Market: A system in which commodities are exchanged between producers and buyers (individuals and enterprises). When a large enough market emerges, commodities start to take on market prices - two sheep is worth one bushel of corn, etc. And eventually these prices are all related to a currency - one sheep is worth five gold, one bushel of corn is worth ten gold, etc. Generally an enterprise that does well in the market will persist, fluorish, etc., and those that do not do well will "go out of business", so to speak.
Enterprise: This isn't the most precise definition, but more or less an enterprise is an entity which buys components/tools/etc and produces some set of other products. Generally, an enterprise can be thought of as having two essential elements:
Capital: - the machinery, tools, building, etc which are needed to produce the product(s) of the enterprise. For example, you probably want a stove or grill if you have a burgershop - the grill is capital. Capital is also the burgers being transformed, and the goods produced.
Labor: - To actually use the tools, people have to do work - Capital just lies dead without the breath of life of labor.
Socialism (Mutualist Definition)*: A socialist economy is when enterprises are run democratically by the workers, and the workers own where they work. Strict equality of payoff and ownership is not necessary, although any uneven-ness is likely a result of different labor input into the enterprise.
*This is the oldest definition of Socialism (this definition can be expanded upon, but the core features remain, therefore why it's a good starting point for understanding).
Capitalism: Someone with sufficient money could just buy the necessary Capital, and own it all. They could then hire people to work the Capital and produce the Capital, pay them a wage, and then keep the difference between labor+commodity costs and net revenue - profit. The Capitalist (unless under an explicitly socialist legal system) is then a dictator of this enterprise, and is free to sell all or parts of the ownership to others - workers have no say (unless they buy some of the enterprise, but since they are paid wages, this is very unlikely... unless government regulation or union efforts force higher wages...), as they have no ownership...
Unions: Except workers CAN have a say. If the workers unionize and strike, the Capitalist can't extract profit from the enterprise and its laborers, because nothing is produced. So unions are a way of forcing worker power, even when they don't have legal ownership over the enterprise.
Capital markets: This is when a group of people (typically, or about to become, the ruling class) have a bunch of wealth, and that wealth can be invested in fractional owernship of companies ("stocks"). As a result, this group of people - the Capitalists - get profit from what they earn, giving them more money, allowing them to buy more of the economy, garnering them increasing profits, and it's a self-reinforcing cycle. Capital markets allow the centralization of the economy into the hands of the few.
Expanded Socialism Definition: To deal with this, the people at large can collectivize sectors of the economy, and officials are elected to manage them. In this situation, a public body becomes the primary Capital provider (although "private" means of Capital allocation are not out of the picture, they would just mean things like corporate bonds, rather than stock ownership, for private Capital raising), and different sectors could be run differently. Some industries are more efficient in a market setting (see the initial Socialist definition), and others in a planned setting.
(Socialists often disagree to what extent the market should be included.)
Here, the workers at collectivized institutions indirectly "own where they work" via their being part of the people. This is nominally what public goods are today - for example, highways, the police, and so on.
What Do I Want, or "Government corruption?" Like many things, dealing with corruption has A LOT to do with the road you take. I argue for a strong labor sector, and the democratic labor union road towards mixed socialism, in large part with this issue in mind.
Centralized, undemocratic wealth is dissipated - There is no longer a strong concentration of wealth amongst the "1%". Ahhh, you might say that now the wealth is ultra-concentrated - the government has it all! Who is to stop the government from being tyrannical?? I said I want a "democratic government", but of course, one can easily reply that "democratic legitimacy can easily break down". Well, remember the path we took to get here...
Unionized/socialized workforce counterbalance: - In this path, because workers have control over vast swathes of the economy, they are capable of shutting it down. More or less workers can collectively strike against a government that gets tyrannical. Why is this possible? Because the road taken here INVOLVES strong labor unions and worker-controlled enterprises, they are already strong in this route. If the government ever gets "out of line" (at whatever level, municipal, state, national, etc) the workers can strike as an immediate "referendum" on that action. The strong labor unions (which in a market socialist situation, would be like enterprise federations - socialist Chamber of Commerce???) would also provide support for workers when they "strike" against the state - as they do for workers today when on strike against the boss.
Good old democracy: - representative democracy is still pretty useful. I like the direct democracy POTENTIAL of labor unions, but having direct democracy be part of EVERYONE'S daily life would be exhausting. The main difference is that unlike today, workers have the power to shut the economy down, and thus they CAN exercise direct democracy when necessary. Of course, it's nice when this isn't necessary, and the government just does its job. And BECAUSE the threat of a strike-against-the-government exists, the government is less likely to get out of hand. Basically, if you know I can hurt you, you aren't likely to start shit. So things stay calm :)
Centralized, undemocratic wealth is dissipated: - Coming back to this, one of the main sources of corruption today is the influence of the Capitalists - "the 1%" - on our political system. They buy politicians, buy judges, buy the media out, and buy everything. But now that wealth isn't centralized amongst a small group of people who are only looking out for themselves (and unlike the government here, aren't democratically accountable to the people), and so it is much more difficult to "corrupt" the government. Who is going to do that? Of course, the people can do that... but it's far easier for 10 Walmart executives to agree to do something corrupt than 10,000 Walmart employees to agree to do something corrupt.
Now you might imagine an alternative scenario - what if we had really strong labor unions, and kept Capitalists? If the main check on government in this scenario is the power to strike (and representative democracy is just a sweet cherry on top), what's the point in going Socialist? What's the difference - we still have concentrated power in either case!
The main difference is in a Socialist system, the government's centralized power is not self-reinforcing. In a Capitalist system, centralized power IS self-reinforcing. It can grow like a cancer, evading the shackles of regulation and the laws against union-busting. It can CORRUPT government, bending it to bust labor (this is what happened in most of the Western nations after WWII, and after 1980 - we've seen this strategy fail before). Furthermore, the representative democratic element is important - not only can a strong labor movement sink the economy, they can also vote for a different representative. They can pick someone else to be at the bargaining table. Is abuse IMPOSSIBLE? No, but in this situation the capacity for corruption and abuse is much attenuated.
I love the idea of trains, and not because I'm some train loving dork (although I probably am). Let me just give you a laundry list of things that suck right now:
When you're driving, you can't do anything, you have to drive (and don't tell me about self-driving cars please)
Cars are resource intensive - every car guzzles gas OR requires a mineral-intensive battery. They require heavy infrastructure (moderately dense charging ports/gas stations/etc), bla bla bla
Car traffic is inherently prone to traffic jams - it's been modeled using Self-organized Criticality/sandpile model and surprise surprise, traffic jams are just a natural side-effect of car-based transport. (Hence why California has one billion highway lanes and you still waste hours on commute time)
Somewhere between 30k and 40k people die in automobile-related deaths per year (Now I need a bit more data on this... but I feel trains are a shit-load safer, although their failures are more of a spectacle). This puts automobile-related deaths in at least the top 10 or 15 causes of death in the US.
related to the commuting thing... cars are kind of slow (over moderate to long distance, probably averaging a little less than 60 mph), compared to a train that can even go 120 mph (imagine something going 250 mph - for reference, an airliner goes around 500 mph)
... building on this, say you have a great job offer, but it is one or two hundred miles away... and all you have is a car, greyhound, or slow-ass Amtrak, well, MOVING is a big demotivator for taking that job. What if it didn't take forever to get there, and you didn't have to worry about parking, traffic, and gas - you could just get there in half-an-hour?
When you drive, you have to (A) worry about where to park, and (B) you have to consider how much you, say, drink (or imbibe in any other substance). If you're intoxicated, you shouldn't drive, and that might make your plans for the night... less fun.
Cars are expensive - you have to pay for registration, gas, maintenance, insurance, parking, you have to buy the damn thing. Sheesh!
Now don't get me wrong - cars CAN be convenient. If you NEED to be somewhere at a SPECIFIC time (maybe catching a plane... although trains would highly reduce the frequency of needing a plane), then a car is great. They afford a flexibity. However, they don't need to be necessary. Obviously what I'm proposing is... high-speed rail, commuter rail, and a wonderful bus system. And in those places where this infrastructure wouldn't be as useful (say bumf*ck nowhere), keep your car! As I said, cars/trucks/whatever have their place, and if not every single one of America's 200 million or so adults are driving an automobile, most of the problems automobiles pose are gone.
Why Rail?
In my complaints above, I've kind of covered why rail would be great, but I'll be more direct. Pretty much all of the problems I outline are gone (and if you DO end up commuting by car, if the majority of people are on public transportation... then the traffic problem dissolves :). Now what problems does this directly solve?
Social justice: A HUGE problem (which I outline in my history post) in inner city communities is that jobs are basically gone; the result is a vicious cycle, where people don't have enough wealth to get out, because they don't have jobs, and so on (there's more to it, but that's the basics). Well, here is a way to expand the radius of where one can work. This is not a SOLUTION, but it is part of a solution.
Solving the "Housing Crisis": Imagine Mopolis and Broomberg are about 120 miles apart - about a two hour drive. The housing crisis happens because today, Mopolis is booming and Broomberg is out-of-fashion. Everyone wants and builds a house in Mopolis, the housing price goes up ("housing crisis" ahhhhhh) ... but then tomorrow, Broomberg is booming, and Mopolis is not. Now everyone wants and builds a house in Broomberg, and so the housing price goes up there... and there is a glut of houses in Mopolis. This REALLY sucks for people in Mopolis, because they have to (A) sell their house in Mopolis cheaper than they bought it (the price has collapsed now that everyone is trying to sell their Mopolis house), and (B) have to buy an over-priced house in Broomberg - this can be tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wealth for families. Ahhh shit.
But what if you could just take a 200 mph train from city A to city B? That's about a 40 minute ride! Well now there isn't really a "housing crisis", because people in city A can keep their house and work in city B... and this is great, because the tax base in city A doesn't evaporate! So even though city A isn't booming, it can still do alright. Furthermore, individuals don't have to lose tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth, due to stupid real estate market dynamics. This also helps stop cities from suddenly dying (like what happened to Detroit).
Lost money, Labor and life hours: Cars eat up an ass load of time. I really hate driving. You can't do anything while driving. You have to deal with parking. Bla bla bla. Well in this system, you don't have that. Go on the train, read a book, watch a movie on your phone, whatever. Also, since you get to work so much faster, workers have more time to live their lives. Imagine working 8 hours a day, sleeping 8 hours a day... and having a two hour commute (car). Now imagine you just have a one hour commute (train) - an extra hour for your hobby, sleep, doing nothing, cooking, hanging with friends and family. Now imagine you save thousands of dollars anually not paying for a car. Wow!
The Environment: Cars (and airplanes) are terrible for the environment. Either you're burning gasoline, or you've got a battery with war minerals mined by small children. Ughhhh, please no. Give me a damn train.
The way this would work is (A) a high-speed rail (HSR) would take you long distance (think freeway travel). Connecting to the HSR stations are commuter rail networks, either for cities or multi-county areas, so you could then take the commuter train to whatever neighborhood you want to get to in a town/region. Then there would be (likely this would be more prevalent in cities than more sparse areas, where cars make more sense, but idk) a bus system, which circulates within a neighborhood. This gives infrastructure to get to wherever you need.
Furthermore, as cars would be less necessary, cities could be overhauled to be more pedestrian-and-bike-friendly; there could be rent-a-bike stations or whatever, giving you more "last mile" choices, if the bus isn't quite what you want. Hell, there's probably taxis too.
What's really nice is you have leg room while on the train, you are free to do other things while on the train (like not worry about colliding into other cars at 70 mph), you go faster than in a car, and it doesn't burn the environment like air travel and cars do.
Freedom of speech is quite a hot topic lately, and I believe it's important to outline two main thrusts of concern. The first is simply opposing various forms of censorship - "Twitter should ban X", "Youtube shouldn't regulate Y", etc. The second is infrastructural - that is, the development and deployment of infrastructure which can regulate and surveil speech. For example, Apple's recent move to scan every picture and message to evaluate if it is child pornography.
Privacy and "Freedom of Speech" Don't Exist in a Privatized Public Forum
The first thrust - so long as it isn't the government curtailing speech - isn't really about legal precedent, and I'm not really concerned about it, at least not in the way a so-called Libertarian might be. This is because private corporations, owned by Capitalists, are dictators of their enterprises - they have supreme power over their dominion. The erosion of freedom of speech on these platforms is therefore not surprising; insofar as it is an assault on the "public forum", this is a failure of the government to properly establish a public forum, not a failure of Capitalist dictators to... be nice?
These assaults from Capitalism are nothing new either. Many many labor organizers have been killed and persecuted for their work for over a century. So am I surprised? No. I believe the right-wing virtue signaling about "freedom of speech" on private platforms is utterly naive, when in good faith, and insidious, when in bad faith. This brings me to my next point.
Freedom of speech is under threat only insofar as the infrastructure is in place to censor and surveil. For example, it is possible to curtail speech right now, to surveil the population (even without all that NSA stuff!), because the "public forum" is controlled by private dictators - there's no law, no Constitutional article or ammendment, preventing Youtube from taking down your video!
This is the key point I want to make - whining about "Twitter infringed my freedom of speech" is misguided. Of course they did, because they can. The only way to prevent this from happening requires de-commodifying the public forum. This means, as I suggest, a federated forum based on open-source and interoperable technology (a la email), or as others argue for, a government-regulated forum (a nationalized Facebook, if you will). Both of these approaches aren't perfect, but until one of them happens, there is no such thing as "freedom of speech" in the public forum to begin with.
I want to get a fairly succinct summary of American history, in broad strokes. Much foreign policy is excluded, as I want to hone in on the two most salient issues in American history, those being of labor and race. Here is the summary so far, albeit incomplete.
Revolution, Unfinished - The 1776 declaration of independence kicked off a revolution, "that all men are created equal", which ostensibly ended in 1783, but had some glaring shortcomings. Most notably was the genocidal war against indigenous peoples and the enslavement of masses of black people in the South. In the antebellum period saw American politics at a "stasis" over the issue of slavery, which effectively was a victory for slavery. As institutionalized by Dred Scott v Sandford, black people were not safe anywhere in this country, even as they built so much. Enormous political tension built over the issue of which states could have slaves and not in the expanding West. Notably, the obtainment of the West was an imperialist venture - part stolen from Mexico (itself an imperialist residue of Spain), part bought from French colonists, part directly conquered from indigenous people, upon which great evils were committed (such as the Trail of Tears).
This tension was brought to a boil in the 1860 presidential election. The newly formed Republican party - with a chief goal of abolition of slavery - nominated Abraham Lincoln. The Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas, who advocated for settlers of each territory deciding if they should have slaves or not. Funny enough for those "The Civil War was over states' rights" types, this Douglas fellow was insufficiently pro-slavery for Southern Democrats, so they nominated their own Democrat, John Breckinridge, Vice President of outgoing Buchanan (and very pro-slavery, and ostensibly pro "states' rights"). Throw into the mix the xenophobic Constitutional Union's John Bell, and you have your candidates. The results? The very pro-slavery Breckinridge swept most of the south (and Bell taking the rest), and Lincoln swept most of the rest, resulting in a Lincoln victory. Immediately (as in 20 December 1860 to Feb 1 1861), Southern states began to secede. And the Civil War began.
Civil War - Thrown into the deadliest American war in history, northerners in general, and notably free black soldiers, trade unionists, and immigrants, fought on the side of the union to reunify the nation and liberate black slaves from the Southern aristocracy. It was a brutal war, with an enormous human toll. But while the war was prosecuted, major Capitalist figures, such as Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, began their ascendancy. Capitalist vultures would corner markets to sell to the U.S. government at artificially high prices, while the Republican government of the Union doled out deals giving the capitalists control over the transcontinental rail project. Rail would become (and freight rail still is) critical infrastructure in the future of the nation. Nascent labor movements, gutted by the call of the Civil War, had early spurts. The Southern aristocrats were eventually defeated, and Republicans had found themselves the party of Capitalists.
Reconstruction and the Gilded Age - In the wake of the Civil War, the Union sought to support and defend the black population in the South, as they were as impoverished as institutionally possible. There was something of a renaissance for black power in this era, which evoked extremely violent reactions from resentful whites and Confederates, as embodied in white-supremacist terrorist groups such as the KKK. Simultaneously, the labor movement started to take off in the industrious North, notably in the city factories, the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania, and the increasingly sprawling transnational rail infrastructure, among others. There was a standard reaction to labor - the press would smear striking workers as either foreign terrorists trying to end society, and/or they were Communists. Business interests would propagate these claims, and private police (such as the Coal and Iron Police), local police, local vigilantes, a private union-busting "KGB"/army known as the Pinkertons, state militias (which became the National Guard), and Federal troops would be sicked on strikers. This brutality, along with the insufferable living conditions of the time, contributed to the strength and militancy of the labor movement of the time. There were notable political conflicts at the time as well. More progressive (or at least tactically intelligent) leaders, such as Sylvis, pushed for inclusion and collaboration with black workers and women workers, to establish a unified labor movement in the face of Capitalism. This of course was an uphill struggle.
It was little helped by Republican cynicism. In 1876, the Republican party secured the support of Southern Democrats for Presidential candidate Hayes in trade for their (Republican) active support and defense of black people in the South. The Republicans (the party of Capitalists) recognized that (A) they did not care about black people enough to take a political risk on them, (B) this effort could stymie efforts to use Democrats as an alternative political vehicle to the Republicans for labor. By neutering the Democrats (by splitting them by region, and tethering Dixiecrat interests with Republicans), it would be very difficult for labor to get a significant foothold in power.
This was the death of Reconstruction, and the beginning of Jim Crow. This securing of power by the Capitalist class furthermore ensured their spiraling growths of power, in what is known as the Gilded Age. During this period, monopolists such as Carnegie and Rockefeller secured their power over the economy itself - over coal, rail, iron, etc. With this enormous power, labor reacted in kind, with exploding strength in organizations such as the Knights of Labor, and ensuing conflict as listed above.
Progressive Era and Rise of Jim Crow -
Postwar and Early Depression
New Deal Era (1930s - McCarthyism in the 50's) - The Depression brought on a new fear of Class conflict amongst the ruling class. Hoover's lack-of-policy policy was not cutting it. Remember, the Russian Revolution was just about 15 years prior to this, and fresh in the memory of the Capitalists. Thus, FDR became a candidate to channel the anxiety of the Depression into reform to avoid the explosion in Russia. But while his "first 100 days" are much lauded, it was actually his work throughout the whole of the 30s which transformed the United States. But why was he compelled for such change? Because of the ascendency of the labor movement. Splitting from the more conservative AFL, the CIO in the second half of the 30s embodied the rank-and-file industrial organization techniques, pioneered by Socialist and Communist organizers. CIO boss Lewis famously remarked, when chastised about the Socialist presence in the CIO, "Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?" Lewis was far from a Socialist, but recognized that they were highly effective at organization and generating class morale.
This rank-and-file organizing approach was critical for the watershed changes of the New Deal era. This style recognized that the true power lies with workers, as the whole economy runs on them working. They further recognized the value not just in strikes, but strategic striking, best exemplified by the GM "nerve center" in Flint, Michigan. They pursued these strategies, in spite of being risky and illegal, because they had the power to, and a world to win by exerting said power. There were setbacks and battles in this era, but it was characteristically a victory for the working class. We still enjoy the fruits of this era - Social Security, for example, although a lot has been gutted in the neoliberal years. While the New Deal had many shortcomings for the black population of the US, it still provided enormous benefits to many, and was strongly supported by black labor leaders such as Philip Randolph.
New Left Era (postwar?, 1960s, 70s) - In the postwar era, labor received a heavy political blow - the Taft-Hartley Act opened the door to "right-to-work" legislation (which allows workers to opt out of unions at their workplace, in spite of the massive benefits of being in a union and undercutting the solidaristic power of the union) as well as making secondary strikes illegal. That's when you strike at a place that isn't the site of the primary grievance, to apply pressure on supply chains and networks. It's HIGHLY effective, and the ruling class wanted to end that. Furthermore, in the opening days of the Cold War was McCarthyism, in which a hysterical Red Scare resulted in the purging of leftists, on account of being Communists (and therefore anti-American, pro-Russia, LoGiCaLlY), from the unions. Remember how the Socialists were the main organizing engine of the CIO? GONE. Taft-Hartley and McCarthyism were a one-two punch which transformed labor unions into what they are today - still great institutions for workers, but far far weaker. Labor's power base shifts from rank-and-file to an institutional voice within the Democratic party [a], an approach with sufficient inertia to maintain much of the New Deal framework for a couple decades.
Simultaneously, in the 1940s was part of the Great Migration. Millions of black workers, who had been tied to the land via Jim Crow laws (and thus totally destitute) were able to leave the plantation and seek better work. Where was work? The cities. So to the cities they went. Yet the United States during the 1950s began heavy investment in suburbia. Thus predominately white workers (who generally had more wealth compared to a Jim Crow indentured servant, obviously) moved to the suburbs in the 50s and 60s, and Capital followed their workers and investment. This opened an enormous problem - an economic hollowing of what would become "inner cities".
Erupting through extensive grass-roots organization, such as amongst black churches, was the Civil Rights movement, challenging the gross injustice of the Jim Crow system which oppressed millions of southern black people. Through ceaseless effort, the Civil Rights movement was able to secure the institutional equality of black people throughout the nation through Federal political action. Notably, the labor movement largely stood with the Civil Rights movement. Furthermore, Martin Luther King Jr., far from the whitewashed vision of him we have today, was more-or-less a Socialist. As a black socialist, a charismatic figure standing on the shoulders of America's powerful labor and Civil Rights movement, he was an enormous threat to the ruling class. On the precipice of the Poor People's Campaign, MLK was assassinated.
In the wake of this was enormous grief and violence. Of course, the discourse on this was extremely racist. Yet we should heed MLK's warning here - "the riot is the voice of the unheard". Millions of black workers had found themselves in cities which were now gutted of industry - there were no jobs to be had. In fact, the lack of any tax base with wealth meant that cities alone were incapable of raising the funds to deal with the social woes of their populations (federal action would be required). Many had no wealth either, because they and their families had been indentured Jim Crow workers for so long, and so they had no way to get out. Poverty and despair results in crime, and liberal Democrats such as Johnson realized this was a serious problem, and that the only path to fix this required an enormous social welfare program. That was the purpose of the Great Society program.
The main problem? Johnson was also waging a war in Vietnam, costing not only American lives but enormous sums of money. And thus Johnson was unable to sufficiently address the requirements for the Great Society, falling short. After this, the program faded, and the inner cities were left to poverty and despair. Following this failure, broke locales turned to the only other option (besides doing absolutely nothing) - rather than deal with the underlying cause, they'd deal with the symptom (crime), which was relatively cheap and easier to do locally. As crime rose (because of poverty), so did rates of incarceration. Couple this with our 13th amendment, saying that slavery is unconstitutional unless they're prisoners, and you have a nasty reminder of our racist roots.
Reaganomics and Neoliberalism (1980s - Today?) - Riding on big-money fueled propaganda in the 70s (along with general apathy, New Left ideals that started to veer from traditional labor, and stagflation), Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era. (Dark Ages of the 90s, when the Left retreated from its core class politics ([a])
Ever-controversial breadtuber Vaush has, as far as I'm aware, most visibly developed the idea of the "Nazbol Vortex". The idea of the Nazbol Vortex is that "we could win so much for workers, if only we would stop worrying about civil rights for people of color, or LGBTQ civil rights, or feminist civil rights" and so on. This is highly dangerous rhetoric that can easily lead to fascistic politics. I assess that this capitulation comes not from a framework which emphasizes the inherent flaws of capitalism in continuously generating class war (surprise surpirse), but from a frame of "insider vs outsider, anti-woke" politics. This is primarily because an insider-outsider framework is primed for a symbiosis of dissafected "leftism" with the far-right. This distinction is critical, as taking the bait on insider-outsider is pretty easy, and it can send people down a rabbit hole (the Nazbol Vortex) which forks away from class politics (even as insider-outsider uses the language of class politics). [Note: this isn't to say all insider-outsiders are going down the nazbol-vortex, this is only a warning that it is very easy to go down it from an insider-outsider perspective.]
A class-war perspective is prety standard on the Left. The idea pivoting on a basic distinction that bosses extract surplus value from laborers, laborers are broke, and thus our interests are in conflict - more or less. In this framework, it is no surprise that "the left" is an outsider - this is a symptom of the cause. Notice there is nothing morally redeeming about being an outsider for this classic leftist view - it is not our "outsider politics" which is a priori important, it is just flat our politics. As such, we recognize that (A) many people are disenfranchised not just along class lines, but along other distinctions (such as race, gender, etc.) and (B) far-right outsider politics (in "normal times") is "outsider" for good reason. There is nothing morally redeeming about being "outsider".
My criticisms of the insider-outsider framework should thus be evident. Shows like Krystal and Sagaar's The Rising (now they are independent of The Hill) highlight this framework - two ostensibly political foes find common cause as outsiders. The Establishment is "rigged against them both", and this is somehow a remarkable political fact worthy of an entire show. This is evidenced by commentators like Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald, who find common cause with far-right extremist Tucker Carlson. Why? Because they're both "outsiders" who rail against the "insiders". Wait wait wait. We can find common cause with an anti-immigrant racist who supports Viktor Orban??
This style of politics is quite dangerous, as it distracts from actually winning. While railing against "woke snowflake" politics (a stance I'm not totally opposed to, to be clear) as politically unviable, figures like Jimmy Dore will go on to suggest electorally moronic strategies, such as supporting third parties and undermining "the Squad". Worse, in pursuit of anti-"woke snowflake" politics, Dore will even defend sexual harrassment! This rabbit hole leads to both totally immoral and politically naive behaviors. So what is the point? What is the reasoning here?
The most charitable interpretation here (which I am inclined to provide to some such as Briahna Joy Gray) is that they believe that politics is the ONLY vehicle for change in the nation, short of violent revolution. Democrats are clearly not providing the change we need, and so no matter how crazy it is, we need to back something that isn't "the Establishment", because the establishment will never fix anything. Perhaps to say "unstable times requires bold action". This bold action should be constituted by brazen obstructionism by progressive Democrats (and their failure to do so shows their complicity in Democrat Establishment interests) and a political game of chicken with third-partyism. You need to hold a political gun to the head of the Establishment to get them to fix things. Aha, Democrat apologists, don't you see the Democrats are doing absolutely nothing productive??
Of course we see that Democrats are doing nothing. Of course, the retort that insider-outsider types loathe (because it's true) is that "Democrats are better than the GOP". Their reply is "so nothing will ever get done then." For a liberal, this IS the end of the conversation (saying "well hopefully the Democrats get it together" isn't going to cut it) - an insider-outsider type wins here, and this is why this sort of political framework is pervasive. This is why we need a class-focused politics. What does this entail?
Class-focused politics accepts the ineptitude of the Democratic party as-is, and does not look to them (for the moment) as anything but a bulwark against GOP-onslaught. No, a class-focused politics instead aims at developing the power of labor through unionization. We don't need to forge alliances with the far-right, as fellow "outsiders", we need to develop organizational strength in the primary way that has ever worked for the left - labor unions. If the working class is organized it can be an enormous hammer for the masses, in a manner that is unavailable now. Labor unions (and the looming threat of working class violence, if not rebellion, in the wake of the Great Depression) are what forced the Democrats to go as far left as they did in the 1930s - it wasn't insider-outsider politics (in fact, try to find someone more insider than FDR!). It is only in this vacuum of a coherent working-class voice that this insider-outsider politics makes any sense.
This is all to say, when an insider-outsider asks "shouldn't we be mad that AOC did/didn't do X?", we simply need to reply "I don't care. So long as labor is weak, she is the best we can get - our individual activist voices will never be sufficient to push Democrats as far left as is required. Only organized labor can do that. Your ceaseless whining about insider politics is at best politically impotent, and at worst aids and abets Republican efforts to secure power, which is objectively worse than Democrat control." Of course, we should criticize politicians when warranted, but we cannot expect them to save the world. They are politicians, not heros.
Does this mean than insider-outsider framework is totally bankrupt, and should be shot down like neoconservatism? Not quite. It is politically useful, and is not entirely misleading (just misguided). Furthermore, this attitude is quite popular amongst leftist political campaigns, largely because they ARE outsider races, and that kind of rhetoric has some appeal. The main issue is it is not the fundamental problem, and we should do our best to channel that insider-outsider rage to a more accurate class-war politics. This is critical, because an authentic class-war politics avoids the Nazbol Vortex. An authentic class-war politics acknowledges the intersection of race and gender issues in the matrix of social problems which persist today - go cry, anti-wokers! An authentic class-war politics finds no bed fellow in the far-right, because the far-right will always be antagonists in the class war, and in the overall war for civl-rights.
Slavoj Zizek often observes that (paraphrasing) "when arguing with a Nazi, if you end up debating over the details of 'if Jews really had all of the money, if Jews were really taking society over, if Jews were really doing this and that', you've already lost. No, the real question is why do you need this figure of the bogeyman Jew for your political identity?" [quoting from here] "The most efficient lies are lies with truths, lies which reproduce only factual data. ... Antisemitism, and other racisms, is wrong a priori, formally, absolutely. You know what I'm saying - it's not the question of, okay, 'Hitler was a little bit right, maybe there were too many Jews in culture or whatever, among journalists, but he exagerated.' No he was absolutely wrong, in what sense? Not because how he distorted facts, he was wrong even if he didn't, but he did distort facts. He was wrong because the way he used facts was in order to sustain a general lie about society, obfuscating its antagonisms, and so on so on. You can use correct data to serve a lie."
Today, there are many bogeyman that take this role for the far-right, but one that has grown to prominence is the crime wave. Many outlets - such as Media Matters and the Guardian - have gone back and forth on this debate, going over how the numbers maybe have grown, but just by a bit, and only for gun violence in particular, as if that means something. This debate isn't totally pointless, don't get me wrong - being aware of the data is totally necessary. However, if our political discourse centers on the details of crime in the United States then we are certainly to get nowhere. What if this crime wave is real? It seems likely. Ahhhh, but here comes the leftist critique.
Where do many of these crimes emerge from? Situations of impoverishment and desperation. In fact, if there is a crime wave, it lends support to a leftist social critique. We have been governed by the bungled hands of neoliberals for decades, of course the people are impoverished, and of course crime may therefore go up. So what then should we do?
Observing this situation, researchers John Clegg and Adaner Usmani in The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration suggest there are really three things a state can do: it can do absolutely nothing (that is, abdicate its responsibility as the monopolist of violence or whatever), it can crack down on the resulting crime with a police state, or it can address the underlying cause of social woes. Their research shows that maintaining a police state is in fact cheaper, and that the requisite social safety net we would need would be very expensive. Still, it would be worth it. This approach, while costly, would not require the electorally costly "defund the police", nor would it stoke attacks on the progressive left as being "pro-crime" or whatever. By addressing social woes (and thus address crime), any attacks on the left for being sympathetic to criminals would expose the Republicans (or moderate Dems) for their pathological malice for the poor.
This then brings us to the final of Zizek's critique. Why is the right-wing so obsessed with crime, when the real villain are far-right politicians who prevent us from properly fixing the social woes of our nation? Echoing Zizek's comments about Hitler's rhetoric, the focus on crime as itself a problem is formally wrong. The right-wing uses news about crime statistics and crimes in general - all themselves true factual data - 'to sustain a general lie about society, obfuscating its antagonisms'. This is not some relativist bullshit either, I am fully willing to accept the data - from a leftist perspective, the existence of such crime supports a view that poverty and impoverishment remain a disease on society.
This same criticism can be extended to many other problems today. The swelling in migrants coming to the United States is not formally, a priori, absolutely the problem. All of the data about the migrants coming in, the violence of drug cartels, all of this can be true. The lie is not the facts, it is the use of these facts to sustain a false narrative. These facts also support the correct assessment - that climate change, the Drug War, and policies of US interventionism have upended peoples across Latin America, displacing them, bearing violence down upon them, and forcing them to seek refuge.
Notably, this is NOT to call conservatives who echo these positions Nazis, this is borrowing a tool that was applied to Nazis. Similar criticisms can be made across the spectrum - focusing on the police, for example, amongst progressive groups with "defund the police". As I write elsewhere on the blog, police themselves are not formally the problem. The problem is capitalist interests (which will ensure that there will be some police, public or private, in the wake of a hypothetical "defund the police" program, as there must be a violent force to defend Capitalist property rights. We see this happening throughout the world, such as in South Africa and Colombia), the problem is the failure of the state to address issues of systemic racism and classism. Police are a symptom of the capitalist violence of our current system, and to focus on them is to obfuscate this structural problem. (In fact, I sometimes speculate as to the value of the "police and prison oversteps" part of my main page's sidebar. I have concluded it is still useful, as many on the right are not willing to bite the bullet on police brutality without "the facts". The point is not to support a fixation on police as a priori THE problem, but to provide a reference point for their factual oversteps)
A popular question of the day is "what to do about social networks?" A fairly popular and even bipartisan wave says we should "bust Big Tech" (or more tepidly, "regulate" it), but it's unclear what this actually means, or how it would work. The common retort to this sentiment is "a Facebook for different regions of the country (like Bell's breakup) doesn't make sense - we need to be big, because of the networking effect" - the network effect meaning that you and I only use a social network service because other people use it (no one users MySpace, because no one uses MySpace). And if you bust Facebook (the social network) into little Facebooks, "well, it doesn't make sense anymore, and so Facebook (the company) deserves monopoly power over Facebook (the social network)". This argument is however entirely fallacious, and is like stoking fear about pool noodles by pointing to water snakes. We don't need central control for the networking effect to exist.
I want to focus more on this core argument that "Big Tech" wags around, and why it is wrong in three main points. First, we misunderstand how much of Facebook (the social network) can be decomposed, with key parts under monopoly company control, while still preserving the network effect virtually unscathed. Second, we misunderstand the relationship of corporations and the networking effect - it won't be the breakup of Bell, and anyone who tells you that is either misinformed or misleading. Rather, it will be the establishment of a "market of competing services" (I translated to American :P). Elaborating on this, I'll make a quick third point - proprietary social networking software actually impedes the networking effect, by siloing user experience into different services (try talking to someone on Discord from Twitter). The solution is not to just break up Big Tech into smaller monolithic regional companies, nor to give the government control of these. **The solution is to open source and federate.** As a nice side-effect, users can also have more control, security, and privacy. The only compromise required is the powerful in Silicon Valley will lose power.
I will pick on Facebook for the most part, but this applies to any service - Youtube, Twitter, Slack, Discord, etc. Additionally, I will not hit on every single point that can be made, just the big structural ones (sorry, no cool conspiracies :P).
***First***, the public's understanding of what constitutes "Facebook" is frankly poor and inadequate. To most, "Facebook" is a monolithic experience - the network of friends we have on it, the ad services, the style and aesthetic of the website/application, the way our data is harvested and analyzed, and so on. We can conveniently sign up to various services using our Facebook account. Note though that these are component parts of the overall experience - even making these observations indicates that "Facebook" (the experience) is not an irreducible structure. What are the ramifications of this observation?
The core feature of the Facebook experience is the user's account and particular social network. It's imaginable then for Facebook (the company) to publish open-source "connectors" (tecnically called "APIs", think how power outlets standardize electric appliances' power draw, so you can buy any lamp and it will work at your house, even though that lamp designer wasn't involved in your house's construction) which allow software engineers to make their own "Facebook" application. This is done by engineering applications that "connect" into the core Facebook data and software via the API (the connector), but also allow the user to experience Facebook through different styles, different ad experiences, and different algorithms to sort what posts you see - this experience being a choice of service on the part of the user. Reddit is a decent example of this - there are handfuls of different Reddit applications out there, allowing you to have a Reddit experience of your choice. Some are more privacy respecting, some look a little nicer, some look more official. You can even access Reddit through multiple different applications if you want. At the end of the day, all of these applications are "fronts" that connect into the core Reddit structure. You can hopefully start to see how these elements can be decoupled. There is no "networking effect" reason for Facebook (the company) to have a monopoly over ads, application, core structure, and so on.
So which of these elements should Facebook (the company) actually have control over? This is a trick question, as hope will be clarified in the next point. Spoiler: no one should have exclusive control over any of these elements. That a company has exclusive control over all of these elements is quite disturbing.
***Second***, we misunderstand the networking effect - there is no need for central control (corporate or government) for social technology to thrive. The most obvious example of how this works is email. Email is, roughly speaking, an open *protocol* (sort of like how putting things in packages, and writing the destination address in a particular way is a "protocol" for mailing physical things - USPS, FedEx, UPS, everyone shares the basics, at least), and email is something which (for better or worse) we all use. You may have noticed that you can basically email anyone from any account - Hotmail, Outlook, Gmail, Proton Mail, Yahoo, your own email server - it doesn't matter. We are all able to communicate between services without a hitch, and able to choose between services based on various personal preferences. A core protocol shared amongst a diverse array of services has enabled email to remain an extremely easy, common and established way of getting in touch with somebody online. BuT iF yOu HaVe MuLtIpLe SeRvIcEs, YoU lOsE tHe NeTwOrK eFfEcT
If Facebook was "broken up" properly, there wouldn't be "Facebook West Coast" and "Facebook South", and you'd be totally disconnected from your aunt and uncle on "Facebook Midwest", or something like that, which is a ridiculous straw man (at least in the stupid sense). The core protocol would be open and available (like email), and anyone would then be free to develop their own service based on this protocol (like Gmail, Proton Mail, your own email server etc.). The users then get to decide which particular service they want (maybe they prefer the privacy options of one, or perhaps they get a small ad cut from another), while being able to interact with anyone on other services seamlessly because **they're services running the same protocol**. This approach is called **federating**, and is basically opens the floor for a "market of services". In this view, no group would have "control" over any given element, although they would be allowed to compete to provide different suites of advertisement, security, interface, etc.
If Facebook was busted into multiple mini-FBs, the experience for most users would more or less be the same, because each of the mini-FBs would still talk to each other through the shared protocol. If I'm on Facebook-A and I visit a user on Facebook-B, then my service fetches relevant user data from Facebook-B's server (like their profile pic, bio, public photos and posts, etc). If I message that user, then our message logs are shared on our respective servers. I might have ads on my Facebook-A (so I can use it for free), whereas Facebook-B might require an annual fee of a few bucks for server costs, but doesn't have ads.
But besides this "market of services", there is an even more important difference. In the event of a breakup, there would be little initial difference in user experience - in all likelihood, the initial breakup (if done correctly) would be largely unnoticed, as the service (the application) would likely be largely the same, regardless of provider; this would be prudent as an initial demonstration that very little changes for the user experience. *The fundamental difference, in this view, is who controls servers*. As it is now, Facebook (the company) has control over all relevant servers. This gives them enormous power. But in this federated view, we can (1) preserve the networking effect and (2) avoid a central monopoly control over data. Such monopoly control is increasingly leading to issues of censorship and control. For example, the far-right PM of India, Narendha Modhi, is able to blackmail Twitter into shutting down protest accounts by threatening Twitter employees in the country. Or Twitter themselves can unilerally ban people as they please. But the fundamental issue is not the politics of Big Tech themselves (they're powerful capitalists, they'll never be on "our" side), but that centralizing control (power) results in situations where power can, has been, and will be abused. By federating, this problem is rendered virtually moot - imagine trying to ban someone from email, it's a ridiculous idea. This does open the doors for extremist proliferation, but in spite of far-right whining, mainstream social media is still a breeding pool of far-right extremism, therefore I don't see how federating would make things worse (but that's another topic).
There's a ***third*** point as well - closed proprietary social network software actually *hinders* the networking effect. Try to retweet on Facebook. And what inter-social-network integration occurs is due to mergers, which increase the control and power of particular companies, such as Facebook's ownership and integration of Instagram. Is there a way to avoid this, and further, fix this? Yes, it's called **interoperability**. Basically, protocol that bridges between different social media services. This isn't just theory either, it exists as the open-source Matrix protocol (analogous to email), with the flagship service Element (analogous to a specific email provider, ie Proton Mail), and/or opening up interoperability between existing social networks is an idea with bipartisan congressional support via the ACCESS Act.
The most interesting feature of Matrix is that it allows users to communicate with people on various services - Twitter, Discord, etc - from a Matrix service (such as Element). It does this by bridging between these services, and thus breaking down the barriers between these different services. That is to say, open-source software *enhances* the network effect, as it is more amenable to interoperability.
This model - protocol/service decoupling, open-source federation, and interoperability - does not directly solve every problem. For example, in all likelihood, if the government is as lazy with trust-busting as they have been, there will likely still be giants in the social networking world who emerge (similar to how Microsoft and Google are giants in the email world). But it also means that fallacious "monopoly networking effect" argument is not on the table, it does mean it is harder to crack down on dissidence, it does mean more user control. Most importantly, while my faith in the government is quite low, it also means trust-busting of social network companies **makes clear sense** in a way it does not if you take Big Tech's arguments at face value (note that Big Tech has the easiest ability to push propaganda of virtually all industries). Furthermore, it makes social networks less juicy targets for hacks and targeting. Having all data under the control of a single entity not only makes it liable to abuse, it's also liable for targeting. By breaking up the monolith, data breaches do not necessarily have the same scale of damage possible. Note, for example, that Microsoft Outlook's servers recently suffered a huge attack, but that the effect on anyone using other email services was relatively minimal, seeing as most of their data is not on an Exchange server. But if there was one monolithic email provider, we all would have been potentially hit.
Monolithicness is not a price we **have** to pay for the networking effect, in fact it holds us back. We can and should decouple service and protocol (a la email), resulting in the obvious conclusion that multiple competing services (federation) are preferable to a monopolistic, monolithic one.
Voter fraud is a hot topic lately, even as it is basically non-existent. Conservatives want to require voter ID, but this kind of complication is unecessary. The easiest way to kill voter fraud is to mandate voting (and make the day a federal holiday). I doubt this is an original idea, but just thought of it, so decided to write about it.
See, suppose voting is mandated. This means you will probably pay a fine if you don't vote. But voting is made stupid easy - you can request a mail-in ballot, polling locations are made to always be nearby, and voting day is a federal holiday. How do you vote? You just come in to the poll, and identify yourself. That's it. How does this kill fraud? Let's evaluate the two fraud scenarios in a mandated voting world. Scenario one: Someone fraudulently votes on your behalf. Then you come in to vote, but it says you already voted! Well, then they take care of this like they do provisional ballots today, and the correct individual's vote is the one that is counted. Take scenario two: you come in and vote, boom, done. Then someone comes in and tries to fraudulently vote on your behalf. Oops, you already voted, and they get charged with trying to commit voter fraud. Now to be clear, these aren't big innovations in election ideas themselves - I'm pretty sure that's more or less standard procedure. The key is that because everyone has to vote, a third scenario doesn't happen: someone fraudulently votes on your behalf, but you don't come in and vote, and so that ballot isn't challenged. Mind you, this is rare, because you're really gambling when you come in and say who you aren't (if they happened to already have voted, boom, you're arrested). You have something of a one in three chance of getting caught, just to change a single vote... and likely have a hard time voting yourself, as this poll now recognizes you as someone else. It's a really stupid thing to do, even in our current system.
The point is though, in a mandated election scenario, that third scenario is impossible. So no fraudulent votes can get through. So in that case, why would anyone attempt to commit voter fraud? They wouldn't, it's way too risky for a stupidly small payoff (you would need tens of thousands of people, in a tight swing state, to conspire and somehow succeed... this is an incredibly impossible mission... you should have been canvassing). So this means that the cases of ballot clashes will be extremely small compared to the actual tally in each state. It's unlikely those ballot clashes will even span the difference of votes between winner and loser. But even if they did, because resolving ballot clashes will be a stronger evaluation of correct identity, they will result in a trustworthy vote anyways, so it doesn't even matter.
Also, we live in the 21st century. We can figure out who died and remove them from the voter list, without having to purge the whole list. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
There's a lot of good things about this. The two most obvious being (A) voters have to do practically nothing to be registered (except maybe come of age), (B) it's very easy to vote and avoids the documentation political thorn bush, (C) securely prevents fraud in a robust and effective way, and (D) generates enormous voter turnout. "What if I don't want to vote for any of the candidates?" Then just turn in a blank ballot. Mail in a blank ballot. Or fill in whoever you want. You'll still be checked off as having voted, and won't be penalized. Ideally, no one will ever know it is your ballot, only that you submitted it successfully. Although I don't know much about all of that stuff, that seems fair enough.
The idea that we need voter ID is already really tenuous (see scenario two for why you wouldn't want to try to commit voter fraud), but is basically mathematically moot with mandated voting. The advantage of mandated voting is extraordinary voter turnout. The advantage of a registered voter/voter ID system over that? Idk... less voters? Is that a good thing? So let's just do that, and not worry about voter fraud.
Sat, 03 Jul 2021 01:08:07 -0500
Modern American History: Points, Questions, Answers
These are various narrative pieces I've picked up. I'll try to put sources where possible.
Slavery, failure of Reconstruction, Redlining, racist policies in the South (and North) keep black population impoverished and disempowered, and tying masses of the black population to the land (thus missing the industrial boom) well into the 1940s
1. Franklin Delano Roosevelt + Labor leads to New Deal; socialist-organized (although not led) CIO strengthens labor (Kaye, McAlevey), although the unionization effort in the south lagged behind (in part due to the powerful and conservative politicians there, Republican AND Democrat)
2. After WWII, returning GIs would be harder to union-bust (it would look bad), and that meant it might be easier to unionize. As a result, the Taft-Hartley Act gets passed (with Republicans over-riding Truman's veto), which is heavily anti-union is does heavy damage to labor movement (Kaye)
McCarthyism guts the socialists from the labor movement, and as the most effective labor-organizers, this results in the modern beurucratic union, which begins the slow decline of labor, weakened institutional power, and heralds the "nationalist" turn (McAlevey)
Large wave of black (40% of Southern-born blacks) moved to the north in the 40s and 50s, as well intra-south rural-to-urban migration (and due to Jim Crow disenfrachisement, had little buying power for housing, had relatively little education, etc) - segregated nature of work also meant that migrating blacks would have to compete with already-present black population; Baby boomers led to a wave of young males, and more competition in the labor market (source)
Masked by gross overall prosperity, joblessness in inner/central cities grew as industry moving away (in part to escape union strongholds, and to take advantage of new infrastructure) from inner cities to suburbs and Sunbelt, and later on automation and foreign competition; already-poorer blacks were less able to leave (poor, low-credit, zoning, lack of public transport) than white counterparts (who themselves were often driven by racist aversion to blacks), and incentivized by federal investment in highway and home construction (which naturally invest away from cities, and into the suburbs) (source)
The post-FDR liberals (ie Kennedy, Johnson) unable to (but both clearly wanting to help, accurately identifed the root causes of the problem, and putting a lot of resources to the problems - just not enough) properly develop federal programs to help inner cities (with dual problems of much investment instead being allocated to suburbs, and the tax-base that funded city social programs having fled) (my expansion: the inability of inner cities to fully integrate in the working black population was in part due to the undermining of labor unions, starting in 1947, thus their work on the ground killed, as well as the political pressure they applied to FDR being much weaker on Kennedy and Johnson) (source)
As a result of the failure to deal with rising social problems, the resulting (symptom) rise of crime lead to local and state governments needing to use the cheapest option to appease the voting base - punitive law enforcement, and the beginning of the carceral state we know today; the prosperity outside of inner cities stigmatized those that were suffering, and the strained social control institutions reduced cost of crime by reducing risk of getting caught; All of this lead to a death spiral, collapsing communities, and the rise of turning to illicit means of income generation (source)
In reaction to this rising crime, defying the structural liberal criticisms (which are more expensive than punitive measures), Conservative law and order talking points (which exploited racist tropes) resonated; this same 'get tough' politics rose in popularity in black communities as well (source)
'The point is that waging an all-out war on the root causes of crime is equivalent to the task of building a large, redistributive welfare state that takes from the rich to give to the poor.' ... 'Thus, liberals did not fail to imagine what ought to have been done. Nor did they fail to attempt to do what ought to have been done. So why, exactly, did they fail? At root the issue is not one of attitudes or motivation, but capacity. The ultimate causes of liberal failure lie outside the state, in the incapacity of the American poor to compel redistribution from the rich.' (due to weakened labor power I'd say, but also the authors point out the costs of the Vietnam War) (source)
Racism was still a nucleus in this, but it's fundamental genesis wasn't in the 60s, it was during the Great Migration, when the North failed to integrate the working black population (source)(my expansion: again, in large part due to the early death of socialist-organized labor unions) (my expansion: rooted in policies such as red-lining)
'In short, we are arguing that American exceptionalism in violence and punishment is a symptom of America’s exceptional history. America has so many prisoners because its development path yielded some unique social problems, while its political economy prohibits redistribution from rich to poor on the European model. In a sentence, the story of American mass incarceration is the story of the underdevelopment of American social democracy.'; 'The failure at the federal level thus matters not because the federal government was the proximate agent of mass incarceration. It was not: neither under Johnson nor under later administrations. Rather, it matters because the persistent failure of the federal government to attack the root causes of crime left the task of managing the rise in crime to state and local governments. In this climate of high anxiety about crime, state and local legislators, mayors, city officials, prosecutors, and sheriffs made careers out of responding to a panicking public.'; 'One of the reasons for this is simply institutional. In the division of labor that characterizes American federalism, police, prisons, and the courts are mostly the responsibility of the states and municipalities, while most of the major social programs in American history have been invented and funded at the federal level. When local and state officials were bombarded by panicking electorates, it is no surprise that it was mainly to these tools that they would turn.'; 'However, this is not the whole story. After all, some states and municipalities do attempt to craft their own social policies. They can raise taxes and spend in redistributive ways. Thus, another answer is that they were subject to the same constraint that bound the federal government: the absence of a constituency that could force the rich to give to the poor.; (source)
Question: There is truth in Alexander's account of the carceral state though. The Drug War has lead to a large chunk (around a quarter) of the carceral population. What about Nixon's southern turn? Is racism deployed in more of a political manner, which enables impunity at the local level?
In the 70s, a corporate propaganda blitz (ie Koch brothers, Coors) further damaged the remaining liberal and labor position - following an insanely bad Carter administration, Reagan took office, and carried out an enormous effort to weaken labor, enact neoliberalism (ie bipartisan privatization with a parallel 'culture war'), amongst many other small tweaks to strengthen the position of Republicans to this day, and cemented the 'neoliberal' ideology of today. (Andersen)
Many Republicans like to fearmonger that Socialists are trying to do this and that, destroy American values, bla bla bla. Well, to be quite honest, I don't know what they're talking about. So I want to go over some policies I would support - as a Socialist, with the first aim being (1) maintain prosperity, social cohesion and peace in society, and (2) proceed towards a more equitable future. This largely entails pursuing something that feels and sounds a lot like Social Democrat policies, while institutionalizing some support for increasing worker power. We cannot impose total, fundamental change - that is for the workers and people to decide.
In politics, a Socialist is not a elephant-in-a-china-shop, at least legislatively (rhetorically though, firepower is always good!). We recognize the constraints of the system at large, and most Western Socialists would likely recognize that the evolution into Socialism should be a "bottom-up" task, not a top-down, imposed one from Washington D.C. It is the Socialists aim to empower workers, to do so effectively with American taxpayer dollars, and maintain what is good about the nation. Most importantly, realizing the constraints of political power, most Socialists would be happy to pursue good policy which empowers each American.
These are not just a smattering of policies. There are three goals in mind: (1) future-proof the economy to boom in the 21st century by not only considering climate crisis, but booming because of it, (2) invest in neglected communities, such as inner cities and rural "fly-overs", through public trains, transits, and incentives for more walkable cities and communities, and (3) empowering individuals to live happier, healthier lives with a voice in the place they work in. This is not just a grab-bag of policies and goals, but a vision of the future, utilizing intelligent policies which dovetail together.
Universal Healthcare and taming Big Pharma - this is a doozy, but it's got to be at the top of the bill. Americans are dying and suffering because of this failure.
Ending the Drug War.
The PRO Act - Unions are fantastic tools in the arsenal of the working class. We need to make it easier to unionize, easier to take action, easier to act in solidarity with other workers. The most cost effective way to regulate business is to let the workers, who know how that business runs, to regulate their bosses with direct action. It's up to Capital Hill to help workers do so.
"For the People" Act and the John Lewis Act - reinforcing the Voting Rights Act (John Lewis Act) and defending against voter restrictions and gerrymandering is of tantamount importance right now. Together, I believe Socialists and Democrats could find common ground here - in fact, nearly every Democrat supports these bills, so it shouldn't be that difficult.
Increased taxes on the wealthy - this one is obvious. Nothing that crazy, but I'm not a tax wonk, so I don't know.
Abolishing (or close-to) standardized testing - standardized testing is the absence of education. We must end this awful practice, and go back to actually teaching.
Federal legislation in support of ESOPS/Meisner-esque plan - this would allow a means of workers to start to own and have an institutionalized voice in the enterprises they work at.
Federal support/subsidies/grants for worker cooperatives - this would help worker cooperatives surmount the initial investment difficulties of worker coops.
Right to Repair (R2R) - This is a big one. In this pandemic, hospital staff were unable to repair crucial equipment, and farmers currently gamble every time they turn their tractors off. Additionally, consumers are forced to waste hundreds and thousands of dollars buying new products, when in a R2R America, they could simply repair the thing (or have a third-party shop repair it). This is also a huge bonus for the environment.
Unpopular position: Nuclear power. A typical nuclear power plant can produce over twice (if not more) than the Hoover Dam [1][2]. We are hurdling towards climate catastrophe, and nuclear power is the cleanest way to get there right now. Eventually, we can wind down nuclear power in favor of wind and solar, but for now, I'd rather be running nuclear than natural gas and coal. That's the reality of our choice right now. Nuclear is highly safe these days. We need it.
High Speed Rail + local-rail: Another great issue facing us today is two-fold: (1) the alienation of a car-driven world, and (2) the climate impact of driving around cars. We all know the points for (2), even for electric vehicles, so nevermind that. Problem with a car-driven world is that to get anywhere, you need this expensive hunk of metal; cities have to be designed around giving space to these hunks of metal. Instead, highly efficient mass transit can allow us integrate and re-imagine communities in new ways. You could commute in from Detroit to Chicago to work, and take the tram downtown to hang out with friends, even get drunk, without worrying you'll have to drive. How to power this massive network? In part, nuclear power.
(Internet) fiber-for-all: Joe Biden and the Democrats appear to be considering this, and Gov. Newsom of California appears to be looking at something in the same ballpark. Fiber provides high speed internet, it is MUCH more cost effective than our current infrastructure... and the people opposing it are of course private companies, who rudely say rural people should be happy with the internet they have! We can do far better, invest in the country, so a 21st century economy can boom.
Cybersecurity, de-privatizing security, and going open-source: Open source is the most secure model for cybersecurity, this has been found true over and over. A Socialist government (or any government) should seek to (A) extensively fund open source projects to support their independence of private interests, and (B) use this field to develop better security protocols. Private security means are too slow to update and fix, as well as being much more vulnerable overall.
Public housing with intelligence dispersal and funding. - We need to learn the lessons from the mistakes we experienced in public housing, while also realizing they are a necessary part of a just and equitable future. We need housing which isn't subject to the whims of profits, no amount of regulation can fix this problem. Private housing can still exist, and much of the project would involve buying property from said land owners.
Expanded Childcare, raising the minimum wage - I put these together because it is the aim here to (A) relieve parents of the scheduling stress involved with having children and needing/wanting to both work jobs, and (B) by raising the minimum wage, to reduce the amount of hours parents need to work, and therefore have more time with their families. Combined with affordable public housing, high-speed rail, fiber-for-all, and general infrastructure investment, we hope to give Americans jobs for the moment, communities for businesses to bloom, and infrastructure to live comfortable and fulfilling lives. Businesses that struggle to meet the minimum wage can file for government support.
Investment into desalination technology and proactive sea-level-rise measures - we are hurdling towards a water crisis. We need to be prepared for when it hits. What costs us $1 today will cost $100 and 5000 lives later on.
It is my belief that many of the issues we face today - declining communities, despair, police-community tensions - these emerge from economic despair, a nation buckling under the weight of the moment, without the infrastructure to support it. By investing in communities, we can give people dignity, jobs, hope. We can draw inspiration from our past, but look to the future towards a century of prosperity.
The Socialist's goal is not to top-down institute socialism. It is to empower the worker, to empower the citizen, who for so long has been so deprived of their rights that they do not know what they deserve, so that they see what is right. To taste prosperity.
I want to be able to take a train, bus, metro, whatever - and go downtown, have a drink, go on a date, grab some food. Take it back, not have to worry about the whole thing getting hacked. I want to be able to get to work, and have a voice there. If I get married and have kids one day, I want us to both be able to pursue our dreams, and still have time to be a family together. I want to be able to have a 21st century business no matter where I'm at, in the city or the country. I want to be able to repair my stuff. I want to live in a prosperous nation.
The second amendment is one of the most controversial parts of the Constitution, which, well, constitutes the United States. Lots of Americans cherish it. Yet in the wake of police shootings of citizens bearing arms, a question I saw posed on the Libertarian subreddit made a good point: if the police can shoot you for having a gun, do we actually have the right to bear arms?
Qualifiers: As I've posted elsewhere, I'm not calling for police abolition (for specific reasons regarding capitalism and power). Additionally, I'm not calling for violent revolution - as I've posted elsewhere, this would be highly counterproductive today, and along with the destabilization of society for normal people, it's not very preferable. I'm only pointing out the intent behind the Constitution - the thing that governs us.
While a lot of gun people tout that they abide by the law, they obey the law, they only use their gun to hunt, etc., the purpose of the gun, as per the Constitution, is quite transparently to prevent a tyrannical government from getting out of control, to 'secur[e ... a Free State'. Guns are part of our legal institution to prevent the government from getting out of control. This isn't a prescriptive position, mind you, only descriptive - there is a lot of technical debate over this issue, and I won't get into that, only these abstract principles, as they are all that is relevant to this issue.
It's key to remember this when discussing issues about guns in the US, because, right or wrong, cops shooting people because they have guns is frankly a violation of the Constitution. Is this a harsh position for cops? Of course it is. But the US Constitution was not written to empower the state, it was written to put the state in check, and empower the citizen.
This argument is important because there are three layers to the police brutality violence, even outside of issues of racism. The first is that a normal human, upon seeing a person with a gun, will probably be scared. But second, a cop shouldn't just be a normal person - they shouldn't be people that get trigger-happy in these situations. But third, cops need to also take into account second ammendment rights. Are these sane requirements? That's not the question. If we are going to keep the second amendment, then this is a consideration that needs to be had. Killing people for possessing a weapon (even in a stressful situation, although threats to life are a different situation) is a 2nd amenmdment violation.
What's the fix here? Economic democratization. People are destitute, and alienated from the value of their labor. They are forced into terrible situations, often putting them crossly with the state. To avoid this, give them the value of their labor, so they won't be forced into these situations.
The people have power, but only so long as they can use it. Here, the theory of Michael Mann is useful. Now I haven't read his last three volumes, but am generally aware of the structure of his theory - there is political, ideological, economic, and military power networks. Let me give an example of such analysis, when Mann discusses the burghers as the 'end' (more or less) of feudalism (I have put at the end of the post). Mann's framework is about the sources of social power - when we evaluate these sources, we can identify the networks which constitute a certain society or civilization. Key to notice is that fundamental change occurs at the interstices of institutional power.
Key to the criticism I have is that the dominant and dynamic framework today - Capitalism - is immanently self-reinforcing, exploiting institutionalized sources of power to the fullest extent to push its interests. Capitalism dominates the economic power source in a fairly obvious way, but notice that here there is a self-reinforcing mechanism - the more profit generated by a capitalist, the more money they accrue. That money can be used to dominate the military, political, and ideological frameworks. On this last point, which is easy to overlook for the American positivist, Zizek would adamantly point out, we do not live in a post-ideology world, we are deeper in it now than ever. Fisher puts it in his book 'Capitalist Realism', 'it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism' - many of us are so entrenched in capitalist ideology that we cannot imagine a world (with all of the luxuries, like grocery stores, drinkable water, the internet, as opposed to some stone-aged post-apocalyptic nightmare) without capitalism. So much of what we do today is about how we as a consumer can refashion ourselves as unique individuals who consume responsibly, worry about our carbon footprint, etc., even as we all know this is a superficial game, and the real polluters are the capitalists. It's more subtle than this, but you get my point, I hope. This system leads to something like 'liberal authoritarianism' - privately allowed to do whatever (actually, encouraged to - be yourself!), even allowed to criticize the system (but actually organizing labor is a different story), and allow 'Big Brother' to take care of things. Every now and then, maybe you get to vote - but really this is unnecessary for efficient operation (as in the case of 'Capitalism/Socialism with Chinese characteristics'). This is the world we live in.
The main problem here is that our global framework centralized power like never before - this happens in the economic, Capitalist sphere, where the capitalists say jump, and the workers ask how high. And power, in the hands of the few, inevitably leads to brutal negligence and mismanagement. How then can we decentralize power? Turning to a Mannian analysis, we can confirm the suspicions of leftists since Marx: the most intersticial aspect of this entire framework is labor (and thus the one most capable of 'changing the system'). This is because labor is largely excluded from the benefits of this system - these are the people 'who suffer what they must'(? - the question mark, as Varoufakis reminds us to put). They are exterior to the siphons and bellows of the capitalist machine. Political power is essentially neutered in the face of capitalism, because capitalism fuses the two together into a political economy. At best, a political route promises the social democracies of Europe which are failing - see the rise of the far right, the yellow jacket protests, the surrender in COVID-policy, threats of coups in France, etc (that is to say, European-style social democracy is not a real option). Military power is not a way to go, as the United States is unbeatable, and threats of violence agains the US state will only destabilize the world. And ideological power is extremely difficult to beat, at best offering memes for the left. We lack the capital and institutional power to mount an effective media revolution - and to get those pre-requisites, we need changes in the economic (or political, which leads back to economic) power network. Memelords are insufficient to change the institution - more likely, Capitalism will co-opt their efforts. While there is a moral argument to make (and I endorse) for workers rights, there is also a pragmatic one. The economic sphere is at the heart of the Capitalist system, but it is also the location of interstitial worker power (which a Mannian analysis implies is the most likely source for a robust change to the system). Furthermore, by learning from the mistakes of Leninism/Stalinism, we can avoid the pittrap of vanguardism, and instead support democratic workplaces. This diffuses the immense economic power given to enterprises in a market amongst its constituent workers, lowering the capacity for such power to be abused.
Here then we flip the power imbalance between economic and political - the United States government could support this effort, with NIH/NSF style grants (among other things), tax incentives, and so on. The main point is that power is diffused from "the 1%", and given to the workers, giving them a better life, and who will have less ability to abuse the international system. As Western Capitalism is currently the primary driver for international exploitation, this will also provide relief to other nations around the world. Capitalism is self-amplifying, but if you swap out its core, that power feedback is weakened. Strongmen, militias, and corrupt governments around the world would no longer be propped up by the multinantional corporations such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, or Glencore (for example). Large companies couldn't sew corruption and destruction in a nation, such as Odebrecht. Importantly, this requires financial reforms which fundamentally outmode exploitative and explosive capitalism. How would this happen?
This would happen via political means, back in the States, the beating heart of Capitalism. As worker democracy would be on the rise, the people would in turn would have (by definition) much more class consciousness. They would see the unnecessary exploitation and destruction wrought by finance markets, and move to regulate them to an appropriate level. This is to say, in a Mannian sense, worker democracy in the US would enable a 'reorganizational spurt, a regrouping both of the myriad networks of society and of its dominant power configurations'.
This would still allow keeping the market. The market has to exist for now, largely to maintain global stability. Enterprises can work just as well (or better) under worker control, rather than a dictator. That is, if we treat enterprises like a black box (and not looking if they are constituted as a dictatorship [capitalism] or democracy [socialism]), the market functions the same. This is not to say that economic networks won't evolve following this reorganization (they probably will), but the process will not require revolution or central planning. Like Capitalism, it will evolve into new forms, adapting to the historical contingencies of its moment. Markets are something we have right now, and we can reorganize within the black box of the enterprise to decentralize power, un-yoking the power of wealth from the ideological, political, and military spheres.
Mann Excerpt
But let us try to look at the military innovations in a different, organizational light. Of course, they had economic, ideological, and other preconditions. But they also had an intrinsically military, emergent, interstitial power of reorganization - a capacity through particular battlefield superiority to restructure general social networks distinct from those provided by existing dominant institutions. Let us call the latter "feudalism," - comprising a mode of production (extraction of surplus from a dependent peasantry, interrelation of peasant plots of land and lords' manors, delivery of surplus as commodities to the towns, etc.); political institutions (the hierarchy of courts from the vassal to lord to monarch); military institutions (the feudal levy); and a European-wide ideology, Christianity. ''Feudalism" is a loose way of describing the dominant way in which the myriad factors of social life, and, at the core, the four sources of social power, were organized and institutionalized across medieval western Europe. But other areas of social life were less central to, and less controlled by, feudalism. Social life is always more complex than its dominant institutions because, as I have emphasized, the dynamic of society comes from the myriad social networks that humans set up to pursue their goals. Among social networks that were not at the core of feudalism were towns and free peasant communities. Their further development was relatively interstitial to feudalism. And in a crucial respect two of them, in Flanders and Switzerland, found that their social organization contributed a particularly effective form of ' 'concentrated coercion" (as I shall define military organization later) to the battlefield. This was unsuspected by anyone, even themselves. It is sometimes argued that the first victory was accidental. At the battle of Courtrai the Flemish burghers were penned against the river by the French knights. They were unable to engage in their usual tactic against charging knights - flight! Not desirous of being slaughtered, they dug their pikes into the ground, gritted their teeth, and unhorsed the first knightly rank. It is a good example of interstitial surprise - for everyone concerned.
But it is not an example of "military" versus "economic" factors. Instead it is an example of a competition between two ways of life, one dominant and feudal, the other hitherto less important and burgher or free peasant, which took a decisive turn on the battlefield. One way of life generated the feudal levy, the other the pike phalanx. Both forms required the myriad "factors" and the functions of all four major power sources necessary for social existence. Hitherto one dominant organizational configuration, the feudal, had predominated and partially incorporated the other into its networks. Now, however, the interstitial development of aspects of Flemish and Swiss life found a rival military organization capable of unhorsing this predominance. Military power reorganized existing social life, through the effectiveness of a particular form of "concentrated coercion" on the battlefield.
Indeed the reorganization continued. The pike phalanx sold itself (literally) to rich states whose power over feudal, and town, and independent peasant networks was enhanced (as it was also over religion). An area of social life - undoubtedly a part of European feudalism, but not at its core and so only weakly institutionalized - unexpectedly and interstitially developed a highly concentrated and coercive military organization that first threatened, but then induced a restructuring of, the core. The emergence of an autonomous military organization was in this case short-lived. Both its origins and its destiny were promiscuous - not accidentally so, but in its very nature. Military power enabled a reorganizing spurt, a regrouping both of the myriad networks of society and of its dominant power configurations.
The far-right relies on fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) to push their platform. But as FDR said, 'all we have to fear, is fear itself'. This was for good reason - fear is harnessed by the right-wing to push for a malicious agenda. These rely on divide-and-conquer strategies and unfounded conspiracies, supported at best by anecdotal evidence and mistaking correlation for causation. Instead of turning to the darkness, the left looks to the light - furthering the purview of democracy.
First, let's be clear - politicians that have relied on FUD and bigotry have done nothing but make the world worse. The Confederacy, anti-black racism and the KKK, racism against Italians, Irish, and other 'have-to-earn-your-whiteness' Europeans, fear and hatred of gay people and transgender people - always the claim is that somehow we are saying these people are okay too fast, and that somehow they aren't working hard. But that has never fixed anything - only hurt people. What has fixed things is workers coming together, and demanding a better life. Because here's the thing - in a Capitalist world, Capitalism is king. The person to be mad at, the person to make demands of, is the boss (the people who work the least, are the people the right never blames). The people to organize with is everyone else in the working class. It's economics which fuels the non-economic (and economic) antagonisms of our day, and to fix them, we must fix the economics. For the sane people in the world, what platform can we use to best leverage our electoral power?
The position of the left, even non-anti-Capitalist 'leftists', is that Capitalism accretes wealth and power at the top. So to fix the problem, we have to do something about that. Policy must be made to address this - this policy must be able to reign in the outsize power of companies over the destinies of nations and lives of workers. On this issue, Republicans are pretty hopeless. Even if they did institute regulations against Big Tech (since they hate them so much now, and I'm sure it would be ugly), they are so beholden to other Capitalists, particularly oil, that they are unlikely to do anything to fix things. So what about the typical Democrat? At best, Biden is a weak social democrat. Unlikely, but it's at best. Cause otherwise Biden does almost nothing, which is better than Republican deregulation and attacks on rights, but it is obviously insufficient.
A little further to the left you have 'progressivism' or social democracy (confusingly, different than democratic socialism) - the idea is to tax the rich more, and to establish a stronger social safety net - universal healthcare, childcare, etc. And I think these policies are necessary, but they're insufficient. We'll ultimately run into the same sociological problem, manifesting right now as turmoil in social democracies in Europe such as Germany and France - Capitalism still ultimately is in the service of making money for the wealthy, and isn't concerned with making money for the working class. But, besides spending time with friends and family and recreating, we humans want the freedom to create, to make, to innovate. But in our current system, to engage in these activities, the vast majority must work for a Capitalist(s), where the fruit of our labor is alienated from us. This means when you make something (be it on the factory line, or in the design room), you don't own the legal rights to that thing. Your corporation does. No matter how nice life is outside of work, you are still dependent on work - and that means you spend 40-80 hours a week working for a dictator.
The utopianism of social democracy is that government can regulate Capitalism. The problem is two-fold, but first, requires recognizing that in a market economy (which Capitalism is an example of), wealth is power. This is because wealth is the capacity to buy commodities, invest, to buy other businesses out, to afford expensive legal campaigns, and to lobby and corrupt - basically, an outsize advantage in any 'conflict'. Given this, the first problem is that (1) in Capitalism, power accumulation is positively enforced. The more wealth (power) you have, the more you are able to use your wealth (power) to bend the system in your favor, accelerating the subsequent accumulation of wealth (power). (2) As a result, whatever barriers a social democracy puts up, Capital will overcome. This may be by impoverishing communities by 'shipping jobs overseas', this may be by buying out media so that positions that are 'too left' aren't aired (and simultaneously convincing people that 'wokeism' is fundamentally what the Left is about), this may be funding the campaigns of preferred candidates. For example, France - a bastion of social democracy and workers rights - was forced to elect a banker because the other choice was a fascist. The results have been disastrous.
That is to say, social democracy is a respectable sloth trying to combat a jaguar (anyone who thinks controlling Capitalism is an issue of democracy vs dictatrship should take a close look at either the USSR (failed) or China (gave in to Capitalism)). And I'm happy to vote for a social democrat - I'd be enthused with our current choices. But it's extremely insufficient. So what's the solution? A radical plan to nationalize everything? No!
The plan is to increase worker say and ownership in the enterprises they work at. This has manifold good consequences, and chief among them are (1) decentralizing power away from a concentrated elite, and as a result creating a more tame-able market economy. (2) Giving workers ownership of their work. When they innovate something, a worker should get more payoff than just the potential pay raise. This is the easiest system to transition into that isn't fundamentally unstable. As we face immanent catastrophes of climate, we need to act now. Leftism is not only just, it is correct.
I'm gonna talk about a few different things - but they all come together. The topic is power, and how it is a dangerous and volatile resource we must design carefully around.
The Lord of the Rings is a great high-fantasy novel, and it's not just because the story is great. If the story was good, it would just be another cool book. No, Tolkien has a very interesting view of power and evil (among many other things) that makes the Lord of the Rings a great testament about the nature of evil. One of the salient themes is power. Sauron's Ring embodies power - to put it vulgarly, it corrupts whoever bears it. Notably, Gandalf robustly rejects bearing the ring, because he is a person (technically a maiar :P) of great power, and therefore more likely to be corrupted by the ring and do great evil with it. It ends up with Frodo, because, among other things, hobbits are not the most powerful creature. Thus, they are able to better resist the corrupting power of the One Ring.
A lesson from LOTR is not just 'evil is bad, good is good', it's that power itself is a corrupting force. Sauron is the villain, yes, a person with malicious intent. But the real tribulation is resisting the ring. See, the Ring could be used by Gandalf to probably defeat Sauron - but this would also come at an unknown cost, and potentially replacing Sauron as the new tyrant. The Ring corrupts, and to defeat the intensive, centralized military power of Sauron, they can't resort to the same intensive, centralized power of the ring. No, they must destroy the Ring, as the Ring contains a lot of spiritual potency of Sauron.
This isn't just a cool detail in the lore of LOTR (that the Ring has a lot of Sauron's spiritual vitality in it). It also suggests how Tolkien views evil - evil is sustained by the existence of absolute, centralized power. See, the folk of Middle Earth don't defeat Sauron in war and battle; war and battle are waged as a necessity to bide time and distract. Even in the War of the Last Alliance (when Sauron loses the ring), Sauron isn't totally defeated, because Isildur doesn't destroy the ring. By destroying its existence, you destroy central power - the spiritual vitality of Sauron becomes 'decentralized' when the ring is melted down in Mount Doom. Victory can only be had by treating the root cause, not the symptom. And anyone who believes they can wield the One Ring wisely only sustains the existence of evil. Tolkien suggests, through LOTR (and his other books) that to understand evil, we must understand power.
There's a book (actually a four-volume series) I like, and haven't quite finished. It's by sociologist Michael Mann at the University of Cambridge/UCLA (lots of plane-rides?), and it's called The Sources of Social Power. Now I'm not a sociologist, so I'm not totally attuned to the criticisms to levy here, but I enjoyed it. The book takes the task of answering 'where does power come from? What is it? What are its forms?' I'm paraphrasing here, idk if it ever explicitly says it asks those questions, but it more or less does. What made it such a fun read, to me, is it walks through history, as if a great sociological experiment, showing how Mann's theory plays out.
It's been a hot second since I read Mann, but the gist is basically that there are four sources of social power - ideology, military, economics, and political. But Mann also defines two axes to describe the nature of power - there is (1) authoritarian to diffuse, and (2) intensive to extensive. By crossing them together, you get four kinds of power: intensive/authoritative [IA] (ie army command structure), extensive/authoritative [EA] (ie militaristic empire), intensive/diffused [ID] (a general strike), and extensive/diffused [ED] (market exchange). So, to put it briefly, power typically comes from the four sources (military, political, etc.), and is expressed in one of the four kinds (IA, EA, etc.). And, I'm gonna butcher this, but the 'final piece' is more or less that the form of power that emerges is often a natural consequence of the history, geography, etc. of that moment.
For Mann, to refer to society being built on dimensions (ie individual, family, village, etc.) is wrong - society is a holistic expression of power networks intertwined and reticulated. Not that this can't be understood, but to break it down into dimensions is asking the wrong question. Mann discusses how various economic considerations made the Swiss phalanx emerge as a new intense/diffuse military power in the middle-ages - but was quickly co-opted by centralized power.
For me then, the great lesson from Mann's book is how to design, constitute, and build political economies which are resistant to evolving towards centralized power. In the vocabulary of a physicist, you can control the boundary conditions of a box, but you don't directly control what goes on inside the box. For example, what if I force there to always be a higher temperature at one boundary and a lower temperature at another? How will this forced non-equilibrium effect the system? Or what if I have a chemical, such as ATP, always at a higher concentration somewhere in the box relative to the rest of the box - how would this effect the system dynamics? You can control the situation at the boundaries, and what happens from there is nature. The lesson is, you can't control everything - you can control the boundary conditions. If you have a good model of the system, you can well predict what happens with different boundary conditions, and if you have a bad model, you can't.
For example, even if you have a charitable view of the USSR (I do not), you might say that they tried their best, trying to control the economy through price control, state-mandated labor, and centralized planning. That does not mean the economy will turn out that everyone will have food, resources, etc. - that just sets the boundary conditions for which the system evolves. Or take climate change. We don't directly control the climate. But by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we are dramatically changing one of the boundary conditions.
Michael Mann's model is a warning about boundary conditions. If we set out to design stable, peaceful systems, they must be systems which are designed to be robustly decentralized from the outset. When power becomes centralized, it obtains a consciousness of its own, through the individual that wields it - like Sauron's Ring (actually the One Ring does have something like a consciousness, but that's a whole other can of worms). This is why I advocate for decentralized systems, but ones that can still link together, ones that are capable of extensibility, and are not limited by their locality. Market socialism, in this sense, is a great step forward, harnessing the extensiveness of market economics expressed in Capitalism, while de-centralizing the power inherent to Capitalism. It should not be surprising that a democratic approach not only accomplishes this, but in the end yields a more just system.
For this site, I use RSS. And for RSS, I use the newsboat program, a CLI, vim-like RSS reader. It's great, but I haven't been using its full functionality. See, I've been going through each feed to get content - so I would go to the Jacobin feed, then the Intercept feed, then the U.S. PIRG feed, and so on. Kind of tedious. Well no more! You can pool all of the feeds of a certain tag into one large parent feed adding the following line to your `~/.newsboat/urls` file:
"query:All news:tags # \"news\""
What this does is says, first, we've identified you want to make a query feed - the one with all the feeds in it. Next, is the name. Here I went with 'All news'. Next you put tags, #, and then within \" and \" put the tag you want to pool - here, I'm pooling all of the feeds with the 'news' tag (you have to escape the quote signs to use them, as the quote signs are already used to put tags). Then in the `~/.newsboat/config` file, put the following line:
prepopulate-query-feeds yes
And you're good to go! You can even put tags on the feed (although maybe be careful of putting of self-referencing the query feed with the tag it queries - I haven't tried it but can imagine it going horribly wrong). On all my query feeds, I have the tag "query", so I can go to the list of all query feeds if I want.
Sun, 18 Apr 2021 16:26:46 -0400
Defeating Conspiracism: Improve the Material Conditions
I recently listened to this Behind the Bastards podcast about the origins of anti-semitism. There's a lot of dark and informative history to learn from. It centers on a plagiarized-of-plagiarized document that is extremely anti-semitic - 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' (TPEZ here on out). Produced in Czarist Russia (likely by the secret police), it has become the bedrock of pulp anti-semitism. The document is osensibly the minutes from a meeting of jews who are plotting to overthrow the monarchies and institute a new world order. Sound familiar? That's because the document basically outlined modern anti-semitism. The thing is, most of those who exploited it realized it was a fake - the Nazis never explicitly used it, for example, because they could see it wasn't something credible to attach their brand to. But what they did say was 'even if it's a fake, its internal content is true'. That is to say, they acknowledged that it was a fake, but because their whole ideology was about fearing that jews were gonna take over the world, they took the content of the fake to be true. And so they indirectly would promulgated it through the more ruffian-branches of the Nazi party. As Behind the Bastards notes, it wasn't something anyone would actually read - it's too ridiculous - but something you would throw into conversation or cite in anti-semitic propaganda to give your argument more... 'credibility', I guess.
Being anti-semitic was quite the fashion before the Nazis showed how horrific it really was. Even before modern anti-semitism took form, Jews have always been highly discriminated against. In the Middle Ages, Jews were often kept in ghettoes, to live by themselves, and often subject to mass killings. Conspiracies spread that Jews would steal Christian babies and do rituals with them and their blood - in fact, there still remains religious art (such as stained-glass windows) depicting Jews extracting blood from Christian babies, or Jewish babies suckling from a pig. Fast-forward to the future, TPEZ explodes - and it ain't just Nazis who don't like the Jews. Notably, Henry Ford distributed hundreds of thousands of copies in the US, and the text caused a huge stir in Colombia in the Great Depression era. 'Behind the Bastards' discusses how, in the throes of the global economic tailspin, the Colombian conservative party found new life in TPEZ - even as it was a known forgery (again, that 'it's a fake, but the internal content is true'). They believed the liberal party was conspiring/controlled by Jews, and so they were not just a political opponent, they were a threat to the state. Sound familiar? Colombian government broke down, because well, one side was mired in an unfounded anti-semitic conspiracy. This then boiled over in 1948 when the Liberal presidential candidate was assassinated, sparking rioting and outrage. For ten years, the nation was in civil conflict - this period known to Colombians as La Violencia.
You might now notice a lot of parallels with modern right-wing conspiracies in America. For example, there is a general fear of George Soros in particular who are sewing disorder and chaos - but why not other billionaires? Or you'll hear the QAnon fears that pedophiles are doing satanic rituals with children, and the liberals are in on it, and only DJT can stop it. Or you'll generally hear of 'globalists' who are trying to destroy Western values and all of that.
Quick sidenote - attacking 'globalists' might sound like it's a critique of capitalism! It's not. The left-wing position is not that capitalists are essentially evil people conspiring to destroy the world (had the dice been rolled slightly different, Jeff Bezos would probably just be another regular guy, maybe a bit special, but not like a psycho), but that Capitalism leads to the accumulation of power in the few, who exploit the labor of the masses. While left-wing politics does not exclude being very angry at capitalists, the capitalists do not maintain power through a grand cabal, they maintain power for structural reasons. So be very careful - don't fall for 'the globalists' type of propaganda!
Back on track, my point is that anti-semitism and TPEZ has outlined what an unfounded conspiracy looks like - it gives the tropes to build such a conspiracy out of. But the problem is, the more evidence you bring to a conspiracy theorist, that will either (A) say it's fake, (B) bring up something totally new ('gish-galloping'), or (C) just shut down the conversation and say you're either a sheeple or you're in on it. That is to say, trying to use evidence to convert a conspiracy theorist is like trying to win World War I without the Mark V tank. Maybe it's possible, but is it the best way? History seems to imply that it's not.
A Solution?
So then how on Earth do you fix it? You have to identify what drives people to believe this stuff. Some people are, well, kind of hopeless. But some of this can be fixed by fixing material conditions. People believe this stuff when the world is collapsing around them - in the States we have collapsing infrastructure, growing power of tech giants, a government that seems incapable of doing anything, drug problems, police violence and protest, and so on. All of this is a symptom of our system being totally paralyzed. When the system breaks, people look for reasons it's broken. If the system isn't broken, that motive withers. Look at the United States under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now anti-semitism was still there (hello Henry Ford!), but it didn't metastasize to critical mass, it didn't rip the nation apart. As a nation, we came together as the New Deal gave Americans work opportunity, brought them electricity and hope, and empowered workers to unionize and have a say at their work. This is another point - If you actually allow people's voices to be heard democratically, they are less likely to believe the system is rigged and that some puppet-masters control everything. Democracy in both the Republic and the workplace can go a long way here.
To people who don't believe in the conspiracy theories, we may wonder why people can believe in this foolishness when the evidence is quite clear that there isn't such a thing. We are inclined to think that these people must just be uneducated. The solution isn't more facts, fact-checkers, bla bla bla. These are good tools, but they aren't the solution. This is because conspiracy theories emerge when everything seems to break down, and people are looking for someone to blame. Most of the time though, things break down not because people made it break down, but because they failed to stop it from breaking down. An error of failure, not an error of malice. But when people are angry and scared, this doesn't cut it. The only way to defuse conspiracism is to fix the system - give people work, give people hope, give people resources - like the New Deal. As history shows, if you don't fix the system, conspiracies can help break it down. To properly address conspiracies, we must properly address their cause.
As I constantly point out, this site is about democratizing the workplace., and on this topic, unions are one of the most familiar and institutionally-strongest means of collective worker action and voicing-of-concerns. They have many advantages, and the criticisms are generally that they aren't democratic enough (see World Socialist Web Site people). Let's break it down.
Generally speaking, the very basic hopes are that when the workers are not being paid enough, or when something bad happens, they can act collectively to demand these things. The problem is, if you do this alone, or with weak organization, the company can divide-and-conquer. They can fire you, demote you, etc. for organizing, since you've shown that you want to try and organize. Companies generally don't like this (see all of Amazon's efforts in Bessemmer) because, drum roll, collective action is basically five dominos away from a corporate Magna Carta - the King is no longer the only one calling the shots. So it's a bit of a catch 22 for workers - start something, and get fired (and live like shit), don't start something, and live like shit. So what to do?
One of the most familiar steps is to unionize. What a Union does is (A) help organize the organizing (since they are supposed to be good at organizing), (B) provide large-scale solidarity between different facilities and sites across the region/nation that face similar problems, and (C) negotiate for the workers - since they're supposed to be good at negotiating (kinda like getting a lawyer to represent you in court). Also (D) provide someone you can come to with problems. If your employer does you wrong, you can trust the union to spill the beans.
But unions aren't just about getting better hours and wages. One, they're about giving workers a voice in their own company, in some sense (although it's pretty 'primitive', compared to how a board member can voice their thoughts at a company). Life isn't just about money and hours - it's about what you do with those hours, and if you believe in your work. Sometimes you hear workers at a union voicing their opinion about their industry, for example. Second, they're about giving a voice to workers, acting together with the realization that what is good for all workers is good for you.
Ths is all great. What do people criticize them for? Well, the general criticism is that they 'become corrupt', and that dues go to something that isn't serving the workers. But let's be clear why - it's no mystery, no pathology with is specific to unions - it's centralized power (and it's not nearly as bad as any capitalist institution). By creating nodes of power, it's much easier to become corrupt (although unions don't have the self-reinforcing mechanisms inherent to capitalists). Unions are sort of like our government today - officials represent our democratic voice, providing the vehicle for our collective action (Of course, no union is totally the same in its organization). On high-level things, unions are given executive responsibility over negotiation, etc., but workers are generally able to vote for or against what the union does. Even if we think our democracy isn't great in the US right now, it's far preferable to a dictatorship (or oligarchy) - which is how comapnies are run. What's the alternative?
The alternative (under capitalism) are democratically controlled rank-and-file committees. These are easy to imagine as hyper-local to a given site/warehouse/factory/etc, but could theoretically extend/collaborate amongst others. This means there aren't representatives through which workers act collectively, they directly do. Think Athenian-style direct democracy, vs the sort we have today. This type of organizing would require high levels of solidarity initially, and strong organizational capabilities and trust to nucleate collective action. It's viable if workers already have high solidarity, and are dissatisfied with their union (although there is some nuance here), but elsewhere it's a lot more uncertain. Look at the enormous pressure put on workers at Bessemer - it would be very hard to develop worker solidarity in that pressure cooker. And yeah, the union failed, but at very least, Unions are the strong institution, and this means they can help back up workers when they act collectively.
Basically my concern here is that not all workers have the class consciousness to bootstrap rank-and-file committees. While union popularity is at historic highs right now (and membership at historic lows), America has been quite successful in breaking class consciousness. It's not shocking to hear workers talk about how other workers are lazy. While occasionally true, this is focusing on the wrong problem - and workers are still able to identify these problems. Collective labor action (mediated and fostered by unions) provides the atmosphere to show workers that they can get what they want and need. This is what fosters class solidarity - for a lot of people, it's not talking about the abstract this and that, it's about showing what can be done. Even showing what other workers can do.
There's a lot to go back and forth with here, but my main point is we want to democratize the workplace, and unions provide secure and reliable paths to getting a proto-democratic workplace. For workers that haven't quite developed the class awareness, but realize that something is wrong, something is unfair about their workplace, but have a hard time articulating this unease, unions are great. Organizing, educating, negotiating - all of this can be incredibly exhausting for already-tired workers, especially if they aren't familiar with all of the ins-and-outs. Unions help with this. They provide a vehicle for collective worker action which is still getting its sea legs (and can be, and has been, a long term strategy). In the America of today, a rank-and-file committee doesn't make as much sense (in virtually every case of non-already-collectivized workers), as it runs into a catch 22 problem here - they're good steps to take, in my opinion, once unionization is much more prevalent; an evolution, so-to-speak.
So there's that `Social Dilemma` documentary, and the ever-cheesy The Hated One has a pretty good criticism. In fact, I'll probably largely re-make a lot of the points he does. Basically what he says is we shouldn't just 'regulate' them... because that sounds like saying nothing if you don't regulate properly. We should use open-source technology to power social networks, and pursue federated technology. As a witness of cap-and-trade, 'taxing data collection' also sounds like a stupid idea, along with what THO says - it will hyper-concentrate power into big corporations. These are treatments for symptoms, not the disease.
There are some things the government should take over (local, or state, or federal), like water treatment, or roads, or healthcare - things were 'profit motive drives innovation' doesn't make much sense, and the public good is at stake. It's not always the case to 'nationalize' (or 'localize'? If it's the county government? Isn't that word taken?), and social media is one of them. The problem here is the government will de facto be the police of speech and socialization. The problem here is you centralize power - in this case, the power over speech/digital socialization by the government. This means something that can be abused. Is this the only option?
No. Instead, a federated social web would decentralize control. There is no one who can censor or call the shots. This raises the issue of the alt right gaining strong footholds here... and my obvious solution is that this is not a technology problem - this is a socio-economic problem; poverty, loss-of-jobs, etc. exacerbates peoples prejudices, makes things uglier, etc. However, technology does play a role - targeting advertising and all that, it acts as a centrifuge which concentrates people into echo chambers. These large tech companies profit off of the madness. One solution is to 'regulate' - the idea being that if we just don't let them do that, then the centrifuge turns off, and the madness dies down. But wait - why do we even need a few centralized dictators, who we have to keep in check like a King with a weak Magna Carta, calling the important shots? Why not decentralize?
The technology to make a federated web exists - for example, the Matrix protocol for a Discord-like application, which is free and open source software (FOSS). The design of Matrix is oriented towards bridging different social media together - they have written bridges for Slack, Twitter, and Discord, for example, so that a user in Slack can talk to a user in a Matrix server. Their flagship server, Element, has around 40,000 people using it, and so far has had no issues. All of this without the profit-motive. The only thing that justifies these large companies and there spying and incessant adware is that this torrent of money to the top is necessary to keep the innovation going. Frankly, that's wrong (Linux + Matrix + more shows that), and that money doesn't pay innovators nearly as much as it pays people that do nothing.
The beauty of Matrix is it also kills the networking argument for large corporations - 'if we split up Facebook, it would ruin the whole point of Facebook - being able to contact all of your friends anywhere in the world'. But there's no reason we need a single company running the show - the Matrix protocol allows people on one server to talk with anyone else on any other server, and they wouldn't even notice. It also means no one single entity has control.
What's even more beautiful is that because there isn't a monopoly on the social web then, users are no longer forced to accept being spied on. In this system, if you don't like how a server handles ads, for example, you could just go to a different server - yes, it might be a little annoying, but you'll still be in the same ecosystem. With Twitter, for example, even if you hate how they run things, you're kinda stuck with them, because if you want to use 'the Twitter protocol', you have to deal with Twitter. Same with Youtube. I mean, imagine, in a decentralized world, the Youtube 'adpocalype' wouldn't have happened, because advertisers would just choose not to advertise on questionable servers.
This gets to another point. There is still power. If you run a server, you can still set rules, terms of service, kick people out, etc. But no one person can set the rules for ANYONE using the protocol. You could build a reputation for being a server with good, reasonable rules. YOU get to decide this - you don't have to deal with the weird annoying rules of the Twitch (Amazon) or Youtube (Google) or Twitter or Facebook leaders. You also get to decide how you run ads. Because in this world, a server pretty much only means (A) rules and limits for what you can/can't do and (B) what set of ads rotate when looking at someones page. For example, if I went to Joe Smith's page, if he is on Server X, I might get Coke ads, and he might not post about how great restricting voting rights are. Or I might go to Susan Jones' page (who is on Server Y) and they may not do ads at all, and she might post about socialism and all that. Or they may do ads still, but just from a select few companies. But here, Susan Jones and Joe Smith are not responsible for determining what specific ads show up on their page (although maybe that's an option on some servers) - that is the responsibility of the server provider. There may even be collectively owned servers - that would be great! The real kicker is that even if you are on Server X or Server Y, anyone on any Server can still interact with you - just like if you were on Twitter, you can interact with anyone on Twitter (unless you block them).
This is all to say, fixing social networks does not mean we have to abandon the benefits of networking, or that we need to give the government control of social networks. We need to decentralize them by federating them, so that there isn't power that can be abused. When you centralize power, when you create an abusable resource, that makes things controversial, that's when people do things that make people mad. That's how you create situations where abusive ad systems can be implemented, and no one can do anything about it. Decentralize the web.
Also, I'm not necessarily an advocate of blockchain stuff right now, or heavy-duty peer-to-peer. It seems pretty resource intensive, and federated networks seems like it both gets the benefits of client-server efficiency, but avoids the pitfalls of centralizing that under one umbrella.
And if you're wondering, the Matrix protocol is free and open source. So even the Matrix devs, and all the contributors, can't abuse it, because everyone would see it. And if they did abuse it, people would just make a fork of it (because it's open source), and switch to that. It's nearly impossible to abuse free and open source software (although it is possible, granted), because someone can always fork it if it goes off the rails, and everyone can see what you're doing.
I'm gonna go over Pass, and GPG. This one is for the enthusiasts, I guess. I like this better because I don't want my passwords on the web. And also, rather than using something like KeePass (a GUI-based application), something lightweight like `pass` is pretty easy to transfer around to other devices, if I want.
What's a GPG key pair?
There's this Computerphile video, 'Public Key Cryptography', and you should watch it. I'm going to briefly summarize.
Maybe it's anecdotal, but either way, the spy story is pretty helpful here to understanding the issue. Say that there are two spies, and they have a connection over the internet. How can they make sure that (A) when one receives a message from the other, that it is really the other and (B) that no one else can snoop on their messages? To tackle this, we have 'public key cryptography'.
A naive first attempt might be that both of you agree on a key which encrypts a message, and which can then de-crypt that message. But how do you both agree on the key over the clearnet (ie an unencrypted connection), without the rest of the world knowing? You have a circular problem here - to get an encrypted connection, you need to agree on a key, but without an encrypted connection to begin with, you can't safely share a key without exposing the key to the world.
To address this, we use public/private key pairs. Your public key is shared and known by everyone, and is capable of encrypting, and decrypting messages encrypted by its complementary private key. Your private key is secret and unshared, and it can encrypt mssages, and can decrypt messages that were encrypted by its complementary public key.
This allows for two kinds of functionality - First, person A can encrypt a message with person B's public key. In this case, the only person who can decrypt that message is person B, since they are the only one with their private key (the key that can decrypt their public key). Second, person A can also encrypt the message with their own (person A's) private key. Obviously this isn't to 'hide' the contents of the message, because anyone can decrypt the private key's encryption with Person A's public key. However, it does validate that person A actually sent the message. If anyone tampers with Person A's message along the way, then the message is no longer encrypted by person A's private key. So then you know Person A isn't the last person to the touch the message - it's been tampered with.
So this combination allows you to both make sure only the inteneded recipient can decrypt the message (since you encrypted with their public key, so only their private key can decrypt), and makes sure the receiver knows that you are the actual person who sent it, as it was encrypted with your private key (they can verify this by decrypting it with your public key - if it doesn't work, then your private key didn't encrypt it, and there was tampering).
So coming back to GPG, GPG is basically this, for all intents and purposes. According to the man page, it's 'the openPGP part of the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). It is a tool to provide digital encryption and signing services using the OpenPGP standard. gpg features complete key management and all the bells and whistles you would expect form a full OpenPGP implementation. So a GPG key pair is basically all of the above.
Pass - remember just one password to have all of your passwords
Now that we understand that, we can get to pass. According to the man page, it 'is a very simple password store that keeps passwords inside gpg2 encrypted files inside a simple directory tree residing at ~/.password-store. The pass utility provides a series of commands for manipulating the password store, allowing the user to add, remove, edit, synchronize, generate, and manipulate passwords.'
So after you initialize the password store, you add a password by typing `pass add ebay` (for eBay, for example), then enter the password - it will then create a file with that information that is encrypted with your public key; only your private key can unlock it then. To access the passwords, you type in the command line `pass X`, where X is the account you want a password for (eBay, for example). To access this password, it has to be unlocked by your private key, so you have to enter the passphrase for your private key to show you are truly you. Once you enter that, boom, it gives you the password (it actually just copies it to your clipboard for 45 seconds).
It comes with a nice tool called `passmenu`, that allows you to type `passmenu` and it brings a dmenu instance with all of your accounts to choose from. So then you can just fuzzy search for the account you want, and get it copied to your clip board. Now I use i3, and so I went into the i3 config file, and entered a hotkey (super+Y) which runs the command `passmenu` when I press the key combo. So if I'm at the eBay website, and it asks for my password, I can just press `Super+Y`, type 'eBay', enter my private key passphrase (one of maybe three passwords I actually need to remember - the other being my email account, the other being my login/admin password for my computer), and boom, the password for eBay is copied to my clipboard. So then I just paste into the password query, and boom, I'm in.
Pass on Your Phone!
Now if you want to use your password store on another device (say an Android phone - for iPhone users idk), you just need to (A) get the `~/.password-store` directory onto that device, (2) export the GPG key-pair, and (3) get software that can utilize these. Off the F-Droid store, I got the 'Password Store' app, and then I did the caveman thing, and just copied the `~/.password-store` directory to my phone over a USB cable. The 'Password Store' app will recognize these, but it can't handle the GPG stuff by itself. For this, go to the F-Droid store, and download the 'OpenKey chain' app. Then I exported my GPG keys into key files, and copied those over. Open them with 'OpenKey chain' (there are more precise guides in the 'Password Store' and 'OpenKey chain' github wikis), do a bit of setting up (follow the wikis), and boom. You should be able to select an account in 'Password Store', and it will, through 'OpenKey chain', ask for the passphrase for your private key! It will then briefly decrypt the password and put it on your clipboard for 45 seconds. Very handy!
The Real Move: Don't Copy-Paste, Use Git
I was too lazy, and did it the cave man way, but I'm gonna set it up soon with the Git way. The git way is nice because if I add a password on one account, I want to keep the repositories in sync. `Pass` can handle git very easy (because it just references a directory with files in it), and so this is the real move to keep everything in sync.
When considering the future of tech, there are three factors to have in mind. (1) Today, the tech sphere is dominated by the phone. It is the core element of the digital experience. However, this doesn't mean other tech doesn't have a role - tablets, computers (PCs+laptops), television, whatever-a-Roku-is, these all play roles in our lives. (2) Within the digital sphere, our plurality of devices makes cloud services that much more enticing. When Google provides cloud services, then using Google services altogether becomes that much more integrated. Furthermore, social media is a big part of our phone use, like it or not. Following data integration (cloud, camera, etc.), social media, we have maps and navigation. Finally, (3) tech and 'fashion' are a factor. It doesn't hurt Apple that their stuff is, well, fashionable.
Saying mobile is a big deal isn't a hot-take, but worth diving into. In this climate, we can see why Apple and Google are included in FAANG, and Microsoft isn't. Microsoft mobile sucks and is dead, and Microsoft software generally sucks and the UI looks and feels like a Soviet committee designed the UI and Brezhnev's corpse rubber stamped it; that is to say, ugly and terrible. Seriously, this company is the eight wonder in the world, the wonder being they haven't gone out of business. Going into the 2020s, I feel like, as the role of the computer/laptop diminishes, Microsoft will slowly die (or become permanently enmeshed as part of the military industrial complex, which wouldn't surprise me, as it seems like that's the only thing that's working out for them).
I predict the computer/laptop will diminish in prominence. This is (A) partly maintaining the trend, but also (B) because of convergence. Convergence means that one device can act as mobile and desktop. If you've ever used a Raspberry Pi (an ARM device the size of a fat wallet), you can see what I mean. Or even the Macbook M1 - that's a desktop running on a phone chip. Today convergence looks like hooking your phone up to a screen, and having a desktop experience at the desk, and unplugging and having a mobile experience on the go. For most consumers, this is clearly a powerful sell. Suppose you're a normal person (you have a smartphone) - if you bought a 32" monitor for around $150-$400, you saved a whole boatload NOT buying a smart TV. Now you can hook your phone up to the TV, using your phone like a Roku (basically), and stream whatever. You can Netflix and chill! But you can also use it like a Desktop. Now you don't need to buy a smart TV or a laptop, cause your phone + monitor does the whole job. Congrats, you probably saved around $600-$1300.
Mopping up with all of this, two companies today look most prominent to me (assuming no Linux chad company comes in and disrupts). Google is in a good position, because Android Desktop is a thing, and because Android has huge market share, and nearly anyone would be fine using one. The other is Apple - they have the capacity to do this, although they are much more oriented towards having many different gadgets, rather than converging them into one. So they have the capital to do it, but it's unclear if it matches with their design, engineering and marketing philosophy.
The next consideration is the digital sphere. In some obvious respects, this is where Linux really lacks right now. On mobile, well, there isn't really a mobile Linux yet, so there hasn't been those apps (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, etc.). I guess it's not impossible, but it would probably need a larger market share than zero to compell developers to make apps for it. But there's more here than you might think.
Privacy advocates today will lament that 'no one cares about privacy'. The problem here is the layperson can't care about privacy, and even specialists can't always go 'all the way'. See if you use an iPhone/Android phone, you already know you're had at square one. Mobile service and GPS can be used to track us down, and Google+Apple don't do much to help (lol). Communication is concentrated in FAANG+ - Gmail, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, Twitter, Slack, Discord (Microsoft now!), Zoom, Teams (garbage). So we can tell people 'don't use social media', but uhh, good luck talking to people without looking like a unabomber primitivist. And Chrome dominates the search-engine landscape. Using something that isn't Chrome is actually very easy, but it's still a fact of life. And even if you don't use Chrome, you still have to worry about browser fingerprinting! Good OpSec demands using like three browsers, and being careful to do particular activities only in one browser. Normal people won't deal with this.
My point being, caring about privacy seems so hopeless, most people wouldn't even bother. I'm willing to bet the most normie person would care about privacy... if that didn't require loads of research and constant vigilance. Privacy is marketable if it's feasible. This is where Linux phones come in - there's a lot more there that supports privacy and security. You got the inherent benefits of an open-source OS, along with those physical killswitches! And more! This is something Linux-centered companies can actually traffic in that other companies (Google and Apple) can't.
Using social media will always entail a security breach, minimizing privacy weaknesses is better than not doing anything. On the other charges, a Linux phone will probably fare better - although there are inherent issues it can't quite get over (like geofencing)... except utilizing those physical killswitches!
Furthermore, the current digital sphere largely thrives on having lots of different gadgets. See, as Apple airdropping shows, using the cloud isn't primarily helpful as a sharing utility. The cloud is primarily helpful for having access to all of your stuff from any device. A picture on your iPhone, a pdf on your macbook - boom, iCloud. A picture on your Android, a pdf on your non-macbook - boom, Google Drive. Now idk much about Apple's emporium of fun, but the Google Office Suite thrives off of having everything all together. And THEN it is useful for sharing. Suddenly, Google has a lot of utility, but this largely depends (but not only) on having many different devices.
Finally, we have trends and fashion - I'm weaker here. Linux doesn't have much firepower, but as a new sheriff in town, its powder is still dry. On the other hand, Google has a bit of a problem - among teenagers, Apple holds an extraordinary 84% preference, and growing. Google has a serious 'birth rate' issue then.
All together, I feel like the trajectory will play something like this: Microsoft will survive longer-than-it-deserves on pure inertia and name recognition. People associate Windows with a (barely) usable computer. And institutions, at their own risk, use Microsoft tools (Outlook/Exchange, Teams, etc.) - a lot of this can't hurt Microsoft (although maybe it'll backfire, cause it's so ugly). My guess is that Microsoft will keep the computer market viable. And unless either Apple and Google feels like taking a revolutionary step, they'll continue down the path of multiple devices (Android phone + Chromebook + other stuff, iPhone+iPad+Macbook). They'll work on convergence - these are huge companies - but it won't be their main focus. At very least, in marketing. Selling a Pixel and a chromebook gets Google more money (and Google Drive dependence) than just selling a Pixel.
Basically, Microsoft is a dying whale (that might never die) that is misleading the whole industry, so Linux convergence has some time. Gaming is the thing most obviously keeping it alive, along with old IT departments. But things change, and GPUs are impossible to buy right now - PC gaming might stagger? That's getting speculative though.
Then, all else being equal, as the desktop/laptop dwindles in importance, I imagine that convergence will become more and more important. Google will probably bite the bullet first, but as I indicated above, it's not the sexiest with the kids. Apple is very invested in its whole gadget ecosystem, so I'm predicting they'll be more reluctant on convergence. Who knows though.
This gives Linux-centered companies a lot of breathing room to push into convergence, and it's already happening, especially as most Linux-centered companies have forgone dominating the computer space, pursuing instead its niche consumer base. But, for Linux, the phones are the wild west - and convergence could destabilize (will destabilize - I'm guessing, Linux or not) the whole market. Purism, with PureOS, is a great example. The problem is lack of key social media apps right now... but again, this is still the very beginning. And there are some third-party apps as a stop-gap for now. In fact, the mobile 'battlefield' gives Linux a huge advantage. The two things that, I believe, truly hamper Linux desktop adoption - lack of Adobe stuff and lack of full gaming capacity - are not issues on desktop. Neither Android nor iOS are competing to have Adobe X and Y or Steam. The potential is very ripe here.
A strong Linux convergent device could make waves. Right now a Linux phone can give a legitimate desktop experience, making the functionality of a Linux phone highly extensible (phone to tablet, phone to laptop, phone to TV) and highly modular (want a better computer monitor? Just buy a new one (rather than a whole new laptop).) - kinda like a PC, but in your pocket - and ideally, the actual hardware of the phone would be modifiable, but maybe that's a reach. It could break us from the prison of clouds, software-as-service, closed-source software, and spyware. And as long as the thing isn't ugly, as long as it looks good, it could be a real thing.
I recently had the pleasure of using Microsoft Teams, and my God, everything about that software was awful. First, you have to have a Microsoft account. But, defying all logic, that's not enough. Microsoft once again makes dumpster-quality software. See with even Google (who I'm no fan of, except that they are generally intelligent), you don't need a whole new sub-account to use Hangouts. You just go to your Gmail and use it. 'Keep it Simple, Stupid' is something Google does well, and anyone should. Microsoft does the opposite.
So barrier one is actually being able to use Teams. First, you have to have a Microsoft account, but that's not enough. If you're using it for school, well, I don't know how you find your account info. If you want to use it for a friends and family, they redirect you to dumpster-fire Skype. Finally, if you say 'for work', it lets you register - a second time.
See, Microsoft tries to cram everything reasonable into one application - its like Zoom + Discord + Slack + Microsoft's signature square ugly style. Microsoft software always looks like it was designed by Brezhnev's politburo.
As a result, it tries to silo everyone into their own work sites (like Slack does), but at the same time tries to compete with Zoom. Now with Slack, there is a whole thing where you shouldn't be able to just message people from other worksites - the people in Dr. Smith's lab need to get approval to talk to people in Dr. Johnson's lab. This avoids issues of spamming, harrassment, etc. For Slack, this makes a lot of sense.
On the flip side, Zoom protects from harrassment by well, protecting the video meeting room. Passwords, that kind of thing - no one can just waltz in (anymore, Zoombombing was a thing!) and bother people. So what does Microsoft, who tries to compete with Zoom and Slack do?
They do the dumbest thing - they do both. So I was dropping in on a Teams meeting I was invited to, and someone chatted me. But I coudln't chat them back! My 'org' didn't allow that (I didn't sign up with any 'org', to be clear).
Next, the sound quality. Everyone on the call had sub-Zoom sound quality. At first I thought it was just one or two people, but it was everyone. Atrocious! It wasn't nearly as good as filtering out background noise either.
Finally, I couldn't properly close out of the program. It froze my computer. I had to reboot by pressing the power button. I uninstalled. Terrible software.
What makes this all so offensive is (A) how extremely ugly Microsoft software is and (B) that they bought Discord! This is such a brazen display of 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish', it's disgusting. At least Google, Zoom, Slack, Apple - they have the generosity to make software that works and looks fine. Microsoft is like a drunken tyrant. Even if I was a staunch capitalist, I would consider Microsoft a threat to good taste and national security. Someone do something, please.
Going through a large code project can be pretty daunting, and I've got some specific tips how to navigate.
The first thing is to use Vim. VSCodium (a FOSS program, not the Microsoft thing) is a pretty solid program, and it has Vim capabilities you can enable. However, straight Vim (actually, I've been messing around with neovim lately) is just solid and snappy. This isn't a Vim tutorial post though, so I will assume you know Vim here (Vim is HIGHLY HIGHLY worth learning - even if you don't code. LaTeX + Vim is a killer combo).
First, we'll need some extensions (largely from Ben Awad's 'making Vim like VSCode' video). Watch that video, and then come back, no sense in repeating what's been said (although I don't personally care about the vim-colorschemes plugin, the vim-devicons plugin, enough to try and make it work, although I can see the benefits). Only thing I WILL say is that you don't need tmux for this.
One small thing - I can't get the location toggle feature to work (where ^n toggles nerdtree AND shows your position in the directory). I've got a clumsy workaround for now - ^m shows you your location in the directory, although you still need to press ^n to toggle off the menu.
Now if you're new to Vim (or even VSCodium), you might be wondering what the purpose of all of that stuff is. First, nerdtree allows you to navigate the folder system, and see where you're at. This is helpful in orienting yourself in the directory organization.
First up is ctrlp (or ^p). Often times, a file/script will call another file/script in the project. For example, in Java, you might be in CrazyTrain.java, which contains the class CrazyTrain that implements the interface class Train, in the file Train.java. Well, you might be interested in looking at the file Train.java. To do so, you'll simply press ^p, and type Train.java - the file should appear, at least be one of the options. So control+p is super helpful for jumping around a project quickly and efficiently, without breaking flow.
Alright, next is vim-gitgutter. This is a nice extension inspired by Sublime (I believe), which shows next to each line if you've either (A) changed the line, (B) subtracted a line, or (C) added the line. This is handy for version control stuff - ie the business of git. Git is a fantastic tool to help you manage changes to your project.
Now we're gonna leave the land of Ben Awad's video. First, it's time for the vim-unimpaired plugin. Now suppose you're in a Java class, SuperUltraCrazyTrain.java, which you know is the great great great great descendent of a family of classes. Now suppose that in some other script in the project, the method gofaster(int x) of SuperUltraCrazyTrain.java is called. Now you're not sure which class in particular in the family tree of Train.java that this particular method is actually written in. One approach could be to ^p to SuperUltraCrazyTrain.java, search, if it's not there, ^p its parent class, search, and repeat. But this is a bit tedious.
This is where vimgrep comes in. Vimgrep is a built in functionality to Vim which you use by typing (given the example of looking for gofaster): ':vimgrep /gofaster/ **'. Th ** basically allows you to search through all of the branch directories of the directory your in (so everything you want to look in), and the '/.../' allows you to enter search terms, even RegEx I believe. The problem is, navigating between the matches is annoying. I forget the key combination, that's how annoying it is.
To alleviate this problem, use vim-unimpaired! This allows you to simply enter the hotkey sequence `]q` (type in sequence, not at same time) to go forward to the next result, and `[q` to go back to the previous result. This might seem small, but it's HUGE. In some C++ projects I've looked at, where different things (objects?) are defined in scripts with names that don't obviously connect with the thing, so just searching through the filenames (ie ^p) isn't much help. But had I had vimgrep + vim-unimpaired, I'd be sane.
The next big thing is not even a plugin: it's built into Vim! If you type `:tabnew`, it will open up a new tab in Vim. If you type `gt` (in sequence, not simultaneous), it will go to the next tab (notice how `g` takes you to places. For example, `gg` takes you to the beginning of a file, and `G` takes you to the end of a file). If you type `gT`, it will take you to the previous tab. If you want to close a tab, either type `ZZ` (which saves and closed the vim buffer(?)), or type `:tabclose`.
So that's the rundown on reading through a large project. Half of the battle is dealing with that. What Vim is absolutely great for is letting you 'get in the zone' with whatever you're working with. It's so easy to digest a large project with this setup, I needed to share.
In the structure of today's society, the deck is stacked against the worker. Consider, for example, Tesla. While I'm sure that Tesla engineers are compensated well, Elon Musk is becoming extraordinarily wealthy on the backs of their labor. What role does Mr. Musk serve that merits this enormous disproportionate wealth accumulation?
This system has stifling echos in many respects. Some examples. (A) If you have an excellent idea, for example, to receive funding you must show that it is profitable - often leveraging the full capabilities of your innovation to fully exploit the profit potential, even if you have ethical concerns with this. For example, it may be more difficult to receive funding for a project if you are less amenable to filling it with ads, spyware, and telemetry. (B) If you have an excellent idea, and you do get the funding, this often comes in the form of investment into your company. This means that there are actors influencing the direction of your company you may not agree with, because you needed their money. It's a catch 22. (C) You have an excellent idea, and you develop under the mast of some other company. In this situation, you may be compensated well, but the people who will truly profit, and the people who best leverage it for power, are the people who own the intellectual property to your work. This is not you. It is the corporation you work for. Your hard work is alienated from you.
This is just from an 'innovator' point of view. The claim that capitalism drives innovation runs into this paradox - the people who make money are often not the people driving innovation. And those that make money, even if they had 'innovated', often pull plenty of dirty tricks to rise to the top, rather than ride on their own merits (ie Microsoft vs Linux in the 90's/2000's).
However, there are other concerns. It's not just engineers doing all of the work - there are workers on the ground, well, working. They make the abstract real - not the engineers, not the board members. But these workers get absolutely no say in the direction of their company. It's a dictatorship from the top - if the chief executive says so, it becomes so. Why isn't this process democratic? The one main argument you can make is that a visionary can best guide their enterprise in an authoritarian mode - but this is by far the exception rather than the rule, and gives cover to bad executives making terrible decisions that enrich themselves. Generally though, wouldn't a democratic enterprise still work as well, except without the risk of corruption at the top (or much much more reduced)?
This is the issue of democratizing the workplace, a first step, a first experiment, in socialism.
There are issues with this approach, mostly due to the dangers capitalism itself imposes. First, it would have issues of funding. Private lending facilities may be hesitant to loan to democratized enterprises, or loan on the condition that they again become dictatorships. Here the government can step in, providing a loan in a similar manner that a bank would, except without the concerns of profitability... like how the NSF and NIH funds scientific research. There are still merits you must meet, not anyone just gets a grant, but there isn't any imposed managerial business that your product has to be some profitable thing.
The main issue is giving every worker an equal vote with every other worker in the business. For larger enterprises, this may mean voting for a representative body. Regardless, it doesn't mean everybody has to vote on everything. For a lot of the tedium, it would amount to voting for some manager to handle all of that. It just seems pretty obvious how this is better - it mitigates potential corruption and nepotism, would result in more balanced and fair pay, and more equitable distribution of the profits of an enterprise. It wouldn't go down the gutter either, because more times than not, the workers would higher a manager that has shown a greater aptitude with that sort of stuff.
This also means that when you innovate something, you are given much more power to represent your ownership at the company. If some engineer team has developed the Tesla Model XYZ, then they deserve to have key prominence at that organization because of it, not some showman CEO - they and the workers who make that car are the people that made Tesla Model XYZ, not the showman (of course, the showman does have a role - but this role is often self-fulfilling in capitalism. Their role is demanded by the pressures of capitalism, not by functional necessities to innovate something. Beyond this, the showman still has some role... but it ain't any better than any other role). You are given much more control and ownership over your work. If you want to start your own enterprise, developing something interesting, you apply for a loan from the government (similar to NSF or NIH). Ideally these institutions are well funded enough (unlike current NSF or NIH) so that your case is funded on merits only, not on random competition.
Such experiments have worked when tried out, the most prominent being Mondragon in the Basque country of Spain. Generally such enterprises are called cooperatives or 'co-ops'. The crux here is that the worker is fairly represented. Arguments against one-person, one-vote have to end up gesturing towards some un-measurable sense that the CEO has 'taken more risk' whereas the worker has not. Most of the time this does not make sense - most CEOs got to where they're at by getting voted in by the board, and besides the earliest days of an enterprise, these are usually stable. And often, they go under due to poor management that mishandled the situation, or couldn't evolve fast enough. As a result, workers are left out to dry, with no say in their enterprise as it nose dives into the ground.
This would also mean reducing the capitalist class, the wealthy. These are the people who corrupt the government such that it is more favorable to their business position. They can do this because they have lots of money, and lots of power. By democratizing the workplace, you totally diffuse the power, thus melting away centralized power (ie 'the 1%') which can and does corrupt the government, influencing it to do things the voting people do not want and did not sign up for. Democracy in the workplace means true democracy in government, and vice versa.
This is not nationalization. This is still 'private enterprise', only funded by the government if need be (so that 'profitability' doesn't become an essential goal, and to avoid outsiders derailing your project), and owned by the people doing the work. In a way, this is the pipe dream that small businesses and start-ups have in mind - a few hard workers generating a great thing. Often times though, some people becomes the overpaid, self-regulating manager class, and some people are just exploited workers. There are market pressures for why this happens, and hence the role of the government as a funder. The result would hopefully be enterprises that are owned by the workers of said enterprises. Such workers would be motivated by, well, profit and success, unlike wage-workers who are motivated only to not be fired. In fact, capitalism in this respect isn't the only system which includes 'the profit motive', it's just the one in which the profit motive is a privilege of birth (into the wealthy) and luck (for the few who 'make it'). The 'burger flipper' has no profit motive, but what if they did? How would that possibily make them less of a worker, and more to the point, wouldn't they be far more likely to feel more fulfilled working? Wouldn't that be great?
The Police have become quite a hot topic lately. On the left, one of the more prominent slogans is to abolish the police. But on this, like a lot of ban efforts, I'm a bit hesitant on. In short, this is because (A) the main force animating and exacerbating conflict is class conflict (like it or not, it's a fact of our social reality as much as oxygen is a fact of our physical reality) (B) the de facto role of law (and thus police) is to defend capital but (C) this is not due to inherent flaws of democracy or government, but due to corruption of government by the interests of the wealthy. And finally, in synthesis (D) government police would be replaced by police which are NOT democratically accountable in ANY way (yes, they barely are now, but I believe it would be far worse), who would defend capital with far more prejudice. I believe the problems with police are systemic, they are in part abberations endemic to these institutions' particular histories, but what sustains this momentum is the animating force of class war. The power of government is currently wielded by the wealthy, and abolishing police will not mean abolishing police, so long as this configuration is maintained. The interests of capital exists everywhere in our world - it is a capitalist world - and thus it will always find a way to muster defense. If it were true that abolishing the police would fix the problems, I'd be totally down. As it is though, it seems like an electorally suicidal platform that wouldn't work anyways.
Police, as they are, are not simply a construct of constitutions and legislation, but an emergent shield for the powerful forces of capital. Some will point to southern police having roots in runaway-slave catchers, and there you go - police are an emergent shield in defense of the ruling class interests. Today, a lot of the immanent concerns with police can be categorized as (A) they conduct themselves recklessly, violently and arrogantly, to the detriment of often-BIPOC and poor communities, and (B) they suffer virtually no consequences for this conduct, often protecting one another. It's a pipe dream to think these problems will disappear if police departments are abolished and reconstituted as private security forces mirroring their government counterparts, a la UPS/FedEx to USPS. Except in this version, any thread of accountability to 'the people' has been cut. For a glimpse of how well they might be regulated, look to for-profit prisons (ie, there isn't much regulation, perhaps little difference between public and private). Yes, there isn't a lot (if any) accountability as it is, but reconstituting police as a private security force (which they will do - it is even a rising trend in the United States right now, and has nightmarish consequences, as seen in South Africa) is not a solution.
In a charitable interpretation of the police today, they are cogs in an extremely unjust system. What is this system? The 13th amendment makes slavery of incarcerated persons legal, and the current War on Drugs disproportionately targets minority communities and has destabilizing consequences for Latin American nations, which results in both organized crime with tentacles in the US and mass displacement which drives immigration into the US. Basically, the United States institutes laws which drive phenomena which we then go on to say we need law enforcement to defend against. So we end up with the DEA and ICE, and police defense of and collaboration with such agencies. We have a vicious confluence of social, economic, political, and cultural (ie police culture, the strengthening of reactionary attitudes amongst law enforcement) factors that result in an 'endless war' which both provides, ostensibly, purpose to the police and their burgeoning power, yet also their actions and the laws they enforce perpetuate this conflict. It's what HR would call a 'conflict of interest'. But would abolishing the police solve these issues, rather than create a vacuum to fill?
As right-wing militant groups are on the rise, there is concern that the vacuum would be filled by such groups. These groups already have an influence in law enforcement, and abolishing the police would cede this space to such groups. Furthermore, such militant groups could easily monetize themselves as private security groups. They already have the organization, already have the auspices of preparation and training, and many have law enforcement or military background. That is, these groups would have all of the 'perks' of law enforcement, without the government accountability part.
In my view, it's quite clear that police are highly problematic. But we have to be wise with fixing problems. First, police abolition is not an electorally popular idea. It won't win elections. As it is, right wing groups and the armed forces of the United States government have a lot more organizational and logistical capacity than the left. Even if 'popular unrest' occurs, the alt right has a very good chance at exploiting this for their own benefit. They talk the talk - they hate big corporations, big tech, etc etc. So abandoning an electoral strategy, in favor of more 'direct action', is, at best, extremely risky. An electoral strategy provides our best route. Electoral victory could work in tandem with unionization and cooperative formation to ween government off of corporate influence and diffuse power by empowering the working class. Throughout this effort, the institution of law enforcement will probably not be an ally. But as they say, better the devil you know than the devil you don't. This tandem legislative and grassroots work would also, via the betterment of the working class, strengthen the leftist position. In such a process, police departments can be de facto 'defunded', because winding down homelessness, the War on Drugs, and the 13th Amendment (among other issues) would decrease the scope of policing, both legislatively (winding down how many laws to actually enforce) and effectively - less dark activity will occur which would merit addressal by armed law enforcement.
The police are first and fore-most defenders of capitalism, and an essential cog at that. The deep-rooted issues they represent cannot be disappeared with simple legislation. Instead, we can address the fundamental issues that propagate the police and the problems of poverty and conflict through legislation and worker organization. This won't be easy, but of course it won't - the problems of the police are fueled by systemic pathologies, and we can address these issues by addressing those pathologies over time. Today, corrupt and problematic as it is, the federal government is one of the greatest shields of disempowered groups. We shouldn't aim to sabotage government agency, so much as break the link between capital and government. This requires unionization and forming co-ops, and also requires legislative efforts. We aren't going to defeat capitalism in triumphant victory - we must wage 'guerrilla warfare', metaphorically speaking. By that I mean we must work to make these efforts popular, we must cultivate class consciousness, and we can't expect to win this fast (and thus seek quick legislative 'blitzes' and hope that it works). Capitalism didn't kill Feudalism, it slowly replaced it. Whatever follows Capitalism, it hopefully will be a bit faster, but we can't put all of our eggs into a blitzkrieg basket. We need to strengthen the position and awareness of workers - this is the fertile soil in which a just economic system can emerge. The issues of police are a symptom of this all, and we can't hope to fix the issues of police under capitalism, as it is.
There's about three main kinds of social applications we use - messaging apps (iMessage, WhatsApp, regular old texting, etc.), social/work media (Twitter, Slack, etc.), and video conferencing (ie Zoom, Skype). (Note that sometimes messaging apps can also include calling and one-on-one or small-scale video chat).
The problem with these is they are closed-source, often relying on fremium, data-harvesting and/or ad-based services. Now it would suck if these were our only choices - but they aren't. Long-story short, for messaging there is Signal, for social/work media there are many choices, but Matrix is a viable option. Finally, for video conferencing there is Jitsi.
First up is Signal. Signal is very easy to get into, and very useful. It is the most secure messaging application, and has the most secure (although not perfect) calling and video chat.
Next is Matrix, which isn't quite an application itself, but a protocol. Now I suggest Matrix for a few reasons. First, the bad news. The flagship server/application - Element (sort of like how WhatsApp was an application based on the XMPP protocol) - is centralized. Now I'm not too concerned with the Matrix non-profit, the problem is centralized servers are a bit of a security liability in my view. But this isn't any more of an issue than with any proprietary application.
HOWEVER, Matrix has a unique and important feature - one of its central goals is to act as glue between different social media 'silos'. As it is, we are often 'siloed' into certain social medias - when you're on Twitter you can only engage with Twitter, when you're in Slack, you can only engage with Slack, and so on. But what if there was an application which bridged these together? And what if this 'glue' was itself a FOSS application? That's Element, or any Matrix-based application.
Basically, Matrix isn't just a FOSS application - it's a bridge service which connects people on many different platforms. This isn't to advertise those other platforms, but to encourage you that going on a platform like Element isn't a dead end.
Finally is Jitsi. Jitsi can be downloaded as a web app, or can be used as a web application. It's a great video conferencing service, as functional as Zoom, but FOSS.
Why title this so provocatively? Well, it's true for a lot of reasons. (A) Let me get into the criticism, (B) let me provide a description (a fair one, I believe) of the current corporate landscape, (C) and a vision of the future.
The first point is the vulnerability and weakness we face in computing in a capitalist setting. Capitalism fluorishes when there is a centralized resource which can be owned, and rented out. That is, a central entity (the boss, the capitalist, etc.) owns a resource - a server, some software, etc. The only way to utilize that resource is to rent it out from them (which is even more true now that software is no longer really 'purchasable', but requires an annual license, or whatever).
Centralized resources though are the easiest to commercially exploit. It's totally possible to adapt a more diffuse and 'federated' system, where everyone runs a software/protocol on their own server. Of course, probably some people will still work on other people's servers for various reasons particular to their own situation - but there will be no central jackpot hit - ie a company - which makes 'cracking the code' extremely tantalizing. Hitting 30,000 companies and government agencies is much more tantalizing than hitting like 30.
To maintain the monopoly on the server... well, that's just regular capitalism. To maintain a monopoly on the software, they need to keep the source code on lockdown. No one can see it. This leads to a problem though - unlike in the open-source community, where flaws are public and fixed by the public (ie the masses of programmers who enjoy coding), a closed-source system requires using (A) a traditional corporate business model (which is not necessarily the most efficient thing for actually 'getting work done' - it is effective for extracting wealth from the labor of workers though), and sometimes (B) trying to cram into this a culture that emulates open-source - this means enormous companies whith many developers, with an ostensibly laid-back environment. You got to treat the programmers right, or else you get ugly software.
The problem with this is is you miss out on the combinatorial effect of having open-source software - having so many eyes on the software means bugs are identified faster. Having a non-exploitative model means that updates and changes to the software are made only (or at least overwhelmingly) because of the merit of that change to the software - no tangential considerations such as profit or 'cost-benefit' are factored in. There is no concern that your enterprise will 'look bad', no cloak beneath which the flaws can be hidden and left to fester. Companies try to make up for this by having lots of programmers, but closed-source still ultimately hinders this effort, and cramming it into a for-profit model slows and mutates organic development.
This is fine and good if you are just making a product - Adobe Photoshop might have a subpar development pipeline (Idk, just using as an example), but at the end of the day, it is a usable piece of software, and looks nice too. The problem is when you combine 'cloud based' rent-seeking behavior on an extremely insecure infrastructure with a closed-source model. The problem is, the 0-day can be anywhere, and a hack works regardless if everyone can see the code, or if only the company can see the code.
What this means is that (A) lots of businesses, government agencies, and individuals are lured into doing things on 'the cloud' - and this often means a few central hubs. (B) they are using closed software which has a high 'opportunity bounty' to crack, and only a select group of people is able to view it to try and fix it when it breaks. (C) This is a little tangential, but these companies collect lots of data on us, and store lots of data on us - as hacks like Equifax remind us, part of the problem is not simply corporate and government spying; it's the fundamental vulnerability of having millions of people's compromising information stored in central facilities, particularly if the software for those facilities is closed and maintained by a limited group of people, ultimately working for the 0-day-inefficient profit-motive. Part of the reason people shouldn't be liberally handing out their information (implicitly or explicitly) to centralized organizations is it is inherently exploitable by (A) those agencies themselves, but also (B) malicious rogue actors who breach those agencies and are more likely to more aggressively assault their victims (ie predictive social networks based on your geo-location vs identiy theft).
(Now I want to be clear about one thing here, and this is quite the socialist point - I am NOT arguing that software engineers and developers at the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple do not do the things they do because it fulfills them. Pretty much every developer does (although from reports of people in FAANGM, often it is the case you do soul-draining work). But it is the case that the capitalist framework they toil in means their labor-value is stolen (by billionaire executives, for example), and that their full potential is not realized.)
Don't Keep All Your Eggs in One Basket - and the problem with good non-commodities
Why do we have this system? Are there alternatives? Well yes, there are alternatives. Basically, the most secure we could be is federated server systems with open-source software running them. This is not a perfect solution - no solution will ever be - but it is about distributing information and resources, which not only disempowers the government and large corporations, but it gives the larger political-economic system greater security, as there is no 'central hub' which can be attacked.
The problem with this route, in capitalism, is that well, resources require money and capital. On top of this is the problem of advertising - how to get people to believe this, when corporate advertising (propaganda) inundates us with messaging that says otherwise? When anti-tech-corporation stance is associated with crazy alt-right? This is the problem we face in capitalism.
You might say 'start a business' - the problem is it's unclear what you would be selling. This idea that 'starting a business' is the solution for any problem is quite obvious when you run into a decommodified... thing. Linux, for example, is pretty damn decommodified. Companies that do traffic on Linux do not actually traffic on Linux - they traffic on having an out-of-the-box Linux experience, using good hardware, and presumably hardware that does not spy on you. PinePhone or Purism phones, for example, allow you to physically disengage features like the camera or bluetooth, as a way to ensure your privacy. Furthermore, they cut down on the spying your device does on you, and as many phones make it extremely hard to 'root' and install a different OS, simply the provision of hardware that you actually own is a marketable service. What is not the commodity is Linux - this is because if you have a device that is truly yours (ie you could do whatever you want to it, within the hardware capacity of that device (you ain't installing Linux on an abacus)).
So now we run into the big problem - how to get cheap laptops with Linux on them? We see chromebooks going for super cheap. Why can't Linux have that? Because, I presume, either (A) Google cuts deals with laptop manufacturers and/or (B) because there is not enough marketing for Linux, so it is doesn't seem a wise market decision for those manufacturers to put Linux on a computer... cause who is gonna buy an 'Ubuntu book' when there is a Chromebook? The problem here is that Linux cannot really be advertised by traditional means - who would actually do that? The Linux Foundation? Seeing as they are partly bankrolled by large corporations (not a criticism, just an empirical observation), this seems unlikely. Also even without the implied 'conflict of interest' issues with their sponsors, why would the Linux foundation waste money on advertising, when they don't turn a profit on the enterprise? It doesn't make sense. And they can't commodify it, because if they did, the Linux developer world would just fork Linux, and start a new project that was basically the same thing, and leave the Linux Foundation in the dust.
So now we can come back to the problem. Why don't people just go to federated servers running open-source software? (A) Partly because that software is unfamiliar - that gets back to the vicious cycle that prevents Linux from 'making it'. (B) Because for the individual business, it may make short term profit sense to go with a big corporation who will do 'the hard work' than run their own server (which would be less of a problem if people were a bit more computer literate, and if big corporations, like Nvidia, did not make it a pain in the ass to run basic hardware on Linux). (C) A networking effect - as more people use a certain ecosystem, more people get on it. This particular ecosystem is flawed and dangerous though. (D) there is a profit-motive for these corporations to keep their software closed (and thus vulnerable), to trap people into their ecosystem (such as by making devices 'un-rootable', as a very vulgar example), and to keep everything in central servers. And seeing as there seems to be no consequences for catastrophic failure, such as the Exchange hack or the SolarWind's Orion hack, then why do anything to enhance security in a structural way? We are gonna keep getting hacked and hit, and as we saw in the town near Tampa (that almost got poisoned by lye), this can have real world consequences. In a capitalist system though, these issues are brushed under the rug as an "oops", not recognized as symptoms of, and thus calls-to-action to change, a system which fundamentally absolves individuals of any security-awareness, and which is fundamentally insecure.
Tue, 16 Mar 2021 14:00:07 -0400
Security and Chrome, Water Treatment Plants
[link—standalone]
Security, Chrome, and Water Treatment Facilities
Yo
Hi
Why care about security? Many of us have been conditioned to have a blase approach to security - what could anyone want to find from my browsing activity anyways? Often these concerns are made with respect to the legislatively legitimized Constitutional violations under the PATRIOT act. These are certainly a concern in principle, and in practice for activists and organizers. While the typical citizen may not have to worry about government surveillance, an ecosystem of security and privacy would certainly provide better cover to such persons and groups.
However, this altruism is probably not enough to compel many to be concerned about security. This lack of security has real world consequences however - user data can be maliciously accessed, facilities can be disrupted, and sensitive data can be stolen by malicious actors (not just the government! :P). Digital security is not an alien, impossible event, it just requires a bad app on your phone, a bad extension on your browser, a slightly-out-of-date Windows OS (the obvious solution being: don't use Microsoft products as much as you can).
Ironically, the Constitutional violations of our government (and the subsequent whistle blowing) seem to have eroded general concern about security. As a result, we become increasingly vulnerable to rogue actors. For example, extensions/apps asking for permissions is something many of us don't think twice about, but can be part of a malicious attack on your security by rogue actors (ie here). This is to say, even if the Constitutional violations were not a problem, the cavalier approach many Americans (and maybe other people of the world) take to cyber security leaves them incredibly vulnerable to infilitration - with obvious potential consequences of stolen money, leaked sensitive data, stolen passwords, and so on. More subtly, this laziness may (besides the actual exploitable flaws) means a general poor sense of cyber-security, resulting in poor defenses at critical infrastructure by their operators (ie here).
'The Florida water treatment facility whose computer system experienced a potentially hazardous computer breach last week used an unsupported version of Windows with no firewall and shared the same TeamViewer password among its employees, government officials have reported.' [1][2]
'The longer back story is that, as reported in a GitHub thread in November, the original extension developer sold it last June, and it began showing signs of malice under the new ownership. Specifically, the thread said, a new version contained malicious code that tracked users and manipulated Web requests.'
'In a post published Friday by security firm Tenable, however, researchers noted that the flaw was reported to Google on January 24, one day before Google’s threat analysis group dropped a bombshell report that hackers sponsored by a nation-state were using a malicious website to infect security researchers with malware. Microsoft issued its own report speculating that the attack was exploiting a Chrome zero-day.'
'Lastly, a security researcher reported on Thursday that hackers were using malware that abused the Chrome sync feature to bypass firewalls so the malware could connect to command and control servers. Sync allows users to share bookmarks, browser tabs, extensions, and passwords across different devices running Chrome.'
'Martin Rakhmanov, a researcher with Trustwave SpiderLabs, said in a blog post on Wednesday that he began analyzing SolarWinds products shortly after FireEye and Microsoft reported that hackers had taken control of SolarWinds’ software development system and used it to distribute backdoored updates to Orion customers. It didn’t take long for him to find three vulnerabilities, two in Orion and a third in a product known as the Serv-U FTP for Windows. There's no evidence any of the vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild.
'The most serious flaw allows unprivileged users to remotely execute code that takes complete control of the underlying operating system. Tracked as CVE-2021-25274 the vulnerability stems from Orion’s use of the Microsoft Message Queue, a tool that has existed for more than 20 years but is no longer installed by default on Windows machines.'
'Researchers from Prague-based Avast said on Wednesday that the extension developers employed a novel way to hide malicious traffic sent between infected devices and the command and control servers they connected to. Specifically, the extensions funneled commands into the cache-control headers of traffic that was camouflaged to appear as data related to Google analytics, which websites use to measure visitor interactions.'
'Based on user reviews of some of the extensions, the CacheFlow campaign appears to have been active since October 2017. Avast said that the stealth measures it uncovered may explain why the campaign went undetected for so long.'
Google surveillance is a liability as it normalized surveillance, and provides an umbrella which breachers can attempt to hide under.
'Many of the attacks gained initial footholds by password spraying to compromise individual email accounts at targeted organizations. Once the attackers had that initial foothold, they used a variety of complex privilege escalation and authentication attacks to exploit flaws in Microsoft's cloud services. Another of the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)'s targets, security firm CrowdStrike, said the attacker tried unsuccessfully to read its email by leveraging a compromised account of a Microsoft reseller the firm had worked with.'
'According to The Wall Street Journal, SolarWinds is now investigating the possibility that these Microsoft flaws were the APT's first vector into its own organization. In December, Microsoft said the APT in question had accessed its own corporate network and viewed internal source code—but that it found "no indications that our systems were used to attack others." At that time, Microsoft had identified more than 40 attacks on its customers, a number that has increased since.'
'Microsoft Corporate VP of Security, Compliance, and Identity Vasu Jakkal told ZDNet that the "SolarWinds" campaign isn't an isolated emergency so much as the new normal, saying, "These attacks are going to continue to get more sophisticated. So we should expect that. This is not the first and not the last. This is not an outlier. This is going to be the norm."'
'“While Malwarebytes does not use SolarWinds, we, like many other companies were recently targeted by the same threat actor,” the notice stated. “We can confirm the existence of another intrusion vector that works by abusing applications with privileged access to Microsoft Office 365 and Azure environments.”'
'When the mass compromise came to light last month, Microsoft said the hackers also stole signing certificates that allowed them to impersonate any of a target’s existing users and accounts through the Security Assertion Markup Language. Typically abbreviated as SAML, the XML-based language provides a way for identity providers to exchange authentication and authorization data with service providers.'
'Twelve days ago, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency said that the attackers may have obtained initial access by using password guessing or password spraying or by exploiting administrative or service credentials.'
'Because the attackers used their access to the SolarWinds network to compromise the company’s software build system, Malwarebytes researchers investigated the possibility that they too were being used to infect their customers. So far, Malwarebytes said it has no evidence of such an infection. The company has also inspected its source code repositories for signs of malicious changes.'
'Malwarebytes said it first learned of the infection from Microsoft on December 15, two days after the SolarWinds hack was first disclosed. Microsoft identified the network compromise through suspicious activity from a third-party application in Malwarebytes’ Microsoft Office 365 tenant. The tactics, techniques, and procedures in the Malwarebytes attack were similar in key ways to the threat actor involved in the SolarWinds attacks.'
'In a post published on Tuesday, the company said that the certificate was used by about 10 percent of its customer base, which—according to the company—numbers about 36,100. The “sophisticated threat actor” then likely used the certificate to target “a low single digit number” of customers using the certificate to encrypt Microsoft 365 data. Mimecast said it learned of the compromise from Microsoft.'
'Certificate compromises allow hackers to read and modify encrypted data as it travels over the Internet. For that to happen, a hacker must first gain the ability to monitor the connection going into and out of a target’s network. Typically, certificate compromises require access to highly fortified storage devices that store private encryption keys. That access usually requires deep-level hacking or insider access.'
'he disclosure comes a month after the discovery of a major supply chain attack that infected roughly 18,000 customers of Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds with a backdoor that gave access to their networks. In some cases—including one involving the US Department of Justice—the hackers used the backdoor to take control of victims’ Office 365 systems and read email they stored. Microsoft, itself a victim in the hack, has played a key role in investigating it. The type of backdoor pushed to SolarWinds customers would also prove valuable in compromising a certificate.'
'FireEye went on to say that a digitally signed component of the Orion framework contained a backdoor that communicates with hacker-controlled servers. The backdoor, planted in the Windows dynamic link library file SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll, was written to remain stealthy, both by remaining dormant for a couple weeks and then blending in with legitimate SolarWinds data traffic.'
FireEye researchers wrote: "The trojanized update file is a standard Windows Installer Patch file that includes compressed resources associated with the update, including the trojanized SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll component. Once the update is installed, the malicious DLL will be loaded by the legitimate SolarWinds.BusinessLayerHost.exe or SolarWinds.BusinessLayerHostx64.exe (depending on system configuration). After a dormant period of up to two weeks, the malware will attempt to resolve a subdomain of avsvmcloud[.]com. The DNS response will return a CNAME record that points to a Command and Control (C2) domain. The C2 traffic to the malicious domains is designed to mimic normal SolarWinds API communications. The list of known malicious infrastructure is available on FireEye’s GitHub "
'Supply chain attacks are among the hardest to counter because they rely on software that's already trusted and widely distributed. SolarWinds' Monday-morning filing suggests that Cozy Bear hackers had the ability to infect the networks about 18,000 of the company’s customers. It’s not yet clear how many of those eligible users were actually hacked.'
'After establishing communication with an actual researcher, the attackers would ask the target to work together on cyber vulnerability research and then share collaboration tools containing malicious code to install malware on the researcher’s systems.'
'In some cases, the attackers were able to create a backdoor to the victim’s computer even when their systems were running fully patched and up-to-date Windows 10 and Chrome browser versions, Google said.'
DDoS-for-hire services are abusing the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol to increase the firepower of distributed denial-of-service attacks that paralyze websites and other online services, a security firm said this week.
'Typically abbreviated as RDP, Remote Desktop Protocol is the underpinning for a Microsoft Windows feature that allows one device to log into another device over the Internet. RDP is mostly used by businesses to save employees the cost or hassle of having to be physically present when accessing a computer.'
'As is typical with many authenticated systems, RDP responds to login requests with a much longer sequence of bits that establish a connection between the two parties. So-called booter/stresser services, which for a fee will bombard Internet addresses with enough data to take them offline, have recently embraced RDP as a means to amplify their attacks, security firm Netscout said.'
'The amplification allows attackers with only modest resources to strengthen the size of the data they direct at targets. The technique works by bouncing a relatively small amount of data at the amplifying service, which in turn reflects a much larger amount of data at the final target. With an amplification factor of 85.9 to 1, 10 gigabytes-per-second of requests directed at an RDP server will deliver roughly 860Gbps to the target.'
'DDoS amplification attacks work by using UDP network packets, which are easily spoofable on many networks. An attacker sends the vector a request and spoofs the headers to give the appearance the request came from the target. The amplification vector then sends the response to the target whose address appears in the spoofed packets.'
'The revelation of an electronic Peeping Tom is a good reminder of the risks that come from installing network connected cameras inside the home or other locations where there's a reasonable expectation of privacy. People who choose to accept these risks should take the time to educate themselves on how to use, configure, and maintain the devices. Among the first things to inspect are the list of users given access and who has actually logged into the system.'
'“It just really shocked me, because I came into this project thinking that these phones are really protecting user data well,” says Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green, who oversaw the research. “Now I’ve come out of the project thinking almost nothing is protected as much as it could be. So why do we need a backdoor for law enforcement when the protections that these phones actually offer are so bad?”'
'The main difference between Complete Protection and AFU relates to how quick and easy it is for applications to access the keys to decrypt data. When data is in the Complete Protection state, the keys to decrypt it are stored deep within the operating system and encrypted themselves. But once you unlock your device the first time after reboot, lots of encryption keys start getting stored in quick access memory, even while the phone is locked. At this point an attacker could find and exploit certain types of security vulnerabilities in iOS to grab encryption keys that are accessible in memory and decrypt big chunks of data from the phone.'
'The researchers found that Android has a similar setup to iOS with one crucial difference. Android has a version of “Complete Protection” that applies before the first unlock. After that, the phone data is essentially in the AFU state. But where Apple provides the option for developers to keep some data under the more stringent Complete Protection locks all the time—something a banking app, say, might take them up on—Android doesn't have that mechanism after first unlocking. Forensic tools exploiting the right vulnerability can grab even more decryption keys, and ultimately access even more data, on an Android phone.'
'Tushar Jois, another Johns Hopkins PhD candidate who led the analysis of Android, notes that the Android situation is even more complex because of the many device makers and Android implementations in the ecosystem. There are more versions and configurations to defend, and across the board users are less likely to be getting the latest security patches than iOS users.'
Infinity (Reddit client), Pdf Viewer Plus (PDF viewer), Book Reader (Epub files), Signal (communication), Briar (communication), File Manager, Gallery (picture viewer), Calendar, Syncthing (cloudless syncing of files between devices), Scrambled (get rid of meta-data on photos), Feeder (RSS feeder), and SkyTube/NewPipe Legacy (youtube), Music Player GO (music - local files :P), and Termux (terminal).
While there are ways to block ads on your phone at the DNS level (ie pi-hole), this means (A) you need to set up some hardware stuff, and (B) it will only work at your house. Which is great. But a more flexible solution is if there is a way around it... on your device!
This only works on Android (or de-Googled phones, I presume). What you do is download the F-Droid store on your phone here (it's easy - just click download and follow the install wizard). F-Droid is a repository (or "store" as in storage) of free and open-source software (FOSS). Then once you're in, download and install either NewPipe Legacy or SkyTube from the F-Droid "store".
Now if you go to those apps, you can watch Youtube, without the ads. NewPipe Legacy allows you to watch with picture-in-picture as well. So far, I've been a little frustrated I can't rotate for landscape viewing - kind of odd, but not terrible. If that's really a deal-breaker, you can go back to ad-land of the actual Youtube app, but that is just very annoying for me.
Subscriptions???
Soon I'm gonna play around with how to get "subscriptions" to work, but right now, as I use newsboat, I've got a natural alternative (for me at least). Using the Feeder app (also from F-Droid), I take the urls of my youtube feeds, and paste them into a Feeder feed.
To get a channel's feed url, what you do is click on one of their videos (on a computer). ONCE you have clicked on one of their videos, click on their channel, and copy that url. For example, the Majority Report homepage has the following URL:
Having retrieved that, you will delete the part that says "channel/" and replace it with "feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=". You then paste the edited URL into your RSS feeder application (for me, Feeder). This will load the feed for that channel into your RSS feeder. Then you can go into that feed, click on a video, and at first, it will default launch videos in the Youtube app! To get around this, I simply disable the Youtube app. After doing so, if I click on a video, it asks if I want to open the video in NewPipe Legacy/Skytube or Brave - I pick the Youtube client I want, and then open it (if it asks if you want "background" or "pop-up" video, select pop-up).
I realize this is a lot of work - it works well for me given my main setup, but maybe not so much for others. So I'll be looking around to see if there are easier ways to get subscriptions to work. But for now, I thought that was pretty neat.
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 19:41:13 -0500
The Problem with Linux Evangelism
[link—standalone]
The Problem With Linux Evangelism (and How to Fix It)
The Problem With Linux Evangelism (and How to Fix It)
A lesson for Linux and other issues
There's a lot of social issues I care about - unions, voting rights, equal rights in general, the right to repair... and GNU/Linux. Wrapped up with my care about GNU/Linux is (A) the view that open-source development is fantastic, and (B) that security and privacy are growing and relevant issues in today's day. Furthermore, (C) that we should know what our software is doing - we shouldn't have to just "trust" corporations.
A little story
I care about these issues quite a bit... but I didn't just start caring out of thin air. In fact, back in the day, I didn't really care about these things. Why? Because, as far as I was aware, caring about privacy and security entailed a hassle, it entailed having to do a lot of figuring stuff out.
'Linux' always seemed like this wonky, unstable, alien thing. And the first time I made the leap to use it, it was because I was working on a project that required 'bash scripting', so I decided I might as well try it out. I looked around the web, found how to do get Ubuntu running (Ubuntu's website is actually pretty useful, ie this tutorial on making a bootable Ubuntu USB stick), and got it running. I was highly impressed on my first impression - and still am, Ubuntu is intrinsically far better than Windows.
So I stuck with it - really there was no reason to go back. For almost any kind of project, there is excellent software native to Linux which works well. If not, well, I kept Windows dual booted. I rarely use it.
For the first six or so months, I used Ubuntu just like a regular old desktop, and using the terminal to install things (which is much, much easier and better than just downloading things off of the web... although you can also do that with Linux). It boots faster than Windows. It doesn't auto-update like Windows. It's less vulnerable than Windows. There are a variety of other features which generally make it much nicer. That is to say, I didn't feel a reason to switch back.
As I became increasingly familiar with Linux, I became more and more inclined to use 'free and open-source software' (FOSS). This is largely because such projects are very good, and are native to Linux. This comes with a side-effect though - you start to become aware that secure and privacy-respecting alternatives exist, and are just as usable. For example, Chromium is effectively the same thing as Chrome, except it respects your privacy. Of course, it's available regardless of your operating system, but you became more aware of these discrepancies.
At first, privacy is a beneficial side-effect, not the main concern. But soon,having enjoyed the privilege of privacy-respecting software (for the most part), you start to become more skeptical of spying done. An abstract aim for 'privacy' is not what will keep most people into Linux - but the effectiveness of Linux will cultivate a concern for privacy.
There are other reasons why people evangelize for Linux - it is more effective for workflows, it is free, it is open-source (I guess I hit on that a bit), but none of these reasons are enough to marshal a market of consumers. These are legitimate concerns though. Instead of selling Linux on these points, we should sell these points on Linux. Many distros are pretty awe-inspiring nowadays, and very sleek. They are capable of selling themselves on their own merit. We need to market Linux. Of course, we can hammer on the other points. But on the basics, the fundamentals, the 'feeling' of using a computer - Linux wins here. And that's where the battle is lost or won.
For some reason, there is some controversy that the trackpad is somehow still more useful than the trackpoint. I've got a 2018 model thinkpad, and I can tell you... Lenovo may have introduced a 'chiclet' style keyboard (still not bad though), they may have made repair less of an option (although still better than its peers, afaik), and the thing may be a finger print magnet. There's one thing they got very right, and that's the trackpoint system.
The Big Lie of the Trackpad
Trackpads are clearly hold a dominant share in the laptop space - I'm pretty sure thinkpads are the only laptops that still manufacture with trackpoints. But I don't understand why - the damn things don't need to be red! If they aren't to consumer taste, why don't HP, Apple, and so on, make a different colored trackpoint? One with a different texture or finish? Who knows! All of this seems possible. Maybe the red, bumpy dot seems a bit 'utilitarian' for your taste, but well, that's not inherent to the idea of a trackpoint.
A trackpoint has in mind that the user will want to be always using the keyboard. In fact, this is much more efficient. So why have we drifted away from the trackpoint, even as the desktop computer (with the mouse) has, it seems like, become less important than the laptop?
Probably the trackpad. The trackpad drags you away from the keyboard, asking you to move your hand down. Now it doesn't seem like much, but constantly moving your hand back and forth to type is a real hassle. That means you'll be less prone to want to use hotkeys (since that requires even more going back and forth), and more prone to just pointing and clicking. Why am I getting so worked up about this?
Because I'm coming from a born-again Vim perspective (it's not a cult :P). Hotkeys make life less annoying on the keyboard. However, having a bunch of different hotkeys for different programs is very difficult to learn. Which is why I try to find vim-respecting software, so I can use the same hotkeys across different software. Luckily, many command-line program programmers have this same thing in mind, and make such compatible software. It's a beautiful feedback loop! All of this doesn't seem necessary, from the POV of trackpad land, but as Henry Ford is fabled to have said, "if I had asked the consumer what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse". The consumer doesn't know what they want - they become ingrained into a certain system of doing things, and then within this local minima, they seek options which maximize this minima. Certainly, with a better trackpad, you will be more productive on a computer that is otherwise a replication, save for having a smaller and/or less responsive trackpad. That is not in doubt.
Problem is, the trackpoint is just as effective, if not more. Perhaps there are some applications where the trackpad really is king (I don't know any off the top of my head), but I can't imagine it's a wide scope. Consider where your fingers are when you type - your index fingers are near G and H, and your thumbs are near the space bar. So, what if I told you, we put the trackpoint near G and H (so it's left- and right-hand respecting), and then we put left-click and right-click... right below the space bar, where your thumbs are. Scroll you say? What if we put a button between left and right click, so when you hold that button down, and adjust the trackpoint, that scrolls (or can be used for expanding/contracting things)!
It makes beautiful sense. The trackpad seems entirely dumb knowing that. It's kind of nice if the thing I'm doing has no hotkeys and rarely requires typing... but that is an extremely rare example... since almost every application (even non-Vim-like) have hotkeys. Even then, the trackpoint is much more sensible. I guess if you've really mastered your laptops particular trackpad, then great. But it's kind of unnecessary. Consider getting a thinkpad. They're really great (although some from 2010s to 2017s?? apparently have some annoying physical layout, where the left/right click buttons were part of the trackpad, which caused issues... but that's a trackpad-related problem, not a trackpoint-specific problem).
The Decline and Fall of America: Standardized Testing has Rotten America to Its Core
(Obviously hyperbole, but also, where's the lie?)
(this is a rant)
Standardized testing has become the great American past-time. Isn't it lovely? Forcing teachers to teach for a test, teaching students to learn for results, not for learning itself, that's exactly what Plato had in mind back in the Academy!
There are multiple issues with standardized testing. The first is that not everyone has the same quality of education - disproportionately, poor and BIPOC communities are 'hit the hardest', although of course there are many many exceptions. Of course, this leads many colleges to either have different standards for different backgrounds, or to throw out the tests altogether. So what the hell is point? To make colleges feel 'good', to make them feel like they have a proper way to filter kids out? I really don't understand. I'll keep elaborating.
Before I get to this next criticism, let me say that it grinds my gears when people talk about 'different ways of learning'. This is some sore BS to compensate for bad teaching and an awful education system. Somehow after twelve years in the meat grinder, people come out thinking they didn't learn cause 'the school didn't teach them for their way', not becase the whole program was fundamentally flawed. What's the flaw?
Well far be it to declare that standardized testing is the fundamental problem, but it is at least reflective of the problem - this insane idea that we have to measure everything, even if those measurements are totally bogus, in hopes that they correlate to something real. This is the same problem with IQ tests - anyone with half a brain will tell you that IQs don't "precisely" mean something, but that they "correlate" to something, vaguely. Well, what's the damn point in knowing the number then? Anyone with an ounce of self-reflection understands roughly how smart they are - they don't need a number that tells them roughly how smart they are. And if someone doesn't understand how smart they are, an IQ test isn't gonna change their mind - they'll just tell you IQ tests aren't perfect! It's a useless number, because it is making an stupid measurement.
Stupid measurements are not just dumb because they are intrinsically dumb, they are dumb because they make people labor for stupid ends. There are people out there, I guarantee you, who try to do better on an IQ test. I bet you there are people you can pay to coach you. You can pay to listen to Jordan Petersen tell you why IQ scores really are important. There is a whole cottage industry based on this dumb idea, and that is all wasted human potential.
More Stupid Measurements
Now maybe this is not a national thing, I'm not sure (America is weird as hell), but in my state, kids are always studying for standardized tests, 365 days a year (not literally, since they have summer and winter break, and weekends, I guess - but even then! You can go to some terrible black hole of fun to study for these BS tests). Teachers, human beings qualified to actually teach, have to waste their potential, all of their training to actually teach, to teach standardized tests. Cause if they don't teach standardized tests, oops, now they're on the chopping block.
This is really, really bad. Not JUST because standardized testing is tedious and systemically unfair, but because you aren't teaching kids how to 'learn' or 'think' - these ideas have somehow been compressed into the buzzword 'critical think', which if you think about it, should actually be redundant, but it's not when kids have to do BS work for twelve years.
So what is learning?
Not everyone is going to enjoy learning as much as the next person. But learning is a very 'human' activity. The world is full of mystery and wonder, and as we acquire more knowledge, as we gain facility with solving the puzzles of life, we see more and more connections. As you learn more history, you do not simply gain a linearly-increasing stack of knowledge, you gain a richer web of understanding. This is the same for any field.
Now how exactly do you gain a richer web of understanding? You learn something here and there, and eureka! this third fact you learned sometime before makes a lot more sense. You connect dots. You get these lightbulb moments. You learn to have lightbulb moments. It's hard to explain, because learning is so complex, so fluid... so human. And then some morons want to NOT ONLY cram all of that experience into a moronic multiple-choice test, they want you to pay for it???.
What's in those tests anyways?
I haven't taken the SAT or ACT in a long time, I don't remember the content that well, but I can guarantee you, it is more reflective of how well you have studied those topics (both in class, and explicitly for those tests), than how smart you are. Yes, it also tests a bit how smart you are... but again, a bad measurement you don't need anyways (I'll come back to that). I DO remember from the SAT they had questions about increasingly obtuse vocabulary, and what the words meant. Do you realize how stupid it is to test how familiar a student is with a dictionary?
I'm more familiar with the 'math' stuff though (and science). On the GRE (which I've recently taken), the 'quant' section was absolutely smooth-brained in design. The questions on there are the sort of questions that, had you taken engineering and physics classics throughout college, you'll pass with flying colors (ie combinatorics, probability, geometry, etc.). If you hadn't, well, you're not gonna do as good. And take a guess which majors do best on the quant section?? Engineers and physicists. Who do moderately well?? Biologists and chemists (who have presumably taken a physics course or two, and also there's physical chemistry which has a bit of that). Guess who does poorly?? Everyone else. Probably cause they don't take the corresponding classes, not because they are less facile with quantitative scores. My point is, these tests aren't testing anything that your transcript won't show. It's an absolute waste of time. (also you might say "well some colleges are better than others, an A in Calc III from Harvard is different than an A in Calc III at X community college... let me say... calc III is the same exact thing no matter where you go).
The reading portion is mostly fine on the GRE, since most people have to read throughout college. It's still kinda dumb, but since the whole test is dumb, that's not surprising. Maybe there are deeper flaws with it I'm not aware of, but my main criticism lays with the quant section, since I'm most familiar with it.
So you have this terrible quant section, which measures something totally unrelated to most people's work, and then you have a whole damn cottage industry dedicated to studying for this damn section. People waste their time and money (well not 'waste' if they get into the program because of their studying, but 'waste' because it is intrinsically a stupid system to have) preparing for this. It's a waste of human potential.
The greatest sin: Misinforming what 'learning' and 'math' is
The greatest sin here is what I said in the title of this section. People think 'learning' or 'studying' is this slogfest. People think math is this awful, awful, tedious subject. While factually untrue (probably), I'm gonna go ahead and blame the decline and fall of America on standardized testing. It is absolutely stupid, makes people think learning and math are terrible, and probably helped cultivate the culture with a stereotype of 'stupid Americans that don't wanna study the "hard stuff"', a culture where 'I'm not good with numbers' is a reflexive answer when people see math (side note: barely anyone is good with numbers. Barely any mathematician deals with actual arithmetic and calculation.).
Then on top of that, the salt in the wound, is that because these tests test stuff like how well your teachers taught you to do monkey math, how much you've read (and with all of the support and encouragement that can require), it builds in systemic biases against poor and colored people. These are self-reinforcing. The truly ludicrous thing is, the measurement isn't even a good one! This is an awful system on every level. I'm no opponent of standardized education (in fact I think that'd be good), but standardized testing (especially predatory capitalists tests which were designed by idiots) are destroying this country's youth's minds. Get it out of here!
I recently got a new phone, this one with many perks over my old one - for example, I have more than 200 MB of spare storage space (actually around 100 GB in the base device, pretty nice). It also has a stylus (which is nice for signing documents, and other things hopefully to come)! And checking out the old Linux tube, and looked up a program I've heard about: syncthing. Why this app, and why sync?
Syncthing is an app that lets you sync across different devices! Now this doesn't sound crazy, if you have Apple devices, or have Googled or Dropboxed your life up, don't these things do the same thing? No, they rely on devices sharing a common repository on the cloud, and then pulling and pushing to the same repository. But wait - what if they just pulled and pushed from each other? As long as you don't care about being able to remotely access all of your files wherever you're at, even if somehow you don't have your phone and computer on you, but you have access to the cloud - then maybe the cloud is for you. By that situation I can't really imagine happening all that much to me, personally. So why not cut out the middle man, and just sync between devices?
The beautiful thing is, it just works. I personally haven't really used Apple's cloud that much (since when I had an Apple device, it was just an iPhone, so I didn't get the whole ecosystem experience), and in my Windows + Android experience... it's maybe possible to set up a slick system to emulate syncing with Google cloud stuff... but the infrastructure doesn't necessarily exist out-of-the-box. Certainly average joes aren't syncing between devices.
Syncing just works. Using syncthing, you (A) open up syncthing on your computer, pull up the QR code for your device (no account creation needed, it just makes a unique code for your instance), and (B) scan that QR code with your phone. You say "yes I wanna sync" on both ends. You do a few steps (there are guides, so I won't go through them), and boom, you sync a folder or file between the devices. (tip: you will sync the contents of a selected folder, not the folder itself. So for example, if I'm trying to sync the folder 'literature' between my computer and my phone, I make a folder called 'literature' on my phone (Android right now, maybe I'll de-Google, we'll see how motivated I am, but this is working on a very vanilla set-up). Then I sync the folder 'literature' into the 'folder' literature; that is, syncing won't 'create' a folder called literature, it only syncs in the contents of the original folder - I messed up the first time and it synced all of the papers I've saved into the 'home'(?) directory of my phone, and I had to go back in and retry)
Now I have to mess around with it more before I say 'whoa, secure!', but conceptually why this is secure is that once you're done syncing, you just pause or stop the syncing between the devices, so there is no more activity. It's like closing the gates, and boom, the target has the files you wanted it to have. It's secure, and easy, and you didn't need to go through the cloud!
To make this website, I similarly use a syncing CLI program called 'rsync'. I have the contents of my website on my local computer, and then I rsync it with my web server to update it. It's pretty easy and clean!
Anyways that's my schpeal on that. I was pretty inspired by this app. A lot of times I find an app WAY more effective than the 'standard' application in Windows or Apple land, but it's largely because I'm CLI literate. But syncthing operates through a web GUI (although you launch it on the command line by typing 'syncthing' and pressing enter), and the phone app is, well, a phone app. So it should hopefully be intuitive to non-CLI-comfortable people. And it's just very nice and clear, doesn't require cloud storage, and you can feel more secure and safe. And efficient.
Pictured above: Newsboat, the RSS feeder I use on my computer
There's this somewhat forgotten feature of blog-like sites and services called "RSS" I want to talk about. Most people have interests of some kind, maybe thats the news, or recent science literature, and other stuff - that's me. And you've probably tried to use the world wide web to access these things - that's what it's supposed to do. But websites are generally awful, theyre buried in pop ups, thumbnails, ads, decoration, and general javascript bloat. You have to click between pages and repeat the mess over and over. So you give that up - who actually goes to the NYT or WaPo or whatever page anyways? Those sites are lessons on how not to design a website.
There's some hope though - you can get some news aggregator like Google News or Flipboard on the job. Then you can add your interests, and it should give you articles relevant. But quickly it becomes disappointing - sometimes it gives obscure and slightly interesting articles (altho probabky not what you were looking for), and otherwse its the same garbage on facebook, and you were trying to avoid that. Where's the good stuff?
That's where RSS feeders come in. Now this won't salvage the so-so quality of WaPo or NYT, but it will let you avoid their awful websites. Further, a third the reason these news sources seem like garbage is their terrible websites, and another third cause the same BS hype stories get shared to death on social media. Also they do suck, thats the other third, but as you can see, not nearly as bad as you thought. An RSS feeder actually shows you what they publish.
Or perhaps more relevant, you're in academia, and there are of course multiple journals you'd love to keep up with, but their interface is garbage, and you keep missing those table of contents emails. While not every journal has a good RSS solution, many of them have something. And you can halfway keep up with the Literature (this needs to be improved by the journals, its not even a threat to their closed pjblicatioms). Why is it worth halfway keeping up? Cause its already hard enough to halfway keep up, and an RSS Feeder puts it all in one spot, with no popups, ads, annoyimg banners and thumbnails, annoying javascript, and neanderthal webpage formatting, and ugly (and buried) table of content emails.
Now you might wonder, whats the catch? There is no catch. Stuff that is paywalled will still be paywalled, the key is you can actually aggregate news (or any updates from anything) properly, and can see all of it with clean formatting. And honestly, even if something is paywalled, if it NYT, who cares? You want to see NEW HEADLINES. How many people knew Mugabe died a few years back? Not many, but you would have known if you saw the headline. And if you really want to read it, you can probably weasel it from somewhere, the point is, youve fought like 90% of the battle just getting everything you want in one clean spot.
