Civil Society

Title

A Civil Society requires limits on human behavior; the alternative is The Dark Forest.

Context

Recent attempts to determine the future of civil society in the age of Social Media

The Beginning of Civilization

Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.

But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said.”

Social Structure

The one social structure that can be said to be built into human genes is the tribe. That is where humans learned to cooperate for the Common Good.

The noxious effects of the web have been the subject of books at least since the 2007 publication of The Cult of the Amateur which "exposes the grave consequences of today’s new [in 2007] participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement." So it is hard to understand the 2019 hand-wringing of the pernicious effects of Facebook and Twitter, let alone the outright hate on 8chan.

The Rule of Law

The book Why Nations Fail explains why society cannot be successful without (1)Rule of Law, (2) inclusion of all in the economy and (3) freedom of each to find their own path to success. This is sort of a economic view of the position that John Stuart Mill took in On Liberty. When people do not have the liberty to pursue their own Interest, exploitative economies will be created with the greatest reward accumulated by a very few, who then develop an aversion to further progress of the economy. After all, they got theirs, why bother changing a good thing.

Virgil Griffith was a former hacker from Alabama who styled himself a “disruptive technologist” and believed that he was using his data-mining expertise as a force for good. His arrest shows the result of those who move beyond liberty into Anarchy. They fall into the trap that if a thing is good, then more of that thing is better. That fails for liberty in exactly the same way that it fails for chocolate or any other valued commodity. Each good must be weighted against all the others. Extreme liberty erodes the rule of law, which results in liberty being taken away with all of the other rights. So Griffith went to North Korea specifically to teach them how to use Bit Coin to launder money, to allow for the free flow of money between North Korea and South Korea. This act of his violates sanction imposed against North Korea, and the U. S. government was not pleased. It is likely he will spend a long time in jail. Expect that many other extreme proponents of Anarchy will face the same outcome, or worse, as the more they succeed, the more liberty they will lose.

Now the block chain technology is suggested to enable user's to have a self-sovereign source of identifiers. This is intended to enable users to have complete privacy on the web. But the is an attempt to create a Technology Solution that is completely beyond the rule of law. That means a privacy that is not protected by the GDPR or other privacy legislation. As we have already seen, Bit Coin losses are also beyond the rule of law. If you lose money, for any reason, on a block chain problem, the rule of law offers little redress. So it is natural to conclude that if privacy is lost on a block chain ID, there will be little that any of those laws can offer in the way of Redress.

As we have seen several countries in the 21st century have been imposing harsh rules on their populations ostensibly to improve security. The result is loss of individual liberty. No country is immune to the struggle between security and liberty and citizens need to reassert their liberty and security as injustices are discovered and dealt with. "Creating the right sort of political balance, and mobilizing society while no dis-empowering laws and institutions are complete first-order challenges we face today." This quote is from two of the recipients of the economics Noble for work on why nations succeed and fail. An out-cry against this award point out that economics should not be considered separate from human values. The list of winners of this prize have been primarily focused on Western countries, and in the US in particular. Perhaps this is why it feels like every year, the prize goes to someone who asks “how does a change in variable X affect variable Y”, rather than asking difficult questions about colonialism, imperialism or capitalism – and daring to question the supremacy of western institutions.