A whack on the side of the head that might wake some folks up.
I don’t necessarily agree with the “Gee whiz” and optimism in Bartlett’s article. The technology is still hard to pull off, and BitCoin still depends on “foreign exchange” with other currencies. The exchanges are the current profit centers driving the currency forward.
Moreover radical libertarianism has its own problems unless creativity is benignly focused, which it might be in some projects and not in others.
Networks have nodes; nodes gain power as they gain traffic, as any blog owner recognizes. Monetizing nodes is no different from monetizing blogs. And nodes arrange themselves, all things being equal, in hierarchies of salience to the network.
So what to make of Parallel Polis and its visions of future global politics?
What to make when there are independent essentially free networks offering open source encrypted access for all sorts of apps?
My key question: Who pays that huge electric bill for all those servers? Who buys the servers? Who mines the minerals that go into those servers? Yes, they have to do with resource and energy constraints.
But those natural resource constraints are much less exacting than the constraints facing the world’s militaries. One way or the other environmental limits will end war, probably long before the Parallel Polis new financial society arrives.
What is clear is that capitalist society in its pure form cannot survive its own disruptions, wars, and destruction of the planet.
What is not clear is the new form of post-capitalist civilization. It is a difficult to predict as post-feudal society was able to predict the consequences of its religious collapse and religious wars. Or the effects that would ripple out during the Enlightenment from Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press.
Just finished reading Joyce Chaplin’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. Today I discovered she tangled with Ted Cruz over the fact that it was the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that granted the US sovereignty, no matter how much legitimacy the Battle of Yorktown gave to the individual states. Franklin was a big player in the emergence of the new capitalist civilization. From the advice of Poor Richard and The Way to Wealth of self-advancement, creating the entrepreneurial frame of mind to the research into electricity that in the 1900s allowed the fractional-horsepower electric motor to drive manufacturing and electric waves and pulses to drive communication. Franklin’s research into the Gulf Stream created reliable and shipping in the 19th century that took advantage of knowledge of the weather and ocean currents. His advocacy of abolition of slavery created cheap wage labor after the Civil War, but paid enough to form a consumer base when coupled with fossil-fuel driven transportation and energy generation that subsidized manufacturing costs.
What he didn’t touch was the beginnings of management theory, worked out in the sugar-to-rum slave plantations of Barbados and Jamaica, transferred to cotton plantations, and then to the cotton mills of the British Midlands. (Engels owned one of them. Marx was subsidized from manufacturing income. That’s how they knew whereof they spoke. Not workers at all.) Franklin was an apprentice for his brother, ran away, then had his own apprentices. Then his own slaves, who became “servants” in France. Changing civilizations make complicated situations. Do the folks at Parallel Polis understand the ins and outs of the consequences of their technology?
