tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82053332024-03-08T00:13:17.638+00:00Anomaly UKAnomalous OpinonsAnomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.comBlogger675125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-12051731944026957552019-05-29T08:08:00.001+00:002019-05-29T08:08:36.082+00:00Blog Location and Feed URL changed<h2>
Very belated announcement:</h2>
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From 2018, I moved this blog from Google's Blogger to a self-hosted solution. The official location is:<br />
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<a href="https://blog.anomalyuk.party/">https://blog.anomalyuk.party/</a><br />
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(It's also available, for no very good reason, as a Tor hidden service at <a href="http://nqesdzhzdb76uf4y.onion/">http://nqesdzhzdb76uf4y.onion/</a> . I haven't tested that recently and don't guarantee that it won't leak out any requests to the normal endpoint).<br />
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Links into this site should automatically redirect, but it's come to my attention (via @isegoria) that feed consumers got no update, so this late announcements are for users of the RSS feed. The new-ish feed url is:<br />
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<a href="https://blog.anomalyuk.party/feed">https://blog.anomalyuk.party/feed</a><br />
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There's also a feed that excludes some smaller mini-blog stuff I've started adding, which is <a href="https://blog.anomalyuk.party/category/main/feed">https://blog.anomalyuk.party/category/main/feed</a><br />
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<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-9003374927332572502017-08-01T14:13:00.001+00:002017-08-01T14:20:54.751+00:00"End-to-end encryption"The question of regulating encrypted communication has come up again. I was going to write again about how the politicians don't understand the technologies, and they probably don't, but if they did, what would they do about it? The details are too complex to debate on TV news. What percentage of the viewing public even knows what public-key encryption is?<br />
<br />
Politicians often talk as if "end-to-end encryption" is a technology, and one which is rare and might practically be banned. There are then huge arguments about whether such banning would be good or bad, which leave me somewhat bemused.<br />
<br />
Of course, "end-to-end encryption" is no more a technology than "driving to a friend's house" is a technology. Cars and roads and driving are technologies, driving to a friend's house, or to a restaurant, or to work, are social or economic practices that make use of the technology.<br />
<br />
Similarly, sending encrypted messages is a technology. sending "end-to-end" encrypted messages is not a technology, it's just sending encrypted messages to an intended end recipient. Whether a particular message is "end-to-end" encrypted depends on who the end is.<br />
<br />
The soundbites talk about one kind of messaging: messages sent person-to-person from a sender to a recipient via a service provider like Whatsapp, Microsoft or Google.<br />
<br />
In 2017, most data sent over the internet that is at all personal is encrypted. <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/https-is-more-secure-so-why-isnt-the-web-using-it/" target="_blank">Huge efforts have been made over the last five or so years</a> to get to this stage, yet the debates about encryption have not even touched on the fact. Data in motion seems to be invisible. The encryption used to send the messages is very strong; again, a few years ago, there were quite a few bugs in commonly used implementations, but efforts have been made to find and fix such bugs, and while there are likely to be some left, it is plausible that nearly all such encrypted messages are unbreakable even by the most powerful national security organisations.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
However, the way most of these services work today is that the sender makes a connection to the service provider and authenticates himself with a password. The Service Provider also authenticates itself to the sender with a certificate, though that's mostly invisible. The sender then sends their message encrypted to the Service Provider, which decrypts it and stores it. Later (or simultaneously) the recipient makes a connection to the Service Provider the same way, and the Service Provider encrypts the message and sends it to the recipient. This is fundamentally the same whether we are talking about messaging apps, chat, or email, and whether the devices used are computers, phones or tablets.<br />
<br />
Anyway, call this method 1. Service Provider Mediated<br />
<br />
A few of these services now have an extra feature. The sender's app first encrypts the message in a way that con only be decrypted by the recipient, then encrypts it again to send to the Service Provider. The Service Provider decrypts one level of encryption, but not the second. When the recipient connects, the Service Provider re-encrypts the already encrypted message and sends to the recipient. The recipient decrypts the message twice, once to get what the Service Provider had stored, and then again to get what the sender originally wrote.<br />
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That is why <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/26/intelligence-services-access-whatsapp-amber-rudd-westminster-attack-encrypted-messaging" target="_blank">the politicians are talking about Whatsapp</a>, Telegram and so on.<br />
<br />
This is method 2. Service Provider Mediated, with provided end-to-end encryption<br />
<br />
An important question here is who keeps track of the encryption keys. If the Service Provider has that responsibility, then it can support interception by giving the sender the wrong encryption key; one that it or the government can reverse. If the sender keeps the recipient's encryption key, that is not possible, the Service Provider receives no messages that it is able to decrypt.<br />
<br />
Going back to method 1, if the Service Provider doesn't guide the end-to-end encryption, it's still possible to add it with special software for the sender and recipient. This is awkward for the users and has never caught on in a big way, but it's the method that the authorities used to worry about, decades back.<br />
<br />
Method 3. Service Provider Mediated with independent end-to-end encryption<br />
<br />
There are plenty more. The sender connects to the Service Provider and indicates, via an encrypted message, what recipient they want to message. The Service Provider replies with an endpoint that the sender can connect to. The sender then directly connects to the recipient and transmits an encrypted message, which the recipient decrypts.<br />
<br />
This peer-to-peer messaging isn't fundamentally different in technology from the end-to-end encrypted scenario. In both cases the actual networking is "store-and-forward": An intermediary receives data, stores it, and then transmits it to either another intermediary or the recipient. The only difference is how long the data is stored from; a typical router will store the data for only a fraction of a second before transmitting and deleting it, whereas a Service Provider's application server will store it at least until the recipient connects to retrieve it, and quite likely will archive it permanently. (Note there are regulations in some jurisdictions that <i>require</i> Service Providers to archive it permanently, but that applies to their application servers and not to routers, which handle orders of magnitude more data, most of which is transient).<br />
<br />
It's not always obvious to the user whether a real-time connection is mediated or not. Skype calls were originally peer-to-peer, and Microsoft changed it to mediated after they bought Skype. The general assumption is that this was at the behest of the NSA to enable interception, though I've not seen any definitive evidence.<br />
<br />
Another thing about this kind of service is that the Service Provider does not need nearly as much resource as one that's actually receiving all the messages their users send. There could be a thousand different P2P services, in any jurisdiction. With <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC" target="_blank">WebRTC now built into browsers</a>, it's<a href="https://github.com/linagora/hublin" target="_blank"> easy to set one up</a>.<br />
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Method 4. Service Provider directed peer-to-peer.<br />
<br />
It's not actually hard to be your own Service Provider. The sender can put the message on his own server, and the recipient can connect to the sender's server to receive it. Or, the sender can connect to the recipient's server, and send the message to that. In either case, the transmission of the messages (and it's only one transmission over the public internet, not two as in the previous cases) will be encrypted.<br />
<br />
As with method 2, the Service Provider might manage the encryption keys for the user, or the user's app might retain encryption keys for the correspondents it has in its directory.<br />
<br />
The software is all free and common. Creating a service <a href="https://www.vultr.com/docs/one-click-owncloud" target="_blank">requires a little knowledge, but not real expertise</a>. I estimate it would take me 90 minutes and cost £10 to set up a publicly-accessible email, forum and/or instant messaging service, using software that has been widespread for many years, and that uses the same secure encryption that everything else on the internet uses. Whether this counts as "end to end encryption" depends entirely on what you count as an "end". If I want the server to be in my house instead of a cloud data centre in the country of my choice, it might cost me £50 instead of £10, and it's likely to have a bit more downtime. That surely would make it "end-to-end", at least for messages for which I am either the sender or the recipient.<br />
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This is getting easier and more common, as internet speeds improve, connected devices proliferate, and distrust of the online giants' commercial surveillance practices grows. There have been one or two "server in a box" products offered which you can just buy and plug in to get this kind of service -- so far they have been dodgy, but there is no technical barrier to making them much better. Even if such a server is intended and marketed simply as a personal backup/archive solution, it is nevertheless in practice a completely functional messaging platform. The difference between an application that saves your phone photos to your backup drive and a full chat application is just a little bit of UI decoration, and so software like owncloud designed to do the first <a href="https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php/JavaScript+XMPP+Chat?content=162257" target="_blank">just throws in the second</a> because it's trivial.<br />
<br />
That is Method 5. Owned server<br />
<br />
There are several variants covered there. The user's own server might be on their own premises, or might be rented from a cloud provider. If rented, it might be a physical machine or a virtual machine. The messages might be encrypted with a key owned by the recipient, or encrypted with a key configured for the service, or both, or neither. Whether owned or rented, the server might be in the same country as the user, or a different country. Each of these makes a significant difference from the point of view of an investigating agency wanting to read the messages.<br />
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Investigating authorities aren't only concerned with encryption, though, they also want to know who is sending or receiving a message, even if they can't read it. This could make the politicians' opposition to <i>mediated </i>end-to-end encryption more reasonable: the Service Providers allow users to connect to their servers more or less anonymously. Using peer-to-peer or personal cloud services, the data is secure but the identity of the recipients of messages is generally easier to trace. The Service Providers give the users that the authorities are interested in a crowd of ordinary people to hide among.<br />
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It's easy to sneer at Amber Rudd, but can you imagine trying to describe a policy on this in a TV interview, or in the House of Commons? Note I've skipped over some subtle questions.<br />
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Even if you could, you probably wouldn't want to. Why spell out, "We want to get cooperation from Facebook to give us messages, but we're not stupid, we know that if the terrorists buy a £100 off-the-shelf NAS box and use that to handle their messages, that won't help us"?<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Summary: kinds of messaging practice</span><br />
<br />
<i>Service Provider mediated non-end-to-end</i><br />
<br />
<b>Data accessible to authorities</b>: with co-operation of Service Provider<br />
<b>Identity accessible to authorities</b>: IP addresses obtainable with co-operation of Service Provider but can be obscured by onion routing / using public wifi etc<br />
<b>User convenience</b>: very convenient<br />
<br />
<i>Service Provider mediated end-to-end</i><br />
<br />
<b>Data accessible to authorities:</b> No<br />
<b>Identity accessible to authorities</b>: IP addresses obtainable with co-operation of Service Provider but can be obscured by onion routing / using public wifi etc<br />
<b>User convenience</b>: very convenient<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>End-to-end layered over Service Provider (e.g. PGP mail)</i><br />
<br />
<b>Data accessible to authorities</b>: No<br />
<b>Identity accessible to authorities</b>: IP addresses obtainable with co-operation of Service Provider but can be obscured by onion routing / using public wifi etc<br />
<b>User convenience</b>: very inconvenient, all users must use special software, do key management</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>Peer-to-peer</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Data accessible to authorities</b>: No<br />
<b>Identity accessible to authorities</b>: IP addresses directly accessible by surveillance at either endpoint or at ISP<br />
<b>User convenience</b>: fiddly to use, need to manage directories of some kind<br />
<br />
<i>Personal Internet Service (Hosted)</i><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Data accessible to authorities</b>: With the cooperation of the host, which could be in any country<br />
<b>Identity accessible to authorities</b>: IP addresses directly accessible by surveillance at either endpoint or at ISP<br />
<b>User convenience</b>: Significant up-front work required by one party, but very easy to use by all others. Getting more convenient.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>Personal Internet Service (on-site)</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i></div>
<div>
<div>
<b>Data accessible to authorities</b>: If they physically seize the computer<br />
<b>Identity accessible to authorities</b>: IP addresses directly accessible by surveillance at either endpoint or at ISP<br />
<b>User convenience</b>: Significant up-front work required by one party, but very easy to use by all others. Getting more convenient.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">Appendix: Things I can think of but have skipped over to simplify</span></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Disk encryption -- keys stored or provided from outside at boot</li>
<li>Certificate spoofing, certificate pinning</li>
<li>Client applications versus web applications </li>
<li>Hostile software updates</li>
<li>Accessing data on virtual servers through hypervisor</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-33817649802118132062017-07-11T10:53:00.001+00:002017-07-12T06:46:06.294+00:00Revisiting the ProgramAlrenous has played the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theses_on_Feuerbach" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Thesis 11</a> card:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<a href="https://twitter.com/Alrenous/status/884668729052635137" target="_blank">Alrenous @Alrenous 2h2 hours ago</a><br />
Finally, if you're really confident in your philosophy, it should move you action. Or why bother?<br />
You moved to China. Good work.</blockquote>
<i><b>Edit</b>: I totally misread Alrenous here: he's not saying "Change the world", he's saying "change your own life/environment". So the below, while still, in my view, true and important, is not particularly relevant to his point. Oh well.</i><br />
<br />
He makes a valid point that good knowledge cannot be achieved without trying things:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Alrenous @Alrenous 3h3 hours ago<br />
Have to be willing to fail to do something new. Something new is patently necessary. NRx isn't willing to fail. That's embarrassing.</blockquote>
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<br />
The problem with this is that neoreaction is the science of sovereignty. Like, say, the science of black holes, it is not really possible for the researcher with modest resources to proceed by experiment, valuable though that would be.<br />
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We have ideas on how to use and retain sovereignty, but less to say about how to achieve it. There is a great deal of prior art on how to gain power via elections, guerrilla warfare, coup d'état, infiltration; we don't really have much of relevance to add to it.<br />
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We could do experiments in this area, by forming a political party or a guerrilla army or whatever, but that's a long way from our core expertise, and though we would like to experiment with sovereignty, attempting to get sovereignty over the United States to enable our experiments is possibly over-ambitious. We could hope to gain some small share of power, but we believe that a share of power is no good unless it can be consolidated into sovereignty.<br />
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Given that we do not have special knowledge of achieving power, it seems reasonable that we should produce theory of how power should be used, and someone better-placed to get power and turn it into sovereignty should run their military coup or whatever, and then take our advice. That's what we care about, even if cool uniforms would be better for getting chicks.<br />
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<a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-library.html" target="_blank">I put this forward as a goal in 2012. </a><br />
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<i>This is an ambitious project, but I think it is genuinely a feasible route to implementing our principles. Marxism's successes in the 20th Century didn't come because its theories were overwhelmingly persuasive; they came because Marxism had theories and nobody else did.</i><br />
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Since then, we have seen Steve Bannon, who apparently has at least read about and understood Moldbug, in a position of significant power in the Trump administration. We have seen Peter Thiel also with some kind of influence, also with at least sympathies towards NRx. These are not achievements in the sense that in themselves they make anything better. But they are experimental validations of the strategy of building a body of theory and waiting for others to consume it.<br />
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I have for the last few days been suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg could win the presidency as a moderate technocrat who will save the country from Trump and the Alt-Right Nazis, consolidate power beyond constitutional limits, as FDR did, and reorganise FedGov along the lines of Facebook Inc. This outcome is, frankly, not highly probable, but I insist that it is not absurd. One of the things that controls the possibility of this sort of outcome is whether people in positions of influence think it would be a good thing or a bad thing. If, with our current level of intellectual product we can get to the point of 2017 Bannon, is it not plausible that with much more product, of higher quality, much more widely known and somewhat more respectable, the environment in DC (or London or Paris) could be suitable for this sort of historically unremarkable development to be allowed to happen?<br />
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This, presumably, is the strategy the Hestia guys are pursuing with Social Matter and Jacobite, and I think it is the right one. We are at a very early stage, and we have a long way to go before a smooth takeover of the United States would be likely, though in the event of some exceptional crisis or collapse, even our immature ideas might have their day. But we do have experimental feedback of the spread of our ideas to people of intelligence and influence: if we had ten Ross Douthats, and ten Ed Wests, and ten Peter Thiels, discussing the same ideas and putting them into the mainstream, we would have visible progress towards achieving our goals.<br />
<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-71910187204485481572017-06-17T16:30:00.001+00:002017-06-17T18:14:42.770+00:00Trophic CascadeI've been blogging for 13 years, and my first post was about <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2004/11/is-europe-becoming-islamicised.html" target="_blank">Islam in Europe</a> : <br />
<br />
I believed then that danger of Islam was exaggerated, by people who I normally agreed with such as <a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/aim/" target="_blank">Eric Raymond</a><br />
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I've changed my view on many things since then, from being a by-the-book Libertarian to something I had to find a new name for.<br />
<br />
Only one thing that I wrote back then is definitely now not true:<br />
<i>The Muslim immigrants to Britain are integrating slowly into British culture.</i><br />
<br />
<a href="http://anomalyuk-dc.blogspot.co.uk/2005/07/death-throes.html" target="_blank">This 2005 piece</a> by me comes off looking especially bad now<br />
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<i>This does not mean that Islam is dying out, just that, like Christianity, it is evolving into a form that makes less conflict with the practicalities of living in a developed society. I expect that in a hundred years Moslems will continue to recite the Koran and observe Ramadan, but what I am calling the "primitive" elements -- intolerance of Western practices of commerce, sexual behaviour, freedom of expression, whatever -- will have died out.</i><br />
<br />
<i>Among Moslems in the West, as well as the more Westernised Moslem countries like Turkey, this is already the case for the majority. And this is why the "primitives" are angry.</i><br />
<br />
File that under "overtaken by events." I did say then that it was more important for the West to be seen to win in Iraq than to achieve anything concrete, so maybe if that had been done then things would look different today. Perhaps what I predicted was at that time still possible, but whether I was wrong about that or not, the reality today is utterly different. It is moderate Islam that is declining, globally, not Islamism.<br />
<br />
"Integration" now going backwards. Possibly that had already begun in 2004 and I hadn't noticed, but I suspect it is something new.<br />
<br />
Many of my online homies say that "moderate Islam" is a myth or mirage -- that the history of Islam shows that it is inherently and inevitably violent and expansionist. Pitched against liberals who say that Christianity has an equally violent and aggressive history, they certainly have the better of their argument. But while the leftists are ignoring everything before the 1800s, the rightists are ignoring everything since. There was very little Islamist violence in the 20th Century. The Partition of India was a free-for-all. The major Islamic states, Egypt and Turkey, were secular socialist-nationalist in character.<br />
<br />
Contrary to my previous assertions, the situation is getting worse not better, but it is still noticeable that Islamist terrorists in Britain are not in their national origins representative of Britain's Muslim population. The ringleader of the 2005 train bombers was from a typical British-Pakistani background, but most of the others have come from Africa or the Middle East. Even Butt seems atypical since he came to the country as a refugee -- most British Pakistanis did not come as refugees, but as Commonwealth migrants back in the 70s and families thereafter. Britain has been granting asylum to very few Pakistanis -- <a href="https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/assets/0004/0488/Asylum_Statistics_May_2017.pdf" target="_blank">77 in the last quarter</a> [pdf] . <br />
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Pakistani immigration was encouraged for economic reasons up until 1971, and since then it has been family-based. However, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Pakistanis" target="_blank">their numbers have increased tenfold over those 45 years, from 120,000 to 1.2 million.</a> That's plausible as bringing in existing family members plus marrying more and having two generations of children, but it's towards the high end of what you would estimate. If there's another significant contributor to that tenfold expansion I don't know what it is. <br />
<br />
Striking as those numbers are, my point is that those "normal British Pakistanis" are not the Islamic terrorists in Britain. They really are the "moderate Muslims" that are alleged not to exist (The child prostitution gangs such as the Rotherham one, on the other hand, <i>are</i> exactly from that typical background, one reason why I see that as a totally separate issue). My biggest worry is that by adding significant numbers of African and Middle Eastern jihadis into the mix, the whole British Pakistani culture could be shifted. The Muslim population of Britain doubled between 2005 and 2015 (per <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/british-values-wont-help-fight-terrorism/" target="_blank">Ed West</a>) and the non-Pakistani Muslim population was probably multipled several times. This was the effect of the "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html" target="_blank">rubbing noses in diversity</a>" -- the Labour government changing the demographics of the country not even out of strategy but out of vulgar spite. That was a development I failed to imagine.<br />
<br />
Waiting for Islam to become more moderate is no longer on the table. Forcing Islam to become more moderate is, I believe, thoroughly achievable with sensible policies. The fundamental is for law and society to be at least as tough on expression of tribalism from Muslims as they are on expression of tribalism from natives. This is currently very far from the case. I try to stay out of day-to-day politics, so when I retweet other right-wingers, it's usually because they're highlighting this disparity:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/i/moments/876110359899385858" target="_blank">Twitter Moment</a><br />
<br />
The other side of that is <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-migrants-germany-mosques-insig-idUKKCN12S0HF" target="_blank">this story</a>: <i>In Germany, Syrians find mosques too conservative</i> <br />
<br />
Mosques in Western countries are now more extremist than those elsewhere in the world. This is a straightforward holiness spiral -- within a community, you can gain status by professing stronger allegiance to that community's symbols than anyone else does. In a<i> functioning</i> community, this tendency is moderated by the practical demands of society. But, even the large, stable, Pakistani communities in Britain are not truly functional -- they are subsidised and supported by the wider society.<br />
<br />
The wider society -- the liberal West -- is deeply opposed to putting any restraint whatsoever on the puritanism growing within the community. They are like the naive conservationists of the past who believed that by keeping out all predators they were allowing an ecosystem to flourish naturally, when in fact they were unbalancing it towards a destructive tipping point. It is natural and universal for religious extremism to come into conflict with its neigbours and be pushed back by them. <br />
<br />
Basically, what I'm saying is that Tommy Robinson is a natural predator, and by suppressing him, liberal society is producing a <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happens-when-predators-disappear-32079553/" target="_blank">Trophic Cascade</a> in the extremist ecosystem. <br />
<br />
It's not only in a minority community that this mechanism should happen. I asked on Twitter, is there any Islamic country where the mosques are not subject to state supervision of doctrine? In majority Islamic communities, the pushback in favour of practicality comes from the state. Again, a liberal Western state disclaims any responsibility for pushing back on Islam, though it is a job that I understand most Islamic states consider necessary.<br />
<br />
<b>Update</b>: It should go without saying that continuing to increase the Muslim population is also destabilising. As well as increasing the imbalance, <i>in itself </i>it is a sign of weakness which makes extremism more attractive and moderation less attractive. I am not saying any more than that it is not (yet) necessary to undertake more drastic measures such as mass deportations of long-standing residents. Since the continued importation of Muslims is the same political process as the active protection of extremism from its natural opposition, ending one means also ending the other.<br />
<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-42914799563976049842016-12-20T22:44:00.000+00:002017-01-04T15:00:14.643+00:00Democracy and HackingThe New York Times has published <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html" target="_blank">a long analysis</a> of the effects of the hacking of Democratic Party organisations and operatives in the 2016 election campaign.<br />
<br />
The article is obviously trying to appear a balanced view, eschewing the "OMG we are at war with Russia" hyperbole and questioning the value of different pieces of evidence. It does slip here and there, for instance jumping from the involvement of "a team linked to the Russian government" (for which there is considerable evidence) to "directed from the Kremlin" without justification.<br />
<br />
The evidence that the hackers who penetrated the DNC systems and John Podesta's email account are linked to the Russian Government is that the same tools were used as have been used in other pro-Russian actions in the past.<br />
<br />
*Update 4th Jan 2017: that is a bit vague: infosec regular @pwnallthethings goes into <a href="https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/816621553643294720" target="_blank">very clear detail in a twitter thread</a>)<br />
<br />
One important consideration is the sort of people who do this kind of thing. Being able to hack systems requires some talent, but not any weird Hollywood-esque genius. It also takes a lot of experience, which goes out of date quite quickly. Mostly, the people who have the talent and experience are the people who have done it for fun.<br />
<br />
Those people are difficult to recruit into military or intelligence organisations. They tend not to get on well with concepts such as wearing uniforms, turning up on time, or passing drug tests.<br />
<br />
It is possible in theory to bypass the enthusiasts and have more professional people learn the techniques. One problem is that becoming skilled requires practice, and that generally means practice on innocent victims. More significantly, the first step in any action is to work through cut-out computers to avoid being traced, and those cut-outs are also hacked computers belonging to random victims. That's the way casual hackers, spammers and other computer criminals work, and espionage hackers have to use the same techniques. They have to be doing it all the time, to keep a base of operations, and to keep their techniques up to date.<br />
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For all these reasons, it makes much more sense for state agencies to stay arms-length from the actual hackers. The agencies will know about the hackers, maybe fund them indirectly, cover for them, and make suggestions, but there won't be any official chain of command.<br />
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So the hackers who got the data from the DNC were probably somewhat associated with the Russian Government (though a comprehensive multi-year deception by another organisation deliberately appearing to be Russian is not completely out of the question).<br />
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They may have had explicit (albeit off-the-record) instructions, but that's not necessary. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/world/europe/russia-hacks-putin-hillary-clinton.html" target="_blank">As the New York Times itself observed</a>, Russia has generally been very alarmed by Hillary Clinton for years. The group would have known to oppose her candidacy without being told.<br />
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"It was conventional wisdom... that Mrs. Clinton considered her husband’s efforts to reform Russia in the 1990s an unfinished project, and that she would seek to finish it by encouraging grass-roots efforts that would culminate with regime change."<br />
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Dealing with the product is another matter. It might well have gone to a Russian intelligence agency, either under an agreement with the hackers or ad-hoc from a "concerned citizen": you would assume they would want to see anything and everything of this kind that they could get. While hacking is best treated as deniable criminal activity, it would be much more valuable to agencies to have close control over the timing and content of releases of data.<br />
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So I actually agree with the legacy media that the extraction and publication of Democratic emails was probably a Russian intelligence operation. There is a significant possibility it was not, but was done by some Russians independent of government, and a remote possibility it was someone completely unrelated who has a practice of deliberately leaving false clues implicating Russia. <br />
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I've often said that the real power of the media is not the events that they report but the context to the events that they imply. Governments spying on each other is completely normal. Governments spying on foreign political movements is completely normal. Governments attempting to influence foreign elections by leaking intelligence is completely normal. Points to Nydwracu for finding <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/opinion/24safire.html" target="_blank">this by William Safire</a>:<br />
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"The shrewd Khrushchev came away from his personal duel of words with Nixon persuaded that the advocate of capitalism was not just tough-minded but strong-willed; he later said that he did all he could to bring about Nixon’s defeat in his 1960 presidential campaign."<br />
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The major restraint on interference in foreign elections is generally the danger that if the candidate you back loses then you've substantially damaged your own relations with the winner. The really newsworthy aspect of all this is that the Russians had such a negative view of Clinton that they thought this wouldn't make things any worse. It's been reported that the Duma broke into applause when the election result was announced.<br />
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The other thing that isn't normal is a complete public dump of an organisation's emails. That's not normal because it's a new possibility, one that people generally haven't begun to get their heads around. I was immediately struck by the immense power of such an attack <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/anonymous-versus-hbgary.html" target="_blank">the first time I saw it</a>, in early 2011. No organisation can survive it: this is an outstanding item that has to be solved. I wouldn't rule out a new recommended practice to destroy all email after a number of weeks, forcing conversation histories to be boiled down to more sterile and formal documents that are far less potentially damaging if leaked.<br />
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It is just about possible for an organisation to be able to adequately secure their corporate data, but that's both a technical problem and a management problem. However, the first impression you get is of the DNC is one of amateurism. That of course is not a surprise. <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/news-and-politics-and-money.html" target="_blank">As I've observed before</a>, if you consider political parties to be an important part of the system of government, their lack of funding and resources is amazing, even if American politics is better-funded than British. That the DNC were told they had been hacked and didn't do anything about it is still shocking. Since 2011, this is something that any organisation sensitive to image should be living in fear of.<br />
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This is basically evidence-free speculation, but it seems possible that the Democratic side is deficient in actual organisation builders: the kind of person who will set up systems, make rules, and get a team of people to work together. A combination of fixation on principles rather than practical action, and on diversity and "representativeness" over extraordinary competence meant that the campaign didn't have the equivalent of a <a href="https://twitter.com/anomalyuk/status/801723984136044544" target="_blank">Jared Kushner</a> to move in, set up an effective organisation and get it working.<br />
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Or possibly the problem is more one of history: the DNC is not a political campaign set up to achieve a task, but a permanent bureaucracy bogged down by inferior personnel and a history of institutional compromises. <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2005/03/organisational-dynamics.html" target="_blank">Organisations become inefficient naturally</a>.<br />
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Possibly Trump in contrast benefited from his estrangement from the Republican party establishment, since it meant he did not have legacy organisations to leak his secrets and undermine his campaign's efficiency. He had a Manhattan Project, not an <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/fusion-power.html" target="_blank">ITER</a>.<br />
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The task of building--or rebuilding--an organisation is one that few people are suited to. Slotting into an existing structure is very much easier. Clinton's supporters particularly are liable to have the attitude that a job is something you are given, rather than something you make. Kushner and Brad Parscale seem to stand out as people who have the capability of making a path rather than following one. As an aside, Obama seems to have had such people also, but Clinton may have lacked them. Peter Thiel described Kushner as "the Chief Operating Officer" of Trump's campaign. Maybe the real estate business that Trump and Kushner are in, which consists more of separate from-scratch projects than most other businesses, orients them particularly to that style.<br />
<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-3040426749465274292016-12-12T14:41:00.002+00:002016-12-12T14:41:47.976+00:00Actually Existing CapitalismSomething that's cropped up a few times with recent discussion of neocameralism as a concept is the role of shareholders in existing firms.<br />
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Conflicts of interest between principals and agents are one of the most significant forces acting on the structure of any kind of organisation, so it is essential when discussing how to apply structures from one kind of organisation to another, to have a feel of how the conflicts are playing out in existing structures and organisations.<br />
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In particular, I have seen more than one person on twitter put forward the idea that present-day joint-stock companies totally fail to resolve the conflict of interest between shareholders and managers, with the result that shareholders are powerless and managers run companies purely in their own interest:<br />
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In discussion of <a href="http://tonreihe.tumblr.com/post/153616158905/on-a-shortcoming-of-neocameral-terminology" target="_blank">this piece by Ron Carrier</a> from November 24th the author said on twitter,<br />
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"<a href="https://twitter.com/tonreihe/status/802157647478882306" target="_blank">Because</a> they are non-contractual, shares are a useful way of financing a company without ceding control.... Contrary to shareholder theory, power in the corporation is actually located in mgmt. and the board of directors."<br />
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More recently (December 9th), <a href="https://twitter.com/Alrenous/status/807279289825509376" target="_blank">Alrenous </a>followed the same path: from the suggestion that dividend payments from public companies are in aggregate very low, he draws the conclusion that stocks are "worthless" and that those who buy them are effectively just giving their money away for managers to do what they want with.<br />
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I'm sure Alrenous understands that the theory is that a profitable company can be delivering value to shareholders by reinvesting its profits and becoming a more valuable company, capable of returning larger amounts of cash in future. And of course I understand that just because someone believes that a company has become more valuable in consequence of reinvested profits, doesn't mean it is necessarily true.<br />
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Discussions like this among people not involved with investment professionally carry a risk of being based on factoids or rumour. In particular, mainstream journalists are fantastically ignorant of the whole subject. But in the end everything to do with public companies is actually public, if you can find the information and not misunderstand it. (Note that I am not including myself among the professionals, though I've worked with them in the past in an IT role).<br />
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At any rate, here is a publication dealing with aggregate dividends across the NY stock exchange. <a href="http://www.factset.com/websitefiles/PDFs/dividend/dividend_9.22.16" target="_blank">factset.com</a><br />
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"Aggregate quarterly dividends for the S&P 500 amounted to $105.8 billion in the second quarter, which represented a 0.8% increase year-over-year. The dividend total in Q2 marked the second largest quarterly dividend amount in at least ten years (after Q1 2016). The total dividend payout for the trailing twelve months ending in Q2 amounted to $427.5 billion, which was a 7.1% increase from the same time period a year ago."<br />
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So, that's getting on for half a trillion dollars in dividends paid out by the S&P 500 over the last year. Throwing numbers around without any indication of scale is another media trope, but that's about 2-3% of US GDP, which seems like the right sort of scale.<br />
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As an aside, if some of these companies hold shares in others, the dividends are effectively double-counted: one company in the set is paying out to another, which may or may not then be paying out to its shareholders. I would assume this is not more than a few percent of the total<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span>even investment companies like Berkshire Hathaway are likely to invest more in private companies than other S&P 500 members<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span>but it's an indication of the pitfalls available in this sort of analysis.<br />
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In addition to dividends, as I pointed out, share buybacks<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">—</span>where a company purchases its own shares on the open market<span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span>are economically equivalent to dividends: the company is giving cash to its own shareholders. If every shareholder sells an equal proportion of their holdings back to the company, then the result is that each shareholder continues to hold the same fraction of the company's outstanding shares, and each has been paid cash by the company. Of course, some will sell and some not, but the aggregate effect is the same. The choice of whether to take cash by selling a proportion of one's holding, or whether to simply hold shares, thereby effectively increasing one's holding as a fraction of the company, enables shareholders to minimise their tax liability more efficiently, which is apparently why share buybacks have become more significant compared to dividends.<br />
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Alrenous found <a href="http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buybacks-cannibalized/" target="_blank">this article from Reuters</a>, which says "In the most recent reporting year, share purchases reached a record $520 billion.". That's not the same period as the one I found for aggregate dividends, so adding them together might be a bit off, but it looks like we can roughly double that 3% of GDP. As I said on twitter, as a general rule, large companies are making profits and paying shareholders.<br />
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The reason neocameralism makes sense is that joint-stock companies basically work.<br />
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That is not to suggest that the principal-agent conflicts are insignificant. They are always significant, and managing the problem is a large part of any organisational practice. That is what the bulk of corporate law is there to deal with.<br />
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I picked up <a href="http://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/2016/12/08/comment/chris-dillow/out-of-date-2z0239g8REv6NTlI0WtsVI/article.html" target="_blank">a recent article in Investor's Chronicle</a> in which Chris Dillow suggests that management is simply overpaid:<br />
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"...bosses plunder directly from shareholders by extracting big wages for themselves. The High Pay Centre estimates that CEOs are now paid 150 times the salary of the average worker, a ratio that has tripled since the 1990s - an increase which, it says, can't be justified by increased management efficiency."<br />
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However, Dillow also links other source with other suggestions: the 1<a href="https://hbr.org/1989/09/eclipse-of-the-public-corporation" target="_blank">989 Harvard Business Review article by Michael Jensen</a> is particularly fascinating.<br />
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Jensen claims that regulation brought in after the Great Depression had the effect of limiting the control of shareholders over management:<br />
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"These laws and regulations—including the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Chandler Bankruptcy Revision Act of 1938, and the Investment Company Act of 1940—may have once had their place. But they also created an intricate web of restrictions on company 'insiders' (corporate officers, directors, or investors with more than a 10% ownership interest), restrictions on bank involvement in corporate reorganizations, court precedents, and business practices that raised the cost of being an active investor. Their long-term effect has been to insulate management from effective monitoring and to set the stage for the eclipse of the public corporation.<br />
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"...The absence of effective monitoring led to such large inefficiencies that the new generation of active investors arose to recapture the lost value. These investors overcome the costs of the outmoded legal constraints by purchasing entire companies—and using debt and high equity ownership to force effective self-monitoring."<br />
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A quarter of a century on from Jensen's paper, the leveraged buyout looks not so much like an alternative form of organisation for a business, but rather an extra control mechanism available to shareholders of a public joint-stock company. The aim of of a buyout today is, as Jensen describes, to replace inefficient management and change the firm's strategy, but today there is normally an exit strategy: the plan is that having done those things the company will be refloated with new management and a new strategy.<br />
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The "Leveraged" of LBO obviously refers to debt: that takes us to the question of debt-to-equity ratio. A firm needs capital: it can raise that from shareholders or from lenders. If all its capital is shareholders', that limits the rate of profit it can offer them: the shares become less volatile. If the firm raises some of its capital needs from lenders, the shares become riskier but potentially more profitable.<br />
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Under the theory of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the choice is arbitrary: leverage can be applied by the shareholders just as by the company itself. Buying shares on margin of a company without debt is equivalent to buying shares of a leveraged company for cash. However, this equivalency is disrupted by transaction costs, and also by tax law.<br />
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There is considerable demand in the market for safe fixed-income investments. A large profitable company is exceptionally well-placed to meet that demand by issuing bonds or borrowing from banks, and therefore can probably do so much more efficiently than its shareholders would be able to individually, were it to hold its cash and leave shareholders to borrow against the more expensive shares.<br />
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The transaction costs the other way, the ones caused by corporate indebtedness, come through bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is essential to capitalism, but it involves a lot of expensive lawyers, and can be disruptive. For an extreme example, see <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/billions-in-cargo-remains-stranded-at-sea-1473285117" target="_blank">the Hanjin Shipping case in September</a>. It's clearly in the interest of the owners of the cargo to get the cargo unloaded, but the international complications of the bankruptcy of the shipping line means that it's unclear who is going to end up paying for the docking and unloading. If Hanjin had a capital structure that gave it spare cash instead of debt, all this expensive inconvenience would be avoided.<br />
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Aside from transaction costs, the argument in Jensen's paper is that the management of a company with spare cash is better able to conceal the company's activities from shareholders. In his account, once the company has been bought out and restructured with debt, any expansion in the cost base has to be directly justified to shareholders and creditors, since capital will have to be raised to pay for it. This improvement in the monitoring of the management is part of what produces the increased value (in his 1980s figures, the average LBO price was 50% above the previous market value).<br />
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A quarter of a century later, we frequently read the opposite criticism, that pressure from investors makes management too focused on short-term share prices, which is a bad thing. I linked <a href="http://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-idea/" target="_blank">this article by Lynn Stout</a>, and while I think the argument is very badly stated, it is not entirely wrong. The problem in my opinion is not with the idea of managing in order to maximise shareholder value: that is absolutely how a company should be managed. The problem is with equating shareholder value to the price at which a share of the company was most recently traded. Though that is most probably the best measure we have of the value of the company to its shareholders, it is, nonetheless, not a very accurate measure. Given that the markets have a relatively restricted view of the state of the company, maximising the short-term share price relies on optimising those variables which are exposed to view: chiefly the quarterly earnings.<br />
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If outside shareholders had perfect knowledge of the state of the company, then maximising the share price would be the same as maximising shareholder value. Because of the information assymetry, they are not the same. Value added to the company will not increase the share price unless it is visible to investors, and some forms of value are more visible than others. Management are certainly very concerned by the share price. As I mentioned on twitter, "<a href="https://twitter.com/anomalyuk/status/802160573421092864" target="_blank">in any company</a> I worked for, management were (very properly) terrified of shareholders"<br />
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But this is a well-known problem. There are various approaches that have been tried to improve the situation. Where a company has a long-established leadership that has the confidence of investors, shareholding can be divided between classes of shares with different voting rights, so that the trusted, established leadership have control over the company without owning a majority of the equity. This is the situation with Facebook, for instance, where Mark Zuckerberg owns a majority of the voting shares, and most other shareholders hold class B or C shares with reduced or zero voting rights. Buying such shares is an act of faith in Mr Zuckerberg, more than owning shares in a more conventionally structured business. The justification is that it allows him to pursue long-term strategy without the risk of being interrupted by a takeover or by activist investors.<br />
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In fact, this year Zuckerberg increased the relative voting power of his holding, by introducing the non-voting class C shares. That <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/08/andreessen-in-hot-water-for-texts-he-sent-zuckerberg/" target="_blank">has been challenged in court</a>, and is the subject of ongoing litigation.<br />
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In summary, the arrangements of public companies consist of a set of complex compromises. There are many criticisms, but they tend to come in opposing pairs. For everyone who, like Alrenous, claims that shares are worthless because companies do not pay dividends, there are some like the Reuters article he found which complain that companies pay out all their profits and do not invest enough in growth. For everyone who, like Chris Dillow, complains that managements are undersupervised and extract funds for self-aggrandizement and private gain, there are others like Lynn Stout who complain that managements are over-constrained by short-term share price moves and unable to plan strategically.<br />
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The arrangements which implement the compromises between these failings are flexible: they change over time and adapt to circumstances. A hundred-year-old resource extraction business like Rio Tinto is not structured in exactly the same way as a web business like Facebook. The point of Chris Dillow's article is that fewer businesses are publicly traded today than in the past (though even that is difficult to measure meaningfully).<br />
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The joint-stock company is not a magic bullet, it is a range of institutional forms, evolved over time, and part of a large range of institutiontal forms that make up Actually Existing Capitalism. They are ways of coping with, rather than solving, the basic conflict-of-interest and asymmetric-information issues that are fundamental to everything from a board of directors appointing a CEO to a coder-turned-rancher hiring a farm hand.<br />
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My worry is that Moldbug's form of Neocameralism is an inflexible snapshot of one particular corporate arrangement, which only works as well as it does because it can be adapted to meet changing demands. That's why I tend to think of it as one item on a menu of management options (including hereditary monarchy!)<br />
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Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-37742450555396209102016-11-12T16:09:00.003+00:002016-11-12T16:22:46.906+00:00Modelling FailuresNothing really new here, but pulling a few things together.<br />
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Start with Joseph K's observation:<br />
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Between the replication crisis and the Great Poll Failure of 2016, quantitative social science has basically committed suicide</div>
— Joseph K. (@fxxfy) <a href="https://twitter.com/fxxfy/status/796374328598269952">November 9, 2016</a></blockquote>
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This is a good point, and I added that the failure of financial risk models in 2008 was essentially the same thing.<br />
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The base problem is overconfidence. "People do not have enough epistemic humility", as <a href="https://twitter.com/padrelamarck/status/797125203889426432" target="_blank">Ben Dixon</a> put it.<br />
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The idea in all these fields is that you want to make some estimate about the future of some system. You make a mathematical model of the system, relating the visible outputs to internal variables. You also include a random variable in the model.<br />
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You then compare the outputs of your model to the visible outputs of the system being modelled, and modify the parameters until they match as closely as possible. They don't match exactly, but you make the effects of your random variable just big enough that your model could plausibly produce the outputs you have seen.<br />
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If that means your random variable basically dominates, then your model is no good and you need a better one. But if the random element is fairly small, you're good to go.<br />
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In polling, your visible effects are how people answer polling questions and how they vote. In social science, it's how subjects behave in experiments, or how they answer questions, or how they do things that come out in published statistics. In finance, it's the prices at which people trade various instruments.<br />
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The next step is where it all goes wrong. In the next step, you assume that your model—including its random variable to account for the unmeasured or unpredictable—is exactly correct, and make predictions about what the future outputs of the system will be. Because of the random variable, your predictions aren't certain; they have a range and a probability. You say, "Hillary Clinton has a 87% chance of winning the election". You say "Reading these passages changes a person's attitude to something-or-other in this direction 62% of the time, with a probability of 4.6% that the effect could have been caused randomly". You say, "The total value of the assets held by the firm will not decrease by more than 27.6 million dollars in a day, with a probability of 99%".<br />
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The use of probabilities suggests to an outsider that you have epistemic humility--you are aware of your own fallibility and are taking account of the possibility of having gone wrong. But that is not the case. The probabilities you quote are calculated on the basis that you have done everything perfectly, that you model is completely right, and that nothing has changed in between the production of the data you used to build the model and the events that you are attempting to predict. The unpredictability that you account for is that which is caused by the incompleteness of your model—which is necessarily a simplification of the real system—not on the possibility that what your model is doing is actually wrong.<br />
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In the case of the polling, what that means is that the margin of error quoted with the poll is based on the assumptions that the people polled answered honestly; that they belong to the demographic groups that the pollsters thought they belonged to, that the proportion of demographic groups in the electorate are what the pollsters thought they were. The margin of error is based on the random variables in the model: the fact that the random selection of people polled might be atypical of the list they were taken from, possibly, if the model is sophisticated enough, that the turnout of different demographics might vary from what is predicted (but where does the data come from to model that?)<br />
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In the social sciences, the assumptions are that the subjects are responding to the stimuli you are describing, and not to something else. Also that people will behave the same outside the laboratory as they do inside. The stated probabilities and uncertainties again are not reflecting any doubt as to those assumptions: only to the modelled randomness of sampling and measurement.<br />
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On the risk modelling used by banks, I can be more detailed, because I actually did it. It is assumed that the future price changes of an instrument follow the same probability distributions as in the past. Very often, because the instruments do not have a sufficient historical record, a proxy is used; one which is assumed to be similar. Sometimes instead of a historical record or a proxy there is just a model, a normal distribution plus a correlation with the overall market, or a sector of it. Again, lots of uncertainty in the predictions, but none of it due to the possibility of having the wrong proxy, or of there being something new about the future which didn't apply to the past.<br />
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Science didn't always work this way. The way you do science is that you propose the theory, then it is tested against observations over a period of time. That's absolutely necessary: the model, even with the uncertainty embedded within it, is a simplification of reality, and the only justification for assuming that the net effects of the omitted complexities are within error bounds is that that is seen to happen.<br />
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If the theory is about the emission spectra of stars, or the rate of a chemical reaction, then once the theory is done it can be continually tested for a long period. In social sciences or banking, nobody is paying attention for long enough, and the relevant environment is changing too much over a timescale of years for evidence that a theory is sound to build up. It's fair enough: the social scientists, pollsters and risk managers are doing the best they can. The problem is not what they are doing, it is the excessive confidence given to their results. I was going to write "their excessive confidence", but that probably isn't right: they know all this. Many of them (there are <a href="https://twitter.com/derickwallerTV/status/797448960709378048" target="_blank">exceptions</a>) know perfectly well that a polling error margin, or a p-value, or a VaR are not truly what the definitions say, but only the closest that they can get. It is everyone who takes the numbers at face value that is making the mistake. However, none of these analysts, of whichever flavour, are in a position to emphasise the discrepancy. They always have a target to aim for.<br />
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For a scientist, they have to get a result with a p-value to publish a paper. <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2010/08/originality-and-science.html">That is their job</a>: if they do it, they have succeeded, otherwise, they have not. A risk manager, similarly, has a straightforward day-to-day job of persuading the regulator that the bank is not taking too much risk. I don't know the ins and outs of polling, but there is always pressure. In fact Nate Silver seems to have done exactly what I suggest: his pre-election announcement seems to be been along the lines "Model says Clinton 85%, but the model isn't reliable, I'm going to call it 65%". And he got a lot of shit for it.<br />
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Things go really bad when there is a feedback loop from the result of the modelling to the system itself. If you give a trader a VaR budget, he'll look to take risks that don't show in the VaR. If you campaign so as to maximise your polling position, you'll win the support of the people who don't bother to vote, or you'll put people off saying they'll vote for the other guy without actually stopping them voting for the other guy. Nasty.<br />
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Going into the election, I'm not going to say I predicted the result. But I didn't fall for the polls. Either there was going to be a big differential turnout between Trump supporters and Clinton supporters, or there wasn't. Either there were a lot of shy Trump supporters, or there weren't. I thought there was a pretty good chance of both, but no amount of <i>Data</i> was going to tell me. Sometimes you just don't know.<br />
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That's actually an argument for not "correcting" the polls. At least if there is a model—polling model, VaR model, whatever<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">—</span></span>you can take the output and then think about it. If the thinking has already been done, and corrections already applied, that takes the option away from you. I didn't know to what extent the polls had already be corrected for the unquantifiables that could make them wrong. The question wasn't so much "are there shy Trump voters?" as "are there more shy Trump voters than some polling organisation guessed there are?"<br />
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Of course, every word of all this applies just the same to that old obsession of this blog, climate. The models have not been proved; they've mostly been produced honestly, but there's a target, and there are way bigger uncertainties than those which are included in the models. But the reason I don't blog about climate any more is that it's over. The Global Warming Scare was fundamentally a social phenomenon, and it has gone. Nobody other than a few activists and scientists takes it seriously any more, and mass concern was an <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate-sceptics-come-out.html" target="_blank">essential part of the cycle</a>. There isn't going to be a backlash or a correction; there won't be papers demolishing the old theories and getting vast publicity. Rather, the whole subject will just continue to fade away. If Trump cuts the funding, as seems likely, it will fade away a bit quicker. Lip service will occasionally be paid, and summits will continue to be held, but less action will result from them. The actual exposure of the failure of science won't happen until the people who would have been most embarrassed by it are dead. That's how these things go.<br />
<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-10175543579905935752016-11-10T09:32:00.000+00:002016-11-14T09:41:00.652+00:00President TrumpI have <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/entertainment-and-policy.html" target="_blank">long ago observed</a> that, whatever its effect on government, democracy has great entertainment value. We are certainly being entertained by the last couple of days, and that looks like going on for a while.<br />
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From one point of view, the election is a setback for neoreaction. The overreach of progressivism, particularly in immigration, was in danger of toppling the entire system, and that threat is reduced if Trump can restrain the demographic replacement of whites.<br />
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On the other hand, truth always has value, and the election result has been an eye-opener all round. White American proles have voted as a block and won. The worst of the millennial snowflakes have learned for the first time that their side isn't always bound to win elections, and have noticed many flaws of the democratic process that possibly weren't as visible to them when they were winning. Peter Thiel's claims that <a href="https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian" target="_blank">democracy is incompatible with freedom</a> will look a bit less like grumblings of a bad loser once Thiel is in the cabinet. Secession is being talked about, the New York Times has published an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/consider-a-monarchy-america.html" target="_blank">opinion column calling for Monarchy</a>. One might hope that Lee Kuan Yew's observations on the nature of democracy in multi-racial states might get some currency over the next few months or years.<br />
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So, yes, President Trump may save the system for another two or three decades (first by softening its self-destructive activities, and later by being blamed for every problem that remains). But Anomaly UK is neutral on accelerationism; if the system is going to fail, there is insufficient evidence to say whether it is better it fail sooner or later. If later, it can do more damage to the people before it fails, but on the other hand, maybe we will be better prepared to guide the transition to responsible effective government.<br />
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We will soon be reminded that we don't have responsible effective government. Enjoyable as fantasies of "God Emperor Trump" have been, of course the man is just an ordinary centre-left pragmatist, and beyond immigration policy and foreign policy becoming a bit more sane, there is no reason to expect any significant change at all. The fact that some people were surprised by the conciliatory tone of his victory speech is only evidence that they were believing their own propaganda. He is not of the Alt-Right, and the intelligent of the Alt-Right never imagined that he was.<br />
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For the Alt-Right, if he merely holds back the positive attacks on white culture, he will have done what they elected him to do. Progressives can argue that there can be no such thing as anti-white racism, and that whites cannot be allowed the same freedoms as minority groups since their historical privilege will thereby be sustained. But even if one accepts that argument, it doesn't mean that those who reject it are White Nationalists. Blurring the two concepts might make for useful propaganda, but it will not help to understand what is happening.<br />
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My assessment of what is happening is the same as <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/a-prediction.html" target="_blank">it was in March</a>: I expect real significant change in US immigration policy, and pretty much no other changes at all. I expect that Trump will be allowed to make those changes. It is an indication of the way that progressive US opinion dominates world media that people in, say, Britain, are shocked by the "far-right" Americans electing a president who wants to make America's immigration law more like Britain's--all while a large majority in Britain want to make Britain's immigration law tougher than it is.<br />
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The fact that US and world markets are up is a clue that much of the horror expressed at Trump's candidacy was for show, at least among those with real influence.<br />
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The polls were way off again. The problem with polling is that it is impossible. You simply can't measure how people are going to vote. The proxies that are used--who people say they support, what they say they are going to do--don't carry enough information, and no amount of analysis will supply the lacking information. The polling analysis output is based on assumptions about the difference between what they say and what they will do--the largest variable being whether they will actually go and vote at all. (So while <a href="https://twitter.com/richardosman/status/796354294534565889" target="_blank">this analyst</a> did a better job and got this one right, the fundamental problems remain)<br />
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In a very homogeneous society, polling may be easier, because there's less correlation between what candidate a person supports and how they behave. But the more voting is driven by demographics, the less likely the errors are to cancel out.<br />
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If arbitrary assumptions have to be made, then the biases of the analysts come into play. But that doesn't mean the polls were wrong because they were biased--it just means they were wrong because they weren't biased right.<br />
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On to the election itself, obviously the vital factor in the Republican victory was race. Hillary lost because she's white. Trump got pretty much the same votes Romney did; Hillary got the white votes that Obama did in 2012, but she didn't get the black votes because she isn't black, so she lost.<br />
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So what of the much-talked-of emergence of white identity politics? The thing is, that really happened, but it happened in 2012 and before. It was nothing to do with Trump. The Republican party has been the party of the white working class for decades. Obama took a lot of those votes in 2008, on his image as a radical and a uniter, but that was exceptional, and he didn't keep them in 2012.<br />
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The exit polls show Trump "doing better" among black people than Romney or McCain, but that probably doesn't mean they like him more: it's an artifact of the lower turnout. The republican minority of black voters voted in 2016 mostly as before, but the crowds who came out to vote for their man in 2008 and 2012 stayed home, so the percentage of black voters voting Republican went up.<br />
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The big increase in Trump's support over Romney from Hispanics is probably not explainable the same way. A pet theory (unsupported by evidence) is that they've been watching Trump on TV for years and years and they like him.<br />
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The lesson of all this is that, since 2000, the Democratic party cannot win a presidential election with a white candidate. There's a reason they're already talking about running Michelle Obama. They've lost the white working class, and the only way to beat those votes is by getting black voters out to vote for a black candidate. While we're talking about precedents, note that the last time a Democrat won a presidential election without either being the incumbent or running from outside the party establishment was 1960.<br />
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Update: taking <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-percentage-points-makes/" target="_blank">Nate Silver's point</a> about the closeness of the result, my statements about what's impossible are probably overconfident: Hillary might have squeaked a win without the Obama black vote bonus, maybe if her FBI troubles had been less. Nevertheless, I think if the Democrats ever nominate a white candidate again, they'll be leaving votes on the table unnecessarily.<br />
<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-11064838130474204072016-10-01T09:53:00.000+00:002016-10-01T12:08:34.113+00:00Personal and Collective PowerIn the context of my writing concerning <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2016/09/constitutions.html" target="_blank">division of power</a>, I want to make a distinction between personal power and collective power.<br />
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That is not the same as the distinction between absolute power and limited power. Absolute power can be collective, for example if a state is under the control of a committee, and limited power can be personal, if an individual has control over a particular department or aspect of policy.<br />
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There is a continuum of collective power, depending on the amount of personal influence. At one extreme there is a situation where a group of two or three people who know each other can make decisions by discussion; at the other is the ordinary voter, whose opinion is aggregated with those of millions of strangers.<br />
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Towards the latter extreme, collective power is no power at all. A collective does not reach decisions the same way an individual does. An individual can change his mind, but that has small chance of altering the action of the collective. To change the action of a collective, some more significant force than an individual impulse normally has to act on it. That's why, when we attempt to predict the action of a collective, we do not talk about states of mind, we talk about outside forces: media, economics, events.<br />
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In many cases, we can predict the action of the collective with virtual certainty. The current US presidential election is finely balanced, but we can be sure Gary Johnson will not win.<br />
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This feature of collective power has implications for the consideration of divided power, because in the right circumstances a collective power can be completely neutralised. An absolute ruler is not omnipotent, in that he depends on the cooperation of many others, most importantly his underlings and armed forces. But as a rule they do not have personal power; they have collective power. Any one of them can be replaced. An individual can turn against the sovereign, but if he would just be dismissed (or killed) and replaced, that is not a realistic power. If too many of them do not act as the sovereign orders, he would be helpless, but that requires a collective decision, and one which with a bit of work can be made effectively impossible.<br />
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There are exceptions to this. If the sovereign is utterly dependent on a single particular individual, that individual has personal power. There have been historical cases of sovereigns in that position, and it is observed that that constitutes a serious qualitative change in the nature of the government.<br />
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Where a person can covertly act against the sovereign's power, that is a personal power. Competent institutional design is largely a matter of making sure that rogue individuals cannot exercise power undetected by anyone. As long as there are any others who can detect this abuse, then the power once again becomes collective power, held by the individual and those placed to stop him. Again, where collectives do act in this way, it is a sign of a breakdown of government institutions. As an example, see <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/did-a-centcom-general-delay-intelligence-meant-for-the-president/" target="_blank">this article</a> describing the upper ranks of the army working together to deceive the president. If the president had absolute power and a moderate amount of sense, this sort of conspiracy would be suicidally dangerous. Once power is formally divided, then the capability to prevent this kind of ad-hoc assumption of power is massively eroded.<br />
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That is the fundamental reason why division of power is bad: whatever division of power is formally made, these gaps for further informal division will tend to be opened up by it, because limited power denies the power to enforce necessary limits on others. If anyone has power to punish those who take powers they are not formally entitled to, then that person effectively is absolute. If nobody has that power to punish, then any ambitious crooks can run wild.<br />
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If there is no single person other than the sovereign who has personal power, then I would call the sovereign absolute. His power is not infinite: he has to maintain control over the collectives which necessarily have power, but that is a lesser constraint than having to cope with personal power held in other hands. It is more akin to the other constraints on his power imposed by such things as the laws of physics and the existence of foreigners and wild animals.<br />
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Note that the nature of feudalism is that feudal aristocrats are not replaceable, and do have personal power—limited, but not collective. Feudalism is thus not a system of absolute power even under my refined definition.<br />
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The great significance of collective power is that it is subject to coordination problems. Or, since from the point of view of the sovereign, the problems of coordinating a collective can be an advantage, I will call them coordination obstacles. That is why it is not voters who have power, it is those who mediate the coordination of the voters: parties and media. A change in the way that voters can be coordinated is a thoroughly material change in what I have called <a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/constitutions.html" target="_blank">the Structure</a> of the state. The US does not have the Structure that it had 25 years ago, because (among other reasons) social media is part of the current Structure. That is an actual revolution, and why the fights over use of social media for political coordination are so significant. Note that since the Constitution doesn't say anything about social media, the constitution in itself obviously does not define the Structure.<br />
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It also means that for a formally absolute ruler, obstructing collectives from coordinating is an important tool. In the period of formally absolute monarchy, any attempt by people of importance to coordinate in confidence was suspect: prima facie treason. The most basic right claimed by parliaments was the right to meet: simply allowing aristocrats and city leaders to meet together and discuss their interests was giving them a power that they wouldn't otherwise have.<br />
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This is the problem with the formalism that Urielo advocates: formally establishing any power that anyone in a given Structure happens to have. Power that is held collectively and is not legitimate is often neutralised by coordination obstacles. If you make that power legitimate, that goes some way to dissolving the coordination obstacles, and thereby increases the effective collective power.<br />
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Modern political thought does not generally respect the idea that coordination by those with informal power is not legitimate (though we retain the historical unfavourable associations of the word "conspiracy") but it went without saying for most of history. Organisations that have existed in England for hundreds of years, such as guilds and the older schools and colleges, generally have royal charters: the charter is their permission to exist.<br />
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There are a couple of interesting exceptions to the modern toleration of conspiracy: one is anti-trust law, and another is insider trading law. Those both deal with economic activities.<br />
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They do show, however, that legal obstacles to coordination are not obsoleted by technological effects. Indeed, modern communication doesn't mean that coordination obstacles are easily overcome, especially if the obstacles are considered legitimate. No matter what messaging options are available, if you need to identify yourself for the communication to be useful, and you cannot trust the other party not to expose your attempt to conspire, then attempting to conspire is dangerous.<br />
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Here is another example: in investment banks, it is generally not permitted for employees to coordinate on pay. It is a disciplinary offence to tell anyone how much you are paid. This is taken seriously, and is, in my experience, effective. That is an example of an obstacle to coordination imposed as part of a power structure.<br />
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Legal obstacles to treasonous coordination were removed for ideological reasons, because division of power and competition for power were considered legitimate. Effectively, "freedom of association" was one more way to undermine the <i>ancien régime</i> and unleash the mob. As with the other historical destabilising demands of progressives, things are starting to change now that the progressives have taken permanent control of the central power structures.<br />
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You no longer need a Royal Charter for your golf club or trade association, but that doesn't mean you are free to coordinate: if you don't have sufficient female or minority members, you may need to account for yourself in the modern Star Chamber. The <a href="http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/02/23/mannerbund-101/" target="_blank">Mannerbund</a> is the same kind of threat to today's status quo as a trade union was to that of 1799.<br />
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The useful point is that it is not proved that you can run a stable society with complete freedom of association. That makes it more acceptable for me to recommend my form of absolutism, where people other than the sovereign inevitably have the capability to act against his policy by acting collectively, but such collective action is both illegitimate and made difficult by deliberate obstacles put in their way.<br />
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That underlies my view that absolute rule is more achievable than <a href="https://antinomiaimediata.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/neocameralism-and-constitutions-3/" target="_blank">Urielo thinks</a>, and that making divided rule stable is more difficult than he thinks. As he says, "we agree on the fundamentals, and disagree on the specifics". </div>
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<i>Update</i>: just come across <a href="http://szabo.best.vwh.net/separationofduties.html" target="_blank">this 2004 piece</a> from Nick Szabo, where he talks about dividing power to produce "the strategy of <b>required conspiracy</b>, since abusing the power requires two or more of the separated entities to collude". However, as I see it doing that is only half the job: the other half is actually preventing the separated entities from colluding.</div>
Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-90004944346308280412016-09-13T08:38:00.000+00:002016-09-13T08:38:22.386+00:00SeparationNo matter how big you grow, you are still vulnerable to a single accident. This includes a single self-inflicted accident.<br />
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For robustness, growing is helpful but not sufficient. You need to reproduce.<br />
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However, reproduction is not merely making copies. That is barely different from growth. Again, redundant structures and information help, but they're not sufficient.<br />
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To survive longer periods and greater risks, you need to duplicate and separate.<br />
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The bigger you are, the further you have to separate.<br />
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Your "size" is not your mass, it is the space you occupy. If you are frequently highly mobile, that is like being large, and means you have to separate further.<br />
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There are two ways to separate: either you use a different mechanism of movement for separation than for all other purposes, (like a plant seed blowing on the wind), or you make a sustained determined effort to escape, to run far away from all of your kind, with a high speed and consistency of direction that you do not use for any purpose other than separation.<br />
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Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-30543724632033146532016-09-11T19:38:00.001+00:002016-09-11T19:39:10.877+00:00ConstitutionsAt last I have set the <a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/unchecked-power.html">necessary prerequisites</a> to discuss Urielo / @cyborg_nomade's discussion of constitutions.<br />
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It is possible I could have been more concise about the prerequisites: what it really amounts to is:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Division of power is dangerous and to be avoided</li>
<li>It's better to have less division than more</li>
<li>Sometimes that isn't possible</li>
</ul>
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Within the context set by those propositions, the difficult parts of "<a href="https://antinomiaimediata.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/neocameralism-and-constitutions/" target="_blank">neocameralism and constitutions</a>", as well as Land's "<a href="https://antinomiaimediata.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it/" target="_blank">A Republic, If You Can Keep It</a>", start to appear at least relevant. So too the considerations of control and property in Land's "<a href="https://antinomiaimediata.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/quibbles-with-moldbug/" target="_blank">Quibbles with Moldbug</a>".<br />
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Let's say that in some given situation, it is impossible to effectively unify power. The next best thing is to nearly unify power. Some small number of people have some small amounts of power, but the main power-holder can set rules about how they are allowed to use that power, and threaten to crush them like a bug if they break them. That's workable too, provided the mechanisms of supervision and bug-crushing are adequate.<br />
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However, that's not always the case. Sometimes, power is too divided, and crushing like a bug isn't on the table. That's when the hard bit starts.<br />
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What you need to do is find a pattern of division of power that is stable, and compatible with effective government. The second implies the first: if the pattern of division of power is unstable, then those in power will be incentivised to protect and expand their power, rather than to govern effectively.<br />
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Part of setting up this stable pattern might be to write a lot of rules on a long sheet of paper. I can't see, though, how you could ever start with the paper and get to the actual division of power.<br />
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"Actual division of power" is such a mouthful. The word I wanted to use for this is "constitution", but I suppose I will have to give in and call it something else. (I had this idea that the original sense of "constitution" meant what I mean, and the idea of a constitution as a higher set of laws was derived from that. But it seems my idea was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_constitution" target="_blank">completely wrong</a>). Let's just call it the "<a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-modern-structure.html" target="_blank">Structure</a>".<br />
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So how should one design a Structure? You have to start from where you are. If at t=0 one power is effectively unchallenged, then they should just keep it that way. You don't need a Structure.<br />
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Urielo really hits the nail on the head here:<br />
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<i><a href="https://twitter.com/cyborg_nomade/status/772978254860914688" target="_blank">eventually, a constitution always arise out of a multiplayer game, because conflict eventually ends with an agreement</a> - @cyborg_nomade</i><br />
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A non-autocratic Structure is the the result of a peace settlement between potential or actual rivals, and a Constitution represents the terms of that peace settlement.<br />
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The aims of the settlement should be that it will last, that those who came into the settlement with power are willing to accept it, and will be incentivised to maintain it into the future and to preserve those things that incentivise the others to maintain it into the future.<br />
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The simplest peace settlements consist of a line on a map. What happens on one side is the responsibility of one party, and on the other is the responsiblity of another. The two (or more) sides invest appropriately in either defensive or retaliatory weaponry, to provide incentive to each other to keep to the agreement.<br />
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This is not normally what we think of as a Structure within a society, though it is an option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(politics) . If the powers of the participants cannot be easily separated by a line on a map, a more detailed agreement is necessary.<br />
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Another of Urielo's tweets:<br />
<i><a href="https://twitter.com/cyborg_nomade/status/772976274570641408" target="_blank">pretty much all working societies recognized some sort of power division. the estates of the realm being the European version</a></i><i> - @cyborg_nomade</i><br />
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I've written before about the <a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/recap-of-fall-of-monarchism.html" target="_blank">vital elements of feudalism</a> as I see them: It resembles somewhat the "line on the map" kind of settlement: each feudal vassal had practical authority over a defined region, subject to certain duties he owed to his Lord. The Lord would spend his time travelling between his vassals, resolving disputes between them, collecting his share of the loot, and checking that they weren't betraying him.<br />
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This worked practically, most of the time. As I wrote before, the crucial fact that necessitated a settlement between the King and his vassals was that he wasn't physically able to administer the whole kingdom, because of limitations of communication and transport. Whoever he sent to run them, would in fact have considerable autonomy (whether the constitution gave it to them or not), and so the Structure had to accommodate that fact.<br />
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I say it worked most of the time, but it didn't work all the time, or even nearly all the time. Conflict between King and nobles was pretty common.<br />
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If we're talking estates of the realm, of course, then there's more than nobles. The Medieval English Structure basically treated the church as a sort of noble. Bishops and Abbots had similar rights to Barons, but fewer duties. (That meant <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutes_of_Mortmain" target="_blank">it would be a problem</a> if their power increased relative to nobles.) The other group to be recognised with power within the Structure were the small landholders. At a guess, I'd put their claim to power as follows:<br />
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Fighting enemies was the responsibility of the King, and in the King's interest. His vassals were required to supply men and/or funds to him to do this. The actual fighting would be done by Knights and men known to and under the direct control of Knights. It was therefore in the King's interest that the Knights be incentivised to fight effectively, and would see honour and/or profit in doing so. However, to the Lords the Knights were just farmers and taxpayers; it was not in the Lord's interest to have his Knights flourishing and strong. Therefore, the King had an interest in defending the status of Knights against their Lords.<br />
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That's kind of a just-so story; I'm open to disagreement on specifics. In any case, this Medieval English Structure obviously depends on an agricultural economy, and military technology that relies on a relatively small number of expensively-equipped, skilled soldiers. It's not coming back.<br />
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The commoners and serfs basically have no power recognised by the Structure. That's probably an oversimplification, at least after the Black Death when their economic power became more significant (and serfdom faded out). But in any case, the point of the Structure is not some abstract fairness, it's stability and efficiency.<br />
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The Structure was quite flexible and changed significantly over time. Burghers were accepted into it once trade became economically significant enough for their power to need to be preserved. But even there the simple fix was geographic: towns were made Boroughs, lines were drawn around them on the map, and the Burghers were allowed to run the towns, with a limited and transparent set of rights and duties with regard to goings-on outside the borough.<br />
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The King, Nobles and Knights form a triangle: that's popularly <a href="http://www.xenosystems.net/rough-triangles/" target="_blank">considered to be stable</a>, for the reason that if any one of the three starts to get too strong (or weak), the other two can see it and attempt to correct it with superiority. With two or more than three large power centres, it's too easy for a theoretically weaker coalition to unexpectedly show itself strong enough to reconfigure the Structure. That's a guideline of Structure Design that one might expect to be durable. One wonders whether Structures that are designed to have many powers (Neocameralism, bitcoin) might coalesce into three. Just a thought.<br />
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Now we come to Parliament. I don't see the medieval English parliament as "part of government" in the sense that the modern UK Parliament is. It wasn't responsible for law, or for any routine act of government. Its role seems to me to have been the constitutional watchdog, checking on behalf of the Lords and Knights (and later Burghers too) that the King was sticking to the constitution. Running the country was the job of the nobles, within their lines-on-the-map, and of the King, regarding defence. The power of parliament didn't come from any constitution; it came from the fact that it could reach an agreement, and then go to the country and say "The King is infringing on his subjects' rights". (Or, conversely, it could say "Lord Splodgeberry has defied the King and the King is justified in going and kicking his arse"). It makes sense as a transparency mechanism rather than as a power in its own right.<br />
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Transparency, even more than Triangles, seems like a durable guideline for Structure Design. You want people with power to be working for good government, not for enhancing their own power, and you need to be able to see that that's what they're doing.<br />
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Having said that, I don't think there are many general principles for Structure Design. I've spent this piece looking in detail on one historical Structure, to say why it was they way it was and why it worked. I think that's what you have to do: Structure Design is a boundary value problem. You have to start from where you are.<br />
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But then again, Structure Design is a thing. Where two or more powers come together, reaching an agreement is more than just recognising their existing position. It may mean one or both giving up some power that they really hold to cement a durable deal. The establishment of rights of Knights I described above follows that pattern: the King needed it to happen so it was added to the Structure by negotiation. (That may be a stylised version of what really happened, but it could have gone that way).<br />
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So I think you can say a bit more than this:<br />
<i><a href="https://twitter.com/cyborg_nomade/status/772577582810292224" target="_blank">the estates of the realm don't arise from nowhere. they were supposed 2 formalize the *actual* structure of power that underlied sovereignty</a></i><i> - @cyborg_nomade</i><br />
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What you can't do is just dream up some "constitution" and assume that anyone will follow it. The half-life of a Structure designed that way is generally measured in weeks. Even a constitution that worked somewhere else will fail immediately if the power on the ground doesn't match the Structure that the constitution is designed to support.<br />
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Decolonisation of Africa produced a number of experiments to demonstrate that process.<br />
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Once the holders of actual power have been identified, "constitutional design" can take place to create an arrangement by which they are incentivised to participate in an efficient government. However, "constitutional design" in a vacuum is worthless. Democracies with deviations from "one-man-one-vote" have been moderately successful in the past, but I do not think <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/feature/against-democracy-17605" target="_blank">this example</a> is rooted in any realistic assessment of power.<br />
<br />
Similarly, various people from time to time (including even myself, long ago) have suggested random jury-type selection of decision-makers. This has attractive efficiency features, but nobody with vested power would have a clear interest in keeping it running fairly, and the scope for corrupting it would be enormous.<br />
<br />
The way to think of creating a stable government Structure where there is intractable division of power is midway between diplomats negotiating a peace and lawyers negotiating a contract. Neither of those are trivial or negligible occupations. (At the completely rigorous level, Structure Design is a matter of game theory, but I doubt real-world situations are tractable to mathematics).<br />
<br />
Constitutions need to resemble contracts in that they have to cover detailed interactions unambiguously, but they need to resemble peace treaties in that they need to provide for their own enforcement.<br />
<br />
The whole Godel amending process is a bit of a red herring. In the words of Taylor Swift, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/goodbye-hiddleswift-what-happens-when-your-very-public-relations/" target="_blank">nothing lasts for ever</a>. Circumstances change, and new Structures have to accommodate them. A new Structure can be built out of an old one--such as representatives of Boroughs being included in the House of Commons alongside Knights--if the parties with power agree they are necessary. Making a constitution change is not the hard bit; making the Structure stay the same from one year to the next is the hard bit.<br />
<br />
Sometimes a Structure has to go. Gnon has the last word.<br />
<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-56251390109261217302016-09-07T15:11:00.000+00:002016-09-11T19:39:10.880+00:00Unchecked Power<a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/checked-power.html" target="_blank">In my previous post</a>, I explained why Neocameralism is not a division of power in Montesquieu's sense, but rather a special case by which the benefits of power can be divided without dissolving responsibility.<br />
<br />
However, while dividing power is not desirable, there is no Ring of Fnargl, and power is never perfectly concentrated. A real sovereign still has to deal with forces beyond his control, most obviously those beyond his borders; the loyalty of his subjects is always a real issue. Sufficient incompetence can destroy anything.<br />
<br />
The reason that division of power is undesirable is that it erodes responsibility. Government is responsible if whoever has the power benefits from exercising it well and is harmed by exercising it badly. If the single absolute sovereign owns all the extractable product of his realm forever into the future, then it is in his interest to make it a successful, functional, realm. His interests may not be perfectly aligned with those of his subjects, but <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/on-interests-of-absolute-rulers.html" target="_blank">they are not all that far away</a>. It is better to live under a secure sovereign who rules in his own interest than under a chaotic parliament which attempts to rule in yours. This is an analogous argument to the superiority of for-profit services to government-provided services in other spheres.<br />
<br />
If power over the corp is divided, each individual with power now has <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/politics-or-rules-manipulation.html" target="_blank">two sets of incentives</a>: to maximise the value of the corp and its product, as for an absolute ruler, but also to maximise their power over and benefit from the corp. Division of power is harmful to the extent that the second set of incentives exist and contradict the first.<br />
<br />
The two largest classes of undesirable incentives are to extract value from the corp for oneself, and to increase one's power over the corp at the expense of one's rivals. The first is more obvious, and the second, in historical experience, more extensive and more damaging. Conversion can be restricted if the number of participants in power is reasonably limited, as it tends to be obvious. However, if power is distributed flexibly, then it is easy to provide rationalisations for a change in policy that is actually directed at increasing the power of one participant.<br />
<br />
The fundamental problem is that power, whether formal or informal, is fungible. As I wrote in 2011:<br />
<i>A realistic chance of power is power in itself. It can be traded, borrowed against, threatened with. A "politician" is one who holds "Virtual Power", and tries to increase it, just as a fund manager tries to increase the assets he holds.</i><br />
<br />
If making power formal doesn't help, then what is "formalism"? <a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.html" target="_blank">Formalism <i>is </i>Neocameralism</a>. Formalism's solution to persons with practical but informal influence over the government is not to formally define and legitimise their influence, it is to buy them out. It is to put a value on their influence, and to have them give up that influence in exchange for dividend-bearing securities.<br />
<br />
As described in my previous post, the point of that is to take away their incentive to steer management in one particular direction or another, and to give them instead an incentive to have the management maximise shareholder value.<br />
<br />
Clearly, then that is not a perfect solution to all problems of politics. It only works to the extent that a participant's power, whether formal or tacit, is seen as legitimate. If a participant's power is informal but legitimate (which is a common situation in the Modern Structure), it should indeed be made formal, but only as a preliminary to removing it.<br />
<br />
It follows that formalism does not solve the problem of necessary division of power: the fact that however legitimate power is defined, there are those outside it who have influence over those inside it. It doesn't solve, in general, the principal–agent problem. (The CDCC is designed to partially solve one particular instance of the principal–agent problem, of the armed forces openly defying rightful instructions; by providing a specific solution it implies that there is no general solution).<br />
<br />
What formalism does is to leave the fundamental problem unsolved, and then insist that it is the fundamental unsolved problem, and that as a matter of day-to-day competence it must be limited at all costs. Take a moment to see how far that is from the conventional wisdom, which celebrates and actively encourages all division and distribution of power.<br />
<br />
If any slope is slippery, it is the division of power. Division proceeds from division. Complete power is inviolable, small allowances of outside influence can be monitored, limited and reclaimed, but once substantial centres of power become strong enough to defend themselves, the remaining power will be shredded in the inevitable conflict.<br />
<br />
The problems of people trying to influence a near-absolute ruler are not a different kind of problem to those we are used to. They are the normal problems; the exact same problems that utterly cripple any kind of competent government of modern states, only much smaller and more manageable.<br />
<br />
There is no magic formula which will make good government out of an unviable realm. The possibility of concentrating power sufficiently for stability is the sine qua non of independent government. What is the ideal form of government for Mauritania? What is the ideal form of government for Marsh Farm? In both cases, it is for them to be ruled by outside forces that are <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/a-scale-free-model-of-reactionary-order.html" target="_blank">strong enough to be secure</a>.<br />
<br />
Compromising the integrity of the structure of centralised power is to be avoided. Take for example, the hypothetical case I raised when I discussed the issue before, in Aretae's day: the <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/on-over-mighty-subjects.html" target="_blank">Pineapple Computer Co</a> who want the King to appoint a judge under their control, to get them out of a PR problem.<br />
<br />
By the logic above, the worst thing the King could do would be to agree to Pineapple's request. That is giving away power, and there is a danger of not ever getting it back. Telling them to go fuck themselves would be better. Offering to match Queen Tamsin's duty-free zone would be better.<br />
<br />
A formalist answer, if instead of a King there was a Neocameralist CEO, would be to hold merger talks: if the sovcorp buys out Pineapple in a stock-for-stock transaction, then the interests of the sovcorp and the factory are henceforward aligned. I'm not convinced it's a good idea for a sovcorp to own too many nationalised industries, but if the factory is genuinely essential to the wellbeing of the state, that is a reasonable solution.<br />
<br />
(If the King is really a King, but the Pineapple company is privately owned, the same end could perhaps be achieved by having the owner of Pineapple marry the King's daughter).Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-2887887057053463662016-09-03T15:10:00.003+00:002016-09-11T19:39:10.874+00:00Checked Power<a href="https://antinomiaimediata.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/neocameralism-and-constitutions/" target="_blank">The latest from cyborg_nomade</a> at antinomiaimediata is a wide-ranging poking at the cracks of the neoreactionary/Moldbuggian concepts of Sovereignty and Responsible Government.<br />
<br />
As I said on twitter, cyborg_nomade is, from my point of view, picking up from where Aretae left off all those years ago, not in that he is the same: as their respective aliases suggest, Aretae rooted his arguments in Classical philosophy, while cyborg_nomade is more Continental. But cyborg_nomade, like Aretae before, is challenging details of neoreactionary theory from the left, and that's a more productive critique for defenders to concentrate on than the intra-far-right discussion that takes most of our time.<br />
<br />
So, "neocameralism and constitutions" is quite a wide discussion, and I'm first going to pick off some low-hanging fruit concerning the role of stockholders in neocameralism.<br />
<br />
I'm not going to talk about "conservation of sovereignty"--to me <a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/conservation-of-sovereignty.html" target="_blank">that is an unclear concept</a>, so I'm going to try to be more concrete. I'm going to talk about the "corp", meaning both joint-stock corporations as we know them today, and sovcorps as envisaged by neocameralism.<br />
<br />
Moldbug repeatedly denounced "separation of powers" as a principle. <a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1.html" target="_blank">no sovereign can be subject to law</a> . On the other hand, cyborg_nomade points out, is it not true that modelling a neocameralist government on a joint-stock company implies a separation of powers:<br />
<br />
<i>The controllers have one job: deciding whether or not Steve is managing responsibly. If not, they need to fire Steve and hire a new Steve.</i><br />
<br />
That quote is from <a href="https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/05/ol6-lost-theory-of-government.html" target="_blank">Open Letter VI</a>, and cyborg_nomade quotes more, but it is actually necessary to read the whole thing.<br />
<br />
In particular, the paragraph immediately following cyborg_nomade's selection:<br />
<br />
<i>What happens if the controllers disagree on what "responsible" government means? We are back to politics. Factions and interest groups form. Each has a different idea of how Steve should run California. A coalition of a majority can organize and threaten him: do this, do that, or it's out with Steve and in with Marc. Logrolling allows the coalition to micromanage: more funding for the threatened Mojave alligator mouse! And so on. That classic failure mode, parliamentary government, reappears.</i><br />
<br />
The introduction of stockholders is not a matter of checks for checks' sake. Nowhere in OL-VI is there a suggestion that dividing power is a good thing in principle. The purpose of stockholders is a very narrow one: to fix the location of responsibility.<br />
<br />
The corp exists for the benefit of the stockholders; if it is run well, they benefit, if it is run badly, they lose out, therefore, they should have the power. All of it. Choosing to exercise that power via at-will appointment of a Chief Executive is an implementation detail, but a well-tested one, and, other than for sovcorps, an almost universally accepted one.<br />
<br />
Why multiple stockholders rather than one? Because with a single owner, the purpose of the corp becomes unclear: it is whatever that single owner chooses. However, if the corp has a large number of diverse stockholders, their idiosyncratic interests cancel out or become negligible, against their single shared interest in ROI.<br />
<br />
Note that this is not a guaranteed state of affairs. A corp with a joint-stock structure can, as described by the quote above, decay into politics. For existing non-sovereign corporations, this is very unusual, but that is because many measures are taken to actively prevent it. In Anglosphere corporate law, it is not considered sufficient that stockholders can replace management by a majority vote of stock. It is in principle illegal for management to work for a goal other than return on stock, even if it has the support of holders of a majority of stock. There are also restrictions on how concentrated stock ownership can be, at least for corps for which stock is publicly traded.<br />
<br />
So it turns out that the purpose of a joint-stock structure is not to <i>distribute</i> power across a larger number of humans, but to <i>concentrate</i> power on a single non-human "virtual" decision-maker, the <b>shareholder-value maximiser</b>. To the extent that a joint-stock structure does not do that, it is always considered defective, and frequently illegal.<br />
<br />
(The parallel to bitcoin, converting individual miner decisions of transaction validity to a single non-human abstract "blockchain" decider, is obvious).<br />
<br />
Compared to the essential feature of responsibility, the preference expressed by Moldbug for joint-stock versus monarchical sovcorp structure is marginal:<br />
<a href="https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/against-political-freedom.html" target="_blank">A family business is a great idea if your business is a corner store or an auto-body shop. If you have a continent to run, you want professionals.</a><br />
<br />
<br />
The next question to answer is: why? Why is it good to have a corp run in the interests of this non-human abstract, "maximisation of shareholder value"?<br />
<br />
The answer is that this is a clearly definable, constant goal that is usually consistent with the long-term continued existence of the corp. As Moldbug explains, if you want some other goal, then first maximise shareholder value, then spend the proceeds on whatever goal you want; that is a matter of consumption, not effective management.<br />
<br />
As an aside, cyborg_nomade suggests that "customers" constitute another check on the power of management of a corp. I don't think that is a useful way of looking at things: we are talking about the management of a corporation, or a nation-state, and any such thing, unless it is the whole universe, exists alongside other things beyond its management, and has to interact with them. Good management means good management in connection with customers, suppliers, neighbours, and competitors, and no change to the organisational structure of the thing being managed makes any difference to that fact.<br />
<br />
This whole defence of neocameralism leaves some obvious gaps. First, enforcing shareholder voting rights on a sovereign joint-stock company absolutely requires the cryptographic-weapon-lock scheme. Moldbug in OL-VI is explicit about that:<br />
<i>The neocameralist state never existed before the 21st century. It never could have existed. The technology wasn't there.</i><br />
It is because I am sceptical of the practicality of that scheme that I tend to advocate for what I call "<a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/degenerate-formalism.html" target="_blank">degenerat formalism</a>", which is right back to that old family business. Nevertheless, my position is that assuming a working <i>cryptographic decision and command chain</i>, neocameralism is good.<br />
<br />
Second, the CDCC provides for shareholder voting rights, but not for the extra minority-shareholder rights that are provided by modern corporate law. If those are actually necessary (and they may well be), then some other mechanism has to enforce them. Note that those rights in part predate the actual corporate law that now enforces them: they were provided in the rules of the company, because it was understood people wouldn't want to buy into corporations that did not have them. Moldbug's solution to these problems is Patchwork: Not only are sovcorps structured according to the neocameralist design, but they exist in a competitive marketplace, and the forces of competition apply the remaining necessary constraints on management.<br />
<br />
<br />
As I said, this is only picking on one part of the argument in "neocameralism and constitutions", the part that is easiest to deal with because I think it is a clear-cut error. The more interesting part, about constitutions as spontaneous order, or products of selection, remains to be answered.<br />
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Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-19126238977738967312016-08-13T15:41:00.005+00:002016-08-13T15:41:45.164+00:00Distinguishing Progressivism and the Left Coalition<a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2016/03/a-prediction.html?showComment=1460130032221#c2665354119509393627" target="_blank">A commenter again objects</a> to the idea that "left" and "right" is a useful categorisation of political ideas.<br />
<br />
On the subject of "left" and "right", there is confusion because I use the terms in two distinct but related senses.<br />
<br />
When I talk about the long-term political trends--"leftward drift" and so on, what I am talking about is what is sometimes called "progressivism". It would be good to define that more satisfactorily, but it is an intellectual-political movement of great age, oriented around a cluster of ideals mostly centred on "equality". There is no corresponding long-term definition of "right", there is only occasional opposition to progressivism.<br />
<br />
In day to day politics, "left" and "right" have much broader meanings, relating to every area of political controversy. Mostly they have no permanent meaning in relation to ideas about policy, and no meaning in relation to practice of any activity outside of politics. They are, however, an essential feature of any kind of struggle for power. There cannot normally be more than two coalitions seriously engaged in seeking power; if you bring any desire to a power-struggle, it is necessary first to get one or other of the competing coalitions to agree to your desire.<br />
<br />
The reason these two very different meanings of "left" get confused is because, given the inevitable division of politics into two factions at any given place and time, we label the faction more in line with "progressivism" as "left" and the other as "right". In some cases, the choice is rather difficult and ends up being pretty much arbitrary.<br />
<br />
So, immigration is a progressive and therefore long-term "left" demand when it is premised on the equality of "natives" and "foreigners". However, while that is in line with long-term progressive principles, it is actually very new for it to be advanced with significant powerful backing on the basis of those principles. As the commentator rightly observed, going back only a few decades, it was much more a practical issue pushed by businesses in order to advance their own economic interests. Because those businessmen were part of the (short-term) "right" coalition, immigration at that point was more a "right"-wing than "left"-wing demand. It is by no means the only issue falling into that category; for a century the progressive agenda focused on advancing the status of the working class relative to the employing class (because equality is the central progressive value), and so many people define "left" and "right" as permanent ideas relating to the two sides of that economic divide. As the same commentator <a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2011/05/left-and-right.html?showComment=1306763106868#c6932706592376465529">put it in 2011</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2px;">In the world I was brought up in (and you were born into) Right/Left politics was quite simple. At the extreme of the Right there were bosses and millionaires, and the extreme of the Left there were deep-sea fishermen and coalminers...</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2px;">But during the 70s the world as I knew it changed into something else. The first inkling of descent into (what appeared to me to be) silliness was called “Rock against Racism”. Then there was the Feminist movement, relying on a series of absurd illogicalities and parodying Marxist class dialectics. Together, and with other ingredients, they formed the basis for the time-wasting activities of so many “equal opportunities” employers today.</span></blockquote>
It is readily observable that that "fishermen and coalminers" model does not hold in the twenty-first century. Indeed, there is massive opposition to Trump from the existing "right" coalition on the grounds that his stated platform is not "right" at all in twentieth-century terms.<br />
<br />
The existing right coalition in the United States, however, is still defining itself in opposition to the left coalition on a field of issues which the left coalition sees as essentially done with or for other reasons not currently important. The force of the left coalition is directed in new, but still progressive directions, including open borders, but the right coalition has the habit of not opposing those policy demands. Hence the "Alt-Right", which is the term for opposition to the new progressive demands of the left coalition, rather than opposition to the old progressive demands of the left coalition.<br />
<br />
If the Alt-Right takes over the right coalition, we could conceivably get to a situation where the right coalition is focused on policies of advancing the status of the white working class against the white elite, while the left coalition is focused on advancing the status of immigrants against the white working class. Since both of those are actually progressive values, in terms of long-term advancing of equality, it would be one of those situations where the labelling of the coalitions as left and right could be argued to be backwards.<br />
<br />
The summary of my prediction in <a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/a-prediction.html">the original post</a> is that that will not happen. I expect the left coalition to back-pedal on immigration, which it only seized on because the right coalition was failing to oppose it..<br />
<br />
Another way of putting my prediction is that over the long term "left" and "right" do usually describe politics well (though they aren't guaranteed to), and that the current left demand for open borders is an aberration that will be corrected before it is allowed to destroy a coherent progressive left coalition. It is reasonably progressive to say that foreigners should have the same rights as natives, but it is not practical for the more progressive coalition to actually go and do it.<br />
<br />
A fuller historical explanation of the "descent into silliness" is needed as a matter of the first importance. Did the cause of further advancement of the proletariat run into diminishing returns? Was it sabotaged by clever rightists? Was the obsession of the left coalition with that one issue over such a long period of time itself the aberration, perhaps caused by the Russian Revolution and the resulting alignment with Marx?Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-52856126285454853072016-08-08T11:42:00.002+00:002016-08-08T11:42:42.431+00:00Going for the ThroatTo set the scene, this is what I think normal politics looks like:<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/shutdown.html">There is a kind of dynamic equilibrium</a> of politics under the Modern Structure. The Cathedral moves left at a controlled pace. It drags the political establishment behind it. The parties and the media drag the backward mass of the people behind them.</i><br />
<br />
To elaborate on that, I believe the pace has been controlled. There has always been a niche for someone to be the most radical, and that is the driving force behind the leftward movement, but there are also a whole bunch of sensible people with power to hold on to, who want to keep the system functioning roughly as well as it is, and who want to avoid triggering outright rebellion from the "backward masses". The mainstream at any given time is a compromise between maintaining the status quo and claiming the status benefits emitted by the leftward spiral.<br />
<br />
This dynamic equilibrium has been in place at least since the late 19th Century. I think it's fair to say it was interrupted, in a small and narrow way, by the Reagan-era reorienting of economic policy. I <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/neoliberalism.html">wrote about that</a>.<br />
<br />
When I wrote the top piece about the dynamic equilibrium, in 2013, I thought the same economic-policy readjustment was happening again. I continued:<br />
<br />
<i>The last 15 years, under the Bush and Obama administrations, have seen an increase in the rate of expansion of the economic activity of the Federal Government beyond the previous rate. We can think of the old rate of leftward drift as the equilibrium rate, though of course that’s oversimplifying a complex situation.</i><br />
<i>That departure from the equilibrium rate of advance produced the Tea Party, by damaging the illusion that flyover country could oppose what was happening simply by supporting the Republican side of the political class.</i><br />
<br />
However, the establishment was able to see off the Tea Party. What appears to be on the cards today, with the Trump movement, is a readjustment on a wider, or at least different, front; the question of the status of white culture and in particular of mass immigration.<br />
<br />
This was very unexpected--I saw no hint of it in 2013 when the Tea Party was the focus of right-wing dissent. The apparent explanation for it was the lack of compromise on the cultural side from the left in politics and in institutions. The left traditionally can be patient; if it hits resistance it can sit and wait for its dominance over education and culture to wear that resistance away. That has always worked in the past. But for the last three years there has been no compromise: the cultural demands of the leftist status spiral have been driven through regardless of opposition, even on almost purely symbolic questions like transgender bathrooms or Syrian refugees where there was no practical reason not to show the usual patience and achieve the usual steady progress.<br />
<br />
This is the question I asked, then, on Twitter in July 2016:<br />
<br />
<i><a href="https://twitter.com/anomalyuk/status/756376646857461760" target="_blank">The cause of Trump</a>, as @FreeNortherner said, is that they boiled the frog too quickly. But what is the cause of that loss of restraint?</i><br />
<i>Candidates are: social media echo chamber, Republican party weakness, purging of right from old institutions.</i><br />
<i>Or, I suppose, just random shit happens sometimes. But while possible it's worth considering structural causes.</i><br />
<br />
I will expand on the three suggestions I made:<br />
By the echo chamber I mean the widely discussed theory that left and right have been socially separating from each other, to the degree that they simply don't see the same world any more. The mainstream left became oblivious to the scale and intensity of opposition to what they were doing, because they literally didn't know anyone who thought that way, didn't read what those people were reading or even take them seriously.<br />
<br />
The Republican Party ran very (electorally) weak presidential candidates for two elections running; we saw a very similar extended run in Britain of the Conservative Party being weak, divided, and not having politically effective candidates, during the Blair years. If elections aren't close, the government naturally feels it can get away with more.<br />
<br />
The purging of institutions is a kind of echo of what I wrote about in <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/what-happened-in-sixties.html" target="_blank">What happened in the Sixties</a>. If what happened in the sixties was that the left had achieved such dominance in civil service, education and media that they could win every battle, in this decade the dominance reached the stage where they could not only defeat any opposition in those arenas, but they could punish any open dissent to their position. Before the Sixties you could take the right-wing line on a matter, and you might win or might lose. From the Sixties, you would lose. From this decade, you would lose and be fired.<br />
<br />
I put forward those three hypotheses, for further evaluation and testing. I still think they're pretty good. The point is that something must have changed. When I referred back to the question yesterday, there were a lot of suggestions on Twitter along the lines "Leftists are bad". Well, they are, but that doesn't explain why after a hundred years of deliberately not triggering a powerful right-wing backlash, they suddenly did it now.<br />
<br />
However, yesterday I came across the Slate article by John Dickerson. "<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/01/barack_obama_s_second_inaugural_address_the_president_should_declare_war.single.html" target="_blank">Go for the Throat!</a>"<br />
Note the article is from January 2013; the occasion being Obama's second Inaugural Address. So it was published before my October 2013 "Shutdown" piece where I saw the right-wing reaction to the establishment being on the narrow size-of-government issue.<br />
<br />
In the article, John Dickerson simply proposes what has since happened as an electoral strategy. By refusing to compromise in any way with right-wing opposition, Obama could force Republican politicians to choose between either accepting utter defeat, and therefore losing all respect with conservatives, or else turning against their own defeated moderates, and allowing themselves to be painted as intransigent extremists. Some would go each way, and the result would be a split and damaged Republican party.<br />
<br />
I dropped a few quotes on Twitter, but there's no sense reading all this and not reading that article. It's ridiculous to read that article and then ask, "Why did Donald Trump happen?" The whole point of the strategy Dickerson describes is to make something like Trump happen.<br />
<br />
There are, however two questions to ask. The first is, "didn't you consider that in triggering the production of 'overreaction and charismatic dissenters' from the GOP, you might get something powerful enough to win, or at least to reshape the political scene to your disadvantage?" The second is "Why is this a good idea in 2013, and not in, say, 1997? What is different?"<br />
<br />
I'm interested in any answers to those questions, but first of all I'm interested in <a href="https://twitter.com/jdickerson" target="_blank">John Dickerson</a>'s answers. I've asked him on Twitter, but as yet not received a reply (to be fair, it's early Monday morning in the US).<br />
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Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-24851403651789830922016-08-06T15:52:00.000+00:002016-08-06T16:55:37.426+00:00More PredictionKicking some ideas around as to what the future of US politics looks like, filling in more detail of <a href="https://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2016/03/a-prediction.html">my previous prediction</a><br />
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The justification for doing this is to test my understanding, not to drive any kind of short-term action<br />
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Note I'm not American, so while I know quite a lot, there's a lot I don't know, and I don't know what a lot of it is. (Unknown unknowns).<br />
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I'm not predicting the election result. Lets take the possibilities<br />
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Let's say Hillary wins.<br />
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<b>Prediction 1.</b> Trump isn't going anywhere. He's gone from well-known figure to one of the most famous men in the world, and he isn't going to mind that at all. He is going to be prominent on US media for the foreseeable future. The media might want to keep him off, but they don't have that kind of veto power--he could literally set up his own TV station and make money off it. More likely someone will give him a platform. He's going to be on the news every week for the next decade.<br />
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<b>Prediction 2.</b> Hillary is going to be very unpopular. She's a hopeless politician and isn't going to be able to evade blame like Obama did. She cannot be reelected in 2020.<br />
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<b><i>Non-Prediction 3.</i></b> Can the Democrats replace her in 2020 primaries? I understand that generally doesn't happen with incumbents. Pressure to not stand due to ill-health or something is possible<br />
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<b><i>Non-Prediction 4.</i></b> Can Trump run again in 2020? Nixon lost & was nominated again, right? Trump on a "I fucking told you, you fucking fools" platform could be in with a good chance. OTOH, the party will blame him for losing, and has a good chance to make that stick over the next 4 years. Also, they will be better-prepared with the machinery to keep him out, having been caught out this time.<br />
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<b>Prediction 5.</b> The Republican mainstream will loudly reject Trumpism and all his works and all his empty promises. Maybe for as long as six months. Then they will gradually begin to compete for his supporters. By 2019, border enforcement, some restriction on Islam, and much more hostility to free trade will be much more common in talking points. And of course that is on top of the fact that Ted Cruz is now symbolic of the moderate Republican mainstream, which would be shocking to anyone who had been in a coma since 2014.<br />
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<b>Prediction 6. </b>The real world has little to do with all this. There will not be a major collapse in the next 5 years. Details will change, but the big picture will be recognisable. That's not because the current situation can go on forever, but because forever is a long time, and collapses are rare. Hillary's policies will look bad, because she's such an incompetent politician, but things won't get worse noticeably quicker than they have been doing.<br />
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<b>Prediction 7.</b> The president elected in 2020 will be elected on a moderate immigration-restrictionist platform, and will act on it with limited cooperation from the establishment, having some marginal effect but not a revolutionary realignment of politics.<br />
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And if Trump wins...?<br />
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<b>Prediction 8.</b> President Trump will not be revolutionary. He will not take communists for helicopter rides, gas the Jews, appoint @Nero as press secretary, or pull out of NATO or the UN.<br />
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<b>Prediction 9.</b> He will attempt to make significant restrictions on legal immigration by Muslims and illegal immigration across the Mexico border. He will need to fight against the permanent government to do this. The character of that fight is the big open question.<br />
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<b>Prediction 10.</b> President Trump will win over the Republican Party. There will be many holdouts but as president he will have enough new allies to defeat them. There may for a time be a "Trump Party" but over time the Anti-Trumpers will be marginalised.<br />
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Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-46369762892011506312016-03-06T23:06:00.001+00:002016-03-07T07:11:23.431+00:00A Prediction<br />
<a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/neoliberalism.html">I wrote a post</a> in 2014 that dealt with the idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”. This catchphrase of Moldbug's has become commonplace in neoreactionary circles, and has even spread beyond. But it has troubled me that it doesn’t seem to be entirely true. <br />
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The key point is that nobody in the system has the aim of destroying society. That is an incidental byproduct of the competition for power. When a particular leftist trend gets to the stage where the destruction of the governing institutions becomes imminent, some conservative will actually be allowed to stop it. After all, the individuals in the permanent establishment are choosing the holy policy in order to retain their power; if it comes to a choice between accepting a less holy policy or seeing the institution in which their power resides fall apart, there is less to lose by compromising on purity.<br />
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But a compromise made in the face of imminent catastrophe is still made, and can’t be immediately reversed once the threat has passed. It sticks, not for ever but for a generation at least. In the previous article I identified the state of nationalised, unionised industry in the 1970s, particularly in Britain, as close to producing an institutional collapse, which was seen off by Thatcher's economic reforms. To a considerable degree those reforms have lasted; even the most recent Labour government took a line on unions, nationalisation and international trade that was to the right of the Conservatives of the 1960s.<br />
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This theory is OK, but looked at critically it is hard to distinguish from post-hoc rationalisation of the failure of the “always swims left” theory. When I put it forward in 2014 that's really all it was.<br />
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Today, though, I have the opportunity to make a prediction based on the theory. The position today as I see it is that immigration has got to the point that nationalisation had reached by the late 70s: if not changed, the current policies produce a real risk of institutional collapse within a timespan to affect the careers of present-day decision-makers.<br />
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Therefore I think those immigration policies will be changed, drastically, and soon. The obvious chain of events would be a Trump election victory in the US leading to border enforcement, a clampdown on illegal immigrants and a reduction in legal immigration. According to my theory, that is what the Trump candidacy is all about; that means we would not expect to see meaningful changes in other areas of policy.<br />
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We might well see broad changes of a superficial nature; an elected politician, like Thatcher, who comes in with a mandate to change a progressive policy has a different image to project than a normal politician, and that will be exhibited in the newsworthy but unimportant elements of the media–political circus. But the central prediction is that the change is not a total repudiation of progressivism, rather a piece of damage control on a limited policy area.<br />
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That's the first prediction: if Trump wins the presidency, there will be a massive change in immigration policy, no meaningful change in other areas of policy. I would not even expect to see any significant change in the status of American blacks, for instance.<br />
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It is possible to go further, however. <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/who-rules.html">Elections are not the major decisive events in history</a>. If Trump does not win the election, the immigration clampdown will happen anyway. It might take a few more years, but the reason it can happen is not because the public is clamouring for it, it is because it is genuinely necessary, and that means it probably will happen. If Hillary wins, it will quite possibly happen even within her term, and if she refuses, then 2020 will see Trump II, with less (but still some) establishment hostility.<br />
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There's more though. The popular discontent that produced Trump has also produced hard-left candidates; Sanders in the US and Corbyn in the UK. There are a number of similarities between the rise of anti-immigration politicians like Trump on one hand and these candidates on the other. However, those similarities are all on the “public” side of their popular, anti-establishment appeal, and that is unimportant. If any of these hard-left characters get into power (which seems unlikely at the moment), the result will simply be more of the same. Cthulhu will continue to swim left, and probably no faster than he has done under Blair or Obama. Immigration is likely to be somewhat fixed anyway, but not necessarily immediately.<br />
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There is no immediate evidence of any sympathy within the establishment for an anti-immigration position. Why would there be? The permanent establishment is not looking for votes. If Trump loses, having shown any less hostility to him than the next apparatchik will be shameful, and if he wins, there will be time enough to come around to the inevitable. He will have to fight to push his policy through, but the opposition will not be as determined as it would have been ten years ago. Privately, many of those he fights will be OK with losing, as long as it doesn’t look like their fault that the incorrect policy has happened. And once the policy has happened, it will be a done deal; reversing it outright will not truly be on the table for twenty years.Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-29737919155467260122016-02-06T22:15:00.000+00:002016-02-06T22:15:28.511+00:00Neoreaction and TwitterThe ideas that became neoreaction were blogged, but neoreaction as a conscious intellectual movement started on twitter.<br /><br />I'm not at all sure it could have come about in the same way without twitter. My aim was to speak to the group of people who read and commented on Unqualified Reservations, who were secular, libertarian or ex-libertarian types. Aretae, Nydwracu, Foseti, Devin, etc. But what gathered round the neoreactionary label were a number of young dissident rightists who were without a movement [1]. These young men even a decade earlier would have been ordinary Christian conservatives, but, alienated from mainstream thought by the progressive overreach which <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/shutdown.html">characterises</a> the Obama era, they grabbed onto the Moldbuggian diagnosis of the modern state in spite of the fundamental difference in outlook [2].<br /><br />There is still doubt on both sides as to whether this collision of philosophies, which produced what we now call "NRx", constitutes a valuable synthesis or a distraction. But for better or worse it was a product of twitter, which by its unique features causes blurring between distinct but proximate communities. The enforced brevity makes it practical to follow hundreds of people, and the way responses work make conversations public. (In contrast, if I share a remark on facebook, and you comment on it, the originator of the remark doesn't see your comment). The one-way nature of following means you don't need to ask for permission to connect to a social group. The encouragement of multiple pseudonymous accounts made it a first choice for dissidents. The fact that it worked by linking rather than hosting content meant it meshed with the pre-existing blog networks of libertarians and Moldbug's readers.<br /><br />That is now history; over the last year or two many active neoreactionaries have left twitter. Their departure is in part a way of making the point that neoreaction is not and does not intend to be a mass movement, in part a way of excluding the less intelligent of the alt-right, and moving on from the same old repeated arguments. However, I did not follow. Though neoreaction cannot measure its achievement in terms of numbers of contributors or readers, it needs to be a live movement, and that means it needs to expose its ideas to outsiders and be exposed to the ideas of outsiders. It is tempting to run away from troublemakers and communicate with a closed group, but I have seen such closed groups shrivel and die. I do not aspire to a mass audience, but I want a growing audience.<br /><br />Also, to my mind, neoreaction is not primarily a community or an embryonic organisation, it is a set of ideas--incomplete, still under construction, but capable of standing by themselves. The long-term goal is not completely clear, but one plausible path is gradually spreading those ideas among the influential. I am greatly encouraged by the rate at which this is currently happening: a few people like Ed West and Sam Bowman are, without adopting the NRx identity, absorbing some of the ideas and leaking them into the mainstream. Moldbuggian concepts like the Cathedral, and recent NRx concepts like virtue signalling are becoming part of the general vocabulary. This spread is happening largely via twitter.<br /><br />I am not opposed in principle to raising private channels of communication in parallel to public, but in practice I have found it difficult to be active on both. There is also one more beneficial attribute of twitter which is its disguise: I can access twitter from an office network and all the network sees is SSL traffic between me and twitter.com--there is no indication of what I am communicating or with whom. In contrast, connections to private sites are potentially more embarrassing to explain.<br /><br />The context of this examination of the importance of twitter, is obviously, the fear of losing it. There is a three-pronged threat: first, the deliberate political attempt to exclude right-wing activity from twitter; second, the evolution of twitter, driven by profitability, in a direction which makes it a more effective disseminator of advertising and a less effective enabler of overlapping communities, and thirdly, the fact that the business itself is in difficulties and might not survive in its present form.<br /><br />I have previously <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/twister.html">discussed</a> alternatives to twitter, but they are not yet useful, because they don't have a user base. The value of twitter I have outlined above all relies on having a wide base of users; neoreactionaries can migrate to one of several platforms, but once moved we will be isolated from the mainstream journalists, the other dissident rightist groups, that twitter currently connects us to.<br /><br />On the other hand, twitter is, from a technical point of view, easily replicable. Facebook is a leader in technology; its data centre technology is cutting-edge, it faces enormous demands in streaming and storage capability, and its automated management of the user experience is driven by immensely sophisticated software. In contrast, twitter, particularly in its 2011 form, is a much more straightforward technology. The original rails app was supplemented with a scala-based event stream, and obviously anything operating at that scale constitutes a technical achievement of a kind, but twitter is, fundamentally, the almost mythical thing that people imagine start-up successes to be but which they almost never are, a good idea. The explanation for its exceptional status is that its good idea, microblogging, doesn't really sound like a good idea, even a decade later. That, of course, is the big problem for twitter as a business: the company and its assets contribute relatively little to the value of the service, and it is stuck in a cycle of adding sophisticated profit-creating new features that its existing user base doesn't have any use for.<br /><br />So technically replicating retro-twitter is very feasible, but without the user base it doesn't get anyone anywhere. There is room in the market for a retro-twitter, because it needn't have high costs: the twitter company is trapped by its valuation as a facebook-challenger; a rival could be run on a small budget like wikipedia. It is plausible that the Mozilla Foundation [3] or DuckDuckGo could roll out a twitter-clone, maybe even with federated features such as those of GnuSocial. <br /><br />The missing step is getting the user base. Ironically, the situation facing NRx on twitter resembles the situation facing NRx as a concept: things have to get worse before they can get better. Just as we can't fight the progressive mainstream for power, but must "become worthy" to step in once it fails, we cannot fight twitter for audience, but must wait for it to fail and take our place in what replaces it. The way things are going, we may not have to wait too long.<br /><br /><br />Notes<br /><br />1. Nydwracu is as young or younger than the newcomers, but he's a prodigy, and under suspicion of being a genius.<br /><br />2. There was conversation between Moldbug and his followers and Christian reactionaries--people like Bruce Charlton and Lawrence Auster--before twitter NRx, but they were still consciously separate from each other.<br /><br />3. The Mozilla Foundation is identified as an enemy over the Eich affair, but it does have strong princpled ideas about freeing internet users from monopoly businesses, so I don't rule it out.<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-58731482564487748282016-02-01T18:54:00.002+00:002016-02-01T18:54:39.987+00:00ArchivingA couple of casual online conversations:<br />
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First, journalist Jamie Bartlett <a href="https://twitter.com/JamieJBartlett/status/687190391997775872" target="_blank">banging on on Twitter</a> about blockchain.<br />
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It became fashionable in 2015 to dismiss bitcoin but get excited about blockchain. I never really got it, because what makes the blockchain work is the fact that there are rewards for building it. I can download the blockchain and not even know who I am downloading it from, but, because (a) it takes enormous resources to create that data, and (b) that enormous effort is only rewarded if the recent blocks were added to the longest chain that other bitcoin users were seeing at time, I can be very confident that the whole chain, at least up to the last few blocks, is the same one anyone else is seeing, though I don't know who I got mine from and I don't know who they would get theirs from.<br />
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A blockchain without a cryptocurrency to reward the miners who create the blockchain is just a collection of documents chained by each containing the hash of its parent. In other words, it is just git.<br />
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What I hadn't realised is that the people so excited about blockchains actually didn't know about git, even though this aspect of bitcoin's design was explicitly based on git, and even though git is about 100-1000X more widely used than bitcoin. They maybe knew that git was a source control system, and that you could store and share stuff on github.com, but they didn't know that it is impossible to publish a version of a git project with a modified history that wouldn't be obvious to anyone who tried to load it but who previously had the true version of that history. If you publish something via git, anyone can get a copy from you or from each other, and anyone can add material, but if anyone tampers with history, it will immediately show.<br />
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So, when Bartlett said "Parliament should put its records on a blockchain", what I deduced he really meant was "Parliament should check its records into git". Which, if you happen to care for some reason about the wafflings of that bunch of traitors and retards, is a fairly sensible point.<br />
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So much for that. On to incidental conversation the second.<br />
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P D Sutherland has been in the news, speaking in his role as Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. @Outsideness highlighted a tweet of his as <a href="http://www.xenosystems.net/moron-bites-7/" target="_blank">"possibly the most idiotic remark I've ever seen"</a><br />
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The interesting thing is I distinctly remember a post on Sutherland, probably 2-3 years ago, on one of the then-young NRx blogs, and a bit of discussion on the comments. It's interesting because Sutherland is such a stereotype Euro-politician ( Irish bar -> Fine Gael -> Trilateral Commission -> European Commissioner -> United Nations ), to be worth attention. Further, it would be interesting to see what we saw and to what extent we might have anticipated the present.<br />
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However, I couldn't find the post or discussion. Blogs come and go, writers change personas, and either it's gone or the search engines couldn't find it.<br />
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Putting these two together, we need to archive our valuable materials, and the proper tool for a distributed archive is git. Spidering a blog might work for a dead one like Moldbug's, but is a poor way of maintaining a reserve archive of numerous live ones.<br />
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I've written <a href="https://github.com/AnomalyUK/abelard" target="_blank">some ruby scripts </a>to convert blog export files and feed files into one file per post or comment, so they can be archived permanently. All a bit scrappy at the moment, but it seems to work.<br />
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The idea (when it's a bit more developed) would be that a blog owner could offer the blog as a git archive alongside the actual web interface. Anyone could clone that, and keep it updated using the feed. If the blog ever vanishes, the git clones still exist and can be easily shared.<br />
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(I wouldn't advise posting the git archive to a public site like github. The issue is not privacy--the data is all public in the first place--but deniability. If you decide to delete your blog, then a recognised public archive is something people can point to to use the content against you, whereas a personal copy is less attributable. Of course, you can't prevent it, but you can't prevent archive.org or the like either)<br />
<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-29532042702726488592016-01-09T11:53:00.000+00:002016-01-09T12:19:30.835+00:00Outrage <br />
I repeated <a href="https://twitter.com/anomalyuk/status/674923252251287552" target="_blank">on twitter</a> a point I've made before:<br />
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<i>I consider local stories from far away as none of my business and refuse to consider them</i><br />
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It was a response to <a href="http://bensouthwood.tumblr.com/post/134860662720/the-lesson-we-should-learn-from-clock-boynever" target="_blank">bswud talking about the "Clock Boy" story / hoax</a><br />
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If someone were actually concerned to assess a situation accurately and respond with appropriate action, individual outrages, such as Clock Boy or Tamir Rice, would not be of any use. Instead, you would need actual statistics of how often various kinds of event occurred. Selecting only newsworthy events for your data set would be counterproductive.<br />
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<a href="https://twitter.com/JaysonVirissimo/status/487643905802772482" target="_blank">Imagine a machine learning algorithm trained only on the outliers; this is your brain on news media.</a><br />
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There are two problems with ignoring outrage stories in favour of statistics. The obvious one is that statistics do not arouse the general public in the way outrage stories do. So, if your intent is propaganda rather than assessing the situation, statistics are less useful. The second problem is that statistics are more obviously mediated by others who may or may not be trustworthy than anecdotes are. What the stories above suggest is that outrage stories are in reality no more likely to be accurate than published statistics, but it doesn't feel that way. You are always conscious that a statistic is potentially suspect, but a story of a reported event feels more like a fact than a claim, even though you read it from the same page as the statistic.<br />
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To emphasize, the real problem with outrage porn is not that it is not true. Reasoning based on selected outrage stories would be wrong even if they were all true and accurately reported. They are less akin to lies, and more akin to Frankfurterian "bullshit", in that it is irrelevant to the purposes for which they are used whether they are true or not.<br />
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For now, propaganda by outrage story is working, but the tenuous link between outrage and truth, because it is not a fundamental requirement of the process, can be completely broken. This seems to be what some on the WN side <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/01/05/how-extremist-right-hijacked-%E2%80%98star-wars%E2%80%99-taylor-swift-and-mizzou-student-protests-promote" target="_blank">have undertaken to do</a>:<br />
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Outrage stories are, necessarily, retailed and commented on without scrutiny, actual scrutiny being impractical. But there is still a widespread assumption that, while slanted reporting and hoaxes happen, most stories (or at least, most stories that are useful to my propaganda purposes) are somewhat true. That assumption can be attacked by flooding social media with false stories. If the public doesn't know what to believe, and is unable to ever find out what is actually going on in some town a thousand miles away, and aware of that inability, then they would actually be better-informed than they are now.<br />
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As a postscript, do note that outrage porn is common across the political spectrum. Cologne New Year's Eve is outrage porn.<br />
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If I do comment on outrage porn, what I am interested in is patterns of reporting. Not the truth, or even the relationship of the reporting to the truth (since I don't know the truth), but the way reports are promoted or suppressed, and their relationships with each other. It is interesting that the Cologne story was kept quiet for a week, then escaped and became major (but not dominating) news. It is interesting that the BBC quoted a police officer one day that police said the attackers were mainly migrants carrying migrant papers, and reported the following day that there was no evidence they were migrants. If I draw conclusions from outrage porn, I am looking for conclusions that are independent of the validity of the reporting.<br />
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Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-63773375823735039392015-12-29T18:38:00.001+00:002015-12-29T18:38:41.692+00:00Elite Cosmopolitanism<br />
Tweet from Anand Giridharadas @AnandWrites <a href="https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/681295910031224833" target="_blank">Dec 27</a><br />
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Dear @realDonaldTrump,<br /><br />I'm at a Muslim wedding in a Christian church in NYC, and everyone is dancing to salsa.<br /><br />America already is great.</blockquote>
<br /><br /><br />That scene may not appeal to everyone: @ClareYChen calls it "a shallow multicultural hellhole where the traditions of different peoples can become reduced to mere window dressing". But to argue against Girdharadas on aesthetic grounds is missing the point. It gives the impression of conceding the implication that the majority of Syrian refugees currently being bused into middle America will likewise be holding salsa-dancing weddings with friends of multiple races and religions; a proposition which could mildly be described as far-fetched. (Not that there necessarily aren't Syrian refugees that <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/damascus-nightclub_n_3941765.html" target="_blank">would do that</a>, but, inevitably, those that do will end up in New York City or somewhere similar, while the rest of the country will get the rest).<br /><br />It is normal for elites to be cosmopolitan. Aristocrats married foreigners, collected curiosities from abroad, adopted (playfully or otherwise) ritual and dress of strange religions. (Some, alternatively, studied and promoted their native culture, but that took the form of treating local traditions and folklore in the same way that others approached the exotic).<br /><br />That normal elite cosmopolitanism may be good or bad—that's an interesting discussion for another day—but either way the elites in the past did not impose their exotica on the common people. George IV built the Royal Pavilion, but he did not import thousands of Indians from Madras to live in Brighton. Christian VII of Denmark commissioned translations of Persian histories, but did not expect his subjects to go to mosques.<br /><br />Today's elites, unlike those of any previous era, do not even see themselves as elite. They think that everyone is equal, that everybody else should be like them, and assume without hesitation that everyone else could be like them. That produces a disconnection with reality that could become the stuff of legend. The peasants have no bread? Let them eat cake! Flyover people don't want Syrian refugees? Let them dance salsa with them! The apocryphal French princess was probably less out-of-touch.<br /><br /><br /><br />The interesting question, beyond the immediate concerns, is whether it is even theoretically possible for a whole society to live in the cosmopolitan elite style. If it is only a matter of material wealth or intellectual development, then there is no reason why we couldn't one day all live in multicultural fairyland.<br /><br />I'm not sure, but the most plausible explanation of why elite culture can only be elite culture is that there has to be a threat of expulsion. If elite culture is universal culture, then there is no way to get rid of unpleasant people; there is nowhere for them to go. I emphasised originally that the NYC culture of Anand Giridharas is a "selected" subculture, but the most important aspect of selection is not the positive filter of who comes into it, but the negative one of who is not ejected from it. The culture of the rural town or the inner city is not an elite culture and cannot be an elite culture, because it is not possible to drive those that do not fit out of it. In those bottom cultures, it is necessary to manage to live alongside those that the elite would exclude, and that involves a range of behaviours to avoid outsiders in ones activities and to reinforce one's own status as an acceptable insider who should not be avoided in turn.<br /><br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-89803519374912395082015-12-22T16:34:00.000+00:002015-12-22T16:34:23.852+00:00Soft PowerOn the question of Islamic terrorism in the West, the narrative of the right has been that letting in large numbers of immigrants from Islamic countries is dangerous. The narrative of the left has been that the terrorism is a result of the West's invasions and destabilising of the Islamic world.<br /><br />Very few people seem to have noticed that there is no contradiction between the two narratives. They can both be correct, and in my opinion they probably both are.<br /><br />I do have one issue with the “left” narrative however; not that I disagree with it, but I think it carries with it some associations that are interestingly wrong.<br /><br />The associated idea is that sending in armies, special forces, cruise missiles and drones to other countries is particularly likely to stir up violent response in your own country, as if by some kind of justice or karma.<br /><br />That is, on its face, quite a plausible thing to believe, which is why it gets carried around as the mostly-unspoken associate of the concrete argument that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in Islamic terrorism in America and Europe.<br /><br />The problem with the idea, plausible as it is, is that it leads to the conclusion that aggressive military interventions are particularly dangerous, and that it is preferable to act in a more restrained way, using “soft power” to achieve foreign policy objectives by encouraging or giving aid to sympathetic factions. (I think the original meaning of “soft power” was a bit more subtle than the heavy-handed but non-kinetic activities I am talking about, but I don't have a better term).<br /><br />That sounds plausible too, but the history of the last few decades seems to me to demonstrate the opposite. Way back in 2003 I argued that the major error that led to the necessity (or near-necessity) of invading Iraq was not the 1991 invasion, but the actions taken after the 1991 invasion to<a href="http://anomalyuk-dc.blogspot.co.uk/2005_03_01_archive.html" target="_blank"> try to overthrow Saddam Hussein</a> via “soft power” and the Kurds. <br /><br />In a similar way, while the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan did much to stir up terrorism in the West, they are not the biggest cause. Much more damage has been done by the “Arab Spring”, the attempt by the West to replace dictatorships with democracies through propaganda and funding for activists, with only a <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/obamas-way.html" target="_blank">tiny little bit of bombing</a> in an extreme case. <br /><br />My view is that these kind of soft power interventions are particularly dangerous. Of course, there is the chance that they will be totally ineffective, which would be OK, but that possibility itself lends a reckless attitude to the decision-makers behind the interventions. When starting a war, even twenty-first century politicians make some small effort to anticipate consequences and problems. When intervening without military force, image and sentiment take over entirely, and no attempt at all is made to predict what the concrete consequences are likely to be, even when it is <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/106084327581949952" target="_blank">very easy to do so</a>.<br />
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<br /><br />As I argued in 2003, I'd rather see military action, thought through and taken seriously, than the kind of gesture politics behind the Arab Spring, or, for that matter, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan" target="_blank">the Ukrainian coup. </a><br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-18306646951745383662015-12-13T19:13:00.000+00:002015-12-13T19:13:02.372+00:00Birth of a ReligionThe most pertinent objection from outsiders to anyone advocating neoreactionary, formalist beliefs is that, historically, single-person rule as a mechanism for overcoming politics and discord has been tried, and failed.<br />
<br />
I have explained previously why it is it failed: it was <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/recap-of-fall-of-monarchism.html" target="_blank">too successful too quickly</a>. When European monarchs used the power of <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/actually-existing-monarchy.html" target="_blank">written communication and efficient transport</a> to eliminate their traditional rivals for power<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19.2px;">—</span>barons, abbeys and guilds<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19.2px;">—</span>the result was an almost immediate flowering of wealth, technology, culture and philosophy. That flowering empowered other groups to step into the shoes of the displaced medieval trouble-makers.<br />
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The first lesson, then for future formalist rulers, is to be less easy-going and tolerant of opposition than predecessors such as Louis XIV or Charles I. Getting rid of the old mess does not buy you very much time at all if you permit the concept of shared power to survive.<br />
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But even with that knowledge, accidents happen. Formalism does not promise a Utopia of endless peace and prosperity. A new trick, like cryptographic weapon-locks, might work for a few decades, but contexts inevitably change and new threats arise. Some of them will be successfully resisted, and some will not. Two centuries of peace and prosperity would be a great achievement of any system. Of course, absolute monarchy in Western Europe did not manage anything close to that.<br />
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The real tragedy of modernity is not that the absolutism failed. It was likely to fail sooner or later, and it is a shame that it did not last longer, but not a tragedy. The tragedy is that in the process, the clumsy and ad-hoc propaganda of its opponents got enshrined as holy writ. And while systems of government almost inevitably fail, and yet can be restored, that was not inevitable, but a terrible fluke.<br />
<br />
When new religions are born, the details of their doctrine are massively unpredictable. Of course, Gnon filters religions for viability, but that is dictated by a few macro-features, leaving enormous scope for random features to be picked up and carried on in the religion's germ line. Looking at something like Mormonism or Baha'ism, you are struck by the sheer weirdness of what is included, usually just because it was one guy's pet idea.<br />
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The burst of cultural exuberance triggered by the arrival of effective absolutist government produced a new religion with some pretty random beliefs about the nature of Man. That religion became entrenched, as successful religions do, and the history of the last two centuries has been the history of its random doctrines being gradually applied by its culturally dominant devotees, starting with the most realistic and practical, and by now concentrating on those that are left, the most bizarre and indefensible, such as the total malleability of human nature.<br />
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That is the problem with modernity. Yes, we have bad systems of government, but that is something that happens from time to time, and can be fixed. Yet for us it is not being fixed, because along with the bad systems of government we picked up something far more damaging and harder to cure: a bad religion.<br />
<br />
Liberalism.<br />
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Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-34821878096840796432015-06-07T15:32:00.000+00:002015-06-07T15:32:02.945+00:00Government and Management<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3113838/Stop-behaving-like-bloody-children-ve-got-election-win-New-evidence-feuds-Labour-s-meltdown-moment-aide-read-riot-act-Miliband-Balls-Douglas-Alexander.html" target="_blank">This is quite an interesting bit of detail</a> about the Labour Party before this year's election.<br />
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What strikes me about it is that Miliband was not in any kind of control of his immediate colleagues.<br />
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In a sane system, the chief ability of a leader, of government or of something intending to become the goverrnment, would be the ability to get a small group of people to work with him. In business, that is the most vital ability of a manager. Ed Miliband seems to have been greatly lacking in that ability.<br />
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The reason, obviously, is that he was not chosen for his ability to lead. He was chosen for his appeal to outsiders—party members, unions, voters. None of those groups would even be aware of his actual managerial competence.<br />
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People talk about the lack of "real world" experience of politicians, with backgrounds in think tanks or as assistants to other assistants. My assumption has been that the valuable experience is of the hard problems of keeping a business solvent, or whatever. But that's much less relevant to a politicians job than the ability to take control of a meeting.<br />
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Of course, as with Nick Clegg, the fact that those around him are "<a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/lobotomised.html" target="_blank">rivals and enemies</a>" makes the task much harder than it might be. All the more reason to demand exceptional ability at it.<br />
<br />
Reading Jonathan Rauch on party machines (<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Political-Realism-Back-Room-Strengthen-Democracy-ebook/dp/B00WNCUMEW/" target="_blank">still free!</a>), this was the main ability that politics selected for in the age of strong parties. The incompetence of Miliband and the like is a new thing.<br />
<br />Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8205333.post-28907904476989363802015-05-26T19:56:00.000+00:002015-05-26T19:56:37.447+00:00TwisterBack in 2012, I <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/more-on-peer-to-peer-blogging.html">looked at the concept</a> of <a href="http://anomalyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/social-network-threat-models.html">peer-to-peer blogging</a>. It is definitely time to revisit<br />
the environment.<br />
<br />
Back then, the main threat I was concerned with was state action directed against service providers being used for copyright infringement. Since then, my political views have become more extreme, while the intolerance of the mainstream left has escalated alarmingly, and so the main threat today is censorship by service providers, based on their own politics or pressure from users and/or advertisers.<br />
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Actually publishing content has become easier, due to cheap virtualised hosting and fast residential broadband, making a few megabytes of data available is not likely to be a problem. The difficult bit is reaching an audience. The demise of Bloglines and then Google Reader has been either a cause or a symptom of the decline of RSS, and the main channels for reaching an audience today are facebook and twitter. I don't actually use facebook, so for me twitter is the vital battleground. If you can build up a following linked to a twitter ID, you can move your content hosting around and followers will barely be aware it's moved. Last week's <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/05/26/charles-johnson-one-of-the-internets-most-infamous-trolls-has-finally-been-banned-from-twitter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Chuck Johnson affair</a> defines the situation we face. We require a robust alternative to twitter—not urgently but ideally within a 12–24 month timeframe.<br />
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I've been running the <a href="http://twister.net.co/" target="_blank">Twister</a> peer-to-peer twitter clone for a couple of weeks, and I think it is OK.<br />
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Primarily, it is built on top of the bittorrent protocol. Messages are passed from node to node, and nodes collect messages that are relevant to them.<br />
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In addition, it uses the bitcoin blockchain protocol. This is not for content, but for the ID database. Content published by an ID must be signed by the key associated with that ID, and the association of keys with IDs is made via writing entries into the blockchain. Ownership of IDs is therefore “first come, first served”, with the ordering of claims determined by the blockchain (just as the order of transaction attempts is determined for bitcoin, preventing double spends).<br />
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As an incentive to build the blockchain, each block can include a “spam message” which will be presented to users.<br />
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What that means is that there is no authority who can disable a user ID or take it over. If the ID is registered on the twister blockchain with your public key, it is yours forever.<br />
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The application runs, like the bitcoin reference client it is based on, as a daemon offering a JSON-RPC socket interface. It also serves some static web pages over HTTP on the same port, providing a working twitter-lookalike web client.<br />
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As far as I can see, it works properly and reliably. I am running it over Tor, and that works fine.<br />
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<h4>
Current Shortcomings</h4>
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It's still treated as experimental by the authors, so it's not surprising if it's not complete.<br />
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The biggest shortcoming is that it's inconvenient to run. Like bittorrent, it needs to find peers and build a network to exchange data with, and, like bitcoin, it needs to keep up with a blockchain. (It is not necessary to “mine” or build the blockchain to use the service). You really need to start it up and leave it running, if not 24/7, at least for hours at a time.<br />
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For the same reason, it doesn't run on mobile devices. It could be ported, but staying on the peer-to-peer networks would be an inconveniently heavy use of data, battery and processor resources.<br />
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Fundamentally, you don't see all the traffic (that wouldn't scale), so you can't conveniently search it. You need to advertise that you are interested in something (by following a user, for instance), and gradually it will start to flow your way.<br />
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<br />
<h4>
Future Shortcomings</h4>
<br />
The network is currently very small-scale, so it remains to be seen how well it would scale up to a useful size. I don't understand the torrent / DHT side of things all that well, but as far as I can see it should hold up.<br />
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The ID blockchain functionality seems more reasonable. If each new user requires of the order of 64 bytes of blockchain space, then ten million users would need about a gigabyte of disk space to archive. A lot, but not prohibitive. As with bitcoin, the hope would be that users would be able to use lightweight clients, with the heavy network functions semi-centralised.<br />
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[The useful feature of a peer-to-peer protocol for us in this scenario is not that there is no trust in the system at all, or that there is no centralisation at all; it is that there is no single thing that must be trusted or relied on. The user has the option of doing everything themselves, and, more useful to the ordinary user, they have the option of temporarily and conditionally trusting a provider of their choice]<br />
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Also as with bitcoin, the most difficult obstacle is key management. When you want to start using twister, you generate a key pair, and post a transaction associating your public key with your chosen twister ID. You need the private key to post twists, or to see private messages. If you lose the key, you've lost your ID. If someone gets your key, they can post as you and read your private messages. Handling keys securely is difficult. For a casual user who isn't too concerned about surveillance or censorship, it's prohibitive.<br />
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Like bitcoin, the network node, blockchain archive and wallet (user ID) are all managed by a single process. Logically, the private operations of creating authenticated transactions/messages ought to be separate from the maintenance of the network node.<br />
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Twister is designed for those who are concerned about surveillance or censorship, but we need to be able to talk to those who aren't. It needs to provide security for those who need it, while being as easy as possible for those who don't.<br />
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The system seems fairly robust to attacks, including denial-of-service attacks. Media companies have attempted to interfere with bittorrent, but have not as far as I know blocked an actual running torrent, rather concentrating on the chokepoints of communicating knowledge of specific torrents.<br />
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The ID subsystem could be flooded with new id requests. There is a proof-of-work requirement on individual "transactions" (new id assignments), separate from the actual block proof-of-work, but that cannot be too onerous, so a determined adversary could probably produce tens of thousands. However, miners could respond by being fussier about what they accept, without breaking the protocol.<br />
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The blockchain itself is vulnerable. The hashrate at present is about one quarter-millionth of Litecoin's (which uses the same hash method), so one block of the twister blockchain currently costs about the same in compute resources as a thirtieth of a cent worth of Litecoin. (I have mined dozens of blocks myself over the past week). Anyone with a serious GPU-based mining rig could mine hundreds of blocks in minutes. The incentive for legitimate miners is always going to be weak, since a customised client can trivially ignore the "spam" messages. However, it does not seem obvious that that is a real problem. The value of the blockchain is that it established ownership of IDs, but an ID is not really valuable until it has been used for a considerable period, so to take over a valuable ID, you have to fork the blockchain from a long period in the past. Even if you have the hashpower to do that, your blocks are likely to be ignored simply by virtue of being so old.<br />
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<br />
<h4>
Suggested Enhancements</h4>
<br />
The main author has suggested taking the cryptography out of the daemon and into the web client (in javascript). That would be an improvement and a step towards usable lightweight clients.<br />
<br />
However, there is another requirement to do that, which is more sophisticated key management. Mobile devices and third-party service providers would hugely improve the convenience and usability of the service, but at a cost of crippling the security, since neither one is sufficiently trustworthy to hold the private key.<br />
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What I have suggested is a system of subkeys, with restricted delegated authority. I create my key pair and post it to the network with my chosen ID, as per the current protocol. Then, I can create a new key pair, and create a transaction signed by my original key (which I call the "master" key), delegating the authority to make posts for a limited time (a week, say) to this new key (which I call a "subkey"). I transfer the private key of the subkey to my phone app, or to a service-provider I trust, and can then make posts using the subkey.<br />
<br />
After the week, that subkey is expired and posts made with it will no longer be accepted as valid by other clients or network nodes. If the key is compromised, the damage is limited. I could even post a "revoke" transaction signed by my master key.<br />
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<h4>
Alternatives</h4>
<br />
@jokeocracy has pointed at <a href="http://www.trsst.com/" target="_blank">Trsst</a>. Also, <a href="https://gnu.io/social/" target="_blank">GnuSocial</a> is quite well established. Both of these are federated client-server architectures. See <a href="http://quitter.se/" target="_blank">quitter.se</a> as an example GnuSocial-based service provider. (It would be funny if we were to all move en bloc onto some lefty-oriented "free from capitalism" platform, and perhaps instructive, but not necessarily a long-term solution).<br />
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There is some resistance to censorship there, in that if one service provider blocks you, you can switch to another. However, your persistent ID is tied to the service provider you choose, which could take a dislike to you or (equally likely in the early stages) just go away, so it makes it harder to maintain continuity. Also, the federation model does not necessarily prevent the consumer's service provider from censoring your messages to its customers. The customers can switch if they want to, but not trivially.<br />
<br />
In the case of Trsst, it strikes me that this is a mistake: users have private keys, but the association of keys to IDs, unlike in the case of twister, is made by the service provider. If mentions, replies, and subscriptions were by public key instead of by "nickname", users could migrate more painlessly. However, that registry would have to be distributed, adding complexity.<br />
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In the long run, what I would hope to see is a service that looks like quitter.se or Trssst, but acting as a proxy onto the Twister network, ideally with short-lived subkeys as I describe above.<br />
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Other relevant projects not ready yet would are Urbit (of course), and <a href="https://github.com/raptros/chatless" target="_blank">chatless</a> (by @_raptros).<br />
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Anomaly UKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780148789321563441noreply@blogger.com1