Cold Constructs Blog

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By far the biggest hurdle that grand innovations have to jump over is the law. The internet is the most recent grand innovation as it has changed the way we work, live and play. It’s more than a new frontier though since it not only freely gives individuals some of the productive powers previously held by commercial enterprises, but it also provides everyone with communicative powers that were previously impossible. So of course it’s going to break new ground on a scale that bares no precedent and change the rules of civilization entirely. Yet the problem is not public acceptance of the change — it’s the government that must be forced to accept it.

It is believed that the government makes laws and the people follow them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Governments were actually established to formalize existing rules that spontaneously emerged from the day-to-day interactions of people holding common ground. Communities didn’t suddenly decide they wanted a few of their members to boss them around — they simply wanted to enforce their existing unwritten rules in order to prevent disputes that arise from a misinterpretation or misunderstanding of those rules. They needed a formalized set of laws that were clear to everyone. (This worked so well that they expanded the laws to encompass everyone of their culture. Voila, the nation-state.)

So when something as disruptive as the internet comes around, it is the government’s job to mediate the progress and, when the new patterns of behavior emerge and settle, to finally formalize those patterns as laws.

Unfortunately no one in office quite understands this historical process and so people continually have to fight the very government they established themselves in order to get it to do its job properly.

A nice article by Timothy B. Lee over at Ars Technica details this process by comparing the development of the internet with the development of property rights. Abundant land was a disruptive condition that current laws could not handle. But instead of adapting to the new conditions, the government fought to preserve old laws that clearly no longer applied (they’re just doing what they were told). Eventually the gov had no choice but to adapt to the people’s informal arrangements. It only took a few decades.

If we are to keep pace with the river of creativity and inventiveness that flows through our society, we will need to establish a political system that is just as swift and flexible. It’s a matter of trusting the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ and seeing patterns as quickly as they emerge — not acting brashly but at least be understanding of the process. If there’s a new medium that undermines almost every industrial-era business model, it should be pretty easy to spot. If you can’t see it, you should at least see the massive paradigm shift it’s leaving in its wake. In the case of the internet, it’s all of the court hearings being brought onto people who are simply acting the way that made the most sense to them — eg “I bought this CD, but I’d like to listen to it on my mp3 player or computer, so I’ll rip it.” Now it’s turning into “fuck CDs, I want download everything because it’s easier and even better.”

The onslaught of court cases should be the tell-tale sign of the shift, telling business and its laws that it needs to change because, quite simply, it’s the ‘common person’ who writes the rules and we’ve already done so. They can either catch up or we’ll force them to adapt. It’s kind of weird though, talking about ‘us’ and ‘them’ — they’re members of this society too, right? So what’s their problem?

Update: Probably this.

Leapfrogging. WC loves it, others not so much. I define leapfrogging as “disruptive advancement”, and I think in general it is dangerous, but there are some instances where it’s helpful.

Let’s look at Africa. The Industrial Revolution in England gave her great power and wealth. She traded with many nations across the world and exponetially advanced the technology of primitives everywhere. Africans only had blades as weapons but soon had machines of all kinds. They were thrown into a whirlwind of miracles, when the only miracle that ever happened was Earth’s orbit. A few grabbed the right tools were able to subdue the others and upset the balance of power. Now it’s easy for a small group of guerrillas to obtain AK-47s and slaughter thousands upon thousands with a twitch of a finger. Africa is now the bloodiest continent on Earth.

You can’t shove advanced technology onto others who don’t know how to bear it. The results are, as I have just shown, quite horrible.

There are two kinds of advanced tech. One is incredibly complex and takes a fucking super power to build and maintain it. This includes things from guns to cell phones. The other is brilliant in its simplicity. The watercone is an example of this, as is some kinds of solar tech.

You can’t say “all leapfrogging is awesome for everybody”. That’s naive. It’s more complex than that. The only kind of “good” leapfrogging is when you pass along a “simple” advanced tech that can be understood by the receiving party. By “understood” I mean that they will be able to build it from scratch once they get knowledge (blueprints, samples) of it.

If a group of people don’t understand exactly how the tech they’re using works, then they don’t deserve it. It doesn’t matter what the benefits are. It’d be like giving fire to a baby. They’d burn themselves. Only with societies, there will be collateral damage, such as genocide (as the case was with Africa).

I love modern technology. I also despise the shit for it’s weak and sometimes counter-intuitive interfaces, it’s unreliability, cost, pathetic efficiency (both productively and concerning energy), and not to mention how much it has made life that much more complicated and quite different, in more than one way.

Basically, technology has nullified natural selection. Today, retards make it through life (and what a life it is) thanks to technology. Kill them off and life would suck less for a lot of us though. The less-retarded (but still regarded as so) struggle through society and sometimes reproduce. Thanks to those assholes several million unwanted genetic traits are kept in the gene pool. People with diseases still reproduce, probably thinking it’s a good way to keep their kid on his toes (har har). Old people last much longer than they should. Layin’ there, veggin’ out. It happened to my grandpa. I watched him die as they unplugged the machines and he drowned in his own fluids. No one deserves that. Then there’s the kids who wouldn’t have died if it weren’t for the doctors ’saving’ them. They come out dysfunctional, weak, stupid, or all of those. Those kids shouldn’t have made it, but now they get to live a life of suffering (thanks, Doc!).

So people that shouldn’t survive, do, thanks to technology. And because of this, there are idiots, diseased, and the deformed everywhere. If they were born without limbs, then they shouldn’t be able to survive, yet they do. How are we supposed to continue to thrive if we don’t allow nature to do its thing? There are growing numbers of stupid people, which is a Bad Thing no matter how you look at it. And yes, if I found out I carried a disease or some sort of dysfunction, then I would get myself neutered without a second thought.

Solutions include stopping hospitals from keeping people alive when it is clear that the patient has either lost his mind or has become inactive. We could also terminate children who have a fatal virus or any dysfunction that will keep them from living a normal life. If they couldn’t survive a life on their own, they shouldn’t survive at all.