Civiocracy: The Ideology of Silicon Valley - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14813830


This is an article that talks about the new political ideology that has originated from Silicon Valley. The author calls this ideology "Civiocracy". I have to say, I am surprised I agree so much with a bunch of Silicon Valley founders politically. I find their description of government to be quite interesting.

So what do you guys think? Do you agree or disagree?
#14813835
I agree with a lot there. I do think there are some important things that need to be addressed though. Technology increasingly allows less and less workers to produce more goods. These same tech companies produce tons of wealth but use much less labor. Eventually we will have an economy that requires only skilled labor and most people will be unemployed. We need a universal income to insure a certain minimus standard of living. Otherwise this is just utopian.

I do think this is more or less how our economy will transition out of capitalism. Eventually labor will become nearly unnecessary for production.
#14813840
@mikema63

Why not instead of having a basic income just use the technology created from the tech companies to produce an abundance, a series of surpluses, and then create an administration that has all the best minds of those tech companies to control the resources and allow citizens to take as much resources through resource allocation. Since the country will continue to produce an abundance with that technology, it won't run out in a feasible amount of time so this way all of us can have the highest standard of living possible and be able to have everything we ever could want free of charge. This would be a post-scarcity economy.

I think the ideas present in the ideology can work anywhere. All you need to do is create a silicon valley (as shown here: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html) and be able to use new technologies where ever they are created. This way you can progress your society technologically quickly and reach a post-scarcity society quickly.
#14813841
Because currently they can't. It's not like one day all the technology to do that will fall into place along with the political and economic institutions to do it.

Unemployment will climb for decades throughout the transition with periodic economic contractions and political instability as a result.

We cannot make policy today for what the economy in 100 years will look like. We must craft policy that will make the intervening time work and allow a smooth transition into it.
#14813844
@mikema63

I know. I just think it's a good idea, for when the time comes. Civiocracy would work well to help with that transition since the framework is there, I just decided to give one of the possible places we can go to when we transition from capitalism.

@Rugoz

How is it nonsense? It seems perfectly logical to me. Just because you disagree with it doesn't mean that it is nonsense.
#14813853
This is an on topic forum. It's one thing to disagree it's another to completely lack any substance in your posts.

You can at least muster the intellectual capacity to point out flaws or rebut some point of the OP.

I'm handing out warnings from here on for people who can't manage to debate on a debate oriented forum.
#14813856
mikema63 wrote:This is an on topic forum. It's one thing to disagree it's another to completely lack any substance in your posts.

You can at least muster the intellectual capacity to point out flaws or rebut some point of the OP.

I'm handing out warnings from here on for people who can't manage to debate on a debate oriented forum.


There are no substantive points in the source linked to in the OP.

The whole thing is a series of completely unsupported platitudinous and utopian nonsense, basically nothing but propaganda, and I'm just calling it out as such. That's not an insubstantive claim.

EDIT: Note the references to "ancient ideology". I mean it is such worthless manipulative crap.

EDIT2: Also, I should make it clear that I'm not accusing @Oxymandias of any of these things, just his source.
#14813858
@Oxymandias you didn't do anything wrong.

@Saeko that's fine. It's great to point that out even. I do agree that the link is silly but there were ideas I could discuss.

Oxy is really trying to start a debate and instead of talking about why he shouldn't support the source you and others posted one line dismissals that do not facilitate debate.

I'm not bothered that you totally disagree or how silly you think it is. At least use it to start a conversation about ideology or something. Or just don't post.

Edit: removed unfair phrasing. My apologies to saeko and others for it.
#14813859
@Saeko

It's a description of the political ideology of Silicon Valley. And it's no more utopian than fascism, libertarianism, or any other ideology. That's not the reason we believe political ideologies. No, we believe in ideologies because we think they are right, moral, or the best way to govern a society. Also it isn't unsupported. If you actually look into the policies Silicon Valley supports instead of just looking at the text, you would understand why they support them and the benefits they will have. Free trade and open borders should be a no-brainer in terms of finding information about them. And competition between government services has been tried again and again, once during the post-WWII economic expansion and again during the Japanese economic miracle. And note that competition between government services was one of the things that lead to such economic events and could potentially boost innovation in the government. Charter schools have also been proven to work and have many benefits. For example, charter schools can be good grounds for experimentation in Critical Pedagogy to see if it works and allow parents and students a degree of choice in where their they go to learn. In fact, Silicon Valley is already doing this with startups such as Altschool become increasingly popular.

There is proof that these policies work you just have to look for them.
#14813860
@Saeko

Here is a list of sources:

Charter Schools:

https://www.altschool.com/
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledg ... -in-cities
http://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles ... r-schools/
http://www.newsweek.com/proof-positive- ... ter-606146
http://www.data-first.org/questions/how ... rformance/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbeh ... 99b3142dbf

Competition between government services:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mon ... ef3b4bfc18
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ns/387460/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/busin ... -view.html
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dced/1 ... 955f2d.pdf

There's also other stuff in the article like calling for the government to encourage good personal decisions amongst it's citizens (such as eating healthy, exercising, acquiring higher education, etc.) or the idea of equality of opportunity (opposing the idea that economic equality is a big deal which I agree with) and that has proof as well. There's nothing that delegitimizes Civiocracy in anyway other than simply not agreeing with them ideologically.
#14813882
@Saeko

Well that is a good point in terms of the ancient ideology stuff. However that shouldn't turn you away from the ideology itself. Just because the author (whom I assume shares this ideology) sounds prestigious doesn't mean the ideology itself is a wast of time. There is something unique and different here. The ideologies that created the WW2 post-economic expansion and the Japanese economic miracle can be considered to be proto-Civiocracy. The combination of government intervention and an entrepreneurial spirit for innovation that is shared by both businesses and the goverment is what post-WW2 America and Japan were. And it did wonders. Of course Civiocracy is an expansion of that. It's neo-liberalism to liberalism. Civiocracy is more city-centered, technology-focused (even though proto-Civiocracy was also technology-focused), and education-focused then proto-Civiocracy. It is also more utopian than proto-Civiocracy I admit but that doesn't make it unrealistic or unfeasible.

I think the word Civiocracy sucks honestly. We need a better name for it.
#14813885
I found the format of the article made it difficult to read and my impression is that the author ignored class interest. I'm not surprised that a billionaire industrialist supports open borders that allow him easy access to markets and cheap labour. I'm not surprised that he supports having the gov't pay to educate the workforce he needs or that he has a low opinion of unions. What can a union do for Zuckerberg? They'd be a thorn in his side.

Tech companies have created gated communities/ campuses with segregated transport to neighbouring areas and a highly paid workforce that prices out everyone else from housing. Any manufacturing is done in Chinese or Vietnamese factories (no useless unions allowed) surrounded by suicide nets and they create parent companies that are better able to exploit tax loopholes.

I recently read Post-capitalism by Paul Mason. The author discusses how more and more value comes from intellectual property rather than from manufacturing and how open source developments can be a model for how mutualism can be fostered in the future. If you do some googling you can probably find a decent summary of the book.
#14813952
Surely I'm allowed to comment on the absurdity of the article?

Let's look at the basic assumptions about human nature:

Founders’ political and moral beliefs are based on a rather extreme idealism about human nature, society, and the future. The tend to believe all change over the long run ends up being good. Likewise, they reject the notion that there are inherent conflicts of interests between citizens, the government, corporations or other nations.


This is just utter nonsense.

Even if one believes in the assumptions, the policy positions do not derive from them. Why do we need environmental regulation, mandated healthcare, international agreements etc. etc. when there are no conflicts of interest? Why do we even need any form of government?
#14813954
It's fine to think it's silly. This is probably the third time I've had to point this out. But when you post about at least, as you've done above, give a little example.

When I joined the forum I was a crazy highschool libertarian raised by an American tea party family. People talked about how I was wrong and had dialouge with me. I learned stuff.

If people had just posted endless one liners about how everything I said was dumb I would've left in a few months and wouldn't have learned a damned thing.

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