(start rant with cancel worthy substrings)
Hear me out, but, it seems like the gist of political philosophy for the last 300 years or so has been "How do we solve the problem of arbitary power, because it's obvously bad." So, we have Montesquieu giving us checks-and-balances, and we have a natural rights tradition flowing out of Locke, and so forth.
And now we have reached the point where there is a feeling of everyone throwing up their hands in disgust at the sheer impossibility of changing anything, that everything is running badly on autopilot, and the electorate throwing Hail Mary passes to messianic politicians. (One would think Obama and Trump were rivals for the Second Coming of Christ, for the way their supporters talked about them.)
It puzzles me, so I look back and I see that, it used to be that there were little fiefdoms of arbitary power all over American society. Online for example: every message board was a little dictatorship, and there were thousands. IRC channels were dictatorships, and there were tens of thousands.
Now, Twitter and Facebook are a dictatorships, and there are 2.
In the real world, small businesses were dictatorships, and there were hundreds of thousands. Now, there are mostly chains.
A counter-intuitive result is that we are freer to be assholes in the monopolistic world. We complain about Twitter and Facebook moderation (with very good cause), but no IRC chanop, no forum moderator, would ever tolerate a hundredth of the bullshit that Twitter and Facebook tolerate.
I can walk into any chain restauraunt and get my food free by being an ass about anything that takes my fancy. But, there is an Italian place down the road, run for decades by a first generation Albanan immigrant and his wife. If something was legit wrong, you'll get a free meal and a heartfelt apology.
But if someone were to pull the "I get free food because I'm an asshole" routine on them, they would quickly discover the inspiration for the Seinfeld "Soup Nazi" episode.
I don't know the answer here. It's certainly not "the US should be a dictatorship." But we may be entering a period where we need to think a little less about traditional polisci solutions to traditional polisci problems and start thinking about how to engineer more little dictatorships into our society, before we end up with one big one.
(end rant)
TrentonZero /
npub1sz…4g279
2022-08-27 13:41:10
Author Public Key
npub1szvxprymkgvxclns7rk4czsz79z50fkpenvfusgcq67ptlvctqws54g279Published at
2022-08-27 13:41:10Event JSON
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"content": "(start rant with cancel worthy substrings) \n\nHear me out, but, it seems like the gist of political philosophy for the last 300 years or so has been \"How do we solve the problem of arbitary power, because it's obvously bad.\" So, we have Montesquieu giving us checks-and-balances, and we have a natural rights tradition flowing out of Locke, and so forth. \n\nAnd now we have reached the point where there is a feeling of everyone throwing up their hands in disgust at the sheer impossibility of changing anything, that everything is running badly on autopilot, and the electorate throwing Hail Mary passes to messianic politicians. (One would think Obama and Trump were rivals for the Second Coming of Christ, for the way their supporters talked about them.) \n\nIt puzzles me, so I look back and I see that, it used to be that there were little fiefdoms of arbitary power all over American society. Online for example: every message board was a little dictatorship, and there were thousands. IRC channels were dictatorships, and there were tens of thousands. \n\nNow, Twitter and Facebook are a dictatorships, and there are 2.\n\nIn the real world, small businesses were dictatorships, and there were hundreds of thousands. Now, there are mostly chains. \n\nA counter-intuitive result is that we are freer to be assholes in the monopolistic world. We complain about Twitter and Facebook moderation (with very good cause), but no IRC chanop, no forum moderator, would ever tolerate a hundredth of the bullshit that Twitter and Facebook tolerate.\n\nI can walk into any chain restauraunt and get my food free by being an ass about anything that takes my fancy. But, there is an Italian place down the road, run for decades by a first generation Albanan immigrant and his wife. If something was legit wrong, you'll get a free meal and a heartfelt apology. \n\nBut if someone were to pull the \"I get free food because I'm an asshole\" routine on them, they would quickly discover the inspiration for the Seinfeld \"Soup Nazi\" episode. \n\nI don't know the answer here. It's certainly not \"the US should be a dictatorship.\" But we may be entering a period where we need to think a little less about traditional polisci solutions to traditional polisci problems and start thinking about how to engineer more little dictatorships into our society, before we end up with one big one.\n\n(end rant)",
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