globalization Archives

Tag: globalization

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

October 23, 2016

Hinting at Globalism

In response to my floundering last week, reader Michael Dempsey suggested:

I think that you could take a look at a weekly concept and go deeper as to the best case, worst case, and cyberpunk outcomes in each. Would allow you to avoid constant negativity while also writing about how our future very well could splinter based on outcomes.

And reader Jan Renner suggested:

Several millennia in the past Europe was the cradle of innovation and cultural development. In my opinion this came to be by chance, since the climate was always very balmy in middle Europe, which made survival much easier compared to other parts of the world. Alongside with some easy to domesticate animals this gave early Europeans a lot of free time for thinking, innovating and developing in all areas of life. This resulted in rich kingdoms and such, which lead to colonization of most of the world, which lead to various other things in turn.

So, I don’t agree with this entirely. Europe and its offspring did end up being globally dominant — see Guns, Germs, and Steel plus current American hegemony — but European empires weren’t the first of their kind and there were other large-scale powers concurrently. Many scientific and cultural advances originated elsewhere before being coopted by Europeans. That said, Renner is broadly correct. (This isn’t a reflection of the quality of European people, but rather luck and first conditions snowballing into surprising end results.)

Tying the two suggestions together, this week I’m going to look at the best case, worst case, and cyberpunk case of today’s empires. I am definitely coming at this from an American perspective, since that’s where I live and what I know best. YMMV.

Image via Salon; originator of the ~cyber~ edit unknown. This is Frank Underwood from House of Cards, played by Kevin Spacey.

Let’s start the week on an optimistic note, eh? I actually think we’re pretty darn close to an optimal setup, assuming we can keep multinational trade deals intact. That may reflect my cynicism re: what the best-case scenario can be.

On a macro level, political outcomes are largely important to the extent that they affect economic outcomes, and I expect Hillary Clinton (the overwhelmingly likely winner, but please still vote) to be pretty pro-trade, whatever her stump-speech rhetoric. She’s a neoliberal and from what the disgusted leftists tell me, neoliberals like free markets.

The great thing about trade is that it’s win-win for the parties who are directly involved. From Nick Szabo’s long essay about the origins of money:

Because individuals, clans, and tribes all vary in their preferences, vary in their ability to satisfy these preferences, and vary in the beliefs they have about these skills and preferences and the objects that are consequent of them, there are always gains to be made from trade. Whether the costs of making these trades — transaction costs — are low enough to make the trades worthwhile is another matter.

One of the useful effects of the internet is pushing transaction costs lower and lower. Transaction costs are intimately tied to distribution, of both goods and ideas. The internet has “disrupted” the geography-bound analogue world in which distribution was slow and full of gatekeepers. We all bounce together so much more often now.

The unfortunate things about trade are 1) environmental externalities and 2) HR externalities.

Manufacturing wreaks a lot of environmental havoc that the perpetrating companies are never held accountable for, often in countries with nonfunctional governments. (Think mineral mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) And then from the human resources perspective, a corporation moving to [insert country with lower labor costs] is good for both the corporation and the workers in the place they relocate to. But it’s hard for the place they relocate from, at least in the short term.

I don’t see a quick solution to either of these problems. We need strong governments so that we can pressure large companies not to do the heinous things that they love to do absent regulation, and we need free trade to fully express comparative advantage.

What’s really missing is easy movement of labor — if individual humans were able to migrate at will, they could go to wherever the jobs were until we reached a supply-and-demand equilibrium.

I said a few paragraph ago, “political outcomes are largely important to the extent that they affect economic outcomes” — this is an example. A pro-immigration, not-explicitly-racist president is crucial because that kind of executive may ease restrictions on workers’ ability to relocate according to their financial prospects.

Does all of that make sense? Am I too callous, zooming out to focus on economics?

Reader JM Porup disagrees with me re: multinational trade deals. He previously wrote an article about his thoughts on the matter, which you should read if you’re interested!

Globalization in action. Photo by Roel Hemkes.

September 19, 2016

The Internet, Globalization, and You

Beau Gunderson’s $10 Patreon reward prompt was, “How does living in a cyberpunk world affect our self-determination?” So first let’s talk about regular ol’ self-determination. There are a couple ways to interpret this: sovereign or individual.

The poli-sci version of self-determination is that the citizens of a country get to choose their own mode of government and get to define their constitution. Wikipedia says, this “cardinal principle in modern international law […] states that nations, based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity, have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no interference.”

The individual form of self-determination is a similar idea, but scaled down — the right and ability to direct your own life. If you examine this closely it’s an obvious illusion, but because free will doesn’t feel like an illusion, we pretend that it exists. I am the master of my fate! It’s a more practical attitude.

Sovereign Self-Determination

Europe and the United States are seeing a split in public sentiment between corporate elite globalism and protectionist plebeian nationalism. I frankly don’t know how this is playing out in South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, etc, etc — but whither goes the USA, the rest of the world tends to follow.

I’d bet on the elite winning over time, and thus the power of governments relative to giant transnational companies weakening and weakening. I mean, hey, at least Cthulhu swims left. But that might take a while, so perhaps global warming will force a sea change first? (Pun very intended.)

The internet is a globalizing force, and it’s so economically compelling that no country or group of people can resist it forever. The winner-take-all dynamics of internet businesses help create new hegemonies that transcend borders. I do want to note that there is significant upside! But upside is not my beat 😉

Personal Self-Determination

I said we pretend to have free will, so even though I don’t believe it exists in a philosophical sense, I’m just going to use conventional language.

Does a cyberpunk world erode the choices available to you? The internet substantially empowers huge companies (think Google, and Facebook) but it also substantially empowers individuals.

You can talk to (almost) anyone, broadcast whatever you want (unless it’s child porn, but I’m okay with that restriction), and sell just about anything anonymously (provided a certain level of opsec prowess — unfortunately this one does apply to child porn). Those caveats don’t negate that more opportunities are available than ever before.

I do worry that I’m over-indexing on my own reality. I have lots of cultural capital, a middle-class safety net, and live in the a place full of jobs. Elsewhere in my country and probably yours as well, there’s a demographic that is saturated with despair.

Opportunities are available. Being equipped to take the opportunities is another thing, yeah?

Header photo by Roel Hemkes.

August 2, 2016

Imagining a Cyberpunk Social Safety Net

I’m still thinking about how to structure the rewards for readers who financially support Exolymph. But one of the current ones is that people who contribute $10 via Patreon can choose a topic for me to write about. Beau Gunderson posed the question, “What would a cyberpunk social safety net look like?”

A social safety net is a formalized way of catching people when they fall. Traditionally, the government pays for a few survival-level services, like food stamps and homeless shelters in the United States, or healthcare in more civilized countries. (Sure do love our privatized medical system that totally doesn’t punish the poor!)

But a cyberpunk future-present is dominated by corporations rather than the state — would they be inclined to pick up the slack?

In a way, the ideal version of a cyberpunk social safety net would be a bit like how things used to function for the middle class. You had a decades-long career at a big company; in exchange for your labor and loyalty, they provided your family’s healthcare and a pension. The Baby Boomers are the last generation to participate in this scheme.

Image compilation via Kevin Dooley.

I don’t mean to romanticize the past — a lot of things about the 1950s through ’90s were awful, especially if you were a person of color, a woman, LGBTQIA, or any combination of the above. Even if you were a straight white man, striking out on your own, whether as an entrepreneur or a societal dropout, was pretty risky. (It’s still pretty risky.)

Regardless, the “work for BigCorp until you turn sixty-five and eat cake at your going-away party” paradigm is being dismantled by the twenty-first century. “Precariat” is a hot buzzword; labor is contingent and people hop from gig to gig.

Workers get shafted unless they have particular scarce skills (like programming or deceiving the public). Broadly speaking, the causes are globalization and technological advances. No need to pay for benefits in [rich country] when workers in [poor country] don’t expect them!

At this point I’m just reviewing things you already know.

One vision of ultra-capitalist social services comes from radical libertarian David Friedman (as quoted by Slate Star Codex):

[A]t some future time there are no government police, but instead private protection agencies. These agencies sell the service of protecting their clients against crime. Perhaps they also guarantee performance by insuring their clients against losses resulting from criminal acts.

How might such protection agencies protect? That would be an economic decision, depending on the costs and effectiveness of different alternatives. On the one extreme, they might limit themselves to passive defenses, installing elaborate locks and alarms. Or they might take no preventive action at all, but make great efforts to hunt down criminals guilty of crimes against their clients. They might maintain foot patrols or squad cars, like our present government police, or they might rely on electronic substitutes. In any case, they would be selling a service to their customers and would have a strong incentive to provide as high a quality of service as possible, at the lowest possible cost. It is reasonable to suppose that the quality of service would be higher and the cost lower than with the present governmental system.

If you want a LOT more speculative detail about edge cases and such, read the SSC review (or Friedman’s book itself). To be clear, I don’t think privatized protection agencies are a good idea.

The cyberpunk social safety net that would be easiest to implement is a sort of collectivized insurance, modeled on Latinx tandas — lending circles. You could probably even incorporate a blockchain to make it trendy — or possibly to make it scale better? I am not a software engineer. Anyway, imagine this:

Every month, fifteen friends put money into a pot, which is kept by a mutually trusted member or a trusted third party (e.g. church pastor or bank safe). Whenever one of the friends has a crisis, like losing their job and needing to cover rent, the necessary funds are dispensed to them.

Before you email me, yes, there are a million ways this would be complex and difficult in practice. What if someone tries to claim something that a third of the group thinks is a illegitimate expense? Okay, majority rules. What about vote brigading? How do you vet people who want to join?

Mixing social relationships and money tends to be tricky.

That doesn’t even address the problem that arises when someone undergoes a real catastrophe and needs hundreds of thousands of dollars to start resolving their issue. But hey, it might be better than nothing. It might help the half of the American population who can’t come up with $400 in an emergency.

If that’s not pessimistic enough for you… I asked members of the chat group to weigh in, and @aboniks elaborated at length:

If this is a cyberpunk vision where people can be digitized, social security is basically a programming exercise, right? The safety net is actually a safety network. Contractors design theme parks for our digitized psyches and call it a day. Or people each get X amount of storage space and X number of processing cycles to run their own virtual retirement. AIs sell them experience-design services. People duplicate themselves with falsified credentials to engage in benefit fraud and increase their storage space.

Political arguments over meatspace benefit levels and healthcare could translate into arguments about involuntarily putting people into hibernation mode. Article 12 of the Digital Rights Act ensures equal access to services, but people with certain neurological conditions are being discriminated against when they apply for control of real-world mobile camera platforms; rich meatspace Thiels find the erratic movement of their drones to be unsightly.

Anyway, however you pitch it in the end, keep in mind that social security is fundamentally about having and not having. It’s going to be the believability of the conflict between the service users and the service providers that makes your vision work. Or not work.

More realistically, I expect we’ll see something like the private prison industry being broken up and reforming as a service provider for social security beneficiaries. The idea that we’re all going to have a 1/1 bungalow with a garden and an aging Labrador in front of a crackling fire… no. Looking at how people with only SS income are living these days, even an institutional housing project with razor-thin profit margins would be a quality-of-life improvement for a lot of urbanites. The extended family is largely a thing of the past unless you go out of your way to make it happen, and the nuclear family is headed the same way. Lots of poverty-line “senior singles” in our future.

I’m still looking into incorporating my family though. The future I’m likely to live through is much more friendly to corporations than it is to humans.

(Lightly edited for style consistency.)

So, what do you think?

Easily the best response, from reader Brett:

Maybe in a cyberpunk social safety net, there would be a (computer) program that would calculate and dictate when volunteers should steal a roll of toilet paper from their work. The toilet paper would be hoarded and then sent along to those who need it. The computer program would subtly manage the rate of stealing across its networks of humans so the thievery is distributed across many different corporations and never detected by competing algorithms looking for “leakage” in their expenses.

June 16, 2016

International Labor Economics, Ugh

The “Bread and Roses” Lawrence textile strike of 1912. Photo via Library of Congress.

In recent musings about Las Vegas, I called myself bourgeois. Refresher: according to Karl Marx, the bourgeoisie are the capitalist class, prone to consumerism — also often associated with snobbery and intellectual affectations. Think New Yorker readers.

I bring this up because commenter gaikokumaniakku said, “There are a lot of folks who thought they were bourgeois, and then they woke up one morning to another rejected job prospect and realized that they were lower-class.” I agree with Scott Alexander that class does not solely hinge on money, but the point is a good one.

gaikokumaniakku also asked what I think of the term “precariat”, which is a play on “proletariat” (opposite of the bourgeoisie). The precariat are people without financial reserves or job security. Macmillan Dictionary’s BuzzWord blog published this in 2011:

“New, international labour markets, significantly expanding the available workforce, have weakened the position of workers and strengthened the position of employers. Increasingly, workers are in jobs which are part-time and/or temporary, have unpredictable hours, low wages and few benefits such as holiday or sick pay. This means that employers can follow what demand dictates and simply [fire people] if work is not available, and are also not obliged to pay anyone that isn’t actually working.”

I find it plausible that globalization is a big part of this. That’s been an ongoing trend: jobs once located in [country where labor is expensive] disappear offshore to [country where labor is cheap]. Workers don’t have the same freedom of movement that employers do, so they can’t easily respond to market changes. Larger companies especially, which rely on many people’s labor, can shift operations to wherever costs the least.

Demonstrators in New York City during the 1913 May Day parade. Signs feature Yiddish, Italian, and English. Photo via Library of Congress.

Priest and professor Giles Fraser wrote a Guardian editorial on this very topic:

“In this era of advanced globalisation, we believe in free trade, in the free movement of goods, but not in the free movement of labour. We think it outrageous that the Chinese block Google, believing it to be everyone’s right to roam free digitally. We celebrate organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières for their compassionate universalism. But for all this talk of freedom from restriction, we still pen poor people into reservations of poverty. […] At present, globalisation is a luxury of the rich, for those of us who can swan about the globe with the flick of a boarding pass. The so-called ‘migrant crisis’ is globalisation for the poor.”

The other macro factor that might be creating (and provoking) the precariat is technological unemployment. The machines are taking our jobs!!!!! Ahhhhh!!!!! My guess is that we’ll adjust to new levels of productivity, like we did after the Industrial Revolution, but the transition phase will be very painful. (I basically stole this theory from Ben Thompson.)

Beyond that, I don’t have any particular insights. If you do, hit reply and let me know?

June 7, 2016

Exporting Japanese Currency & Culture

Sponsor: Bret Bernhoft

I’m thrilled to announce Exolymph’s first sponsor! Bret Bernhoft is creating an experimental futuristic character called Ruby Leander:

“In 2034 (age 18), Ruby decided to have transhuman implants ‘installed’ into her physiology. Devices/technologies that will follow her throughout the rest of her life. […] She was hired into a new policing program/effort dedicated to sniffing out impurities, forgeries and/or attempts at sabotaging/misusing modern technologies.”

Read the first installment of Ruby’s story and learn more about Bret on his website.

Exporting Japanese Currency & Culture

Artwork by ThvnderKat.

Thomas Vallance of Virtual Mech (website currently under maintenance) emailed me the following contribution. Lightly edited for this venue.

While the information is flowing I would contend that the gatekeeper is merely a man. Matt Pearce hasn’t spent a considerable enough time sitting by Satan’s eye to say such things. [Vallance is referencing Pearce’s comment about the Panama Papers — “Nobody loves a gatekeeper” — which I quoted in a previous dispatch.]

The euro continues to subdue smaller state currencies — this is true for most except Japan, who has a more powerful running economy than its larger counterpart China. In fact, they contend with economic giants like the United States, Britain, and Europe. This leads one to question; how is it that a nation so small outweighs those with populaces and landmass well beyond their own? Asia in general should be posting a considerable yield, yet we turn to little Tokyo for our Eastern trade opportunities. And that’s the kicker, the yen clocks in so high that unless you speak their language you won’t get a foot in the door.

Not surprisingly, the yen is growing more powerful. Where is China’s great and powerful yuan; is it just another case of outsourcing? An example: when I spoke to my local paper about advertising the comic I am currently writing, they didn’t respond. When I dropped into their office to ask why I hadn’t received a reply, I was referred to an advertising group in Malaysia (they don’t even have the same first language). This off-handing of all queries to Asia, specifically in Japan, seems a common trend, if not an absurd one. You want to ask questions? Just translate them into an Asian language.

Yoshide Suga reported on emergency call numbers as they currently experience 7.3 earthquakes in Kumamoto. Sendai Nuclear Power Plant has reported “no irregularities” — meanwhile US markets will eventually crash under the pressure from China.

I am presently reading the Japanese version of The Godfather, Yakuza — it details their overarching presence in Japan, one that has seemingly spread well beyond their border. I find it interesting that the Yakuza is quite well known while the Triad hardly appears on our radar, apart from niche features.

Back to Sonya again. The Triad is actually pretty well-known in the Bay Area due to its influence on San Francisco’s Chinatown.

I can’t speak for Vallance directly, but I think he’s reflecting on some of the oddities of globalization. The interactions between various national economies are exceedingly complex, but fundamentally human-defined, whereas the natural disasters capable of disrupting everyday life come from deeper powers.

The unleashed energy of nature, pressure built up over centuries — it’s easy to liken it to rage, but an earthquake is more like a cat stretching. Just instinct, just built-up tension following the path of least resistance.

January 11, 2016

Nation State, Meet Circuit Board

Photo by Robert Scoble.

Politics and technology play nicely with each other, in the sense that each facilitates the other’s progress. I don’t mean “progress” positively, but neutrally — just movement forward through time, not necessarily improvement.

I’m not talking about the evolution of media changing how powerful people spread information, nor am I referring to the ongoing Crypto Wars. Those phenomena are important, but they’re relatively micro-level concerns. I’m talking about technology on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, which was defined by the steam engine but encompassed a variety of innovations, eventually enabling the modern factory.

Tech analysts like Ben Thompson have argued that the Computing Revolution (or whatever history might dub it) will cause upheaval comparable to the global fallout from the Industrial Revolution, which materially contributed to various wars, including revolutions in formerly colonized countries.

Technology and politics are tied together by economics, which is more important than either. (Money > enfranchisement.) “Economics” is just a fancy word for “resource allocation”, and computers have changed how we do this. What second- and third-order effects will manifest as the century continues to unroll? No idea, but globalization is going to be a helluva ride.

Tag: globalization

Disclosure

Recents Posts

Search