Do you have specific issues with the real democratic structures of AES states that you can point to further decentralization helping with?
I understand how all this works, and I think those are systems built on human communications systems of the 18th century, not the 21st. I think communications have come so far that we need to consider that more decentralization and distribution than we already have isn’t going to somehow make things worse.
Current iterations are Napster, and I want us to be be Bittorrent.
Like I said elsewhere, I think communications and how they alienate us from each other has potentially become the bigger issue than commodities separating us, which is why I’m less interested in Marx and more interested in Debord/McLuhan.
Like how McLuhan talked about the history of ancient Egypt and how, after the invention of papyrus and use by the military, the power in society went from the Priest caste, who previously were the only people who could write, to the military caste, because their writing was current, prudent, and useful in everyday life. It changed power relations in society based on a different type of communications system. Modern communications, especially software are literally language made manifest and so much of our world runs on it all now that the private corporations that own it all can effectively put a gun to the world’s head and say “do what we say or we make it all stop working.” We can also look at the flip side, the Great Firewall of China, which endlessly spies on all its citizens and even gives them cute popups to remind them that cops are actively watching their online activity, and why friends of mine used to risk running Tor exit nodes because they wanted to support dissidents in countries who were blocking their communications.
Does that make sense?
Those systems that I described came from the 20th century at the earliest, and are regularly iterated upon to better meet the demands of the people. I’m not saying your focus on communication is wrong, but that you shouldn’t attack others if you aren’t aware of their actual history or developed theory, as you casually tossed aside frequently in this very conversation. Even with China, Western companies spy to an even greater degree and yet China was specifically singled out, I think this method is entirely unproductive and further alienating.
I literally expressed that Western tech companies can and will hold a proverbial gun to the worlds head to get what they want and you attack me for “singling out China.” Okay.
My point was that communications are fucked when they’re controlled by centralized powers instead of decentralized and citizen-controlled. Like I said, there isn’t a modern country that does this right. They’re all draconian fuckheads who want to spy on their populace but have privacy for those in positions of power. It’s not the system, it’s humans, and it’s that kind of shit that you have to face when designing societies (remember the Utopian thinking you brought up?) that when you’re centralizing power of any kind, you’re creating more opportunities for despotism.
I’d say the answer lies in further centralization, which when combined with democratic structures leads to no abilities for individual actors to take advantage of the system itself. Decentralization can often backfire, but presently it’s useful under Capitalism.
