Personal Editorial - Freedom Exposition
(TTR - Tall Tim Ramble)
I'm a pretty logical guy. Being wired how I am, its hard for me not to see certain trends and then extrapolate into the future. (I press my face against the present to glimpse the future all the time while trading, its a habit.) While contemplating the celebrations happening in the United States for their Independence Day, I couldn't help but follow the bread crumb trail of where it is all leading to.
So, in a rather non-technical way I'd like to break down some of the topics floating around my brain at present.
Every System Eventually Is Undermined
Entropy. Its everywhere in our universe. You fight it every time you make your messy bed, clean your clothes or simply wash your face in the morning. Its the tendency of anything to revert to a disordered and chaotic mess. Your system, the habits and methods you use to combat this force are constantly being subverted.
It is no different for the systems that have been put in place to control people. Government seems like a monolithic entity that will never go anywhere, but its a dynamic system that is subject to the same forces as our personal struggle to keep our living spaces clean.
Its even worse than that, because large systems like government encourage middle-men and those who seek power to strengthen their positions within that network. Its their way of fighting their personal entropy, by ensuring their ability to exercise a bit of power in addition to the benefits that such power brings.
This is like allowing a wrecking crew to move into a multi-story apartment building, and then ignore the sounds of them starting to demolish it, floor by floor. All the while getting deliveries for new equipment that they'll merrily use to split concrete and chop up steel beams along the way.
This means to me that even government won't survive its internal forces forever. The building eventually will fall, either from internal subterfuge or external forces upon it. Its inevitable, just like the heat death of the universe.
Governments Don't Scale Well
Its a common experience.
You are in line for some kind of license or permit, waiting for a government functionary to give you the small stamp/form/card that you need to continue doing what you normally do in your life.
Even with the proliferation of online access, a lot of government functions have only peripherally integrated this kind of convenience into their processes. Most of the time, it only allows expedited issuance of something that has a lot of requirements behind it -- and it is extremely easy to fail the pre-requisites for using such a service, which delegates you back into the line of shuffling humans.
Consider any kind of regulation or law that is used to control what people do. These expand on a monthly and yearly basis. It eventually becomes a strangling web of compliance, where you run afoul of many competing rules just trying to get something done.
These are what I call scaling problems, and government and its associated systems have plenty of these.
Before you shout "Wait, we can use technology!" I'll just point you back to the fact that even with the advent of computers and their usage in offices and bureaus, we still PRINT EVERYTHING OUT. It may seem like tech should help solve problems, but all it really allows is those that want to cling to their power networks the ability to strengthen their fortresses, while providing entropy a chance to bring it all down. (My prior point.)
Technology Is Persistently Permeating
As you know, technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace. We may like to think that such systems have a one-sided use, which is personal exercise of intellectual curiosity and pursuit of knowledge, but there's more to it than that 2-Dimensional profile.
Feeding into my prior points, technology is only useful to those that know how to utilize it. You can argue that millions upon millions of smartphones are a good thing, but I could also point at the fact that a majority of people are using them for the most basic of purposes. There aren't millions using their personal mobile pocket computers to write programs.
Most browse a walled-garden app store, purchase a few trivial games and novelty apps - only using them once - if at all.
In this case, tech is just latent and not really contributing to anything. As for my previous points, tech being integrated into government processes will only accelerate their demise. Its part a function of encouraging control - by those wielding such power, and the forces that allow them to consolidate their influence, which makes the whole system inflexible and fragile to outside change. (Entropy again...)
Given the large revenue streams generated by technological pursuits, this force will not be going away. In fact, it will be accelerating into the future.
People Aren't Stupid
Sure, there was that time your distant cousin decided to jump off a roof into a kiddie pool and nearly broke his spine, but for the most part people generally are smarter than you think. And people don't like it when systems that they thought were functioning just fine end up throwing a rod on the freeway, or refuse to turn on when plugged in.
It goes double for government.
People will lose their minds and react with much vigor against a system they thought was "always there" when it suddenly becomes apparent that it isn't. This isn't a call to revolution, more an observation that people like to be comfortable and react badly when that comfort is taken away.
This all feeds into my prior points.
In a nutshell, it goes like this:
Entropy Is An Inevitable Force
Government Scales Badly and Encourages Entropy Fueled Effects
People Will Demand Change When Government Stumbles
The exact timeline of this progression isn't easily predicted, only that the steps outlined above will occur within close succession of each other.
So if you are celebrating the American 4th, or simply having a good rest and time off from the stresses of your work-a-day life, consider the effects of entropy and how everything that frustrates you about governing systems is on a universal expiration timer.
The best part, however, is that we still will have each other and be able to build a better future once the obsolete systems crash and burn into ashes. That is one potential use of technology that I see as a positive force for all human beings.
Thanks for reading, and have a good one!