[ExI] the myth of the US "liberal media"

[Kelly Anderson]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Jeff Davis <jrd1415 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/7/14 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
>> ... I am
>> inclined to think that transhumanism / anti-transhumanism is going to be the
>> real political divide of the future...
>
>> ... I am inclined to keep an open mind,

Me too... though for now I will stick to my belief that freedom is the
best system for the development of technology, and that technology is
what matters to people's quality of life.

>> including for theories which are, or have become, quite out of the
>> mainstream.
>>  ... I think we may be too quick in believing that
>> contemporary States are an insuperable paradigm
>> ... I like the freshness, creativity and
>> lateral thinking exhibited by the solutions envisaged by libertarians in the
>> "anarco-capitalist" sense.
>
> Masterful post.  Dispose of the nation state?  "Take my wife,
> ...please."  It's a lumbering anachronism -- not my wife -- chock full
> of inefficiencies arising from the cobbling together of disparate,
> incompatible, unavoidably fractious, often actively hostile
> subpopulations with  leadership and control of power held by an
> inherently despotic and socially distant political elite.

The state's future is very uncertain in the face of globalization, new
non-governmental currencies, and other developments. If the US
government defaults and collapses, for example, it doesn't mean the
end of the US people... so what steps in?

> So shall we start over again?  Back to the drawing board?  Clean slate?

It would be good to do so. Thomas Jefferson never imagined us making
it this far without a clean slate. He wanted a new revolution every
20-30 years. Perhaps we are in the beginnings of the first major
revolution in some time, if the last election was any indicator.

> By all friggin' means.
>
> Years ago,... many years ago, ...when I was taking the first steps
> toward what would later become my transhumanist worldview, I
> encountered "Here Comes Immortality" by Jerome Touchille.  JT was a
> Randian disciple and one of the founders in the early 70's of the
> Libertarian "thing".  These days HCI would be almost mainstream, and
> "behind the curve" for those of a transhumanist bent.
>
> One of the ideas presented in HCI -- an idea which has not yet
> manifested -- is of an alternative social/governance structure: a kind
> of corporate mediated tribalism resulting in a diverse array of
> corporate mini-states.

Could still happen. Would it be good? I dunno.

> Now, "corporate" and "state" put together has some negative historical
> baggage, ie fascism.

Ya.

> Let's just get beyond that.  I'm talking "nice"
> corporate,... "corporate with a human face".  (If how to make
> corporate "nice" rather than rapacious seems problematic, then just go
> back to corporate first principles and make "nice" the key to
> profitability.

How do you do that?

> Essentially, under corporate guidance -- which is to say run as a
> business, rather than a
> gun-to-the-taxpayer's-head-concentration-camp-er-"nation" --
> like-minded folks -- there's the tribalism -- are offered the
> corporate "product": a turn key community where they can live safely
> and efficiently in accordance with their mutually-held values, and
> free-from the discord of diversity (ie living with and putting up with
> discordant beliefs, values, practices, etc.)

When we each have more bandwidth than we do today, then perhaps a true
democracy could work.

> As innovative as this is, Touchille added another novelty: to avoid
> the siting problem -- the problem of the old bad govts having a
> monopoly on available land.  These communities would be built at sea,
> floating communities.  An obvious advantage to such a system is
> (1)voluntarism: the "citizen" chooses a community (ie his "country")
> which meets his needs (matches his meme set/values), and (2)
> efficiency (I will leave it to others to enumerate the list of
> efficiencies arising from this form of governance.)

A pirate's life for me!!!

> A more modern variant of this idea is of course communities sited
> outside the terrestrial gravity well.
>
>                 ***********************************
>
> I'm gonna leave it there.  I would love to hear what other notions any
> of you might have.  Kelly?  Including the impact of the singularity
> and the possible "retirement" of the meat-based way of life.

Like I said, if we each have enough bandwidth to think about
everything we want all at once, then we can dedicate part of our
processing power to governmental issues, and a true democracy could
arise in scale for the first time in history. That is a very
interesting prospect in my mind. Republican representation works best
with limited human bandwidth... and barely at that when they can't
even read the laws, and nobody really knows who writes the damn laws.

> Once again, I am totally jazzed.

It's going to be a bumpy ride. Hold on!

-Kelly