#subsidiarity

[disgruntledexplainer]

boy, but i do love watching companies burn because of their own greed, callousness, disassociation from reality, and short-sighted decisions. It's delicious.

[apenitentialprayer]

Okay, not to pit two brothers in Christ against each other, but a real win on C.S. Lewis's part here:

He would give money to beggars over the objection of his great friend Tolkien. 'Jack,' Tolkien would say, 'he's only going to drink it up,' and Lewis would answer, 'well, Tollers, that's exactly what I was going to do with it.'

(James Como also says C.S. Lewis gave away about 70% of his annual income)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Collective Intelligence Institute

History is written by the winners, which is why Luddite is a slur meaning “technophobe” and not a badge of honor meaning, “Person who goes beyond asking what technology does, to asking who it does it for and who it does it to.”

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/full-stack-luddites/#subsidiarity

Luddites weren’t anti-machine activists, they were pro-worker advocates, who believed that the spoils of automation shouldn’t automatically be allocated to the bosses who skimmed the profits from their labor and spent them on machines that put them out of a job. There is no empirical right answer about who should benefit from automation, only social contestation, which includes all the things that desperate people whose access to food, shelter and comfort are threatened might do, such as smashing looms and torching factories.

The question of who should benefit from automation is always urgent, and it’s also always up for grabs. Automation can deepen and reinforce unfair arrangements, or it can upend them. No one came off a mountain with two stone tablets reading “Thy machines shall condemn labor to the scrapheap of the history while capital amasses more wealth and power.” We get to choose.

Capital’s greatest weapon in this battle is inevitabilism, sometimes called “capitalist realism,” summed up with Frederic Jameson’s famous quote “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (often misattributed to Žižek). A simpler formulation can be found in the doctrine of Margaret Thatcher: “There Is No Alternative,” or even Dante’s “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Hope — alternatives — lies in reviving our structural imagination, thinking through other ways of managing our collective future. Last May, Wired published a brilliant article that did just that, by Divya Siddarth, Danielle Allen and E. Glen Weyl:

https://www.wired.com/story/web3-blockchain-decentralization-governance/

That article, “The Web3 Decentralization Debate Is Focused on the Wrong Question,” set forth a taxonomy of decentralization, exploring ways that power could be distributed, checked, and shared. It went beyond blockchains and hyperspeculative, Ponzi-prone “mechanism design,” prompting me to subtitle my analysis “Not all who decentralize are bros”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/12/crypto-means-cryptography/#p2p-rides-again

That article was just one installment in a long, ongoing project by the authors. Now, Siddarth has teamed up with Saffron Huang to launch the Collective Intelligence project, “an incubator for new governance models for transformative technology.”

https://cip.org/whitepaper

The Collective Intelligence Project’s research focus is “collective intelligence capabilities: decision-making technologies, processes, and institutions that expand a group’s capacity to construct and cooperate towards shared goals.” That is, asking more than how automation works, but who it should work for.

Collective Intelligence institutions include “markets…nation-state democracy…global governance institutions and transnational corporations, standards-setting organizations and judicial courts, the decision structures of universities, startups, and nonprofits.” All of these institutions let two or more people collaborate, which is to say, it lets us do superhuman things — things that transcend the limitations of the lone individual.

Our institutions are failing us. Confidence in democracy is in decline, and democratic states have failed to coordinate to solve urgent crises, like the climate emergency. Markets are also failing us, “flatten[ing] complex values in favor of over-optimizing for cost, profit, or share price.”

Neither traditional voting systems nor speculative markets are up to the task of steering our emerging, transformative technologies — neither machine learning, nor bioengineering, nor labor automation. Hence the mission of CIP: “Humans created our current CI systems to help achieve collective goals. We can remake them.”

The plan to do this is in two phases:

Value elicitation: “ways to develop scalable processes for surfacing and combining group beliefs, goals, values, and preferences.” Think of tools like Pol.is, which Taiwan uses to identify ideas that have the broadest consensus, not just the most active engagement.

Remake technology institutions: “technology development beyond the existing options of non-profit, VC-funded startup, or academic project.” Practically, that’s developing tools and models for “decentralized governance and metagovernance, internet standards-setting,” and consortia.

The founders pose this as a solution to “The Transformative Technology Trilemma” — that is, the supposed need to trade off between participation, progress and safety.

This trilemma usually yields one of three unsatisfactory outcomes:

Capitalist Acceleration: “Sacrificing safety for progress while maintaining basic participation.” Think of private-sector geoengineering, CRISPR experimentation, or deployment of machine learning tools. AKA “bro shit.”

Authoritarian Technocracy: “Sacrificing participation for progress while maintaining basic safety.” Think of the vulnerable world hypothesis weirdos who advocate for universal, total surveillance to prevent “runaway AI,” or, of course, the Chinese technocratic system.

Shared Stagnation: “Sacrificing progress for participation while maintaining basic safety.” A drive for local control above transnational coordination, unwarranted skepticism of useful technologies (AKA “What the Luddites are unfairly accused of”).

The Institute’s goal is to chart a fourth path, which seeks out the best parts of all three outcomes, while leaving behind their flaws. This includes deliberative democracy tools like sortition and assemblies, backed by transparent machine learning tools that help surface broadly held views from within a community, not just the views held by the loudest participants.

This dovetails into creating new tech development institutions to replace the default, venture-backed startup for “societally-consequential, infrastructural projects,” including public benefit companies, focused research organizations, perpetual purpose trusts, co-ops, etc.

It’s a view I find compelling, personally, enough so that I have joined the organization as a volunteer advisor.

This vision resembles the watershed groups in Ruthanna Emrys’s spectacular “Half-Built Garden,” which was one of the most inspiring novels I read last year (a far better source of stfnal inspo than the technocratic fantasies of the “Golden Age”):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

And it revives the long-dormant, utterly necessary spirit of the Luddites, which you can learn a lot more about in Brian Merchant’s forthcoming, magesterial “Blood In the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech”:

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/

This week (Feb 8–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’ll be in Brisbane tomorrow (Feb 8), and then we’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 9. Next are Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. I hope to see you!

[Image ID: An old Ace Double paperback. The cover illustration has been replaced with an 18th century illustration depicting a giant Ned Ludd leading an army of Luddites who have just torched a factory. The cover text reads: 'The Luddites. Smashing looms was their tactic, not their goal.']

[probablyasocialecologist]

Relocalisation helps to break through some of the obscurity and illusions endemic to consuming goods and services that have been produced far away. When you go to a supermarket you often have to buy products without any clear understanding of how they were made. You do not know whether or not, or to what extent and in what ways, their production exploited ecological systems, say by using materials and non-renewable energy. The labels do not provide information about the conditions under which the people making them worked and were paid. This is not a moralistic statement but an alarming observation of the depth of secrecy in a private and competitive system of production for trade.

Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson, Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide

[a-really-big-cat]

Anarcho-Monarchism | David Bentley Hart

The only thing I know that J.R.R. Tolkien and Salvador Dalí had in common—or rather, I suppose I should say, the only significant or unexpec

"As for Tolkien’s anarchism, I think it obvious he meant it in the classical sense: not the total absence of law and governance, but the absence of a political archetes—that is, of the leadership principle as such. In Tolkien’s case, it might be better to speak of a “radical subsidiarism,” in which authority and responsibility for the public weal are so devolved to the local and communal that every significant public decision becomes a matter of common interest and common consent."

[sunder-the-gold]

Networks: Chameleon versus Octopus

The Chameleon is a centralized network, where the brain consciously controls the chameleon’s skin and decides what color it will be, in what patterns. The chameleon’s skin does nothing without a signal from the brain, and must always wait for the brain to recognize a situation, reach a decision, and send a command.

The Octopus is a much more decentralized network. There’s still a central brain, but much of the octopus’ nervous system is spread throughout its body and even through its disposable tentacles. Every inch of its skin thinks for itself.

Why is the octopus built this way? Because that’s what gives it responsiveness and flexibility the chameleon cannot begin to approach.

Did you know that octopi are colorblind? Their eyeballs cannot see the colors their skin reproduces. So, how do they know what colors and patterns to mimic?

An octopus sees color through its skin. The skin itself has photoreceptors, which are connected directly to the color-changing organs in the tentacles through the neurons inside the tentacles. Therefore, the octopus’ skin can instantly shift color to the objects immediately around it.

This renders the color-changing process as reflexive to the octopus as breathing; the central brain can assert control when the octopus wants, but otherwise the octopus can rest easy knowing that its body is taking care of itself on its own initiative. No part of its skin needs to wait for the brain to respond to input, render a decision, and send a command.

[onancientpaths]

Hot take: If having a Pope doesn't go against the principle of subsidiarity, then neither do intergovernmental organizations, many forms of socialism, etc.

[cultml]

Stop Believing The Big Lie That Washington Can Solve All Our Problems

Too many think we no longer need to roll up our sleeves and work, bottom-up, to earn a growing economy, a just society, or a stronger nation.