33 posts tagged with institutions and humanism.
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Power (Plough, Sword & Book) and Progress (Exit, Voice & Loyalty)
Justice by Means of Democracy [archive|transcript] - "[T]he work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again. So we have to do work to introduce new governance mechanisms in the place of those that are not working."[1,2; link-heavy post!] [more inside]
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
The Memory Bank*
A Hidden Currency of Incalculable Worth [ungated] - "We need to start thinking about policies aimed at freeing up time for impoverished families as a form of aid. We could begin by defining a healthy society as one in which everyone has a place to stay, food to eat and time to enjoy the fruits of their labor with those for whom they labor. A living wage should be one in which there is space for something beyond work." [link-heavy FPP! ;] [more inside]
What if climate change meant not doom — but abundance?
Rebecca Solnit: How to meet the climate crisis? Redefine 'abundance.' [ungated] - "Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we're well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?"[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
Abundance: Aplenty for All
Making energy too cheap to meter - "The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it's almost free." [more inside]
Practical Utopias from Degrowth Pastoralism to Star Trek Futurism
Why the Age of American Progress Ended [ungated] - "Invention alone can't change the world; what matters is what happens next."[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
Civilization reboot: Imagine post-capitalism instead of the world's end
An Economic History of the ('Long') Twentieth Century - "Slouching Towards Utopia is a rise-and-fall epic—but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall."[1,2,3] [more inside]
Atoms and Bits
The story so far: So until some random assortment of matter and energy somehow arranged itself into what we think of as 'life', the universe was just that: a random assortment of matter and energy. After life, life began to arrange matter and energy, according to life -- creating life (and death) at least on the third rock from some star... [more inside]
"The Modern Point of View and the New Order"
What comes after smartphones? - "We've spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we've only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them." [more inside]
The Trick of Orthodoxy
Economics truly is a disgrace - "This is very personal post. It is my story of the retaliation I suffered immediately after my 'economics is a disgrace' blog post went viral. The retaliation came from Heather Boushey–a recent Biden appointee to the Council of Economic Adviser and the President and CEO of Equitable Growth where I then worked. This is not the story I wanted to be telling (or living). Writing this post is painful. I am sorry." (via; previously) [more inside]
Age of Discord II
Welcome To The 'Turbulent Twenties' - "We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it's here and what we can do to temper it."[1,2] (via) [more inside]
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
Ethics in AI
DeepMind researchers propose rebuilding the AI industry on a base of anticolonialism - "The researchers detailed how to build AI systems while critically examining colonialism and colonial forms of AI already in use in a preprint paper released Thursday. The paper was coauthored by DeepMind research scientists William Isaac and Shakir Mohammed and Marie-Therese Png, an Oxford doctoral student and DeepMind Ethics and Society intern who previously provided tech advice to the United Nations Secretary General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation." [more inside]
Angry, educated and rich
Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies - "Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands."[1] (via; previously) [more inside]
A better world than this is possible
Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century
Politics Without Politicians - "The political scientist Hélène Landemore asks, If government is for the people, why can't the people do the governing?" (via) [more inside]
Your Data, Your Money, Your Laws
Your data could be at the centre of the fight against big tech (NYT) - "Furman, a Harvard professor advising the British government on tech regulation, said that rather than relying on antitrust law alone, countries should create a dedicated regulator for the tech industry, to match those covering the banking, health and transportation sectors of the economy. He said a watchdog with expertise in the field could better review a company's behavior and use of data on a case-by-case basis." [more inside]
Money Stuff
Facebook Will Make the Money Now - "Money is a technology. This is true, first of all, in a grand abstract sense: The human capacity to generate collective fictions is our most powerful and general technology, the thing that distinguishes us from other animals and enables long-term cooperation and complex societies, and money is one of the most important collective fictions."[1] [more inside]
(dystopic) utopianism...
The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand's 'Whole Earth Catalog' - "Brand's generation will leave behind a frightening, if unintentional, inheritance. My generation, and those after us, are staring down a ravaged environment, eviscerated institutions, and the increasing erosion of democracy." ('We Are as Gods and Might as Well Get Good at It') [more inside]
In Communist China, censorship routes around the net
How China Walled Off the Internet - "The web was supposed to set the world free. China's is censored, but booming anyway." (previously) [more inside]
Humanism
You Might Have Earned It, But Don't Forget That Your Wealth Came from Society - "The distribution of that wealth doesn't rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can." (via) [more inside]
Lesson for the 21st Century
Why Technology Favors Tyranny - "Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don't take steps to stop it." (via)
Social Wealth Fund for America
The big idea that could make democratic socialism a reality - "An ambitious proposal to create an Alaska-style social wealth fund that could transform the global economy." (previously) [more inside]
Dataism: Getting out of the 'job loop' and into the 'knowledge loop'
From deities to data - "For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people... Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data." [more inside]
Trekonomics
The Economic Lessons of Star Trek's Money-Free Society - "[Manu Saadia] points to technologies like GPS and the internet as models for how we can set ourselves on the path to a Star Trek future. 'If we decide as a society to make more of these crucial things available to all as public goods, we're probably going to be well on our way to improving the condition of everybody on Earth', he says. But he also warns that technology alone won't create a post-scarcity future... 'This is something that has to be dealt with on a political level, and we have to face that.' " (via) [more inside]
Sapiens 2.0: Homo Deus?
In his follow-up to Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari envisions what a 'useless class' of humans might look like as AI advances and spreads - "I'm aware that these kinds of forecasts have been around for at least 200 years, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they never came true so far. It's basically the boy who cried wolf, but in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time." [more inside]
WORLD OF TOMORROW
World After Capital by Albert Wenger [Work in Progress; GitHub; GitBook; PDF; FAQ] - "Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting from capital to attention. World After Capital suggests ways to expand economic, informational and psychological freedom to go from an industrial to a knowledge society." (previously)
UBI in NYT
It's Payback Time for Women - "Society is getting a free ride on our unrewarded contributions to the perpetuation of the human race." (via) [more inside]
Faced with gaping moral and economic holes in society
Rewrite the rules to benefit everyone, not just the wealthy - "If there's one thing Joseph Stiglitz wants to say about inequality, it's that it has been a choice, not an unexpected, unfortunate economic outcome. That's unnerving, but it also means that citizens and politicians have the opportunity to fix the problem before it gets worse." (via) [more inside]
Desire Modification in the Attention Economy
The Future of (Post)Capitalism - "Paul Mason shows how, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy." (previously; via) [more inside]
Basic Income: How to Fix a Broken Monetary Transmission Mechanism
FINLAND: New Government Commits to a Basic Income Experiment - "The Finnish government of Juha Sipilä is considering a pilot project that would give everyone of working age a basic income."[1,2,3] (via) [more inside]
After Capitalism, Humanism
Shared Prosperity, Common Wealth, National Equity and a Citizen's Dividend: Nirit Peled takes a look at social experiments in basic incomes for VPRO Tegenlicht, a Dutch public television documentary series. Starting with a German crowdfunded UBI chosen by raffle -- kind of like the opposite of Le Guin's Omelas (or Shirley Jackson's Lottery in reverse) -- the focus moves on to Albert Wenger who wants to disconnect work from income not only as automation progresses but to accelerate the process. Then it's on to Guy Standing who has conducted basic income experiments in India and Namibia (pdf) and is trying to get one off the ground in Groningen (Utrecht apparently is also a go). Finally, a stop in Alaska to ask some of its residents about their views on the state-owned Permanent Fund. This last part brings to mind the question: just what is wealth anyway? [more inside]
How to fix inequality: Squash the finance industry and redistribute more
Joe Stiglitz on Inequality, Wealth, and Growth: Why Capitalism is Failing (video; if you don't have 30m, skip to 20m for discussion of political inequality, wealth, credit and monetary policy) - "If the very rich can use their position to get higher returns, more investment information, more extraction of rents, and if the very rich have equal or higher savings rates, then wealth will become more concentrated... economic inequality inevitably gets translated into political inequality, and political inequality gets translated into more economic inequality. The basic and really important idea here is that markets don't exist in a vacuum, that market economies operate according to certain rules, certain regulations that specify how they work. And those effect the efficiency of those markets, but they also effect how the fruits of the benefits of those markets are distributed and the result of that is there are large numbers of aspects of our basic economic framework that in recent years have worked to increase the inequality of wealth and income in our society... leading to a society which can be better described, increasingly, as an inherited plutocracy." [more inside]
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