Tag Archives: politics

Blog

The inevitability of global government

1 Comment

United Nations, GenevaMichael Anissimov found an intriguing (and rather odd) post by one Britt Gillette, which argues that a single monolithic global government is not only possible but inevitable, and that the driving force will be the rise of molecular manufacturing technology:

Imagine a scenario in which a single individual in possession of unrestricted technology and resources could conquer the entire world. This will be our world in the era of molecular manufacturing. With such high stakes and an almost infinite number of potential threats, the world population will require some means of defense. And that defense will require around-the-clock, ever-present surveillance of the world at large.

A system of safeguards will have to be constructed in order to prevent emerging nation states, terrorist groups, and individuals from breaching the peace. A single global government will go a long way toward eliminating military conflict, as there will be only one military power with a unified purpose. However, in the era of molecular manufacturing, competing militaries could rise quickly, and to prevent a loss of its governing monopoly, a global government will have to deploy unprecedented measures.

This surveillance could be “god-like” in scope – seeing everything, hearing everything, and knowing everything. Imagine “nanodust” – nanoscale cameras and listening devices as plentiful and as difficult to remove as common, everyday dust. MM will enable the construction of trillions of these sophisticated devices at negligible cost.

It’s quite a lengthy post, looking at trends in political detente and weapons stockpiling since WW2 to justify the argument. Beyond the paragraphs quoted above it gets all Bible-literalist, but there’s some genuine logical thought going on before Gillette invokes a themed short-story anthology of dubious editorial provenance as a guide to future inevitabilities, and Anissimov concedes the validity of molecular manufacturing as a game-changing technology:

… MM will not arrive tomorrow, and probably not in the next decade (maybe in the next two), but if it does, I believe that global government is indeed probable, whether you like it or not. Go read Nanosystems. Even if MNT is implausible, hijacked ribosomes would still give rise to exponential manufacturing, so even “soft machines” could lead to the ability to build millions of missiles in less than a couple years. The crucial effects are the exponentiality and programmability.

I’d go with global government being plausible, but I’m not entirely sure it’s the most likely scenario. Personally, I tend to think that governance will become radically decentralised as the nation-state concept finally dissolves; molecular manufacturing would accelerate the erosion of geography that communications technology has already begun. Much as in the original comic books version of Watchmen, I think the only thing that could unite the planet into a single body would be an external existential threat on an equivalent scale to an alien invasion – and I don’t consider one of those to be very likely at all! [image by lilivanili]

That said, I think a global framework based on communications that allows local governments to interact with each other on an equal footing is fairly likely – as well as more appealing than the thought of some bureaucratic behemoth spanning the planet.

But I’m aware that’s not a majority opinion – so what do you lot think? Is a single global government inevitable, and would such a thing be desirable? What would be its causes, and what would be its flaws?

Blog

The web as emergent collectivist digitopia

1 Comment

socialist starEven now, US resistance to the concept of socialism is a knee-jerk of epic proportions, at least among the more vocal ranks of punditry. But maybe it’s coming anyway – Kevin Kelly crops up at Wired, claiming that the internet is fostering a grassroots variant of technology-enabled collectivism deep in the heart of America… and beyond.

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

It’s an interesting and provocative read, and I heartily recommend you take twenty minutes to read it all.

What I find most intriguing about it, though, is the fact that most of the article would work just as well if you replaced every instance of the word “socialism” with the word “capitalism”. That doesn’t invalidate Kelly’s argument, though; what I think it means is that the old polarity between the ideas encapsulated by those two words is weakening; both socialism and capitalism as ideologies have taken some serious blows in the last sixty years or so, but the underlying systemic approaches to examining and adjusting the way huge numbers of people live that lurk beneath those political edifices are increasingly looking like complementary models or theoretical frameworks, much like you’d find in science.

Which isn’t to say that people won’t crusade under the banner of a scientific theory – look at the new wave of militant evolutionists, for example. But it suggests to me that social economics may gradually be coming detached from the binary oppositions of geopolitics; as awareness of the flaws and benefits of both approaches become clearer and more widely disseminated (thanks to the web, natch), perhaps it will become harder for politicians to claim that one or the other is “right”, “better” or “more American” (or British, or Chinese, or whatever). [image by anarchosyn]

Hey, a guy can dream, right?

Blog

The Red Dragon has no head – China’s citizen hackers

4 Comments

Chinese flagsThere’s been plenty of press recently about the threat of Chinese hackers undermining infrastructure in the West, and about the GhostNet network, which may or may not be a covert espionage tool of China’s government.

The trouble is that the line between state-sponsored or military hackers and young patriots with time and talent isn’t clear; it may be that the bulk of the “red hackers” aren’t employed by their government, and are just hobbyists with a convenient target. Some folk do it “for the lulz”; these people are allegedly doing it for their nation. [image by parrhesiastes]

From China, where I’ve lived for four years, this assessment looks spot-on. Hackers are pervasive, their imprint inescapable. There are hacker magazines, hacker clubs and hacker online serials. A 2005 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences survey equates hackers and rock stars, with nearly 43 percent of elementary-school students saying they “adore” China’s hackers. One third say they want to be one. This culture thrives on a viral, Internet-driven nationalism. The post-Tiananmen generation has known little hardship, so rather than pushing for democracy, many young people define themselves in opposition to the West. China’s Internet patriots, who call themselves “red hackers,” may not be acting on direct behalf of their government, but the effect is much the same.

Is this, perhaps, the new emergent youth politics? Going out and fighting for what you believe in out in the digital trenches – even if the thing you’re fighting for isn’t quite what you think it is. And hey – if you get powerful enough, maybe it’ll start changing to be more like what you want to keep you sweet, as it becomes increasingly dependent on your leverage beyond the border. Talk about grass-roots change, right? [via Bruce Sterling]

What’s interesting to me is that patriotism can motivate these kids to hacking. Here in the UK, the most that nationalist sentiment can seem to stir up in young folk is the desire to thump brown people, and those easily swayed by such desires aren’t often in the possession of a mentality that would lend itself to 00b3r-1337 computer skillzorz; as a general rule, Western hackers tend to work against governments and authority (how much is that due to the influence of cyberpunk literature?), so it’s a cognitive dissonance moment for me to read about kids voluntarily furthering the cause of their nation rather than their own interests.

Which is one of the things that makes me wonder just how true all of these stories are. As a general trend, the last twelve months have seen a big increase in news stories that give us reason to fear an amorphous and distant conceptual bundle labelled “China”, in inverse proportion to coverage of the previous faceless multiplex global enemy, namely Muslim extremism. The economic crisis has made this particularly easy (China is buying up western debt! China is stockpiling commodities!), and climate change is a nice lever too (China won’t stop polluting, so why should we?).

While I understand the need for political rhetoric (and the media that feed from it, remora-like) to set up ideological opponents against which to rally the diminishing regiments of Western patriots, I sincerely hope we’re not headed for some sort of Cold War re-run. We’ve enough problems on our plate as it is.

Blog

Coal: fuel of the future

1 Comment

geological-carbonThe British government has given the go-ahead to a new generation of coal-fired power plants incorporating carbon-capture and storage technologies in a bid to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Clean coal has been met with criticism and the policy seems just a little bit flaky:

Up to four new plants will be built if they are fitted with technology to trap and store CO2 emissions underground.

The technology is not yet proven and would only initially apply to 25% of power stations’ output.

Green groups welcomed the move but said any new stations would still release more carbon than they stored.

Uh huh. According to UK energy secretary Ed Miliband:

Once it is “independently judged as economically and technically proven” – which the government expects by 2020 – those stations would have five years to “retrofit” CCS to cover 100% of their output.

Kind of a glass quarter-full situation then. And it might not even work. But do check out the details.

[image and articles from the BBC and the Guardian]

Blog

The other side of Dubai

1 Comment

Last week I linked to a lengthy article on Dubai that didn’t paint it in an attractive light at all; it was pointed out in the comments (not to mention in many other places around the web) that said article was a bit of a hatchet job.

Via BoingBoing (from whom came the original story) comes a response from Joi Ito, a recent arrival in Dubai:

I’m still new to the region so I can’t speak definitively as a native, but I do know that the picture that is sketched is pretty biased and I think could be rightly called “bashing”. As far as I can tell there is a crunch going on, just like everywhere else, and the government and businesses are trying to figure out what to keep and what to shut down. There are a lot of solid businesses and a lot of solid business people in Dubai and like anywhere else, consolidation and downsizing is taking its toll.

[…]

I don’t want to sound too defensive about Dubai or the Middle East in general, but one thing I’ve learned from my still brief time is that it’s much more complicated than it appears. Just calling Muslim law and governance “medieval” and writing it off is ignorant. It’s very different and isn’t in sync with what many of us might think is “fair”. They treat bounced checks and drug smuggling very seriously. Moving to the Middle East casually and assuming that everything should be just like home is dangerous and I wouldn’t recommend it. However, I knew about the drug thing even before I visited and I learned about the “bounced checks land you in jail” thing on my first day.

He’s got some important points there; current media coverage is definitely playing to the backlash against conspicuous consumption and weird financial doings. I lived in Saudi Arabia for three years when I was a kid, and that part of the world operates very differently to the West – culturally, religiously and politically. It’s probably not fair for us to judge entirely based on our own standards.

That said, I don’t think it’s entirely out of line to point out that Dubai is still a very weird set-up indeed, and will quite possibly become an emblem of the attitudes and approaches that led us to our current economic situation.