[ExI] Wired: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

[Brent Allsop]

I think all hierarchical institutions or leaders are about to become 
insignificant and to be completely ignored by everyone.

There is a great example in the recent terminator movie.  The 
hierarchical 'leader' of the rebellion gives a command to attack the 
robot command.  But all the underlings comunicate back that they will 
not do so till John Connor gives his OK, effectively neutering his command.

It's all about communication.  In the past, where communication from 
masses has been so difficult and expensive, hierarchical leaders have 
always been able to do more of of such through their hierarchical 
structures.

The internet has already taken us half way where we need to be, the only 
remaining problem is still there is  no way for the masses to 
efficiently and easily comunicate in concice and quantitative ways.  
Sure, everyone has several blogs these days, but nobody without a 
hierarchical staff can even get close to any quantitative and concise 
idea of what everyone is saying.

But as soon as you can easily, efficiently, and in an unbiased way know 
concisely and quantitatively what everyone is saying, suddenly the world 
is a very different place and the above T3 type activities will neuter 
any leader attempting to deviate in any way from what the masses want.

Reputation is another critical component of all this.  Right now, spam 
and scam is killing everyone because everyone and all the advertisements 
online are anonymous.  But once we have the ability for large mases of 
people to communicate concisely and quantitatively, everything will have 
a permanent reputation.

Credit agencies get close to this kind of communication today.  Before 
anyone loans any money, they communicate with all other people that have 
had financial transactions with this person, and based on that, do or 
don't loan them money.  I believe some system is about to develop that 
will give this kind of reputation system to everyone and everything.  
Anyone that attempts to stop such will be completely unable, since you 
can't stop people from telling everyone else what they think about their 
experience with something.  We'll easily have e-mail and advertizement 
filters that will simply not let anything in our inbox without it having 
a certain level of reputation associated with it.  In other words, we'll 
simply ignore all the spam and scam.

With such a communication ability, where large groups of people can 
communicate concisely and quantitatively, you don't really need 
governments or even police for most things.  Everyone will simply choose 
to not do business with scum bags (as they define them) of any kind (let 
alone allow them to remain in any position of power).  In such a world 
reputation will be everything, worth more than money.  Without a good 
one, life will be hell, with a good one, life will be heavenly and money 
will be easy.

Of course, we're working to make such a tool with canonizer.com.  
Whether this succeeds or not, someone somewhere is eventually going to 
come up with some kind of system that enables large groups of people to 
communicate concisely and quantitatively.  And with that, the world will 
be a very different place with no spam, scam, or evil dictators that we 
don't all simply easily ignore.

Brent Allsop
















ben wrote:
>
> Stathis wrote:
> >I guess one difference online is that no-one is in a position of real
> >power over anyone else.
>
> Hm.  In an 'ideal internet' that would be true.  But in the real world 
> we have the great firewall of china, rampant censorship in places like 
> iran, and the future threat of a balkanisation of the whole internet 
> if we're not very careful. I think this is an under-appreciated 
> threat, because we all realise that the usual kinds of attempt to 
> restrict people's access to information are doomed - but what about 
> when the powers-that-be finally realise this too?  What's to stop 
> china, russia, indonesia, and the muslim world from setting up their 
> own domain name systems and isolating their internal public 
> communications networks from the rest of the world? (wouldn't have to 
> be physical, just impose an incompatible protocol).
>
> Any traditional power structure will be very afraid of this internet 
> socialism, once it becomes aware of it.  We've already seen how media 
> cartels react to file-sharing.  What will governments do when they 
> start sensing their power over the people slipping away?
>
> With any luck, the acceleration of technological progress will be 
> perpetually ahead of any govenments ability to realise its 
> implications and successfully stifle it, but there's no guarantee.
>
> Ben Zaiboc (waiting for someone to invent an infinitely scaleable 
> network protocol that inherently resists any kind of top-down control, 
> needs no domain name servers and is ready for installation on 
> godzillions of smart-dust nanomachines that will unstoppably saturate 
> the entire globe.  _Then_ Stathis' claim will really be true.)
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