topic/drift

Many years and clients later, this greed for more data, and more again, had become a commonplace. It had become institutionalized as a good feature of computer systems: you can link them up, you can cross-check, you can find out all sorts of things you didn't set out to know. "I bet this thing can tell me what everyone is up to all day," said the insurance agent whose employee of twenty-six years knew all his customers by name. "The people who own this system have a right to good data!" said the woman who had set out to do a favor for sick people.

I'd like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull. But there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image. Like the rock-and-roll culture, it forms an irresistible horizontal country that obliterates the long, slow, old cultures of place and custom, law and social life. We think we are creating the system for our own purposes. We believe we are making it in our own image. We call the microprocessor the "brain"; we say the machine has "memory." But the computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule, and clarity. It is as if we took the game of chess and declared it the highest order of human existence.

• low and high earners should pay the same share of income in tax (a proportional system;
• higher earners should pay a higher share of income in tax (a progressive system);
• both should pay the same amount in tax (a regressive system).

They were also asked how state pensions and unemployment benefits should relate to their previous earnings--whether they should vary according to past contributions or likely need:

• previous high earners should get more because they had paid in more, that is, they should be earnings-related;
• they should get the same, through flat-rate entitlements;
• previous low-earners should get more because their needs are greater, implying, for instance, that benefits should be means-tested.

[...] Egalitarian democracy, regarded under Keynesianism as economically productive, is considered a drag on efficiency under contemporary Hayekianism, where growth is to derive from insulation of markets – and of the cumulative advantage they entail – against redistributive political distortions.

"Power users! I don't just want uniques or impressions, eyeballs are cheap! I want young, cool, engaged, legitimately disabled influencers who'll bring in other active registered goddamn users!"She slapped her armrest and glowered at her glowering screen. "We only get one launch."

Under 'business as usual', however, managements are less concerned with discharging an organization's avowed purpose (providing nutritious food, easy transport between A and B, warmth, comfort, and so on) than with discharging their responsibilities to shareholders (to provide healthy dividends and an ever-rising share price) or to themselves (to maintain their careers on a constantly rising trajectory and their children at private schools). Such organizations are simply not equipped to tackle their alleged aims, but Ashby's law decrees that the discrepancy between claim and reality must be made up somehow. [...]

[...] Someone buying a meal in a restaurant might use a card, as now, but the result would not be a transfer from their bank account to that of the restaurant; instead there would be a sale of shares from the diner's portfolio and the acquisition of different shares, or other assets, to the same value by the restaurant. [...] There would be no unique role for something called money in order to buy 'stuff'.

As for wealth, we live in a civilization which piously denies that it is an end in itself, and treats it exactly this way in practice. One of the most powerful indictments of capitalism is that it compels us to invest most of our creative energies in matters which are in fact purely utilitarian. The means of life become the end. Life consists in laying the material infrastructure for living. It is astonishing that in the twenty-first century, the material organization of life should bulk as large as it did in the Stone Age. The capital which might be devoted to releasing men and women, at least to some moderate degree, from the exigencies of labour is dedicated instead to the task of amassing more capital.

[...] John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), today a half-forgotten American political activist and essayist who wrote about political radicals:

The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humour, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody follows them, yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat. The community cannot get that A out of its head. Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as the real A is kept sounding.

[...] When the International Monetary Fund forces austerity measures on a country, it's not like there's less food, housing, or education to go around than before--the problem is that the current economic system can't distribute access to these according to human need. The same goes for famines that plague one nation while another pays farmers subsidies not to grow crops: the means exist to eradicate famine once and for all, but they will never be used for this so long as resources flow according to the laws of profit.