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republicstandard · 6 years ago

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From Weber to Weibo: The Relentless Creep of Bureaucratic Tyranny

A rationally ordered world has been the vision of social engineers from across the political spectrum, although most commonly from the Left. Marxists, fascists, and caliphate-builders are the extremists of orderliness, but all governments and international authorities exert regulatory control, whether perceived as benevolent or oppressive. Around the world, states are becoming more authoritarian, not less. Liberal democracies are struggling to maintain the trust of their people, following economic crises and the consequences of mass immigration, while China, Russia, and Turkey have reverted to central command. Democracy is a hindrance to master-planners.

In the early 20th century, Prussian sociologist Max Weber introduced the concept of bureaucracy, whereby organizations would be rationally-arranged systems, in which every employee had a specified role. A worker’s personal attributes were irrelevant beyond his ability to perform the prescribed job, and he could be replaced by someone else with the required skill. The bureaucratic structure looks good on paper, but in practice, it depersonalizes relationships, stifles initiative and needs overbearing governance to keep people in check. Military history has shown how a large lumbering army of a dictatorial regime can be defeated by a smaller force able to think on its feet.

The production line of FW Taylor, while making Ford the leading automobile manufacturer, was soul-destroying. Indeed, the apparent efficiency of simple and repetitive piecework was countered by the frequent interruption of strikes, which crippled the British car industry. Popular author Arthur Hailey, in Wheels, portrayed the subversive culture on a typical Detroit factory floor, where officials had limited influence on the heavily unionized workers. The Hawthorne experiments by Chicago sociologists in the 1920s showed that employees create a social environment and an informal hierarchy that differs markedly from the formal structure. Human beings refuse to be mere cogs in the wheel.

Since the late 20th century, there has been a steady decline in manual labor in the West, due to imports from countries with cheaper labor costs, outsourcing, and automation. Meanwhile more people ascended to the middle class. In Organization Man, an expose of white-collar corporate culture, William H Whyte showed how loyalty was nurtured, with a collective identity and belief that only the organization could make the right decisions. The rugged individualism associated with the American dream was ironed out. Effectively, capitalism and communism relied on the same submissiveness.

After the Second World War, western Europe flirted with socialism, many on the Left seeing the Soviet Union as a guiding light. Cradle-to-the-grave welfare was pledged by the post-war Labour government. But an all-providing state comes at the price of freedom. In her biography of Pope John Paul II, Mary Craig described Karol Wojtyla’s return to his homeland in 1948. For the Poles, liberty after the Nazi occupation was short-lived:

Poland had become a People’s Republic, the Russian ‘advisers’ were in control, and the country lay in the grip of a great Stalinist freeze. Surrounded by red flags, portraits of Stalin and Lenin, peasants were being forcibly collectivized, and while officials droned out statistics proving how prosperous the workers were under Socialism, housewives wandered disconsolately about with empty shopping baskets. The air was heavy with slogans, the mind-deadening propaganda which robbed even the simplest activity of its normal human meaning: "the train – for – Chelmno – will – leave – from – Platform – Number – Three – beware – of – bacteriological – warfare – by – the – foreign – imperialists – the train – from – Cracow – is – arriving – on – Platform – Number – Two – long – live – socialism – and – workers’ – unity."

In a Russian oblast, schools were not named (my friend Maria, for example, went to School 7 in Tambov). Names are sentimental, and of no use to logical ordering. Numbers are the currency of control, and everyone and everything is counted. The ‘nanny state’ makes selective use of data to justify action on the ‘gender pay gap’ and to impose sin taxes on alcohol or sugar. We mustn’t forget Stalin’s reputed observation that:

"the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic."

To maintain its grip, authoritarians create a surveillance society. In the Soviet Union, tens of millions of political criminals were sent to a vast Gulag Archipelago in the frozen wastelands of Karaganda and Kolyma. We are a long way from that in Britain, but consider the messages sent by police forces urging reports of online abuse. Heard several times daily by commuters, ‘see it, say it, sorted’ has a broader target than suspected jihadists. With the creep of so-called ‘hate crime’ legislation, George Orwell’s 1984 has become a manual for our leaders. This amazingly prophetic dystopia, written long before the arrival of the internet, showed how technology would be exploited to quash humanity and its messy ways.

The internet was naively celebrated as an irrepressible bastion of liberty, but it is increasingly manipulated by governments to curtail freedom of speech (often in collaboration with the tech companies, whose liberal-left political outlook has led to the censoring of conservative or libertarian opinion). Pubs close down while younger people interact via mobile devices, unperturbed by this being recorded. In China, people are very much aware of state snooping. Under President Xi, a ‘social credit' scheme is being rolled out, whereby career opportunities and access to schools, services, and travel are determined by an algorithm that rates the acceptability of each person’s posts and followers on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Facebook). Twitter bans are the thin end of the wedge.

While no Western country would overtly ditch democratic principles, the British establishment’s response to the EU referendum shows how the hoi polloi can be defied. The British people have been hoodwinked as their government has ceded sovereignty on the trajectory from the Common Market to the European Union. This was always the plan, as laid out by Monnet in the 1960s. Like Pravda, truth can be dressed up for public consumption, although not always credibly. Merely 13% of the British public believe what the government tells them on immigration (a result that shocked only the survey sponsors Hope not Hate). Politicians who thought they would represent their voters find themselves in the pockets of Sir Humphrey, the chief civil servant in the satirical TV show Yes Minister. Olly Robbins was always in charge of the EU negotiations, not David Davis; making a mockery of his status as Minister of the Department for Exiting the EU.

A healthy democracy relies on people having access to information. But the British government spent £9.3 million of taxpayers’ money promoting the Remain cause in the EU referendum. ‘Project fear’ was meant to scare the ordinary people from voting intuitively against rule by a foreign power. Checks and balances on government power are no longer functioning properly: the corrupted Electoral Commission, for example. The Tommy Robinson case was an exercise in state propaganda, with a blackout of his summary imprisonment followed by approved disinformation from compliant mainstream media. Populism is perceived as dangerous as it pits the common people against the cosmopolitan elite. So it is suppressed by demonizing any rabble-rouser who exposes lies or the underlying agenda.

Equality before the law is another casualty of the creep of autocracy. The moral relativism of identity politics is a boon to state control because it facilitates the old strategy of ‘divide and rule’. In the counter-culture of the 1960s, influenced by the critique of Michel Foucault, emancipatory campaigners spoke truth to power, while the privileged spoke power to truth. But the left-wing students of that time became the new Establishment, quashing opposing fact or opinion with their ‘safe spaces’, ‘no-platforming’ and weaponizing of mental health language such as ‘trauma’.

This new puritanism is a tightening ratchet on the Enlightenment triumvirate of freedom of speech, democracy, and equality before the law. Society has retreated from rationalism to moralizing emotionalism, thereby weakening democracy by boosting the power of leaders who are able to manipulate emotional weaknesses. What is to be done? Perhaps nothing less than a revolution, but this could be averted if people took the plunge and voted for a party that genuinely puts them first. Populism is simply a pejorative term for people power.

The slogan 'take back control' used by Vote Leave implies a shift of power from one authority to another. Tough action is needed on terrorism and crime, but most people just want to get on with their lives with minimal state meddling. We should revisit John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty: -

"The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection".

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2OD11Mt via IFTTT

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cryptoga-blog · 7 years ago

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ICOs: The Beauty, the Beast and JFK

http://www.cryptoga.com/news/icos-the-beauty-the-beast-and-jfk/

ICOs: The Beauty, the Beast and JFK

Christine Duhaime is a economic criminal offense lawyer and the founder of the Digital Finance Institute, the place she advises electronic currency corporations, and the co-founder of Chatbo, an AML chatbot remedy for screening and onboarding.

The subsequent write-up is an special contribution to CoinDesk’s 2017 in Evaluate.

All technological developments have a fantastic and a poor facet.

First coin choices (ICOs) are no various besides that as opposed to other new systems, their fantastic and the bads facet exist in extremes with no any center ground or stability.

The beauty

Let’s converse about the fantastic, or the beauty, of ICOs first.

The beauty of ICOs is that they have reinvigorated the American aspiration of possessing the opportunity to launch a firm, operate tricky and strike gold. Only this aspiration is authentic and superior mainly because it is egalitarian – an entrepreneur can be abundant or inadequate, a banker or a farmer, a male or a female, and with practically nothing much more than a computer system, a fantastic business concept and funds from an ICO, that entrepreneur has an opportunity to protected investment.

There are no economic, money boosting or gender-centered limitations to entry this sort of as exist for startups boosting money in the classic way. ICOs open up the doorway to everyone to increase money, and in 2017, they lifted more than $2.3 billion.

There are other vital positive aspects of ICOs to the financial system – they let startups to get investments in electronic currencies from other nations around the world or from across just one state instantaneously so that the ICO crew can start out acquiring technologies straight away.

It means that innovation can go ahead much quicker. ICOs also perform an vital role in serving to to mitigate the expanding dilemma of prosperity disparity, distributing prosperity into the palms of much more, alternatively than less, folks.

The beast

But there is a beast lurking in the ICO room, and that beast is an utter and complete disregard for the rule of regulation that has plagued the funding product in 2017.

Most ICOs violate so lots of regulations, it really is tricky to observe them in the so-known as white papers issued by groups. Among the the most egregious are violations of constitutional regulation that purport to strip buyers of the proper to sue in the party of a dispute and violations of intercontinental treaties and human legal rights conventions that likewise exist to ensure entry to justice more than business, investor, professional and home disputes.

Most ICOs have upcoming to no compliance with client protection regulations either. Traders are seldom informed of the hazards of an ICO, the hazards of the technologies, the hazards of the complete reliance on a electronic currency trade, the hazards of hacking and theft, the hazards of inexperienced crew members beginning a startup or the hazards of regulation or improvements of federal government insurance policies.

Customer protection violations cause anti-have confidence in issues of misleading advertising, a further place the place some ICOs are unsuccessful to comport with the regulation.

Most ICOs are improperly launched as foundations but solicit investments as for-financial gain businesses. In regulation, they won’t be able to be each a foundation and a for-financial gain business. Lots of ICOs, despite what they are cleverly termed in white papers, are the issuance of securities and are launched in violation of securities regulation.

Ultimately, upcoming to no notice is compensated by ICOs to anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing and sanctions regulation when they acknowledge investments or contributions, placing the intercontinental economic process at danger. ICO groups occasionally undertake attempts at economic criminal offense compliance but only following funds have been accepted which is way too late.

ICOs are invested in by the transfer of electronic currencies from just one wallet to a further from wherever in the entire world and this sort of investments can be fully anonymous this sort of that a terrorist organization could fund an ICO with no any individual staying the wiser.

If that transpires, despite all the positive aspects of ICOs, governments will severely limit entry to the room and the get together will be more than.

New regulations with new technologies

In fairness to ICOs, although, the dilemma is not only just one of non-compliance with regulations – there is the included dilemma of outmoded regulations that have not retained speed with technologies.

Even though bitcoin and electronic currency transactions have been all over since 2009, not just one federal government in the entire world has taken a management role in investing in understanding the technologies and functioning with the non-public sector to draft regulations to aid liable innovation that consists of client protection, intercontinental trade, securities, company, on the internet dispute resolution and economic criminal offense regulation.

Many nations around the world have just lately begun internet marketing them selves aggressively as ICO-helpful, but they are likely to be jurisdictions acknowledged as tax havens or havens for on the internet gambling corporations that fled from the US, and their ICO-friendliness does not translate into the adoption of liable innovation to deal with economic criminal offense issues.

ICOs have to have a capable lawful framework and till governments allocate sources to modernize outmoded regulations, ICO groups will stick to the route of the very least resistance and increase funds in the most friction-free of charge method probable.

But you know what? We’ve been in this article just before.

A long time back, President John F. Kennedy tackled the issue of what he known as the “march of technologies” confronting “outmoded regulations.” In a speech to Congress in 1962, he known as on the federal government to just take motion to meet its accountability to individuals when there are technological developments by making sure individuals could workout their legal rights.

He could have been chatting about ICOs mainly because those legal rights, he mentioned, contain the proper to be informed and safeguarded against fraudulent, deceitful or grossly deceptive information and facts and to be specified the facts to make an informed decision, and the proper to be read by staying certain that federal government plan will contain client passions and importantly, the proper to be quite and expeditiously handled in the court process in the party of disputes and to search for cures.

It is important, he concluded, to fortify federal government applications, enhance federal government businesses and move new regulations to defend individuals when there is new technologies.

Even though President Kennedy legislated for liable innovation to defend individuals, his vision hasn’t been continued in the ICO room.

ICOs will be scrutinized

In 2018, the ICO ecosystem will face considerable upheaval and much more scrutiny.

We will see the SEC be much more aggressive against ICOs that issue unlawful securities or that solicit funds from U.S. folks. We will likely also see movement criminally against ICO groups or exchanges that listing them, for anti-money laundering, sanctions and counter-terrorist financing failures.

We will also see lots of much more civil actions against ICO groups for technologies or investments that in no way materialize.

Less than stress from the U.S., tax and other safe and sound haven nations around the world that solicit ICO businesses will likely be forced to just take a liable tactic to innovation to defend the economic process.

Believe that it or not, 2018 will nonetheless be a fantastic 12 months for ICOs.

The regulatory motion coming down the pipe will power enhancements on the players and the approach, serving to to make sure that the ecosystem that remains is superior and balanced.

Disagree? CoinDesk is looking for submissions to its 2017 in Evaluate sequence. Electronic mail [email protected] to pitch your concept and make your sights read.

Bitcoins in shadow through Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk strives to give an open up system for dialogue and dialogue on all issues blockchain by encouraging contributed articles or blog posts. As this sort of, the views expressed in this write-up are the author’s own and do not essentially replicate the look at of CoinDesk.

For much more specifics on how you can post an viewpoint or examination write-up, look at our Editorial Collaboration Information or e mail [email protected].

Disclaimer: This write-up really should not be taken as, and is not intended to supply, investment assistance. Remember to carry out your own thorough analysis just before investing in any cryptocurrency.

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