Thinking About Technocracy

Why do households work as collaborative organizations?  Perhaps they don’t.  Divorce rates are high.  But households remain a consistent venue for sharing and common use.  Why?  Princeton University Press has a new book out on the topic and a review is presented at On the Commons.

From the Skoll Foundation’s Social Edge blog: Ten things learned about transparency…  I certainly agree with Kjerstin Erickson on her first point…transparency is a value.

Whether one is much interested in the workings of the mind or related topics in cognitive science, Deric Bownds’ MindBlog is always fun to read and usually has something relevant to a manager, innovator, futurist or general dreamer. 

Yesterday his column disturbed me.  It’s basically about how larger brain sizes go with being sneaky.  No doubt it is true.  Evolution rewards a liar. 

One has to wonder whether evolution rewards collaboration in higher brain-sized species.  Of course packs and teams are prevalent in whales, dolphins, canines, and cats among others.  But what about planning for the future?  To my knowledge no creature but humans effectively plans for the future. 

I wonder if those plans are necessarily duplicitous?  Can we be open, collaborative and plan-oriented while still be honest?  Perhaps not.  Perhaps that will require machines, or machine-augmented humans that can easily smell a fib.

Pinker is always entertaining.  In the NY Times  Magazine recently he took on morality and whether humans are ready to deploy the tools evolution seems to have furnished to us.  From a governance standpoint, the answer would have to be a resounding no.

Here’s one I liked that was run in the local Cayman paper:  The Birth of Ideology

John Quiggin is quickly becoming a favorite read for me.  Great stuff here on the risk of moral arbitrage.

Asia Sentinel carries a Sarajit Majumdar article on the seeming power shift from West to East.  It’s happening at an accelorated pace to be sure, but Majumdar, like so many other economists, see technocrats as anti-liberty boogeymen.  Perhaps they are.  What never seems to come from the economist’s pen is the implicit political assumptions they make that are essential to their worldview.  Indeed economics is always political economy.  The underspoken deserves greater fleshing out.  Where are their boundaries?  What is a sine qua non of their liberty systems?  Human rights?  Free trade?  What about Singapore?  Switzerland?  Free?  Why or why not?  Economics seems to run from the discussion of necessary foundations.  As a science, that makes it weaker.

Bryan Alexander’s blog is always worth the time.  Today he tackles technical dystopia in the Edge articles that everyone (including me) has munched on.

Are we becoming part of the borg? Is this the opposite of Hillis’s forebrain I discussed earlier in relationship to technocracy?

See Alexander’s coverage here.

Housing Doom picks up on James Saft’s (Reuters) realistic inquiry published in the International Herald Tribune into whether the whole shibang (the WHOLE shibang) was indeed a Ponzi Scheme.  Worth considering.

Vineet Nayar at Harvard Business Publishing discusses transparency and how much we need it in business; though I don’t much care for his saccharine conclusions.

Those who know me will find little to be surprised at that I am for radical transparency.  I think the loss of trust is behind huge swaths of current social problems.  It’s all that social capital stuff they were going on about a few years ago.  Apparently no one listened.

Radical transparency is sort of the Canadian approach to Freedom of Information…on speed.  Unless someone is specifically hurt by it, make it public!

I think this could be a quality policy for far more organizations than at present, particularly in civil society.  We ought to be able to ask straightforward questions and get straightforward answers that are published and made readily available.  Of course tort law probably needs to change a bit to achieve that, but realistically, we could be far more open than we are at many levels of society.

Open access plays a role here.  So too does much broader institutional use of the Internet.  It’s shocking how bad governments are at using he web.  That poor fellow who quit in England recently over essentially the complete bungling of Web 2.0 by government there illustrates the point.  Technocrats love the web and its latest version.  They love free release of large amounts of data even more.  They get it out there.  Faster is better than more spun.