THE NEW STACK: GAME ZERO & TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT

EPISODE 32 MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Throughout the Industrial Era, interchangeable parts manufacturing was about rendering identical lumps of matter indistinguishable, and then stamping with serial numbers to redistinguish them, rendering addressable inside a local namespace.

The modern era enhances this development by rendering interchangeable arrays of bits, such as file copies, distinguishable by adding cryptographic signatures that make them special by introducing high physical costs from the atomic universe of complex computations.

Combining the two layers of technology related to interchangeability, uniqueness, identity, addressability — the identity stack — means that any collection of bits and/or atoms can now be exactly what it needs to be, at almost the cost of atoms and energy alone.

The identity stack is 3 layers: fabrication of interchangeable components, knowledge sets and expensive cryptography. This means the material structure can get as cheap as nature allows, and advances as quickly as technology. Non-material roles may be priced at will pertaining to social conceptions of status, possession, rights and so forth.

The practice of splitting the economic and social aspects of technology at the lowest attainable level — time/energy costs at the bits and atoms level — is like dividing church and state for our day.

Venkatesh Rao

TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT

Until the turn of this century we didn’t need to worry about technological advancement devaluing people, because new technologies always created new kinds of jobs even as old ones were destroyed. But the dominant principle of the new economy, the information economy, has lately been to conceal the value of information, of all things.

Trying to hypnotize the world into positivity, technologists would dream our way into a kind and creative future, as if abuses of power were nothing but bad habits that would vanish forever if they could just be broken once, during a technology transition.

The magical version of Abundance is that if you can buck up your self-confidence, not only will you succeed in the world of human affairs, but you will also be able to bend or “dent” physical reality. It is really your show, if you would only realize it.

THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT?

Evolution has gifted us with a very large capacity to learn but it’s not quite clear exactly how much our capacity to increase our capacity to learn is there (in fact have more or less the same capacity to learn as a stone Age’s human being). By contrast the capacity to re-package and shrink the economy seems to be growing exponentially and so we now may be reaching a crossover point where the capacity to “innovate” is now potentially exceeding the capacity to learn.

MARX AND ARISTOTLE

We have talked about Aristotle in a previous episode. He was the first to sit down and text the explicit concern which is that people become obsolete if the machines get good. He was saying we really need music but we don’t have to like musicians. If we just had a machine that could operate the looms and pluck the strings you know we could get these guys out of town we would have to put up with these pathetic slaves anymore.

Marx as technology writer took this idea this concern and really made it explicit. You really realize that Marx was thinking ahead to what it would be like if you lived in a world of such advanced technology that it would bypass people and so his conclusion of course is that you could no longer rely on emergency systems like Commerce because they would become corrupted and they would falter and there had to be some sort of societal system that would dole out the benefits of the machines.

THE INFORMATION YOU HAVE IS NOT THAT INFORMATION YOU WANT.

Information worship as religion is stickman art that has forgotten that it’s art and every seemingly innocent fragment of information is secretly plotting how to escape its context and cause trouble. However, when the economy becomes more about information it seems to distort and shrink the overall size by demonetizing value and eventually driving it off the books in order to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few.

In the case of the music industry, making a pre-digital system “efficient” through a digital network shrank it economically to about a quarter of its size. It will shrink perhaps to about a tenth once people with old habits die off. Music is not fading away. Instead wealth is being vacuum upstairs, since most of the real value, which still occurs out in the real world, is reconceived to be off the books.

We’re used to treating information as “free,” but the price we pay for the illusion of “free” is only workable so long as most of the overall economy isn’t about information. We can think of information narrowly only because sectors like manufacturing, energy, health care, and transportation aren’t yet particularly automated or ‘net-centric.

We insist that information be demonetized online, which meant that services about information, instead of the information itself, would be the main profit centers. That inevitably meant that “advertising” would become the biggest business in the “open” information economy. But advertising has come to mean that third parties pay to manipulate the online options in front of people. Businesses that don’t rely on advertising must utilize a proprietary channel of some kind, as Apple does, out of the commons, and into company stores.

Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about their code instead of content industry files. Maybe technology will then make all the needs of life so inexpensive that it will be virtually free to live well, and no one will worry about money, jobs, wealth inequality, or planning for old age but instead, we are probably heading into a period of hyper-unemployment, and the attendant political and social chaos.

Artificial intelligence programs over networks typically repackage huge amounts of data taken from people, therefore it is ever harder to distinguish a collective output from an “artificially intelligent” algorithmic one. We used to imagine that elite engineers would be automation’s only puppeteers. It turns out instead that big data coming from vast numbers of people is needed to make machines appear to be “automated.

The problem is that if thinking about people as components of network architecture is what creates the greatest economic success, then that thinking is reinforced every moment that you strive to succeed. But If the world is to be reconceived and engineered as a place where people are not particularly distinguished from other components, then people will fade.

WALMART

You can create a local shield against entropy, but your neighbors will always pay for it. In other words in order for a computer to run, the surrounding parts of the universe must take on the waste heat, the randomness.

In the beginning WalMart confronted the ordinary shopper with two interesting pieces of news. One was that stuff they wanted to buy got cheaper, which of course was great. But there was another piece of news that emerged more gradually. It became clear that WalMart plays a role in the reduction of employment prospects for the very people who tend to be its customers.

This is one of the ironies of Game Zero…corporations aren’t in the “job creation” business, they’re profit generators…and employees are often their largest expense. So in reality, as profit generators, businesses are actually in the job destruction business.

For instance, Google wants you to be “open” so that it can search all the data related to you, even if you didn’t initially enter it through the company’s services. Google also wants to be closed about how it compiles and exploits your information. Facebook wants you to have only one identity, so that it’s easier to collate information about you and reliably influence the options put in front of you, and it also doesn’t want to share how your information is used (it also doesn’t want Google to have access to it).

Twitter suggests that meaning will emerge from fleeting flashes of thought contextualized by who sent the thought rather than the content of the thought. In this it is distinct from Wikipedia, which proposes that knowledge can be divorced from point of view. In this it is distinct from the Huffington Post, where opinions fluoresce.

In all these cases. The designs of these sites are embodiments of philosophies about what a person is, where meaning comes from, the nature of freedom, and the nature of an ideal society. A few of the folks Game Zero aggregates will inevitably get an insane lift from being hitched to it, and they’ll create even more excitement. An early investor will get superrich fast, or a user of the free service will earn a windfall from sudden exposure. This will happen to only a tiny token number of people, though.

For all the SM talks about risk and the quantum soup it’s obvious it lacks something essential to replicate the unifying vision of an individual artist that is creating something new as it draws the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical nature. Because, behind tech is Capital and of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all

NETWORK EFFECTS — FREEMIUM

Game Zero delivers dual messages similar to the pair pioneered by Walmart. On the one hand, “Good news! Treats await! Information systems have made the world more efficient for you. With Facebook the free service is social connecting, and with Google it is an efficient search engine. Other examples of free (or nearly free) services include Youtube (owned by Google), Vimeo, Yahoo!, Bing, Wikipedia, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Blogspot (also owned by Google), WordPress, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Digg, Reddit, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Kickstarter, Craigslist, eBay.

Game Zero wants the algorithm to run the show with as few humans in the loop as possible, ostensibly to improve “customer service” by “lowering prices” (note: all incremental costs their strategy incur are quickly externalized and so are paid indirectly by the rest of society). Conveniently for Game Zero, it is the users themselves (or in some cases the general public) who provide the content. So, again, Facebook pages form the content on Facebook, and ‘scrapable’ websites form the content on Google.

This customer service beneficence on their part also- shockingly- manages to generate an extreme concentration of wealth for the top people/investors. Big surprise. Meanwhile, trinkets tossed into the crowd spread illusions and false hopes that the emerging information economy is benefiting the majority of those who provide the information that drives it. If information age accounting were complete and honest, as much information as possible would be valued in economic terms.

The illusion that everything is getting so cheap that it is practically free sets up the political and economic conditions for cartels exploiting whatever isn’t quite that way. When music is free, wireless bills get expensive, insanely so. You have to look at the whole system. No matter how petty a flaw might be in a utopia, that flaw is where the full fury of power seeking will be focused.

Game Zero gains dominance through rewarding network effects, but keep dominance through punishing network effects.

“Network effects” are feedback cycles that can make a network become ever more influential or valuable. Facebook attracts people because of the people already on it. People use Apple products in part because there are so many apps in its store. But for example with Facebook, in order to continue to participate, I’d have to accept Facebook’s philosophy, which includes the idea that third parties would pay to be able to spy on me and my family in order to find the best way to manipulate what shows up on the screen in front of us.

DATA IS THE NEW OIL

Scientific big data, like data about galaxy formation, weather, or flu outbreaks, can be gathered and mined, just like gold, provided you put in the hard work. It isn’t like a view through a microscope, but more like a view of a chessboard. We use terms like data- mining routinely to reinforce that illusion. Our core illusion is that we imagine big data as a substance, like a natural resource waiting to be mined. But big data about people is different. It doesn’t sit there; it plays against you.

If we ask what should be done with the people who used to perform the tasks now colonized by machines the most crucial quality is how we conceive of the things that the machines can’t do, and whether those tasks are considered real jobs for people or not (the assumption is put forward that the human role is to produce an output in the same sense that an algorithm or a collective could). Then, a marketplace method, typically formulated as winner-takes-all, is put forward as the only means of valuing outputs from people and machines.

One of the increasingly prominent uses of data streams is its role in programming and refining artificial intelligence systems. Most artificial intelligence systems are relatively inert without input generated from human activity. Google Translate was generated by way of scraping millions of translations off of the Internet and other databases, and then processing these translations through sophisticated algorithms.

And this pattern holds for virtually all other artificial intelligence systems. A giant act of statistics is made practically free because of Moore’s Law, but at core the act is based on the real work of people. We can’t tell how much of the success of an AI algorithm is due to people changing themselves to make it seem successful. This is just the big data way of stating the fundamental ambiguity of artificial intelligence. People have repeatedly proven adaptable enough to lower standards in order to make software seem smart. Efficiency is a synonym for how well a server is influencing the human world to align with its own model of the world.

Pretending that data came from the heavens instead of from people can’t help but eventually shrink the overall economy. The more advanced technology becomes, the more all activity becomes mediated by information tools. Therefore, as our economy turns more fully into an information economy, it will only grow if more information is monetized, instead of less. That’s not what we’re doing.

Even the most successful players of the game are gradually undermining the core of their own wealth. Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers. A market system can only be sustainable when the accounting is thorough enough to reflect where value comes from

A more honest network economy would be one where risks would be taken more wisely, as there would be informed participation by the ground level creators of value. A scam is always an illusion of creating something from nothing, but there is no nothing. Game Zero makes money by shorting that the improvement of reality couldn’t keep up with the supernatural and extrahuman realm of something from nothing.

The Napsterization Of Everything:

The initial benefits don’t balance the long-term degradations.

Initially you made some money day trading or getting an insanely easy loan, or saved some money couch-surfing or by using coupons from an Internet site. You get an incredible bargain up front, like super-easy mortgages, insanely cheap retail items, or free online tools or music. Maybe you loved the supercheap prices at your favorite store or you got free online education up front.

But in the long term you also face reduced job prospects, the pink slip, the eviction notice, and the halving of your savings when the market drooped. Then you realized that you couldn’t pursue a music career yourself because there were hardly any middle-class, secure jobs left in what was once the music industry. Also there were fewer academic jobs in the longer term and then noticed that the factory you might have worked for closed up for good.

The latest wave of high-tech packaging has not created jobs like the old ones did. New ventures employ fewer people than General Motors. Even then, if they had big overhead, or other costs, they might still contribute greatly to growing an economy.

But again, this is not the case as most of the audience-drawing content and valuable information exploited is user-generated. Now, if this new stack were but a small portion of the economy as whole, all of this may well be relatively inconsequential.

However, the new stack has already become a major part of the economy; and, it will only grow in relative importance moving forward. This is because whenever something is capable of being mediated through software it can be shared over the Internet — for next to nothing

However, no economy can be sustained on the backs of a few hundred major companies with a handful of employees and virtually no overhead. This stack will probably eat itself undermining the core of their own wealth.

A new stack can only be sustainable when the accounting is thorough enough to reflect where value comes from. What are we gonna do with when there is almost no intrinsic scarcity, and therefore market value collapses.

Now, as levees break and austerity rules, suddenly contracts turn out not to be inviolable. This is what union members and copyright holders have learned. They include recording musicians, journalists, and photographers. There were also a significantly larger number of people who supported these types of creators, like studio musicians and editors, who enjoyed “good jobs” (meaning with security and benefits). So where will this leave future, as our century of digital networking proceeds?

Sure there might be fewer jobs, but people are getting so much stuff for free. You can now find strangers’ couches to crash on when you travel instead of dealing with traditional hotels!. No amount of cost lowering can foster economic dignity when it also means that there are fewer good jobs.

COLLAPSE

This means a real good chance of a demand cascade + High unemployment and very high underemployment may well result in a non functioning state. This means building new models for the distribution of necessary rival goods and as future persons are likely to have less to spend, new models to leverage smaller amounts will be needed.

It may well mean either the state takes the means of production to sustain itself (i.e seizes say a bitumen plant to keep roads) or simple hollows out in time. Throughout history governments have taken steps to, “counteract the danger that public goods will be underproduced.

The new stack is so successful that it optimizes its environment instead of changing in order to adapt to the environment. The new stack no longer acts only as a player within a larger system. Instead it becomes a central planner

Cheap networking facilitates exaggerated and rapid network effects. These engender failures of the classical economic models, which had been based on competitions between multitudes of players with distinct and limited information positions.

The stack might eventually become an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. This would happen when so many goods and services become software-centric, and so much information is “free,” that there is nothing left to advertise on Google that attracts actual money

This reduces the number of available business plans. Silicon Valley, which once seemed a portal to unlimited potential, now induces claustrophobia as so many distinct companies with different competencies and cultures must compete for the same global pool of so-called advertisers

Whatever it is we want a marketplace to achieve for us, we will not find it if we organize markets to radiate risk and become deterministic accumulators of power around a small number of computing nodes

TECHNOLOGY

Technology is not pure/impure but subjected to ape psychology

I think where people go wrong in imagining post-capitalist economies is starting with values. The stacking order is technology → economics → values. You need to start with alternative technological principles. Example: design with degradation/aging as a feature not bug.

Venkatesh Rao

Technology is someone’s opinion in material form, sometimes it’s tantamount to being trapped in someone else’s head. If nature is free of concepts, art qualifies as nature. If you go to a great concert you come back energized and refreshed, as if you went for a walk in the woods.

What if tech was designed to solve last century’s problems? Why are we so ineffective tackling the 21st? Maybe we are not prepared to make changes that go beyond our current level of mental complexity and are still proposing technical solutions to adaptive challenges

As if to better ‘deal with’ or ‘cope with’ the greater complexity adding new skills or widening our repertories of responses, not necessarily developing people. And while coping and dealing are valuable skills, they are inadequate for accomplishing long-term, adaptive change.

Much of internet was a means to access inner space with different destinations being different possible versions of future you. That was great for people missing nonverbal communication, poor eye contact, theory of mind problems, and flexibility in response.

This access to inner spaces was supposed to make up for our lack of experience in peer relationships which was preventing some the development of the common pathway through which people learn about decision-making skills and the capacity to maintain a relationship.

However, when your inner space is opened to commercial activity, it exaggerates this economic system tendencies toward extraction, growth for growth’s sake, and the removal of human agency and connection.

It has amplified capital. It obsolesced the local, peer-to-peer. Now when pushed to its extreme, capital “becomes a person through corporations and tech and granted human rights and protections under the law.

Now the system amplifies for ruthlessness

Unfortunately the medium has ended up amplifying lack of flexibility, along with self-absorption, which would increase the significant areas of conflict in a potential relationships with culture, art and other reality interfaces.

Our new time lords and their emotional dysregulation displayed difficulty understanding the on the books value of culture. Part of what helps us create a sense of self is the ability to create an internal autobiography. Self-absorption fosters another type of social disability as they may have little to no desire in sharing this interest with others or attending to the interests of others, since there can be a lack of ability to detach from the area of interest without anxiety or distress.

All of the above challenges tend to be magnified when they have an intimate emotional rapport with art. Art is the sharing of emotional, cognitive, and physical aspects of oneself with those of another. A prerequisite for art is the establishment of a firm sense of self-identity

Art requires the flexibility to loosen one’s identity in order to feel the pleasure of merging with the artist in an emotional and physical connection. For all of the reasons above, they are unable to share with another or may be limited in his or her ability to do so

Bill Gates made his money by extinguishing free software and convincing us it was in our interest us to pay him a tax just to turn our computers on. This was only possible because the State was ready to violently enforce his “intellectual property”. He didn’t created a computer revolution, he destroyed one.

Zuckerberg made his money in the exact same way, of course — by prevent it a social network from following open protocols. Unpopular opinion here. This seems like subtracting value, an enormous amount of value, and stymied progress to seize control and extract wealth.