Can a Low Productivity Congress lecture values to us?

For a decade and more, I have pointed out that Republican members of the Senate and House do not work very hard.  Completely apart from issues of fanaticism or craziness or left-versus-right, there is the quantifiable matter of work ethic. Take for example this item that's much in the news: this U.S. Congress has seen bills become law at the slowest pace in 100 years, even as this president has used the veto power hardly at all.

(REVISION: a re-calculation shows this was in error. The present Congress has - in fact - been the least productive ever, of any in the history of the American republic.)

In the Senate, the reason for such low productivity has been filibusters, with the last 5 years containing 90% of the filibusters that ever happened across the entire history of the United States.  That is the doing of the GOP minority.

In the House,  the problem is that the GOP is the majority.  The minority has zero power in the House.  The onus at all levels and in all ways for what happens there falls on the majority. (See: Lawmakers in Name Only? Congress Reaches Productivity Lows.)  Hence, the Republican Party is responsible for a Congress that makes the famous "Do Nothing Congress" of 1948 seem frenetic.

Consider this statistic to be a fluke? Ever since the far more active, Republican-led Congresses headed by Newt Gingrich gave way to the New Republicans controlled by Rupert Murdoch, every chamber led by Republicans (House or Senate) has broken records for lowest numbers of days in session, fewest hours attended by majority members, fewest committee hearings and fewest subpoenas issued.  That last statistic is especially telling, for a party that screams publicly about corruption in the Obama administration, yet holds almost no investigation hearings and calls almost no witnesses. Other than re Benghazi.

(Recall such screams earlier - that the Clinton Administrations was "the most corrupt in U.S. history"? During the first 6 years of G.W. Bush's tenure,  when every branch and lever of government was in GOP hands and FBI agents were diverted from counter-terror duties to search for Clinton era corruption "smoking guns," not one senior Clintonite official was ever even indicted for any kind of malfeasance of office. Not even one -- the first time that has happened, ever. Talk about calling white black!)

To put this productivity in context, the annual salary of each Representative is $174,000. The Speaker of the House and the Majority and Minority Leaders earn more: $223,500 for the Speaker and $193,400 for their party leaders. This excludes benefits like excellent health care and generous pension vesting, plus promises of jobs with lobbyists, when leaving office.

By the way, the recent dismal Congressional inactivity record would be even worse, if you remove the nearly FIFTY times the US House of Representatives has passed futile and pointless bills to cancel Obamacare, knowing they would get nowhere. The Senate passed a budget. The House has not only failed to do so, it has refused more than twenty invitations to attend House-Senate Budget Reconciliation talks, which the Constitution prescribes as the method (not shut-downs and sequesters) for getting our fiscal home in order.

During the Gingrich Era, such meetings worked. Why not now?  (Hint, it has to do with the reason that Rupert Murdoch had Newt fired.)

Now the response of any Republican who has read this far is predictable. The cant on the far right is to proclaim that government rigor mortis is a gooood thing! 

Determined to ensure that government of the people, by the people SHALL perish from the Earth, the New Confederates, adore deathlike inactivity, even though it is the most hypocritical thing imaginable.

Think! If government is too big, then the agenda should be to pass bills that aim to simplify and to deregulate. Um… duh?  And on that basis, democratic offers to reduce the number of tax loopholes should be something that any non-hypocrite conservative would be willing to discuss… along with other simplifications that bring more efficiency to entitlements.  In other words -- Simpson-Bowles, the deal that has been on the table for 6 years, under which deficits would be erased and tax fairness increased. Newt and the old-less-insane republicans wanted to do this.  Rupert says -- no way.

Let us make this very clear for those crying their love of small government. For all their howling against Big Government, the GOP never brings forward any bills to actually de-regulate or simplify.  ALL of the major acts of de-regulation in our lifetime -- e.g. elimination of the horrid/captured Interstate Commerce Commission, or the Civil Aeronautics Board, or telecom deregulation, trucking… and the greatest deregulation of all… the unleashing of the Internet -- every one of these deregulations were performed by Democrats.

If you want to trim - judiciously and with care - there is only one party for you.

Oh but there's one exception to the pattern I just mentioned.  One industry that the Republican Party has taken the lead in deregulating, not once but over and over again, across the last 40 years, stripping the power of the peoples' agencies to oversee and watch for excesses by banks, SandLs, Wall Street and so on.  The Finance Industry. In that one narrow field, the Republican Party at least thirty times pushed through active bills stripping away supervision. And time and again the results were the same… another giant rape-raid of the middle class.

Sorry, this is inconvenient, fellows.  And double sorry that it is not "argument by pithy FaceBook-posted jpeg."  But dig this.  Not one of my objections or denunciations above -- or elsewhere -- had a single aspect that was "leftist." I push people to read Adam Smith more than anyone else alive!  Indeed, it is the way that the Koch-Murdoch-Sa'udi owned and insane new version of the GOP has betrayed Adam Smith's capitalism that makes me infuriated.  That and the utter refusal of today's "ostrich" conservatives to face the simple fact that can then lead to hard-healing. To admit that:

"My side has gone stark, jibbering insane."

== Such noble tactics ==

Right wing activists have been distributing links and tools to perform Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on the Healthcare.gov website through social networking, as pointed out by Information Week, and other websites.  Calling it civil disobedience, the aim has been to prevent shoppers from using the site to compare competitive bids to purchase their own policies from commercial insurance companies.  In other words - socialism.

"This program continually displays alternate page of the ObamaCare website. It has no virus, Trojans, worms, or cookies. The purpose is to overload the ObamaCare website, to deny service to users and perhaps overload and crash the system," reads the program's grammar- and spelling-challenged "about" screen. "You can open as many copies of this program as you want. Each copy opens multiple links to the site."

Just to be clear, keep in mind that this "socialism" was the Republican Party's own plan - designed by the Heritage Foundation, pushed by the Gingrich Congress, implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts (where it has worked well) and then proposed by a Democratic President in the delusional belief that offering his opponents their own damn plan would result in open and rapid negotiation. (What naiveté!)

Consider what we're seeing -- activists who are sabotaging what boils down to a way for uninsured people to escape the Emergency Room by paying for their own commercially-competitively offered commercial insurance policies is not exactly "letting it fail on its own, in a fair test."  Especially since the exchanges run by a dozen blue states (New York, California, etc) are working just fine.

Hence, the poor people who are being hurt by sabotaging HealthCare.gov are mostly in red states that refused to set up their own exchanges where commercial insurance companies can competitively bid for new customers under the (Republican designed "socialist") Affordable Care Act.

Ah, facts are inconvenient to the narrative.

== A Republican governor to watch ==

Two Republican governors have bucked the mania of their party in order to actually care about their people.  One you know about, Chris Christie of New Jersey.  Here's another.

Keep your eye on Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval. "Sandoval is the only Republican governor whose state is both running its own health insurance exchange this year and expanding its Medicaid program under the health law. He’s arguably doing more to put the Democrats’ signature law into place than any other Republican. But in fully implementing Obamacare, Sandoval faces a double-edged sword: He’s helping bring health care coverage to a state with the second highest uninsured rate in the country, while he may be hurting his national ambitions because he’s not actively blocking the president’s law."

Hm. Governor of a deeply purple state with extremely high rates of uninsured… Now let's suppose he helps solve that, proves his independence… and now let's further suppose that Obamacare actually… winds up working.  (After all, it works fine in Massachusetts.) Then who will have the last political laugh?

Sandoval would be -- especially as a Hispanic -- in a position to help Republicans claim "the fight over Obamacare is ancient history!"  Exactly the agile tactic they have used over every other time they were wrong wrong wrong. (Remember George W. Bush?  They don't! Nor opposing Social Security, Medicare and Marin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.))

In fact, what's obvious is that in a few years, suddenly, the Republican Party line will be "it was our plan, all along!" (In fact… it was.)

Watch this fellow.

== Is a Big Deal in the Offing? ==

Okay… now let's look back into the past at an earlier riff of mine and you can judge for yourself whether I was naive.  The following passage was posted on October 5.

Yipe. The following is from Fox. It is very harsh, factual, on-target... and from Fox. Could Rupert be asking "what have I done?" and seeking a way out?  --  begin quote:

"“Compromise,” to these demagogues, is to mandate that Democrats scrap President Obama’s signature domestic legislative accomplishment, which was passed by Congress, signed into law by the president, upheld by the Supreme Court and ratified by voters who returned its architect to the White House last November."

"Senate Democrats, of course, had been begging for a budget compromise for months – ever since the senate passed its budget last spring. But Republicans rejected this attempt at compromise 18 times, refusing to allow the Senate and House of Representatives to go to a budget conference to hammer out a deal that would have put an end to this cycle of continuing resolutions."

To be clear, what this means is that the House Senate conference committee on the budget was invited to meet 18 times since April and it was always the GOP that refused to meet and negotiate. Every single time. And to be clearer, the House Senate conference committee on the budget is exactly where ALL of this was, is and always should be thrashed out, instead of with loony threats and shut-downs.

Moreover, the deal that was on the table, ready to be hammered out in the conference, was clear, bipartisan and probably what Speaker Boehner will ask for, next week.

(1) An end to sequester and shutdowns and debt limit threats.

(2) A substantial set of reforms to make entitlement programs more efficient and -- in a few ways -- more tight-fisted. The big Democrat concession.

(3) Repealing a set of maybe forty outrageous tax breaks for fat cats and specific profitable industries that never needed subsidies (e.g. oil companies) allowing some revenues to rise without raising tax rates.

It is a deal that the vast majority of moderate Americans would back and we know it from huge responses in opinion polls.  Only Tea Partiers who have signed the Norquist Pledge have blocked the deal, declaring they do not want to return to the Clinton Era surpluses... what they want is to strangle government in principle.

Hence my ongoing prediction.  The Speaker will announce that President Obama has "caved" and "allowed" the budget conference committee to meet "at last!" And because of that huge democratic "concession," Boehner will now allow a vote on the continuing resolution on a straight up-down basis instead of under tight party (Tea) discipline, ending the shutdown and the threat of a debt ceiling crash.

And Fox will sigh with relief, then peddle that message verbatim... but without the well-deserved and apropos finger-quotes.  Sigh.

So how did that October prediction do?

On the plus side, almost no one else predicted that a compromise would actually happen… and one has!  Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wis) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) have presented a budget bill that will evade a new-stage sequester by narrowing deficits just enough, by reducing federal employee benefits and adding a few fees. It certainly does evade a crisis and moves somewhat in the right direction… 

Only it's more like a mini-bargain. And all the missing elements are absent precisely because the yawning ideological rift between Washington Democrats and Republicans makes it impossible to get to the Grand Bargain that both sides had worked out years ago -- Simpson Bowles.  You know what's changed over the years.  Rupert has created a monster he can no longer control.

But still, as prediction. it probably deserved a solid B.  Maybe a B-minus.

The Chief Threat to our Great Experiment: Can we reduce disparity without killing market enterprise?

The difficulty of maintaining a civilization of empowered citizenship -- the "diamond-shaped social structure" about which I often speak -- was well described by the famous historians  Will and Ariel Durant, in The Lessons of History.  

"…the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.”   

Consider the efficiency with which the Durants convey multiple ideas there! First, that an open, citizen-based system that I call "diamond-like" may have many of the advantages that Adam Smith wrote about -- e.g. vigorous competitive-creativity and the rapid delivery of positive-sum outputs. But such enlightenment systems as markets and democracy and science are inherently unstable. Unless carefully tuned and maintained, competitive systems inevitably get suborned by cheaters.  Those who may have gained power or position through legitimate competition, but who then connive and use that power to warp all further competition in their favor.

It's called human nature and it is what Adam Smith and the American Framers tried new methods to prevent under moderate regulation, so that mild-creative-competition might continue.

Durant and Smith knew the natural outcome of such cheating, which happened so often in human history that it is the default -- that flat diamonds of egalitarian-competitive citizenship collapse into traditional pyramids of inherited power -- e.g. feudalism -- as happened in  99% of human societies across 6000 years..

Durant went on to say, however, that the people themselves can choose to resist!  When they see this slump taking place, they can either choose calm deliberation or simplistic anger. Reform or revolution.

History shows far more cases of the latter.  And the vast majority of emotional, violent revolutions do not turn out well for Smithian Enlightenment.  Dogmatists rage and raise the ante of ideological fervor, stoking heat instead of light.  The French, Russian, Chinese and most African revolutions followed this pattern, killing the oppressor oligarchs, only to establish new ones, and one result was to spread misery for benighted generations.

Those who are pushing hard to smash our Smithian diamond into a feudal pyramid should take note, and consider that they are not as smart as they think they are, if they are blithely ignoring the possibility of tumbrels.

The alternative that Durant cites would be the relatively rare examples of calm reform that can occur when mature deliberation takes hold, as when Cleisthenes (508/7 BC) led in the creation of the Athenian democracy, or when Themistocles and Pericles kept that democracy laser-focused on the greater good.  Or when the American Framers performed acts of severe 'leveling,' seizing and redistributing a third of the land in the former colonies, so that the new republic would be born in a spirit of lively egalitarianism, instead of cloned-European lordship.  Or when the slave-o-crat plantations of the South were likewise redistributed, in ways that did not undermine the competitive spirit.  Or the far more modest diamond-building activities propelled by Franklin Roosevelt, that left the U.S. both rather-flat and spectacularly entrepreneurial, at the same time.

We face Durant's choice, as that flat social structure -- emphasizing a dominant-empowered middle class -- is now under harsh pressure and threat from all directions. When the pressure becomes unbearable, will Americans respond as their ancestors did?  By calmly performing the next necessary tweaks and fine-tunings… while keeping faith with the framers and with Adam Smith? Encouraging the cornucopia that spills from open, joyful competition?

When disparities get much worse, the other option, of vengeful radicalism, will rear its head, especially among those masses on today's right who Rupert Murdoch believes (naively) he has under tight rein and permanent control. He should know better… but human nature is what it is.

It's not too soon to be working hard on those moderate, rational reforms.

== Stormclouds ==

In a harbinger of things to come, an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, by Roman Hatchuel, describes growing calls -- even among the world's financial elite -- for a re-adjustment of taxes to demand more from the very rich.

Very few intelligent people any more assert the never-right and always-wrong nostrums of Supply Side "economics" - asserting that mega tax largesse for the top 0.01% will translate into high velocity investments in new goods, services and productive capacity. All sane economists can see that the supply side experiment (sometimes misleadingly called "trickle down") has miserably failed. Spectacularly failed, contributing the western nations' fast-rising indebtedness -- now at an average of 110% of GDP.

Some, such as billionaire investor Bill Gross, have been calling for marginal, top-earner income tax rates to return to levels that existed when the economy did best, when entrepreneurship peaked and when the middle class was growing healthier yearly -- not quite the levels of Franklin Roosevelt, but in that range.  A partial measure would be to accept the end of special, fat-cat tax breaks which Democrats in Congress have asked-for in exchange for the GOP's demanded entitlement reforms.  (The demmies are willing to horse-trade, but the goppers are intransigently defending their sponsors, knowing that infamous resource-extraction tax-breaks would be first on the block.)

Some degree of consumption or VAT tax may be an important part of the mix, though this not only affects the already-hurting middle class and poor, but also has the unfortunate effect of reducing the velocity of money.

Much more helpful would be to go after the lowest velocity money of all.  Not so much high incomes as existing and passive pools of staggering wealth.

In October the International Monetary Fund or IMF - not exactly a center of socialism - floated a bold idea that didn't get the attention it deserved: lowering sovereign debt levels through a one-off tax on private wealth. As applied to the euro zone, the IMF claims that a 10% levy on households' positive net worth would bring public debt levels back to pre-financial crisis levels. Indeed, this notion was broached in the US by several billionaires including -- shockingly -- Donald Trump.

The reason to go along is simple. Your billions become worthless if the society that helped you win them collapses. Of course, this is one of the chief determinants as to whether a billionaire votes for and supports Democrats (Gates and Buffett, for example) or actually believes that all the goodies will still flow, once democracy has been stifled into a feudal social order.

== A transparency alternative ==

The wealth tax is interesting, though my own suggestion is a bit different. Instead of seizing assets (which the American Founders did) or raising rates dramatically (per Franklin Roosevelt), let's try something uniquely modern, with-it and in tune with transparency.  It must be done worldwide, but it would not be considered quite as radical as asset taxation.  Indeed, it is blatantly the fairest reform possible. 

Simply pass a universal world treaty declaring:

If you own something, you must openly avow and say that you own it. 

That's it. Any property that has not been claimed by a human being, family, or clearly tracked group of humans within three years will revert to the state and be re-sold to pay down the public debt.

Think about it.  What does "ownership" mean, if you are unwilling to state, openly, "I own that"?  So many problems in the world can be attributed to murky title, from peasants abused by a nearby lord to an oil tanker that befouled beaches in Brittany with no owner ever held accountable, because of deeply nested shell companies.

Indeed, no act could ever benefit small stockholders and market capitalism more than for shell corporations to be banned if they are more than three layers deep, forcing hidden puppeteers to come into the open. In other words, no object or land on Earth should be considered owned unless -- just three or less layers down -- you find real, accountable human beings.

Naturally, this reform-treaty would have immediate effects:

1) A whole lot of property would simply be abandoned by owners with murky, illicit or coerced title, or by those who acquired it inappropriately. Like drug lords. The immediate effect would be that one-time pay down of debts.  Indeed, by some estimates the pay down would be so great that tax rates could go down rather than up.  In other words, legitimate property owners should love this plan!

2) The second beneficiary would be many of the world's poor, who would suddenly find themselves vested in land and goods that local lords did not want to publicly claim (for a wide variety of reasons.) Sure, there would be backhanded deals and many of those poor men and women would remain beholden under some degree of informal fealty-compulsion. Still, despite all the nods and winks and collusions, the fact remains; a whole lot of poor people will be better off than before. Especially if many nations respond by enacting reforms like those promoted by the great Hernando de Soto.

3) Okay okay. The third beneficiary group is obvious.  Lawyers.  Just openly declaring "I own that," will result in plenty of other humans declaring "Oh no you don't; that's mine!"  The treaty would have to carry an accompanying onus for all nations to set up fair methods for arbitration of a tsunami of disputes.

And yes, libertarians and conservatives would be right to fear that -- in some nations -- a spirit of radical leveling might take advantage of this sudden transparency of ownership.  To which I respond… so?  Those who try to handle it smoothly and fairly will experience a burst in active market enterprise, as happened in Peru, when de Soto's property vesting reforms took hold.

Those who cater to socialist mobs will experience a few years of recession… then human market forces will re-assert.  BFD.

4) We all would win, however, as capitalism starts to work much better!  As state taxation regimes that are based upon open and publicly accountable knowledge take over from murky cheating.  As Swiss-style banking secrecy is shattered and developing nations get back trillions stolen by kleptocrats.  As the theories of Smith and Hayek finally see fruition in an open system in which all of the players know most of what they need to know, in order to make good decisions.

Of course, any wealth tax would need a reform such as this to happen first, in order to work at all!  The irony being that, once this "I own that!" treaty was in play, the wealth tax would probably prove unnecessary at all.

== One more absolutely necessary tax ==

Oh… I'd also institute worldwide a very tiny, 0.1% financial instruments transaction fee.  It could save the human species from extinction and do more for our children than any other levy!

And you can read the reasons here.

Bitcoin and other DACs -- a new cyber-lifeform?

Bitcoin is very much in the news. In fact, recent headlines -- that the Bitcoin system has experienced a fair number of "heists" lately, combined with the Chinese government's decision to ban banks from trading in the ephemeral digital currency -- combine to make this the topic of the day.

Cyber utopians raise Bitcoin as an example of how secret transactions can still take place, even in an increasingly transparent world. The most zealous proclaim it as the harbinger of libertarian apotheosis.

What is Bitcoin? Aw heck, even after a life spent interacting with fellow scientists and cypher-punk types and writing books about the social implications of the info-age… I admit to having little more than a Wikipedia-level understanding of how these purely digital experimental currencies (there are others: see below) work. They operate through exchange of public key encryption schemes, in which the bit coin seller (person A) who wants some good or service from Person B, sends Person B a code that lets him or her match and claim the public  portion of the coin. Person "B" may then create a new secret key (signature) portion so that no one watching the transaction can claim the coin and that new key will let "B" buy something else with it.

As with most currencies, bit coins are only worth what people - in aggregate - are willing to trade for them. Goods and services and - quite often - dollars. If you've ever used the Linden Money on Second Life or exchanged magical items on World of Warcraft, you know this aspect has precedence.  Only those digital currencies are run, created and supplied by the owners of the game or net world.  Real people meet and plan and decide how many Linden Dollars to keep in circulation.  And the law and courts in the real world can interfere, any time they see something that they do not like.

In contrast, Bitcoins were designed from scratch with ultra-libertarian values in mind.  There is no central repository, mint or controlling entity.  Some suspect that the original designer -- pseudonymous developer "Satoshi Nakamoto" -- may have kept "trapdoor" means of control. (In fact, I have my own reasons for (sort of) hoping it is true.)  But as more and more Bitcoin sub-servers are created from open source kernels, any such control mechanisms will inevitably decay… as new figures attempt to plant their own self-interested mechanisms into the sub-server hosts that they control and proselytize upon others.

But put aside those paranoid (if wholly realistic) musings. Part of the system's libertarian appeal is that it appears to be free of any overt and overall human control that could then be suborned or else co-opted or controlled by a corporation or government. Digitally signed payment messages are broadcast to and verified by a decentralized network of computers all over the world, which helps to reduce the problem of "double spending."

In this posting I have embedded three video tutorials that will explain Bitcoins to you - including an introduction from the Khan Academy.

Putting aside the way that Bitcoin empowers secrecy in transactions… which you would expect the author of The Transparent Society to treat with some skepticism. Or the fact that Bitcoin helps to empower skulduggerous transactions, such as the "Silk Road" market for illegal services; this is not seen by cypher-libertarians as a flaw, but as a feature.  It may surprise you to learn that I am blasé about such things.  For one thing, I deem the chance that the system is not fully understood and penetrated by the NSA already to be virtually nil.  One chief effect may be to give the intelligence services their own way to transmit un-traceable cash with near perfect plausible deniability.

No, none of that bothers me as much as the implications of the general type of system Bitcoin represents. It is designed to operate independent of any direct human control.  Its developers perceive it as a new kind of life form.  Because it is based in a distributed network of independent and separate computers, no one of whom is needed for survival, it is the next step upward, for autonomous cyber self-replicating forms, from viruses and simple amoeba-worms, these new systems are deemed "multi-cellular."

Welcome to the Pre-Cambrian  And be careful what you wish for.

== Bitcoin-like behavior in a story ==

Oh… an aside. The latest edition of Starship-Sofa features a wonderful reading-podcast of my creepy and chilling short story "Mars Opposition." Truly, it is a great reading and perfect for that commute…

… but what does this have to do with Bitcoin?  You'll see, as you learn how the Martians get to pay human traitors in untraceable ways that are… cool.

== Will online distributed "robot" corporations dominate the economy? ==

In fact, Bitcoin is only the best-known and most widely used example of a wider class of system. So let me link you now to a very interesting… and perhaps necessary… reading for those who would like to have a Big Picture look at the new ecosystem of autonomous networked entities online.

These Distributed Autonomous Corporations -- as named by Stan Larimer of Invictus Innovations -- dwell in the separate computers of thousands of individuals and groups who independently decide to run -- or update -- host software for the system, allowing it to "live."  Like stockholders in a company, or customers, they thus vote for it to exist, by using it and providing it with an array of distributed homes.

The rapid evolution of these DACs cause Larimer to opine that we appear to be heading toward a realm that automatically and organically invokes Isaac Asimov. That this is the way robots have truly arrived.  And they need laws. And "nature" will be pretty much compelled to provide them.

Larimer foresees independent software-residing and internet spanning entities that are "corporate" in that they have a semblance of motivation and life, they thrive when they attract customers based on high reputation, and they defend their existence.  Unlike standard corporations, however, a healthy DAC soon becomes independent of human control EXCEPT the market need to keep attracting and satisfying customers. No other human parameter can interfere, he claims.

In "Bitcoin and the Three Laws of Robotics," Larimer attempts to show how a set of Generally Stable Attractor States (my terminology here), will make it likely for these DAC's to stay autonomous and healthy in a market ecosystem that naturally and organically tends toward synergies similar to the renowned Asimovian laws (that I channeled and dissected in my novel, FOUNDATION'S TRIUMPH).  

Indeed, Charles Stross' Accelerando, popularises this concept of autonomous economic legal entities, demonstrating in accessible ways this concept as one logical set of ends.

On the other hand, this market-home model of distributed markets that are out of human supervision has a scary side, since there may be a critical mass of humans willing to provide networked home bases for any kind of activity, including bazaars for evil, like hiring assassins. Indeed, the last vestige of human control… customers and members setting up virtual homes in distributed computers… may seem quaint when we approach the cloud-like cyber world forecast by William Gibson and Vernor Vinge, way back in the 1980s.

Without any doubt, Larimer's incantation and prediction is fascinating, even persuasive…

… until we recall that it is still an incantation and a polemic. A just-so story, like countless we have been told about markets, like Supply Side "economics," that just ain't necessarily so.

Me? I think parallels for these new software  forms are found in biology, all right.  But not in the leap from single cell to multi-cellular life. The true fundamentals span all of that, going back to life's very beginning -- predation, parasitism and so on.

Life, for most of its eras, never saw a lick of cooperation or genuine, deal-making quid pro quo, but rather ferocity, voracity and ruthless taking-advantage. These basic drives and successful methods have a billion years more precedent than the much more recent -- and demonstrably unstable -- regime of human-made markets, corporations and libertarian conceptions of fair exchange.

Show me the benign "market" of voluntarily-exchanged goods and services that evolved organically in the Cambrian! Or Devonian, or Permian, or Cretaceous. It might have happened on other worlds! It might have happened here - letting animal species trade in positive sum games - that is, it might have, had the market state of quid-pro-quo been as automatically compelling in the real world as Mr. Larimer implies, in breathless enthusiasm. Just as Karl Marx and Murray Rothbard and other transcendentalist logicians urged us to believe in their if-therefor incantations.

But biology did not spontaneously evolve or create quid-pro-quo markets. Although there certainly have been symbiotic relationships -- e.g. between plants and pollinators -- these arose amid death and exploitation and almost never involved the kinds of knowing reciprocity that Larimer describes as happening automatically with his beloved DACs.

Elsewhere I describe how close we may be to quasi intelligent information systems that grow spontaneously and unsupervised, bursting onto the scene of artificial intelligence from a wholly unexpected direction… making "Skynet" look like Mr. Rogers… programmed with exactly this age-old voracity, with parasitism lying at its newborn heart. A scenario motivated by short-sighted, human greed and one that we allow to play out, at our great peril.

Pain, exploitation and death were the attractor states for a billion years.  Mr. Larimer and other cyber transcendentalists bear a burden of proof that This Time It Will Be Different..

== An alternative: making goodness part of it ==

I won't  raise more than one eyebrow at the "mining" process by which hackers with strong computers and mathematical programs can create new bit coins by cracking "proof of work" puzzle problems. Sure some of these are involved in maintaining the system, or verifying transactions or preventing double-spending. And some proof-of-work systems are communally productive, e.g. adding the sort of friction that deters denial of service attacks. Nevertheless, when it comes to "mining," it would seem to be a system inherently built for unfairness and abuse. Or subornation by the mighty.

Indeed, it could have been just as easy to set things up so that the mining operations would reward those who do the most useful work in solving crowd-sourced scientific or medical problems of value to the real world.  The same kind of reward for finesse and hacking ability… but doing something more useful than uber-nerding-out.

Had such altruistic puzzle-solving been the embedded "mining" method, it might have had profound effects upon future artificial intelligence, since (as described above) some AI experts consider it possible for these systems to "evolve."  The underlying ethos of always expecting-requiring a positive sum outcome with altruistic side-effects might have drifted the evolving system toward Asimov's Laws, or the Golden Rule, rather than self-serving rapacity. It all seems rather foolish, redolent of sophomoric sanctimony...

But then, I should be careful what I say and whom I offend!  Given that these fellows are among the cleverest (if not wisest) folks on the planet -- well, ahem -- let me now assuage any ill will that my questioning-poking might have aroused! I will now mollify by offering the one modern phrase that excuses all!

"Hey… I'm just sayin'…"

== Transparency Miscellany: Self-Logging exhibitionists, and more ==

Read about something I predicted in EARTH (1989) -- compulsive self-loggers who wear 360 degree camera arrays that click at intervals, posting everything online in accessible stores of "mere" terrabytes (now cheap) of glimpses at the dully mundane activities of a boringly typical fellow homo sapiens.  Cathal Gurrin, a computer scientist at Dublin City University, wears a wide-angle camera around his neck which snaps several pictures of his field of view every minute, recording its location and orientation each time it does so. He has been using such devices for more than seven years. Over that time he has built up an archive of 12m images, and he currently produces about a terabyte of data a year. That is more computer memory than was available on the whole planet 50 years ago. Today it can be bought, or leased in the cloud, for well under $100.

To which, my unusual response is… yawn.  Though it is only an extreme case of a more useful general trend, like the use of dashboard cams in Russia to staunch the tsunami of false traffic accident claims and police shakedowns. Or lapel cams to help police work… or others to protect us from bad police. Or assistance to the elderly, or other examples in this interestign article.

How it ought to be done. I lived in London when the police were putting up vast networks of surveillance cameras.  But neighbors in New Orleans choose a difference approach, setting up a net of 1200 privately owned camera systems. Police have to ask - please - to see footage. And nearly always the answer is yes - since crime plummets. But they CAN say no, till subpoenaed. Slower reaction times, but it is off the public budget.  And folks have the ultimate recourse of deciding to "go blind" if the police become questionable.  A Transparent Society.

It is the true essence of libertarianism, instead of the sham now followed by lemmings.

AvaTwist, a "privacy service" might be a step toward the pseudonymity and reputation mediation services that - I predict -- will be billion dollar industries when someone catches on… or it could be just another deceitful offer of actual privacy-through-obscurity, which would be a scam .  Someone out there try it out and report back!  

An interesting talk by Vinay Gupta, the inventor of the hexa-yurt emergency shelter, about how new living technologies are emerging from two movements: the camping industry and "appropriate technologies," interplaying to develop ultralight methods over creating the basics: shelter, light, power, heat.  It starts interesting and devolves toward the end into a bit of a rant… in fact, kind of loony.  But still, with enough interesting and original insights to make you think.

Your cell phone is the perfect surveillance tool,  writes Stephen Wicker in his new book Cellular Convergence and the Death of Privacy. But Wicker says there are ways to change the system and to reclaim privacy.

and now… time for the cyber-libertarians to respond - in comments.  Welcome home, fellows n' cuz's. Put your feet up. Let me fix some tea.

The Ongoing Privacy Problem: Other Voices

Ah… and so we return to the perennial topic that this astrophysicist never would have expected to stand at the center-of. How we should deal with an increasingly information-rich world.

== A Transparency Riff Worth Reading ==

Evgeny Morozov's fascinating rumination in MIT's Technology Review on The Real Privacy Problem  begins with an even more fascinating look back at one of the visionary pioneers of our age:

"In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing … the same way one now buys electricity.”

"Our home computer console will be used to send and receive messages—like telegrams. We could check to see whether the local department store has the advertised sports shirt in stock in the desired color and size. We could ask when delivery would be guaranteed, if we ordered. The information would be up-to-the-minute and accurate. We could pay our bills and compute our taxes via the console. We would ask questions and receive answers from “information banks”—automated versions of today’s libraries. We would obtain up-to-the-minute listing of all television and radio programs … The computer could, itself, send a message to remind us of an impending anniversary and save us from the disastrous consequences of forgetfulness.""

Baran was, indeed, almost as much an icon of tech prophecy as  the great Memex seer Vannevar Bush. Or the late Willis Ware, who foretold in 1966 that computers would be everywhere. But Morozov goes on to cite Tal Zarsky, one of the world’s leading experts on the politics and ethics of data mining, who refers to an earlier 1985 prediction by Spiros Simitis that vast, semi-intelligent systems of automated governance, whether run by state officials or corporations, would start predicting and then nudging individual behaviors, even when they are not illegal, starting with route planning and dietary advice and so on, with the danger that such nanny systems might even lose track of the underlying reasons or correlations that  the advice (which starts firming into compulsory tones) is even based upon!   “Data mining might point to individuals and events, indicating elevated risk, without telling us why they were selected.”

Writes Morozov: "This is the future we are sleepwalking into. Everything seems to work, and things might even be getting better—it’s just that we don’t know exactly why or how." 

So far, that is a very cogent description of a subtle and interesting failure mode. His subsequent discussion of rights and and contradictions is certainly an interesting one, well-worth reading.

== The rumination falls apart ==

Alas, Morozov then gloms onto a "solution" based on concealment, obscurity and hiding -- one that cannot possibly work. Like nearly every seer in this benighted field, he absolutely refuses to consider how there might be transparency and accountability-based solutions that work with unstoppable  trends toward a world awash in light, rather than raging against the tide.

He buys into Jaron Lanier's notion (explicated earlier by Steve Mann) of each person having a commercial "interest" in their own information and a right to allocate it for profit or personal benefit. Any business (or government) that uses your personal information would pay you for the privilege. This is an improvement over the fantasy of a legal "right" to conceal your information and to punish those who have it, a stunning delusion in a world of limitless leaks.  Lanier's notion is certainly a step forward -- instead of prescribing futile and delusional shrouds, it envisions a largely open world in which we all get to share in the benefits that large entities like corporations derive from our information.

Except that "our information" is also a delusion that will fray and unravel with time, leaving us with what is practical, what matters… how to maintain control NOT over what others know about us, but what they can DO to us.

In order to accomplish that, we must know as much about the mighty as they know about us.

Alas, after an interesting discussion, Morozov devolves down to this: "we must learn how to sabotage the system—perhaps by refusing to self-track at all. If refusing to record our calorie intake or our whereabouts is the only way to get policy makers to address the structural causes of problems like obesity or climate change—and not just tinker with their symptoms through nudging—information boycotts might be justifiable."

This notion, that any measures taken by private persons will even slightly inconvenience society's elites (of government, corporatcy, oligarchy etc) from being able to surveil us,  would be charming naivete if it weren't a nearly universal and dangerous hallucination. It proposes that individuals attempt to cower amid a fog of their own hamstrung data ignorance, in utter futility, since the lords above them will see everything anyway.

In The Transparent Society I discuss the alternative we seldom see talked-about, even though it is precisely the prescription that got us our current renaissance of freedom and empowered citizenship.  Sousveillance. Standing up in the light while demanding -- along with hundreds of millions of fellow citizens -- the power to watch the watchmen. Embracing the power to look-back and helping our neighbors to do it, as well.

I agree with Morozov about the need for "provocative services" where he almost seems to get the core idea, that we can solve most of these problems through open and fair confrontation, of the sort that teaches people to behave like adults.  An actual proposal for how such systems of dispute resolution through competitive opposition might work can be found in my article Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society's Benefit.

Look, these matters are too important for cliches and unsubtle reflexes. It is a dismal situation when even society's smartest observers cannot see what is in front of their faces.  One simple fact.  In order to preserve both freedom and safety, we humans need to see.  And in order to see… there must be light.

==Long Live Transparency==

In an article, Privacy is Dead; Long Live Transparency, Kevin Drum writes, "I call this the 'David Brin question," after the science fiction writer who argued in 1996 that the issue isn't whether surveillance will become ubiquitous -- given technological advances, it will -- but how we choose to live with it. Sure, he argued, we may pass laws to protect our privacy, but they'll do little except ensure that surveillance is hidden ever more deep and is available only to governments and powerful corporations. Instead, Brin suggests, we should all tolerate less privacy, but insist on less of it for everyone. With the exception of a small sphere within our homes, we should accept that our neighbors will know pretty much everything about us and vice versa. And we should demand that all surveillance data be public, with none restricted to governments or data brokers. Give everyone access to the NSA's records. Give everyone access to all the video cameras that dot our cities. Give everyone access to corporate databases."

Drum continues, "This is needless to say, easier said than done, and Brin acknowledges plenty of problems. Nonetheless, his provocation is worth thinking about. If privacy in the traditional sense is impossible in a modern society, our best bet might be to make the inevitable surveillance more available, not less. It might, in the end, be the only way to keep governments honest."

In fact, I don't go this far.  I believe we've retain a bit of control.  Some ability to enforce some close-in privacy.  But this (ironically) can only be assured in a mostly open world.

For more: collected articles about Transparency in the Modern World.

== Dads, tell your daughters! ==

It's been spoofed and expected for decades. At last, is this the pre-date site you can tell your daughter to check, before going out with some dude?  What's the delay, already! There should also be blood tests!

== And Finally ==

A fascinating riff from Kurt Eichenwald's new piece for Newsweek, "How Edward Snowden Escalated Cyber War With China," concerning the increased challenges facing US efforts to curb widespread Chinese hacking in the wake of the controversies triggered by Edward Snowden's selective disclosures of surveillance activities. Here is Richard B. Eisenberg, Attorney-Advisor Office of the General Counsel, US Air Force-   

"Some security industry and former intelligence officials say they originally believed Snowden's apparent outrage at espionage by governments might lead him to expose activities by the Chinese, who use their hacking skills not only for economic competition but to track and damage dissidents overseas and monitor their citizens. There was good reason to believe Snowden had plenty of details about Beijing's activities – he has publicly stated that as an NSA contractor he targeted Chinese operations and taught a course on Chinese cyber counterintelligence. And while he says he turned over his computerized files of NSA documents to journalists in Hong Kong, he boasts that he is so familiar with Chinese hacking techniques that there is no chance the government there can gain access to his classified material. But outside of American intelligence operations conducted there, Snowden has revealed nothing about surveillance and hacking in China, nor about the techniques he asserts he knows so well." 

There are screwy things going on. Always remember that there are currents and implications that aren't simple black and white. Don't give in to that temptation.