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RE: Extortion Attempt of Julian Assange Reveals Total Invasion of Privacy By Ecuadorian Officials at Embassy
Doesn't give much credibility to the Ecuadorian government does it. Well, at least it seems he hasn't been waterboarded, murdered and disappeared - which is likely to happen if he ends up in the hands of the US. Although, the official story might be something like "Assange confesses: commits suicide in cell"
All too likely, I'm afraid. I'd love to see an ocean of people protesting in the streets and carry him away - like he's crowd surfing right out of the embassy. I think that@kerrywolf is correct though we're inundated and even when a spark is lit apathy floods back over us and we get whisked away by its current.
Governments are made up of sacks of shit like us who, after getting to taste a little power, see checks and balances fundamentally as nothing but an impediment. In a world where everything happens increasingly in the digital realm, as many types of transactions as possible should take place on distributed ledgers. That would increasingly obviate the need for counteracting bad actors after the fact thus increasingly removing the need for the criminal justice system. Physical violence will always remain the ultimate trump card, but that resource, too, could be controlled using smart contracts executed on distributed computer networks given sufficiently advanced robotics and AI. The key is to remove the animal element from coercive power.
IMHO, the key is to restore power to individuals from the centralized institutions that have parasitized all of us to gain their oppressive power. DLTs are only part of that endeavor, and alone will simply be coopted by the financial institutions that presently exert control.
Means of production in every industry are being decentralized today at the bleeding edge of technological advance, from agriculture to manufacturing. By adopting individually the decentralized mechanisms that make the most sense in our personal situation, we decrease the parasitism of our wealth and power that creates oppressive tyranny.
We wouldn't even know that JA had been arrested without that decentralizing of the media by citizen journalists, for example. We may not presently have the power to secure his liberty, or even his life, today, but we never will be able to protect any - or all - of us unless we take back our power from the tyrants feeding off our production by adopting nascent technological advance across all industries burgeoning today.
It is the concatenation of decentralization that most creates a robust mechanism to resist tyranny. Any single person, like JA, or mechanism, like DLTs, is able to be oppressed and controlled via the centralized institutions that parasitize us all. That centralization is the very weakness that prevents control of the breadth of decentralization. Institutions centralize our wealth and power via parasitization, and project that power in mechanisms focused by the corrupt individual agents of those institutions. That utterly prevents broad spectrum responses to decentralization across all fields of human endeavor.
We are all animals. It is not to our benefit to further decrease our power, but rather to restore it to us from whom it has been parasitized by inhuman institutions controlled by individual agents. We do that by making what we need ourselves as our situation indicates, by being journalists ourselves, and by making our own means of transacting amongst one another that is resistant to parasitism - DLTs.
Nature is messy, redundant, and robust exactly because of the decentralization of the web of life. Centralized institutions are neat, efficient, and fragile because they are able to specialize and focus on one particular vector for wealth/power. To best defeat tyrants wielding institutional parasitic power against us, we must adopt the redundancy and powerful decentralization natural ecosystems reveal as the secret of their robust ability to thrive under all conditions.
I define abuse and injustice as the problem.
Times before centralized institutions were violent, chaotic and rife with abuse and injustice. Abuse and injustice, plenty of it, can take place at the micro level, too, as in between individuals, within small groups or between small groups. It does not require any degree of centralization.
The out-group vs. in-group distinction is built into our psyche. We are capable of dehumanizing those whom we consider not members of our in-group, committing unspeakable acts of cruelty against them and killing them without compunction given sufficient "justification". Harming our competition and tormenting those beneath our station are par for the course within our in-groups. In a state of nature, our lives are nasty, brutish and short. This has been going on since the dawn of our species, long before there were any centralized power structures.
What centralized states did was stop endemic warfare between tribes by instituting a justice system. But that solution was and remains very inadequate because the problem only played out at a higher level of organization. And thanks to centralization, we have state-level actors capable of developing weapons of mass destruction powerful enough to kill everyone. In fact, that has almost happened at least once.
You're right in that DLT alone is insufficient against corrupt centralized power structures. It's a part of a large array of tools. What I see being done by those in control of centralized power structures is act out the dark side of their human natures with little to stop them. Power is seductive because we're hardwired to seek it. Power is extremely useful at enhancing our success at propagating our genes. But dismantling centralized power structures solves only part of the problem.
No part of this comment isn't true enough. We are indeed hardwired to form hierarchies, and all the social niceties you mention are part of that system. To skip to the end, I also agree that dismantling centralized power structures by implementing decentralized mechanisms will not solve all our problems.
Good. Without problems to solve, we'll become vapid, insipid wastes of oxygen. Without struggle neither of us would be able to speak at all - we had to struggle to learn how to do so. I don't expect decentralization to solve all human problems. I just want the free and sovereign people of the world to have both the authority and the responsibility to do that themselves. Darwin can take care of the aftermath.