From Nations to Corporations

constant escape

winter withered, warm
That's interesting. It leads me to frame corporations in an esoteric light, "insiders" at the top, etc.

And "self organizing" is a good point too. The start-up team as the nucleus, around which the bulk of the mass materializes.

Do you think phenomena like this are what led to certain governmental bodies? Or have most ruling bodies subsisted through lineage, supported by sheer force? Not sure how clear those question are.
 

version

Well-known member
Over the past decade, “neofeudalism” has emerged to name tendencies associated with extreme inequality, generalized precarity, monopoly power, and changes at the level of the state. Drawing from libertarian economist Tyler Cowen’s emphasis on the permanence of extreme inequality in the global, automated economy, the conservative geographer Joel Kotkin envisions the US future as mass serfdom. A property-less underclass will survive by servicing the needs of high earners as personal assistants, trainers, child-minders, cooks, cleaners, et cetera.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
Nervous system simulations of head-out-the-window joyrides. The human cannot be bothered to go outside if the digital symbiosis is to be accelerated.

Its weird because I'm writing this as a joke, but it doesn't really lie outside the realm of valid theory/conjecture, as far as I can tell.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I can't say I know almost anything of Peter Thiel, other than his foundation, and vague connections drawn between him and some transhumanist crowd.
If someone told me a tech billionaire was investing serious money in research into prolonging human longevity using blood and organs harvested from adolescents, his name would be the first I thought of.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Perhaps he is one of those who fears he may not live to pass the singularity, and is desperate to milk every second he can get out of his life, by way of robust vitamin regiments, like Ray Kurzweil, et al.

Perhaps I am making a premature and uninformed judgement, but I doubt he commands/employs the proper theory behind his praxis. Can't say I'm inclined to probe him for potential approaches, but again, I know little of him.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
First they came for the dog walkers, but I was not a dog walker....

@constant escape i guess with small scale socialities and the transition to agriculture, the relationships between agency and social domains are still hard to recover. Hunter-gatherers equalling hairy people and early farmers equalling better haircuts and better clothes were the standard ‘profiles’ for decades. The differences are more to do with ideological shifts (or conversions) as much as industrial transitions. Langdale axe networks that spread out from the Lake District are worth a read around because the emphasis isn’t on monuments and the manipulation of mass Labour, so Foucault’s interpretations are trickier to integrate


Trade and exchange are easier to foreground, but they’re nowhere near understood fully enough yet outside of generalities surrounding identity construnction. You get Scandinavian stone axes turning up in Neolithic Britain, so these networks were clearly extensive. The earliest domestic cattle bone recovered from these islands was from the Dingle peninsula in Kerry, circa 4700BC. That‘s a thousand years before any significant domestic monument construction and about 5000 years after domestication began in the Middle East.

Marriage networks have more comparable case studies in late Mesolithic and early Neolithic France (off the coast of Brittany), in that many female graves had genetics from central and eastern France. Women were indeed exchanged, but that could mean coerced just as easily as it could have been mutually co-operative/beneficial. It also poses questions about trade, bodily decoration and identity


As life spans were much shorter and life more ephemeral, our understanding of these social domains based on trade and specialised skill sets still needs developing to tease out the nuances. It’s a vast, complex and incomplete mosaic.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
"I'm not a vampire" is exactly what I would say if I were a vampire.

Pretty conclusive, if you ask me.
 

luka

Well-known member
Very impressive, @WashYourHands , and inspiring. I've a very underdeveloped archaeology and anthropology myself, but your points help illuminate the wonders of it all.

I'll read that PDF, but do you happen to know of any good lectures/videos on the matter? Or similar matters?

read 'a note on metal' by JH Prynne. that's all you need. unless it's something about building the pyramids with sonar technology. or magnets.
 

luka

Well-known member
the private prison as a micro state, and granted the companies that run them are paid by the state at present, offers one model of governance by corporation. a captive work force essentially.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
would an increasingly data-based governance prove to be more profitable?
I'm sure it would be rife with notions of data-driven optimization. "efficiency" has been the privatization rallying cry since forever.

an efficiency I'm always skeptical of, since it often fails to materialize, but assume for the sake of argument it's basically true

the main benefit of "algocracy" certainly seems to be the promise of more efficiently allocating scarce resources

couple issues

first, as long as scarcity exists, there will always be hard points where you're forced to choose between profit and some other goal

data-driven management might be able to ease that tension, but certainly can't erase it

second, the problem of input

what are the motives of the people creating the algorithms, or whoever has the power to tell them what kind of algorithms to create?

what are their goals? who benefits, who loses?

even assuming the programmer' motives are "good", is efficiency as an end in itself desirable?

when it comes to say, distributing medicine, clearly yes. as a way to structure all of society, very much unclear.

I do agree that big data seems like a very good way to more robustly exercise power, as indeed we have already seen

unfortunately almost all in the service of authoritarianism

this future to me looks like technocratic feudalism plus totalitarian data-driven social control

(we should all note "feudalism" is used in a pretty loose sense in this discussion, rather than the narrower definition a historian would use)
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
i just don't like being told i dont understand them
I see. I must have been thrown off the abysmal cyberpunk fan fiction you posted a couple pages back.

you seem very much not to grasp the real difference between privatized rule within a state and private company as state, but as you will

policing has always been about subduing colonized populations of one kind or another btw. an Englishman should know that better than anyone.
 

luka

Well-known member
definitely the worst character in this soap opera. will block him in fact, saves me getting wound up.
 
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