Tag: disruption

Book by Quote: Tegen Verkiezingen

Yet another ‘Book By Quote’ then. A full of … ‘marvellous content’ one again.

An attempt to subjectively summarise a book by the quotes I found worthwhile to mark, to remember. Be aware that the quotes as such, aren’t a real unbiased ‘objective’ summary; most often I heartily advise to read the book yourself.
This book, should be translated to a great many langauges and be mandatory reading for all high school student least. Many more to include. E.g., ‘grown-ups’, and politicians. Et al.

Here we go then, with David van Reybrouck, Tegen Verkiezingen, Bezige Bij 2014, ISBN 9789023474593:

‘Le peuple anglais pense être libre, il se trompe fort, il ne l’est que durant l’élection des membres du Parlement; sitôt q’ils sont élus, il est esclave, il n’est rien.’
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762)

Er is iets vreemds aan de hand met de democratie: iedereen lijkt ernaar te verlangen, maar niemand gelooft er nog in (p.9)

Politici gaan er dus massal van uit dat burgers er andere, in hun [sic; red.] ogen minder hooggestemde waarden op nahouden dan zijzelf. (p.11)

Democratie, aristocratie, oligarchie, dictatuur, despotisme, totalitarisme, absolutisme, anarchie: elk politiek stelsel moet een evenwicht zien te vinden tussen twee fundamentele criteria: efficiëntie en legitimiteit. (p.13)

De crisis van de legitimiteit blijkt uit drie onmiskenbare symptomen. Ten eerste gaan steeds minder mensen stemmen. … Ten tweede, naast kiezersverzuim is er kiezersverloop. … Ten derde zijn steeds minder mensen lid van een politieke partij. (pp.14-15)

Op zich gaat het hier om een heel merkwaardige evolutie: de tijden zijn onvoorspelbaarder dan ooit, flexibel inspelen op acute noden is aan de orde van de dag, maar kennelijk moet het beleid op voorhand tot in de puntjes worden uitgestippeld en dichtgespijkerd, zo groot is het wantrouwen onder de coalitiepartners geworden, zo groot ook de nervositeit voor een afstraffing door dekiezer. (p.17)

Waren zulke projecten vroeger een bron van prestige en kundigheid, tegenwoordig zijn ze op hun best een bestuurlijke nachtmerrie. (p.18)

Bij het begin van de eenentwintigste eeuw is souvereiniteit, ooit het fundament van de natiestaat, een zeer relatief begrip geworden. (pp. 18-19)

Politiek is altijd de kunst van het haalbare geweest, en tegenwoordig is het de kunst van het microscopische geworden. (p.19)

Met het beroep van politicus vergaat het zoals met dat van onderwijzer: Vroeger een nobele functie met aanzien, nu een hondenbaan. (p.20)
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Book by Quote: Empire

Yet another ‘Book By Quote’ then. A full of … one again.

An attempt to subjectively summarise a book by the quotes I found worthwhile to mark, to remember. Be aware that the quotes as such, aren’t a real unbiased ‘objective’ summary; most often I heartily advise to read the book yourself. This one too, yes, but with the caveat that some of below’s quotes have been included to demonstrate the deconstructionalist mumbo jumbo you may have to wade through…

Oh and for the record; I like the book, and major parts of its analysis, but certainly not all of it…

Here we go then, with Negri & Hardt’s Empire, Harvard UP 2000, ISBN 067425121-0:

Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. (Ani DiFranco) (p.0)

Putting this society to work and ensuring obedience to its rule and its mechanisms of inclusion and/or exclusion are accomplished through disciplinary institutions (the prison, the factory, the asylum, the hospital, the univeristy, the school, and so forth) that structure the social terrain and present logics adequate to the “reason” of discipline. (p.23)

Power is now exercised through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, monitored activities, etc.) toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity. (p.23)

By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari present us with a properly poststructuralist understanding of biopower that renews materialist thought and grounds itself solidly in the question of the production of social being. Their work demystifies structuralism and all the philosophical, sociological, and political conceptions that make the fixity of the epistomological frame an ineluctable point of reference. (p.28)

The absoluteness of imperial power is the complementary term to its complete immanence to the ontological machine of production and reproduction, and thus to the biopolitical context. (p.61)

Kant throws us back into the crisis of modernity with full awareness when he poses the discovery of the subject itself as crisis, but this crisis is made into an apology of the transcendental as the unique and exclusive horizon of knowledge and action. (p.81)

Whereas Foucault’s analysis is vast in its diachronic breath, Weber’s is powerful in its synchronic depth. (p.89)

Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts. (p.210)

The capitalization of realized surplus value requires that for the subsequent cycle of production the capitalist will have to secure for purchase additional supplies of constant capital (raw materials, machinery, and so forth) and additional variable capital (that is, labor power) – and eventually in turn this will require an even greater extension of the market for further realization. (p.225)

The centrifugal movement of production is balanced by the centripetal trend of command. (p.297)

And a picture to lighten up:

DSCN7963[Reich]

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On how life is

For most of us, this is the metaphor of life. About how you aim for the best future, but are held back by accident and others are just more … lucky?
It seems. Because the article isn’t about how others may be in even slower queues, or the purpose of life. To make it to the (your) end. Not even the fastest. Or the zero impact of talent (which is a form of luck) or a bias for effort (same). But to not care.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with
DSCN5610[Queueing up, in a sense]

Buck shot or machine gun; assurance

With news about the slow but steady adoption of SBR everywhere (but mostly on related sites…), it suddenly struck me that with this Standard Business Reporting we see a move from single firings of buck shot to the machine gun age in assurance.

First, this:
DSCN4309[Yup, actual business lurking in the background. Date this pic]

By which I mean that until now, and for a short bit of time to come, accountants of the annual accounts certifying type issue(d) single assurance statements about a whole number of individual reporting items; in conjunction with each other but hence (!) also about all of them individually. The single blow of much data, in multiple but somewhat related directions.
Now, with XML, and XBRL as a common ‘subset’ taxonomy definer, and SBR on the back of that, we suddenly have the possibility of firing a great many but single data points in all sorts of directions. Where each bullet data point has to stand on itself, and be assured separately, aimed at, well, a single recipient.
Which makes a change necessary from the cover-all assurance of yesteryear to a single data point assurance thing of today. Where one cannot rely on context – or the context is re-created by a recipient collecting the data points they want …! – one has to provide assurance on … does this end up with a system-of-production assurance thing again ..?

Hope not. Since that is too far off of any real application. Since assurance of systems misses the vast enormity of details that matter when one wants to give assurance on … details. What then? Both. Both systems assurance overall, not circling on the ledgers only. And detailed assurance per data point or tinysubset. With SBR for target audiences as intermediate [stage?].

And, will we not need the ‘traditional’ assurance over annual reports anymore …? Well, we will, for sure as we seem to need more than ever true and fair views of how business in general was conducted, to establish credibility of management control for the (near) future. But then, such reports would be enormously much more qualitative by nature. To be qualified in a very non-quantified since by second opinion givers like accountants. [And/or others …!?] What lyrical prose we’ll have, what market push to cut the cr.p, what difficulty of accountants to grapple with the auditees’ sheer poetry enlisted to window dress.

Moar will follow, especially re single point assurance…

Milky Way of ratings

One for the holiday season: The star classification of hotels (in the Netherlands) will become meaningless. Or rather, nothing is mandatory anymore and there will be two standards to choose and rate by. So, we’ll have a Milky Way full of ratings.
And don’t come to me with the argument that user reviews dominated the skies (Internet) already. First, as the article states, tourists still pick hotels by their star rating; and second, user ratings with all their flaming and rigging have been even more useless than any official one. Though the latter was too simple to game, as well. E.g., having a ‘spa’ of sorts (basement with two massage beds and a puddle (-sized pool) upped any hostel with another star.

But then, what now?

Will restraint win at the end of the day, or will by that time the restrained have fallen back too much to cope and join the hyperinflation that came from below?

DSCN6030[How would you rate this view, if at all? Madrid]

Hopefully, CitizenMe will be trending

This may be a trend: Decide yourself what personal data to ‘sell’, and for how much. First step: Know what you ooze out. Hopefully, through this we’ll awake and implement Jaron Lanier’s dreams…

And even before this post came out, there’s an [update] to do … With this.

And then, of course:
DSCN0088[‘goza just like that, for no apparent quality or reason]

Business Model Down

DSCN2931[Deventer for zero relation with the following]

Although probably hardly still the core money maker for Big G, collecting search data for may fall back maybe significantly in the near future. Since, e.g., when did you last search for something specific enough that patterns may emerge from it..? Wasn’t it just point-and-shoot search-phrase-for-single-answer work that you did, if at all because you entered full URLs anyway ..?

Unless you’re of course part of the hoi polloi that delivers such low ultimate revenue to advertisers that it’s not worth it just return to mass marketing and don’t need Big G data specifics for that.

{Edited to add:]
… Ah, so that’s why said company is moving so swiftly into AI…

Double shhh


[On a rooftop ..! ‘t Spant, Bussum]

Yeah, it’s a post on double secrets again. Not just because I haven’t seen any conclusive research on what to do with it; how to handle oversight (what is warranted, , etc.), what limits to justifications there would be, how to close the recursive secrecy gap, etc.
Not even because of stuff like this.

But because another issue was pointed out yesterday/today in a post at Bruce Schneier’s blog: Where double secrets may exist, trust is lost, and (theoretically and practically) impossible to regain.

Which is a problem not only for ‘current’ (big) companies relying on the trust of ‘consumers’ (who are in fact drone suppliers of almost completely free raw materials) and other business partners on the receiving end, as their business model will crumble to nothing when (not if) those cheapoo supplier leave in massive numbers.
It also spells trouble for the not-yet-big, almost-not-yet-companies. As defined in this slide deck, those new companies rely on distributed power, which is based on trust. The said (not sad) companies can grow only to the point where the base of trusting counterparts in exchanges (~facilitated) still grows. If at one end, trustors still flow into the system, but trustors on the other end flow out at a faster pace, the base will be ever narrower; the house of cards becomes more fragile and will collapse as some business wind (if only draft) comes along.

So, in order to really ‘disrupt’ as if that would be a lofty goal of any business [I am very much opposed to such thinking! ‘Disruption’ invariably leads to massive job losses and ever so many more family members’ life dreams ruined. No, the new industry will be of (relatively) jobless growth and yes, at some scale one has to take the macro effects into account], one would need to have a pre-emptive way to deal with double secrets, so the trustor trust base may grow in breath and depth.

My feeling is now that this sort of issue may also be the foundation of the inevitable-collapse-of-any-democracy issue. As predicted toungue in cheek, and shown practically throughout history. Are we at the verge of such a (Schumpeterian?) collapse, dinosaur extinction phase, in the way societies manage themselves? Utopian or distopian visions of what’s next for the coming era (remember the ‘Mayan calendar’ prediction of such a ‘new era’ ..?) may both be overblown, or … does reality always play out a bleak version of what could have been?

All in all, it seems rather important than someone [preferably someone more intelligent than me – regarding these issues, that is] would have a look at this all…
Is there really nothing out there in the intersection of sociology-, trust-, legal-, and economics- research that has pointers on how to resolve this issue ..? If the NSA or other TLA(s) are listening in and would have some Confi stuff, that’s good, too …!

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord