Political Atrophy
“The mechanical brain does not secrete thought ‘as the liver does bile,’ as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive the present day.” – Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948
Caddell would say France run by a king, a dictator, or any of its innumerable republics would still be France, but the US, if we lost the republic, democratic politics, it would no longer be the United States. So here, in our threatening political bankruptcy, the best hope beyond hope is for at least a Chapter 11, you know, buy a little time for desperately needed reorganization.
Two pieces, thanks to Naked Capitalism, demonstrate our political insolvency. The first is an interview with a Democratic Socialist running for Congress in New York City. What a tragedy ten years ago, at a time when a crack opened for new political thinking, that old fool arose from the backwoods of Vermont and congressional backbench poisoning the youths' minds with the dead socialism of the past as future. Not that Barnie was ever any kind of socialist, he was at best a New Deal restorer. A long time ago, I had been one of those too.
The NY congressional candidate looks to labor organizing as a key political remedy. At least she gets, and that’s a giant get, organizing as fundamental to any democratic politics. However, to define and confine organizing through both labor, I guess she’s not reading the news about compute, and the structures of our agrarian era government, well, let’s just say that ain’t nearly good enough. And boy, the peoples, both Ds and Rs calling for more concentration of power in DC – America what happened?
On the other side of our infinitesimal political spectrum is a piece from something called the Open Market’s Institute. This piece at least deals with technology, particularly the latest generation of compute marketed as AI. Importantly, it questions the ability of a handful of corporations to pillage society’s information and knowledge base and then sell it back. Not that they really have a problem with the pillaging or the selling, they’re just looking for fair compensation, beneficial market transactions.
Just as the labor organizer doesn’t question the fundamental power structure of the corporation or our archaic government, neither do the market advocates. The former looks only for a fair wage and benefits, the latter a fair trade, neither concern themselves with technology's defining role.
Another example, the FT has a piece stating, “AI companies are just companies,” adding, “As we leap into a new technological age, the old rules of capitalism still apply.” Nothing's further from the truth, but then the author looks so authoritative in his picture.
Outside ever growing authoritarian action, no thinking needed, our politics are brain dead. Maybe 75 years of compute has already created complete political atrophy? Politics needs to talk about organization, a reorganization from the ground-up.
