25. Killing People to Reboot Things 🔗

It’s when you consider problems like air traffic control (ATC) on a busy continent that practical problems with libertarianism become apparent. It’s a tightly synchronized federated architecture (ie a network of locally centralized entities) that’s hard to “libertarianize”

There have been technical proposals over last 20 years for distributed ATC protocols (planes coordinating directly with each other) requiring low or zero ground control elements. After all birds fly around without ATCs. The problem is transitioning to such systems.

The existing solution is decades old, with a lot of metis (tacit knowledge) accumulated over the years. Switching away from it is 1000x harder than switching away from the QWERTY keyboard. It’s about as hard as switching regular money to crypto. Doable in principle, cost unclear.

Recipe: take some snazzy cutting-edge decentralized ATC ideas (for eg like news.engin.umich.edu/2018/11/decent…), throw in AlphaGo to mine all the metis from historical records, re-solve it better starting from blank slate like AlphaGoZero, download to all your planes/drones, fire all ATCs.

You can imagine the end state: no ATCs at all. Planes and airlines do it all in decentralized software, government gets out of the act, tickets cost a bit more to pay for it all, taxes go down more, everybody wins. The Lords Koch are happy, 1 step closer to night-watchman state.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could have software, decentralization, and blockchain eat ALL government functions this way? Nothing for governments to do, nothing to be shut down. Ayn Rand smiles down from her place in insane heaven.

The problem with this scenario is that the transition cost might well be “collapse of civilization.” Transitioning a function like ATC to decentralized utopian future might be, to coin a phrase, “collapse complete.” You might have to blow it ALL up to achieve ONE such transition.

That’s the problem with a lot of libertarian visions. They are quite possibly collapse complete. Achieving any one of them might require “collapse” as a transient state. ATC is just one of dozens of critical “stack realities” (public health, disaster relief, food security...)

But there may be non-collapse clever pathways to achieve such transitions. We’re navigating one (energy) right now. The small problem is some are impatient and want to try blowing up what we have to redo the whole thing, taking a leap of faith that it’s NOT collapse complete.

The BIG problem is that many believe such transitions ARE in fact unavoidably collapse complete and still want them. Effectively they want to bunker down with civilizational crown jewels/reboot plans, let us other 99% subhumans die off, and emerge from bat caves to rule in 2119

These are awful people, but they do exist, do hold such views and serious power, and do in fact react with glee to progress in BTFSTTG (burn the fucking shit to the ground) plans. 200 years ago BTFSTTG was a silly dream. In 2019, it could actually be done (reboot not guaranteed)

These are “Sometimes Going Galt needs a Donald Trump to clear the way” people. Aka Claremont conservatives operating with a “Flight 93” theology. A sort of “we must burn it all down to save it” mindset. The Flight 93 Election - Claremont Review of Books

Now we technological pragmatists still want to get to nice decentralized future outcomes, but we want to muddle through, in a messy, constant “under construction” slouching-towards-utopia way. We don’t want to blow it all up. We don’t want to BTFSTTG along the way.

This is why the shutdown concern me. This isn’t like previous shutdowns. This is a shutdown with a lot of BTFSTTG types in power. Their BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is collapse. Maybe not ATC, but they’d like to see a lot of stack realities collapse for good

Sure the risk of a crash caused by a fatigued unpaid controller moonlighting driving Lyft, leading to a strike, is low. But I bet there’s BTFSTTG people thinking “we could use a gory crash to force privatization of ATC, on the road to automation and eventual elimination. Win!”

Government shrinkage by starvation collapse —> privatize —> automate. Gut what you can, when you can to transition it to your utopian state via crash chaos. There’s people in power who actually want lots of things to break and not be fixed. Reaganomics but with violent sadism.

This is why, though I actually share many libertarian and ancap end goals, I don’t identify as either. I think most of them fetishize technology in illiterate sci-fi ways, understand it in micro bits that makes them overconfident about macro things, and are basically sadists.

Starting a slide towards a Hobbesian world because they think they can come out the other end as winners. Because they’re idiots who think because they’re rich, they must be smart. Because they like apocalypse movies, they must be like The Rock themselves.

Am I overstating things? Well, here we are, talking about diverting actual disaster relief funds to build a symbolic wall and wondering if it will take an airplane crash to get governance back, by people who will then predictably exploit the tragedy to burn more things down.

This is what lunatics running the asylum looks like. Not “move fast and break things” which could at least be justified as calibrated risk-taking.

No, this is “deliberately break things and hurt/kill people to reboot things” sadistic playbook.

Happy Day 34 of a shutdown world.