Regulating big tech

The big four tech companies stood before a congressional committee.  This might have been a great turning point in economic and social history.  It may yet become one.  However, they did not stand, they appeared via video link, and the committee had no power to enforce any action.

These enlightenment mechanisms, social shame among elites, the idea of heaven and hell, hold little fear for the modern global elite. They can jet off and forget about all their worries in their favourite sun kissed tax haven.

As to fear of God, it is these companies that have become modern Gods, only their moment of complete triumph has been spiked by overseas competition. The Russians have vContact and the Chinese have Baidu.  Given diplomatic tradition it is surprising that the French have not set up their own social media platform.

So now that their strategic power in the world is no longer unique the question arises domestically in America, how can they be regulated?  The question has arisen in Europe before and there are ongoing court cases involving all these players.  These court cases go beyond the rule of law into the realm of politics and inter-state relations as Washington seeks changes in the law of Europe, and indeed ignores its own long anti-trust traditions.

The solution must be different for each of the Giants.  Ironically, Google seems to be in the most trouble legally, largely because it does not exert direct pressure on public opinion.  Facebook is both courted and reviled, greenlighted by the Pentagon overseas, forming problematic even anti-constitutional arrangements at home. If I hear Zuckerberg say he does not want to be the arbiter of truth once more I will think a. he protests too much b. he has scant grasp of the concept of truth.

Amazon has enormous commercial power and has captured the minds of Wall Street more or less since its inception.  Building on the obsessions of bookish librarians to leverage the ISBN system. Barcodes for everything and the might be able to information manage the planet.

Apple was at the forefront of so much new technology but since Steve Jobs lost his 10 year struggle with pancreatic cancer they have largely been concerned with a conservative defence of their market dominance, including the right to offshore cash profits that could wipe out the debt of many countries

Google clearly needs to stop squashing vertical search competitors, specialisd image searches, product searches, geographic information, have all been bullied off the page rank by the tech giant over the last two decades.  There technology was staggeringly innovative, they are making other innovators stagger.  Their argument that other sites have their own functioning internal search, such as Amazon or EBay does not address their dominance in the advertising market.

The only solution to this problem is to make Google data publicly available.  Not just to other corporate third parties or the US government, but to have an effective searchable back end as well as a front end.  I would imagine it has virtually all the tools already developed for in house purposes and would just need to release them to the public.

Facebook is another with a large share of global advertising and a trove of personal interest data that enriches anyone with curiosity about individuals or society.  Due to network effects, that larger networks are more valuable, there is little to be gained in breaking the company up into smaller units, competition between rival silos would not on the face of it help the consumer.

But Facebook more than any other platform is built by its users, it offers just the platform, and no content.  Its development team does seem to work primarily for the people that populate the site, but the people who seek to manipulate the people who populate the site.

“One person can connect with another person for free on the premise that a third party will pay to manipulate the pair”.

Is essentially the Facebook model.  Two measures might help, one which obviously appeals to rewards for work, is payments from Facebook revenues to site users. This might not be full co-operatisation of the platform, though a co-op would probably be Facebooks natural legal form, but profit sharing would seem just.

The issue of data access is the same as with Google.  The company has a wealth of data analysis tools, they just need to be accessible to all.

But like the old campaign for a standardised bank account number, or the transferable mobile phone number, the data profile should be standardised and portable.  That way, alternative providers could compete to offer services while the social experience remained on one cohesive network.

Time Berners-Lee semantic web project includes technology to allow individual data to be held with the individual, not the company.  It would be held locally with local permissions.

Amazon has some fairly traditional anti-trust problems of bullying, stealing IP and under-cutting.  Their data gathering with in house bugging devices attempts to lift them more into the data insight category of Google and Facebook.  But before they get there problems with training humans to be robots, and stealing popular products from successful suppliers are amenable to traditional legislation, if it was applied.

The infrastructure of AWS is essentially a modern infrastructure utility and might be regulated like other essential utility services.

If it was a profit sharing co-op many of these complaints would have no basis.

But the technology these groups develop going forward.  The software that they will be able to create with their armies of societies most talented, their cross border reach, their ubiquitous surveillance make them unique organisations in human history.

There are other smaller, more nimble players with equally if not more clever software (just not with such large resources).  The only real solution to oversight of these, and the developing artificial intelligence systems is to have public code repositories.  That every piece of software that runs on any machine connected to the web be registered before it is run.

This would be relatively simple to enforce as digital signatures are not hard to create or monitor.  The problem is will and power.  Will power, or Power will.  Power will corrupt and the basis of power shifts like waves of a sea in these times of rapid change.  But that see is software, it will increasingly be WetWare.  Biological software programmes written in DNA and RNA.

The danger is that Hubris, a competitive race that blinds developers in greed and power lust or just a plain and simple accident produces some version of the Grey Goo scenario.  A self-replicating progamme that makes everything else extinct.

The “move fast break things” approach, if deliberate, is a clear admission of criminal damage. It should be treated as such.  The pace of change needs to be at a pace that allows for scrutiny.

Concentration of power produces tyranny.  Tyranny produces misery. Silicon Valley has grown giddy on the privatisation of DARPA funded research, but now, the Chinese know what they know.  And just as if we are to train moral artificial intelligence we have to treat the animals better (for we are dumb apes to HAL), to provide any moral leverage on Chinese research excellence, it is time we, or America, got hold of the behaviours that it has enabled through it’s tech companies.

Transparency, Software repository and co-operatisation are what’s necessary. I expect many pages of report and little action.

(Zuckerberg admitted anti-trust action buying Instagram, Bezos admitted anti-competitive dumping on the price of Alexa, will even the existing law be enforced?)

Papyrus. Symbiotic Crops

Papyrus

The papyrus reed is nothing less a foundation of human of civilisation. It is one of the earliest domesticated crops, having been farmed on the Nile as far back as 6000BC, it was used extensively in the Mediterranean, Cyprus, Sicily, France and up into the Tigres Euphrates delta.  It provided a crucial source of fibre for rope making, matting, construction, writing, boat building and the roots are used as a food crop similar to potatoes.

Papyrus was the medium upon which knowledge was recorded across Europe, giving its name to paper.  The word derives from Greek with the some scholars distinguishing between Papyros, which was the food, and Byblos, which was the paper. The earliest recorded papyrus scroll dates from around 2500BC. Though given its tendency to degrade, it was likely used long before then.

Papyrus was replaced by more durable wood pulp paper, a Chinese technology spread through the Islamic conquests. It had a ceremonial and spiritual importance with all Papal Bulls written on papyrus until 1022, the period of the first crusade.

It was papyrus boats that allowed the builders of the Iranian step pyramids to reach central America and found Aztec civilisation.  As Thor Heyerdahl demonstrates in Ra II.

Heyerdahl first came to fame sailing a Balsa wood raft across the Pacific to prove the possibility that the Polynesian Islands were populated by South Americans. A fact recently proven by genetic analysis that dates contact between the populations as 1100AD.  However Heyerdahl second “mission” demonstrates that contact could easily have occurred before the eruption of Thera in 1600BC, or indeed before the collapse of the Egyptian Old Kingdom in 2700 BC.

Heyerdahl took the design of his boat off a painting inside a pyramid, which proves the technology was in use by that point, the particular pyramid was the classically recognisable smooth sided Pyramid.  However the Iranian step pyramids predate those of Egypt and in design bare greater similarity to the pyramids of central America.

One of the finest pieces of Levantine archaeology is a shopping list that fatally hulled the idea of Hebrew as an oral culture.  A stone tablet containing items to be ordered from Alexandria concluding with the line “please send more papyrus, writing on stone is tedious”.

Papyrus paper, like the palm leaves of early South Asian writing, is highly perishable and rots anywhere but the most arid conditions. Fortunately a great ancient Egyptian rubbish dump exists outside Cairo, in those most arid conditions, and it is from here that most samples of ancient papyrus are taken.  A bit like the old fashioned private detectives going through your bins, only a few thousand years too late.

If we are looking at the what plants would be good targets for crop research, or biological alteration, papyrus must be one. Fast growing,  keystone species, a fibre and food crop that hid baby Horus, and baby Moses, it could be used to slow the erosion of the Mediterranean coastline.

If planted it would create new habitats for wildlife, allow for the sequestration of large amounts of carbon in wetland habitats, be a readily harvestable fodder and fibre crop.

Papyrus became extinct in Egypt after the Islamic conquests, but has since been reintroduced, if the Mediterranean littoral was re-littered with papyrus pastures it would provide rich habitat for fish and waterfowl, provide purification of the water and support a range of postmodern cottage industries (or industrial enclosure of the coastline).

Heyerdahl deliberated long and hard whether to follow the Biblical design of the reed boat and cover the bottom with tar.  He decided against it. For while a tar bottom would preserve the reeds a little longer, an untarred bottom had a key advantage for ocean travel.  When the boat was hit by a wave, rather than sinking as a solid hulled boat would, the wave simply washed straight through the boat.

This could provide an instructive design for papyrus or indeed some new material such as carbon fibre rods, made to allow the waves to wash through the vessel.

If pleasure craft were made of papyrus, which would, like thatch, need regular replacement, this would stimulate demand for oxygen producing plants and further the economics of sunlight.

Indeed, the ancient method was to store papyrus bulbs on board the boat, such that wherever the early seafarers went, they could simply stop, plant bulbs and wait for papyrus to grow and repair their boats.

It is likely that these people were significant to central and south American culture. Two great questions are explained by the idea that it was the Iranian/Egyptian culture that settled central America after the initial migration of the Clovis. One is where did people living in the middle of the mezzo American jungles acquire their stone masonry skills?  The other is what is a fresh water reed doing growing in a volcano on Easter Island?

Heyerdahl records various different Andean languages that use the word “Ra” for Sun and an identical boat design to that of the pyramids exists on Lake Titicaca, from whence Heyerdahl found the skills to build his successful second attempt (the first was built by a shipwright from Lake Chad and lacked the ocean going features of the painted design) .

The South Americans used a different reed. The Tora reed.  And it is this fresh water reed that is found in the caldera of the volcano on the most remore Island of the Pacific – Easter Island.  Indicating that the people who built the great stone heads carried their skills in stone masonry and boat building from a culture that originated in Iran.

Reed boats clearly made excellent ocean going craft. And if the littoral of the Mediterranean was replanted with papyrus it would make a haven for wildlife and maybe the migrants that face the assault course of the Sahara and sea crossing to Lampedusa or Greece could fish while they waited, maybe even creating their own cottage industries as in East Africa where 75% of household incomes can still be derived from the crop. If nothing else, rather travelling in boats made of melted plastic bags they could attempt the crossing in planet-friendly sustainable crafts that were less likely to sink en route.

In this way the migrant crisis could become a driver for habitat creation and carbon sequestration, and some might even live hidden among the reeds on the North African coast like baby Horus or Moses.

Some links

The Intelligence Committee may have left details out of its report, but much is in plain view online.

A google site search of Open Democracy on Arron Banks.  Gold mines, insurance companies purchased, a Spy 1 number plate.  Married to what a Russian colonel described as the “most useful operative in 40 years”

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/dark-money-investigations-what-we-ve-found-out-and-why-we-re-looking/

Arron Banks
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/tagged/arron-banks/

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHZL_enGB783GB783&sxsrf=ALeKk01CA4ph0aVGR2RjtIdU2RLg0dxNNw%3A1595416360164&ei=KB8YX8PUCbyDhbIPl6a1wA0&q=brexit+banks+site%3Aopendemocracy.net&oq=brexit+banks+site%3Aopendemocracy.net&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzoECAAQR1D1pgZYiLcGYIS9BmgAcAF4AIABX4gB4QOSAQE2mAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpesABAQ&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjDiKqL3eDqAhW8QUEAHRdTDdgQ4dUDCAw&uact=5

Boris in Bylinetimes (probably a Russian source)

Tip of the Iceberg: More Connections Between Boris Johnson and Russian Influencers Emerge

Boris Johnson’s Russian Oligarch Problem

 

Securing government against corruption

The Russia report, the threat of a more assertive China, a cabinet full of ex-US PR lobbeyists.  As the UK prepares to leave Europe we are beset by foreign powers trying to take a chunk out of the British Democracy. The question then is what can be done to secure it.

The essential approach is that sunlight is the best form of disinfectant.  The best way to secure the government from corruption is to make sure that deals cannot be done in back rooms.  We have the technology, we spend more on keeping information secret.  It would be cheaper and easier to make it public.

The whole of Whitehall should be made an open system.  Every keystroke typed by a civil servant or Government minister should be recorded. Every decision made should be recorded on a distributed ledger, a “blockchain” of political decision making.  Every penny of government spending should likewise be recorded on a blockchain. Software to interrogate these systems should be widely distributed.

These ledgers could be recorded and verified not just on whitehall PCs, but the computers of political parties and interested citizens. Downloading the “mining” software could even be made mandatory or a requirement for electoral registration.

Frequent voting by the public, plebiscitary democracy, would be enabled by a blockchain recording all votes.

Going beyond this, there is the question of whether political leadership and representation is the appropriate or most efficient form of government in a world of internet and big data.  Just as the logic of the firm is undermined by information technology, that there is no particular logic in centralising economic activity in one place, there is no particular logic in centralising parliament in one place.

Representation and scrutiny can take place online if there are sufficiently secure and transparent systems to create trust in government.  The best solution currently on offer is blockchains (essentially slow databases that are very hard to edit).

Removing concentration of power would also reduce the leverage of corruption.  If you have to bribe the entire populace, then the bribe might be termed in the national interest.  To guard against cognitive bias and the inherent short termism or lack of technical or expert understanding, constitutional rule, a system of parameters that limit what can be bought or changed would provide some protection against human frailty.

The difficulty all nations face is that there are many trans-national actors.  The financial system is international.  The payments clearing system is international.  Many corporations are international.  Many private citizens have multiple passports.

There is no longer any social constraint on national elites within a nation. Rather national elites want to elevate their status to international elites and to do this they follow the IMF financial imperialism/perestroika model of extracting cash from a population.  Rentier economies, privatisation of essential services to provide dependable income, theft of credit created by national and private banks, financial and legal systems that facilitate international capital transfer, these macro-corruptions affect nations across the world.

Unless we can get hold of these forces, protecting nations from rapacious global elites will be an uphill struggle.  Greater trans-national regulation is the only plausible long term solution to the global problem of corrupt extraction of the national wealth. The WTO, ILO, UN, Basel, all these institutions must be made transparent in the same way as the civil service suggested above.  Open computer systems, blockchained decision making, and democratic input from all interested citizens.

Any corruption must be held to account and targeted at particular individuals or decision making algorithms concerned. Straightforward bans from governance organisation public and private should be the minimum redress applied to both.

Concentration of power produces corruption and inefficiency.  If we are to compete with the autocratic powers of the world then we must utilise the new technology to update our government.  The principles, the mathematics, of tolerance, accountability and citizen inclusion remain sound.  The autocrats are using the new technology, the democrats are clinging to the comfort blanket of nostalgia and the light of past success.  If transparency, accountability and inclusion in decision making are facilitated through technology there is no reason to think that the advantage over the wasteful and ignorant practice of autocracies will not reassert itself in the modern world.

If not, there is no reason to think that the misery and torture inflicted by autocracies but forgotten in a cosseted west will not likewise reassert themselves at great cost to all.

Taxation, what’s your problem?

Is Taxation Slavery?

The crucial distinction in slavery is that there is no choice of occupation.  That you must do the work of your masters. It is not, as it was commonly seen under capitalism, absence of pay.  Many slaves in the Roman Empire were paid.  Voluntary work is not slavery.

The hallmark of slavery is lack of choice.  There are various other forms of labour exploitation across history.

Is Taxation Theft?

In anything other than a kleptocracy, taxation buys public services.  Whether these are good value, is a matter of efficiency.  But an individual cannot buy public goods, such as street lights, clean air, railway.  They can be provided privately, but the negotiation power of citizens is limited and the pricing power the provider of essential goods has precludes anything other than exploitation of customers.  Anything else would be “non-rational” in classical economic terms.

So taxation in exchange for public services is collective buying, buying in bulk.  And this is almost always cheaper than buying individual items.

Is Taxation Violence?

There is the idea that because taxation is coercive then it is violence.  But coercion is not violence.  Coercion is that amount of force or pressure that stops short of violence.  Politics is the use of coercion, war is the use of violence.

Taxation is a way of overcoming human cognitive bias.  That we are selfish when we are insecure or threatened and that we discount long term gains for short term benefits. Taxation allows people to pool resources and undertake long term planning using those resources.

Violence is a manifestation of insecurity or an immediate threat response. Taxation is the very opposite.  It is a collectivist, non-selfish effort that allows the provision of collective and public goods over the long term.

Topical

The chancellor today will unveil some package, largely based on debt.  The tax-evading classes of the world feel their status is dependent on gaining this extra advantage that most ordinary citizens do not enjoy (the ISA in the UK makes tax evasion democratically available). But most could not spend their wealth within their child’s lifetime, let alone their own. There is no threat in taxation and certainly no violence.

Consumption, Income, Land

There is the question as to what should be taxed.  We have traditionally taxed income,  which is asking people to give up some of accrued value of their effort to a collective pot. What we need now is productive effort to change the economy and society, it is not obvious that all income should be taxed.  Friedman’s “negative income tax” is an example of how income tax could be levied without being a drag on productive effort.

An alternative would be to tax consumption.  In particular the consumption of luxuries or items that kill the planet.  Gordon Brown’s fuel tax escalator was an example of this. What is the value of a finite resource?  It makes complete sense to escalate taxation on finite resources to compensate for humanity’s cognitive bias towards the short term.

Land values are prone to rise with productivity and population.  They rise from social perception with no effort required from individuals. As such they represent a perfect proxy for the rising wealth of a society. Land acquires value from collective enrichment, as such, it makes sense to tax it for collective benefit. Land tax can be applied like reverse rent.