours of labor or making daily life more fulfilling.

This leaves us with the necessity of contesting state and capitalist control of the process of technological development, and harnessing it to our own liberatory ends. And speculative fiction, Shukaitis argues, functions as a sort of cognitive map for this purpose: “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” In this regard, the fictional setting of outer space is more symbolic than literal, implying not so much “a conception of exodus in physical terms” as “one in terms of intensive coordinates.”

In other words a shift towards an exodus that does not leave while attempting to subtract itself from forms of state domination and capitalist valorization.

Shukaitis mentions hippie dropout communities and Italian autonomist social centers as examples of such exodus within the physical surroundings of capitalist society.

Similar themes of exodus were developed in Afrofuturist science fiction, “which as a literary and cultural movement is based on exploring the black experience through the relation between technology, science fiction and racialization.” In particular he mentions the fascinating decades-long trajectory of the Sun Ra Arkestra (including the 1974 film Space is the Place), which fused themes of libertarian alien societies, Afrocentric history and advanced technology, and related them to issues of racial oppression in the United States.

In recent decades space has become a setting for explicit Leftist development of radically utopian and anti-capitalist visions. Shukaitis quotes Eduardo Rothe, who put it as plainly (and messianically) as anyone could want in a Situationist journal in 1969. Rothe directly addresses the seizure of science from capitalism and the state by the people, and its recuperation for their own utopian goals.

Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military ‘promotional’ gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as ‘volunteers’ of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers’ councils.

(Leaving aside, obviously, the question of whether there are other people on the worlds out there who aren’t quite ready to be “pillaged.”)

As the example of Rothe suggests, the use of outer space by radical Leftists is not always utopian or fictional. There are efforts here and now to take back space exploration from government agencies and capitalist corporations, and bring it within the domain of free, cooperative, and self-organized human endeavor. Shukaitis mentions the formation of the Association of Autonomist Astronauts in 1995, in protest against the Pentagon’s militarization of space. Although they initially emerged from the radical artistic scene, they formulated (admittedly for the most part as a spur to the imagination) a five-year plan to “establish a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space.”

A more pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts vision along similar lines was presented in the fictional short story “Open Shot” in Analog science fiction magazine, about the Stallman, an open-source hardware group’s victorious entry in a private moonshot competition in a field otherwise dominated by capitalist corporations.

Although Shukaitis’s 2009 article predates most of these developments, the continuing development of cheap micro-manufacturing tools and open hardware communities since then has led to a proliferation of real-world open hardware space projects. Elon Musk’s space ventures have, at the same time, been the source of misguided but understandable hopes along the same lines. In an earlier commentary (“One Cheer for SpaceX”), I surveyed some of the current FOSS space projects and noted that even though Musk’s own corporate vision is toxic, he is nevertheless pushing space technology in cheaper, more modular, and ephemeral directions that can be pirated and otherwise recuperated by commons-based peer production for the eventual post-capitalist expansion into space.

I’m disappointed that Shukaitis didn’t give Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy the attention it deserved, as a fictional scenario of a viable libertarian socialist society being developed on another planet, and providing a demonstration effect for the oppressed peoples of earth that was a real and present danger to the power structure.

In contrast to Robinson’s relatively optimistic visions in the Mars Trilogy and 2312, the television series The Expanse presents a dystopian vision of a solar system under the hegemony of exploitative capitalist corporations.

My own guess is that the truth is a lot closer to Robinson’s vision than to that of the TV show, and capitalist and state technologies of control are simply not equal to the requirements of maintaining hegemony over people living and working off-planet. Once the first mining colonies and space habitats are set up in the asteroid belt, or the first colonies on the moon and Mars, I suspect earth’s government agencies and corporations will quickly discover that whatever contractual arrangements they’ve made with the inhabitants of space — and whatever absentee titles they have to the land and resources those people are working — aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. In that case the future of space will be post-capitalist regardless of what happens here on earth, and may well provide leverage for the transition here at home.

Photo by SerenityRose

The post Essay of the Day: “Space is the (non)place: Martians, Marxists, and the outer space of the radical imagination” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Our cohort of tech founders is feeling the chill breath of mortality as they drift into middle age. And so part of what is driving this push into space is a more general preoccupation with ‘existential risk’.

Musk is persuaded that we’re living in a simulation, and he or a fellow true believer has hired programmers to try to hack it.

Peter Thiel, our most unfortunate German import, has built a survival retreat for himself in New Zealand.

Sam Altman hoards gold in Big Sur.

OpenAI, a religious cult thinly disguised as a research institution, has received $1B in funding to forestall the robot rebellion.

The biggest existential risk, of course, is death, so a lot of money is going to make sure that our big idea men don’t expire before the world has been received the full measure of their genius.

Google Ventures founded the very secretive life extension startup Calico, with $1.5B dollars in funding. Google loses $4B a year on its various “moon shots”, which include life extension. They employ Ray Kurzweil, who believes we’re still on track for immortality by 2045. Larry Ellison has put $370M to anti-aging research, as anybody would want to live in a world with an immortal Larry Ellison. Our plutocrats are eager to make death an opt-out experience.” (via Re:publica email)

Notes From An Emergency

Maciej Cegłowski | Idle Words | 17th May 2017

{This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 10, 2017, at the re:publica conference in Berlin}

The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it.

The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.

Depending on where you live, the rise of this new right wing might be nothing new. In the United States, our moment of shock came last November, with the election of Donald Trump.

The final outcome of that election was:

65.8 million for Clinton
63.0 million for Trump

This was the second time in sixteen years that the candidate with fewer votes won the American Presidency. There is a bug in the operating system of our democracy, one of the many ways that slavery still casts its shadow over American politics.

But however tenuously elected, Trump is in the White House, and our crisis has become your crisis. Not just because America is a superpower, or because the forces that brought Trump to power are gaining ground in Europe, but because the Internet is an American Internet.

Facebook is the dominant social network in Europe, with 349 million monthly active users. Google has something like 94% of market share for search in Germany. The servers of Europe are littered with the bodies of dead and dying social media sites. The few holdouts that still exist, like Xing, are being crushed by their American rivals.

In their online life, Europeans have become completely dependent on companies headquartered in the United States.

And so Trump is in charge in America, and America has all your data. This leaves you in a very exposed position. US residents enjoy some measure of legal protection against the American government. Even if you think our intelligence agencies are evil, they’re a lawful evil. They have to follow laws and procedures, and the people in those agencies take them seriously.

But there are no such protections for non-Americans outside the United States. The NSA would have to go to court to spy on me; they can spy on you anytime they feel like it.

This is an astonishing state of affairs. I can’t imagine a world where Europe would let itself become reliant on American cheese, or where Germans could only drink Coors Light.

In the past, Europe has shown that it’s capable of identifying a vital interest and moving to protect it. When American aerospace companies were on the point of driving foreign rivals out of business, European governments formed the Airbus consortium, which now successfully competes with Boeing.

A giant part of the EU budget goes to subsidize farming, not because farming is the best use of resources in a first-world economy, but because farms are important to national security, to the landscape, to national identity, social stability, and a shared sense of who we are.

But when it comes to the Internet, Europe doesn’t put up a fight. It has ceded the ground entirely to American corporations. And now those corporations have to deal with Trump. How hard do you think they’ll work to defend European interests?

The Feudal Internet

The status quo in May 2017 looks like this:

There are five Internet companies—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Together they have a market capitalization just under 3 trillion dollars.

Bruce Schneier has called this arrangement the feudal Internet. Part of this concentration is due to network effects, but a lot of it is driven by the problem of security. If you want to work online with any measure of convenience and safety, you must choose a feudal lord who is big enough to protect you.

These five companies compete and coexist in complex ways.

Apple and Google have a duopoly in smartphone operating systems. Android has 82% of the handset market, iOS has 18%.

Google and Facebook are on their way to a duopoly in online advertising. Over half of the revenue in that lucrative ($70B+) industry goes to them, and the two companies between them are capturing all of the growth (16% a year).

Apple and Microsoft have a duopoly in desktop operating systems. The balance is something like nine to one in favor of Windows, not counting the three or four people who use Linux on the desktop, all of whom are probably at this conference.

Three companies, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, dominate cloud computing. AWS has 57% adoption, Azure has 34%. Google has 15%.

Outside of China and Russia, Facebook and LinkedIn are the only social networks at scale. LinkedIn has been able to survive by selling itself to Microsoft.

And outside of Russia and China, Google is the world’s search engine.

That is the state of the feudal Internet, leaving aside the court jester, Twitter, who plays an important but ancillary role as a kind of worldwide chat room.

Google in particular has come close to realizing our nightmare scenario from 1998, a vertically integrated Internet controlled by a single monopoly player. Google runs its own physical network, builds phone handsets, develops a laptop and phone operating system, makes the world’s most widely-used browser, runs a private DNS system, PKI certificate authority, has photographed nearly all the public spaces in the world, and stores much of the world’s email.

But because it is run by more sympathetic founders than Bill Gates, because it builds better software than early Microsoft did, and because it built up a lot of social capital during its early “don’t be evil” period, we’ve given it a pass.

Security

It’s not clear that anyone can secure large data collections over time. The asymmetry between offense and defense may be too great. If defense at scale is possible, the only way to do it is by pouring millions of dollars into hiring the best people to defend it. Data breaches at the highest levels have shown us that the threats are real and ongoing. And for every breach we know about, there are many silent ones that we won’t learn about for years.

A successful defense, however, just increases the risk. Pile up enough treasure behind the castle walls and you’ll eventually attract someone who can climb them. The feudal system makes the Internet more brittle, ensuring that when a breach finally comes, it will be disastrous.

Each of the big five companies, with the important exception of Apple, has made aggressive user surveillance central to its business model. This is a dilemma of the feudal internet. We seek protection from these companies because they can offer us security. But their business model is to make us more vulnerable, by getting us to surrender more of the details of our lives to their servers, and to put more faith in the algorithms they train on our observed behavior.

These algorithms work well, and despite attempts to convince us otherwise, it’s clear they work just as well in politics as in commerce. So in our eagerness to find safety online, we’ve given this feudal Internet the power to change our offline world in unanticipated and scary ways.

Globalism

These big five companies operate on a global scale, and partly because they created the industries they now dominate, they enjoy a very lax regulatory regime. Everywhere outside the United States and EU, they are immune to government oversight, and within the United States the last two administrations have played them with a light touch. The only meaningful attempt to regulate surveillance capitalism has come out of the European Union.

Thanks to their size and reach, the companies have become adept at stonewalling governments and evading attempts at regulation or oversight. In many cases, this evasion is noble. You don’t want Bahrain or Poland to be able to subpoena Facebook and get the names of people organizing a protest rally. In other cases, it’s purely self-serving. Uber has made a sport of evading all authority, foreign and domestic, in order to grow.

Good or bad, the lesson these companies have drawn is the same: they need only be accountable to themselves.

But their software and algorithms affect the lives of billions of people. Decisions about how this software works are not under any kind of democratic control. In the best case, they are being made by idealistic young people in California with imperfect knowledge of life in a faraway place like Germany. In the worst case, they are simply being read out of a black-box algorithm trained on God knows what data.

This is a very colonial mentality! In fact, it’s what we fought our American War of Independence over, a sense of grievance that decisions that affected us were being made by strangers across the ocean.

Today we’re returning the favor to all of Europe.

Facebook, for example, has only one manager in Germany to deal with every publisher in the country. One! The company that is dismantling the news industry in Germany doesn’t even care enough to send a proper team to manage the demolition.

Denmark has gone so far as to appoint an ambassador to the giant tech companies, an unsettling but pragmatic acknowledgement of the power relationship that exists between the countries of Europe and Silicon Valley.

So one question (speaking now as an EU citizen): how did we let this happen? We used to matter! We used to be the ones doing the colonizing! We used to be a contender!

How is it that some dopey kid in Palo Alto gets to decide the political future of the European Union based on what they learned at big data boot camp? Did we lose a war?

The lack of accountability isn’t just troubling from a philosophical perspective. It’s dangerous in a political climate where people are pushing back at the very idea of globalization. There’s no industry more globalized than tech, and no industry more vulnerable to a potential backlash.

China and Russia show us that the Internet need not be a world-wide web, that it can be subverted and appropriated by the state. By creating a political toolkit for authoritarian movements, the American tech giants may be putting their own future at risk.

Irreality

Given this scary state of the world, with ecological collapse just over the horizon, and a population sharpening its pitchforks, an important question is how this globalized, unaccountable tech industry sees its goals. What does it want? What will all the profits be invested in?

What is the plan?

The honest answer is: rocket ships and immortality.

I wish I was kidding.

The best minds in Silicon Valley are preoccupied with a science fiction future they consider it their manifest destiny to build. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are racing each other to Mars. Musk gets most of the press, but Bezos now sells $1B in Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin. Investors have put over $8 billion into space companies over the past five years, as part of a push to export our problems here on Earth into the rest of the Solar System.

As happy as I am to see Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fired into space, this does not seem to be worth the collapse of representative government.

Our cohort of tech founders is feeling the chill breath of mortality as they drift into middle age. And so part of what is driving this push into space is a more general preoccupation with ‘existential risk’.

Musk is persuaded that we’re living in a simulation, and he or a fellow true believer has hired programmers to try to hack it.

Peter Thiel, our most unfortunate German import, has built a survival retreat for himself in New Zealand.

Sam Altman hoards gold in Big Sur.

OpenAI, a religious cult thinly disguised as a research institution, has received $1B in funding to forestall the robot rebellion.

The biggest existential risk, of course, is death, so a lot of money is going to make sure that our big idea men don’t expire before the world has been received the full measure of their genius.

Google Ventures founded the very secretive life extension startup Calico, with $1.5B dollars in funding. Google loses $4B a year on its various “moon shots”, which include life extension. They employ Ray Kurzweil, who believes we’re still on track for immortality by 2045. Larry Ellison has put $370M to anti-aging research, as if anybody would want to live in a world with an immortal Larry Ellison. Our plutocrats are eager to make death an opt-out experience.

Now, I’m no fan of death. I don’t like the time commitment, or the permanence. A number of people I love are dead and it has strained our relationship.

But at the same time, I’m not convinced that a civilization that is struggling to cure male-pattern baldness is ready to take on the Grim Reaper. If we’re going to worry about existential risk, I would rather we start by addressing the two existential risks that are indisputably real—nuclear war and global climate change—and working our way up from there.

But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.

The tech industry enjoys tearing down flawed institutions, but refuses to put work into mending them. Their runaway apparatus of surveillance and manipulation earns them a fortune while damaging everything it touches. And all they can think about is the cool toys they’ll get to spend the profits on.

The message that’s not getting through to Silicon Valley is one that your mother taught you when you were two: you don’t get to play with the new toys until you clean up the mess you made.

The circumstances that have given the tech industry all this power will not last long. There is a limited time in which our small caste of tech nerds will have the power to make decisions that shape the world. By wasting the talents and the energies of our brightest people on fantasy role play, we are ceding the future to a more practical group of successors, some truly scary people who will take our tools and use them to advance a very different agenda.

To recap: the Internet has centralized into a very few hands. We have an extremely lucrative apparatus of social control, and it’s being run by chuckleheads.

The American government is also being run by chuckleheads.

The question everybody worries about is, what happens when these two groups of chuckleheads join forces?

The Winter

For many Americans, the election was a moment of profound shock. It wasn’t just Trump’s policies that scared us. It was the fact that this unserious, cruel, vacant human being had been handed the power of the American presidency.

Scariest to me was how little changed. No one in the press or in social media had the courage to say “we fucked up.” Pundits who were stunned by the election result still made confident predictions about what would happen next, as if they had any claim to predictive power.

After the election both Facebook and Google looked at the mountains of data they had collected on everyone, looked at the threats the Trump Administration was making—to deport 11 million people, to ban Muslims from entering the country—and said to themselves, “we got this.”

The people who did worry were tech workers. For a moment, we saw some political daylight appear between the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the tech sector, and the small clique of billionaires who run it. While the latter filed in to a famously awkward meeting with Trump and his children at the top of his golden tower, the former began organizing in opposition, including signing a simple but powerful pledge to resign rather than help Trump fulfill one of his key campaign promises: barring Muslims from the United States.

This pledge was a small gesture, but it represented the first collective action by tech workers around a political agenda that went beyond technology policy, and the first time I had ever seen tech workers come out in open defiance of management.

A forest of new organizations sprung up. I started one, too, called Tech Solidarity, and started traveling around the country and holding meetings with tech workers in big cities. I had no idea what I was doing, other than trying to use a small window of time to organize and mobilize our sleepy industry.

That feeling of momentum continued through when Trump took office. The Women’s March in January brought five million people out onto the streets. America is not used to mass protests. To see the streets of our major cities fill with families, immigrants, in many cases moms and daughters and grandmothers marching together, that was a sight to take your breath away.

Hard on the heels of it came the travel ban, an executive order astonishing not just in its cruelty—families were split at airports; in one case a mom was not allowed to breastfeed her baby—but in its ineptitude. For a week or two lawyers were camped out at airports, working frantically, sleeping little, with spontaneous efforts to bring them supplies, get them funding, to do anything to help. We held a rally in San Francisco that raised thirty thousand dollars from a room of a hundred people. Some of the organizations we were helping couldn’t even attend, they were too busy at the airport. It didn’t matter.

The tech companies did all they could to not get involved. Facebook has a special ‘safety check‘ feature for exactly this kind of situation, but never thought of turning it on at airports. Public statements out of Silicon Valley were so insipid as to be comical.

Employees, however, were electrified. It looked like not only visitors but permanent residents would be barred from the United States. Google employees staged a walkout with the support of their management; Facebook (not wishing to be left behind) had its own internal protest a couple of days later, but kept it a secret. Every time the employees pushed, management relented. Suddenly top executives were going on the record against the travel ban.

People briefly even got mad at Elon Musk, normally a darling of the tech industry, for his failure to resign from the President’s advisory council. The silent majority of tech employees had begun to mobilize.

And then… nothing happened. This tech workforce, which had gotten a taste of its own power, whose smallest efforts at collective action had produced immediate results, who had seen just how much sway they held, went back to work. The worst of Trump’s travel ban was blocked by the court, and we moved on. With the initial shock of Trump in office gone, we now move from crisis to crisis, but without a plan or a shared positive goal.

The American discomfort with prolonged, open disagreement has set in.

When I started trying to organize people in November, my theory was that tech workers were the only group that had leverage over the tech giants.

My reasoning went like this: being monopolies or near-monopolies, these companies are impervious to public pressure. Boycotts won’t work, since opting out of a site like Google means opting out of much of modern life.

Several of these companies are structured (unusually for American corporations) in such a way that the board can’t control the majority of votes. At Google and Facebook, for example, the ultimate say goes to the founders. And since Google and Facebook are the major online publishing outlets, it’s unlikely that the press would ever criticize them, even if journalists were capable of that kind of sustained attention.

So that leaves just one point of leverage: employees. Tech workers are hard to find, expensive to hire, take a long time to train, and can have their pick of jobs. Tech companies are small compared to other industries, relying heavily on automation. If even a few dozen workers on an ops team acted in concert, they would have the power to shut down a tech giant like Google. All they had to do was organize around a shared agenda.

Workers seemed receptive to the argument, but confused about how they could make collective action a reality. Trade unions in the United States have been under attack for decades. There is almost no union culture in technology. Our tech workers are passive and fatalistic.

So here I am in Europe, wondering, what on Earth can we do?

And I keep coming back to this idea of connecting the tech industry to reality. Bringing its benefits to more people, and bringing the power to make decisions to more people.

Closing the Loop

After Communism collapsed in Poland, I started visiting the country every eight months or so. Even in the darkest period of the 1990’s, it was striking to see people’s material standard of living improve. Suddenly people had cars, phones, appliances. These gains were uneven but broad. Even farmers and retirees, though they were the hardest hit, had access to consumer goods that weren’t available before. You could see the change in homes and in public spaces. It was no longer necessary for office workers in Kraków to change their shirts at lunchtime because of soot in the air. The tap water in Warsaw went from light brown to a pleasant pale yellow.

For all the looting, corruption, and inefficiency of privatization, enough of the new wealth got through that the overall standard of living went up. Living standards in Poland in 2010 had more than doubled from 1990.

In the same time period, in the United States, I’ve seen a whole lot of nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it pioneered in our country, there’s been a singular failure to connect our fabulous prosperity with the average person.

A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United States, the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967. That is astonishing. People born in 1942 had better lifetime earnings prospects than people entering the workforce today.

You can see this failure to connect with your own eyes even in a rich place like Silicon Valley. There are homeless encampments across the street from Facebook headquarters. California has a larger GDP than France, and at the same time has the highest poverty rate in America, adjusted for cost of living. Not only did the tech sector fail to build up the communities around it, but it’s left people worse off than before, by pricing them out of the places they grew up.

Walk the length of Market Street (watch your step!) in San Francisco and count the shuttered store fronts. Take Caltrain down to San Jose, and see if you can believe that it is the richest city in the United States, per capita. The massive increase in wealth has not connected with a meaningful way with average people’s lives even in the heart of tech country, let alone in the forgotten corners of the country.

The people who run Silicon Valley identify with progressive values. They’re not bad people. They worry about these problems just like we do; they want to help.

So why the failure to do anything?

Like T.S. Eliot wrote:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

As I said earlier, the tech industry hates messy problems. We’d rather dream up new problems we can solve from scratch.

One reason nothing happens is a culture of tax evasion. There’s a folk belief in American business that if you pay full taxes, you’re not doing your fiduciary duty, and your board will fire you.

Apple now has a quarter trillion dollars offshore that it refuses to put into direct productive use in the United States. Apple boasts that its products are designed in California—they will sell you a $300 book called Designed By Apple In California. But they do their damndest to make sure that California never sees a penny of their overseas profits.

You in the EU are all too familiar with this brand of tax evasion. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft have all been under investigation or in court on charges of evading European taxes.

Another reason good intentions don’t translate is that capitalism, especially venture capital, doesn’t work very well when there is vast wealth inequality.

The richest 20 people in tech control a fortune of half a trillion dollars in personal wealth, more than the GDP of Sweden.

This small subculture of wealthy technophiles promotes investment into luxury goods for rich people, or into “mom as a service” types of companies that cater to spoiled workaholics in the tech industry. And so we end up with things like a $120M juice squeezer, or three startups competing to deliver organic baby food.

Silicon Valley brings us the worst of two economic systems: the inefficiency of a command economy coupled with the remorselessness of laissez-faire liberalism.

One reason it’s been difficult to organize workers in the tech industry is that people have a hard time separating good intentions from results. But we have to be cold-blooded about this.

Tech companies are run by a feckless leadership accountable to no one, creating a toolkit for authoritarianism while hypnotized by science-fiction fantasy.

There are two things we have to do immediately. The first is to stop the accelerating process of tracking and surveillance before it can do any more harm to our institutions.

The danger facing us is not Orwell, but Huxley. The combo of data collection and machine learning is too good at catering to human nature, seducing us and appealing to our worst instincts. We have to put controls on it. The algorithms are amoral; to make them behave morally will require active intervention.

The second thing we need is accountability. I don’t mean that I want Mark Zuckerberg’s head on a pike, though I certainly wouldn’t throw it out of my hotel room if I found it there. I mean some mechanism for people whose lives are being brought online to have a say in that process, and an honest debate about its tradeoffs.

I’m here today because I believe the best chance to do this is in Europe. The American government is not functional right now, and the process of regulatory capture is too far gone to expect any regulations limiting the tech giants from either party. American tech workers have the power to change things, but not the desire.

Only Europe has the clout and the independence to regulate these companies. You can already point to regulatory successes, like forcing Facebook to implement hard delete on user accounts. That feature was added with a lot of grumbling, but because of the way Facebook organizes its data, they had to make it work the same for all users. So a European regulation led to a victory for privacy worldwide.

We can do this again.

Here are some specific regulations I would like to see the EU impose:

• A strict 30 day time limit on storing behavioral data.
• The right to opt out of data collection while continuing to use services.
• A ban on the sale or transfer of behavioral data, including to third-party ad networks.
• A requirement that advertising be targeted strictly to content, not users.

With these rules in place, we would still have Google and Facebook, and they would still make a little bit of money. But we would gain some breathing room. These reforms would knock the legs out from underground political ad campaigns like we saw in Brexit, and in voter suppression efforts in the US election. They would give publishers relief in an advertising market that is currently siphoning all their earnings to Facebook and Google. And they would remove some of the incentive for consumer surveillance.

The other thing I hope to see in Europe is a unionized workforce at every major tech company. Unionized workers could demand features like ephemeral group messaging at Facebook, a travel mode for social media, a truly secure Android phone, or the re-imposition of the wall between Gmail and DoubleClick data. They could demand human oversight over machine learning algorithms. They could demand non-cooperation with Trump.

And I will say selfishly, if you can unionize here, it will help us unionize over there.

If nothing else, we need your help and we need you to keep the pressure on the tech companies, the Trump Administration, and your own politicians and journalists, so that the disaster that happened in the United States doesn’t repeat itself in Germany.

You have elections coming soon. Please learn from what happened to us. Please stay safe.

And please regulate, regulate, regulate this industry, while you can.

Thank you.

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Managing a Commons

Space is generally thought of as a commons. A commons is a resource which is not under the exclusive control of anyone. This makes it an interesting and challenging economic coordination problem. The US Department of Defense classifies outer space as one of the “global commons” alongside the oceans, atmosphere, and cyberspace.

Former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy, and Shawn Brimley of the Center for a New American Security write:

“…as rising nations and non-state actors become more powerful, the United States will need to pay more attention to emerging risks associated with the global commons, those areas of the world beyond the control of any one state—sea, space, air, and cyberspace—that constitute the fabric or connective tissue of the international system.”

Even during the heated Space Race between the United States and the USSR, there were lofty ideals about how to treat the cosmos. The Outer Space Treaty, ratified by all major world powers at the time, limits the use of orbital pathways and celestial bodies to peaceful purposes. Weapons of mass destruction are specifically banned. More interestingly, it also prohibits any signatory nation from claiming ownership of celestial resources.

The resources of space were not to be seen as just a bunch of loot waiting to be plundered. According to the Treaty, managing outer space was viewed as an international responsibility of utmost importance, for the benefit of all.

New Space Race

But a new space race is on. This time, a private space race. Billionaires are funding serious commercial spaceflight companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Planetary Resources, Virgin Galactic, Stratolaunch Systems, and Bigelow Aerospace, and other lesser-known private companies and defense contractors are also competing. Additionally, competitions like the Google Lunar X Prize are under way. All of these enterprises share the goal of making space more accessible.

Elon Musk once raised the possibility of launching as many as four thousand micro-satellites into low Earth orbit for the purpose of providing worldwide high-speed internet access. Mark Zuckerberg had planned a similar service  via Internet.org. Both men have quietly put these plans on the back-burner; however, the inexorable trend of cheaper spaceflight is continuing to increase satellite congestionsurrounding Earth.

The progress that SpaceX has made with reusable launch vehicles does help reduce the quantity of space junk per-launch, but it also makes spaceflight cheaper thus encouraging more congestion. Junk continues to accumulate much faster than it is burned up.

Kessler Syndrome

Space junk is any small debris left in orbit by spacecraft. The problem is that it can impact orbiting spacecraft at speeds up to twenty times faster than a bullet. Worse yet, in the event of a collision, more debris is created.

In the worst-case scenario, this process of collisions creating more debris starts a chain reaction called Kessler Syndrome. If there are enough orbiting satellites, this chain reaction can eventually consume all of them, and leave behind a speeding cloud of bullets encircling the Earth and keeping humanity grounded for a century or more.

In political economy, we would call this an example of tragedy of the commons.

To reduce this threat, a number of mechanisms have been proposed. Decommissioning large obsolete satellites can significantly reduce the likelihood. However, doing so is expensive and of little direct benefit to the individual spacefaring organization. Nonetheless, the European Space Agency has already planned missions as part of its Clean Space initiative.

Another theoretical mitigation technique includes the development of lasers to shoot down space junk, or to redirect it whenever it threatens important orbital spacecraft.

Financing cleanup efforts

Who ought to be paying for these cleanup efforts? If billionaires intend to start launching thousands of satellites, is it simply up to the public to clean up the mess?

The ‘polluter pays principle’ is standard in environmental law. In addition to aligning with our moral intuitions for responsibility, taxes on pollution have the benefit of discouraging the damaging activities that create pollution in the first place.

In keeping with this thought, it would be sensible to propose a Pigouvian tax on anyone who creates space junk, in proportion to the amount of junk that they create. Since this junk can be accurately detected, it would be straightforward to measure and determine the tax.

Amending the Outer Space Treaty and establishing a body to implement the polluter pays principle would be a common sense method by which we could work to eliminate the threat of space junk.

There’s another possible source of revenue if we consider that the orbital paths themselves are a finite resource. Satellite collisions have happened in the past and will continue going forward. Indeed, every satellite launched brings with it a small risk of collision. In fact, it has happened before. And the more satellites we have, the greater the likelihood of collision and, eventually, of triggering Kessler Syndrome.

Certain orbital pathways are more desirable than others. Geo-stationary orbits might be more desirable than low Earth orbit; a sun-synchronous orbit may be more desirable than an alternative orbit. If billionaires start launching thousands of satellites, it is entirely possible that we could eventually be forced to allocate these orbital paths by auction, in order to fund general collision insurance.

Such a model would certainly be more fair and predictable than our current process, which is for companies to patent orbital pathways, and sue anyone who infringes on it (regardless of collision risk). Granted, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation also has a permitting process in the United States. But permitting practices vary by nation, and there’s little or no international coordination for revenue-sharing, insurance, or cleanup.

Motherboard interviewed Andrew Rush, a patent attorney and entrepreneur with expertise in space law, who said “As more and more companies start commercial activities using satellites, and using new and innovative ways to do so, we should see an uptick in patent activity.”

“We may also see the attendant uptick in patent litigation around some of those activities,” he added. “I personally hope that’s not the direction that we go. I hope there’s a lot more licensing and a lot more cooperative ownership and stewardship of patents, rather than just suing each other. “

An exemplary model of proper resource management can be found in the Norwegian Oil Fund. Upon discovery of its oil reserves, Norway instituted the collection of economic rent based on the revenue generated from oil extraction, plus oil exploration licensing fees. The resulting revenue was then kept in a trust fund and used to invest both within Norway and internationally. As of June 2015, the fund has accrued $873 billion. Given its size and stake in companies worldwide, the fund has become an significant player in international affairs. As such, it pursues economic and social justice through its decisions concerning its holdings, divesting from companies that violate its ethical standards.

If our civilization is able to use market pricing to collect economic rent from the Earth’s geosynchronous orbits, we would enjoy similar success as Norway while preserving a critical resource. Such concepts are already proving successful here on Earth. London uses congestion pricing to reduce traffic in its city center, and uses that revenue to fund public transportation. Congestion in space is ultimately no different.

Let’s preserve our common inheritance of space for future generations, not at the expense of our current generation, but by achieving justice. We all deserve to share the benefits and the value of outer space.

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