The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Technology and Prosperity Series

The Internet Makes Real Organizing Harder (Technology and Prosperity #2)

When it comes to communications technologies and their effect on freedom and prosperity we have to remember that income and wealth share is a product of power.

All wage increases are a result of either scarcity of labor, whether labor in general or a shortage of specific skills; or they are a matter of organizing to convince powerful people, whether corporate bosses or politicians, to give you more money.  (There should be no shame in this, the rich spend billions influencing politicians to give them more money and power.)

This means that there are three conditions where wages are good:

1) Labor is scarce and people can easily find a new job.  The job market is, therefore tight, there are really more jobs employers want done than there are people who want work.

2) Wages can be good in specific jobs even if they are lousy elsewhere if there is a shortage of workers in that field: see computer programmers during the late 90s.

3) People can make a good living without working for someone else, or at least a good enough living so that they have to offer a good job for people to stop doing so.

The more fungible labor is, that is the more one person can be replaced by any other, the less it is paid.  If every job is skilled, workers are harder to replace.  The more jobs are Taylorized – easy jobs that anyone can do, as with the de-skilling of fast order cooking by places like McDonalds, the less the workers get paid.  (Short order cooks, before the rise of fast food, were well paid.)

Communications technology influences this in two ways:

1) the ability of management to control workers without being there themselves.

2) the ability of workers to organize, either politically, or in the work place for work stoppages, strikes and so on.

Before the telecom revolution it was very hard to offshore or outsource so much work.  It wasn’t impossible, the telephone and the jet airplane existed, but it was hard.  You couldn’t control the people working for you overseas.  As a result, you tended to want to keep your factories close to hand.  Generally in or near your home town or city; and if you moved to a cheaper locale, it was still in the country.  If you wanted to properly control workers and production in foreign countries you had to send your own executives to do it because you just didn’t have the easy communications we have today.

This was one thing if you were sending them to Canada or Western Europe. It was another thing entirely if it was some third world country where, servants aside, the executives would hate living.

So the telecom revolution makes it much more practicable to offshore production to both lower cost domiciles and to domiciles where you can expect the government to beat, jail, torture, rape and in many cases kill any labor organizers.  Even if you don’t move overseas, you can easily keep your wages cheap by playing domestic workers off against foreign ones: “if you don’t make concessions, we’ll move this factory to China/Bangladesh/Mexico.”

(There are many other factors.  In a very fast moving market there are reasons to keep production at home for the fastest turnover, for example, but in an economy where there are only 3 real smart phone companies, why bother?)

The second question is of organizing ability. In the work place people can organize if they know their fellow workers, if they trust their fellow workers, and if withdrawing their wages will leave their employers unable to produce (which is why scabs are so hated.)  In the days of classic union organizing everyone worked in a few huge factories; they knew each other; and they worked with dangerous machinery and trusted each other.

The internet fragments people.  Instead of grouping people geographically so that they can learn to trust each other even if they have some differences, it finds ways to group us with like minded people.

Worse, it makes real political disruptive political organizing extremely difficult.  The bottom line about the internet is that everything you do can be tracked, and tracked easily. If you use the internet to organize a strike or a demonstration or to shut down a city: whatever it is, the authorities know.   Most of it is public, what isn’t public is spied on.

Worse are cell phones.  Everyone carries one, and it is a bug you carry in your pocket, which can even be turned on remotely to listen in on you.

One result of this is pre-emptive arrests.  You get organized to protest the G20, or whatever, you show up, and the day before the summit, the key organizers are all arrested on trumped up charges.  Even if they beat the rap, they aren’t there for the key days making sure things work.

And if you intend to do any serious work: a strike large enough to shut down a city or a major corporation: something that actually inconveniences the rich and powerful, they will know as well.

If you significantly encrypt and use one-off cell-phones and so on, this sends up a red flag as well, and there are a variety of ways around it. (If your laptop has ever been out of your sight, it is not your laptop.  If you ordered it online and had it shipped, it may well have been intercepted, as with one TOR developer’s laptop (diverted to Richmond, I kid you not.)

Cameras, computer, license plate, and cell phone surveillance mean that it’s almost impossible not to be surveilled.  As routine use of recognition systems is rolled out, as audio pickups are added to cameras in larger numbers, and as drones are added to the domestic surveillance mix, it will become even harder.

Oh sure, if they don’t know you’re organizing they can’t narrow down to you.  But they will know, because to organize most significant actions you have to be visible.

Politics is ultimately where most of distribution is decided.  Absent a vast array of “free trade” treaties and protections, the massive movement of jobs offshore from the late 70s on would not have happened.  Absent the breaking of unions by Reagan and Republicans and Democrats from 80 onward, wages would not have stagnated nearly so much.

If you can’t organize effectively, you are politically mute.  And, by and large, workers are in the US, and increasingly so in almost every other Western country.

A communications technology that actually enables people to organize requires ways of vetting people that can’t be goosed by the government. It needs to bring people together in geographic areas where they can actually work together. It needs to allow the experiences which create solidarity amongst them, and generally that means they must meet and do things together which build trust.

By taking so much of the talk that used to occur in unlistenable, unwatchable ways, and making it visible to the government and any corporation willing to make friends with the right people, the telecom revolution has made actual revolution much, much harder. In the old days you basically had to have spies, and you could never be certain how reliable they were.

Now you can just listen in or watch.  You can see the networks developing in real time, you can identify the leaders, and you can use the information you have to take the leadership out and to be ready for any action before it happens.

The telecom revolution may less about freedom that in it is about control.  It enables the surveillance state revolution: the 24/7 panopticon and rather than putting power into the hands of the people, it puts power into the hands of those who control it.  That’s not to say it has no use: Twitter wasn’t banned in Turkey because it wasn’t making the authorities’ lives harder, after all.

But it is a two-edged sword.  As with most things, it works well only for movements which are so large that taking out the leadership is effectively impossible.  For any movement which isn’t a real mass movement, it is a death trap (and remember, most mass movements start as less.)  And you must have victory if you are a mass movement. If you aren’t, when the mobs die down, and the people go home, well the leaders have been identified, and not just the biggest ones, as in the old days, but the people who are influential without showing up on the podium.

And then the big men come.

Any technology which makes top-down control easier and which makes it easier to replace workers, will reduce prosperity.  The telecom revolution might, one day, make some sort of networked democratic decision-making possible.  But it equally might be used to create a surveillance state that would leave Big Brother in awe.


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The Technology of Violence and its effect on prosperity and freedom

Picture of a Greek Phalanx

A Greek Phalanx

 

Prosperity is two things:

1) How much you can produce with your technology and social organization;

2) Who gets how much.

 

The second is determined by a number of factors, but the simplest is the structure of violence.  Those who aren’t good at fighting, don’t get as much of the surplus created by society as those who are.  Who is good at violence is determined to a remarkable extent by the interaction between the technology of violence, geography and the everyday life of different classes of society.

It has long been noted that in polities where warfare requires a large, organized chunk of the population, more widespread affluence and democracy are more common.

So we have Athenian Greece, where free males fought either as infantry or in the fleets, and where the franchise extended to those who fought.  We have Republican Rome, whose legions were originally raised from the citizenry, and which became an Empire when the armies were no longer raised primarily from those close to the city of Rome and when soldiers became more loyal to their generals than to the state.  We have the Swiss Cantons, where men fought as close order pikemen and were free, while most of the rest of Europe was ruled by mounted nobles and most ordinary people were serfs.  And we have the age of conscript armies in the 19th and 20th centuries, also coincident with a vast increase in democracy and prosperity.

Note that in many of these cases democratic rights extended almost exactly to the fighting class.  Women in Switzerland received the vote later than in most of the European subcontinent.  Athenian women were infamous for the lack of rights, and the same is true of Republican Rome at its height: the society which defined patriarchy.  In Rome there was a separate, higher class, the Eques (Equestrians) based on having enough money to afford to fight on horseback.

All of these places were well known for their prosperity in the heyday of their use of citizen armies.  Men too poor to take care of themselves properly (by which we mean eat a nutritious diet) make poor soldiers, and just as poor rowers in a galley navy.  There were always rich, and Republican Rome can be understood as partially oligarchical and partially an aristocratic oligarchy depending on what time period you’re looking at, but still, Romans were free, had access to relatively reliable law, and were prosperous.

When they stopped being prosperous as a group, when inequality soared, the Republic went through a series of convulsions (recognized as class wars even at the time), and eventually ended in rule by an Emperor.

The relationship between fighting as infantry, even close order infantry, and prosperity and democracy is not a sure thing.  Many of the Greek Polis were not democracies and had frightful inequality, Sparta most famously.  Rome fought using close order infantry well into the period of the Emperors, and so on.

Nonetheless, if the method of warfare involves men who must cooperate together and trust each other implicitly, they are much more likely to be free, prosperous, or both.  Saxon and Norse England, before the arrival of the Normans is a place where ordinary people have far more rights than the Normans (a Norse offshoot) allow (in part because of Norman forts, meaning that local revolts can rarely succeed, and in which a small number of men can hold off a vastly largely number.  It is largely because of forts that Wales, for example, is permanently subdued.)  The wealth is also much more evenly spread in pre-Norman England.  English history books often start with the Norman conquest, it should be understood that, overall, that conquest was a disaster for the inhabitants of England.

The price of armaments is one of the key factors in prosperity and democracy. If a group of individuals is effective and can win using cheap armaments over those using expensive armaments, again, expect more widespread prosperity and greater rights for the poor.  The cutoff point for effective armaments if the cutoff point for widespread prosperity in most cases.  If a rifle with a bayonet is all someone needs to be effective, expect the franchise to spread.  If it does not spread, expect the first nation to spread it, to be wildly successful on the battlefield: the French revolution is the paradigmatic case.

Of course reactionary regimes can conscript too, but Germans in the late 19th century are more prosperous, even the poor, than those before widespread conscription.

If, on the other hand, effective warfare requires significant wealth, as with Medieval knights, who require a multitude of serfs to support even one fighter, well, expect that those who aren’t good at fighting won’t be prosperous.  People today don’t realize how many peasant revolts there were.  What is instructive about them is the slaughter involved: the slaughter of serfs and peasants. Often huge rebellions would be put down with only a handful of casualties.  Knights were very good at killing peasants armed with makeshift weapons.

If you can kill them and they can’t do anything about it, how much of what they produce is really theirs?

How armaments are made also matters. Even cheap weapons, if they must be made in centralized factories and cannot be made by individuals and small groups, will not be as useful to widespread prosperity as otherwise.  The Jeffersonian style yeoman farmer society takes a serious blow in the war of 1812, when it becomes clear that the British centralized manufacture of weapons is more effective than making weapons locally.

The technology of violence interacts with the terrain. Note that in three of these cases we are talking about societies which were born in hilly terrain.  Greece, Rome and Switzerland are not flat land.  Cavalry is far less effective.  Cities have mobs that are effective, even communes, in the Middle Ages, because of how they are laid out.  Not only is cavalry useless inside a city, but the narrow streets mean that men can only fight one or two abroad, so even organized infantry has very little advantage in a city.  The great broad boulevards of Paris, the wide streets of other cities were created first not for the convenience of the citizens, but so that they could easily be killed in large numbers if they revolted.  Medieval cities were free in part because they were very hard to conquer: fortifications, enough money to equip soldiers and streets in which a knight could easily be hauled from his horse and have a knife shoved into the eye-holes of his helmet.  And, of course, cities paid a great deal of money for the privilege of being free, often directly either to the king or the equivalent of a Duke; thus putting them under the protection of the most powerful noble in the realm.

Terrain where cavalry can operate freely; where infantry can be bypassed, tends to either be ruled by states or, historically, by nomads, depending on whether it is good for growing crops or for pasture.

Nomads and barbarians, but especially horse nomads, should also be discussed.  Much of history can be viewed as a cycle of Agrarian civilizations expanding, being conquered by barbarians or nomads, expanding till they have no surplus due to administrative overload, then being conquered by barbarians or nomads again.

From a population point of view, this is absurd.  The Manchu, when the conquered China, probably had 1 to 2% of the population of China.  The Mongols were a miniscule fraction of the population of the territories they conquered.  But Barbarians have something going for them; every fighting age male who isn’t a thrall or slave is a warrior, and often a very good one.  It has long been noted that healthy rural or wilderness people make the best soldiers: Roman recruiters wanted the sons of free farmers.  Canadian and Australian soldiers in WWI were far better than English soldiers because they grew up on the farm, well fed as a rule, and shooting a gun.

Unfree or other impoverished rural types are generally not much use in a fight.  If they didn’t have proper nutrition as children, they’re worthless.  But free rural males are tough, and in a culture where they use weapons, already skilled, generally to a level no “basic training” for conscripts can possibly reach.  All basic training teaches such people is how to fight as a disciplined group: the weapon skills are already there.

The Mongols hunted in large, indeed army sized groups, driving the prey before them.  They were expert horsemen, master archers using one of the best bows in the world, and they were used to working in organized groups.  The Mongols, it is said, hunted like it was war, and made war like it was a hunt.

The specific technology they used was also perfect in an important sense: horse archers choose their battles against slower armies, and can withdraw effectively taking few losses. If the Mongols didn’t want to fight, they didn’t.  They only fought, during their heyday, when they had the advantage and as a result they racked up victory after victory.

The everyday structure of Mongol life thus provided most of what they needed to be extraordinarily effective soldiers: it took only uniting them and making some strategic and tactical doctrine changes to turn them into a force that conquered the largest land empire in history, and allowed them to conquer nations which were far, far more populous than they.  Note, again, however, the interaction of terrain and technology: the Mongols’ initial conquests were generally in relatively flat lands.  (Though not exclusively. Genghis Khan was the last person to really crush the Afghans, after all.)

So we have our trifecta: the Mongols had excellent technology (bows, horses and stirrup); the terrain was suited to their style of warfare; and their way of life made them tough and taught them almost all the skills necessary to be effective soldiers.

BOOM.  World Conquest.

Another major factor might be called “not worth conquering”, or (related, but not identical) “area denial”.

This is an important consideration in today’s world.  The Coalition attack on Afghanistan was all very fine and good, and they easily conquered the cities, but they couldn’t control the countryside.  Guerrilla warfare, to be sure, has been used for millennia (the Romans fought a nasty guerrilla war in Spain.)  But modern technology, specifically explosives in the form of mines and their easily made irregular counterpart the IED, make it easy to do area denial.  NATO troops in Afghanistan and Iraq had their mobility and their ability to control the country severely curtailed: they couldn’t drive their vehicles down most roads without risk.

The Taliban and the Iraqi freedom fighters thus could not defeat the US army in open field battle, as a rule, but they could bleed them and deny them the fruits of conquest.   Much of Afghanistan could not be effectively taxed by the puppet government in Kabul; the same was true in Iraq.  In the end, in Iraq, the US military had to pay militias in order to be allowed to withdraw.

This, then, is the question of how effective irregular warfare is.  How much loss can under-equipped troops inflict?  An American infantryman is expensive; an American tank is more expensive. An American helicopter pilot is precious.  An insurgent with an grenade launcher is not.  Your expensive troops may inflict higher casualties on the enemy, but they are more expensive and harder to replace.

If the Chinese had been able to reliably inflict one loss on the Mongols per five Chinese losses, they would have won, at least in the early part of the war.

For much of history many areas were simply not worth conquering: the natives were dangerous and had no wealth that anyone else wanted.  The fall of the British Empire can be viewed in part as “why are you conquering huge chunks of the world that offer nothing worth the cost of subduing and then administering them?”

The more the locals can resist; the more they can have a good life without creating portable wealth; and the more they are lucky not to be sitting on gold, silver, or oil, the more likely they are to be left to their own affairs.  If the wealth of a nation is its people, profiting from its conquest is tricky: if its wealth is a resource that a few people can extract, profiting from conquest is easy.

Being conquered, some exceptions aside, is rarely good for those conquered. India before the Mughals and the British was one of the most prosperous areas in the world.  Afterwards it was known for its poverty.  India had more manufacturing ability than the British before the British started conquering it, for example.  And British India had frequent famines, while independent India does not.

For those involved, this can be a lose/lose proposition: Iraq has been devastated. Afghanistan has been devastated.  Some Americans definitely got rich (mostly by stealing from the American government through vast corruption); but both societies lost.  Nonetheless, those who will not resist, gain only and exactly what those who win will allow them to have.  Republican Romans were not taxed.  Their conquests were.

The effectiveness of personal violence also matters.  The concealed dagger, the concealed revolver, make assassination possible, even easy.  They restrict the mobility of those who oppress. It is not accidental that Nixon, who is President when American inequality is still low and world inequality is declining, goes to see protestors at night with only one aide, and no bodyguards, while Clinton, Bush or Obama would never consider such a thing and Washington DC is disfigured by huge concrete barriers; constant weapon checks and so on.

The more ruling requires the rulers to actually be amongst the ruled, the more the effectiveness of personal weapons matter. Obama can rule behind a cordon of guards; rulers who need to be in contact with the people cannot.

Finally we come to the balance of terror.  Weapons that devastate are weapons of terror.  Aerial bombardment is about terror, drones with hellfire missiles are about terror.  “We can kill you, and we can destroy your infrastructure, and there is nothing you can do to stop us.”

Terror begets terror.  Those who are terrorized (and bombing is a terror weapon, let no one tell you otherwise) begets attempts to retaliate.

Terror is remarkably ineffective against non-elite societies until it scales.  If you can destroy entire populations, your terror will work.  If everyone fears your kidnap and torture squads; it may work.  But it doesn’t win actual wars: even World War II strategic bombing was found to be largely ineffective at stopping German production, what it was good at was killing large numbers of civilians.

What terror is good at is dealing with out of touch enemy elites.  If you can swoop in, kill the elites, and they cannot stop you, they are more likely to give you what you want without ever having to fight.  This is also what conventional military supremacy is good for.  Imagine the following scenario: George Bush invades Iraq, publishes a proscription list, and elevates a competent Colonel to be the new leader of Iraq and leaves within 6 months.

That would send a message to elites with ineffective conventional armies all through the world: “we can kill you, personally.”

It does not work against highly motivated ideological organizations.  Killing the #2 man in the Taliban more times than I can remember has not stopped the Taliban.  Vast waves of assassination throughout large parts of the Muslim world have not stopped the rise of al-Qaeda affiliates or similar organizations.  Terror works against people who have something left to lose, or who value their life more than anything else.  Against those who are willing to die for their beliefs and who lead an organization or society which agrees with them, it matters little: they will be replaced and their replacement is just as likely to be more competent than less.

But if your elites fear for their lives and do not have strong beliefs they are willing to die for your society will be run, in effect, by the foreign nation which they fear, and while your elites will probably do well enough from bribes, ordinary people will not.

From the point of view of those with an advantage in terror, then, it is best used either as wholesale slaughter, or as very occasional examples. Once people have nothing to lose; or once you have radicalized them, it is almost completely ineffective, and can even be counterproductive, with each new atrocity simply making the masses more determined to resist.

If terror is your weapon, use it sparingly, or make sure your enemies’ ability to resist in destroyed utterly.

Wars of terror are devastating to prosperity.  Waves of torture; mass bombing campaigns; serial assassination, destroy either the infrastructure of society or the cohesion and trust required for prosperity. If one side feels it can destroy the other with impunity, you wind up with Gaza.

Those who want prosperity must be able to retaliate effectively. If you can be fined millions for “stealing” a few dozen songs; if you can be jailed for, in effect, going bankrupt (the case in America today); if the police can easily defeat the masses; then those who control government and thus control the police can and will take as much of the surplus of society as they want.  Those who doubt this proposition are invited to note that the top 10% of society (really the top 3% or so) in America are now taking more than the entire gains of the recovery while America has created a paramilitary police; and an unprecedented in American history surveillance network and has put in prison the largest % of its population in history.  These three facts are not unrelated.

Concluding Remarks

There are many in the world today who want to change technology to make the world a better place.  If they are concerned with prosperity for the masses let me suggest to them this: cheap weapons that make groups of men and women effective fighters; which require them to trust together and work in groups; are in the long run likely to lead to prosperity.  Nor can this empowerment be in area denial alone. IEDs are great at ensuring the writ of the government cannot extend to an area: but they destroy prosperity.  Technologies like drones (and effective ground combat robots are about 10 years out), will do the opposite.

By itself technologies that empower organized groups are insufficient.  But they are virtually a requirement for widespread prosperity. Without them those who have the advantage in violence will use it to take what they can, and those who cannot resist will live in the conditions their superiors allow.

(Update: reference to droit du seigneur removed.)


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