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stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, et alia

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2004-10-30

Revolt of the Engineers, Part III

More on Palchinsky.

On pages 40-41 of The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union, Loren R. Graham writes as follows:

Palchinsky promoted a very ambitious role for engineers. He wanted engineers to apply a new form of social analysis to problems of industrialization, and he believed that in order for this to happen the engineer's place in society must change. Earlier, the engineer had been assigned a passive role by society: higher authorities asked him to find solutions to technical problems. Now, Palchinsky maintained, the engineer must emerge as an active economic and industrial planner, suggesting where economic development should occur and what form it should take....

Palchinsky's vision of the new Soviet engineer was based on a justifiably strong conviction that a broad approach to engineering would result in more efficient industrial enterprises and more satisfied workers. The new model engineer also appealed to Palchinsky's professional pride. Edwin Layton observed that engineers in the United States in the same period displayed an "obsessive concern for social status." Palchinsky and his colleagues were eager to promote the engineer to a new prominence in society, and they believed that the Soviet state, with its emphasis on centrally planned industrialization, provided unusual opportunities for this promotion.

For all his sophistication about engineering, Palchinsky badly misunderstood the political course of the Soviet Union. His ambitions for engineers could be realized only in a society that granted the various professions a high degree of autonomy and whose government was willing to listen to advice from outside official circles. As he was to discover, Stalin had a very different vision of society and of industrialization.

Perhaps the engineer-entrepreneurs in Rand's Atlas Shrugged are the ultimate in autonomous professionals?

Posted on 2004-10-30 at 17:57. File under society.

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2004-10-29

Gridlock

More lessons of history.

Lew Rockwell busts some more myths and explains why gridlock is better than one-party government, especially when the executives are Democrats and the legislatures are Republican.

Posted on 2004-10-29 at 21:07. File under politics.

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Fulcrums and Frameworks

Thoughts on societal phase shifts.

Dizzy and I had another interesting talk today while strolling around downtown Denver and environs. One topic that came up was what he calls frameworks -- what others might call mind-sets or paradigms (hey, we're geeks, and 'frameworks' is a good geeky word). In software, a framework might be an operating system like Linux, a programming language like Perl, or a platform like Twisted. People get religious about these things, and they tend not to switch very often. Once you've sunk a great deal of time, energy, and synapses into working a certain way, you don't like to switch. So your existing framework has to get really bad (or the alternatives have to become seriously superior) for you to consider making a change.

There is a similiar phenomenon in societal organization. For instance, life in the former Communist Bloc had to get really bad before people rose up and changed the framework (some argue that evidence began to trickle behind the Iron Curtain that life in the West was much better; either way, the benefits began to seriously outweigh the switching costs). Will we ever get to such a point in the West? Will things ever get really bad here, especially in this age of abundance? Perhaps not soon within the generalized framework of politics, but people might start switching out of certain sub-frameworks, such as the government education system. We already see this happening with the move to charter schools, vouchers, and especially parent-directed learning (I don't call it homeschooling because there is by definition no school involved). Parents are voting with their feet, and the sum of those individual decisions may eventually change the very framework of education in America.

It strikes me that this is where real change happens: at the fulcrum-points where old frameworks are discarded and new frameworks are adopted. One can work one's whole life within a framework but never change things much, yet a seemingly momentous but in fact quite simple change in outlook or behavior (say, teaching one's children at home) can lead to fundamental improvements in society when adopted by enough people. To date, Western civilization has been better at framework-switching than other civilizations, which is why it has reformed itself in the past rather than ossifying into stagnation. And the big changes have occurred despite "the system" of religious, political, military, and corporate power. So I think that working within the system is almost never the right way to bring about progress and change. The Internet was not developed by the telcos; long-haul trucking was not developed by the railroads; guns were not developed by knights; printing presses were not developed by scribes; jazz was not developed by classical composers; personal computers were not developed by mainframe manufacturers; the World Wide Web was not developed by publishing companies; Wikipedia was not developed by Encyclopedia Britannica. Similarly, deep educational reform will not come from the public schools; medical reform will not come from pharmaceutical companies and the NIH; copyright reform will not come from Disney and the record companies; legal reform will not come from trial lawyers and legislatures; monetary reform will not come from central banks; political reform will not come from the Democrats and Republicans.

I happen to think that real reform in all of these areas will be the result of introducing markets and other forms of voluntary interaction from the bottom up: parents teaching their kids at home or contracting with other providers of alternative education services, patients paying doctors and nurses directly rather than through government- or company-provided insurance, creative types selling (or giving) to their audiences directly rather than depending on publishers and record companies, people settling disputes through mediation rather than the courts, folks using gold or local currencies rather than government-issued fiat money, and eventually perhaps even many people seeking consistently voluntary solutions rather than vote-mongering, regulating, legislating, and other forms of forcing their views and desires on others through the instruments of government power.

Call me a utopian, call me an idealist, but I see evidence that already some of these trends are in full force and others are beginning to gain steam; granted, some may never take off, but then again it once seemed as if the Iron Curtain would never be parted, either. Hope springs eternal, even in the midst of yet another acrimonious political season.

Posted on 2004-10-29 at 20:43. File under society.

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So Close

A great divide?

The fact that the last two U.S. presidential elections have been so close leads people to think that there is a great divide among the populace: blue America vs. red America, liberal Democrats vs. conservative Republicans, coastal elites vs. heartland populists, and all the rest. Perhaps. But perhaps there's a simpler explanation: each party has gotten really good at crafting its message to attract as many votes as possible. For example, Democrats don't talk about gun control anymore, because that turned off too many mainstream voters (lots of whom have bought guns for self-defense in the last 5 or 10 years). Since both parties have perfected such strategies, we've reach a kind of steady state in which each party receives about half the vote in presidential elections. The same reasoning applies to U.S. Senate elections in some "battleground" states (one of which seems to be my adopted state of Colorado). But most U.S. House elections appear to be foregone conclusions, mainly because of gerrymandering but also because urban politics are quite different from rural politics. The congresscritter from the House district in which I live has a safe seat and could basically hold her "job" for life, until and unless she decides to run for some other office, returns to real life, or inexplicably faces a challenge in the Democratic primary. The rise of so many safe seats leads to polarization or radicalization in more local elections, which gives the impression that Americans themselves are polarized; but I think such a conclusion is unwarranted, and that there is much greater diversity of opinion than the pundits and parties would have us believe.

Posted on 2004-10-29 at 19:37. File under politics.

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2004-10-28

The Strike

More on the revolt of the engineers.

This evening I came home from the library with about ten books on engineering in Soviet Russia (and given that my saddle bags were full, I had a mighty hard time biking home with all those books -- it's a good thing I live only three blocks from the library!). Following up on my reading of Edwin Layton's book The Revolt of the Engineers, I'm delving more deeply into attitudes towards engineering (what Layton calls the "ideology of engineering") in Russia and America in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly as background for a planned essay on Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged as the story of an engineers' revolt (Rand's working title for the book was "The Strike"). As Layton describes, seeds for the American ideology of engineering were planted as early as the 1890s, came to fruition in 1920s, and then fizzled out in the 1930s despite enthusiasm for the application of engineering to social problems in the early years of the Depression. It seems that Russia never experienced quite the same optimism about the role of engineers in society as America did: engineers with their specialists' knowledge were mistrusted as opposed to the interests of the workers (a conflict illustrated in Bogdanov's 1913 novel Engineer Menni); there were engineers' strikes soon after the Russian Revolution (well before Rand left Russia in January 1926); and Stalin crushed any remaining independent professionalism among Russian engineers with the Shakhty Trial of April 1928 and the Industrial Party Trial of December 1930. Rand undoubtedly was aware of events and attitudes in Russia before her departure, as witnessed by the fact that the protagonist of her 1936 novel We The Living was a Russian engineering student during the early 1920s.

As noted in my previous post, the heroes of Atlas Shrugged are almost all engineers (indeed, in one striking passage, the fictional composer Richard Halley describes the process of writing music as a kind of sonic engineering!). But they are not functionaries: almost all of them are simultaneously engineers and entrepreneurs (the main exception in the prehistory of the novel is Galt, who goes to work in an industrial research laboratory -- with fateful consequences, since his experiences there precipitate the strike). Does this combination owe something to Peter Palchinsky's assertion that "the future belongs to managing-engineers and engineering-managers"? (Quoted in Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union, Harvard, 1993, p. 44.) Palchinsky argued for such a combination in the context of a socialist economy, but he opposed centralized planning and thought that such manager-engineers should function autonomously and take into account the particulars of time and place (e.g., the availability of local materials). I see similarities here to Rand's entrepreneur-engineers, who apply their rational judgement to their own companies and steer clear of broader industry groupings and even working for others.

Graham provides references to two resources that look like must reading: an essay by Kendall E. Bailes entitled "The Politics of Technology: Stalin and Technocratic Thinking among Soviet Engineers" (American Historical Review 79, 1974) and a longer treatment by Bailes of related issues in his book Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton, 1978). I guess it's back to the library for those two!

On a related note, I must say that I found the temporal setting of Atlas Shrugged to be a bit jarring when re-reading the novel recently. There are two mentions of television in the novel, and some rich industrialists have private planes, but radio is the main form of communication and aircraft are not used for commercial aviation (nor, it seems, for military purposes). The events of the novel depict something like a Greater Depression that disintegrates into an economic death-spiral (greatly hastened by the strike of the engineer-entrepreneurs) and a political descent into a kind of bumbling fascism. So the novel seems to be set in something like the 1930s gone even more horribly awry, which is why continued references by latter-day Objectivists to the prospect of "Atlas shrugging" seem so off the mark to me.

Posted on 2004-10-28 at 20:49. File under philosophy.

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2004-10-27

Halloween Emoticons

'Tis the season?

Just what we all need: holiday-themed emoticons for Jabber. What'll people think of next? (Tip o' the hat to Carl Malamud.)

Posted on 2004-10-27 at 14:51. File under jabber.

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2004-10-25

Hospersian Hysteria

An intellectual obituary.

John Hospers, professor emeritus of philosophy at UCLA and the first presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, has apparently committed intellectual suicide by urging those of a libertarian persuasion to vote for George W. Bush. Hospers, once a clear-thinking philosopher with strong Objectivist tendencies, has accepted several key myths promulgated by anti-intellectual American nationalists and therefore has abdicated completely the field of ideas; among those myths:

This election is a turning point in American history, "an important electoral crossroads for the future of liberty", a fulcrum on which turns the very fate of Western civilization.
A vast left-wing conspiracy is poised to take over America and foment an international leftist revolution as soon as a Democrat is elected to the presidency.
Creeping socialism is such a clear and present danger that we must sacrifice our liberties and assent to creeping fascism in order to protect the American way of life.
American patriotism requires continuous war, relentless intervention in foreign nations, and the building of an American empire rather than peaceful trade with all and entangling alliances with none.

Services are planned for November 2, 2004. Hospers is survived by reason and freedom, which outlast all fair-weather friends. In lieu of flowers, well-wishers are encouraged to redouble their commitment to clear thinking and the principles of liberty.

Posted on 2004-10-25 at 20:19. File under politics.

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2004-10-19

Lost Messages

Sorry, you'll need to contact me again.

I just logged in to my stpeter@jabber.org account with a new Jabber client but unfortunately it couldn't handle the flood of offline messages I received (probably well over 1000 of 'em, since I haven't logged into this account in 3 weeks). So if you've sent me a message in the last little while, you may need to contact me again. Sorry!

Posted on 2004-10-19 at 13:04. File under jabber.

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2004-10-18

Certainly Scary

Faith vs. facts in American politics.

Anyone concerned about the direction of the United States of America needs to read this article on the decision-making processes of the Bush presidency (hint: it's always a bad sign when those in charge disparagingly describe the opposition as uncooperative members of "the reality-based community", i.e., those who deal with facts). It will be interesting to see if Bruce Bartlett's prediction comes true: that, if Bush wins, a "civil war" will erupt within the Republican Party, presumably between fact-based free marketeers and faith-based theocrats. It's unfortunate that the alternative to Bush is an industrial-age, class-warrior scion of the loony left. If only Americans did not live under a stifling political duopoly, there might be a chance for some kind of moderately libertarian party to appeal to the broad middle of those who are neither creeping fascists nor creeping socialists. Given relentless gerrymandering and the many privileges of power, don't hold your breath.

Posted on 2004-10-18 at 20:27. File under politics.

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Come Together

Toward the real-time Internet.

I've blogged a bit before about what I call the emerging real-time Internet. In fact it's about more than real-time communication, because personalization is a big part of it, too. A lot of smart people I chat with sense that there exists some confluence of IM, chat, presence, weblogs, social networking, search, relevance rankings, pubsub, RSS/Atom, and other technologies that will provide the platform for next-generation Internet applications. Consider:

PubSub.com lets me know (via a publish-subscribe mechanism that's hooked into Jabber) every time a weblog author publishes an entry containing the words "jabber" or "xmpp" (and they track 3+ million blogs). In essence that's like a standing search request, except that I don't have to go out to Google and do the search, nor do I have to wait for email. If I'm not online, the IM gets stored for me by Mimir. That's good. It would be even better if I could provide feedback to PubSub.com so that they could know which blog entries I found of interest (perhaps there is some smart semantic matching of "jabber" to "technology" being of interest but of "jabber" to "Iraq" not being of interest so that stories about guys named Jabber Al Hussein get filtered out and stories about IM technologies get filtered in).
Not so good is what happened to Orkut (see previous post), at least in my experience. The groups got poisoned, there was no easy way to filter out useless posts (and posters), I didn't go there very often because the service didn't keep me informed and I hate to poll for updates (a simple IM would do wonders to increase stickiness), the groups were not integrated at all with the main ways I communicate (mostly IM, less so email), so I lost interest and have not visited the site in ages even though it helped me get in touch with some old acquaintances. Yet if it integrated with my IM contact lists and pinged me via IM, I might return.
Weblogs provide a wonderful filtering mechanism, and a personalized one at that. I don't watch TV, read newspapers, or listen to the radio. But when someone I respect blogs about an article in the New York Times or whatever, I'm liable to follow the link. In essence I use the blogosphere as a distributed filtering mechanism. Blogs good. (Well, some blogs good.) But there's no easy way for me to let a blog author that I found a particular story valuable (trackbacks sort of provide that, as do comments but comment spam sucks.)

Common themes here include filtering based on relevance to me or to a group of which I'm a member, the ability to provide feedback regarding that relevance, immediacy (I want it pushed it to me, but only if I will find it worth my attention), smart groups that enable me to find people of interest and block out the losers, and tapping into the editorial intelligence of people I respect and admire.

One insight that became stronger for me at the recent IAB messaging summit is that the flow of information and messaging will eventually become unwieldy for most people connected to the Internet (as it already is for power users like me). Personally, I want to access the tremendous information flow out there and connect to the online world, but I want the information I receive and people I communicate with to be worthy of my attention (which is my most precious resource). In fact, I want that information faster than ever (the need for speed), but only if it is relevant and of interest. Some kind of filtering mechanism out there needs to learn what I find interesting, and learn fast from what I tell it. To some extent other people already if unwittingly perform that function on my behalf (thus the attraction of at least some weblogs), but I'd sure like to have some kind of communications console working to filter the flow for me.

The company that gets this right is going to have a powerful platform at its disposal, and I don't want that company to be Microsoft -- not that I would use their stuff anyway, since it has to be a company that's not evil (but lots of regular folks would use it, which scares me). Gmail+, perhaps? Some killer app for OS X? Google has the relevance-matching skills to make this work (though probably not at the level of the individual), and Apple has the user interface smarts. The Jabber community has some of the underlying delivery and real-time communication technologies (via XMPP and pubsub), but we're just a bunch of protocol geeks. RSS and Atom are a big part of this (see also Atom over XMPP), perhaps even to the level of diablogs. We need traditional IM contact lists to integrate better with the social networking world (FOAF, anyone?). We need to filter ingoing and outgoing messages and presence in much more intelligent ways (it's in RFC 3921 but not yet in Jabber clients and servers).

Obviously a lot of technologies and trends need to come together in order for this to happen. But I do think it will happen, because otherwise the net will become unusable. Well, the net is too powerful for people to stop using it altogether, but a service that directs my attention to things that will most interest me and stimulate my thinking would make its users so much more productive that someone is bound to offer such a service (and make a handsome profit in the process).

Posted on 2004-10-18 at 16:44. File under jabber.

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2004-10-12

Homeward Bound

Another trip.

FWIW, I'll be burning through some frequent flyer miles by visiting my family in Maine this weekend (leaving tomorrow, returning Sunday). I promise I'll catch up on all my Jabber to-do items when I return...

Posted on 2004-10-12 at 16:53. File under personal.

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2004-10-11

The American Pastime

Baseball and American society.

In flight to San Francisco the other day, I picked up the Colorado Rockies magazine while we were landing and read the following quote from historian Jacques Barzun:

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

There is, I think, much truth in that statement, well explicated by Tim Wales here and here. And I note that Ayn Rand never gave evidence of any interest in or knowledge of the game (though as previously noted Rand did not truly understand American culture).

Posted on 2004-10-11 at 21:09. File under society.

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Phase Shifts

The history and future of growth.

Could the world economy double in size every week or two? Tyler Cowen links to an essay by Robin Hanson which argues precisely that. On the face of it, the notion seem preposterous, no? But a hunter-gatherer living before the agricultural revolution would have thought it preposterous if presented with the notion that human productive output could double every 900 years rather than every 225,000 years. Similarly, a farmer during the agricultural age would have thought it preposterous if presented with the notion that human productive output could double every 15 years (which it is doing right now) rather than every 900 years. Hanson argues from this historical series that the industrial revolution is not done yet: eventually the industrial phase will result in a doubling every six years or so.

So what comes after that? Each previous phase has ended in a "phase shift" with a massively increased growth rate (on the order of a 150 to 300 times increase). But massively increasing the growth rate from (soon) doubling every six years would result in doubling the total world product every week or two! And Hanson notes that, if the historical series holds true, the next phase shift would begin less than 70 years from now.

Phase shifts are the paradigmatic "interesting times". Within human history, the phase shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture coincided (over thousands of years) with massive upheaval in living patterns: the birth of writing, the founding of the first towns, the origin of class distinctions, etc. Similarly, the phase shift from agriculture to industry coincided (over hundreds of years) with printed culture, exponentially growing knowledge accumulation, world exploration and conquest by the most advanced civilization (Europe), unprecedented concentration of people in large cities, etc. Hanson seems to think that such phase shifts happen "naturally" and are primary historical causes, but as I've written before it's impossible for a phase shift to occur without an accompanying shift in the way that the human mind perpetuates itself: first in language, then in writing, then in printing, then (perhaps) in something else that we have not quite dreamed up yet. The next phase will have something to do with electronic storage of information and human knowledge, which is already causing deep changes in human society. Indeed, one catalyst for the next phase shift might be (as Hanson mentions) the potential to upload a human mind into electronic form -- the ultimate in perpetuating individual intelligence. (Trans-humanists and fans of the Singularity don't stop there: why not upload the sum of human knowledge?)

So while I disagree with Hanson in connecting each phase shift with the ability to store more information (after all, even DNA is "just" an information-storage mechanism), I agree that something momentous may be afoot before long -- and that the phase shift will happen more quickly than ever this time (on the order of decades or even mere years). Will humans be able to adjust to such fast and far-reaching changes? Will humans even be part of the picture (e.g., if machines become intelligent)?

May you live in interesting times!

Posted on 2004-10-11 at 20:25. File under society.

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2004-10-10

112+

Further JEP adjustments.

This evening I made a few adjustments to JEP-0112: User Physical Location to align it more fully with the vCard and PIDF-LO specs. I think that's it on modifications to the various extended presence JEPs, unless members of the Jabber Council have comments.

Posted on 2004-10-10 at 21:15. File under jabber.

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Report

Summarizing the IAB messaging summit.

Well, I volunteered to help the estimable Pete Resnick write up the official report on last week's "messaging summit" held by the IAB (actually, Lisa Dusseault volunteered me, but she said it so nicely that I couldn't very well refuse). So I guess I'll add that task to my .plan, eh?

Posted on 2004-10-10 at 21:03. File under jabber.

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Markets as Facts

More on belief systems.

Following up on my recent entry Either-Or, Perry Metzger emailed me to question the truth of my saying that I have no political belief system or ideology. Au contraire, he said: I do have a political ideology and it is called anarchism.

Perhaps I did not make myself clear. Specifically, I think my assertion that I lack a political belief system turned on a subtlety about the meaning of the word "belief". On this topic, consider these wise words from Don Boudreaux's recent post on Facts vs. Faith:

A belief that is founded upon a compelling theory and that is consistently supported by plenty of empirical evidence is not properly described as "faith." As I understand the meaning of the word "faith" -- especially when this word is used in an attempt to discredit a proposition -- it means belief in something for no rational reason and without sufficient supporting empirical evidence. Indeed, truly to have faith in something requires that you believe in that something even if it is illogical and if the empirical evidence is stacked against it.

I see much evidence that most people's political ideas are driven by nothing more than emotivism, and that they are ideological; by which I mean that they are not a matter of facts and evidence, but of faith and doctrine (ask your typical "liberal" or "conservative" what evidence would lead to a change regarding his or her political beliefs, and you will find the answer instructive). Thus the attachment of that "-ism" suffix.

By contrast, we do not attach the "-ism" suffix to the recognition of facts. No one describes themselves as a "heliocentrist" -- they simply recognize the fact that the earth revolves around the sun. To describe one person as a heliocentrist and another as a geocentrist would be to put observable facts and unprovable dogmas on an equal footing, and that's just wrong.

At the age of nine, I stopped believing in the existence of gods, because there seemed to be no evidence for the kind of supernatural power asserted by those around me. I don't see my lack of religious belief as a matter of ideology, which is why I prefer the term "non-believer" to the term "atheist" (one who actively disputes the existence of gods, often in a militant fashion) or "agnostic" (one who doesn't think there is enough evidence one way or another to determine if gods exist).

Now, let's look at markets. To my mind, there is an abundance of evidence that markets are a natural fact of voluntary human interaction. Markets happen in a way quite different from the way that, say, Congress happens. Humans beings are trading animals, and market phenomena emerge in an organic manner. So "putting one's faith in markets" is not a matter of faith at all: it is simply a matter of recognizing that voluntary human interactions lead to peaceful societal orders.

Thus I don't see my lack of belief in government force as a matter of ideology, dogma, doctrine, or faith; and I'd certainly prefer a term that didn't end in "-ism" to describe that lack of belief.

Let me add that I don't think a lack of religious belief necessitates a lack of spirituality; in fact, I think I'm a fairly spiritual person in my own way. Nor do I think a lack of belief in government force necessitates a lack of concern for one's fellow man; in fact, I think working for a fully voluntary society is the truly progressive approach to human interaction.

Posted on 2004-10-10 at 20:38. File under politics.

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2004-10-08

Adoption

A little meme-squashing to start my day.

Open platforms are good. But no one uses open platforms; case in point: Jabber. Or so says Jeremy Zawodny. Unfortunately for his argument, he's wrong. It's hard to say that Jabber technologies have experienced no adoption when they're being hacked on by folks at Apple, HP, Oracle, and Sun, not to mention serious adoption by Wall Street banks, large ISPs, mobile telephony providers, and countless other organizations worldwide. Just because Zawodny's friends (or the people at Web 2.0) aren't cool enough to be using Jabber and are still stuck in consumer services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo does not prove that there is no adoption of Jabber technologies.

Posted on 2004-10-08 at 10:11. File under jabber.

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2004-10-05

SF Bound

Travelling again.

I'll be in San Francisco for the next few days participating in the IAB messaging summit and chatting IRL with other interesting folks. Not sure I'll be blogging much, but you never know...

Posted on 2004-10-05 at 14:51. File under personal.

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2004-10-04

R-F-C!

IETF publishes XMPP specs.

I've been working towards this for the last two-and-a-half years, and so have a lot of other people in the Jabber community. Hats off to Jabber!

Posted on 2004-10-04 at 20:04. File under jabber.

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2004-10-02

Kudos

High praise indeed.

After completing the "Authors 48 Hours" review on the XMPP RFCs-to-be in record time the other day, I was shocked to be cc'd on a message from the office of the RFC Editor to the Chairs of the IETF and IAB, thanking me in effusive terms for my diligent attention to the RFC process. Honest, I was just doing my job! But that got me to thinking: shall I start hiring myself out to write RFCs? ;-)

Posted on 2004-10-02 at 21:11. File under jabber.

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Unvoting

Further thoughts on the futility of electoral politics.

Recent readers of this weblog may get the impression that I have always been opposed to electoral politics. Not true. Although I didn't vote for the first few U.S. elections held after I became eligible to vote, something happened to me that changed my mind: while visiting Czechoslovakia in 1990 and again while teaching English there in 1991, I witnessed the first and second free elections held in that country since the Communist putsch in 1948. The outpouring of sentiment for the simple act of choosing one's representatives affected me profoundly. On Election Day in 1992 I voted for the first time (and also joined the Libertarian Party), and in 1996 I even started a run for U.S. House of Representatives from my district in New Jersey (an effort truncated by my move to Pennsylvania that year). By 1998 or so I had tired of active work in the political arena (mainly because of my disillusionment with the Libertarian Party, which is the party closest to my own views), and although I voted in the 2000 elections, it was with little enthusiasm. Since then I have come to the conclusion that it is more effective to work outside the political system than within it, so much so that I would now say I don't believe in government any longer. (Whether this makes me a kind of market anarchist, societal voluntarist, or progressive libertarian I'm not quite sure yet, since I tend to shy away from any label that ends with "-ist" these days -- but that's a topic for another blog entry.)

In any case, it seems to me now that voting is misguided, so I plan to not vote in this year's election. It's been interesting to hear people's reactions to my statement that I shall not vote -- you'd think I had stated my intent to throw a newborn baby into a trash dumpster. One recurring theme in people's objections is that my voice won't be heard. Naturally, I am making my voice heard -- that's one reason I keep a weblog (yes, I think that rights are meant to be exercised; I also think that this blog is a more effective means of exercising my right of free speech than voting for some monkey or another to fill a government job). But today I had a funny thought: what if I show up at my local polling place and deliberately state that I shall not be voting this year? Voting is the only time when one explicitly gives one's consent to the government, so what if I let the election monitors know that I won't be voting and won't be giving my consent?

It seems rather crazy, doesn't it? But what if all the people who are thought to be apathetic turned out to consciously and deliberately not vote? "Well, Dan, the polls are busier than usual this year, but half the people are not voting!" Wouldn't such behavior, en masse, help to expose the fact that our current system of government is illegitimate?

We could call this "unvoting". Unvoter groups could hand out "I Unvoted" buttons. Bumper stickers could proclaim "I'm X and I Unvote" (where "X" is your societal hobbyhorse of choice). Pundits and politicos would be aware that people across the country had actively and with full intent withdrawn their sanction from the system.

You may ask: To what end? Why unvote? Isn't it better to work through the system? I think not, because at this point the system is the problem. You may vote for Kerry and his ilk because you fear creeping fascism, or you may vote for Bush and his ilk because you fear creeping socialism. But personally, I fear them both -- and I know that no matter whom you vote for, governments at various levels will continue to throw innocent people in prison, regulate us to death, invade foreign nations, and commit countless other acts that directly contravene the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the founding principles of the American people. Electing a few token Libertarians, Greens, or whatever will not change things, and may even hurt because that will only further legitimize the system. But legitimizing the system is a mistake, because it is the system itself that is rotten.

As far as I can see, the only moral option remaining to me is to withdraw my sanction and consent, in as explicit a manner as I can. Only about 40% of eligible voters turn out to vote in American elections. What if that number were 30%, or 20%, or 10%? What if the number of unvoters were greater than the number of voters? What if twice as many people unvoted as voted? Wouldn't that expose the fact that this government (no matter which monkey is in charge) does not have the consent of the governed?

Voting is the soft underbelly of the current system. Those who govern need votes -- and lots of them -- in order to maintain a semblance of legitimacy. That's why members of the political class (as well as their hangers-on in the media and other centers of power) work so hard to convince you that voting is your civic duty -- and that's why they reserve special opprobrium for those don't vote. Their error lies in believing that only apathy can cause one to not vote. They cannot yet conceive that one could consciously and deliberately be an unvoter. But perhaps they are about to find out.

Posted on 2004-10-02 at 20:21. File under politics.

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