Very Brief Notes on Forms of Human Organization, & c.; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-04-08 Sa
Notes: primitives for human organization, post-1870 societal-organization patterns, & modes of production; Dan Drezner on chaos monkey-controlled networks; America's two nations; Nasim Taleb talks...
FOCUS: Very Brief Notes on Forms of Human Organization, & c.:
Eight “primitives” for forms of human organization:
Reciprocity
Propaganda
Redistribution
Hierarchy
Prestige/honor
Bureaucracy
Market economy
Algorithm
Six “patterns” for the large-scale organization of societies that have been tried since 1870:
Pseudo-classical semi-liberalism
Really-existing socialism
Fascism-Cæsarism
The New Deal Order/social democracy
The Neoliberal Order
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (i.e.: Leninist State Capitalism with Egalitarian Aspirations and Chinese Characteristics)
Ten “modes of production” (including distribution, communication, and domination):
Agrarian-Age Stone (“Tribal”)
Agrarian-Age Bronze
Agrarian-Age Iron (“Ancient”)
Late Agrarian-Age Feudal-Royal
Imperial-Commercial Society
Steampower and Machine
Applied Science
Mass Production
Global Value-Chain
Info-Biotech
ONE IMAGE: Jeremy Ney: A Tale of Two Countries:
What a life expectancy map tells us about the state of the US right now:
MUST-READ: When Dominant Networks Go Bad:
Dram, I suspect that Dan Drezner is wrong here. There is a big difference between a, in Mancur Olson's formulation, “stationary bandit” who rationally seeks to milk you and understands the situation on the one hand, and a chaos monkey in it for the LULZ on the other. Certainly there can be nobody in the world right now who believes that putting more of their eggs into Musk’s twitter basket is a good idea. By contrast, there are lots of people who find paying the Google or the Facebook or the Apple or the Amazon tax worthwhile, and are deepening their commitment to the platform. I think that difference will, in the long run, tell:
Daniel W. Drezner: Even serious abuses of power do not always topple a powerful network: ‘Elon Musk decided that he was not disrupting Twitter enough… blocked people who use Substack from embedding tweets into their stories… blocking engagement on tweets containing links to Substack…. Matt Taibbi… went from telling MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan that he likes Elon Musk and did not want to criticize him to confirming Musk’s paranoia about Substack Notes and posting that he would be, “staying at Substack, and leaving Twitter, I guess.”… Musk unfollowed Taibbi’s Twitter account…. So, to sum up: after multiple moves that have shed payroll but also destabilized Twitter’s platform, Musk has now targeted the very independent writers who are most likely to provide content for Twitter, thereby ensuring even more people exiting the site. At this point I am beginning to wonder if Musk is trying to memorialize himself into a Harvard Business School case study of what not to do when running a social media company…. But… Casey Newton… how difficult it has been and will be for some to leave the bird site…. It’s really, really difficult to exit from the dominant network. Simple inertia is a powerful force…. It takes an awful lot of self-inflicted damage to weaken status quo networks…
ONE AUDIO: On What Bitcoiners, Anti-Vaxxers, VCs & Deadlifters Are Getting Wrong:
Nassim Taleb, Tracy Alloway, & Joe Weisenthal: <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-06/nassim-nicholas-taleb-on-bitcoin-vaccines-svb-stocks-and-risk>
Very Briefly Noted:
Daron Acemoglu: In Search of a New Political Economy: ‘The late-twentieth-century assumption that democracy and markets would ultimately triumph everywhere has since been met by an intellectual backlash that is even more wrong-headed. To chart a better path forward, we will need to revise our thinking in several policy domains at once…
Todd Woody: The Final Mission for a California Military Base: Become Housing:
‘The US Navy shuttered the Concord Naval Weapons Station in 2008, but plans to redevelop it for climate-friendly homes and a park are moving slowly…
Dan Pfeiffer: Elon Musk Declares War on Independent Writers: ‘Twitter's new "policy" is going to hurt a lot of writers doing important work…. Currently, it is still possible to share links to Substack content [on Twitter] if they are put through a link shortener…. This is all so stupid… but what else should you expect from Elon Musk?…
Harrison W. Chase: ‘@LangChainAI, previously @robusthq @kensho MLOps ∪ Generative AI ∪ sports analytics…
Ayushi Batwari & al.: Origin: ‘Building the future of personalized browsers with LLMs…
Amanda Holpuch: New Mexico Police Fatally Shoot Man After Responding to Wrong House: ‘Responding to a call at 5308 Valley View… knocked on the front door at 5305 Valley View… fatally shot Robert Dotson, 52, after they “mistakenly approached” his home around 11:30 p.m. and he opened his screen door armed with a handgun…
Yastreblansky: Disorganized Crime: ‘Peter Baker and Susan Glasser[‘s]… The Divider… devoted to showing how hard administration Republicans were willing to work to save us all from Trump so it's really all OK…
Jonah Goldberg: The Ties That Blind: ‘Young conservatives… think being shabby is normal and smart…
¶s:
Paul Krugman: The weird new war on “woke” money: ‘On March 20, DeSantis, speaking from a podium bearing a sign reading “Big Brother’s Digital Dollar,” announced that he plans to introduce legislation that would ban Floridians from making use of a digital currency issued by the federal government…. “One of the things we’re gonna ban in Florida this year is the idea of a Central Bank Digital Currency that they’re trying to do. his is something where they want the Fed to control a digital dollar. And guess what’ll happen? They’re gonna to try and impose an ESG agenda through that. You go and use too much gas, they’re gonna stop it, they’re not going to honor the transaction because you’ve already bought more than what they think. You want to go buy a rifle they’re gonna say no, you have too many of those, you can’t do it. So it’s ceding the power of our financial freedom to a central bank which does not have our interest at heart. So I think all states need to band together, need to say we’re not doing this Central Bank Digital Currency. We’re gonna let you be in charge of your own finances. What we have seen, whether it is education, whether it’s the bureaucracy, whether it’s corporate America, is there is a left-wing agenda that is being imposed on our society, and in Florida, we just said no. We said we recognize this as a threat across the board and we pledged to fight the woke in the schools, we pledged to fight the woke in the corporations, we pledged to fight the woke in the halls of the legislature. Florida will never, ever surrender to the woke mob because our state is where woke goes to die”…
Johnny Evans: Apple's M3 chip is a bigger deal than you might think: ‘TSMC held a ceremony Dec. 29 at its Fab 18 new construction site in the Southern Taiwan Science Park to announce mass production of 3nm chips had begun, estimating these would deliver $1.5 trillion revenue within the next five years. Subsequently, Digitimes claimed Apple purchased chip manufacturer TSMC’s entire yield of 3nm processors, giving it a unique position as the only manufacturer able to ship mobile devices and computers equipped with 3nm chips in mass market quantities. That investment matters because it also gives Apple access to a clear path toward future improvements in its chips. In a statement, TSMC said: “Compared with the 5nm (N5) process, TSMC’s 3nm process offers up to 1.6X logic density gain and 30-35% power reduction at the same speed, and supports the innovative TSMC FINFLEX architecture”…
Jaewon Shin & al.: Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution: ‘Societies developed additional layers of administration and more information-rich instruments for managing and recording transactions and events as they grew in population and territory. Yet, while such increases seem inevitable, they are not. Here we use the Seshat database to investigate the development of hundreds of polities, from multiple continents, over thousands of years. We find that sociopolitical development is dominated first by growth in polity scale, then by improvements in information processing and economic systems, and then by further increases in scale. We thus define a Scale Threshold for societies, beyond which growth in information processing becomes paramount, and an Information Threshold, which once crossed facilitates additional growth in scale. Polities diverge in socio-political features below the Information Threshold, but reconverge beyond it. We suggest an explanation for the evolutionary divergence between Old and New World polities based on phased growth in scale and information processing. We also suggest a mechanism to help explain social collapses with no evident external causes…
Dylan John Riley: Drowning in Deposits: ‘We must speak clearly to the section of the left that might be described as ‘neo-Kautskyite’…. The Biden Administration is in no way a rerun of… Clinton-Obama…. Their sincere desire is to create well-paid jobs and green the economy…. The problem is that neither the Biden administration, nor the neo-Kautskyites, have a credible answer to the structural logic of capital…. What the planet and humanity need is massive investment in low-return, low-productivity activities: care, education and environmental restoration. Capital is incapable of doing this. It seeks ‘value’ which these sectors struggle to produce. The underlying reason is obvious: neither health, nor culture, nor the umwelt function very well as commodities…
Nina Quinn Eichacker: Thinking about “Drowning in Deposits”: ‘To Riley’s point that “neither the Biden administration, nor the neo-Kautskyites, have a credible answer to the structural logic of capitalism,” since a successful outcome of massive state push to increase industrial capacity would inevitably create a global bubble in green tech, first of all, we should be so lucky! I’m not sure how Riley supposes progressives or the state will force firms to start producing low-cost daycare, solar panels, and more; a cursory read of US history reveals that moments of the best successes for labor have occurred when the state and business have worked together… through industrial policy with a wide scope…. Critiqu[ing] how our government motivates firms to contribute to the public good; to do either requires left attention to industrial policy, if we would have future efforts better than prior ones…
Re: A Tale of Two Countries. Until recently, I divided my time between Quebec and Florida. I have long pondered the discrepancy between these two colonies acquired simultaneously by the British under the Treaty of Paris. A great deal of the red portion indicated on the map includes Florida as it existed under the British during this period. Nobody lived in Southern Florida then, which is today populous, urban, and blue.
The great difference, in my view, is that Britain needed to subdue an existing European population in the case of Quebec, while they desired to make money for the aristocracy by establishing an entirely new population and new economic system in Florida.
The British used homesteading to attract slavers, I refuse to call them slaveowners, to their Florida colony at a ratio of three blacks to every one white. They also exported the Bloody Codes, which in my view form the basis of the honor codes in the South.
We suffer from the remnants of this history today, as I believe that the map reflects. Everywhere that the British established this system, violence, poverty, and ignorance persist.
I hope that this post is not too long and too off the subject Brad,
Is Drezner claiming that Twitter is now cashflow-positive? I find that difficult to believe. And if it's not cashflow-positive, then its continued existence depends on Musk putting new money in. How likely is that?