Counterpoint to fears of losing the drudgery we're entitled to: once the value of labor has evaporated, and we still have the masses controlling the ballot box, we may finally achieve Fully Automated Luxury Communism[1].
And we have the, mostly commercial, propaganda machine controlling the masses.
And regardless, if the masses would try to use the ballot box to make moves to something like FALC, it would be taken away, by force if necessary. This has been seen countless times.
Looking at how wealth, capital and power are concentrating, we are well on our way to some sort of new feudal system.
How do we know we are not in feudal system right now? Propaganda machine is telling us we are in a democracy, but all I see is oligarchy controlling the system.
It’s called the iron law of oligarchy.[1] All democratic organizations decay into oligarchies - a minority group of elites that are in control. So the question becomes who gets to join that elite and how do people get cycled out of it. When there isn’t a sufficient cycling (people who shouldn’t be a part any longer remain - nepotism etc; people that don’t deserve to be a part are invited - diversity for diversities sake, etc) people then it becomes rotten.
> Later Michels migrated to Italy and joined Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party, as he believed this was the next legitimate step of modern societies.
"Iron law" isn't a law in any real sense here, other that it was one fascist guy calling it that. Still, there's a valid point:
> By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes
This really shines a light on the innovative system that Australia uses[1], which I think helps mitigate the non-participation factor: voting in Australia is compulsory. It's your civic duty to participate in elections and everyone is automatically registered when they reach the age of 18.
Overall I think that it's hard to make any 'iron laws' in modern times, because these laws were based on looking back rather than forward. A lot of these are based on assumptions that technology wouldn't change, but that's not the case - modern telecommunications have moved us past the age where information only traveled as fast as a horse could carry you. For 99.99% of human history it was totally impossible for a direct democracy to function, but with instant, global communications and information access that's no longer a safe assumption.
It’s worth looking into Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, both from the Italian school of elitism. The overruling theme being a well connected, organized minority will always rule over a disorganized and disinterested majority.
Machiavelli too had many interesting ideas, in particular how the elite moved through the various forms of government. A monarch decays into a despot and is eventually overtaken by an aristocracy of nobles which decays into democracy over a few generations which has a very short life and takes on the darker side of “rule by few” as an oligarchy. Eventually they become so decadent that a populist government (rule by many, the darker side of democracy) overtakes them and soon after a new prince, or monarch “of the people” is born and the cycle continues possibly over many hundreds of years.
Looking at America I think we are in the oligarchical phase and pushing hard towards a populist whom will reform the government dramatically.
I'm really interested in these views that view these human systems almost as physical systems, with semi-legible dynamics and complex (but comprehensible) interactions, and even implications. Thus the irons laws.
I'm also very taken with the idea of systems propagating themselves. Formally, this is called "autopoiesis" and is its own fascinating and related rabbit hole.
The coolest thing this morning, prompted by your comment, is the "self-licking ice cream cone" [1]. This paper [2] is particularly intriguing. Thanks again.
Yeah the self licking icecream cone is a classic at this point and correctly identifies one of the problems with new government (or any organization) programs/agencies/projects. Without explicit end goals and objectives that when met will trigger the dissolution of the program/agency/project as having successfully completed their mission, they end up existing to find reasons to exist. We see it everywhere today.
For example, at one point 50 years ago it was decided that we needed to do things to get more females into universities - a noble goal. So we set up a variety of things that made it more accessible to females and the things we did were successful. The way we did this is questionable (lower standards for females, in part) but they accomplished the goals. But we still have these systems setup and the people who run them have become entrenched and organized and any motion to dismantle them is met with aggression. You can extrapolate this well beyond females.
So we end up in a situation where more and more people find a prime mechanisms of elite credentialism (elite universities) as unfair and meaningless. And our pool of elites are weaker and unable to defend themselves against the rise of populism since so many of them aren't actually elites in reality, even if they pretend they are or believe they are being oblivious to all the artificial mechanisms that put them there in the first place.
We have already introduced so many automations into our lives in the past century. People from 100 years ago would assume that, with the tools we have today, we already would have reached “fully automated luxury communism”. But instead, we fall short of that utopia.
The growth in consumption seems to always ever so slightly outpace innovation.
A result of this relationship between consumption and innovation seems to be that there is always some drudgery for humans right beyond the edge of what we can automate. The drudgery serves to eek just a bit more out of the system in order to match the demands of consumption.
Tomorrows drudgery will not look like todays, but it will remain drudgery all the same.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. I also suspect that, if you translated the median person from the US to the alternate-reality world of FALC they might look around in wonder; while the people native to the FALC reality would be as disaffected as many are today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communi...