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Technology and its weaknesses

The Party System

2010

RFID chips seem to be rather strongly marketed by the industry, whereas they have also created a fear of totalitarianism, with various claims of it being the plan by  the men behind the curtain.

It is rather self-evident that there are certain risks with putting your whole life on a single chip. One of the fears I’ve read about is the Government or somebody else turning off your chip, leaving you without money, ID or anything which would be required in order to live. This would indeed be devastating for a person, whatever the reasons might be.

In short, this whole technology relies on that the masters are good and respects people to live their lives. The fears, again, claim the masters are not good, but evil, and will seek to destroy opposition, much like we see in totalitarian and dictatorial countries.

It is easy to fall into this fear and reject the whole concept of RFID chips. The idea, though, that money would be available only on a chip, is rather intriguing. This would, after a while, make money only electronic, giving a whole new perspective on money.
When money become mere numbers on an account, as opposed to physical money, it is more easily subject to manipulation. Also, the abundance of money created by money being electronic and thus having no actual limit, could provide with some interesting results. How, for instance, would we limit things? The owners of the systems, such as bankers, could easily create zillions for themselves, without creating anything at all, merely editing the number on their account.

The most intriguing idea, however, would be to take bankers and banks out of the question totally, and letting the government maintain the system instead. This, again, assumes the government to be good. If it assumes the government to be really nice, the government could just add infinite money to everybody’s account, letting everybody buy everything, successfully abandoning the production of new things and leading to a system suicide. Which would be just fine by me, since it proves how weak everything is. However, in a more serious tone, if the system would be maintained by the government, which is (or rather, would be) controlled by the people, we find a way easier way to transform the system as a whole.

The idea of unlimited money for everybody is nice, but for things to work, heavy regulation would have to take place. For instance, prices could sky-rocket, as with wages, in an unlimited system. Ideally, though, prices and wages could be frozen, as the whole system would allow for efficient regulation and a controlled market. This would have to be done through legislations, as naturally, a system collapse would seem rather inevitable to me, as explained above.

In conclusion from my little mind game above, such an economy would lead to a regulated market, rather than a free market, in the sense that prices and wages should be set with everything taken into consideration, at least initially. After a while, though, the system might be self-regulating, as the total amount of the output of money would be limited, thus limiting newcomers from paying huge wages simply because they could (because they cannot do so). Though, economy mechanics considered, inflation may still lead to explosive results, which is why it would have to be regulated on that field as well. (Although I am unsure how you would limit the progress of prices and wages.)

To go back to the RFID-technology as a whole, I remain somewhat positive to its potential, but with a few requirements.
Before we go and unleash the dragon of technology upon our societies, we should ensure our own safety from the system. This means constitutional legislations protecting the individual from surveillance in any form by third parties. Note: self-chosen surveillance, such as the option of displaying personal information to other people, perhaps even position, as I read in a recent science magazine, where phones use GPS technology to locate your friends, would always be okay, as that is you choosing what you want to display, rather than Google or your government monitoring and storing your activities and information without your knowledge. It might be argued that they need to do this in order to provide you with services, but it should at least be protected what they can do with that information, which should be nothing else than provide you with services.

Furthermore, the government should emphasize the use of encrypted communication, and perhaps even help develop them. Why? Governments making requests is a far better way to ensure something being done, than having risky business interests do it. Having the government on your side, rather than against you, is something which can be really beneficial.

On the same time, the government(s) should spend more on helping develop and manufacture new technology, such as “green” technology, for instance as renewable energy production. This is independent of whether or not there is a global warming caused by CO2, as creating these new technologies provides a boost for the country itself, both by creating jobs and by gaining international recognition as a technological country.

I end this post with my conclusion, a.k.a. tl;dr;

New technology is very promising and has got a lot of potential, however, we need to ensure that our privacy and our freedoms are secured as constitutional rights (and safeguard them from being easily removed), before we proceed with applying these new inventions. It would be devastating to rush into the future in an outdated system as the ones we have got now, as these might lead to radical dystopia.
This is again another example of a “fix first”-scenario. No use in going far in a broken machine.

Over and out.

No, I am afraid this is not an analysis of your average Friday night, but rather the political party system.

To begin with, in order to get into politics, the common way to do so is by joining a party. This, because the parties already are organised and have their share of both the Parliament and media. So in other words, you have to first go through their internal party system, and then you get to use their goodies and that way take you forward to the rest of politics.

Because the current situation with the parties is inevitable, I cannot simply ignore it, although I for the moment is not seeking to join any party, because of reasons I will state later. However, this does not mean I would be positive to the system, I am only playing its game because I have to.

Now, what a party is, is a political organisation with a pre-set set of ideas and opinions. Joining a right-wing party and proposing left-wing ideas is simply not going to work, as the brief idea with parties is that people with the same opinions should be joined together and that way have a better way to influence politics. However, this has also lead to parties defining their opinions as if they were individuals, rather than setting up guidelines or whereabouts for opinions. A party, for instance, can be positive or negative towards nuclear power. Although individual members of a party may disagree and have the at least theoretical right to do so, this is really an individual opinion that the organisation as a whole has taken. Of course, it is fine if everybody within the party thinks so, but they rarely do.

Furthermore, the variety of parties is not broad enough to have all opinions covered. This makes it harder to choose party, especially when they define themselves in a one-dimensional world, the left-right axis. For people who have learned a bit more about politics, know that there isn’t just the left-right perspective, but other variables as well. For instance, we have the authoritarian-libertarian axis, which, depending on your opinions, may be rather important. For me, as I focus quite much on freedom, and thus libertarianism, a party seemingly authoritarian is not in my taste.

Another, according to me, negative thing with parties is how they, albeit together, monopolize the system. They have huge resources, as compared to a newcomer or individual, to spend in order to be seen. I consider this to be a negative thing, as it prevents new parties from getting into the system. Even radical parties seem to maintain a rather conservative view when it comes to the political system itself.

What would be far better, from my point of view, is if the party system was abolished, and rather every individual politician was on his or her own to create their own opinions. Of course, nothing prevents cooperation, such as forming alliances between individuals for something they share, in a way creating a party, but on a lower level, which is acceptable. What I mean with this is that, for instance, if you have a specific topic, you can bound together with people who think similarly about that very question. What this does not mean, is that you create an organisation receiving governmental funds in order to help you with your campaign.

Even though it may seem to many people as “too complex to work”, because of the efforts required to have a lot of individuals competing in an election, rather than a few parties with their members, I would consider it to be in the department of “if you try, it works”. It is also important to remember that the argument of claiming something to be too impractical to work, is a way for conservatives to cause doubt about an idea which hasn’t been tried yet.

My final point against the party system is that it limits the options for you, if you would seek to get into politics. Rather than having an open environment with other individuals where you could go and be like them, you have to get into an organisation first, and work yourself to the top there, before you can take on the rest.

In conclusion, I disprove of the political party system on a theoretical level, but in practice I, like everybody else, have to deal with it if I were to deal with politics. However, this is not too limiting, so that it should not be an actual problem. It may just require more effort than otherwise.

With 11 days 23 hours 58 minutes and  1 second at the time of writing until a new year and a new decade begins, it would be time to make some statements.

In the current decade, which is running out, we have experienced a sophistication of the technologies developed in the ’90s, and our computers has got a lot better.
With this, though, has come a conservatism, not looking too kindly on what is going on on our beloved Internetz. We have seen this through the numerous strikes which has been taken against different niches of the Internet, such as the more violent fight against piracy, as well as certain legislations which hurt our freedoms on the Internet. With more and more people having access to the Internet, and more and more activity, to some extent replacing that old afk/irl one, it is more or less inevitable that it also would get more attention.

What the Internet has given us is a tool for people to gain power, without going through the monetary or political system. We, on the Internet, can select what we want to watch and read, we can communicate with each other in a much more affordable way than through telephony. With the uprising of user-rated content, we have found a way of telling people “I like this, you should watch it too!”

Either way, politicians and corporatists alike has started to realise that their powers are decreasing as people use the Internet more and more. Our news are no longer limited to newspapers and television, filtered by private interests. Instead we can choose ourselves what news we want to read.

The Internet is a powerful tool in re-building Democracy. We need to realise and take advantage of this.

When we now are about to enter a new decade, I hope we can turn around this negative trend of freedom, to be positive, by developing and utilising the tools we have. Some people seem to want to turn the Internet into their controlled sphere, just as the rest of society is, but we should know better than that. We should know, that although the corporatists try to control our lives, the Internet is too mighty a machine for them to control. Because the Internet fights back.

Instead of governments trying to control the Internet and degrading it to suit their systems, they should upgrade to take full advantage of the Internet.
Even though the technologies may not be perfect for all their needs, there is potential for it to be. All there is required is willpower.

Make sure this new decade will be different, make sure it will be the best decade ever.
Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

11 days  23 hours  58 minutes  1 second

Time, in common language the description of the 4th dimension, is something required for our daily lives. We must hold a basic understanding of time, in order to use future or past tense when composing sentences. As with most things, this is not actively recognized, as it is not necessary for our every day use.

Nonetheless, time is used, not only as a measurement between what happened, the now, and what will happen, but also for transitions. For instance, every living thing is first born, then grows up, and is bound to at some point, die. This is a way of using our perception of time to describe how the state of something may change.

What we use to help recall the past is memory. In my previous post I gave a brief explanation on memory and how it might not be a reliable tool. However, to actually understand that there is a past, we need memory to tell us what has happened. Without memory, we would not know of the past, and thus it would make it difficult to perceive time.

Without a past, the future would be questioned, too. For without experience, although experience could be said to exist without memory, we could not be able to predict the future. Similarly, any scientific experiment would be of no meaning, as nobody could have evidence from experience, and thus empiricism, if something works. Now, one could argue that with the invention of physical memory, such as writing and other techniques, we would be remembered of what has happened. However, with no memory, what happened 10 seconds ago would be unknown, and thus impossible to write down.

Now, over to a more in-touch with reality subject, how we perceive time is rather subjective. Some, when they think of how they would see time, see a transition of an object, whereas others may see the object multiplied, and for every new instance of the object, slightly changed, to explain the transition without actually using time, which is the case in the 1st example. Continuing, time may be perceived as a path, most easily described as a line, with dots for every event.
This is commonly used when illustrating history, and rather objective, except for the implementation of the dots.

For my own perspective, I view time as an infinite amount of roads, if I was to use a figure of speech somewhat easy to understand. You are currently standing on one road, and in front of you, you’ve got an endless amount of roads and intersections, as far as your eyes can see. Behind you, you have a known path, the one you have “walked”. It goes back to when you were born, and possibly beyond that. It has a set amount of intersections, one for every option you may have chosen.

The point here, is that you, or other people for you, have made certain choices throughout your life. Every choice made has brought you further down the road, where every intersection has been where you had to choose between things. In the long run, you have made your way down a path unique to you.

This is my way of perceiving the past. Every single instance in the past could have been different, a slightly different choice could have brought you down another path, depending on where it lead. Some small choices might change your path completely, but for most of the time, they barely matter, leaving you on your main road in the end.

When investigating your past, you might find a dozen things which could have gone different and made you go some elsewhere.

For the present, you undoubtedly stand in an intersection, pondering what choice to make. You might stand in a larger or smaller one, depending on the importance of your choice.
Even if you may claim to be standing in several intersections at once, this is probably not the case. For the choice you first make brings you forward, to the next intersection, even if all of these end up at the larger intersection. The outcome of that, larger choice is then partially decided by from what way you came.

As for future, you may have figured it out a long while ago, but the future follows the same pattern. When you set up a goal, you, in my maze of roads-figure, set up a location to which you will attempt to reach.

If you view this as a whole, you get a complex of roads, where the intersections represent your choices made and your choices possible to make and where these different choices will lead. One axis represents, if not a direct measure of time, your choices, from your first to your infinitely last. The length between each choice is ignorable, as the roads are not linear, and you do not live forever, but have infinite options.
Another axis (if we would use the Cartesian 2 dimensional coordinate system, the first would be the x-axis and this would be the y-axis) can be set to represent, for instance, the positiveness of a choice and where it leads, for instance higher values on the y-axis could be said to be better choices, and lower would be worse ones.

However, measuring progress in terms of positivity and negativity is subjective, and it thus applies only to oneself. This, I would then say, is a way of measuring where you are and where you can go, and how good your choices are, rather than an objective interpretation of time.

If you will, fatalism can be easily applied to this system, for then every choice is pre-made, and you have a set path, of definite amount of choices you can make. Furthermore, the view I have described here also gives a good view of how determinism works, as every choice leads to another, in one way or another.

A light form of determinism would here mean that some intersections are set, meaning at one point or another, you will come across certain things. The outcome then depends on from where you came.

I hope that’s all for now.

Cheers, Kennie

To begin with, recent studies show that memory can be manipulated, consciously and unconsciously. This not only adds a question mark to the certainty of witnesses, but to every day life as well.

Of course, there is undoubtedly no question concerning the main parts of the memory, more likely the details. But in order to discuss time, which I will do after this, a brief debate about memory is in order.

In theoretical philosophy, uncertain memory is quite a valuable piece of information. For whereas philosophy questions existence, but cannot question one’s own existence, if your memories would be imaginary, it would allow for some serious toying with your mind.

However, to stay in touch with reality, it is highly doubtful that memory would be made up in any larger sense. With the invention of writing and similar physical memories, it is quite obvious that what you remember is largely related to the rest of the sense-data we perceive as the physical world.

It is thus rather a question of however the rest of the world exists, than whether your memories about it are true. However, we should be doubtful concerning the details of our memories. Over time, memories fade and quite often change. Dark parts become brighter, and so forth.

I however admit that it would be good matrix-material if we could conclude that our memories are artificial and never happened. This, however, makes it difficult to trace a limit, for what I did a second ago is as much a memory as is what I did 10 years ago, although the former may be easier to find signs of.

Thus we can conclude that such memory-manipulation would make the past obsolete and only the present to be existent. It is an interesting thought, although something one cannot easily comprehend. Similarly, all you would ever do would be of no importance, as the memories would always be made up and affect your present, if you could even said to be living in a present when the one-millisecond-ago-memories would be made up.

I leave the rest up to your minds to figure out,

cheers.

The project has finally been launched, and is thus transitioning into phase One.

I shall put a brief view over what is happening at around this time:

First of all, the creator of this project, me, is in the military (because of compulsory military service), which means progress is rather slow and time is limited.

Similarly, the project’s main idea is somewhat unrepresented as there is not sufficient time to provide that.

I hope you like the look of the website, it has what you would call a plethora of reasons behind why it looks as it does.

Finally, I would like to put a warning word, as in the closest time, mainly theoretical and philosophical content will show up here, if I know my capacities correctly.

Cheers, Kennie