A few random thoughts before I return to boring work:
The most important and poignant differentiator between the U.S. non-policy and China's pro-active, pro-innovation regulation in one of the most critical aspect of the 21st economy which is DATA.
What is even more important in this picture is if China manages to kickstart something even more impactful and profound than "fourth industrial revolution" that is the "fourth communist revolution". The phrasing here is just customary.
Those social phenomena are really traditional names for
transitions in the punctuated equilibrium of any given evolutionary trajectory i.e. the forking of the phylogenetic tree.
You can see already that it's just a more convenient way to talk about it
If China stops at the current stage and doesn't progress further don't they will eventually fall back and be overtaken by whoever does it as China will be driven into the same dead end that industrial economies of the past did. The fall of Qing dynasty is applicable here as well.
Necessary digression:
I usually don't like to use Marx and Lenin as examples because of their incredibly faulty thinking and flawed methodologies but they are the most well-known sources on the problem of economic predation vs. economic sustainability and a lot of their intuitive observations are correct and valid.
The problem is that they talk about economic processes it in the wrong terms - using politics and ideology, instead of ecology and mathematical meta-biology (today it is most commonly called "dynamical systems science" but this name wouldn't emphasize the crucial difference between it and the old approach).
Because of the flawed methodology the Marxian framework becomes self-referential and is bound to fail for the same reasons why inbreeding always results in failure. This is why people in the USSR couldn't understand why their economy was struggling so much compared to the western ones. The western economists didn't have an explanation either. They just lucked out and only for the time being as we now can clearly see because they are going in the exact same direction despite their alleged "fundamental differences".
There are no differences in biology which is why bacteria, algae, trees, bees, birds and primates can be described with the same models. Humans are no different. We only are arrogant to think that we are.
End of digression.
Data or more precisely information is the property of the individual. The "property" is not a social convention - it is a "property" as in "a physical characteristic of any system". There's no semantic error here. We understand "property" wrong.
If individuals own (i.e. control) their data they become more effective at cooperation. If individuals are expropriated (i.e. data is only known by a third party) they never gain the efficiency and the centralized system is always a less effective one because of entropy. Energy must be wasted to maintain stable structure. That's physics.
That much was understood intuitively by Marx - if a government is imposed over people it will waste resources to maintain itself. The optimal solution is for people to work in a way that is "centralized" without it being centralized at all. Markets being ad hoc information networks provide that possibility but they are also prone to takeover i.e. predation which creates asymmetries which then lead to information inbreeding and collapse.
It is literally the same dynamic that leads to genetic defects in homogenous populations. We're just confused by the "individual human" part instead of thinking of populations as streams of genes.
If China establishes the market for data which leads to development of prices for data then there is an opportunity to transfer that price system onto individuals and turn an individual "stock market" for mass data into a mass market for individual data. Once such market is established and is protected from external predation - this is the natural role for the one necessary predator in the system i.e. government - it will lead to an explosion of productivity that will be as close to the idealized theoretical vision of "true communism" as humans are capable of engaging in.
Obviously physical resource bottlenecks will still exist but most people don't realize that the key to economic productivity is the optimization of time use and that can't be done without access to individual data. At some point if data markets are well developed we won't need physical resources as mediation for trade because information itself will provide that.
This is what cryptocurrency based on blockchain should be instead of the speculative shitshow it is now. Money is a facilitator of exchange, a physical instantiation of information.
So it won't be communism as the political theorists of the past imagined it because it will be run on market principles but the end result will be indistinguishable. It will be a truly ironic twist on the notion of phase transition from capitalism to communism. Most people think "capitalism" has to be overthrown. They can't imagine it could ever mature - that is evolve - into something else.
Evolve or become extinct. Survival of the fittest. Living fossils are relegated to evolutionary niches as the ecosystem is taken over by a better adapted species.
The problem is that right now data is being stolen from the people in exchange for trinkets - "free" applications, "free" search, "free" websites. The population is treated like a naive young girl being used by a skillful sex predator and so it shouldn't be surprising that the end result is a relationship of that between a crack prostitute and a pimp - in a very literal sense.
This is why American Big Tech is so highly valued by the markets. They are legal entities which under protection of US legal system steal data to sell it without fair compensation to the people providing the data. And the "free" services which they receive in return are neither free nor services.
But it shouldn't surprise us that a country founded by slave owners for the protection of slave owners thinks that owning slaves is the best way forward.
The problem is that those slave owners imagine themselves as benefiting from the system. They don't understand that they are the first in line for the culling. That blissful ignorance is the really scary part. Titanic sinks. Orchestra plays.
Although these firms have delivered clear benefits to society, the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google has come at a price.….
We should stop referring to the mass theft of data performed by Big Tech in America (and wherever else applicable as well) as "
provision of services".
A parent molesting their children is
providing a service by keeping them sheltered and fed but I don't think anyone would describe a sexually abusive parent as "
delivering clear benefits to the child".
A farmer who feeds chickens to sell them for meat is also
providing service by keeping them sheltered and fed but I don't think anyone would describe a farmer as "
delivering clear benefits to the chickens".
Big Tech is more than Marxian exploitation. It is anti-human predation, pure and simple.
Once you control and legally own your data and are capable of including it in the exchange with an explicit value then and only then will actual
services happen.
What comes next I don't know. Vinge was wrong. We are already in the "singularity" and we have always been in it and it really isn't a singularity. But at least there will be a "next".
It's also not political. It's species level. It's humanity's future or extinction.
So yeah...China... try not to fuck it up. We here in Europe are still looking for sticks to fend of the big bad wolf and we really appreciated if somebody kicked the wolf in the testicles. Might as well be you.
