5 posts tagged with "anarchism"

The Dispossesed is a sci-fi novel about an anarchist society formed on the imaginary planet of Anarres. The society has been founded after an anarchist revolution in Urras, which led its government to send the anarchists to an uninhabited Anarres to establish the society of their dreams. The story is told from the point of view of Shevek, who is a physicist in Anarres and visits Urras for furthering his research and collaborating with the scientists there.

The novel is a great exploration of how a society founded in anarchist ideals could actually function. The stark contrast from our established ideas of property, nation-states, marriage, etc. are very interesting and lay bare many assumptions which we make about how a society should be organized.

Below are just some of the ideas which I found quite interesting in the book:

1. The idea of Property​

“Oiie was an ethical man, but his private insecurities, his anxieties as a property owner, made him cling to rigid notions of law and order. ”

“I have something they want,” he said. “An idea. A scientific theory. I came here from Anarres because I thought that here I could do the work and publish it. I didn’t understand that here an idea is a property of the State. I don’t work for a State. I can’t take the money and the things they give me. I want to get out”

Anarres being an anarchist didn't have any idea of property. People lived in syndicates, did the work they were assigned by PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination). Hence, Shevek is appalled by the idea of state owning property. Since there is no idea of property, there is also nothing called money in Anarres.

Interestingly, different countries in today's world have different attitudes to property. Property is one of the central pieces of the American legal system and is considered an unalienable right.

From Property Rights in American History

Americans have long esteemed private property and economic opportunity.

Well before the formation of the United States the colonists enjoyed widespread ownership of land and were increasingly receptive to an emerging free market economy based on private contracts.

While in India, the Right to Property is not a fundamental right. By the 44th Amendment Act of 1978, Right to Property was removed from our Fundamental Rights and was made a Legal Right. It expanded the power of the state to appropriate property for social welfare purposes.

Locke argues that

Individuals can acquire full property rights over moveable and nonmoveable parts of the earth in a state of nature, absent government. Our natural rights include the right legitimately to acquire property, and any government must respect natural rights including rights to property.

It is quite interesting to see that though most of us consider right to property as our unquestionable right, the legal foundations of it are quite intricate and vary from one nation to another.

2. Is centralization inevitable?​

“you can’t have a nervous system without at least a ganglion, and preferably a brain. There had to be a center. The computers that coordinated the administration of things, the division of labor, and the distribution of goods, and the central federatives of most of the work syndicates, were in Abbenay, right from the start. And from the start the Settlers were aware that that unavoidable centralization was a lasting threat, to be countered by lasting vigilance.”

Although Anarres society was envisaged to be a decentralised one, organizations for coordination and communication had been instituted. For example, PDC coordinated all the production and distribution mechanisms. There were also institutes like Central Institute of Sciences which controlled most of research and publication.

The key question this raises is:

Is complete decentralization ever posssible or any decentralised organization will develop centers of authority/influence which will control the independent bodies. Is centralization inevitable and the only way to counter it is with being vigilant about such accumulation of power? But if such centralization of power comes about, will these centres want to lose power to enable decentralization?

3. Is "time" just a manifestation of consciousness?​

“It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time.”

This is a deep philosophical question on the existence of time - Does time really exist? At least physics doesn't agree with it and time is just considered a perception from our existence in the space-time continuum.

4. The survival of the fittest for a social animal?​

“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!”

“Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.”

The laws of evolution suggest that the strongest survive. Though recent research on biology has suggested that evolution doesn't care about the survival of the individual - but that of the gene pool(more technically, genome). Sapolsky has a great set of lectures on Human Behavioural Biology where he argues how human behaviours and customs have emerged to accomplish this goal.

In Part 1 of this post, I discussed a particular example - that of decentralised Uber to decipher if a decentralised Uber makes sense, or in general is decentralistion always better?

In this post, we will explore some the theoretical basis of the argument.

Braess's Paradox​

Braess's paradox (often cited as Braess' paradox) is a proposed explanation for the situation where an alteration to a road network to improve traffic flow actually has the reverse effect and impedes traffic through it.

You can find the complete explaination of this example here. I will just suffice to say that the total commute time from Start to End is lower if there is no link from A to B vs when there is. It would be better if a rule is laid down that only a certain number of people are allowed in the road A to B. Keeping it open to independent choices of everyone produces an outcome which is sub-optimal to everyone

Decentralisation is not a value in itself​

I recently came across a very interesting tweet by Simona Pop of Bounties Network.

There is no inherent value in decentralization. What decentralisation enables is of value for some people or in some contexts. Does it make people more efficient? Can theynow do things which government or regulators didn't want them to? Does it give them more control of their lives? These are the questions which actually matter.

Democracy vs Dictatorship​

In context of nations, the tradeoff between democracy and dictatorship is very similar to that between decentralization and centralization.

Though nations have much broader and varied goal, compared to organizations. For example, companies have a clear metric of creating more shareholder value.

What are the metrics on which decentralised organizations should be judged? Is it the value accrued to network participants?

How much value can be assigned to network participants not getting censoured - which is one the key benefits of decentralised orgs.

Countries' metric can be GDP, GINI coefficient or the happiness level ( Bhutan actually uses this metric)

Historically, Decentralisation always emerged as a response to restrictions in centralised systems​

Here's a great post which talks about the rise of decentralization in context of mp3 file sharing. The author points that decentralization always arises in response to the law when a certain use of centralized technology is denied.

A quote from the above post which sums this beautifully

Ask yourself, what can some people not do on centralized systems which they should be able to do? If you look closely, you might be able to spot informal strategies people are using today to get around the rules, and these could help inform what to formalize into a protocol.

What do people really want?​

I think the key question is - What do people really want? Are they OK with sacrificing some privacy and freedom for better user experience and less effort.

If we try to reason with organization of states, most states have high level of centralization. US, China, Russia are some examples which come to mind. Direct democracies in comparison have been few and has only worked for fewer states.

Other advantage of centralization is that it concentrates power on the top layers. These people want to increase their power - leading to more alliances, subjugation or attacks - ultimately leading for the organizations to be more powerful.

Similar dynamics can be seen in corporate orgnizations. The profit motive actually helps them become bigger and concentrate more power. This drive is lacking in decentralised organizations.

Urusula Le Guinn in her book The Dispossesed portrays this beautifully. The book talks about a society born out of anarchism, an extreme form of decentralization. These people establish a society from ground up in a new planet. What was interesting was that even in this anarchist society points of centralization emerged. For example, people were given names by a centralised computer systems. Important people controlled means of production and media. The book is a great portrayal of the dichotomy between centralization and decentralization.

The emergence of miner centralization, high level of control by developers, etc. point to this phenomenon in current crypto ecosytem. It emerges primarily for better coordination and efficiency.

This begs the question:

Isn't the inherent tendency for people to strive for power a deterrent against decentralization? And what has fundamentally changed in the last few years which would tilt the balance towards decentralization?

Below are my notes from the book Underground by Suelette Dryfus & Julian Assange. It's an amazing book if you want to get a glimpse of the early days of the hacking culture. It also explores the culture which created folks like Julian Assange who is a powerful force in the world today.

I mostly focus on the human aspects of the book as the technical aspects are anyways outdated now. But even the human and social aspects throw a lot of light on how these early day hackers used to think.

1. Friendship

When Craig Bowen (aka Thunderbird1) came to believe in 1989 that he had been duped by Gill, he retreated into a state of denial and depression. The PI community had trusted him. He entered his friendship with Gill a bright-eyed, innocent young man looking for adventure. He left the friendship betrayed and gun-shy.

Hackers are after all humans and are driven by a sense of friendship and community. Some people may imagine hackers as people who eat and breath technology, but at some level, the sense of friendship and community is important for everyone. After all, man is a social animal.

1. Hackers would reveal their most prized hacks only to other hackers they trusted the most

The two hackers trusted each other; in fact Gavin was the only person to whom Force revealed the exact address of the CitiSaudi machine.

Even among hackers, there are multiple layers and inner circle and outer circles. You are admitted to these circles once you prove your worth - by hacking difficult systems.

1. Recognition, important for some

Phoenix laughed at how well he had thumbed his nose at Cliffy Stoll. This article would show him up all right. It felt so good, seeing himself in print that way.

1. The High

At home over the next few weeks, Electron struggled to come to terms with the fact that he would have to give up hacking forever. He still had his modem, but no computer. Even if he had a machine, he realised it was far too dangerous to even contemplate hacking again. So he took up drugs instead.

Hacking and owning systems provide a different type of high! :)

1. The motivation

"In your own words, tell me what fascination you find with accessing computers overseas?"

`Well, basically, it's not for any kind of personal gain or anything,' Electron said slowly. It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Not because he didn't know the answer, but because it was a difficult answer to describe to someone who had never hacked a computer.

`It's just the kick of getting in to a system. I mean, once you are in, you very often get bored and even though you can still access the system, you may never call back.

1. A clear head

When he was in serious hacking mode, he never smoked. A clear head was much too important. Besides, the high he got from hacking was a hundred times better than anything dope could ever do for him.

1. See and Look hacking as illegal

The Scottish Law Commission issued a 1987 report proposing to make unauthorised data access illegal, but only if the hacker tried to `secure advantage, or cause damage to another person'--including reckless damage.2 Simple look-see hacking would not be a crime under the report's recommendations. However, in 1989 The Law Commission of England and Wales issued its own report proposing that simple unauthorised access should be a crime regardless of intent--a recommendation which was eventually included in the law.

Should simple see and look hacking be made illegal? What damage is it causing? Isn't it just like entering a house and seeing things. It is not nice certainly, but is it a crime?

1. Weird is good

Trax seemed slightly eccentric, and possibly suffered from some sort of anxiety disorder. He refused to travel to the city, and he once made reference to seeing a psychiatrist. But Mendax usually found the most interesting people were a little unusual, and Trax was both.

Eccentric people are the most interesting. Homogeneity is a killer of creativity and genius.

1. Many great discoveries are made by just tinkering

Trax made his great discovery by accident. He was using a phone sprinter, a simple computer program which automatically dialled a range of phone numbers looking for modems. If he turned the volume up on his modem when his computer dialled what seemed to be a dead or non-existent number, he sometimes heard a soft clicking noise after the disconnection message.

This is how Trax, one of the pioneers in phreaking discovered a new hack. Many great discoveries are just happy accidents by prepared minds who keep on tinkering.

1. Music

Techno was musical nihilism; no message, and not much medium either. Fast, repetitive, computer-synthesised beats, completely stripped of vocals or any other evidence of humanity. He liked to go to techno-night at The Lounge, a city club, where people danced by themselves, or in small, loose groups of four or five. Everyone watched the video screen which provided an endless stream of ever-changing, colourful computer-generated geometric shapes pulsing to the beat.

Music has a potential to bring people together. A similar observation was made by Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, in his book Delivering Happiness. He observed that dancing to techno music with big crowds made him feel part of a bigger whole, part of the human experience.

1. The Will to Power

The desire for power grew throughout Anthrax's teenage years. He ached to know everything, to see everything, to play with exotic systems in foreign countries. He needed to know the purpose of every system, what made them tick, how they fitted together. Understanding how things worked would give him control.

Hackers are driven by their immense curiosity and a desire to control systems.

1. What is power?

Anthrax defines power as the potential for real world impact.

Great definition of power.

American Kingpin by Nick Bilton is the story of Ross Ulbricht, the creator Silk Road, arguably the most dangerous website to have existed on the Internet.

Here are some of my notes from the book:

1. Fundamental belief​

“It is not the government’s right to tell the people what they can and cannot put in their bodies,” Ross began, going on to explain that drugs—all drugs—should be legalized, as it would make society safer and people have a right to do what they want with their bodies.”

“How can you legalize something that kills tens of thousands of people a year?” The College Democrat agreed.

Ross calmly countered, “So do you think we should outlaw Big Macs from McDonald’s too, because people gain weight and have heart attacks and die as a result of them?”

The fundamental belief which ultimately led Ross Ulbricht to create Silk Road. Shows a lot of what we currently find right or wrong has been made so for benefits of big corps or people in power.

2. Ability to code up a prototype yourself is a superpower​

“He spent innumerable hours writing front-end code, back-end code, and code that helped sew those digital dialects together. Ross was teaching himself all of these programming languages on the fly. He was technically doing the equivalent of building eBay and Amazon on his own, without any help and without any knowledge.”

Ross did the majority of the coding work on his site on his own. Only later he asked a friend for help. The fact that he can get a prototype out on his own was very powerful. Also, he couldn't have asked for help - as mostly what he was doing was illegal, and even he understood that.

3. Everyone has their struggle​

“And he certainly didn’t tell them that the gaming simulation he had been building for months, which would simulate a seasteading project, had failed, as no one wanted to purchase it. He didn’t mention all those odd jobs he had done off Craigslist to make a few dollars, including editing science papers. He didn’t say that everything he had done had felt like a complete failure to him. One brilliant idea after another that no one else thought was brilliant.”

If you leave aside that what Ross created was illegal, the sheer audacity of his goals was remarkable. And if, even he, has had such periods of doubt, why should the rest of us have it any easier? In a way, the struggle strengthens your muscles to endure things.

4. Intentions, always good?​

“René then went on to explain that he had experienced an epiphany of late, that we all work so hard in our jobs, and for what? “There is no level of success that would make me feel happy all the time,” he reflected. “Those little achievements are little fleeting moments.”

Ross scratched his beard, seemingly disagreeing with his friend. “I imagine there is some silver lining to . . . pushing yourself to the limit,” Ross said. “I’ve had similar experiences with my work, where that becomes everything, more important than anything.”

“I want to have had a substantial positive impact on the future of humanity by that time,” Ross remarked.”

In his own mind, Ross was trying to have a good impact on humanity.

5. How things turn bad​

“If word got out that it was okay to sing to the cops and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, the Dread Pirate Roberts wouldn’t be the most feared pirate sailing the Dark Web, but rather a weakling pushover. The Silk Road would be known as a place where you could break the rules without reprisal.

This led to the third option for Green: killing him.”

In an effort to preserve what he was creating at Silk Road, Ross made a very rational decision of killing someone. Shows that there's a very thin line between right and wrong. Morality and immorality. And many times, it justs depends upon the story we tell ourselves.

6. Killing someone, justified?​

“Yes, but the use of force is completely justified if you have to defend your own rights or personal property,” young Ross had argued while discussing one of the latest Murray Rothbard books he had devoured. Back then it had just been idealistic, hypothetical banter by a group of college students.”

“Now, as the Dread Pirate Roberts, the more Ross thought about it, the more he wondered if beating Green up would be enough of a punishment to deter others on the site from betrayal. He started to wonder if he might not have a choice but to put his libertarian theories to their ultimate test. Curtis Green had, after all, stolen DPR’s “personal property.” All $350,000 of it.”

So, the ordering of the killing for Ross aka Dread Pirate Roberts was just putting his theories to practice.

This eerily reminds me of Dostoevsky's Crime and Puninshment, where the protagonist Raskolnikov logically argues that killing the old woman was the right thing to do.

7. Repeat. Repeat.​

“One of the strangest of these idiosyncrasies was the bizarre fact that he read everything—literally everything—three times. It didn’t matter what it was; if it had text on its pages, Gary would read it once, then again, and then once more. When he received an e-mail, he would read it three times before replying. He would read news articles three times. Books; text messages; research papers; someone’s tax forms. He did this, he told people, to ensure that he remembered more information than those around him. When he was younger, he had heard that the brain retains only a small percentage of words when you read, so he reasoned that if he started consuming every snippet of text at least three times, he would remember more.”

There's a very curious character of Gar Alford, who works at IRS and apparently reads everything 3 times. By going through the same material three times, he is able to catch nuances and details which others tend to miss.

So someone in 2011 was already practising the mantra of going slow which the tech world is slowly adopting now.

Art of going Slowly

8. Mission and Meaning​

“Let me tell you a little parable,” Dread wrote to one employee. “It’s the middle ages in Europe. . . .” He went on with the story: A man “walks onto a construction site and he sees a group of laborers carving stone blocks for a building. Most of the men are working slowly, with long, unhappy faces. “What are you doing?” the man asks the laborers, to which they reply, “What does it look like we’re doing? We’re carving stone blocks.” But then the man sees another worker who has a glint in his eye and a smile across his face. This worker seems to be toiling at twice the speed of the others, and his stone carvings are impeccable. So the man goes over and asks him, “What are you doing?” To which this laborer looks back and answers: “I’m building a cathedral to the glory of God.”

Human beings seek meaning in the work they are doing. You provide them meaning - they can withstand anything. A great book to read on this topic is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl in which he talks about how the captives in the Nazi concentration camps survived arduous conditions.

9. What can a single person do?​

“ That every single person can have a sweeping and massive impact on the world they live in. Some choose to have a positive effect, others a negative; some don’t know the difference. But most people think their role in this big, big world is meaningless. Just a job.

”

Here, Jared, one of the homeland security agents who helped catch Ross Ulbricht reminisces how he had set out to end Silk Road based on a single pill he had caught in the customs checking. How these pills were destroying the fabric of American society and how his work has prevented it from debilitating further.

Ross Ulbricht was finally caught and was given a double life sentence. He is serving his term now and will possibly remain in jail for the rest of his life.

For those interested, many believe that Ross Ulbricht was railroaded and there's campaign to get his sentence reduced.

While I had heard about the idea of Hacker Culture, I recently encountered this curious fact.

In a recent interview, Paul Graham the famous founder of YCombinator, was sharing the fact that his co-founder in his startup, ViaWeb which was later acquired by Yahoo was a convicted felon. His co-founder, Robert Morris, or RTM as he is more commonly known, was the creator of Morris Worm which was one of the first such worms which used the Internet to spread. RTM went on to do great things in life from becoming a prof to being co-founder of YCombinator, again with PaulG.

The floppy disk with the source code of the Morris worm is now kept in the Boston Museum of Science

Source: Morris Worm turns 25

What blew my mind was this: A convicted felon was the founder of a great startup (ViaWeb) and a world-leading incubator (YC). When I think about a felon, I mostly picture a person who is badass, scruffy and generally not a nice guy. But I was so wrong. It just meant that the law of the land was not advanced enough to understand what RTM was doing. It shows that law is a living creature and depends on the societal and technological context in which it operates.

Hackers are generally painted in a negative light and most people think that hackers do shady things by stealing money by sneaking into systems. Very few people see them as pioneers who are pushing the boundaries in their field, figuring out gems which push our society forward.

Paul Graham has a great book, Hackers and Painters, which tries to elucidate the opposite point of view. Hackers are similar to creative people in other domains, its just that they have chosen technology as their playing field.

I delved a bit deeper into this, primarily via two books - Underground by Julian Assange and Suelette Dreyfus and American Kingpin by Nick Bilton.

Underground talks about the stories of early hackers in Australia, USA, the UK of which Mendax(aka Julian Assange) was also part. American Kingpin focuses on the story of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road. I plan to do a detailed review of these books sometime, but that's for another post.

Books: American Kingpin and Underground

So, the hacker scene originated in the 1980s when the BBSs(Bulletin Board Systems) came into the picture. It started with phreakers messing with telephone systems to get free phone calls across the world. This opened a new world for them as they can exchange notes with people across the world and boast about their skills.

The Internet in the initial days was dominated by academic and research institutions. It was designed primarily for research institutions like NASA, universities, etc. to collaborate with each other on their projects. Hackers started getting onto such systems tinkering with the servers and information they had.

What are the primary drives which motivate hackers

• Explore and tinker with systems. Play with a system to figure out what it can or cannot do.
• "Own" a system - Gives a sense of power
• A sense of community - To meet a group of people who think like you. Enjoy the same things when normal society treats you as an outcast and you always get a sense that you don't belong there.
• Irreverence for authority - If something is forbidden by an authority, that makes it more interesting to do it.

But, the majority of the social progress belongs to such outcasts.

I can hear you asking, "Why?"

Well, creating something new needs you to have a streak of irreverence, otherwise you will be bogged down by society's questions and criticism. By default, most people think that nothing new could be done. We are programmed by evolution to conserve energy. (Remember the time when humans were hunter-gatherer and securing food was the prime worry of our ancestors! Those genes haven't yet gone away). It takes a lot more energy to examine why things are how they are and propose a better solution, which is more in sync with the current state of societal and technological progress.

The strange thing is that the way our current society is organized doesn't have anything sacrosanct about it but is just a point in the evolution of the society. It can be changed, and it will be changed

Anarchism​

Wikipedia defines Anarchism as a political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary institutions. Anarchism holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary and harmful.

The state is the ultimate symbol of power. By definition, citizens give up a part of their sovereignty to create a state and agree to follow the legal structure of the state. This ensures that people don't kill each other and live in relative peace.

Anarchists question this fundamental belief that state is good. They argue that though the state was designed to serve its citizens, it becomes an institution of and for itself, and people running it wield unprecedented power. This state becomes the Leviathan.

Anarchism has at roots similar beliefs which power the hacker culture. The irreverence for authority. In that sense, how right are we as a society to paint hacker culture or anarchism as impalatable concepts. Aren't these ethos fundamentally important to take our society forward in the changing technological context?

Some question which I find myself asking:

1. Why India produces no great hackers? Barring a few exceptions (e.g. Yaha worm) we are severely lacking in this field.

It is unfortunate, that as a nation the most famous hacker we have is Ankit Fadia, who is, in reality, a charlatan. Some argue that it is our subservient upbringing and risk-averse training which has led to this. But, then..

1. Why China, even though has similar subservient upbringing, produces lot more hackers? (Political ideology? Nationalistic drive?)

Some people argue that the next world war will be fought in the cyberspace and Zero Day exploits will be used as weapons of mass destruction. If that day really comes to pass, are we prepared to face it?

References​

Underground - Julian Assange & Suelette Dreyfus

Started with BBSs and telephone phreaking, which became more and more advanced with the coming of the Internet.

American Kingpin by Nick Bilton

The core belief of Ross Ulbricht was that it should be individual's choice what they chose to put or not put in their body. He believed in libertarianism and rejected the authority of the state to meddle with drug control.

Citizen Four

Story of NSA Whistleblower - Snowden

Risk - A film by Laura Poitras

Story of Julian Assange - The founder of Wikileaks