We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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All pale compared to the horror of having the builders in. The mess, the noise, the frangible schedules, the trail of half drunk mugs of tea… In fact, the combination of slipping schedules and a partially dismantled house (and an illness in the family) has forced me to delay a brief business trip to Europe I had planned for this week. Inconvenient does not even begin to describe it.
I mentioned my views on ‘The British Builder’ to both Joanne Jacobs and Brian Linse when they were in London recently, intimating to them both on separate occasions that these sceptred Isles produce by far the greatest domestic affliction known to Western man since Attila the Hun remodelled much of Italy… but both Joanne and Brian quickly asserted that the British Builder’s American counterparts are even worse fonts of woe, calamity and ruined carpets, taking deposits and promptly taking on a strangely ethereal quality.
I remarked on this to a German associate of mine and he in turn dismissed both British and American claims with a wave of his hand, claiming nothing leaves more misery in its wake than the attentions of Westphalian interior decorators. Then an Irish friend of mine asserted that the Irish builders had amongst their ranks many who had been rejected by the paramilitaries for being too destructive and had thus ended up with careers in construction, joining and decorating where their talents had a more ready outlet.
I seem to be detecting a strange form of inverted nationalism at work here!
I love Economics classes that tell the ‘truth’ about environmentalism. The worst part of it is that the way they paint the two sides of the issue. On the one side are the conservatives who “think that money-grubbing companies will somehow fix the environmental problems”. On the other hand are the “progressives who who view government as capable of promoting an activist agenda to serve the general interest of the public”.
These quotes come from my economics teacher, who by the by I found out (through a campus Deep Throat) worked for Ralph Nader a while back. The textbook has similar viewpoints: the conservatives versus the progressives. Which one do you think most students support: those conservatives that want to go back to the old way or the progressives that want to move us to the future. Is it any wonder that environmental regulations constantly grow given the way it is taught? Is it any wonder why people my age do vote for Nader?
Kevin Marks has a rather different ‘take’ on the matter of reputation in the modern world. So is ‘Google envy’ the new snobbery, Kevin?
Neel Krishnaswami is taking a very centralised view of reputation that smells of a synoptic delusion to me. The real revolution in online reputation is happening from the ground up, with Google being the prime example.
Google ranks webpages on how many pages link to them. It then repeats this process, weighting the links from highly linked-to pages higher. In effect, some pages have a higher reputation than others through an emergent mechanism created by all those individual links.
One can argue whether this is elitist or democratic endlessly, but it is certainly based on a Hayekian spontaneous order.
For example, I posted Two Kinds of Order by John Marks on March 11th, and mentioned this to some colleagues who might be interested. I linked to it from a Weblog or two, and Doc Searls did too.
Today it is number 1 on a search for ‘two kinds of order’ out of over 2 million, and a search for John Marks shows it in the top ten, despite there being lots of other John Marks’s on the net.
Have I piggybacked on Doc’s reputation? Yes, but only because he thinks what I and my father wrote is worth reading. If his readers disagree, they’ll stop linking to him, and his reputation will go down.
Cory explains this in more detail, and how a centralised effort can never match this.
Hey, hey! It’s been so long since I have written with a pen,
its sharper than a razor, I don’t feel like Errol Flynn.
Got no computer, I can’t type the letter ‘M’.
You’re not responding right, I guess I better start again.
– ‘Last cigarette’ by Dramarama
At some point when I was growing up, it was impressed upon me by someone, I do not remember who or even when, that good handwriting was something that mattered. I don’t mean mattered just to them, but that it was something that was one of the multiplicity of ways a person could be judged, much in the same way a person could be judged by how they dressed or their smell or the manner in which they spoke. By this I do not mean the shop from which their clothes came, or what sort of aftershave they used or the specific meaning of what a person said. No, I mean were there clothes unkept, clean, carelessly worn, well fitted, did they smell unwashed or was aftershave used to mask rather than attend natural odors, were words carelessly and crudely strung together or well chosen and rich.
Clearly handwriting was another one of those ‘things-that-matter’. So I attended to it, studied calligraphy, adopted formal, social and casual hands, did a wicked gothic black letter and a distinctive cursive italic… and the years slid by.
Then tonight I found myself rummaging through one of several teetering piles of music CD’s I have not listened to for quite a while and popped on ‘Dramarama’, a reasonable but essentially unremarkable late 1980’s band and heard the song quoted above.
And it was true. In spite of churning out thousands of words a day for business and pleasure I have not written anything with a pen for more than two weeks by my best guess. And what I wrote then was a scrawled supermarket shopping list on the back of a page of last year’s The Far Side daily calender.
So does ones handwriting really say anything significant about you in this digital age? Well last year an old chum of mine got married again and asked me to do her invitations by hand, just like I did 12 years ago the last time she got married. I told her I was very out of practice and that she should get them printed but she insisted in that way she knows I cannot refuse. So I suppose she certainly thought it was ‘something that mattered’. Fortunately she provided a vast number of spare invitations as it seems that formal handwriting is most certainly not like riding a bike. It took me several days of concerted effort to dredge up that unused skill before I was producing hand lettered invitations to what I felt was an acceptable standard.
So what does it actually mean? Well there was a time when I would probably have thought a bit less of a person with ghastly handwriting. It was almost as if when handed a hard to read scribble that that person was being presumptuous and disrespectful, forcing me to try and decode it rather than making themselves clear. It was rather like someone who does not deign to look at you whilst addressing you.
But times do change. Although it might still irritate, I do not really accord quite so much stock to the quality of a person’s written hand. In this age of print-outs and IR networks there are people I know very well indeed and yet have probably never even seen what their handwriting looks like.
Perhaps it still is important, just not in quite the same nuanced way it once was. Still, I do hope my friends marriage proves more durable than the last one as I do not look forward to doing her invitations for a third time.
I must confess that I don’t know much about software. I know that it is logical instruction stuff that enables me to do interesting things with my computer and that it is made up of bits, bytes, bobs, bangles, beads and a couple of egg-whites. I also know that it is fabricated by frightfully whizz-bang clever chaps who possess powers far beyond my ken.
I did not know, though, that they were the footsoldiers fighting to bring down Capitalism but, according to Mr. Soderberg, that is exactly what they are.
A word of warning before you open the linked article (if, indeed, that is what you are minded to do): it is a ponderously long and narcolepsy-inducing marxist tract of the kind that I seldom can be bothered to wade through any more but for the inclusion of this early caveat:
“The article address readers sympathetic to the Marxist project and it presumes a basic knowledge of Marxist terminology”
Clearly, it was not meant for the flinty-eyes of a Mammon-Worshipper such as me. It is a sort of shrunken-head-on-a-stick warning that all ye who venture beyond this point risk mortal peril. Well, how could I resist? That’s not a warning, it’s a challenge.
Disappointingly, though, there was no peril, mortal or otherwise and negligible challenge. The thrust of the whole piece is that there are a whole slew of software designers out there beavering away designing excellent software which they then give away for free, thus undermining the corporations who exploit their capitalist intellectual property rights to charge for their (allegedly) inferior products. According to Mr. Soderberg, this heralds the dawn of a new age when the principle of giving away one’s software products for free will be applied to all other products and thus bring about a gift-based society.
All very tedious and all very wrong. As usual when these flat-earthers pop their heads over the parapet, the article is not so much an analysis as an extensive extrapolation of wishful thinking and deeply erroneous assumptions. All Marxists tend to get throbbingly priapic at the thought of folks giving their labour and ideas away for free. For them, it is a validation of their absurd insistence that everyone must give away their labour and ideas for free whereas, truly, it is an example of the kind of voluntarism that lies at the heart of the libertarian view of capitalism.
In other words, if said designers (or collectives thereof) decide to labour for no return then that is tickety-boo by me. And if others decide to that they want a return for their labour that is also tickety-boo. They will only get that return if they produce software that pikers like me are prepared to pay for. In other words, they have to compete and whether they do so successfully is entirely a matter for them.
However the corporations that Mr.Soderberg so dislikes must be churning out some good software because if they were not, they would go bust and in quick time. But that point seems to have been lost on him. Not surprising when you see assertions like this:
“Quite to the contrary, the study supports a connection between general welfare systems and commitment to non-commercial projects”
Now, correct me if I am wrong, but there aren’t a whole lot of magnificent software programmes emerging from, say, Cuba are there?
Mistake compounds mistake as Mr. Soderberg unmasks his vision of a society changed into a gift-society by the act of giving away the software while wholly ignoring the products of capitalism that enable the volunteer designers to do what they do. Nobody is giving away computers for free, or desks or chairs or Kangol hats or pizza or Diet Coke. If Mr. Soderberg wants to excite himself over free information and ideas then let him look no further than this blog and its copious links: loads and loads of folks giving away their intellectual product for free. Does this mean we are all Marxists? Not in my reckoning.
Like all unreconstructed lefties, Mr. Soderberg believes that capitalism insists on the pursuit of profit. Capitalism neither insists nor requires any such thing. It merely requires the voluntary exchange of goods and services upon whatever terms contracting parties agree. People labouring for free is not marxism; people being forced to labour for free is marxism. It is a very easy distinction to grasp and you certainly don’t have to be a software designer to do so.
Neel Krishnaswami has some very interesting views in response to an article by Natalie Solent in Samizdata yesterday regarding the value, nature and possible future understanding of personal reputation:
I don’t think things will play out like this. Reputation is already extraordinarily important in determining whether you can get a bank loan or a credit card: it’s just that we call reputation a “credit rating”. Notice how this is different from the traditional notion of reputation: it’s highly specialized, with only the income and repayment habits of the person listed on it. It doesn’t matter whether one is a communist or libertarian, a Bible-thumping evangelical or an anal-fisting disco raver.
In the future, technology will enable people to create even more fine-grained ‘reputational’ judgements: the combination of computers and networking means that (in principle) one can look up every neighborhood someone has lived in and discover the price, or what magazines you have subscribed to since college, and which brands of shampoo you buy and when. This will increase economic efficiency, through the futuristic equivalent of targeted marketing, only the target niche is a niche of one consumer. These benefits won’t be captured by consumers, though because it enables firms to indulge in pricing behavior a bit closer to perfect price discrimination (eg, if you will only drink Coke and not Pepsi, then the price you pay for Coke might be increased — just for you!)
However, this is likely to be counterbalanced in two ways. First, ubiquitous networking means that price competition will get a lot fiercer. Second, people will also be able to use public-key cryptography to create multiple network identities, each of which has its own set of reputations associated with it. So you could create “sober citizen” and “wild-eyed radical” personas, independent of one another.
Two really good books on this subject are the collection Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct (Daniel B. Klein, ed) and Information Rules (by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian). The first is really essential reading for any libertarian who wants to see how voluntarist organizations work and also how they don’t — it has a beautiful mix of theory and case studies.
Jason Soon over on the Catallaxy Files has a fascinating article about the idea of using native rights to over-fished waters as a means for achieving some free market environmentalism.
Libertarians have long claimed that there are alternatives to environmental regulation – one of the more obvious is giving property rights to what were previously unowned resources. Native title rulings seem to be a perfect opportunity (where a tradition of property ownership can be established) to put this worthy libertarian principle into practice while recognising ‘Aboriginal rights’ in a manner that promotes economic efficiency and justice and encourages entrepreneurship – and privatises more of Australia (alright so ownership will be vested in the tribe but how is that different from firms in Western society owning property? It’s part of their tradition, let them sort out the principal-agent problems).
Interesting idea. The whole article is well worth pondering.
Kevin Holtsberry uses Russell Kirk‘s opus The Conservative Mind to analyse his own views. I find this approach interesting because I suspect the devil is in the details. Here is my libertarian take on Kevin’s listed summation of ‘The Conservative Mind’:
1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.
Yes: I believe that morality is something objectively derived but the understanding of which is often an evolutionary process. However it is this objectively derivable morality, which being the basis for all natural law, which transcends the custom of time and place and complex utilitarian constructs of written law, business and economy. It is the test all custom and law must in the end be subject to.
2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
Yes, this is surely one of the keys to a libertarian or classical liberal mindset: an antipathy to conformity as a desirable objective independent of context. It is liberty and the inevitable diversity of objectives and understandings that spring from minds freed from literal coercion that is the highest objective of the classical liberal, rather than a utilitarian objective such as tractor production or discouraging single mothers. I am not so convinced “proliferating variety and mystery of human existence” is actually a true conservative value however.
3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders an classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.”
Yes, but given that ‘class’ is just a moving amorphous set of social cues, it is not something that is an end in and of itself, anymore than ‘classlessness’ should be. It is only when concepts of class take on force backed statutory characteristics that ‘class’ becomes an objective ill. ‘Class’ when rationally understood is an emergent phenomena that means a whole lot less than Marxists would have people believe.
4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.
Yes. All true libertarians would regard this as axiomatic.
5) Faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters, calculators, and economists” who would restructure society upon abstract designs.
Yes. Civil society is the product not of reason and imposed models of ‘what should be’ but rather of evolutionary processes. To think otherwise is to confuse the essential difference between society and state, which is the underpinning fallacy beneath all forms of statism. Yet a willingness to let ‘nature take its course’ invariably means a willingness to accept the inevitability that as economic realities shift and readjust dynamically within any rational economic system, so too will society… and not all people who have ‘abstract visions of society’ want those visions imposed at bayonet point.
6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration rather than a torch of progress.
Yes, see above. But the libertarian/classical liberal is also a dynamist, and thus grasps that rational understanding of the gradualist evolutionary nature of societies does not preclude an enthusiasm for innovation and the changes that tend to spring from that. A society which accepts change through social evolution and development towards a less statist/stasist imposed order is not a society unmaking itself but rather one becoming deeper and denser: an adaptable society is a successful society.
A.N. Wilson is one of that species of writers that Britain has in abundance: well educated, articulate and not excessively intelligent. He is an exemplar of a particular strain of well heeled British thought that will praise a well crafted essay that states the received wisdom with an air of wise engagement and formulaic cynicism. However such people are deeply suspicious of anything resembling a rigorous argument (for that might imply the truth is not self-evident) or any attempt to make causal links beyond the second logical tier. This species of writer’s forbearers were the people who knew that ending unemployment was good, and that The National Socialist German Workers Party had ended unemployment in the 1930’s. Thus as they looked on and saw a tidy, neat Germany arise from the social and economic chaos of the Depression Years, they would state at parties in their Eton and Oxford educated accents that that Hitler chap might be on to something.
And so we have A.N. Wilson writing about Eugenics on Sunday, 10th March 2002 in The Future lies with Eugenics. He quite interestingly and articulately describes an underclass in Britain that lives a life of state subsidised indolence, crime and childbirth, leading to generations predisposed genetically from birth to become predatory unemployed drains on the diminishing public purse that would otherwise be setting aside tax money for more worthy retirees.
And his solution? Keeping in the tradition of not so much Occam’s razor but rather Occam’s chainsaw, all problems are resolved in one causal step:
(A) The children of ‘hooligan parentage’ provide the majority of repeat offending criminals.
(B) Therefore the solution is to forcibly sterilise repeat offenders to prevent the birth of more congenital criminals.
The justification for this is that these hooligan elements not only absorb a disproportionate amount of appropriated state tax monies containing, housing and feeding them but also will have the temerity to demand an equal share of nationalised state welfare benefits in their dotage.
Now a more rigorous mind might have noted that the common thread here is not some societal line of poison genetics but rather who gets to share in the money the state has appropriated from its hapless taxpayers. The concept that perhaps it is the very structure of the predatory wealth destroying state that is the problem, rather than a genetic underclass, would appear to be a causal link too far for a writer whose primary aim is to be articulate rather than intelligent.
So house prices are skewed by state intervention in tenancy relationships, low end jobs are priced out of existence with minimum wages, undercapitalised businesses are bankrupted with taxes and regulations, tax monies are forcibly taken from the productive and given to subsidise unproductive behaviour and yet somehow the emergence of a perpetually unemployed underclass is deduced to be a genetic problem? Well perhaps it is. Maybe if a few more of A.N. Wilson’s class had contrived to get themselves slaughtered in Britain’s 20th century wars, we would not have developed a political and media elite that seems genetically predisposed to blame everyone for the miserable state of Britain except themselves.
I cannot think of a more compelling argument for the importance of the libertarian argument that no state can be trusted with such a high degree of power over civil society as states have today. The likes of A.N. Wilson would have people castrated and spayed by the state because those people have to live in the reality that the likes of A.N. Wilson helped to create.
Patrick Crozier has some interesting remarks about ‘Labour women’
This article in the Telegraph got me thinking.
First of all there is Mrs Kinnock’s use of the term “real women”. It sounded far too much to my ears like “all women”, or the “only women of any worth”. The truth is that some women go out to work and others stay at home. Is that really such a terrible idea to bear?
Maybe it is. Maybe, to dyed in the wool feminists like Glenys Kinnock, the idea of total sex equality shines so bright that any woman who chooses what we might describe as a “traditional” role is in some way a traitor to her sex. Perhaps, Mrs Kinnock understands only too well that to many women home and family are far more important than boring old work. Thus they have to be forced into the workforce by economics or, as in this case, ridicule.
It is the economics that frighten me. If I ever marry or have children I want my wife to stay at home – at least for the first few years – just as my mother did with me. I believe that (usually) a mother’s love brings huge benefits to child rearing – benefits for which a child minder or a creche is no substitute. I want that choice. But I can’t have it. In London it is virtually impossible for one person on one salary to buy a house (certainly not in the careers that I am considering). Thus we are more or less forced (apologies for the quasi-Marxist terminology) to set up two income households. And hence stay-at-home mums are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
The answer is to build (or at least allow to be built) more houses, semis and apartment blocks. Same demand, more supply, lower prices. But that is more or less impossible in London – the State decrees it. And that is a whole other issue.
Perry de Havilland, David Carr, Christian Michel and I all attended a meeting last Friday night. David Carr has a car (naturally), and drove us all back home, and the first stop was Chateau Perry where we paused for coffee. We covered a lot of conversational ground most agreeably, part of which was about what if? … some particular bit of history had gone differently, and radically changed the next bit of history?
One of the most interesting books I read during the year 2001 was called exactly this, What If?, and was about exactly that. (What if?: Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley, first published by Putnam, New York, 1999; my paperback edition, Pan, London, 2001.)
For instance, did you know that in 1931, a New York taxicab injured and might easily have killed Winston Churchill? No, nor did I. It’s the kind of event that gets left out of the regular history books, because what might have happened didn’t.
Better know to specialists (such as Perry – he finished the story for me on Friday night) is that in 1241 a Mongol army was just about to trash Vienna and probably then move south and abort the Italian Renaissance. But then, the Mongol Supreme Boss of Bosses (one of Ghenghis Khan’s sons) died and his successor had to be picked. Since the Mongol army was always deeply involved in this particular decision (a wise procedure if you think about it), it had to go back to Mongolia at once. It never returned.
Or what of the Assyrian army that was just about to obliterate Jerusalem and strangle the Jewish religion at birth, in 701 BC? It caught a plague and died. The Jews, instead of ceasing to exist as a coherent people, regarded themselves from then on as chosen ones whose God had made a particular point of saving, unlike all the other gods in the area who had proved useless against the Assyrians. Take away that plague, and western civilisation turns out just a bit different, doesn’t it?
Theodore F. Cook Jr. begins his piece about Midway thus: “There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, that gamers at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, have many times replayed the 1942 Battle of Midway … but have never been able to produce an American victory.” Had Japan won Midway, America would still have beaten them in WW2, but it would have taken longer, and the consequences of that would have been …
Of all the history books I’ve ever read, this one brought the past most vividly to life for me, and connected me to it most strongly.
For us now, the next bit of history is fraught with alternatives. Is America about to attack Iraq, and if so how will that play out? What if a Muslim terrorist does manage to contrive a nuclear explosion in some American city? Or in a European city? (Which of those two would make quite a difference.) What will happen to China? Smooth ascent to superpower? Bloody break-up? Ditto India, much in the news now. A week or so ago I posted a speculation about the future of Japan, and let’s just say that not all the resulting e-mails were in agreement, with me or with each other. Speaking locally, will Britain subside into a mere EU province, or will it shake itself free of the EU and continue to make an independent difference to the world?
What If? showed me a past that was likewise fraught with portentous alternatives. To be alive in the past, just as now, was not to be looking at just the one next bit of history, the one that with hindsight we know actually happened. Then as now, they faced many futures, not just the one. Then as now, individual accidents, and also of course individual efforts could make a huge difference.
I love Grand Theories of history, and this is the grandest Grand Theory of them all: Things Could Have Turned Out Quite Differently.
Dale Amon has pointed out the interesting anti-tax We the People movement in the USA who are arguing against US taxes on arcane constitutional grounds. I have to say that whilst I certainly do wish them well, such arguments leave me cold.
The illegitimacy of most taxation springs from the illegitimacy of much of what states do, so arguing such matters on legalistic grounds actually legitimises the fact that the problem is one of incorrect laws rather than a fundamentally incorrect structure of the state. The nature of the illegitimacy of much taxation in the USA comes from its underlying immorality and immorality has nothing to do with constitutionality.
We the People are fighting their battle on grounds that concede from the outset wide areas of legitimacy to the state to tax provided the appropriate legal gymnastics are carried out first. I see what they are doing as useful in so far as it perhaps plants a seed of doubt in the minds of some as to the morality of the state to tax at all in the manner it does. They will of course lose the legal argument but perhaps to an incrementalist like me that is probably just as well: taxation is not wrong because this or that part of the constitution says so (or does not say so)… it is wrong because it is an immoral confiscation of several property for illegitimate uses. It is not a matter of law but rather a matter of objectively derived right and wrong.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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