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Outstanding as ever, Brett. And I'm strongly reminded of this from the late David Fleming's Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It!

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"Here is the villainy of distraction revealed by the simplest of all possible subjects for debate: the proposition that two and two makes four.

Distraction might urge, for instance, that the idea is old-fashioned, that the time has come to move on from traditional thinking on the matter, or that it is too technical for the public to understand. It could take the form of an ingratiating assurance that the only thing that matters, naturally, is the well-being and happiness of everyone concerned. Distraction might urge that it is perfectly okay nowadays to think that two plus two makes five; or that even thinking about it means an unforgivable neglect of the far more important proposition that three plus four makes seven. You might be invited to take note that there is money to be made by taking a different view of the matter, or that we have to move on from the notion if we are to be competitive, or that the proposition is a bit rich coming from someone with a private life like yours. Or it could insist with some passion that, contrary to the view that two plus two makes four, we must take our place at the heart of Europe. Distraction might add, with hoped-for finality, that the argument has already been lost: two plus two is going to make five in the future, whatever we do...

Distraction, evidently, has the power and freedom to cause havoc wherever it likes. It is a spoiler, worse than the cheat: the cheat at least recognises the existence of the rules on which argument depends if it is to make any sense, even though he then proceeds to break them, hoping not to be found out. Distraction recognises nothing except conquest: the argument is too serious to have any connection with the orderly rules of honourable play; it will be settled by other means. Rules? What rules? It presumes the death of logic.

A characteristic form of distraction is to make an assertion which is not true, but which is hard to disagree with. This happens, for instance, with the appeal to the inevitable: the distracter does not argue for or against a proposal; instead, he simply asserts that it is going to happen anyway, and he may do so in a slightly bored drawl that passes off the sell-out as if it were a routine comment on the weather.

Don’t stand for this: it is one of the ways in which our citizen’s right to have a say in deciding for ourselves dwindles into a loss of belief that we can influence anything at all. It is designed to induce give-up-itis, an acceptance that technology and the sweep of history make the decisions. What we are then supposed to do is to surrender, to make sure we are not in the way."

(Source: leanlogic.online/Distraction )

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Thanks Shaun. More great stuff from David. Very interesting breakdown on the modes of distraction. The inevitability assertion is a massive part of the playbook

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Overall this is a great post. One nit to pick: referring to "they" as nefarious forces, when usually they're just low-paid journalists trying to their job, is right out of the populist playbook. I don't have a generalizable alternative answer to it, just something to be aware.

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Yeah, I often debate this with myself. Obviously social media etc rewards antagonistic posts where defined 'enemies' are identified, and I don't normally like to use that style, and I also do systemic style analysis where I recognise that individual people are often just reflecting some trend or systemic tendency that is beyond their individual control. That said, I suppose I did identify a 'garden variety tech optimist' at the beginning, and there are in fact quite a lot of people in innovation circles etc that aggressively promote this stuff

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Really like the perspective shift in viewing digital development. I feel increasingly certain that besides the profit motive there is a power play in the digital race to erode our autonomy demoting us from being the captain of our ship down through the ranks until we are just the cabin boys who just have to do as we’re told.

I also liked the two-track view although there are some tech developments which will always dispense with the analogue version as in the health sector.

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Thanks for the comment Richard. Yes, there's often three tracks to analysing these big developments.

- 1) The mainstream story is always that people desire this and that everything emerges from this bottom-up desire

- 2) then we have the top-down accounts, like mine above, that look to profit motives and systemic drives under capitalism

- 3) then there are top-down power narratives about political figures and leaders trying to take control over us

The reality is always a complex mix of feedback loops circulting between top-down and bottom-up

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"A paradigm is a subterranean framework for thinking, so deep that it goes unnoticed, which governs what questions are considered valid to be asked about any particular issue."

I'll quote that! An excellent characterization of a 'paradigm' -- and without even bowing to Thomas Kuhn!

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The original version of this piece actually did have a section on Thomas Kuhn, but editing required me to shorten ;)

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NIce. In this game of constant 'progress' there is an unstated, perhaps unconsidered, teleology. What happens when humanity 'wins' the game?

Long ago I read a sci-fi novel which posed an answer (I forget the title and author). At a certain point in civilizational progress, humanity transcends its physical form and as pure consciousness joins the universal consciousness as it departs numinously from its Early bounds.

A contrary philosophy from the East, best illustrated in Buddhism, life is seen as a cycle, the Wheel of Life going from birth through all the stages to old age, sickness, and death. Because it is a wheel, the process starts over, unlike the vision in the novel where evidently the whole human species reaches Nirvana and escapes from the cycle of life.

Enjoy the ride!

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I really love this comment. Yes. The scenario from the book sounds like a hybrid between some of the stuff you find coming out the transhumanism movement (e.g. Singularity thinking), and new age movements that imagine an evolution in consciousness (interestingly enough, the highly entertaining pychedelic philosopher Terrence McKenna sometimes spanned between tech utopianism and new age spirituality like this). I'm much more on the Buddhist spectrum - the imagined road going ahead into the future is a circular track with changing scenery

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Your sci fi novel was probably drawing from ancient wisdom traditions that describe points of accelerated human consciousness "upgrades," which we are currently undergoing right now, imho. This sounds like new age whoo whoo because new ageism is a false matrix posing as the truth. It's given the deeper aspects of life on Earth a bad name. Humans respond to the light frequencies emanating from Earth, and as Earth evolves so must humans. If you are estranged from this energy and understanding (most are), you can simply read this as a fun mythology. Elevating human consciousness to "5d" coexists with re-birth. People living in 5d consciousness don't leave the Earth, they just live in a different reality/dimension, one that is less run by a false matrix type of reality of the current 3d world that pushes things like money, religion, Earth as resource instead of an animated consciousness, etc. But death, regeneration, and life happen within any consciousness we choose. We can call this a sci fi novel though.

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Fantastic.

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I just found you and love your work and will share widely

September 20 Safe Tech International News and Notes (substack.com)

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Great, thanks Patricia!

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Brett, As usual your deep insight is helping people to become conscious of things like paradigms that we are immersed in and seldom question.

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Thanks Thomas, I'm grateful for your support

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It is people who need to stand up against mainstream ideologies, so there is nothing wrong in marking them as not having the guts to be critical

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Fantastic post, thank you for sharing.

Perhaps you might be interested in my slightly more cynical view on very similar topics:

https://activisms.substack.com/p/compliance-with-vibes-is-the-primary

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Thanks Kerrin. That's an intriguing ideological mix you've got going there. I mean, I'm not libertarian like you, and I'm also very left wing, and I work with the MMT movement (which, incidentally, banks do not support, or for that matter even understand). It's interesting that, from the conservative libertarian perspective, the things you imagine looming are wokeism, DEI and ESG, because from the left wing perspective companies just shallowly cloak themselves in that, rather than actually caring about that. I mean, they've spent the last few centuries not caring about those topics, and I'm sure they'd drop ESG at the first chance they could. Also intriguing that you imagine de-growth is a mainstream topic, because it's really not - there is not a government or company in the world right now that would ever dare to authentically consider not growing - that's what drives acceleration.

My sense is that you could benefit from dropping that core foundational pillar that underlies so much libertarianism: the false belief that there is, or ever has been, a distinction between statism and capitalism - capitalism is inherently statist, and always has been ;)

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I never connected with the “bicycle of payments” thing (because American?), but “the stairs of payments” feels really simple, powerful, and literally close to home

Like, yes, escalators exist and are fine in some places but would you really want to replace all stairs with escalators? Like in your own house? That’s patently absurd!

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I've noticed these cultural differences in how people respond to that metaphor. As a matter of interest, how would you feel about the 'mountainbike of payments'?

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Really good, and very very clear. First rate, accessible, fundamental tech criticism. And fwiw, I happen to agree. Bravo. Oh, and fwiw, I've also used "bicycle" in this context, as in "a motorcycle is not a better bicycle." It's a fine example of elegance not being superseded by the "next." But money is made on the delta, so the structural/social bias is always for the next.

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Also, in this piece I don't go into the systemic pressure that pushes people towards that bias (which you hint at). I see standard progress stories as the ideological layer pasted over systemic tendencies that we are seldom in control of

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Absolutely. Really glad you like it David

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A long time ago I argued that finance, in its effort to realize new ideas, was inherently progressive, like sharks swim forward, but this was not necessarily a good thing. I should probably return to that theme.

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This is a really good framing. Ecological systems can thrive with these co-existing different levels of organisation - say, a horseshoe crab alongside a primate or an ant colony. All in balance. No group outgrowing its niche (I’m disregarding the Anthropocene). All adapted to their environment. The horseshoe crab is not a laggard, it’s perfect for its environment. The primate is not a ‘frontier species’, it’s just developed more complex adaptations for its niche. But don’t you think that money, as a global unit of exchange, is the reason why 'species' of economic units can’t co-exist? Indigenous Australia and Renaissance states could co-exist in their own niches & their societies worked fine serving the needs of those populations. But as soon as colonialists turned social currencies into units of exchange, they were placed in the same niche. Exploitation (vs conservation) is always about resource efficiency. So resilience can't win when niches are savagely disrupted. I think about this a lot wrt to globalisation. All this embedded resilience (e.g. small family farms, fishing boats, local markets etc) can't compete when they are thrust into competition, using a shared unit of exchange, with industrialisation. The stair is not forced to compete in its niche. It is Australia before colonials. But a global order is naturally exploitative & colonising rather than resilience building. In fact Francois Chollet, a philosophical & interesting member of the AI community, tweeted stg like this recently about the Scientific Method vs random / trial & error. He said (paraphrasing) trial & error is good but time consuming. But you can make ‘leaps’ if you have a big theory. I think this sums up most of the problems in our highly globalised world where slow, bottom up trial & error resilience has been swept away by big top down designs first from colonisers, then capitalists. Some of it's been good, a lot has been maladaptive. At least social democratic govts tried to mimic natural systems by building in buffers & trying to rebalance. The global exploitation brigade in Silicon Vslley aren’t even trying. If they could excise stairs as ‘inefficient’ - “we’re going to remove them so that ‘markets’ will come up with a better solution”, they would. In fact, I can even imagine the pitch from the 22 year old Stanford grad now: “we’re going to take out all the stairs in everyone’s homes & replace them with our high tech alternative that we call ‘air’. This is going to create huge new markets for companies that can straddle this ‘air’ & we will license them to offer solutions. We will also charge consumers to access our air (we own it of course). If they can’t afford to buy the new high tech services from the straddlers, they can jump! Poor people need to exercise more so we see this as God’s work”. This is my post Trump fear of what new horrors lie ahead.

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"What if we called cash the bicycle of payments, and ApplePay the Uber?"

It is worth thinking about this statement a little more closely. A means of transport - the bicycle - is compared with Uber, whereby Uber is not actually the means of transport, but provides a communication channel with the help of which an Uber driver then arrives in his car to provide the desired transport service. In other words, a means of transport and a service are compared here, whereby the service does not provide the transport service - Uber is therefore merely the intermediary and not the executing entity. In contrast, you can get on a bicycle immediately and ride off. So you can see that it is possible WITH THE HELP of Uber to get a transport opportunity that is contractually linked to Uber, but IS NOT Uber.

Interestingly, this relationship - direct means of transport here, mediation of transport opportunities there - also applies to the payment side. Cash can be used to pay directly, whereas xyzPay itself does not make any payments, but merely provides a communication channel that can be used to get your own bank to make a payment that you cannot or do not want to make directly. The difference here is comparable to the means of transport: cash can be used to pay directly, whereas WITH THE HELP of xyzPay you only make a payment order to you bank. To put it bluntly: you cannot pay WITH xyzPay, but only WITH THE HELP of xyzPay, just as you cannot pay WITH your card, but WITH THE HELP of your card. The payment process itself is carried out by your own bank, xyzPay is only the communication channel to transmit your desire to make a payment. You can therefore see that it is possible WITH THE HELP of xyzPay to order a payment to the bank that is contractually linked to xyzPay, but IS NOT xyzPay.

The crucial point here is that neither Uber nor xyzPay are a further development of bicycles or cash, because they cannot or do not want to do what bicycles or cash do. In terms of payments, it is the payment service providers (banks) that carry out the payments for the client, although here too one should first look behind the scenes to see that banks, in conjunction with the central banks, carry out payments by transferring claims to cash. However, this is not a topic for comment:

https://substack.com/@reneemenendez/p-136930534

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Hi Renee, thanks for your comment. I'm aware of how the payment system works, but for me to start pointing out these technical elements would distract from the piece. Most people intuitively understand the distinction between a service like Uber and a Bicycle, so I work with that.

For what it's worth, I'm not sure your characterisation of Uber captures it's essence. Old corporations would have a management layer that controlled employees, whereas Uber is like a management layer severed from the employee base. When viewed as a system, Uber drivers essentially are employees, just with a higher rate of churn than the average company, and ones that have to finance the assets they use while being employees. I mean, sure, Uber doesn't do the driving, but no corporate managers do the actual work that their employees do

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I notice that the proponents of 'digital cash' in the West are all private companies. One of the functions of government is to provide currency for the public good. Thus, private digital cash is a departure from this good and should be seen as just another attempt to privative public property.

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