Kartik Agaram

Feb 20

Thinking critically about the ideal of a techno-utopia

Technology can compromise resolve. East Germans who watched West German television were paradoxically more satisfied with life in their country. The fact that Dresden—where the 1989 protests started—lies too far and too low to have received Western broadcasts may partly explain the rebellious spirit of the city's inhabitants. While we fret about the Internet's contribution to degrading the civic engagement of American kids, all teenagers in China or Iran are presumed to be committed citizens who use the Web to acquaint themselves with human rights violations committed by their governments. For the vast majority of Internet users, increased access to information is not always liberating. With their endless supply of entertainment, Twitter and Facebook might make political mobilization harder, not easier.

Technology empowers all sides equally. We cling to the view that all non-state power in authoritarian countries is good, while state power is evil and always leads to suppression. Not all opponents of the Russian or Chinese or even Egyptian state fit the neoliberal pattern. Nationalism, extremism and religious fanaticism abound. Facebook and Twitter empower all groups—not just the pro-Western groups that we like.

Technology drives decentralization; demonstration requires centralization. Thanks to the decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran's Green Movement couldn't collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. It simply drowned in its own tweets.

Technology increases noise and misinformation. We assume the Internet makes it easy for citizens to see who else is opposing a regime and then act collectively based on that shared knowledge. In the age of the Spinternet, cheap online propaganda can easily be bought with the help of pro-government bloggers. Add to that the growing surveillance capacity of modern authoritarian states—greatly boosted by information collected through social media.

Technology shines a harsh light. Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of "open government"; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors.

—Paraphrasing Evgeny Morozov

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Jan 23

Tyranny of the majority, or regulatory capture? Just be more agile.

Plato, de Tocqueville, et al.: In a democracy, the greatest concern is that the majority will tyrannize and exploit diverse smaller interests.

Mancur Olson: Narrow and well-organized minorities are more likely to assert their interests over those of the majority.

Neil Freeman: Just redistrict the states after each census.[1]

me: Can this idea be generalized? Minorities can be oppressed or powerful; strive to so intertwine motivations that minorities are eliminated. Track minority power and standard deviation of group size as a quality metric for democracy.

But maintain diversity. And don't allow collusion to foster bubbles.

[1] Credit: James Fallows. Related comments: Hacker News

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Jul 10, 2009

Cities and slums

Mike Davis: More than half the human race now lives in cities. Mostly in the squalor of slums and squatter cities.

Kevin Kelly: The city is a wonderful technological invention which concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint it generates a maximum of ideas and inventions. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. Discomfort is an investment. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate.

Michael Balter: In Anatolia nine thousand years ago, a stone-age civilization lived in high density without cities or slums for three thousand years. (via Ken Macleod)

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Jun 15, 2009

Rethinking America's prisons is cheaper than rethinking incarceration

We punish people with architecture. The building is the method.

New prison construction is parceled out to a handful of large and anonymous firms, discouraging innovation.

American prisons are built in the countryside. Rural prisons need no public face. It need articulate no sense of communal pride or civic justice.

Convicts tend to come from cities; guards do not. Culture clashes inevitably arise.

Convicts tend to come from cities; their families often can't afford to travel to visit. Rehabilitation becomes difficult.

Guards serve "lifetime sentences 8 hours at a time." Guards and prisoners often want the same improvements.

Prisons that look pleasing suffer less vandalism.
— Jim Lewis

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Apr 9, 2009

“Children even as young as three and four years old often know that stealing is wrong, even without being explicitly told by adults. They don't need us to define the goal. That's easy. The problem is actually living by those values day to day. We need to help them develop a deep, abiding commitment to these values, a commitment that can override other needs and goals. The hard part isn't moral literacy; it's moral motivation."
— Richard Weissbourd

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Mar 16, 2009

“The tendency for prices to fall during recessions has declined over time. An increasing proportion of the effect of any reduction in aggregate demand shows up as a reduction in real output. We shut down our factories rather than running them with lower wages and lower prices for finished goods; in the event of deflation reducing collectible property taxes, a city will fire half of its schoolteachers rather than cut any teacher's wage.

The longer a society remains stable, the more freighted down with special interest groups it becomes. Unions or cartels of businesses slow an economy’s response to change because they require the assent of many members in order to effect a change. This makes wages and prices much stickier than in a classical free-market economy."
—Mancur Olson as paraphrased by Philip Greenspun. original

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Jun 27, 2007

“ Are crowds wise or dumb?

Groups of people are dumber than their constituent members when they exchange words, like in committees, boards, governments, meetings, etc.

Groups of people are smarter than their constituent members when they exchange actions. Markets are smarter than individuals because currency is a surrogate for action.

— me

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Oct 18, 2007

“ Whatever it professes, practical politics has always been about the systematic organization of hatreds.

— Henry Brooks Adams

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May 6, 2007

“ One had no time to think. There was so much going on. The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.

How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? I do not know, I do not see, even now. To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. ..it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further.. So you wait, and you wait.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. You have gone almost all the way yourself.

— Milton Mayer on living in the Third Reich. via

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May 22, 2008

“ A fanatic redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his aim.

— Santayana_info as quoted here and here

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