“liberty”
28 posts under this tag.
A saint said “Let the perfect city rise.
Here needs no long debate on subtleties,
Means, end,
Let us intend
That all be clothed and fed; while one remains
Hungry our quarreling but mocks his pains.
So all will labor to the good
In one phalanx of brotherhood.”
A man cried out “I know the truth, I, I,
Perfect and whole. He who denies
My vision is a madman or a fool
Or seeks some base advantage in his lies.
All peoples are a tool that fits my hand
Cutting you each and all
Into my plan.”
They were one man.
I went to Mikhail Bakunin’s God and the State to read his famous boot-master quote straight from the source. As it often happens, the quote makes no justice to its context, which now follows. This is lucidness embodied—”simplicity that is clarity, the light of intelligence.”
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.
If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed on me by no one, neither by men nor by God. Otherwise I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their counsels, their directions, and their services, certain that they would make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such scraps of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.
I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labour. I receive and I give—such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.
This same reason forbids me, then, to recognise a fixed, constant and universal authority, because there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in all that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social life. And if such universality could ever be realised in a single man, and if he wished to take advantage thereof to impose his authority upon us, it would be necessary to drive this man out of society, because his authority would inevitably reduce all the others to slavery and imbecility. I do not think that society ought to maltreat men of genius as it has done hitherto: but neither do I think it should indulge them too far, still less accord them any privileges or exclusive rights whatsoever; and that for three reasons: first, because it would often mistake a charlatan for a man of genius; second, because, through such a system of privileges, it might transform into a charlatan even a real man of genius, demoralise him, and degrade him; and, finally, because it would establish a master over itself.
Get this: I love the net. There are few human inventions I treasure more; damn, there are few things I treasure more. Consciousness predated the net only by a slight margin in my life, and I can’t help but be a part of the translucent generation it has engendered, the first generation whose values have been shaped by the net.
Yet, I fail to understand what all the brouhaha regarding net neutrality is all about. Of course I’m moved by all the calls to action and won’t-somebody-please-think-of-the-children threats of impending netdoom, but I fail to see the real problem, the “great injustice”. And beneath the obvious good intentions, the rhetoric with which this argument is being fought by “my side”, the side of prominent netheads (Google’s Vint Cerf for instance), reeks of governmentism, stasism, and don’t-let-walmart-wreck-your-downtown anti-capitalistic sentiment—not my cup of tea.
Frankly, it all seems to me as articulate special-interest groups arguing for the right to impose their vision of the net on telcoms. This may well be the net’s first reactionary upheaval of nostalgia and status quo1, the first symptom of the sclerosis that plagues every human institution. An end-to-end internet is one of the greatest accomplishments of modernity, a vision I personally cherish, and the one that has successfully guided the web up ‘til now—granted. But that doesn’t mean I want it imposed on others, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t allow others to experiment with new visions. If we really cherish it so much, shouldn’t we be willing2 to pay for it its true economic price? If it is truly the one best way, shouldn’t it be able to survive competition on its own merits? It seems like a particularly devious contradiction to call net intervention net neutrality.
With this in mind, it was a blow of fresh air to find T. J. Rogers recent opinion on the issue:
What do you think of Net neutrality?
This is where basically the Net is not allowed to discriminate? I think it’s an obscenity. I think people that have paid for the wires and cables should be able to charge whatever they want for their product. And for other people to come in and force companies to run their businesses and set their prices is absurd. If some of those companies came into being by virtue of a government monopoly—the old AT&T comes to mind—then fine. But to go and tell companies what they can and cannot charge money for—that’s un-American. It’s against freedom. It’s just bad news.
It was only later that I found out why Rodgers sounded so rational: he’s a libertarian. Also to treasure from that interview is this fragment:
Some claim they [CIGS, a type of non-silicon cell] are close to equal to silicon in terms of efficiency.
You go buy one. You know, that’s another problem we’ve got in the industry. There are a lot of con men in the solar industry who say a lot of things that are really, really, very wrong.
Every libertarian I’ve known of has had this respect for personal, boot-maker, contextual, decentralized knowledge, this hard social virtue of refraining from telling other people what to do (expressed even more clearly later in the interview: “I don’t want to second-guess the people that are trying—I’m not an expert—and they’ll surprise you when they do.”). They all recognize the world’s complexity and the great problems of our models of it. So yeah, I liked this guy. I googled him and I found out this most-interesting open letter from him and a book of his on Amazon, No-Excuses Management, that I promptly ordered.
Anyway, back on topic, what do you think on net neutrality? What am I failing to see from this tangle? Why do so many smart, visionary people oppose it?
The recent and thankfully past presidential campaign in Mexico was a bizarre spectacle of major rifts in each of the 4 major parties. So important they were, it is not far-fetched to imagine that had a party managed to avoid them it would have been an easy victor. The ruling party, the PAN, was torn at the beginning between the incumbent’s pre-candidate, Santiago Creel, and the party’s one, Felipe Calderon; the PRD between the Cardenas family and Lopez Obrador; the PRI between Madrazo and Elba Esther Gordillo.
And that was all childish bickering compared to the hard, unprecedentedly dirty fights between parties. The race had simply never been this close.
It all made for grisly headlines, nauseating TV spots, debilitating internecine wars, and tiring discussion in every reunion you care to name. But now that’s past I can’t help but think of it as progress. You may call me naive or unsophisticated but I’ve oft thought, in what I do not believe to be my least lucid times1, that if there is such a thing as progress in politics it is nothing but the fragmentation of power2.
Yes, fragmentation can be ugly, and noisy, and wasteful, (particularly at its early stages) but we only know one answer to the ancient Latin question of “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who shall guard the guards themselves?”) and it is ”each to one another” (Can someone please translate this to Latin?). No matter what convoluted system, ideology, rules, mechanisms, or technologies of any sort we throw into the mix, it always comes down to the people that implement them, “it’s always a people problem.” In fact, the most that can be said in defense of a system is that it fragments the power to do wrong between many people.
Take the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) If it deserves any credibility (and I think it does) it is not because our voting technology ranks among the most sophisticated and expensive in the world (it does) but because there are deputies of every party3 physically overseeing every step of the electoral process.
[Vernor Vinge] added a third [future] trend: “The great conspiracy against human freedom.” As novelist Doris Lessing has observed, barons on opposite sides of the river don’t need to be in cahoots if their interests coincide. In our case, defence, homeland security, financial crime enforcement, police, tax collectors and intellectual property rights holders offer reasons to want to control the hardware we use. Then there are geeks, who can be tempted to forget the consequences if the technology is cool enough. Vinge quotes the most famous line from the comic strip Pogo: ”We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Vinge’s technology to satisfy these groups’ dreams is the Secure Hardware Environment (She), which dedicates some bandwidth and a small portion of every semiconductor for regulatory use. Deployment is progressive, as standards are implemented. Built into new chips, She will spread inevitably through its predecessors’ obsolescence.
This part is terribly plausible. It sounds much like the Trusted Computing Platform, implemented in Intel chips and built into machines from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and others. Most people don’t realise their new computer contains a chip designed to block the operation of any software not certified by the group. Now enhance that and build it into RFID chips, networked embedded systems, shrink and distribute as “smart dust”. All are current trends or works in progress.
Geeks are willing to fight Trusted Computing on the grounds that it could be used to block open-source software or to enforce draconian digital rights management. But what if accepting it meant less visible security, less bureaucracy, even slight profit? She automatically sends taxes, enables much less noticeable surveillance and gets you through security checkpoints with no waiting. There’s less crime, because legislative reality can be enforced on physical reality. Fewer false convictions. Make regulation automatic, and it seems to go away. New laws can be downloaded as a regulatory upgrade.
But the strongest outrage was reserved for the film’s final scene, in which Gallo’s character finally meets up with his ex-lover (Chloë Sevigny), and she performs unsimulated fellatio upon him.. Sevigny, already known for taking on controversial roles, had been a real-life girlfriend of Gallo’s. Notably, after the film’s release, the William Morris Agency dropped her as a client, claiming the scene made her unmarketable; she quickly signed with another agency and has continued her acting career despite fears to the contrary.
The quiet last line of this paragraph is a pearl of capitalist freedom that could so easily pass unnoticed, taken-for-granted. If Chloë was able to do what she did was only because she wasn’t tied to prude William Morris, one of the largest talent agencies in the world; it was only because there were other agencies more than willing to take her in.
Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
What a wonderful world to live in, isn’t it? One in which puritans can be self-righteous while we enjoy watching a purdy gal blow her ex-boy.
This blog had been gone for quite a while, a while in which I never stopped writing, it’s just that I saved it to a local text file. You see, I wanted (and want) something quite different from this blog than what it is now and I was experimenting with new formats. I was close to figuring out what I wanted but then this whole wonderful Imagery media blitz got a hold of me and I’m focusing all my energies on it. So the new blog will be another while coming and I thought that it was pointless (and rude of my part) to not publish anything in the mean time.
Most of what I’ve been doing this past month or so has been reading my ass off. Oh boy, have I good taste or what:
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
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