CDR: Re: Katz /. piece on improving "political technology"

[Jim Choate]

On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> of attitude adjustment. After all we sell votes in corporations all the
> time, and, sooner or later, we're going to treat our force-control
> structures as non-monopolistic businesses instead of monopolistic
> nation-states.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately Katz'a and your crypto-anarchy-economic 
understanding and predictions are based in 18'th/19'th/20'th century
concepts and views. They unfortunately bear little resemblence to the
motivation of those actualy living the event.

Actualy it won't. When the society gets to this level it no longer needs
such structures. The individual controls enough resources directly that
such assaults, while devastating to the target, will render the attacker
in an equaly sorry state. The quantity and types of controlled resources
are also sufficient to elleviate the 'homeland' motivation. Nation states
won't exist in that sort of environment either, for the same sorts of
reasons. There will be giant manufacturing firms for hardware.

This won't of course come to pass until mankind is well off this mudball.
There simply aren't enough resources on a sigle planet to support even a
small group of such technologist for more than a few years. Certainly not
the 100's of Billions such a society will require.

Consider Kurzweill's predictions of the last few days for example. With
such a technology many of the current business and social institutions
become questionable at best. In a very real sense the concept of
'business' and 'profit' become problematic but let's not upset anyone too
badly to start.

The singular aspect of the crypto-anarcy view that is most laughable is
that almost everyone runs around thinking the world will be the same,
there just won't be taxes or cops/soldiers. How naive. 99% of the current
social meme's in your head are obsolete today, almost all of them will be
worthless 50 to 100 years from now when this sort of potential really
begins to arrive. With the taxes and cops demise will go the vast majority
of day to day trappings you're familiar with. Look around, are you willing
to give this ALL(!!!) up? It isn't pick and choose.

Autarch is NOT anarchy and they're not 1-to-1 mappable in axioms.

If you want this utopian vision (it will have it's own crosses to bear, be
warned) as soon as possible then put every iota of energy into getting
mankind off this mudball permanently.

Consider the impact of current neurological research into human cognition,
fundamental limits to capacity are being found. Without biotechnologies
ability to address this many of tomorrows problems won't get resolved and
this utopia won't happen (can you say "bye bye dino"?). The current
religious, social (incl. religious), and economic institutions can't
survive in a world of such morphed humans who live 200 years. I can
suggest "Man after Man" by K. Drexler.

The reality is that while most of us will reap the benefits of life
extension we'll be locked out of the majority of future human development
because we were born too early to genengineered in the womb. Respected and
pitied at the same time.

Unless of course the human mind isn't an artifact of the ghost in the
machine and really is just a machine. In that case transfer into a 'new'
body would be possible. My guess is this is about 200 years off. The odds
are that about 50% of those people reading this who don't die in the next
20 years will live to see it.

Where's your fucking stock market in that sort of world? It isn't. The
technology is so pervasive and 'open source' while the pockets of humanity
are so wide spread that such entities can't exist.

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