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Question: A Counterpoint to the Technological Singularity?

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Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, indicated about The Singularity is Near Book (ISBN: 978–0143037880),

“ … A very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad …”

AND FOR INSTANCE:

“… Technology is the savior for everything. That’s the point of this course. Technology is accelerating, everything is going to be good, technology is your friend … I think that’s a load of crap …” By Dr. Jonathan White

Back to the White Swan hardcore:

That discourse can be entertained at a forthcoming Renaissance, not now. Going against this idea will be outrageously counterproductive to ascertain the non-annihilation of Earth’s locals.

People who destroy, eternally beforehand, outrageous Black Swans, engaging into super-natural and preter-natural preparations for known and unknown Outliers, thus observing — in all practicality — the successful and prevailing White Swan and Transformative and Integrative Risk Management interdisciplinary problem-solving methodology, include:

(1.-) Sir Martin Rees PhD (cosmologist and astrophysicist), Astronomer Royal, Cambridge University Professor and former Royal Society President.

(2.-) Dr. Stephen William Hawking CH CBE FRS FRSA is an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. Formerly: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

(3.-) Prof. Nick Bostrom Ph.D. is a Swedish philosopher at St. Cross College, University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, the reversal test, and consequentialism. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (2000). He is the founding director of both The Future of Humanity Institute and the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology as part of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University.

(4.-) The US National Intelligence Council (NIC) [.…] The National Intelligence Council supports the Director of National Intelligence in his role as head of the Intelligence Community (IC) and is the IC’s center for long-term strategic analysis [.…] Since its establishment in 1979, the NIC has served as a bridge between the intelligence and policy communities, a source of deep substantive expertise on intelligence issues, and a facilitator of Intelligence Community collaboration and outreach [.…] The NIC’s National Intelligence Officers — drawn from government, academia, and the private sector—are the Intelligence Community’s senior experts on a range of regional and functional issues.

(5.-) U.S. Homeland Security’s FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency).

(6.-) The CIA or any other U.S. Government agencies.

(7.-) Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International).

(8.-) GBN (Global Business Network).

(9.-) Royal Dutch Shell.

(10.-) British Doomsday Preppers.

(11.-) Canadian Doomsday Preppers.

(12.-) Australian Doomsday Preppers

(13.-) American Doomsday Preppers.

(14.-) Disruptional Singularity Book (ASIN: B00KQOEYLG).

(15.-) Scientific Prophets of Doom at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bUe2-7jjtY

White Swans are always getting prepared for Unknown and Known Outliers, and MOST FLUIDLY changing the theater of operation by permanently updating and upgrading the designated preparations.

Authored By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini
White Swan Book Author
www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini
www.amazon.com/author/Agostini

Among transhumanists, Nick Bostrom is well-known for promoting the idea of ‘existential risks’, potential harms which, were they come to pass, would annihilate the human condition altogether. Their probability may be relatively small, but the expected magnitude of their effects are so great, so Bostrom claims, that it is rational to devote some significant resources to safeguarding against them. (Indeed, there are now institutes for the study of existential risks on both sides of the Atlantic.) Moreover, because existential risks are intimately tied to the advancement of science and technology, their probability is likely to grow in the coming years.

Contrary to expectations, Bostrom is much less concerned with ecological suicide from humanity’s excessive carbon emissions than with the emergence of a superior brand of artificial intelligence – a ‘superintelligence’. This creature would be a human artefact, or at least descended from one. However, its self-programming capacity would have run amok in positive feedback, resulting in a maniacal, even self-destructive mission to rearrange the world in the image of its objectives. Such a superintelligence may appear to be quite ruthless in its dealings with humans, but that would only reflect the obstacles that we place, perhaps unwittingly, in the way of the realization of its objectives. Thus, this being would not conform to the science fiction stereotype of robots deliberately revolting against creators who are now seen as their inferiors.

I must confess that I find this conceptualisation of ‘existential risk’ rather un-transhumanist in spirit. Bostrom treats risk as a threat rather than as an opportunity. His risk horizon is precautionary rather than proactionary: He focuses on preventing the worst consequences rather than considering the prospects that are opened up by whatever radical changes might be inflicted by the superintelligence. This may be because in Bostrom’s key thought experiment, the superintelligence turns out to be the ultimate paper-clip collecting machine that ends up subsuming the entire planet to its task, destroying humanity along the way, almost as an afterthought.

But is this really a good starting point for thinking about existential risk? Much more likely than total human annihilation is that a substantial portion of humanity – but not everyone – is eliminated. (Certainly this captures the worst case scenarios surrounding climate change.) The Cold War remains the gold standard for this line of thought. In the US, the RAND Corporation’s chief analyst, Herman Kahn — the model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove – routinely, if not casually, tossed off scenarios of how, say, a US-USSR nuclear confrontation would serve to increase the tolerance for human biological diversity, due to the resulting proliferation of genetic mutations. Put in more general terms, a severe social disruption provides a unique opportunity for pursuing ideals that might otherwise be thwarted by a ‘business as usual’ policy orientation.

Here it is worth recalling that the Cold War succeeded on its own terms: None of the worst case scenarios were ever realized, even though many people were mentally prepared to make the most of the projected adversities. This is one way to think about how the internet itself arose, courtesy the US Defense Department’s interest in maintaining scientific communications in the face of attack. In other words, rather than trying to prevent every possible catastrophe, the way to deal with ‘unknown unknowns’ is to imagine that some of them have already come to pass and redesign the world accordingly so that you can carry on regardless. Thus, Herman Kahn’s projection of a thermonuclear future provided grounds in the 1960s for the promotion of, say, racially mixed marriages, disability-friendly environments, and the ‘do more with less’ mentality that came to characterize the ecology movement.

Kahn was a true proactionary thinker. For him, the threat of global nuclear war raised Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of ‘creative destruction’ to a higher plane, inspiring social innovations that would be otherwise difficult to achieve by conventional politics. Historians have long noted that modern warfare has promoted spikes in innovation that in times of peace are then subject to diffusion, as the relevant industries redeploy for civilian purposes. We might think of this tendency, in mechanical terms, as system ‘overdesign’ (i.e. preparing for the worst but benefitting even if the worst doesn’t happen) or, more organically, as a vaccine that converts a potential liability into an actual benefit.

In either case, existential risk is regarded in broadly positive terms, specifically as an unprecedented opportunity to extend the range of human capability, even under radically changed circumstances. This sense of ‘antifragility’, as the great ‘black swan’ detector Nicholas Taleb would put it, is the hallmark of our ‘risk intelligence’, the phrase that the British philosopher Dylan Evans has coined for a demonstrated capacity that people have to make step change improvements in their lives in the face of radical uncertainty. From this standpoint, Bostrom’s superintelligence concept severely underestimates the adaptive capacity of human intelligence.

Perhaps the best way to see just how much Bostrom shortchanges humanity is to note that his crucial thought experiment requires a strong ontological distinction between humans and superintelligent artefacts. Where are the cyborgs in this doomsday scenario? Reading Bostrom reminds me that science fiction did indeed make progress in the twentieth century, from the world of Karl Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots in 1920 to the much subtler blending of human and computer futures in the works of William Gibson and others in more recent times.

Bostrom’s superintelligence scenario began to be handled in more sophisticated fashion after the end of the First World War, popularly under the guise of ‘runaway technology’, a topic that received its canonical formulation in Langdon Winner’s 1977 Autonomous Technology: Technics out of Control, a classic in the field of science and technology of studies. Back then the main problem with superintelligent machines was that they would ‘dehumanize’ us, less because they might dominate us but more because we might become like them – perhaps because we feel that we have invested our best qualities in them, very much like Ludwig Feuerbach’s aetiology of the Judaeo-Christian God. Marxists gave the term ‘alienation’ a popular spin to capture this sentiment in the 1960s.

Nowadays, of course, matters have been complicated by the prospect of human and machine identities merging together. This goes beyond simply implanting silicon chips in one’s brain. Rather, it involves the complex migration and enhancement of human selves in cyberspace. (Sherry Turkle has been the premier ethnographer of this process in children.) That such developments are even possible points to a prospect that Bostrom refuses to consider, namely, that to be ‘human’ is to be only contingently located in the body of Homo sapiens. The name of our species – Homo sapiens – already gives away the game, because our distinguishing feature (so claimed Linnaeus) had nothing to do with our physical morphology but with the character of our minds. And might not such a ‘sapient’ mind better exist somewhere other than in the upright ape from which we have descended?

The prospects for transhumanism hang on the answer to this question. Aubrey de Grey’s indefinite life extension project is about Homo sapiens in its normal biological form. In contrast, Ray Kurzweil’s ‘singularity’ talk of uploading our consciousness into indefinitely powerful computers suggests a complete abandonment of the ordinary human body. The lesson taught by Langdon Winner’s historical account is that our primary existential risk does not come from alien annihilation but from what social psychologists call ‘adaptive preference formation’. In other words, we come to want the sort of world that we think is most likely, simply because that offers us the greatest sense of security. Thus, the history of technology is full of cases in which humans have radically changed their lives to adjust to an innovation whose benefits they reckon outweigh the costs, even when both remain fundamentally incalculable. Success in the face such ‘existential risk’ is then largely a matter of whether people – perhaps of the following generation – have made the value shifts necessary to see the changes as positive overall. But of course, it does not follow that those who fail to survive the transition or have acquired their values before this transition would draw a similar conclusion.

As the old social bonds unravel, philosopher and member of the Lifeboat Foundation’s advisory board Professor Steve Fuller asks: can we balance free expression against security?

justice

Justice has been always about modes of interconnectivity. Retributive justice – ‘eye for an eye’ stuff – recalls an age when kinship was how we related to each other. In the modern era, courtesy of the nation-state, bonds have been forged in terms of common laws, common language, common education, common roads, etc. The internet, understood as a global information and communication infrastructure, is both enhancing and replacing these bonds, resulting in new senses of what counts as ‘mine’, ‘yours’, ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’ – the building blocks of a just society…

Read the full article at IAI.TV

A presentation of the future strategic options available to both Tesla and Chevy Volt, using the Holistic Business Model, as published in the book, Reengineering Strategies & Tactics. Note, correction that GM will be investing an $449 million not $1.4 billion I had stated in the video.

In Part 1, I show the strategic structural positions Tesla & Chevy Volt occupy. In Part 2, I show the future strategic options available to both, and potential mistakes they could be making.

If after reviewing the videos you would like to a similar 1/2 day review of your business, please do contact me.

A presentation of the future strategic options available to both Tesla and Chevy Volt, using the Holistic Business Model, as published in the book, Reengineering Strategies & Tactics. Note, correction that GM will be investing an $449 million not $1.4 billion I had stated in the video.

In Part 1, I show the strategic structural positions Tesla & Chevy Volt occupy. In Part 2, I show the future strategic options available to both, and potential mistakes they could be making.

If after reviewing the videos you would like to a similar 1/2 day review of your business, please do contact me.

I am very pleased to announce the publication of my book “Reengineering Strategies & Tactics”.

The book is based on more than 2 decades in manufacturing & management consulting, and presents the new business model, the Holistic Business Model, that ties together operations, revenue generation and business strategy. It also enables one to do strategy sensitivity analysis, and much more. Watch the video. Buy the book & enjoy rethinking & re-strategizing your company.

I might add that this is much better than anything you can get out of McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen Hamilton or Bain Capital.

The book details are:

Book details are:
Title: Reengineering Strategies & Tactics
Sub Title: Know Your Company’s and Your Competitors’ Strategies and Tactics Using Public Information
Publisher: Universal Publishers
Date: July, 2014
Pages: 315
ISBN-10: 1627340157
ISBN-13: 9781627340151

Publisher’s Link: http://www.universal-publishers.com/book.php?method=ISBN&book=1627340157

1st 25 pages(free): http://www.bookpump.com/upb/pdf-b/7340157b.pdf

Synopsys:
The Holistic Business Model identifies, in a structured manner, the 48 structural positions and 32 strategies your company can effect, resulting in 2 million variations in your company’s strategic environment. This complexity is handled by three layers, consisting of the Operations Layer, the Revenue Transaction Layer and the Business Management Layer.

Strategy is the migration from one structural position to another in the Business Management Layer. Therefore, the Model prevents investors, business owners and corporate managers from making incorrect moves, while both, enabling them to see their future options, and enhancing the quality of their management decisions.

The Operations Layer explains why lean manufacturing (JIT and Kanbans) works when it does, when it does not, and the important considerations when setting up a manufacturing operation using lessons learned from the semiconductor and Fast Moving Consumer Goods industries. The Revenue Transaction Layer identifies how your company generates its revenue.

Based on 20+ years in manufacturing and management consulting in multinational, large, medium & small companies, Solomon invented the Holistic Business Model that only requires public information to determine your company’s and your competitors’ strategies. Four case studies are presented: a manufacturing operation, a home builder, a non-profit and a sea port.

Most of you will know that in December 2012, I wrote 4 blog posts here at the Lifeboat Foundation, explaining why Spaceport Colorado will be an enormous success. The blog posts are:

The Fabulous Spaceport Colorado (Part 1)

The Fabulous Spaceport Colorado (Part 2)

The Fabulous Spaceport Colorado (Part 3)

The Fabulous Spaceport Colorado (Part 4)

Here is the reason why I was able to do this. I spent many decades working in manufacturing companies and management consulting firms. I am now sharing this experience in a book titled “Reengineering Strategies & Tactics”. The book presents a new business model, the Holistic Business Model, that allows one to infer private information from public data.

If you have read the book, I would appreciate your feedback.

Book details are:
Title: Reengineering Strategies & Tactics
Sub Title: Know Your Company’s and Your Competitors’ Strategies and Tactics Using Public Information
Publisher: Universal Publishers
Date: July, 2014
Pages: 315
ISBN-10: 1627340157
ISBN-13: 9781627340151

Publisher’s Link: http://www.universal-publishers.com/book.php?method=ISBN&book=1627340157
1st 25 pages(free): http://www.bookpump.com/upb/pdf-b/7340157b.pdf

Synopsis:
The Holistic Business Model identifies, in a structured manner, the 48 structural positions and 32 strategies your company can effect, resulting in 2 million variations in your company’s strategic environment. This complexity is handled by three layers, consisting of the Operations Layer, the Revenue Transaction Layer and the Business Management Layer.

Strategy is the migration from one structural position to another in the Business Management Layer. Therefore, the Model prevents investors, business owners and corporate managers from making incorrect moves, while both, enabling them to see their future options, and enhancing the quality of their management decisions.

The Operations Layer explains why lean manufacturing (JIT and Kanbans) works when it does, when it does not, and the important considerations when setting up a manufacturing operation using lessons learned from the semiconductor and Fast Moving Consumer Goods industries. The Revenue Transaction Layer identifies how your company generates its revenue.

Based on 20+ years in manufacturing and management consulting in multinational, large, medium & small companies, Solomon invented the Holistic Business Model that only requires public information to determine your company’s and your competitors’ strategies. Four case studies are presented: a manufacturing operation, a home builder, a non-profit and a sea port.

#Exclusive: @HJBentham @ClubOfINFO responds to @Hetero_Sapien @IEET
After the reprint at the ClubOfINFO webzine of Franco Cortese’s excellent IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) article about how advanced technology clashes with the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, I am interested enough that I have decided to put together this response. Changes in technology do eventually force changes in the law, and some laws ultimately have to be scrapped. However there is an argument to be made that the Second Amendment’s deterrent against tyranny should not be dismissed too easily.
Franco points out that the Second Amendment’s “most prominent justification” is that citizens require a form of self-defense against a potentially corrupt government. In such a case, they may need to take back the state by force through a “citizen militia”.

Technology and “stateness”

The argument given by Franco against the idea of citizens engaging their government in battle leads to a conclusion that “technological growth has made the Second Amendment redundant”. Arms in the Eighteenth Century were “roughly equal” for the citizenry and the military. According to Franco’s article, “in 1791, the only thing that distinguished the defensive or offensive capability of military from citizenry was quantity. Now it’s quality.”
I believe the above point about the state monopoly on force going from being based on quantity to quality can be disputed. The analysis from Franco seems to be that the norms of warfare and the internal effectiveness of state power are set by the level technology available to the state. Although there is of course a strong technological element involved in these manifestations of state power, it is more accurate to say “stateness” – which military power is only the international reflection of – is due to a combination of having more legitimacy, resources and organization. The effectiveness of this kind of “stateness”, including the ability of the most powerful states to overcome challenges of internecine warfare, has not changed very decisively since the Nineteenth Century.
In fact, stateness is said by many analysts to have declined worldwide since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since that event and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR, the number of states facing internal crisis seems to have only risen, which suggests stateness is being weakened globally due to many complex pressures. Advanced technology is itself even credited with eroding stateness, as transport and the Internet only give citizens ever more abilities to get around, provoke, rebel and ultimately erode the strength and legitimacy of the state. In most arenas of social change, states face unprecedented challenges from their own citizens because of the unexpected changes in advanced technology that have taken place over the last few decades. Concerning the future of this trend, Franco aptly anticipates in his article that “post-scarcity” technologies would make things even more uncomfortable for the state, pushing it to rely on secrecy and suppression of knowledge to avoid proliferation of devastating weapons.
Much of this commentary on the loss of stateness may seem irrelevant to the right to bear arms in the United States, but it is relevant for reasons that will become clear in this article. We cannot say that the US government has a true monopoly on force due to its technology, and that the potential of a citizen uprising is gone. We have seen too many other “modern” states such as Yugoslavia, Somalia, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Mali quickly deteriorate into full scale civil war just because groups of determined citizens took up light weapons (many of those rebels have far less skill and technology at their disposal than the average US gun owner).

Internecine warfare in the United States

From what we have seen of civil war in other countries, we cannot know that simple rifles and handguns really are a useless path of resistance against a modern state tyranny, just because the tyrants will have more lethal options such as cluster bombs and nerve gas. Even the most crudely armed insurrectionists are capable of overthrowing their governments, if they are determined and numerous enough. Having a lightly armed population from the outset, like the US population, only makes it more likely that such a war against tyranny would be ubiquitous and likely to succeed swiftly from the outset.
If we do take the unlikely position of supposing that the United States will degenerate into a true tyranny in the Aristotelian definition, then US citizens certainly need their right to bear arms. More than that, their path of armed resistance using those light weapons could still realistically win. If their cause was just, we can suppose that they would be battling in self-defense against a tyrannical regime that has plummeting legitimacy, or is buying time for contingents of the military to break off and join the rebellion. In such a situation, the sheer number of citizens taking up arms would do more than just demoralize government troops and lead to indecision among them.
The fact of a generally well-armed population would, if they took up arms against their regime, guarantee the existence of a widespread insurgency to such an extent that the rulers would face many years of internecine resistance and live under the constant specter of assassination. Add the internal economic devastation caused by citizens committing acts of sabotage and civil disobedience, foreign sanctions by other states, and even international aid to the insurgents by external actors, and the tyrants could be ousted even by the most lightly armed militia units.
Explaining the imbalance that has prevailed between the military might of states and the internal ability of citizens to resist their ruling regimes with arms, Franco notes that the “overwhelming majority of new technological advances are able to be leveraged by the military before they trickle down to the average citizen through industry.” This is certainly true. However, the summation that resistance is futile would not take into account the treacherous opportunities that exist in every internecine war.
When the state projects force internally, it prefers to call that “law enforcement” for as long as it remains in control of the situation. Even if the violence gets more widespread and becomes civil war, the state denies such a fact until the very last moment. Even then, it prefers to minimize the damage on its own territory, because the damage would ultimately have to be repaired and paid for by the state itself. Even in a civil war situation, the technology brought to bear against citizens by the government would never be as heavy or destructive as the kind of equipment brought to bear against foreign states or non-state actors. This is for the simple reason that the state, in a civil war, has to try to avoid obliterating its own constituents and infrastructure for political reasons. If it is caught committing such a desperate and disproportionate act, it will only undermine itself and give a propaganda coup to its lightly equipped opponents by committing a heavy-handed atrocity.
The imbalance of the superior technology of the United States government in contrast to the basic handguns and rifles of its citizenry is real, but it would have zero significance if a real internecine war took place in the United States. The deadliest weapons in the arsenal of the United States, such as nuclear or biological weapons, would never be used to confront internecine threats, so they are not relevant enough to enter the debate on the Second Amendment.
The concept of taking back government via a citizen militia is not about defeating a whole nation in the conventional sense through raw military strength, but rather about a multifaceted political struggle in which the nation is able to confront and defeat the ruling regime via some form of internecine combat. The US would tend to prefer handling militant and “terrorist” adversaries on its own territory with the bare minimum of heavy equipment and ordnance at all times. Given this, the real technological contest would only be between opposing marksmen and their rifles (any advanced firearms would soon be seized by guerrillas and used back against the state). No ridiculously unbalanced battle with tanks, nukes and generals on one side and “simple folks” with shotguns on the other side would take place. In most civil wars, the use of tanks and warplanes (never mind nukes) only tends to make matters worse for the ruling government by hitting bystanders and further alienating the people on the ground. The US military leadership should know this better than anyone else, having condemned regime after regime for making that same mistake of heavy-handed escalation.
Anti-tyranny insurgency using only light (and easily hidden) armaments is as viable in 2014 as it was in the Eighteenth Century, and has proven sufficient to delegitimize and ultimately remove brutal regimes from power. Any sufficiently unpopular regime can be delegitimized and removed from power by the armed resistance of lightly-equipped militia forces.
Franco’s conclusion that the US should neither extend the Second Amendment to cover giving everyone access to ridiculously devastating weapons, nor scrap the Second Amendment altogether, is wise and relevant to helping US society make some difficult decisions. Law (and by extension stateness) is “uncertain in the face of technologies’ upward growth.” States that want to remain popular should try to be as adaptive as possible to new (and old) technologies and ideas, and not be swayed by any single narrow-minded idea or program for society. If the American people distrust their system of government enough to keep their right to bear arms, for fear of tyranny, then the Second Amendment ought to remain.

By Harry J. BenthamMore articles by Harry J. Bentham

This article originally appeared at the techno-politics magazine, ClubOfINFO

- @ClubOfINFO - On May 15, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed rules that would threaten net neutrality.
As stated by Michael Copps at the Common Cause grassroots organization, “This is an alarming day for anyone who treasures a free and open Internet – which should be all of us”. Many are still unfamiliar with this subject, but they should take the time to learn what it means. Not simply US citizens should be concerned about a threat to net neutrality. US hegemony over the Internet means everyone should be concerned.
According to an analysis from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), rules proposed by the FCC “threaten the future of our Internet” by stifling the potential for creativity, innovation and freedom of expression. They do this by saying it is okay for internet service providers to discriminate in favor of bigger web companies, so they can connect to their users faster. The EFF amply sums this up as “allowing Internet providers to discriminate how we access websites by offering an option for web companies to pay to connect to users at faster speeds.” This has been called creating “fast lanes” for firms able to pay more than the others.
The discrimination permitted under the FCC proposal is recognized to mean there will be less diversity, less creativity and less freedom available to everyone through the Internet. Internet service providers could become “gatekeepers”, thus reducing competition and freedom of expression.
Many believe that the unique character of the Internet as a place of anarchic socialization and equality – the most celebrated aspects of life online – is under threat by the FCC’s proposed rules (If you are one of them, sign here to take a stand). If people do not act quickly to stop it, they will face the dark possibility of the Internet being yet another space occupied by a handful of monolithic companies, like the airwaves or the newspapers before.
What is happening is part of a frightening trend that seriously threatens the usefulness of the Internet as a popular space giving a voice to the voiceless. The Internet should not be hired out to the highest bidders and dominated solely by them, in a mere sham of free speech and competition. The actions of large firms in the direction of curtailing competition, freedom and the popular Internet will take more offensive forms, if they are not stopped.
While the current proposed rules by the FCC are a threat mainly to small businesses, we can already imagine the trend eventually affecting our own lives. Imagine not being able to view the best of anything other than the sites controlled by powerful corporations – the same “stakeholders” that already control the US government and media through lobbying. Not only would this discrimination be tantamount to censorship, it would also appear to be part of a deepening offence against democratization and moral revolutions through technology in the Western world.
As usual, the US government is continuing to accuse vulnerable regimes around the world of not respecting freedom, while it goes to extraordinary lengths to stifle freedom and strengthen a corrupt and autocratic corporate regime to the detriment of society. As usual, the US government continues to claim it supports competition, yet its only interest seems to be in privileging and protecting a handful of corporations, crushing competition, retarding technology and crippling the long-term potential of humanity for the sake of its own greed.
Regardless of its origins or its original design, the Internet has come to be used as a means of disclosing and encountering the truth. It has been a source of alternate media, and it has drastically weakened the influence of the corporate media. It is inevitable that the corporate-lobbied regime in the US will try to launch an onslaught against the foundations of such transparency and freedom. Greed and the desire for illicit monopoly and oligopoly pervade the US establishment and regime, leading them to seek out the total invulnerability of the regime and the handful of monstrously powerful corporations that sponsor it.
If consumers do not take a stand against the creation of “fast lanes”, they can expect to suffer further costs in the near future as powerful companies gain unfair advantages and tighten their grip over the Internet. The FCC rules, if they really come into effect, may be the thin end of a wedge to completely removing individuals and organizations from the Internet because they are unable to conform to the cruel monopolistic regulations of the corporate-dominated regime.
The problem, according to consumer advocates, lies in the attempt to portray the web as a service to be purchased at different qualities depending on how much money you have, rather than a utility that should be equally available to everyone, guaranteed and protected by the government. If the Internet can be classed as a utility to be safeguarded by the government, like electricity and gas, web users can be assured that they are not at a disadvantage to the handful of powerful businesses determined to suffocate freedom and competition.
If we take into account its true liberating and awakening impact on global society, the Internet must be seen not just as a utility but as a human right. As Pope Francis noted, the Internet is truly valuable for society. It offers an unprecedented opportunity for communication and the elimination of global disparity. Such things make it tantamount to a “gift from God”, something that cannot be denied so long as we know it to be a source of liberation for the many.

By Harry J. BenthamMore articles by Harry J. Bentham

Originally published on 22 May 2014 at Dissident Voice

Technology has the potential to liberate those who resist statism and oligarchy. Send your email address to get more ClubOfINFO articles delivered for free.

Based on the Bloomberg TV program “The Next Space Race” and other reliable sources, I determine the realistic payload costs goals for the next generation of private space companies.

I review NASA’s Space Shuttle Program costs and compare these with SpaceX costs, and then extrapolate to Planetary Resources, Inc.‘s cost structure.

Three important conclusions are derived. And for those viewing this video at my blog postings, the link to the Excel Spreadsheet is here (.xlsx file).