It is. It’s like the medieval Sound Toll, you can’t measure it well enough because there are no trade routes between the Baltic and the North Sea other than the Sound, the Kiel channel is not yet a thing.
That can’t be fixed. We can’t wait for a different kind of human (what if it’ll be an artificial psychopath anyway) to fix our current thing.
So hard to disrupt means of organizing (for associations, unions and such, unofficial) and building electoral systems (for Internet communities even, why not) are needed ; social media gave people a taste of that to lure them before subverting it all, but the idea is good.
Some sort of a global system. When it’s in place, improvement around will follow.
It’s encouraged to use things with a supply chain easily poisoned.
There’s the issue of a Heisenberg effect here - when a spectator is present, like a huge audit of something, nothing happens, and when a spectator isn’t present, there’s nobody to look every day in piles of constantly changed crap to detect if something happens.
Also not even easily poisoned, but easily denied. It’s about control. The militaries and producers of complex industrial equipment were the first to start doing this, however nuts that may seem. It’s useful to sell your allies a system they can use, but only when allowed. Or sell industrial equipment that can’t be smuggled to a third country without your permission.
These things - they are legal even morally, but at some point in discussion of them common good might arise as a thing in itself, separate from morality. For the common good such systems of control are clear poison.
This has to be fixed though. I don’t know, how, but it’s an economic situation bringing enormous damage every moment.
And most of people it affects are, like me, in countries where real political activism is impossible.
This is the next thing that should be somehow resolved like child labor, 8-hour workdays, women’s voting rights and lead paint. Interoperability and non-adversarial standards of the global network.
I would say the future is in pooling resources.
Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.
Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.
All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.
But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.
And global cryptographic identities.
Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.
There’s a counterpoint to that. In real hard truth, nobody is anonymous and creative handles can be traced back to a name easily.
But having pseudonyms affects human psychology. And makes people post things they wouldn’t want to be traced to them. And do things.
There was a time when it seemed that everything is insecure. That time didn’t end. Just with HTTPS everywhere and encrypted everything and with glossy appearances people have genuinely lost all understanding of the real world.
They think, metaphorically, that if there’s no name written on their door, everyone who asks can’t learn who they are.
OK, so now it’s important to create collegial democratic project government for Linux, and freeze Linus in carbonite as a memorial. Before Linux has become too important, and before Linus lost his marbles to become a geriatric dictator.
Actually in the age of Android I think it’s already too late, but this should be done regardless.
I meant joining BRICS together after formally ceasing to be part of British monarchy. And becoming less dependent on other integrations much abused today.
The western countries are dependent on the imperial framework of “the eyes” cooperation, other intelligence and security cooperation, NATO cooperation, similarity of financial, patent and IP regulations, similarity of legal systems, interconnectivity of their elites and various blackmail material on those, and their common crime networks (one would hope that at least mafia groups should align along some other clusters on the map, but it doesn’t seem so).
Those regulations support the status of western elites, which means the elites themselves won’t reform anything in any good direction.
The NATO cooperation is extremely efficient and comfort-providing - instead of countrywide mandatory conscription you have small groups of professional soldiers and military bureaucrats, military matters are not something that all the society cares about.
Instead of domestic military industries sufficient to fulfill the needs of a military you can have as much silent and respectable corruption as you wish. It’s both convenient for the population and for the elites (criminals) to have a small professional military, an international (imperial) MIC framework, all not influenced significantly by domestic popular opinions.
Intelligence cooperation allows domestic intelligence services to bypass all limitations that exist for them on paper about their own citizens. It also makes every such service more powerful than intended.
Similar financial regulations lead not only to good things, like smaller cost of doing business, but also to bad things, like monopolies. Even the EU supposedly big regulations don’t prevent big tech from abusing honestly whatever they want. GDPR is a farce in its actual enforcement.
Patent and IP regulations - well, that’s basically a way to legal monopoly, and that’s how it works. BTW, let’s just remember that even trademarks are a relatively new thing legally. And copyright. And patents. And when all these were introduced, that was similar to state monopoly on alcohol beverages in some countries or state monopoly on tobacco in others, and was reasoned legally in exactly that way - authorship and right to print something should be registered for the crown to have an income from that, not because of some ownership of ideas or protection. It still works like an imperial mechanism.
Similarity of legal systems - I’ll admit at some point I thought English law is the best thing after sliced bread. But I’m not so sure at this point. At some point a German court acquitted Tehlirian, after all. As an example of the main competing family of legal systems.
Elites and crime - I mean, your whole part of the world is in the “trade and denial” stage after really buying the 80s and 90s idea that democracies and institutions don’t require perpetual struggle to maintain. That is, fiction of those years would usually argue with that idea, but sometimes wide masses just want to believe something so badly that no art can dissuade them. And in the 00s it was decided.
OK, too much text.
What I really mean is that for Canada it doesn’t make sense to join BRICS unless it manages to pull a Brazil and somehow switch the camp from “imperial” to “fringe kingdoms”.
This is also funny in the sense that one of explanations of Bitcoin is “digital gold” - that world economies and societies went in a wrong direction once they stopped being gold-backed, except gold and everything RL is controlled by governments, while Bitcoin is a subject to freedom of speech and whatever.
An already archaic viewpoint TBH, that many even western governments respect freedom of anything and human rights. And in another sense too archaic - the idea that a currency being gold-backed is something valuable was kinda libertarian around year 2007.
Which is also an answer to people saying that Bitcoin is not backed by anything (like country’s economy in this sense and not technical ability to exchange it for gold), it’s the main cryptocurrency, and it seems to work well enough despite high volatility.
This won’t be a circle though. Today they really like their control and surveillance. A gold-backed currency is where anyone owning N of M can exchange them to gold with which an M is guaranteed by a rate that doesn’t change, load that gold into bags, carry it to another country, go to a bank and exchange that gold to its currency. Perhaps declaring that they are carrying that gold at customs.
Gold-backed for governments - we-ell, maybe in some way.
Well. There was a time when currencies were to an extent interoperable, via a certain portion of silver called joachimstaler, or just taler, or yefimok, or dollar … being approximately the same everywhere. Still, that was mostly used in colonies and in international trade, locally they’d use different incompatible currencies.
The British Empire is most notable on this picture with its glaring absence.
Yes, about the British and the French - these are countries that still fought small undeclared colonial wars after USSR ceased to exist.
They still fucking do.
Jordan is still not very different from a UK puppet regime.
Also why the West loves Arab monarchies so much - because they don’t change anything in inconvenient directions. They sell oil, buy weapons, build nice shit. But their countries are not just staying on one place in terms of democracy, enlightenment and human rights - they are further into medieval shit than they were after liberation from the Ottomans. Then they were sort of “naturally”, traditionally tribal and medieval. Not much different from many parts of the world. But since then those puppet monarchies, installed by empires, have been changing their societies in the opposite direction. The West not just supports Muslim religious movements against Leftist movements, the West supports Muslim monarchist and fundamentalist creme-de-la-creme (not) basically Nazi movements like our recent time’s ISIS against Muslim republican and Leftist movements. So some Muslim and socialist mojaheds, like those US supported in Afghanistan, are not good enough when guys like HTS are available. Even Egypt’s ikhvans, with their democratic component, are not good enough. Only Salafi beheaders in black with their nasheeds.
Germany - at some point their society realized firmly that there are mistakes in the past to be worked through. Unfortunately that was somewhere in the 90s, and in the middle of that process they for whatever reason abruptly decided that they have understood enough and are now a morality specialist nation. Which is why a German often feels entitled to express their opinions on the Holocaust as if their nation were participating in the victim role.
In some sense USSR was a huge spoiler. It took upon itself a lot of hopes of this world, despite Stalin and repressions, and then Brezhnev happened - just covering every budget inefficiency by selling natural resources to the supposed enemy, covering every pipeline hole by buying technology of the supposed enemy, resolving every deadlock between interested local producers by cloning technology of the supposed enemy, and so on. Then after 10 years or so the whole Soviet society and even more its elite were confident in Soviet system’s inferiority, and it couldn’t end any other way than it did from that point.
they elected a race to superiority
Unless a member of that race is against Israel, then you’ll get sometimes the nicest kinds of things like “or, so then it was all right for you?” from them - that being about Holocaust.
BRICS has the downside of including Russia.
It might not seem that way, but Russia is actually the shittiest of USA’s minions. Its “independent” actions like war with Ukraine are no more independent in fact than those of Saudis.
It’s definitely aligned with the stinkier part of USA’s elites, but somehow had good enough relationship with all of them.
Maybe reforming UN as a candidate for some actual world confederation would be a better idea.
EUR is honestly a better reserve currency, more stable already.
About divesting from dollars - I dunno how hard this is. Probably would be better for the US to provoke it to signal that time is nigh. Because otherwise this can only happen very slowly.
Nah, the more time passes, the less incentive there is for many people to pursue justice when there are newer things on their plates.
Same as modern Web’s “attention economy”.
But frankly in classical cultures they knew that too, catch the moment, now or never.
are not dropped, “all options remain on the table,” he declared.
That being dicks offered to him
Yep.
Parents sometimes can’t help not wanting to put their kids through what traumatized themselves.
Except inverted.
I’ve thought of all these, but what I’m describing should be a comprehensive system in itself and at the same time have global identities and addressing of all content, so that data model could be applied, for example, for a sneakernet or for some situation where you’d have to synchronize data over delay-tolerant networks.
Most of all like Briar or Usenet or something else.