Posted on December 1, 2012 by Benjamin David Steele
I just left a meeting at the place I work, City of Iowa City Parking Department. The management of the department and of the city have been planning for future developments to improve the downtown area, some of which will eventually alter my job. It’s interesting to see the functioning of government from a slightly inside perspective.
Being a liberal city, the government here is very obsessed about such things as transparency and providing optimal services. There is some bureaucracy involved, but not as much since it’s a smaller population, not even large by Iowa standards. Also, surprising to some people, I’ve observed how Parking management doesn’t seem overly focused on profit-making, despite Parking being the only department that actually makes a profit. Everything is about serving the public. They take their role as civil servants very seriously.
(Although not focused on the profit of the parking department, they are focused on overall tax revenue. So, the ‘public’ in question particularly includes anyone involved in the downtown economy. The downtown business association — going by a different name these days — is directly involved in such city decisions. As such, the city is very focused on the profit of downtown businesses and thus the happiness of prospective customers.)
I’ve wondered about some of the recent changes, as I get to see much of it firsthand with my job. I’m a parking ramp cashier. I started out working in an empty lot that had no ticket spitter or even gates. Everything was done manually and it was a bit chaotic. Over the years, they keep adding new elements to parking such as building new ramps and now putting in self-pay stations. Eventually, my job will be replaced by what they call and ambassador position which then be my new job. Being an ambassador means I won’t be stuck in a booth and my job description will involve more customer service of the ambulatory variety, i.e., going to the customers when they have problems and generally being out and about doing what needs to be done.
They’ve invested massive amounts of money into technology. Along with self-pay stations, they have cameras everywhere and they are looking into various other possibilities: new meter systems with more options such as paying by smartphone, license plate reading machines, etc. One idea is that they might save money in the long run because they’ve let recidivism decrease the number of employees, but I doubt that can be a very central goal since they are spending such a vast amount of money in the process. I suspect they could run the parking department very cheaply with almost no technology at all.
It’s not really about money. It’s about information. Technology means data can be collected, stored, organized, and analyzed. Also, it is data that can be provided to the public as part of the services offered such as maps showing where open parking is at any moment or where a bus is at any moment.
The future is all about information. It’s not data for the sake of data as might be seen in the bureaucracy of a more authoritarian government. It’s all data with a specific purpose, the idea of a smoothly running machine, an entire city mechanized. Some might find that disturbing, maybe even dystopian. As for me, I’m just a curious observer.
The following are my responses. I want to be clear about one thing, though. These are my responses to my perception of Crisp’s presented view in this particular blog. My specific perceptions here, of course, may not be entirely accurate and most likely involves various biases and projections.
To speak of Crisp more generally, I like him and agree with him more than not. In this particular case, however, I found myself having a bewildered response in trying to understand why Crisp’s ‘loathing’ was so strong, especially as his loathing seemed directed at a group of people of which I am a member, i.e., Kindle owners.
My first response:
I’m of the type who thinks change just happens and there ain’t nothin’ can be done about it. After civilization began, it was all downhill from there. I’m fatalistic about progress. I embrace it until civilization collapses. I’m curious where it will lead before then.
I bought a Kindle for various reasons, but my original reason was that I wanted something to replace my electronic dictionary. I still buy some physical books, not as much as I used to though. It’s a good thing because I was running out of room in my apartment.
By the way, why does “just sayin’” irritate you so much? I would assume it originates from American English. I’ve used the phrase “just sayin’” on occasion. I just find it amusing to say. It’s silly and stupid.
As I read your blog post, I must admit I felt some gut response to defend the world wide web. It’s ‘democracy’ in all of its beauty and ugliness. As Freck said in A Scanner Darkly, “Well, I like it.”
In early America, the government gave subsidies to presses so that it would be cheaper to publish newspapers and books. This would also meant more opportunities for writers. Of course, not everyone had a newspaper column like people now have blogs. But I’m sure the average published writing back then wasn’t all that well-edited. I was wondering about this. It would be an interesting analysis to look at first editions of books across the centuries to find out when writing was the most well-edited according to the standard grammar of the time period.
Having more writers does create more chaos. Even so, I’d point out that (since you were blogging about VALIS) I’m with PKD in having faith in chaos and the good it can safeguard. The corollary to chaos is innovation. Every age of innovation began with the crumbling of the previous age. We can’t know if it will lead to progress or destruction, but either way it can’t be avoided.
My second response:
On the whole I’m more sympathetic to chaos than order, as anyone who’s visited my flat can probably testify, but I think I’m most sympathetic of all to benign chaos – that is, self-regulating chaos of the idyllic kind which seems to be championed in the Dao De Jing, etc.
I’m also a man of much personal chaos. But there is a difference between one’s own chaos and someone else’s. And, as you say, there is a difference between benign chaos (benign to me, at least) and other varieties of chaos. I don’t know how benign PKD saw chaos, but he didn’t see chaos as an automatic enemy. He saw the divine as that which can’t be controlled, that which in fact will seek to avoid control. The divine sought hiding in the chaos so as to not to be found by the demiurgic forces that seek to control the world for their own purposes.
The argument that is always raised with any new technology, when anyone objects, is basically that “it’s all good” or “you can’t stop change”. But the same argument is never used in the case of politics. In politics, the points themselves are generally argued, and people, however stupid their decisions may be as related to the points, hardly ever just revert to “all change is good and/or inevitable.” So why do this with technology, which is, after all, as much of human manufacture as politics?
That may be true for some or even for most, but it ain’t true for me. I see two warring tendencies in society’s progress. There are those who see all progress as good and those see all progress as bad. An interesting middle position is that of Jeremy Rifkin in his book The Empathic Civilization. In Rifkin’s analysis, the progress of civilization is both destructive and creative. On the creative end, new technology (for traveling and communication) increases collective empathy. But it does so at a very high cost. Will our empathy for other people and other life increase quickly enough that we will find solutions to the destruction we’ve caused?
I don’t know. I just thought such a way of thinking might be applicable to this issue as well. Modern society changes ever more quickly which means much of the past gets lost. With the introduction of Western culture (including the Western invention of the book), many indigenous cultures are destroyed and lost forever. Likewise, with the introduction of new technologies, the traditions of the West can also become endangered. However, there is also a counter trend. For example, the digitization of books has saved many books from the dustbin of history. Some of these books only had one physical copy left remaining in the world, but now anyone anywhere can read them.
I think people have been hypnotised into thinking technology is inevitable and has a kind of universal objectivity to it, in other words, that it doesn’t have cultural implications or cultural bias. But all technologies have cultural implications and biases. Someone has made a decision somewhere to switch tracks to this or that thing.
Yeah, that is true. Even a simple technology like books hypnotize us into a certain way of looking at and being in the world. The printing press probably was the first to create or at least widely promulgate this perception of inevitability and universal objectivity. The vision of inevitable progress goes at least back to the Age of Enlightenment. More broadly, of societies around the world, a collective decision over generations was made to switch from oral to written, from stone and clay to scrolls and then to books and now to e-books. No single person or even group of people is making this decision, but this isn’t to say that individual choices don’t have influence. It’s just that individuals are increasingly choosing e-books. Still, you are free to think people like me are wrong or stupid for choosing e-books.
My third response:
I think that PKD must have been at least ambivalent towards chaos. In Valis, he identifies ananke, or ‘blind chance’ (also translated as ‘necessity’, or could that be ‘you can’t stop change’?), as a symptom of evil in the universe, and generally seems to equate rationality and order with good.
Oh yeah. I’m sure PKD was ambivalent about lots of things. I should’ve clarified my thoughts. I was partly referencing PKD’s view of what he called “God in the gutter” or “God in the garbage”. PKD was fascinated with chaos, not that he idealized it.
People accept free will in politics and other areas of life, so why not in technology?
I have no clear opinion about freewill. Part of me is attracted to the view of philosophical pessimism. I don’t think individuals are all that free. We act according to our natures and our natures were formed (with genetics and early life experience) long before we had any opportunity to aspire to become self-willed agents. And, on the larger scale of society, I suspect we have even less willed influence.
As I see it, freewill is a very modern concept, if anything created by and magnified by technology. Books are just one of the early technologies that have formed the modern sense of self. the book format was first used by the early Christians and it was that era when individualism was beginning to become what we know of it. With modern technology, people have an even stronger sense of self and of a self-willed relation to the world.
The problem you seem to be perceiving is that as the masses gain more freedom then more specific groups lose their monopoly on specific areas. When everyone can be a writer, everyone can influence the culture of writing, not just ‘professional’ published authors. Writing is no longer an elite profession. The internet and other new technologies have democratized writing and empowered the average person. For example, I’m just a parking ramp cashier and yet I’m talking to you, a published author. Online, I am equal to you and we’re both equal to everyone else. Power and authority have little meaning online, unless you’re one of the people who owns a major internet company like Google.
You have a sense, as an author, of losing power even as many people around the world are gaining power through more opportunities of reading and writing. But that isn’t how I see it. A small press author like you gets more readers from more countries for the very reason of newer technology. A century ago, you might never have been published at all or have remained almost entirely unknown. There are trade-offs. You gain more ability to reach more people but so does everyone else. Also, you have been self-publishing recently. Yes, you are more careful in editing, but because of limits of funds many small press publishers (whether self-published or not) often have issues with quality editing as it is very time consuming. I know Mike has bought expensive small press books with many editing problems. So why blame the average person for such issues? Why should anyone get to decide who can publish or not? Who would be on this publishing board of literary oligarchs?
I know you aren’t actually promoting oligarchy or anything. But how do you think the average person would be persuaded to your position? Considering the increase of writers among average people, you’d probably have a hard time even convincing writers of your position. This, however, doesn’t mean your position is wrong. Many of my own positions seem in the minority which doesn’t cause me to stop holding those positions. However, on this issue and as an American, I do have a healthy skepticism of any elite who wishes to tell the masses what they should do. Maybe if I were a part of the elite of professional published writers my views would be different… or maybe not. Matt Cardin bought a Kindle before I did. Mike is a collector of rare books and a lover of a fine book. He also has been considering buying an e-reader so as to not to have to read the expensive copies of books he owns.
There are a couple of factors I see.
First, there is an increase of freewill rather than a decrease. It’s just that there is greater equality of freewill (more opportunities to influence, more choices available) than ever before in all of the history of civilization. However, this creates other problems. As the ability to publish writing spreads to the lower classes, the upper classes lose control of defining correct and acceptable grammar. As the English language spreads to diverse cultures, British English becomes less dominant in defining correct and acceptable English grammar. For example, the more informal American English has become more popular because of American media.
Second, there is the development of large corporations. It’s ultimately not the average person defining writing and publishing. Large corporations (like Amazon and book publishing companies) aren’t democracies. This is probably where your insight fits in. These big businesses often promote a false sense of freedom and opportunity. What we’re experiencing is a shift of who is the elite controlling society. In the US, the founders were mostly an intellectual elite and small business owners who were actually fighting against a transnational corporation (British East India Company). But now such transnational corporations have taken over every major country and economy and taken over society in general. It’s the corporate elite, instead of the traditional intellectual elite, who now mostly control the publishing of books. It’s also large corporations who own most of the media companies (newspapers, tv, movies, internet, etc). It’s these companies who have the greatest power to influence language and there main motivation is profit, not maintaining the proud tradition of literature.
Eugenics was ‘progress’ and a new idea once. Should we have accepted it merely on those terms?
There is always the question of defining ‘progress’. I would, of course, agree that not all ‘progress’ is good.
However, I would point out that eugenics as a basic idea isn’t new. Spartans supposedly threw deformed babies off of a cliff. Male cats when they become the new alpha male will often kill the kittens of the former alpha male. The only modern part is that eugenics was able to be done on a larger scale and done with more precision. I would say that eugenics isn’t progress itself, although it can be used in the service of certain visions of progress.
I think everything I’ve said still stands. If there were concomitant spritual or social progress, technological progress would be simply useful, possibly irrelevant, probably harmless. But I don’t think that genetic modification, for instance, will represent true progress, because it will be an amplification of the steering will of a number of individuals in order to wipe from existence the possibility of certain other steering wills.
I also think everything I’ve said still stands.
Actually, I don’t know to what degree we disagree. Like you, I’m not blindly for progress. Mabye less like you, I’m not against progress either. Like most issues, I’m agnostic about progress. It brings out my fatalist side. I can read someone like Derrick Jensen and find myself strongly persuaded. All of civilization (books and e-readers alike) is built on and maintained through massive dysfunction, oppression and violence. On the other hand, nothing has yet stopped the march of civilization’s progress, despite millennia of doomsayers.
I honestly don’t think it matters whether I like e-readers or not. I loathe lots of things and yet those things continue to exist. I loathe war and yet my tax money funds wars where worse things than Kindles happen.
I own a Kindle not because I have a strong opinion in support of e-readers but because I have a strong opinion about reading. I like to read and love books, in any and all formats. An e-book if it’s public domain is free and if not it’s still usually way cheaper than a physical book. As a relatively poor person, I can get more reading material for my money with e-books. As a person living in a relatively small apartment, I can from a practical perspective own more e-books than I could physical books. Even my public library already allows the public to ‘check out’ e-books. I personally like having my opportunities and choices increased. If that happens through e-readers, it is good by me. Or, if it happens by some other format, it is also good by me.
Similarly, I don’t see Kindle as a form of real progress, since what it does is allow people who don’t care about books and literature to call the shots.
Yes, I understand you feel strongly about this. But why does any individual get to decide which people are perceived to care? I suspect many of these people do care and some to a great degree. Like many normal people, I care. Don’t I matter? Defining who cares is like defining what is or isn’t literature, what is or isn’t art. In some ways, you might be right. Literature as we know it may be in the process of being destroyed. This is just like how Socrates was right that the oral tradition as he knew it was being destroyed by written texts. The ironic part is that Socrates supposed words are now recorded in text. It’s also ironic that your views here are recorded on a blog.
We don’t really know what will happen, and I hope the outcome ends up being more positive than negative, but I honestly don’t see much that’s positive coming out of it at the moment.
Yep. I don’t entirely lack hope, but in the long run I think it’s all doomed. We’re all just going along for the ride. Sometimes the ride is fun, often not.
Reading is already one of the most egalitarian of cultural media. It is an open university.
It’s true that it is to an extent an open university, but not equally so. Poor people in wealthy countries have a lot less access to this “open university”. And people in poor countries have had little access to it at all until very recently. The internet and e-books have opened up this “open university” to the entire world.
Now, however, Amazon have got the thin end of their wedge into reading, and I’m rather afraid (this seems to be the direction), that before long, Amazon (with Kindle) will be saying, “All those who want to come to reading, must do so by me, and my technology. All those who want to come to writing, must do so by me, and my technology. Keep up. Plug in. Buy the next model.”
The issue of transnational corporations taking over the world isn’t the same as the issue of e-readers, although like everything in life there is overlap. Right now, there are numerous devices (computers, tablets, pads, e-readers, smart phones, etc) that anyone can use to read almost any book (or at least any book that has been digitized) and such devices are becoming cheaper and more widely available. Right now, even poor people can access some kind of device that allows them to access the entire world’s library of public domain literature. I see that as a good thing.
Yes, many plutocrats would like to use the power and wealth of corporations to take over the world. They might be successful, but don’t blame the average person who simply wants more freedom and opportunity to cheaply and easily access reading material. In time, the natural trend of things should lead to open source e-readers being developed just as there are open-source computers and browsers.
The difference between us, in this matter, seems to be where we direct our loathing the most. The main problem I see is a plutocratic elite rather than the democratic masses. Democracy can be messy and ugly, but I think it’s better than the alternative. You seem to be equating the plutocratic elite with the democracy-seeking masses because the former is always trying to manipulate the latter. Even if the latter is being manipulated, why blame them instead of those who manipulate? Why not try to end their being manipulated rather than trying to end their having influence?
I realize that you have an old fashioned respect for the intellectual elite. I do too in many ways. I think the demise of the intellectual elite has had major problems. Maybe there will always be an elite. If so, I’d choose an intellectual elite over a plutocratic elite. In case you’re interested, Chris Hedges writes about the loss of power and influence among the intellectual elite in his book Death of the Liberal Class.
I would emphasize that this issue is part of a larger set of issues. Reading, writing and publishing are being democratized just as knowledge and education is being democratized. The first public library was only in recent centuries. For most of the history of ‘Great Literature’, most people had little or no access to any book besides the Bible and often not even that. Public education is likewise very new. I think it was Jefferson who helped create the first publicly funded university. Now, starting in the mid 20th century, almost anyone in the West can go to college if they really want to and if they have basic intelligence.
There is another tidbit of history related to American and British history. Thomas Paine was a working class craftsman. His father, a Quaker, taught him a love of learning and made sure he received a basic education. But lack of money and social position disallowed Paine to follow a scholarly profession. Fortunately, he went to London where he discovered many self-educated people. The lower classes weren’t allowed into the universities and so these people paid people to give them lectures. It was the rise of democracy that first took form through knowledge and education. From the perspective of the elite, this led to what was seen as chaos challenging tradition, the masses challenging authority. It probably didn’t look like democracy as we know it. During this era, there was much rioting and violence. An old order was collapsing.
The democratization of knowledge and education has led to problems in some ways. It created a literate middle class who mostly read crappy pulp fiction, but it also created a massive publishing industry that made books available to average people. It’s this pulp fiction industry that allowed someone like PKD to make a living at writing, despite the literary elite at the time thinking his writing was worthless.
I’m far from being an optimist, but apparently I’m the one defending optimism. I suppose I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate. Maybe it’s easy for me to be an optimist as I don’t have skin in the game in the same way you do. Your livelihood is dependent on book publishing. Nonetheless, I would point that, from a practical perspective, if you want to continue to make a living as an author, you should embrace e-readers. However, if principle is more important than profit, you are free to fight the Goliath to your dying breath. I wouldn’t hold that against you. We all have to pick our fights.
Posted on August 27, 2010 by Benjamin David Steele
In this interview, David Callahan’s view intrigues me.
He is arguing that the liberal rich has been smaller in recent decades than the conservative rich. However, supposedly with the growing technology industry and the knowledge economy, there has been a growing liberal rich. These wealthy liberals are highly educated and got their wealth through entrepreneurship. It’s an interesting argument. Entrepreneurs are more likely to be liberal whereas old money and established corporations are likely to be conservative.
Over the last half century or so, the conservative rich created a massive infrastructure of conservative media, think tanks, lobbyist groups, and astro-turf movements. Liberals, on the other hand, have been very lacking in organization. But this apparently has been changing this last decade. I’d probably say it’s the internet that has been a boon for liberals because the internet makes it easier to do grassroots bottom-up organization which is where liberals excel. The argument, however, is that the internet has boomed along with the wealth of the liberals who started businesses in this sector. So, there was the introduction of tools for grassroots organization at the same time new money was funding liberal organizations and media.
It still seems liberals aren’t quite organized in a lock-step way as is seen among conservatives, but definitely a shift has happened.
The shift the author sees is in that the upper class is shifting away from the Republican party. “The upper class is becoming more educated, more secular, more based in urban America (particularly on the coasts). And the Republican party is becoming more religious, more based in small town America, and becoming less educated.” This argument seems supported by the evidence showing the average IQ of Republicans has decreased since a high point during Reagan’s administration.
Profit, greed, selfishness… are these the primary motivations of human nature?
I’ve always thought that humans aren’t primarily selfish. Going by my studies of psychology, humans seem to be primarily social animals. However, modern society forces people into a self-centered mentality. The problem is that this isn’t natural. It worked well enough in the past when society was hierarchical and when the central ideal of society was merely that of success. Using this mindset, many people became filthy rich and very powerful. But we no longer live in the times of the Robber Barons.
The Industrial Age attitude of individualism is being replaced by the very different view which is encouraged by this new Technological Age. All you have to do is look at the Millennials who grew up on technology. They have much more of a group mentality. They’re more interested in cooperation than competition. It’s not that they don’t want to succeed, but they just are less likely to define success as being the result of the isolated actions of an individual. The technological Age is slowly creating a less hierarchical society. Out of this, a creative class is arising.
I’ve always found it strange that conservatives are so embracing of Social Darwinism. This is particularly strange with Christian fundamentalists who believe their culture is superior and often this is identified with “white culture” or “Western culture”. It’s the idea that we genocidally destroyed the Native American cultures and so our culture is superior. We deserve our superior position because our culture is superior (i.e., stronger, more dominant, more forceful, more successful). We won. You lost. The same for the African-Americans. Conservatives whites love to complain about the black culture being dysfunctional which is rather convenient since the black culture was destroyed by whites.
I wonder how much this has to do with Christianity. Not all Christians have this superior attitude, but it has been a far from uncommon attitude throughout the history of Christianity. Christians have always been about “spreading the Good Word”. Unlike the views of many Eastern religions, not everyone is guaranteed of being saved in Christianity. In fact, there is the idea of an elect few who will be saved and this idea has been popular since the beginning of Christianity. There were other views within the Christian tradition. Universalism (i.e., everyone is saved) has also been a part of Christianity from the beginning, but unlike Buddhism or Hinduism it never gained much traction within mainstream Christianity.
It’s interesting that “white culture” Christian fundamentalism is on the decline at the very same time that the creative class is on the rise. But it isn’t surprising. My guess is that the creative class tends to be liberal and open to alternative lifestyles such as atheism and agnosticism. Buddhism, or certain traditions of Buddhism, have become very popular as well in the creative class, the educated class, the liberals. The greatest spokesperson for this new attitude is probably the Dalai Lama who is of course a Buddhist.
At the same time, the developing world is simultaneously embracing both the model of materialistic success and the modern attitude of religious fundamentalism. I’ve always thought that Karen Armstrong was correct when she identified religious fundamentalism as a modern phenomenon, a reaction to Industrialization and demographic shifts forcing the mixing of cultures. In the US (along with Europe and countries such as Japan), we’ve assimilated this change and it has become a part of our identity. Particularly, the US demographics are shifting so quickly that the newest generation is already past much of the old racial/cultural conflicts.
The Industrialized West is entering terra incognito. There are some people (*ahem* conservatives *cough cough*) who don’t want their world to change, but like it or not the world is changing and there is no going back. As a liberal, I’m very curious where it’s all heading. I don’t see Western Culture as a static artifact or a set of laws set in stone. The entire history of the West has been of progress. The very idea and ideal, the very narrative of progress is at the heart of the Western Culture.
I should add that this doesn’t mean that Christianity is simply being left in the dust of the 21st century. If there is one thing that Christianity has proven itself to be, it is that it’s an evolving tradition which is very flexible and adaptable (the grand ideal of cultural mixing of the Greco-Romans). Christianity is shifting partly because the culture wars are shifting. It used to be the God-fearing Americans versus the Godless Commies. However, we no longer have a great enemy like the Soviet Union and the enemy we are focused on is even more religiously fundamentalist. The atheists and agnostics have gained a foothold and are growing, but more importantly even religious Americans think about religion differently. When Christianity was politicized by conservatives it became a competition of values where one side had to win at the cost of the other side. The young generations no longer see it that way and they don’t like the way religion has become politicized.
Why has Christianity been shifting so dramatically in recent decades? The most obvious explanation is that biblical studies itself has changed as it became free of church control and as new texts were discovered.
What is taking place of politicized Christianity? That is easy to figure out. Just listen to what the religious right is complaining about. Presently, the most vocal defender of the religious right is Glenn Beck. So, what is Glenn Beck complaining about? Social Justice Christians. What is different about these liberal Christians? For one, they tend towards the ideas of Unitarianism and Universalism. Many Christians have been fighting for these ideals for centuries, but only in this last century have they had great impact on US culture (although there was a Universalist European country in the past). My basic point is that this is a less competitive and more inclusive view of religion. It’s what Martin Luther King, jr was speaking about when he said he had a Dream. The Social Justice Christians argue that this was the very message that Jesus spoke of.
Of course, this Dream is older than Christianity. To speak of it broadly, this is the vision and ideal of human rights.
Many people have spoken of a world that wasn’t or shouldn’t be just dog eat dog. There is an ancient idea that humans, all humans have inherent worth.
One thing I’d is that of the Axial Age. Many cultures around the world developed along similar lines at about the same time. It wasn’t that the idea of human rights simply spread out from a single point. There was something inherent to human culture that hits a tipping point where human rights become a collective ideal and aspiration.
It’s been more than a couple of millennia since the beginning of the Axial Age. We Westerners like to think we’re so advanced and yet we’re still processing the radical change, the cultural shift that happened so long ago. Some argue that we’re in a Second Axial Age.
I’m not exactly optimistic. I do feel that something is trying to be born, but the birth pangs are going to be painful.
I can’t speak of certainties in the context of global society and what it may become. My point is simply that culture itself is shifting, attitudes are changing. It’s something that is happening on the level of relationships and communities, on the level of everyday communication and interactions. More important than anything else, people are changing on a fundamental level. It’s not about what is happening in politics, not about what leaders are deciding, not about what the plans and agendas international corporations project into the future.
No one knows what is coming. There is no one at the top who is in control.
I always enjoy hearing Chomsky talk on almost any issue. In this interview, Chomsky discusses: anarchism, community, technology, class warfare, wealth transferral, taxation, free market, outsourcing, command economy, totalitarianism, Marxism, neoliberalism, and globalization.
There is a lot of technology that is quite impressive, but most of it feels like its still in development. The whole internet and computer industry feels like its in permanent Beta mode (similar in concept to Orwell’s endless, permanent war). There always glitches and compatability issues. They always come up with a new product or service before ever quite perfecting what they provided before. The companies are more afraid of controlling their product than offering the best possible service. Its a shame considering the potential.
There are the cable and dish tv companies that have near monopolies. These monopolies are being challenged. Also, the monopolies of other media (newspapers, networks, etc.) are likewise being challenged. And they’re all fearful of the internet and wary of investing too much in it. But mostly its just the monopolies from one industry butting heads against the monopolies of another industry.
Its not all negative. A few companies are paving the way. Starz and CBS have stood out as companies who are willing to make deals and experiment. As for internet companies, Google and Amazon seem to be the leaders in bridging to non-internet companies.
The problem is that integration and standardization is happening slowly and in a very flawed fashion. For example, Blu-ray won the war of new video format and has been out for years, and yet it has so many flaws as to be almost utterly worthless to the average person.
Three companies that personally interest me are Netflix, Amazon, and Rhapsody.
Netflix has a great service, but you can’t buy movies from then and instead have to go to another site such as Amazon. Amazon has a wide selection of services including two that I’m attracted to. The Kindle is revolutionary, but relevant to Netflix is Video On Demand and the Unbox. However, in order for Amazon to make its deals with the movie industry they have to control the data. So, you buy a movie and yet you don’t own it. Its very convenient and reliable, but whenever they lose rights to a movie you lose the product you bought. You can download it to your computer and that is fine as long as you keep using the same computer. Netflix is also having a constant change in the movies available in the online streaming. The movie industry seems to be fidgety and unwilling to come to any final agreements.
The music industry is similar, but is quite a bit more established online. Rhapsody is one of the best models ever created. They have a reasonable subscription price for an all-you-can-listen-to service which has an immense selection. Also, they’ve copied Amazon in selling MP3s and they’ve made them DRM-free which puts them above iTunes. Rhapsody is doing what most companies fear. Besides offering compatability with players they don’t make, they’ve also encouraged scrobbling with Last FM. They’ve have made their own player, the ibiza which does what no other player does. It uses a similar concept to Amazon’s Kindle in that it directly connects to your account. The downside of Rhapsody is that they don’t have much in the way of spoken word and no audio books. Also, they don’t have movies.
What I want is to have tv, movies, music, music videos, spoken word, audio books, and electronic text from a single company… instead of needing multiple companies and constantly having to search around. What I want is fairly simple in that its not beyond present technology. If Netflix, Amazon, and Rhapsody merged or integrated their services, that would be awesome. And if they could make permanent deals with the entertainment industries, they’d have a perfect product.
The problem at the moment is that there isn’t enough cooperation and neither is there enough competition. There are just a few mega-corporations that own practically everything in the world, and so its not that far off from being a complete monopoly. These companies have no reason to be in a hurry to offer a great service because they have the only game in town. And any company that attempts something new (such as Youtube) eventually has to chose to go out of business or sell out to one of the large mega-corporations.
Another reason that companies don’t want to cooperate is because they probably think they can get more by nickle-and-diming the customer. If something you bought a few years ago isn’t compatable with somethin new you’ve bought, then you have buy a new version of that or a new upgrade. Also, it would seem like more money if you paid for all these technologies and services together. Separately, the customer is less likely to notice how the cost adds up.
Humans are strange. If we wanted to, all kinds of things could be possible… but something always holds us back. There were all these utopian dreams from the ’50s (and also from the 1800s). The thing is the only thing unrealistic about those visions is that they didn’t take into account the limitations of human nature. Technologically-speaking, we could have fully functioning colonies throughout the solar system by now. We could have robots that did almost all manual labor and people could be freed from long work hours of drudge work. War, famine, and poverty could be ended almost instantaneously. Humans have proved themselves capable of near miraculous leaps in development during certain periods… often periods of war, unfortunately.
However, it comes down to control. Change doesn’t happen because those in power would rather have control than change and those not in power would also rather the world stay predictably the same. Companies only create new services if it helps them control consumers better. Corporations have become quite talented at manipulating people. We aren’t free because the manipulation is unconscious to us in that its seamless. There is no way to protest except to feed back into the system which is something Tim Boucher talks about.
Its to companies advantage to keep customers contented. But its also to their advantage to control development and feed it slowly to the public. People in power have a vision and it takes decades or even generations to fulfill that vision. Its no accident that most politicians come from the same set of families and that those families have royal blood. Its no accident that politicians have good jobs waiting for them in the industries they used to oversee.
The one nice thing about this internet age is that the world is becoming more complex. Its less clear who is manipulating who. Its easier for the oppressed masses to manipulate in return. The real hope is in the potential for cooperation. Humans have never been good at equal-opportunity cooperation especially on a large-scale. This is becoming a real potential with the internet, but its still yet to be seen whether it will ever become more than potential always just beyond the horizon.
From a spiritual perspective, maybe seeking for freedom in this world of power games and materialism is looking in the wrong place. Still, it seems we humans are incapable of giving up on the hope that the world might eventually be transformed. Places like this here Gaia seem to be all about that hope. Gaia maybe primarily about the connections between people, but human connection is inseparable from human technology.
Even our understanding of God is limited by our technological metaphors. That is an area that is explored by many Sci-Fi stories and movies. I guess I managed to bring this blog back to my recent thinking.
My personal motivation is that I’m very curious, but of limited means. I can only explore my curiosity so far. I’d love to own an Amazon Kindle and I’m thinking I’d enjoy Rhapsody’s ibiza. Its not that I can’t afford either of these, but that these technologies are imperfect.
This goes back to the idea of technology in eternal Beta mode. If I buy an expensive piece of technology, I’d like to know if it will work well several years from now and continue to be compatible with other developing technologies. And there is always the possibility that one can buy a technology for a specific company’s service and that service is discontinued for any number of reasons.
I’d love to see both more competition and more integration. However, the more integration that I’d like to see might lead to less competition. Google has done a lot to integrate many different technologies and services. If Google gets any more powerful, it might become a near monopoly of the whole internet.
Monopolies are a natural tendency of human nature. It goes with globalization. People seek ever greater power, and people seek ever greater forms of social connection and cultural aggregation.The development of civilizationhas been primarily a history of the slow but sure concentration of power… political, religious, and capitalistic. Along with this, its also been the concentration of human knowledge and wisdom.
So, this is far from beingan inherently bad tendency. Much benefit has come from civilization of course. Anyways, even if the tedency is inevitable, the specific direction it takes isn’t. Many people would like to control the direction of this development, but I suspect its an unpredictable phenomena.
To bring inthe spiritual angle, I think there is an obvious and direct relationship between this tendency and Monotheism. And this reminds me of the conflicted relationship between mainstream Christianity and Gnosticism. Gnosticism, even though Monotheistic, was wary of how Monotheism could be used politically to oppress the individual.
I didn’t come up with the “eternal Beta mode” on my own. I came across that idea a few times this past year in my various researches. It makes a lot of sense to me. The original contribution I made was in relating it to Orwell’s idea of continuous war… which is a dystopian idea that seems to have come true or maybe was always true. I think I remember reading that America has been continuously involved in one war or another since it became a country.
The connection between monopoly and monotheism is something I thought of on my own, but I’m sure others have thought of it before. Itsa simple and somewhat obvious view. And, yeah, I’d add monogamy in the mix. Stories of polygamy in theOld Testamentrepresent a time when polytheism still had major influence in Jewish culture.
Monotheism isn’t really any great insight limited to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Any culture that develops a centralized government will come to a conclusion like this about the divine. Even seemingly non-theistic religions will end up focusing their “worship” on some singular ideal.
Its kind of funny that this isn’t the blog I intended to write when I started it. I think I originally just wanted to write about technology. I’ve had all these other ideas on my mind for a while. I suppose it all goes together, but my mind wasn’t very focused when writing this.
Let me add a different factor. No monopoly will ever be absolute. Its just one tendency amongst many. Similarly, if “monotheistic” religions were completely monotheistic, then they wouldn’t have these complex hierarchies of spiritual beings. Likewise, if monogamy was the only tendency of humans, then studies wouldn’t show that possibly between 10 and 20 % of children aren’t of the father that claims them and married women wouldn’t be more likely to cheat when most fertile.
As for capitalism, that which undermines the monopolistic tendency is two-fold.
Specific to computers and the internet, the open source community has many loyal followers. This levels the playing field, but open source will never be the central player. Mega-corporations aren’t entirely against open source because it gives them a free resource of ideas that they can co-opt.
More generally speaking, the black market is the closest that capitalism gets to being a free market. Black markets force companies to be more competitive and hence innovative. The main motivating force behind coporate innovation online is to provide a better product than what people can find illegally for free. The music industry was the first that had to come to terms with this. The plethora of nice music services such as Rhapsody is a direct result of free file sharing.
An interesting intersection of ideas !! I’d like to address some underlying ideas, even though I recognize they don’t contribute much to your actual discussion, but to me they are super-important. Part of my mission in life is to make sure people are clear about these economic ideas, because almost no one IS clear, and there is a lot at stake in our way of living, if misunderstandings persist and we make choices and decisions based on them.
Based on my research and studies, we don’t really have “capitalism” in this country, never have. We have a so-called “mixed economy” which technically is a Socialism-Fascism mix. Capitalism is synonymous with “free market” – the government does not interfere with the economy in any way. In Fascism the government regulates or controls some or all of the economy. In Socialism, it owns some of the economic entities. (In Communism, it owns all of them.)
I found it interesting you called for a big conglomerate, and then recognized you were suggesting something akin to a monopoly.
In capitalism, there are “natural monopolies” but they come and go. Whenever a monopoly persists, you will – with sufficient research – find government regulations are the force keepingit from its natural dissolution (from a significant competitor emerging.) Utility companies that you mentioned, are not “natural monopolies.” In fact, most of them are not just allowed or supported by government, they are government-mandated/created.
Thanks for letting me hold forth. I hope this was seen as somewhat relevant. I really enjoyed your thoughts !!
Its all good, OM. I don’t even know what my actual discussion is. Myset of ideas feels rather sprawling.
I think I agree with all that you said. Yep, “capitalism” doesn’t exist in the US. That is what I was implying with my comment about black markets. I don’t know exactly what kind of economy we have, but your description of a “mixed economy” sounds about right.
I’m glad you noticed the conflict in my view… which I was conscious of. The concentration of power and knowledge has advantages… and disadvantages. I like your idea of “natural monopolies”. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, but it does clarify the problem of how utility companies are forced into a permanent monopolistic structure by the government itself.
I don’t know how it works in other cities, but here the government disallows competition. There is one electricic company and one cable company. You have no other choices other than turning to other forms of technology. Also, the city runs a monopoly their own monopolies on certain utilities such as water and parking. Maybe this is a necessary evil for utilities such as water, but not for most utilities. However, maybe even water could be provided in new innovative ways if it weren’t controlled as a monopoly.
I shouldn’t complain too much as I personally benefit from the City government’s monopoly on the parking industry… where I’m employed. Its run innefficiently with way too much overheadand doesn’t even provide that great of service considering the money spent. If every parking ramp downtown was owned by different private companies, then there might be cheaper parking or else at least improved options. Besides, there is no reason for the government to run parking ramps. Its not as if their isn’t a market to motivate private companies to invest.
I’m glad to have you hold forth. Its all relevant in my book. Enjoyment is all around.
yes, I can see the connection to Orwell’s continuous war.
I’m intrigued by the stat about married women cheating more when fertile, it seems a difficult thing to establish with clarity. But more importantly, are human tendencies away from monogamy a sign that it’s a bad idea or … something else? Worth pondering especially for those in monogamous relationships
I first heard about such stats on a tv show that was about human sexual behavior. I did a websearch and tons of pages came up, but most of it is discussion. The Wikipedia article about evolutionary psychology is interesting, and I thought this quote relevant:
“In particular, Haselton and Miller (2006) showed that highly fertile women prefer creative but poor men as short-term mates. Creativity may be a proxy for good genes. Research by Gangestad et al. (2004) indicates that highly fertile women prefer men who display social presence and intrasexual competition; these traits may act as cues that would help women predict which men may have, or would be able to acquire, resources.”
The difficult to establish part is something I’m not sure about as I don’t know about all of the research. I haven’t come across any research (not that I was looking that much) that was based on direct observations of human women cheating. The research I have heard of is various.
There are direct observations of animal behavior, and research is starting to show that even animals considered monogamous still cheat. The human research is about studying how women dress in more sexually attractive ways when fertile (skirts instead of pants, showing more skin, etc.) and that fertile women shift their behavior to a pattern that fits mating strategy.
I really don’t know the research that well, but there seems to be plenty of it out there if you wish to spend the time to ferret it out.
I didn’t think you would necessarily be. I’m not all that inspired to research it much myself. Its just an interesting piece of info… whatever its validity or meaning.
My personal theory is that (most? many?) humans are genetically programmed to be polygamous but not openly. I suspect that the outward display of monogamy is necessary for social order and peacable relations.
My personal attitude towards life is that I prefer monogamy. I’m too lazy to deal with multiple mates. I hardly can handle a single one. Throw in the normal tendencies of human jealousy, and polygamy doesn’t seem worth it to me.
I don’t see it as primarily a moral issue. Our moral ideals cause us as many problems as they attempt to solve, but I don’t think idealizing the opposite of the social (genetic?) norm is helpful either.
But all of that is neither here nor there as it pertains to this discussion.
The article is decently informative, but it doesn’t offer much analysis. I found it irritating how the author concluded. There are always critics of every new technology. Experts and others have been warning about the death of the book for the last century and the book industry is still very profitable.
Video (or hyperlinks or whatever) aren’t going to destroy people’s ability to read text. People will still have the choice to read books with plain text. This merely increases the options.
Videos don’t make people stupid. Every technology demands different kinds of intelligence. Even video games increase intelligence. These new hybrid books will make reading more interactive which will most definitely increase intelligence.
However, it’s very rare to see an intelligent criticism of evolving technology. People were complaining about written text when it was replacing oral culture. There were those who believe telephones and television would destroy society when they were invented. Change is change. Get over it and quit complaining.
Posted on September 17, 2009 by Benjamin David Steele
Here are some articles from The New York Times that caught my interest (I do look at other news sources such as The Wall Street Journal, but for whatever reason The New York Times seems to have more articles on subjects of interest to me). Anyone who is familiar with my blog will notice that these articles relate to subjects I often write about.
About 300 people attended a memorial service Wednesday for James Pouillon, who was slain Friday while protesting abortion.
Paul Sancya/Associated Press
Mary Jo Pouillon sang at a memorial service for her slain father, anti-abortion protester James Pouillon, in Owosso, Mich. on Wednesday
I’m always saddened by killings based on ideology whether or not I agree with the ideology of either side. A random killing by a gang or a crazy person seems less evil. Ideological killings seem so evil because the killer often rationalizes their actions as good.
There was nothing particularly interesting about this article except for one line.
His killing is believed to be the first of someone protesting abortion, and at the memorial and a vigil later outside a Planned Parenthood office, he was praised as a symbol of dedicated action.
That is utterly amazing. He was the first anti-abortion protester to be killed. On the other hand, anti-abortion protesters regularly kill abortion doctors. Why did Damien Cave leave that important detail out? There are two extensive Wikipedia articles about anti-abortion violence.
Why is this one murdered anti-abortion protester a symbol of dedicated action? Are all of the doctors, nurses, receptionists, and security guards who died in supporting abortion (or simply doing their jobs) also symbols of dedicated action? Going by the Wikipedia articles, anti-abortion protesters have committed hundreds of incidents of violent attacks, death threats, murders, attempted murders, kidnappings, bioterror threats, property crimes, bomb threats, bombings, arsons, vandalism, and trespassing. Most of those, of course, were committed in the US.
This reminds me of protesters who try to protect nature and animals, but the situation is in reverse. Evironmentalists and those against animal testing have never killed anyone in US history. However, these protesters have been the target of numerous threats and acts of violence leading to many deaths and injuries. Why is that? Why are conservatives (social conservatives in the case of anti-abortion protesters) more prone to violence than liberals? The most violent liberal protesters ever in US history were the Weather Underground and even they never killed anyone. The Weather underground used bombs, but were always careful that people wouldn’t be harmed. Contrast that to anti-abortion bombers who specifically target people.
What is interesting is that liberal protesters are often threatened, harmed and killed by people working for the government or large corporations. The reason for this is that liberals are more likely than conservatives to clash with authority probably because conservatives by nature are more subservient to authority (which can be explained using the research into boundary types which shows that thick boundary types are more likely to be promoted in hierarchical institutions). Maybe I’m being unfair, but it seems to me that conservatives for whatever reason are more likely to turn their aggression towards private citizens (i.e., those they perceive as being below them rather than those they perceive being above them).
Actually, I wonder how true it is that conservative protesters are less likely to confront and conflict with authority. There are some conservative protesters that are aggressively confrontational to the powers that be and they tend to be libertarians especially of the religious variety, but maybe that says more about religious extremism than conservativism. I was also thinking about how libertarians (such as farmers and other landowners) will support environentalists against the government and big business (such as when the government wants to take or otherwise use their land).
The odd thing is that Fox news was during the Bush administration so critical of protesters. But now that a Democrat is in power they support and actively promote protest. However, the protesters of Bush were often libertarians. Why does the conservative party have an uncertain relationship with libertaranism. When it comes to protesting, libertarians became identified with liberals because it’s often impossible to tell them apart and even the protesters don’t necessarilly make this differentiation.
So, there are two questions. Why are conservatives reluctant towards becoming involved in protesting and often critical of protesters? Why are conservatives the most violent protesters when they do become involved?
I really loved this article. It goes against commonsense, but I must admit it’s the type of thing that has always made sense to me. I’m just happy when research supports my own intuition. However, I have no special power of intuitive knowing. If you’ve studied widely the subject of psychology, I doubt you’d be surprised by this research.
In recent years, social psychologists have begun to study what they call the holier-than-thou effect. They have long known that people tend to be overly optimistic about their own abilities and fortunes — to overestimate their standing in class, their discipline, their sincerity.
But this self-inflating bias may be even stronger when it comes to moral judgment, and it can greatly influence how people judge others’ actions, and ultimately their own.
Heck, you don’t even need to study psychology. Just observe people and this holier-than-thou effect is fairly obvious. There really is nothing surprising about the fact that moral judgment has a personal bias. That’s just basic human nature. However, self-awareness of one’s own human nature isn’t inherently of human nature… or, to put it simply, most people are oblivious to their own biases.
A quote from the social psychologist David Dunning is more intriguing.
“But the point is that many types of behavior are driven far more by the situation than by the force of personality. What someone else did in that situation is a very strong warning about what you yourself would do.”
That is something that is so important that it can’t be over-emphasized. Social conservatives always worry about moral relativism, but what their ideology misses is the actual psychology of moral behavior. People should think twice before judging someone else. If you had the same experiences and were in the same situation as another person, you’d probably make the same choices. In this light, righteousness isn’t very moral in and of itself. Compassionate awareness and humility is more likely to lead to tangible moral results. I would guess that the more righteous someone is the more likely they’re to act against their own stated beliefs. This is partly why outspoken evangelists become involved in socially unacceptable sexual activities.
“The problem with these holier-than-thou assessments is not only that we overestimate how we would have behaved,” Dr. Epley said. “It’s also that we blame every crisis or scandal on failure of character — you know, if we just fire all the immoral Wall Street bankers and replace them with moral ones, we’ll solve the problem.”
And that is exactly what moral conservatives believe. This attitude comes up all of the time in the comments of the local news website. The more different someone is the more likely they’re to be judged harshly for their failings. It’s easy to dismiss the situation of another person when you’ve never lived in that situation. Also, people tend to want to take credit for the advantages they were given in life and claim it as “moral character”.
In experiments as in life, the holier-than-thou effect diminishes quickly when people have actually had the experience they are judging: dubious accounting practices will appear less shady to the person who has had to put a good face on a failing company. And the effect is apparently less pronounced in cultures that emphasize interdependence over individual achievement, like China and Spain.
It’s hard to be humble and compassionate if you’ve never experienced difficulties and suffering, and even then you’ll tend to only sympathize with the specific difficulties and sufferings that you’ve experienced. I always get irritated by people who judge others for something they’ve never personally experienced. That is one of my pet peeves.
I appreciated the last comment about “cultures that emphasize interdependence”. I’d assume that those cultures also emphasize sympathy because it’s through sympathy that interdepndence is encouraged. On the other hand, I should point out that research also shows that interdependent cultures tend to isolate individuals and so the sympathy that is encouraged might be very narrow. Anyways, an interdependent culture would certainly value personal humility over personal righteousness.
One practice that can potentially temper feelings of moral superiority is religion. All major faiths emphasize the value of being humble and the perils of hubris. “In humility count others as better than yourself,” St. Paul advises in his letter to the Philippians.
Yet for some people, religion appears to amplify the instinct to feel like a moral beacon. In a 2002 study, [ . . . ] the students in this highly religious group considered themselves, on average, almost twice as likely as their peers to adhere to such biblical commandments as “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The study also found that the most strictly fundamentalist of the students were at the highest end of the scale. “It reminds me of one of my favorite bumper stickers,” said Dr. Epley, of Chicago. “ ‘Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite.’ ”
This reminds me of a long post I wrote trying to come to terms with Christians relationship with morality (Morality: Christians vs. Jesus). I was comparing research done on the type of person who supports torture with the teachings of Jesus who was tortured. The extremely interresting fact was that Christians were largely in favor of torture. This seems rather odd until you consider the larger context of Christian history and modern fundamentalism. This article adds even further data to explain this situation. The more ideologically religious one is the more one is likely to judge oneself favorably and presumably more likely to judge others less favorably. This might be explained partially by the way a religion creates a clear sense of an in-crowd and an out-crowd. And the person not a part of the group is inherently less worthy (and this attitude is probably responsible for a fair amount of the violence in the world).
For all that, an abiding feeling of moral superiority is intrinsic to what some psychologists call self-enhancement. So-called self-enhancers think that they’re blessed, that they’re highly appreciated by others and that they’ll come out on top. And sometimes they do, studies suggest — especially in life-or-death crises like 9/11 and the Bosnian war.
“Self-enhancers do very well, across the board, on measures of mental healthin these situations,” said George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia.
But in the mundane ebb and flow of life, an inflated sense of personal virtue can also be a minefield. “Overconfident stock traders tend to do worse; people buy too many gym memberships,” said Dr. Dunning, of Cornell. “In the economic realm, the outcomes are not so good.”
This reminds me of research done on pessimism and optimism. Optimists are more successful in many fields and there are many advantages to being an optimist such as better health. However, pessimists have a more realistic assessment of the actual facts and also a more realistic assessment of themselves. A pessimist may sound like a cynic, but they might be more likely to consistently act according to their own sense of morality.
An important point I’ve read about before is the following.
But a vast majority of people rarely, if ever, act on such urges, and their susceptibility to rude fantasies in fact reflects the workings of a normally sensitive, social brain, argues a paper published last week in the journal Science.
It’s normal to have “abnormal” thoughts and fantasies. It’s because people worry about these kinds of things that they become so prominent in the workings of our minds. The person who acts on such horrible thoughts may actually think and fantasize about it less than normal. However, these thoughts do have influence.
The empirical evidence of this influence has been piling up in recent years, as Dr. Wegner documents in the new paper. In the lab, psychologists have people try to banish a thought from their minds — of a white bear, for example — and find that the thought keeps returning, about once a minute. Likewise, people trying not to think of a specific word continually blurt it out during rapid-fire word-association tests.
The same “ironic errors,” as Dr. Wegner calls them, are just easy to evoke in the real world. Golfers instructed to avoid a specific mistake, like overshooting, do it more often when under pressure, studies find. Soccer players told to shoot a penalty kick anywhere but at a certain spot of the net, like the lower right corner, look at that spot more often than any other.
[ . . . ]
The researchers had about half the students try to suppress bad stereotypes of black males as they read and, later, judged Donald’s character on measures like honesty, hostility and laziness. These students rated Donald as significantly more hostile — but also more honest — than did students who were not trying to suppress stereotypes.
In short, the attempt to banish biased thoughts worked, to some extent. But the study also provided “a strong demonstration that stereotype suppression leads stereotypes to become hyperaccessible,” the authors concluded.
None of this is exactly new insight, but the point is that research is starting to prove it. Psychologists and parenting gurus have been telling people for a long time to state things in the positive because the mind doesn’t understand a negative. To the subconscious mind, the phrase “don’t think” simply translates to “think”. Any self-aware person realizes the truth of this.
The point of taking this type of research into consideration is that it can be helpful to give people perspective. People shouldn’t be so hard on themselves. There is nothing wrong with you for having strange thoughts. If you’re worried about acting on dark fantasies, your worrying demonstrates that your unlikely to act on them. However, if those urges become too strong, I’d recommend seeking help. When the voices tell you to kill someone, please get a second opinion.
I was just recently writing about this topic and this author in my blog (Punishment/Reward, Good/Evil, Victim/Victimizer). This article is about contingent love as a method of parenting (and I think this topic has direct bearing on the above article about moral righteousness). One can question the morality of contingent parenting, but the practical side of it is simply whether it works or not.
This raises the intriguing possibility that the problem with praise isn’t that it is done the wrong way — or handed out too easily, as social conservatives insist. Rather, it might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment. The primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love. A steady diet of that, Rogers warned, and children might eventually need a therapist to provide the unconditional acceptance they didn’t get when it counted.
Any reward always implies a potential punishment. Even if the punishment isn’t overt or even intentional per se, what is the effect of this contingent love?
It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed. [ . . . ] Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.
[In another study] giving more approval when children did what parents wanted was carefully distinguished from giving less when they did not.
The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.
I’m a fan of research. Most people ground their opinions in ideology rather than facts. Of course, the data has to be interpreted. There are always other interpretations, but even so an interpretation is only as good as the data it’s based on. I don’t believe parents should simply submit to experts to tell them what to do any more than they should blindly submit to any other authority figure. Parents should trust their own experience to an extent, but research can help us to understand the larger context of our experiences. Any parent should take this kind of research very seriously.
In practice, according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.
The last of these features is important with respect to unconditional parenting itself. Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children — whether they feel just as loved when they mess up or fall short.
I liked these ending comments. This answers the crticisms of those who would oppose unconditional parenting. It doesn’t simply mean to let kids do whatever they want, but it means having a sympathetic and understanding of one’s child. The idea is that if you want respect from your children then you should treat them with respect. If you want to teach your children how to be loving, how to be open and trusting, then you should teach by example. One has to decide about one’s priorities. Is it more important to force a child through fear (or withholding of love) to respect one’s authority or is it more important to raise a happy and well-balanced child?
In a new paper, a pair of statisticians at the University of Vermont argue that linguistic analysis — not just of song lyrics but of blogs and speeches — could add a new and valuable dimension to a growing area of mass psychology: the determination of national well-being.
“We argue that you can use this data as a kind of remote sensor of well-being,” said Peter Sheridan Dodds, a co-author of the new paper, with Christopher M. Danforth; both are in the department of mathematics and statistics.
“It’s information people are volunteering; they’re not being surveyed in the usual way,” Dr. Dodds went on. “You mess with people when you ask them questions about happiness. You’re not sure if they’re trying to make you happy, or have no idea whether they’re happy. It’s reactive.”
But I do have some criticisms. Emotional expression may not be equivalent to emotional well-being. The ways of expressing emotion may change, but I’m unconvinced that the basic level of emotion has changed. Even so, I wouldn’t be surprised if such a change has occurred. I do share the excitement of these researchers but I also share the opinions of the skeptics.
“The new approach that these researchers are taking is part of movement that is really exciting, a cross-pollination of computer science, engineering and psychology,” said James W. Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas. “And it’s going to change the social sciences; that to me is very clear.”
Researchers who specialize in analyzing mass measures of well-being are skeptical about what a content analysis of pop culture can really say, at least as a stand-alone measure.
“The approach is interesting, but I don’t see any evidence that the method produces a valid population-based measure of well-being,” Uli Schimmack, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, wrote in an e-mail message.
One issue is that pop culture and mainstream media have changed which might be the actual result of this apparent change in emotional well-being. Media was more controlled and self-censored in the past. There are more indie musicians who get their music out now than in the past. There are more people voicing their opinions through non-traditional media. So, maybe this only demonstrates a shift in censorship of emotional expression.
I’m impressed by the quality of journalism in this article. The subject matter a bit different from the other articles in this post, but it’s related. It’s about how the common person participates (or not) in US democracy, and how this could change. So, it’s about human relationships. More importantly, it’s about challenging the hierarchical territory of politics where democracy only exists in name (btw I see this issue of hierarchical politics loosely related to the hierarchical style of parenting that promotes contingent love). It’s a serious issue to consider whether democracy is doomed to be forever controlled and manipulated by the money and power of corporations and special interest groups. It’s hard to imagine what a real democracy would even look like. Some people claim a direct democracy where the average person’s opinion actually counts is an impossibility…. or even dangerous as the general population if given power supposedly would just turn into a mobocracy.
PERHAPS the biggest big idea to gather speed during the last millennium was that we humans might govern ourselves. But no one really meant it.
Exactly! Ideals are always nice. They make for good political fodder and an effective method for subduing the masses… as long as they forever remain just ideals.
The headlines from Washington today blare of bailouts, stimulus, clunkers, Afpak, health care. But it is possible that future historians, looking back, will fixate on a quieter project of Barack Obama’s White House: its exploration of how government might be opened to greater public participation in the digital age, of how to make self-government more than a metaphor.
I’ve been of the opinion for some time that we are in the midst of a major socio-political shift in our culture and probably in the world in general. Technology is utterly transforming the world and we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. With the technological generations coming into power and taking over the workforce, we are going to see a massive jump in technological innovation of the likes that hasn’t been seen in recent decades. The industrial age and the modernist ideals it fostered are still very powerful, but a new paradigm has finally gained enough power to challenge it. It’s been a long time coming, but the massive size of Boomers slowed down this shift. Gen Xers have been working in the background building the infrastructure of the Information Age and now we have our first Gen X president. Obama won by appealing to the youth which offers us a glimpse of what we’re going to see in the near future when in 2012 the Millennials will dominate the presidential election. The US is no longer controlled by the Boomers, but the Boomers are far from being out of the game. There will be some major generational clashing in the next decade.
President Obama declared during the campaign that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.
I’m not sure it matters that Obama lives up to his promise. The important point is the promise was made. The sweetness of it may be undermined with the bitterness of politics as usual, but still the sweetness once tasted creates a hunger. Any promising ideal will usually fail when it’s first proposed. If one looks to history, it can take centuries for a good idea to really catch on and succeed. Without a revolution to overthrow the government, it takes time to change established politics. However, technology may speed up this process.
Federal agencies have been directed to release online information that was once sealed; reporters from Web-only publications have been called on at news conferences; the new portal Data.gov is allowing citizens to create their own applications to analyze government data. But the most revealing efforts have been in “crowdsourcing”: in soliciting citizens’ policy ideas on the Internet and allowing them to vote on one another’s proposals.
During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the president receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote to supporters.
It sounds good in theory. LOL The author describes the results of this gathering of public opinion. It may not seem inspiring, but I’d rather hear people’s actual opinions no matter what they are. Even if the average person’s opinion is completely stupid, that is still a good thing to know. Maybe the public isn’t capable of more serious opinions until their collective opinion is taken seriously.
There is a lively debate in progress about what some call Gov 2.0. One camp sees in the Internet an unprecedented opportunity to bring back Athenian-style direct democracy. [ . . . ] The people in this camp point to information technology’s aid to grassroots movements from Moldova to Iran. They look at India, where voters can now access, via text message, information on the criminal records of parliamentary candidates, and Africa, where cellphones are improving election monitoring. They note the new ease of extending reliable scientific and scholarly knowledge to a broad audience. They observe how the Internet, in democratizing access to facts and figures, encourages politician and citizen alike to base decisions on more than hunches.
But their vision of Internet democracy is part of a larger cultural evolution toward the expectation that we be consulted about everything, all the time. Increasingly, the best articles to read are the most e-mailed ones, the music worth buying belongs to singers we have just text-voted into stardom, the next book to read is one bought by other people who bought the last book you did, and media that once reported to us now publish whatever we tweet.
Yes, it’s a strange new world. The question is does this actually open debate. Do people just listen to the crowd and follow along? Do people just get stuck in their own self-created niche where everything caters to their biases? There are definite dangers.
Another camp sees the Internet less rosily. Its members tend to be enthusiastic about the Web and enthusiastic about civic participation; they are skeptical of the Internet as a panacea for politics. They worry that it creates a falsely reassuring illusion of equality, openness, universality. [ . . . ] “Many methods and technologies can be used to give voice to the public will. But some give a picture of public opinion as if through a fun-house mirror.”
True it creates an illusion, but politics at present just creates another kind of illusion. Choose your illusion, as they say. From my viewpoint, the risk is worth it because the opportunity is increased (as are the stakes).
Because it is so easy to filter one’s reading online, extreme views dominate the discussion. Moderates are underrepresented, so citizens seeking better health care may seem less numerous than poker fans. The Internet’s image of openness and equality belies its inequities of race, geography and age.
Now, there is a criticism that resonates deeply with me. I get annoyed by how few moderates choose to voice their opinions and I get annoyed that so many ideologues feel it’s necessary to announce their every thought. The internet is a specific medium that attracts a specific type of person. The internet is Social Darwinism in action where thoughtful debate isn’t always fostered. It takes effort to encourage people to relate well, but the ease of the internet doesn’t lend itself to people going to this effort. People often make their quick rude comments and the people running the site are too busy or lazy to moderate such trolling and other anti-social behavior.
Lies spread like wildfire on the Web; Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, no Luddite, warned last October that if the great brands of trusted journalism died, the Internet would become a “cesspool” of bad information. Wikipedia plans to add a layer of editing — remember editing? — for articles on living people.
This sounds like fear-mongering to me. The great brands of trusted journalism aren’t going to entirely die out. The ones that do die out will be replaced by new ones. People want good journalism and anyways the quality of journalism was suspect long before the internet. People have been looking for alternative journalism for much of this past century and now the opportunity is here for alternative journalism on a large-scale. It will take time for all of this to develop, but it will develop because the demand is there.
Perhaps most menacingly, the Internet’s openness allows well-organized groups to simulate support, to “capture and impersonate the public voice,” as Mr. Fishkin wrote in an e-mail exchange.
Ah, yes. This very well may be the biggest danger of them all. The new technologies allow for manipulation and propaganda on a scale never before possible. The workings of the internet are so subtle that most people don’t even notice the inherent biases to search engines. Also, it’s hard to tell if a website is trustworthy or even who is running and funding it. Even so, there is more info than there ever has been. The difference of todays technology is that it allows people to research something if they want to. However, the average person has little desire (not to mention time and energy) to research most things. If manipulation succeeds in todays world, it’s because of willful ignorance. As long as people are willing to unquestioningly accept lies and deception, then there will always be those willing to supply it. But this has always been true no matter what kind of technology is used.
There is no turning back the clock. We now have more public opinion exerting pressure on politics than ever before. The question is how it may be channeled and filtered to create freer, more successful societies, because simply putting things online is no cure-all.
Damn straight! There is no turning back. Full speed ahead be it utopia or dystopia. It’s a brave new world, baby. However, I don’t see too much reason to worry about it mainly because worry won’t alter the change that is happening. We all might as go along with the flow. Instead of struggling against the inevitable, let’s save our energies and keep our eyes open. Democracy needs to be able to adapt and that is true now more than ever. Also, democracy needs vigilance.
To end on a humorous note, I shall reward anyone who made it all the way down to the bottom of this post.
Posted on August 22, 2009 by Benjamin David Steele
I’ve been thinking about society in terms of cultural shifts. I sense we’re in the midst of a shift or several shifts combined. Three main factors have come to mind. I was thinking about racial conflicts in the US (in particular in my own small midwestern town), there is of course a lot going on with technology as the information age is just starting to hit its stride (is the industrial age ended yet?), and the ever so fun topic of generations. Here is some of what I came across, but I plan on doing much more research.
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The first article is quite interesting. It’s about the US shifting towards a new racial majority. I was discussing this yesterday with somone in the comments of my local paper’s website. They challenged my assertion that this shift was supposed to happen so soon. It’s always hard to say with predictions, but I’d think the Census Bureau would be fairly accurate. It does seem that I was partially correct in that the shift will happen with the younger generation within the next decade or so. I’ve heard that already for Gen Y race isn’t much of an issue. I was a Gen Xer in the South and in the 1990s bi-racial dating was acceptable.
However, in many small midwestern towns, race was never an issue in the past because some people grew up never or rarely seeing anyone who wasn’t white. My town is a relatively more racially diverse town (still as a college town the other races tended to be of a higher class such as wealthy people from other countries), but is only now feeling the the full impact of Chicago’s overflow (increasing inner city population?). Crime has increased and the population in general has increased. Even though there is more gang activity, I suspect that the crime is as much a result of cultural conflict as anything else. It’s hard to know what is causing what with changes in various factors: race, poverty, crime, culture, racial tensions, downward turn of economy, etc. I somehow doubt that the conflict going on in my town is simply a local issue and instead probably connects to the shifts going on in the entire country.
Whether you describe it as the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America, we’re approaching a profound demographic tipping point. According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities—blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians—will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of 18, this shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.
Obviously, steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage complicate this picture, pointing toward what Michael Lind has described as the “beiging” of America. And it’s possible that “beige Americans” will self-identify as “white” in sufficient numbers to push the tipping point further into the future than the Census Bureau projects. But even if they do, whiteness will be a label adopted out of convenience and even indifference, rather than aspiration and necessity. [...] To take the most obvious example, whiteness is no longer a precondition for entry into the highest levels of public office. The son of Indian immigrants doesn’t have to become “white” in order to be elected governor of Louisiana. A half-Kenyan, half-Kansan politician can self-identify as black and be elected president of the United States.
As a purely demographic matter, then, the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs.
For some, the disappearance of this centrifugal core heralds a future rich with promise. In 1998, President Bill Clinton, in a now-famous address to students at Portland State University, remarked:
Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City. Within five years, there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time … [These immigrants] are energizing our culture and broadening our vision of the world. They are renewing our most basic values and reminding us all of what it truly means to be American.
Not everyone was so enthused. Clinton’s remarks caught the attention of another anxious Buchanan—Pat Buchanan, the conservative thinker. Revisiting the president’s speech in his 2001 book, The Death of the West, Buchanan wrote: “Mr. Clinton assured us that it will be a better America when we are all minorities and realize true ‘diversity.’ Well, those students [at Portland State] are going to find out, for they will spend their golden years in a Third World America.”
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This next article is making too broad of generalizations for my taste, but I thought it interesting anyhow.
The author is pointing out a decisive point that might represent a shift in culture. The year 1994 is presented as a highpoint of popular culture which so happens to be the year of my highschool graduation. I don’t know if the author has some useful insight or not, but it does seem possible that technology has forced culture into more diffuse manifestations.
As for the possibility of decreasing intelligence, I’d question what is being tested. The younger generation is obviously focused on different kinds of activities which would require different kinds of intelligence. Still, this is important as standard IQ tests have apparently always shown steady increase in the population until now. The Flynn Effect was named by the authors of The Belle Curve which was a highly controversial book because it commnted on the connection between race and IQ.
By the late 1990s, The Flynn Effect — a phenomenon whereby each generation had a steadily increasing IQ — no longer was in effect.Sure, SAT scores are on a steady upswing, but psychologists seem to be concluding that intelligence quotient (the best available measure of our raw intelligence) is slipping downward.
[...] Reading over those lists it’s obvious: There may well have been a year that matched 1994 sometime in the ’40s, ’50s or ’60s, but there sure hasn’t been one since. I, for one, seriously doubt there will be again. The Internet has made popular culture too diffuse, making it impossible to gather the sort of critical mass necessary to launch an all-encompassing mega-trend like grunge.
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The next article is critical of the Boomers. I have a less clear opinion about health care reform, but the sentiment of this article is something many post-Boomers can resonate with.
The Boomers were the largest generation that had been born at that point and Gen Xers were tiny in comparison. They were a generation that dominated all segments of society (media, advertising, politics, and career opportunities) for a half century. Not only were they big but they were loud. They always made sure their voices were heard and they’ve been an ideologically divisive force in our society. Constant complaining and bickering. They started more wars in their time of power than any generation ever in US history.
And now they’re retiring and they potentially could be a massive drag on society. Who is going to support their health care? Certainly not themselves as they’ve been bad about saving and certainly not the small cohort of Gen Xers. We must turn to the even larger Gen Y, but it’s funny that he Boomers love to project their own narcissism onto Gen Y which is the only generation that can offer us the hope of getting beyond all the problems Boomers helped to create. Of course, Gen Xers has their part to play as practical leaders if the Boomers will just get out of the way.
Much has been written about the narcissism and self-involvement of the boomers, and the way in which the undisciplined indulgences of the sixties — sex, drugs, rock and roll — became sublimated into a parallel consumer world of undisciplined, indulgent consumption.
If you’re going to reward yourself with everything NOW, and scorn the future (just take a look at the dismal stats about boomer savings) — then you’re going to have an equally selfish view of health care. Which means a reluctance to share it; a very anti-Woodstockian value
Indeed, the boomers consume health care in the same guzzling fashion that they bought homes and cars and electronics and designer everything. And they’re worried that their God-given right to consume often and endlessly is being threatened by the Obama plan.
Can we blame them for this expectation of everything? From the time they were born, and their Spock-trained parents catered to their every whim, boomers were spoiled and privileged. Society existed to dandle them and indulge their fantasies.
They also grew up as children (and adults) during the largest expansion of employer-based health care in history. Corporations may have been boring (and sometimes evil), but they were generous. Boomers’ white-collar and blue-collar parents had great benefits. They never had to deal with scarcity, with limits, with tough resource decisions. They always had plenty of toys, plenty of jobs, plenty of choices. So when opponents of reform use trigger words like “rationing”, boomers get all twitchy and shrill.
Then there’s the “Unplug Granny” distortion. The reason it’s so contagious is that it strikes at the essence of boomer anxiety, the inevitable march to mortality. They want to go on forever. They see themselves as adolescents, they dress like adolescents,they listen to oldies music that suspends them in adolescent amber. [...] Talk to physicians in any area with a high concentration of those on Medicare and you’ll hear the same refrain: every little ache and pain is an occasion (even a social occasion) for a trip to doctor, since Medicare pays anyway. That’s the boomer ontology.
Technology, of course, is having a massive influence on society. But it isn’t technology itself but what it makes possible. Two aspects to this are information and imagination. Human potential is increased and so are moral issues.
Individuals and groups have more information technology which offers more power. The results of this are too numerous to list. A simple example is how cellphones have given oppressed people a quick and easy way to organize. A protest can form and disappear before the police even realize what is going on. On the other hand, technology offers better ways for the government to control its citizens and propaganda is becoming more advanced.
On the level of imagination, it’s even more interesting to consider the consequences. Television and movies have opened wide the gates of our collective imagination. And other things (such as cameras, software, and websites like YouTube) have given an opportunity for average people to create and explore possibilites.
The problem is that the more people know and imagine the more they become dissatisfied and restless. And our normal lives pale against the fantasies we obsess over, whether porn or pop stars or travelling. And this is the moral issue. In the past people repressed their imaginations. Thinking about unnatural sexual acts? Just repress it and say 100 Hail Marys. That often works, but often doesn’t. Even priests end up acting on some of those urges. And repression works even less in a culture like ours where everything you can imagine satiates the media.
Right now, many governments are trying to figure this all out. Violence and sex are legislated, but imagination is more difficult to legislate. It only becomes an issue when someone’s imagination becomes a product, something to be shared. There has been many cases in the past decade about animated porn and violence. In the US, violent video games have been mostly winning this battle as some big cases have been thrown out of the court.
Anime porn is an even thornier issue. Art has often been held above the level of pop culture, but the distinction grows less with advancement of technology. Is a picture of an underage nude person porn? Does it matter the intentions of the photographer? Is there such a thing as tasteful nudity? Is the human body to be considered a respectable subject of art? Is it simply a matter of age? If so, what about a painting of a nude underage person? Or what about anime? How legal officials determine the legality of photographic or video porn is by determining the person’s age, but how does one determine the age of an animated figure? An anime character isn’t real and so how does age of consent apply? And who is the victim? Is society as a whole a victim?
It’s well-known that a certain sector of Japanese culture is obsessed with images of young girls. And this has gone beyond anime. There has been computer programs created that portray a cute underage girl you can play with and give gifts to. There have been robots created to look young. Would sex with an android that looked like a child still be pedophilia? These are real questions society will be struggling with very soon.
I have some interest in virtual worlds, but I’ve only been on a couple of them such as Second Life. I’ve heard of another one called Red Light Center. It’s designed so that people can use avatars to have sex with other people’s avatars. I don’t know but something seems missing in the equation. Having virtual sex with a stranger’s virtual self doesn’t overly appeal to me. But the concept of it is fascinating.
This type of thing is just the beginning. Such technological imaginations are also used towards practical ends. Architects, chemists, and doctors all use these technologies to portray information visually. Also, if you consider what science has learned, it’s going to be a brave new world. Science has researched about how the brain works and various techniques to read minds and alter functioning. Scientists now understand how brainwashing works and much money has been put into light and sound machines that can have powerful effects on the brain.
On a really dark note, the development of robots and AI have been put to military use. The US has thousands of unmanned robots operating overseas. I read about a problem when something went wrong with one robot and it started targeting US soldiers. Wars of the future will be technological. Warfare is already happening on the internet. I forget which country, but one of Russia’s neighbors had its whole internet system knocked out. Fortunately, they were prepared for such an attack, but many countries such as the US supposedly aren’t prepared.
Access: Public 
However, I have no special power of intuitive knowing. If you’ve studied widely the subject of psychology, I doubt you’d be surprised by this research.
Marmalade said
My personal motivation is that I’m very curious, but of limited means. I can only explore my curiosity so far. I’d love to own an Amazon Kindle and I’m thinking I’d enjoy Rhapsody’s ibiza. Its not that I can’t afford either of these, but that these technologies are imperfect.
This goes back to the idea of technology in eternal Beta mode. If I buy an expensive piece of technology, I’d like to know if it will work well several years from now and continue to be compatible with other developing technologies. And there is always the possibility that one can buy a technology for a specific company’s service and that service is discontinued for any number of reasons.
I’d love to see both more competition and more integration. However, the more integration that I’d like to see might lead to less competition. Google has done a lot to integrate many different technologies and services. If Google gets any more powerful, it might become a near monopoly of the whole internet.
Monopolies are a natural tendency of human nature. It goes with globalization. People seek ever greater power, and people seek ever greater forms of social connection and cultural aggregation.The development of civilizationhas been primarily a history of the slow but sure concentration of power… political, religious, and capitalistic. Along with this, its also been the concentration of human knowledge and wisdom.
So, this is far from beingan inherently bad tendency. Much benefit has come from civilization of course. Anyways, even if the tedency is inevitable, the specific direction it takes isn’t. Many people would like to control the direction of this development, but I suspect its an unpredictable phenomena.
To bring inthe spiritual angle, I think there is an obvious and direct relationship between this tendency and Monotheism. And this reminds me of the conflicted relationship between mainstream Christianity and Gnosticism. Gnosticism, even though Monotheistic, was wary of how Monotheism could be used politically to oppress the individual.
Nicole said
eternal Beta mode, that’s a great way of stating it.
I’d never thought of the connection between monopoly and monotheism. Monogamy too I guess?
Singularly focussed…
Marmalade said
I didn’t come up with the “eternal Beta mode” on my own. I came across that idea a few times this past year in my various researches. It makes a lot of sense to me. The original contribution I made was in relating it to Orwell’s idea of continuous war… which is a dystopian idea that seems to have come true or maybe was always true. I think I remember reading that America has been continuously involved in one war or another since it became a country.
The connection between monopoly and monotheism is something I thought of on my own, but I’m sure others have thought of it before. Itsa simple and somewhat obvious view. And, yeah, I’d add monogamy in the mix. Stories of polygamy in theOld Testamentrepresent a time when polytheism still had major influence in Jewish culture.
Monotheism isn’t really any great insight limited to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Any culture that develops a centralized government will come to a conclusion like this about the divine. Even seemingly non-theistic religions will end up focusing their “worship” on some singular ideal.
Marmalade said
Its kind of funny that this isn’t the blog I intended to write when I started it. I think I originally just wanted to write about technology. I’ve had all these other ideas on my mind for a while. I suppose it all goes together, but my mind wasn’t very focused when writing this.
Let me add a different factor. No monopoly will ever be absolute. Its just one tendency amongst many. Similarly, if “monotheistic” religions were completely monotheistic, then they wouldn’t have these complex hierarchies of spiritual beings. Likewise, if monogamy was the only tendency of humans, then studies wouldn’t show that possibly between 10 and 20 % of children aren’t of the father that claims them and married women wouldn’t be more likely to cheat when most fertile.
As for capitalism, that which undermines the monopolistic tendency is two-fold.
Specific to computers and the internet, the open source community has many loyal followers. This levels the playing field, but open source will never be the central player. Mega-corporations aren’t entirely against open source because it gives them a free resource of ideas that they can co-opt.
More generally speaking, the black market is the closest that capitalism gets to being a free market. Black markets force companies to be more competitive and hence innovative. The main motivating force behind coporate innovation online is to provide a better product than what people can find illegally for free. The music industry was the first that had to come to terms with this. The plethora of nice music services such as Rhapsody is a direct result of free file sharing.
1Vector3 said
An interesting intersection of ideas !! I’d like to address some underlying ideas, even though I recognize they don’t contribute much to your actual discussion, but to me they are super-important. Part of my mission in life is to make sure people are clear about these economic ideas, because almost no one IS clear, and there is a lot at stake in our way of living, if misunderstandings persist and we make choices and decisions based on them.
Based on my research and studies, we don’t really have “capitalism” in this country, never have. We have a so-called “mixed economy” which technically is a Socialism-Fascism mix. Capitalism is synonymous with “free market” – the government does not interfere with the economy in any way. In Fascism the government regulates or controls some or all of the economy. In Socialism, it owns some of the economic entities. (In Communism, it owns all of them.)
I found it interesting you called for a big conglomerate, and then recognized you were suggesting something akin to a monopoly.
In capitalism, there are “natural monopolies” but they come and go. Whenever a monopoly persists, you will – with sufficient research – find government regulations are the force keepingit from its natural dissolution (from a significant competitor emerging.) Utility companies that you mentioned, are not “natural monopolies.” In fact, most of them are not just allowed or supported by government, they are government-mandated/created.
Thanks for letting me hold forth. I hope this was seen as somewhat relevant. I really enjoyed your thoughts !!
Blessings,
OM Bastet
Marmalade said
Its all good, OM. I don’t even know what my actual discussion is. Myset of ideas feels rather sprawling.
I think I agree with all that you said. Yep, “capitalism” doesn’t exist in the US. That is what I was implying with my comment about black markets. I don’t know exactly what kind of economy we have, but your description of a “mixed economy” sounds about right.
I’m glad you noticed the conflict in my view… which I was conscious of. The concentration of power and knowledge has advantages… and disadvantages. I like your idea of “natural monopolies”. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, but it does clarify the problem of how utility companies are forced into a permanent monopolistic structure by the government itself.
I don’t know how it works in other cities, but here the government disallows competition. There is one electricic company and one cable company. You have no other choices other than turning to other forms of technology. Also, the city runs a monopoly their own monopolies on certain utilities such as water and parking. Maybe this is a necessary evil for utilities such as water, but not for most utilities. However, maybe even water could be provided in new innovative ways if it weren’t controlled as a monopoly.
I shouldn’t complain too much as I personally benefit from the City government’s monopoly on the parking industry… where I’m employed. Its run innefficiently with way too much overheadand doesn’t even provide that great of service considering the money spent. If every parking ramp downtown was owned by different private companies, then there might be cheaper parking or else at least improved options. Besides, there is no reason for the government to run parking ramps. Its not as if their isn’t a market to motivate private companies to invest.
I’m glad to have you hold forth. Its all relevant in my book. Enjoyment is all around.
Nicole said
yes, I can see the connection to Orwell’s continuous war.
I’m intrigued by the stat about married women cheating more when fertile, it seems a difficult thing to establish with clarity. But more importantly, are human tendencies away from monogamy a sign that it’s a bad idea or … something else? Worth pondering especially for those in monogamous relationships
Marmalade said
I first heard about such stats on a tv show that was about human sexual behavior. I did a websearch and tons of pages came up, but most of it is discussion. The Wikipedia article about evolutionary psychology is interesting, and I thought this quote relevant:
“In particular, Haselton and Miller (2006) showed that highly fertile women prefer creative but poor men as short-term mates. Creativity may be a proxy for good genes. Research by Gangestad et al. (2004) indicates that highly fertile women prefer men who display social presence and intrasexual competition; these traits may act as cues that would help women predict which men may have, or would be able to acquire, resources.”
The difficult to establish part is something I’m not sure about as I don’t know about all of the research. I haven’t come across any research (not that I was looking that much) that was based on direct observations of human women cheating. The research I have heard of is various.
There are direct observations of animal behavior, and research is starting to show that even animals considered monogamous still cheat. The human research is about studying how women dress in more sexually attractive ways when fertile (skirts instead of pants, showing more skin, etc.) and that fertile women shift their behavior to a pattern that fits mating strategy.
I really don’t know the research that well, but there seems to be plenty of it out there if you wish to spend the time to ferret it out.
Nicole said
hmm!
well, not at the moment, but thanks for sharing what you do know.
Marmalade said
I didn’t think you would necessarily be. I’m not all that inspired to research it much myself. Its just an interesting piece of info… whatever its validity or meaning.
My personal theory is that (most? many?) humans are genetically programmed to be polygamous but not openly. I suspect that the outward display of monogamy is necessary for social order and peacable relations.
My personal attitude towards life is that I prefer monogamy. I’m too lazy to deal with multiple mates. I hardly can handle a single one. Throw in the normal tendencies of human jealousy, and polygamy doesn’t seem worth it to me.
I don’t see it as primarily a moral issue. Our moral ideals cause us as many problems as they attempt to solve, but I don’t think idealizing the opposite of the social (genetic?) norm is helpful either.
But all of that is neither here nor there as it pertains to this discussion.
Nicole said
yes, I do see your points – from a practical standpoint one person is more than most of us can handle! LOL!