Dan tdaxp:

November 14th, 2005 at 3:09 am

Dave,

Thank you for the very interesting post.

Isn’t “the linguistic model” exactly what al Qaeda is fighting against?

What does the first sound of economics mean in relation to anything else? Nothing. It is “free” of a true semantic network,” floating independent of anything else.

Sure, there’s social inertia dragging it along, but nothing that makes life worth making. Nothing that makes a future worth saving.

A linguistic future sounds like a meaningless future. To many, a future worth aborting.

Dan tdaxp

Rizalist:

November 19th, 2005 at 7:37 am

Dear Dave Schuler,

I thoroughly enjoyed your essay and I hope you will indulge a comment.

It has been pointed out by others that the process of globalization addresses two levels of human civilization–the world of individuals and the world of state actors.

In his contribution to the Roundtable, Prof. D.J. Rummel demonstrated how, in free democratic societies, the citizens tend, in the long run, to select policies and leaders that have a relatively high utilitarian value for producing happiness and prosperity in their societies, including, significantly, long and peaceful lives.

The frequency distribution of such choices against a ranked list of them — from most useful to least useful, is a power-law distribution (Zipf’s Law), which reflects the observed data in the Core states, where the “area under the curve” is mostly in the realm of the high-utility choices in policies and leaders (being fully cognizant of “outliers” and the “long tail”.).

This at least is the observed “equilibrium” distribution after 200 years and a long turbulent start with slavery, “the Indian Problem”, sexual and racial inequality, and even a short dalliance with Empire between 1898 and 1935.

I would argue that had American populations not made the highly utilitarian historic choices they made in leaders and policies that addressed those “initial conditions” — there might not be a peaceful and prosperous society in America today. As much as the differences between Republicans and Democrats look large, seen up close, I hazard to guess that in a zoomed out view, their antagonism has produced acceptable approximations to some ideal (though the antagonism will be perpetually essential!).

Now, a power law disribution is highly skewed and not homogeneous at all. I think that argues against the predictions in the first and second scenarios of an homogeneously desultory global culture. Instead, this predicts a non uniform distribution weighted toward such things that make for a vibrant, creative, highly fecund and most of all useful or utilitarian global culture–the free variation scenario with kickapoo juice and large dimensionality. In existing exemplars such societies are also not Disney worlds, unless one would characterize present-day America in that way. Such societies exhibit diverse genres in the free pursuit of happiness or unhappiness: in religion, art, culture, science, and politics..

But what is “free”?

My definition of freedom is this: Freedom can be pictured as special kind of network topology–a highly connectable network of human beings and their institutions (just like the Internet is a highly connectable scale free network of human beings and their machines.). The degree of freedom in any given society is really the degree to which any human element of it can connect OR disconnect and back again with any other human element or institution in the network

“Free” societies are where the humans, who own all the free will, can freely connect or disconnect — at will. Unfree societies are just the opposite. They are composed of disconnected Gulags — archipelagoes of hate and division and demoralization, and violence.

I know this is a roundabout way of saying freedom is good, but it does buttress a strategy that you have already pointed out: to altruistically connect the Gap and Rogue state societies to the Core, so that the right memes get through. This is not just to engender good will, but to prepare the battleground of ideas for the proper operation of the “Rummel Principle.”

I would argue that breaking the “Digital Divide” is more than a goodwill gesture with PR benefits. I think breaking that divide is crucially important because if it is not, the digital have-nots will be tinkering with bombs and bullets instead of commenting on blogs, or even just clicking on porno.

[Here in the Philippines (the First Iraq) we are determined to acquire, or would be ready to receive and deploy any spare computers and servers you might have because the enemy is well-entrenched in the old media and our best thinkers proclaim that communism has already won the peace though they lost the war. They call for us to surrender these connections. They call it nationalism.]

The problem of how to describe the ideal topology for the network of state actors, is however an outstanding one, even after all states are “Rummel-optimized. The stage upon which governments play are definitely not a scale free network of democratically interacting agents. Never could we have one nation one vote. I think democracies can definitely go to war on each other–I don’t believe we can generalize that they don’t. even if they have deep “connections” of culture, trade, science and ideas, as you say.

Maybe the key lies in the struggle between the two layers of Civilization: the citizens and the governments. In the long run, one of them has to get on top of the other. Computers and already globalized networks can help one of them do that.

But which one?

Dean Jorge Bocobo
Philippine Commentary