Re: <nettime> "Too bad your great ideas will never work."

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

I don't think that there is anything in-between for the individual, but 
yes, there is a lot in the space of social contracts and regulations.
Which brings up an interesting topic - stratification of the society 
based on particular cognitive abilities.
While one (usually a Marxist) can argue that nothing ever changes, I 
think that the exponential rise of the complexity of everyday technology 
creates a qualitatively new environment, where smaller and smaller 
number of specialists really understand (and therefore have power over) 
everyday "objects".
To illustrate: few centuries ago, when King sent soldiers to beat the 
shit out of someone, you didn't need IQ over 80 and special training to 
understand what happened, and you could make an informed vote to limit 
the king's ability for search, seize and beat, and you could verify that 
it was executed.
Today, the argument goes, the computers, networks and cryptography are 
so complicated, that people must rely on regulations, executed by the 
trusted elected officials, to be protected from "soldiers" that ordinary 
people cannot even see. This is where the system breaks down - this 
completely novel requirement to blindly trust officials to do the 
unverifiable. Trusting the officials to reign in the obvious thugs that 
everyone can see has been equated to trusting the officials to protect 
our data, which 7 people have any clue where it is and how it moves. 
Mind boggling.
Unfortunately the left cannot wean off this fallacy, which is its only 
allowed solution, and keeps ending in the blind alley. The powers that 
be wholeheartedly support this avenue (including some famous exiles), 
exactly for that reason - it's guaranteed to go nowhere.
Why is this (blindly trusting elected officials and faith in the system, 
which just needs to be a bit better) the only allowed option for the 
left? Probably because otherwise the left would have to acknowledge that 
we entered the techno-saturated era where people are fundamentally 
unequal to the extent that the 19th century democracy and social models 
simply do work any more and cannot deliver. It's just too easy to fuck 
over, wholesale, the uneducated and the stupid. The left has no 
mechanisms to deal with this: it does not have the currency to pay the 
clever and the educated, which then work for powers that be, and it is 
left with the loud, "hackers" and not so capable ones.
If the left is to prevail, it must find such currency, integrate those 
into its body politic, and dismantle the cognitive stratification. The 
currency is not necessarily the cash. It can be the ideology that is 
attractive not just to janitors, minorities and the unemployed. 
Unbelievable number of very clever and capable techies wander through 
various groups (Ethereum, Bitcoin, yoga, Blockstack, etc.) looking, in 
vain, for the meaning of life - the 6-digit salaries are not enough.
The best the left could think of was to throw rocks at the Google bus, 
thus elegantly contributing to the stratification. It continued to rely 
on the old models of "educating" and "organizing" masses, spreading 
class consciousness, etc, among the irrelevant ones. We see the results.

On 9/14/17, 04:17, Felix Stalder wrote:
> I'm not sure about this. There are lots of things in the middle, if you
> leave the what-I-can-do-as-an-individual-perspective. One is called
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