Here’s a thought.
When human agency increases, andceverybody becomes say 10% more superhuman, the expanded agency isn’t automatically grandfathered into old social contract. It creates new ungoverned territory that requires an expanded consent-of-governed addendum.
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One reason corporations tend to win the early land grab for the ungovermed territory is that people equate “regulation” with “expanded governance under existing consent” rather than “renegotiated consent”
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Google for example is “superhuman power of search and free knowledge” and treating it as an obvious extension to DC’s or EU’s authority is misguided. It needs an expanded-consent v]conversation, which is pre-regulation, at the level of something like a constitution amendment.
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That’s why we have this weird disconnect with 2 tracks of dissonant political conversations.
Track 1: “regulate big tech with bizarre constraints that look like bullwhips on steering wheels”
Track 2: “spin wheels on too-hard-to-update fundamentals like free speech”
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I have no suggestions. Constitutional governance doesn’t seem capable of the kind of agility necessary here. California is trigger happy with too many amendments and it doesn’t seem to help because it’s not actually driven by imaginative reconstitutional thinking.
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Theresa precedent though. Colonialism was a 2-phase affair. Phase 1, roughly 1600-1800, was corporations land-grabbing the new superhuman agency of new European transportation tech (sailing). Phase 2 was nations building empires (1800-WW2). It is debatable which was worse.
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I think the national-empire phase was worse. It had the same level of exploitation but an added layer of hypocritical idealism. The difference between the Imperial Raj and Company Raj in India was that the the company era people didn’t pretend (as much) to be noble idealists.
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We’re engineering imperial colonial era in the Internet age now. The Corportation Raj era is drawing to a close. Four political powers: Russia, China, EU and US are taking different approaches to building new empires based on NOT renegotiating consent-of-governed.
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Russia and China are like Spain and Portugal. Naked aggression in building a cyber-empire without even a Papal Bull dividing up the world by longitude. They’ll probably fail in the same way. Gangsters never learn to govern.
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The EU is approaching it like the continental colonialists. To understand the future as mapped out by GDPR, look to the colonial models of Netherlands, France, Belgium etc.
The US is taking a British approach. High-minded commerce-inspired incompetence. Gunboat diplomacy.
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A new Great Game is afoot, with the Internet playing the role of Afghanistan. The companies are going to decline. Political power is going to replace it.
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