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While the Net has certainly scored a point or two against the State, the State has scored a lot more points against the Net. If the State wants your domain name, it takes it. If that's independence, what does utter defeat and submission look like?
Worse: whatever state tyranny exists, it's obviously dwarfed by the private, free-market, corporate tyrannosaurs that stalk the cloud today. We can see this clearly by imagining all these thunder-lizards were actually part of the government. "Private" and "public" are just labels, after all.
Imagine a world in which LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and the NSA were all in one big org chart. Is there anyone, of any political stripe, who doesn't find this outcome creepy? It's probably going to happen, in fact if not in form. While formal nationalization is out of fashion, regulation easily achieves the same result, while keeping the sacred words "private enterprise."
How do today's technologists win freedom from State control?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 10 2015, @12:14PM
Government is the General Will
Except when it's not. There's way too many examples of special interests taking precedence over general interests in any government to take Rousseau's abstractions seriously. The innumerable defections and distortions from Rosseau's ideals can't be ignored.
Communitarianism means we all get to decide what should be public policy, but that means what we decide is a communal decision, not a aggregation of individual decisions.
Get back to me when you've fit the NSA into that.
This is what looks like oppression of with taxation to our benighted libertarians. But it is inclusion in this whole that makes us part of a government.
I think the problem here is that I want to be more than just a food source. Nobody starts yapping about inclusiveness until they want my shit. The simple solution is not to give them my shit.
Now this is the real split between the right (individualist) and left (communitarian), although there are right wing communitarists (Catholics and Fascists), but it is the overcoming of the dichotomy between individual freedom and communal freedom that defines the left. Not that I expect you to get this. Talk to your mom.
No, this is wrong on several levels. First, individualism is not a "right" ideal any more than its opposite, authoritarianism is a "left" ideal. Second, there is no dichotomy between individual and communal freedom, this is just an artificial distinction made by Rosseau. Among other things, the latter is just individual freedom which is enabled by some degree of communal action/cooperation which makes it a subset of the former. The "dichotomy" is actually just a slight trade off between a ridiculous degree of individual freedom and important rights that most libertarians support. For example, for the sacrifice of the "right" to arbitrarily kill anyone and take their stuff, we get property ownership, a communal right (and a standard example from Rosseau as I understand it).
Now look at a typical left cause: a public pension. I grant the idea could result in greater economic freedom for old people who can no longer work. The gotcha is that public pensions are notoriously inefficient and ineffective at their intended task. It is common for them to promise too much and then fail to deliver to some future generation on those promises (particularly when the older generations vote themselves more pension than is their due). Is it really to my community's benefit to take wealth from ourselves, making us poorer now and then dump it ineffectively on the elderly (or whatever special interest/business manages to intercept those funds before they get to the elderly, plus fraud)? This example not only weakens both individual and communal rights, but it also results in a net loss for society. As the sardonic observation goes, that's an awful big mess just to keep Grannie from eating catfood.
This is the third issue. In order to grant a rather insignificant right, we trampled on important individual and communal rights and ignored various other terrible economic and law enforcement consequences. That is not the sort of "overcoming" I respect. This sort of thing incidentally remains the key difference between government and an independent private business. Someone who can't rely on a vast, permanent captive revenue stream in turn can't afford to make generations of bad decisions.
Not that I expect you to get this.
When you discuss Rosseau's ideas on governance, you are not even wrong. You aren't speaking of real world governments, real world people, real world decisions, or real world rights. When we actually look at real world left schemes, we typically see huge sacrifices of freedom in exchange for paltry benefits, which often don't even surpass the strictly economic costs of the scheme. In turn, all this talk of we being our own governments is cover for you taking my stuff for your special interests. This environment also leads to the very problems that people in this thread claim to be concerned about, like government/business collusion. Businesses which can devote a small, very competent army to lobbying and bribery are far more effective at taking stuff from others than the left is. And businesses have more to offer to their government counterparts than some clueless leftist flunky does.
I suppose fundamentally, the problem here is that there is no feedback. If you touch a hot stove, the pain you receive (presuming a normal sense of touch) is sufficient to warn you that you are hurting yourself. At the business level, cash flow and the profit motive provide a weaker, but still effective feedback mechanism for avoiding really dumb activities. But at the government level, the feedback mechanisms are particularly weak. It's hard to connect attempts to protect or strengthen workers with the resulting destruction of worker freedom and power. It's hard to connect the gargantuan morass of regulation with unaccountable and unsupervised intelligence agencies. It's hard to connect the creation of an environment where taking things from others for what appears to be good reasons with taking things from others for bad reasons (such as creating a government/business complex and massive corruption). Rosseau and his adherents can be wrong forever and yet never associate the consequences with the actions.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:03AM
Yes, you get my point, but do not understand it. I am willing to accept that. But more importantly, a recent conversation with someone else reveals that you actually have completed a Doctorate? I am somewhat impressed, and now realize why you are, as Stephen Colbert would say, a "formidable opponent". Dr. khallow. This will take some getting used to.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:37PM
Plus, in the hypothetical, purely theoretical scenario where I'm talking out my ass, I really don't want to hear endless mockery about my degree rather than the foibles of the moment.