#greshamslaw — Public Fediverse posts

@carapace The general question of how to combat China's surveillance regime, both internally and externally, is an interesting one.

Random thoughts whilst typing...

The growth differential may kick in. Something that's forgotten about many Communist states is that after an initial rapid period of industrialisation, stagnation set in. This occurred in the USSR and notably in North Korea (which was outperforming the South through the 1960s). China is of course a notable exception to the rule with absolutely unprecedented development for any country in world history, over the past 40 years or so. And by at least some measures China are no longer fast-following but are actively leapfrogging Western technology.

Why the Soviets didn't create the, or at least an Internet is a great episode covering by Tech Won't Save Us, 27 May 2021, with Benjamin Peters: https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/62_why_the_soviet_union_didnt_build_the_internet_w_benjamin_peters. Amongst other things, it shows that power-preservation behaviours are NOT exclusive to capitalist systems.

Brain drain. Creativity wants and seeks freedom generally, freedom from oppression most especially, and cheap rents. The number of ways different countries (or states/provinces) have killed their own golden geese is staggering. A big lesson for me is early-20th century Europe which was losing Jewish intelligentsia and gaining Black American talent (artistic and scientific) simultaneously, the former fleeing European anti-semitism, the latter US Jim Crow. Brain drain is interesting ... It's also a case of #GreshamsLaw, FWIW (differential compensation for a given product or capability).

Related, Stalinist Russia rather famously purged much of its own military leadership prior to WWII, on top of general antisemitic tendencies.

Creative antiauthoritarianism. Repressive practices tend to generate secret languages, multi-level communications, shadings of nuance and implication, etc. See Soviet-era humour, "Winnie the Pooh" in current China, etc. Unless monitoring systems become exceptionally good at extracting nuance (and they well might with LLM), that's going to confound efforts. It's also difficult to have a creative and innovative economy without at least some unfettered communications. The TWSU episode above also addresses this.

Data poisoning. I'm far less confident that this really will be effective. Chaffing in the light of overwhelming signals (where you are, as tracked by mobile devices and car plates, what you spend as tracked by payments systems, contact metadata for voice and text comms) is exceptionally difficult to mask.

An emerging civil rights culture. This is what occurred in the West: protections enshrined in law, protecting at least some classes of people. You can trace this back to the Magna Carta, which #AstraTaylor discusses in this year's #MasseyLecture Series (#CBCIdeas). The US Bill of Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, an EU's GDPR, and others. Problems are that these often exist in name only, as dead letters, or are entirely ignored for most of the world's population, to say nothing of backsliding, with growing authoritarianism in multiple countries (US, India, Brazil, Russia, Hungary, Turkey) and long-standing hold-outs (most of the Arab world, large portions of Africa, Myanmar, Iran, North Korea, etc.)

China has an interesting mix of both rapid industrialisation and technological development and retaining at least elements of an authoritarian state. Whether that's a temporary exception or a future indicator ... hard to say.

Prediction as is said is difficult. Particular about the future.

@scottspeaking There's a growing set of literature, though generally you could look at the rise and fall of movements, social groups, religious movements (look up the Second Great Awakening and Burned Over Districts sometime), etc.

My basic take is that there are two forces at play: (1) network effects though not the n^2 of Metcalfe's Law but some diminishing-return function (Odlyzko and Tilly suggest log(n): https://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf) and (2) frictional costs which are more-or-less constant per node instance (though which can be modified across the network as a whole through various network-hygiene measures).

So, if you've got diminishing returns and constant costs, at some point adding another node no longer breaks even.

The pathological death spiral occurs when high value nodes start defecting from the network. This is the Yogi Berra effect: "Nobody (who's anybody) goes there anymore, it's too crowded (with everybody who's nobody)".

Danah Boyd has some great early work looking at the dynamic between Facebook (upstart) and MySpace (incumbent) in the mid/late aughts: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/ICA2009.html

That's related to the Nazi At the Bar problem as described by @imaragesparkle at Birdsite: https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw/kicking_a_nazi_out_as_soon_as_they_walk_in/. There are some founding / infiltrating cohorts who are so toxic that they lead to the flight of others. See generally Brain Drain and recognise that this can work in multiple directions for multiple groups, e.g., European Jews fleeing to the US whilst American Blacks fled to Europe. Same fundamental reason, but different dynamics affecting different groups. (This is also a #GreshamsLaw phenomenon, which is another trope of mine.)

I've written my own thoughts on why Usenet died, which Fedizens might want to consider. Not all the factors apply, though some do, upshot: it simply became too high-risk (and low-reward) to host Usenet: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/

#Usenet #MetcalfesLaw #OdlyzkoTilly #AndrewOdlyzko #SocialNetworks #RiseAndFall #DanahBoyd