Seventeen bullet points from Charles Stross

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Who he? Meet Charles David George "Charlie" Stross - great writer.

From his blog Charlie's Diary:

A different cluetrain
Right now, I'm chewing over the final edits on a rather political book. And I think, as it's a near future setting, I should jot down some axioms about politics ...

    1. We're living in an era of increasing automation. And it's trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society).

    2. A side-effect of the rise of capital is the financialization of everything—capital flows towards profit centres and if there aren't enough of them profits accrue to whoever can invent some more (even if the products or the items they're guaranteed against are essentially imaginary: futures, derivatives, CDOs, student loans).

    3. Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.

    4. The iron law of bureaucracy states that for all organizations, most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective. (This emerges organically from the needs of the organization's employees.)

    5. Governments are organizations.

Thirteen additional trenchant observations as well as three afternotes. There are over 850 comments so his thinking is definitely hitting a nerve.

The word cluetrain hearkens back to the 1999 Cluetrain Manifesto published by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger (PDF here, original website here, more here)

Revolutionary stuff when it was first published sixteen years ago and great stuff now.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on March 18, 2015 8:25 PM.

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