The protester response:

(from)

The woman being given the Silent Treatment being the university chancellor who ordered the police clearing of the protest.

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There has (inevitably) been talk about violence, and the 2nd amendment and when to shoot back and so on. The key thing here though is how this will play out if we win: We win if we attract sufficient biomass for political leaders (new or existing) to take up our cause. Then the “the government” changes by election… with or without the incumbent’s resignation.

A step along the way to achieving this is winning over the legacy-media – the mass media, which also happens by biomass… when simply too many people know that Emperors New Clothes don’t exist for them to carry on pretending.

That is how we win – anything involving violent confrontation with OUR police and OUR armed forces is very very problematic.

So… it’s an exercise in getting people on-board. It is a war of ideas, and of truth against lies… and we have truth on our side. To this end, violence is very, very problematic… violence is simply too easy for THEIR media to turn into The Story, and for it to backfire. THEIR media cannot do this with peaceful protest. They try, and they try, and they try… a march with a million people… if one single person kicks over a trash-can, that’s The Story. We’ve seen this a thousand times. The key is to make a theatrical event that is not twistable, but which is still riveting television.

Everything needs to be seen within the context of a media event. We have to understand the theatre in which we’re operating… that it is theatre.

And it works – I went on a silent protest back in the 80s – big march at night, no talking at all, just a single solemnly banging drum. This was against apartheid in South Africa. We won.

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I’m not against violence for it’s own sake – I’m not a pacifist… I’d like to kill these fuckers. I’m Scottish – I’d like to kill them with a fucking claymore… I think there comes a point where violence is a morally justifiable, and in many ways, we have already passed that point… but violence is not how we’re going to win, and we could lose it that way.

So be smart people. Carry on being smart.

So the other day, someone (a reporter) asked:

“why is it that wifi coverage in disaster-zones, war-zones, slums, refugee camps is better than what I can get in my classy hotel?”

To which I replied “Because your classy hotel is interested in creating “billable events”, so they optimise for scarcity”

Now Optimizing For Scarcity” is a concept I first heard in the video below – John Perry Barlow speaking at a conference hosted by one of the world’s most repressive “IP” regimes, for the benefit of large corporations – the gist of the entire event being “how can corporations and govts control the web?”. They invited JPB by mistake.

So that’s where it’s from.

Optimizing For Scarcity.

This is what corporations tireless and relentlessly do – they are completely about “making the maximum amount of money while delivering the smallest amount of value.

This is why the American Health “Industry” is fucked – this is why it delivers the lowest value at the greatest expense, of any country in the world. This is why 60% of US bankruptcies are due to medical bills. This is why 875,000 people in the US died of poverty in the US alone… before the crash of 2008.

The reason hundreds of millions of people die of… well, lack of these…

is because the institutions that deliver them are privatised, and therefore optimised for scarcity… and for those that aren’t privatised, there is a relentless pressure for them to be privatised. This is the end-goal of IMF colonialisation… to privatise the basic life support system, because when you do, you’ve basically got the population over a barrel.

Which is why in Bolivia it was illegal for people to collect rainwater from their rooves.

Which is why the first thing the US imposed on Iraq was a law making it illegal for farmers to plant seeds from the previous year’s crop.

Which is why in London, Rent is over 50% of the average income.

Which is why education has gone from being a basic human right, to an “investment”, the cost of which is geared to barely justify itself.

This is why the chocolate bars are so much smaller than they were when you were a kid. It’s not because you got bigger… they actually ARE smaller. It’s because there are people who’s only job it is, to pour over spreadsheets to see how more money can be charged for delivering less.

The purpose of bean-counting is to deliver fewer beans, for the same money.

The purpose of “IP” is to stop you re-planting the beans.

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We need to recognise that optimising for scarcity is killing more people than Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and all of the religious nuts in the whole of human history put together (which for the record, is 67M + 47M) (Christianity was only marginally less dangerous than the black death).

We need to recognise that while corporations are good for providing soap and laptops, when they get into a position where they control life-support, they (systematically) become extremely dangerous.

We need to recognise that the bias towards optimising for scarcity is actually built into our currency – which is lent into existence as a scarce resource, rather than representing value created.

Or, in a nutshell, we need open-source everything.

Now.

This is a rant about Magic Formulæ

Just because it works inside your head, doesn’t mean it actually works

It seems to be a staple of geek (or non-geek come to that) politics. The Magic Formula.

- “If we lower taxes on the wealthy, the country will become richer, because the wealthy create wealth”
- “If we execute murderers, it will reduce murder, because that’s one less murderer off the streets”
- “If we legalise pot, drug use will go up, because pot is a gateway drug”
- “It’s ok to torture people because if there’s a ticking bomb like on TV, it might save lives”
- “Anyone who works hard can become rich”

Some are obviously less based-on-lies than others. Some are true – but only within a limited perspective, outside of which they become a lie. eg: “Anyone who works hard can become rich” – yup, but that’s not the point. The point is that the system is set up so most people don’t become rich regardless of how hard they work. Rags to Riches stories are not the basis of sound social or economic policy.

Anyway – Magic Formulas. For geeks it seems to be Libertarianism… particularly American Geeks. Geeks love Game-Theory. Geeks don’t like having to deal with what actual people actually do. Libertarianism a web 2.0-era computer-programmer attempt to “write” a utopianism program. It’s like distributed Das Kapital for people who’s only foray outside the sphere of cable tv, is internet chat rooms.

Libertarianism is a classic Magic Formula. All theory; No evidence.

In fact it isn’t even a theory because it isn’t falsifiable.
In fact it isn’t even an hypothesis because it’s not based on observation.

It’s a magic formula.

The Austrian School specifically ignores empirical evidence (look it up), so no pesky reality need get in the way… which is handy, because I’ve yet to see a single case of libertarianism actually working anywhere. You can see a gradient in fact: the better the social-spending; the better off, and happier the people. Tax is not fucking theft. Tax is us, thinking in terms of “Us” rather than “Me”. If you look at evidence, what you see is that the opposite of libertarianism seems to work best.

The fact that the government has become corrupted by corporate money, doesn’t mean that liberal, secular democracies, with an easily measurable, transparent balance of taxation, don’t produce the best results that we’ve ever seen in the whole of recorded human history. They do.

Libertarianism is a magic formula who’s basic fallacy comes down to the idea that “people are individuals”, when actually, on the whole, they’re not.

Clay Shirky gave us an example of this in one of his talks… parents picking their kids up from school, some would turn up late – so somebody thought it would be a good idea to issue a small fine. That’s the magic formula. “If you financially penalise someone for a behaviour, the behaviour will decline”. Unbeatable… in the tiny mind of the person who’s idea it was. What actually happened was that “the fine” became the price of being late, which was easier for people to pay, than breaking the unspoken social contract they had before, so lateness increased. Unfortunately, when they tried to put things back the way they were before, it made no difference. The social contract once broken, stayed broken.

So what have we got? We’ve got a million different laws based on magic formulas (you have to be a lawyer to understand them all)… we’ve got a whole ecosystem of discourse that is only allowed (by the broadcast media) to take place within the frameworks of magic formulas… and we’ve got well-meaning people, including geeks (who are scientists, so should really know better) providing “solutions” that are all magic formulas.

All conservative political policy is based on Magic Formulas.

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Just because it works inside your head, doesn’t mean it actually works.
Just because it works inside your head, doesn’t mean it actually works.
Just because it works inside your head, doesn’t mean it actually works.

Here’s an idea: If a theory isn’t falsifiable, then it shouldn’t be part of any policy conversation.

Policy without evidence needs to be recognised as being speculative – and experiment is great, we should definitely experiment… but policy without evidence needs to be stamped “SPECULATIVE” with a specific expiration-date built into it, so it is rolled back if it fails to meet specific measurable goals. And to minimise the damage that speculative policy can do, it should be conducted on a small scale, with specific focus given to The Amsterdam Effect*.

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Never talk about “belief” – just show us the data. Show us your methodology for collecting it. Leave the interpretation to us.

Thanks.

*The Amsterdam Effect is what happens when an experiment is not carried out in isolation – when your neighbours swamp your results. A similar thing happens in Estonia – who’s relative prosperity is not because of their flat-tax rate, but because of their flat-tax rate AND their proximity to Scandinavia.

There’s this post over here, about the EU protests… the Spanish Revolution (which sounds dead romantic)

Bruce Sterling (everything he says is worth listening to about 5 times) calls for a global youth movement here. This is a series of 3. You need to see all of them. The first one has too much reverb.

Anyway… I thought it would be a nice arty sort of excercise to show the scale of the thing by putting them all in a block on the same page, probably breaking my entire blog in the process. If you play them all at once, you’ll probably crash your browser, and then the entire internet. Massive thanks to http://roarmag.org/ for this outright stealage.

I’d like to declare my passionate solidarity with The Millenials.

A while back I wrote this thing which detailed some fairly radical proposals – most of which were to do with scaling back corporate power.

Turns out that these proposals weren’t as radical as I’d initially thought – many were in fact law in the US in the 1800s.

• Corporations were required to have a clear purpose, to be fulfilled but not exceeded
• Corporations’ licenses to do business were revocable by the state legislature if they exceeded or did not fulfill their chartered purpose(s
• The state legislature could revoke a corporation’s charter if it misbehaved
• The act of incorporation did not relieve corporate management or stockholders/owners of responsibility or liability for corporate acts
• As a matter of course, corporation officers, directors, or agents couldn’t break the law and avoid punishment by claiming they were “just doing their job” when committing crimes but instead could be held criminally liable for violating the law
• State (not federal) courts heard cases where corporations or their agents were accused of breaking the law or harming the public
• Directors of the corporation were required to come from among stockholders
• Corporations had to have their headquarters and meetings in the state where their principal place of business was located
• Corporation charters were granted for a specific period of time, such as twenty or thirty years (instead of being granted “in perpetuity,” as is now the practice
• Corporations were prohibited from owning stock in other corporations, to prevent them from extending their power inappropriately
• Corporations’ real estate holdings were limited to what was necessary to carry out their specific purpose(s
• Corporations were prohibited from making any political contributions, direct or indirect
• Corporations were prohibited from making charitable or civic donations outside of their specific purposes
• State legislatures could set the rates that some monopoly corporations could charge for their products
• All corporation records and documents were open to the legislature or the state

Some key things

1) Zero corporate money in politics
2) CEOs go to prison if their company breaks the law
3) Democratically accountable govt can revoke corporation’s right to trade

I also like

4) corporations cannot own stock in other corporations
5) corporations cannot own land (I’ve extended that slightly)

and I’d also tax corporations at 60%… which is the rate that got us out of the 1930s depression. In the 1950s, ~60% of the US federal income was corporation-tax. Today it’s ~6%. This isn’t a recession, it’s a heist – and it’s rapidly sliding into fascism. We need to identify and isolate the people causing this.

Here’s some context

This video is 1 hour, 20 minutes long… but watch it. I’ll come back to it later

Thing here about a grad student using TV signals to transmit wifi

Which has a mile range, doesn’t rely on line-of-site, works and is stable. This is particularly interesting for mesh-networking – which is looking like an increasingly vital step towards routing around authoritarian control (and corruption) of the web.

This is currently using “TV white-spaces”… but have you seen TV recently? It doesn’t deserve to live. It is so shite it’s gone beyond self-parody and is now this limping charade… drunk and masturbating in public, begging for it all to end.

Fuck white-space. We should just pirate the entire spectrum.

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As it happens, I’m looking for a new TV myself. The killer-USP? Wifi connectivity – the ability not to have to watch the patronising, infantile, emasculated dreck served up by broadcasters. We should just short-circuit to the better (and inevitable) long-term scenario – let the web swallow the entirety of last-century TV infrastructure.

I’ve gone away, and come back even more radicalised before – I am in no mood to give any quarter to any corporate/governmental collusion whatsoever, and I don’t think I’m alone.

[edit] meet the open-wifi movement