Activists should not try to liberate Society, only help it liberate itself.

Many hackers try to build tools that can allow individuals and Society to escape a system of repression.
Let me make some examples to clarify the way those tools liberate.

The Tor Project

  The Tor Project wants to help individuals maintain their privacy and allow them unrestricted access to information. In a world where everything you do on the internet is kept and processed by NSA and similar organizations, tor gives the ability to some individuals, to express their discontent without legal repercussions. It is the only way for whistle-blowers to provide information to the public about illegal or unethical misconduct of powerful organizations.

Open Value Networks and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Multiple projects exist that build new tools that allow many people to collaborate to solve problems or cocreate value. The new communication methods that they provide allow for new forms of organization that are more democratic and more participatory.

Examples of such projects are :

1. Sensorica's open value network.
2. Multiple projects built on top of Ethereum
3, Enspiral

On the non technological side of activism, we have multiple efforts to shape a better world.

We have non-profit organizations:

1. Greenpeace.
2. Free Software Foundation
3.  Red Cross

We have legislative activists:

 These activists try to influence the types of laws that are passed by governments. They work with or inside the government to promote their ideas.

We have social movement activists:

These activists try to create movements around social subjects so as to provide pressure to the government or to overthrow it so that a new system of democratic control can be put in place.

Some definitions:

A superstructure is called the set of material reasons that allow / enable or determine a specific organization of society and the shaping of individuals (behavior).

By our definition, the superstructure not only alters the social relations we have, but it also determines what we can do and it effectively shapes the individual itself, determining its opinion and its cultural preconceptions.

The role of the individual/group of people:

Of course, this definition of superstructure would be incorrect if we didn't point the effect that the individual or a group of people has over the composition of Society and on the superstructure itself.

Biologist Richard Lewontin correctly explains the role of the organism in shaping its environment:

In "Organism and Environment" in Scientia, and in more popular form in the last chapter of Biology as Ideology, Lewontin argued that while traditional Darwinism has portrayed the organism as a passive recipient of environmental influences, a correct understanding should emphasize the organism as an active constructor of its own environment. Niches are not pre-formed, empty receptacles into which organisms are inserted, but are defined and created by organisms. The organism-environment relationship is reciprocal anddialectical. M.W. Feldman, K.N. Laland, and F.J. Odling-Smee,^[15] among others, have developed Lewontin's conception in more detailed models under the term "niche construction". 

Activists want to change Society or the environment as Lewontin would say. Let us define two types of activists.

We call an activist superstructuralist when he wants to change the superstructure so that the new superstructure will eventually change Society.

We call an activist political when he he wants to change the minds of the people so that they, themselves, change both the superstructure and Society.

Determination of the type of activist.

Can we effectively find which activist is a superstructuralist or a political activist? One cannot do that by simply examining the work of the activist. One needs to look into his motivation.

A greenpeace activist can promote social awareness so as that the people take action.

A social movement activist/organization can have partial control of the social movement. In other words, it could act as another type of superstructure inside the movement. It could control the discussions, the interactions with the government or with the unions.

One could say that the Free Software Foundation is the same as the Open Source Initiative. In practical terms, they both promote free/open-source software. The difference , though, is that the Free Software Foundation wants to create a social movement in which people actively work on the creation of ethical software.

The practical Importance of it.

Now it is time to answer the main question that is raised by this post: What practical difference does it make if you want to try to change the superstructure or if you want to convince and help the people change the superstructure and Society?

The practical difference is that when the people are not in control, they will not be able to change the new superstructure if the new structure is as bad as the previous one. If the populace is passive in the transition of superstructures, they will remain passive in accepting the new system.

What we end up with is not very different from where we started. As activists, we used the superstructure to change Society and the people themselves.

What we should have wanted is that the people be able to control the supestructure democratically and to change it whenever they want. Instead of being the objects of the system, they should be the subjects that change the system.

How to be a political activist/hacker.

Being a political activist doesn't mean that you should only try to convince people to change their ideas.
Building tools that liberate people is good too as long as you explicitly ask people not to depend on your tools/expertise for a solution but to be an enabler for their own active participation and the possible rejection of your own set of tools/ideology.

An effective test:

You can only be a political activist if you enable people to reject your ideas and tools.

Explaining the Capitalist crisis - A Marxist analysis

I would like to make an argument that the Marxist rate of profit doesn't necessarily have to fall and propose a counter proposal on why we have crises.

I assume that everyone agrees with the theory of value, in other words that in the long run, prices are determined by the effort spent to produce something.

The Marxist falling rate of profit is defined as the ratio of the variable capital to both the variable and fixed capital.

V/(V+C)

Edit: It is S/(V +C) but if we assume that S/V is the same for the whole economy and fixed, the following arguments continue to hold. S is the surplus value by the way.

It is evident from this equation that if the variable capital is reduced, the rate of profit will fall. Thus the main question is whether the aggregate variable capital of the economy does fall, while all other remain constant.

The decrease in variable capital happens because of a new scientific discovery that reduces the cost of production.
In the case that production produces capital goods, the aggregate fixed capital doesn't remain constant. Thus, the type of research determines whether the condition of the fixed capital being constant is true or not. The type of research is a probabilistic event and it would require us to analyze it in order to draw any conclusions.

Now, having fixed capital not constant doesn't mean that the average rate of profit will rise. I will present you with an example in which it happens, thus it will act as a counterexample.

Consider a chain of enterprise in which all previous ones provide capital goods and the last one consumer goods. In every event in the economy, it is assumed that enough time passes that the theory of value holds.

This diagram shows the rate of profit of each company for the production of a single consumer commodity. I assume that the RoP is the same in all companies. That is not true in general but I do not believe that it will affect the validity of the counterexample.

A                           -> B              ->  C                 -> D
8/(16 + 8)     12/(24 + 12)   18/(36 +18)       27/(54 +27)

The average rate of profit is equal to
ARP = 8 + 12 + 18 + 27/ (16 + 8 +24 + 12 + 36 + 18 + 54 + 27)
= 0.33333 , not surprisingly since all RoPs are equal.

Now, a new invention occurs that reduces the variable capital of firm A, from 8 to 2.

Then after a while when all the firms in the chain have bought this machine (but without having the RoPs become equal for simplicity) these are the new RoPs:

A                           -> B              ->  C                 -> D
2/(16 + 2)     12/(18 + 12)   18/(30 +18)       27/(48 +27)

The average rate of profit is equal to
ARP = 2 + 12 + 18 + 27/ (16 + 2 +18 + 12 + 30 + 18 + 48 + 27) =
= 0.345

Thus as we can see, the average rate of profit as defined by Marx does increase.

Let us consider another counterexample. Let's suppose that B is bought by A. What would be the rate of profits? :

A                           ->  C                 -> D
20/(16 + 20)     18/(36 +18)       27/(54 +27)

The average rate of profit is equal to
ARP = 20 + 18 + 27/ (16 + 20 + 36 + 18 + 54 + 27) =
= 0.38

Here again the rate of profit increases because we do not consider the product of company A as fixed capital for company B.

Does this mean that Capitalism is not prone to have crises. On the contrary, capitalism is prone to crises. Let us see why.

For every scientific discovery, what happens for sure is that the total cost of production is reduced.

In our example, before the invention, we had:

AC = 54 +27 = 81

After the invention:

AC = 48 +27 = 75

Thus after the invention, the capitalists only need to give 75 to continue the exploitation of the workers. The remaining 6 cannot go to the previous investment, they need to go to another investment. But the profitability of new investments do not depend on the sum of profits that were previously obtained by the current investment. In fact, because of all the innovations that are happening and the shrinking of the cost of production, it is impossible to invest those sums of money.

Now it is important to understand that if a sum of money remains dormant in the hands of a few, that also means that debt is kept in the hands of the many. That debt forces people to underconsume, that forces companies to lower their prices and thus decrease their profits which then forces them to exploit more their workers that eventually leads them to underconsume.

The way to get out of this spiral can be done in many ways:
A) Tax the rich and redistribute the wealth.
B) Make the debt payable in 2500.

Both of these cases do not solve the problem but its consequences.

The reason why capitalism has the tendency toward crises is because capital investment is performed by force with a complete disregard of the needs of the economy/people. Money are siphoned because capitalists have the means/ability to exploit the working class. The only way to stop the crises is if production is performed democratically by the people for the people. In such a case profits would not exist, only individual and social good.

Helicopter money - A savior of Capitalism or a glimpse to a Socialist Society?

I recently read Michael Roberts analysis on the merits of Helicopter money as a savior of Capitalism.

You can read his analysis in his blog:
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/helicopter-money-and-the-chicago-plan/

I argue that Helicopter money should be viewed as a glimpse to a future socialist Society, not as a savior to Capitalism. Here is my response to Michael's article:

Michael,
I think that you have tried to answer two different problems with the same answer.

Helicopter money cannot save capitalism from itself as profits are the determinant force that drives investment.

Helicopter money is an alternative to Capitalism in which investment is decided democratically. If used inside Capitalism, then it is like a drug that prevents Capitalism from destroying itself for a period of time, if of course the money go to the real economy.

Thus Keynesians make a double mistake.

First, they believe that printing money will save Capitalism from itself. It can’t. It is just an aspirin.

Secondly, because of the first mistake, they do not see that helicopter money works because it is not controlled by profits and thus the only solution is to go to an economy without profits with increased democratic control.

Helicopter money is anticapitalist. Keynesians do not see it that way.
In your effort to explain the errors of Keynesian Economic thinking, you have accepted helicopter money as a method to save Capitalism rather than what it is, a glimpse into an economy not driven by profit.

Testing Complex Software manually is impossible

Suppose that we have a program that we managed to split into multiple pure functions.

Each pure function has one a switch statemenet with 5 possible cases, thus 5 different paths of code execution.

Let us assume that the output of one function is the input of another. In other words, our main program is the composition of those functions.

Let us assume that the total number of functions is n.

How many unit tests do we need to make if n=6?

number of functions * number of code execution paths = 6 * 5 = 30

How many tests do we need to make to test the global behavior of our program if n=6?

5^6 = 15624

One may say then that we should only do unit tests and avoid global tests. This is wrong.

Testing allows us to check whether the behavior of a function matches our intuition and our expectations. Does it have the results we designed it to give?

Thus the global behavior might indeed be determined by the behavior of all the functions, but can that tell us anything about the behavior of the whole system? Can it tell us if the global function does what it is supposed to do from our design?

So, the only way to test the global behavior of programs is to use fuzzers that check all possible paths of our code.

But fuzzing doesn't mean giving random data as input. That would not work. One needs to create data that will trigger new paths of execution. A good article on fuzzing can be found here.

Measuring Democracy and its Cost.

In my previous blog post, I have pointed that it is important to create a political and social movement around democracy and being driven by those ethics, to propose new forms of social organizations as they become available with new technological innovations.

The problem that arises, if we have the goal of democracy, is that there are multiple types of democracies. Most of us live in so-called Democracies. Others like me do not consider this a Democracy. Instead I say that it is an oligarchy.  Leninists prefer democratic centralism in their party and delegative democracy in Society. Anarchists prefer direct democracy.  New software applications allow the practice of liquid democracy. We all consider ourselves democrats but noone considers the other a democrat. It is apparent that any social movement based on democracy would fail because of the ambiguity of the goal.

The problem with the above definitions is that they mingle the implementation with the result. 
In the same way that software developers use tests to check the output of a function and do not care about the implementation of the function if the results are the same, our social movement about democracy should develop such tests to check whether an implementation is democratic or not. 

What is democracy?

It is a decision process in which the majority opinion is accepted as the decision of the whole.

A simple test

 Thus for any of the above systems, a way to test its level of democracy would be to make surveys about different topics and check whether the majority opinion is the one that has been accepted.

This is not as simple as it seems though.  The output of any democratic implementation should be checked if it has certain characteristics.


* Cost

The cost of the decision making process is determined by the sum of the decisions of the persons that participate in the democracy divided by the number of subjects that were decided upon.

* Speed of decision making - latency

The latency of the decision making process is determined by the time it takes to make a decision. This is unrelated of the fact that the decision is the majority opinion or not.

* Convergence speed of the decisions to the majority opinion.

Here we measure the speed in which a decision changes to reflect the opinion of the majority. This could happen for many reasons:

** In order to reduce the latency and/or the cost, the implementation hastily takes decisions that can be changed in the future with a more costly decision process.

** The opinion of the people changes and that needs to be reflected on the decisions as fast as possible.

* Per-topic analysis

All of the above wouldn't be sufficient if we didn't point that each subject matter has different requirements for the above characteristics. A nuclear power plant that has a leak would require a decision mechanism that is quick when it comes to emergency situations. For the working conditions of the personnel, latency requirements can be relaxed. For non-reversible decisions, the majority opinion should be reflected immediately in the decision.

Conclusion

I think that it is time to introduce a scientific analysis of the different types of democracies. This way, we can have plenty of statistical or theoretical data to show that the world we live in is not as democratic as it seems to be and that we should fight for a better democracy.

It is about Democracy, not economic Efficiency, Robustness or Equitable distribution of revenue.

Following the 2008 economic crisis worldwide and the crisis in Greece, people around the world are trying to change the world.

There are many ways we can improve society:

* A recent credit suisse report has pointed once more the great wealth distribution inequalities among people with the one percent owning 50% of the wealth.

* The free market is not as free as it seems. Private interests control most of the production sectors, doing deals behind the tables, setting prices as they like and blocking competition from entering. At the same time , the non collaboration of firms in research and in production leads to the doubling of research and production costs.

* The market doesn't care about the environment or any other externalities that might affect the local communities.

* Most economic activity is orchestrated by centralized points(page 200) of power. It those points fail, look at the failure of the recent banking sector, then all of the economy will fail.

All of the above problems are a good reason to try to improve society. Below are some of the solutions that have been proposed:

* Political activists have proposed Socialism.
* Libertarians have proposed technological solutions:

** Bitcoin is trying to reduce the cost of financial transactions while at the same time remove the control of the financial system by the central bank.

** The free/open software movement has reduced the costs of producing software. The open hardware movement is trying to do the same for hardware. Big firms have invested in this sector. IBM has recently committed to spending 1 billion dollars on linux. Facebook has created the open compute project to create open datacenter server designs.

** New types of economic organizations have emerged that remove friction in the job market. Anyone can participate in the production process with a tap on their phone. Uber has created a smartphone app that allows any person to become a taxi driver. Amazon has created an app for everyone to become a delivery boy in their 24-hour delivery system.
  The open value network model has proposed a new form of organization in which networks of producers form naturally so as to produce value that is then redistributed equitably to the participants.
  Blockchain activists want to enable the creation of DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations that enable the production of value across the internet by any person and at the same time be independent from the state and its interference.

** My work on ryaki is building a new financial system that removes the banks and the firms. Instead the production is done in an open value network and investments happen in a distributed way while at the same time guaranteeing that inequalities in wealth and production control will never emerge.

All of the above problems and solutions have to do with practical problems. In others words, we do not do this because it is ethically correct bu rather because of efficiency or robustness of the economy. One interesting question then arises:

If an ethical solution required a reduction in efficiency or robustness, would one propose the inefficient ethical solution or the efficient unethical?

This question has already been posed and answered by the Free Software Foundation.

When it tries to explain the difference between open source software and free software, this is what it writes:

'The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.” For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.'

I think that it is time to stop speaking about the new open and distributed structures in practical terms and introduce an ethical framework. This will allow us to speak about our values and we will be consistent to those values even if technology changes what is efficient and what is not.

If the Free Software foundation has freedom as its main ethical point, the movement around distributed open organizations should have Democracy as its ethical value.

We want openness so that everyone can participate in the production process. We want distributed organizations because we want the control to be distributed to as many people as possible. We want people that are affected by political or economic decisions to be the only ones that decide. In other words we want the give the power back to the people.

With the goal of Democracy as the primary goal of a political and social movement, this allows us to look critically at organizations that are part of the wider movement.

* Most political parties do not care about democracy that much. For them , the end result is more important than the process. Thus, their structure has nothing to do with democracy. For them democracy is a theoretical thing that will happen when they succeed in their goals. A good example to this is the English SWP party's undemocratic rule over the movement. Syriza, the greek political party that won the elections in 2015 is not in any way democratic. Decisions are made by a closed group of people that are in the government disregarding the decisions of the party. They do not want to give the power to the people but instead to rule over the people as a benevolent oligarchy.

* One of the organizations that has been influential in the peer to peer movement, the p2pfoundation, doesn't care about democracy as well. Their argument is simple. The internet and the open source movement have introduced new forms of production that are unavoidable. Thus the only thing we can do is to help them succeed as soon as possible and shape them in a form that are in favor of society. Then, they believe that through this economic transformation, we will also have a political transformation. This has led the p2pfoundation to sacrifice political movements form below in order to collaborate with governments for certain economic reforms. To put it another way, political change will not come by the people through democratic political movements from below.

By emphasizing our ethics over practicality, we remain consistent with our ethics both on our process of transforming society and on the qualities of our proposals.

Laws defined on Sets

I have been thinking on how to define laws that take effect only on the people that agree with them. The main problem in this case is that each person would define laws for himself and reject the laws of the others.

The solution that I found is a very simple one. Each one of us can decide to extend his laws to other people and then decide on the laws in a democratic way.

What I think will happen is that the boundaries of the sets will stabilize.

Let me give you an example:

Let's say that 3 people are in a neighborhood and the 2 people decide that it is prohibited to smoke. They extend that law to the other person. For the other person to change this law, he would have to extend this law to other people that agree with him. Others that do not live in this neighborhood will not care for the applicability of that law and will be indifferent. (except due to other reasons). On the contrary, smokers of the neighborhood will join the democratic process and will reject that law.

As we understand from the example, the majority will always win when they care to participate in the democratic process. That allows laws to be applied only to specific people without having to define the boundaries based on a priori knowledge of the locality of the problem.

For example,  Laws to protect the environment will be applied globally, because all the people of the earth will be interested in them. The boundary of the set will be formed naturally.