The laws we make are supposed to protect us, yet we can see daily that citizens no longer make the laws, companies do, through lobby (sometimes by ideological proxy). Most of our political views are ignored, some are used to get a politician in power, but businesses have a stage every day of the week. Ultimately though it is the adherence to economic principles that puts the biggest stamp on our laws and what activities are enabled.
When we listen to the media we usually listen to a single person’s view, that person is supposed to have absorbed and analysed all the facts and come up with the best solution. For whom? In an environment full of influencers and lobbyists? How can anyone stay sane or prevent getting hyjacked by some special interest?
We can see the FBI advocating the creation of a standard backdoor into iPhones. The discussion is about may individual conflicts that can be identified, so f.i. the right to privacy, the idea of government snooping, the idea government is not watertight, the hackersphere as a threat to anyone, the menace of identity theft. All these memes are being tossed around, but really nobody knows the first thing about what happens to iPhone data.
What becomes apparent is that everyone has a limited sphere of attention and knowledge, everyone is working with the best team available and takes an action that seems the right one from their perspective. Everyone including me is trying to steer a ship that is growing in size and complexity every day. There used to be a few passengers and some cargo, now the ship is slowly turning into an networked coginitive monster, a kind of interlect, or an internet of intellects.
The interlect is the result of millions of people exposing themselves to the online environment, responding to it, adding complexity and functionality to it and being themselves swayed or controlled agents of it. The data on the internet would be stale pretty quickly, but it isn’t just the internet, it is the combination with the human intellects that makes it work. The interlect is a giant mind that thinks because it is facilitating the economic system. We already called it a rogue AI when its principles become dominant in an individual, but viewing it as the source code of the interlect makes it even more potent.
The problem is that slowely we lose sight of the edges of the mediasphere in our lives. We are so exposed that if we use Whatsapp to contact somebody we will be asked on Facebook if we want to befriend that person. This means some code on some server is putting 2 and 2 together and concludes that I would be happier being Facebook friends and I may forget so this is something fun I can safely occupy my time with (befriending , checking the pictures etc.). My person is so well know to algorithms and databases that where I worth it it would be easy to influence my behaviour in profound ways.
Which leader can truely exist outside this evolving economic creation, with added intelligence, infinte memory and ever more sensing capacity. You walk down the street and the surveilance companies may not know their hardware has a backdoor that allows china or chinese AI systems to track me as I go through my daily life. NSA had a catalog of hardware all with backdoors, many VIO phones have hardcoded passwords, meaning your calls (if you use them) are open for anyone from anywhere. That little eye on your smartphone means it is looking to see you face. Banks, always trying to put us in deeper capture, actually hope to introduce face recognition biometric payment.
Those that try to go deepest inside our economy are useless to our survival. They actually strive for things that are bad for us by definition. Economic growth is not a good thing if it drowns our grandchildren. Those that move to the fringes of the economy have no influence on it. Living in a hut in Norway is not going to tame this monster. Only individuals with true freedom in it, that can see that their sense of reality is eroded and their choices when following the rules are all bad options can change things. But how long until the algorithms learn to keep those types out of power.
Physical an biological systems can reach steady state. For instance when global warming happend (4 times before) and life was all but destroyed, our oceans formed hot and cold layers, they stratified so that nutrients in the bottom cold layers could never reach the sunlight that heated the warm top layers. Oceans where dead for millions of years. Our society may reach such a steady state in which no individual will be able to break the economic principles until the whole thing crumbles on a dried out and dying planet.
We need to aknowledge that the rules of ROI, investment of fossil credit, importance of economic growth (over health statistics) the price hiking effect of the profit motive of banks, they should be subject to possible revision at all times. They should be revised, and at the core should be the principle of species survival, not of the free fossil fuel powered market.