Episode: 783
Title: HPR0783: Libertarianism + IT, a match made in heaven?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0783/hpr0783.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:29:14

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Music
Hello this is dismal science coming with another episode concerning my
predictions for the future. Then how long this episode will be because it's a
broad topic.
But I've been thinking a lot recently about how I am going to survive in the
future and however, Brails will do the same. We're in very unusual times
economically. We have just mismanaged ourselves for so long on planet Earth
that you really wonder what the next stages are going to be. I could speak
about jobs for instance. I think it's so interesting that borders bookstore has
closed its doors. Another victim at the hand of information technology. So it's
been amazing how information technology has just revolutionized the whole way
that people work. And in response has been destroying jobs at a frightening
pace. You know all of these new companies that we have now don't employ anywhere
near as much people as the companies that we had before. You know we have
companies now like Craigslist that has like 12 employees. Facebook has like
2,000 employees but you know you look at a company like Amazon and you realize
how many businesses have fallen due to their dominance. You realize that the
world is going to be a different place very soon. Not only that we've been
using our natural resources at a breakneck pace. When I speak of natural
resources I'm speaking mostly of food resources, water resources, gasoline, oil, and
those basic things that we've come to become so dependent on. Some of them we've
been dependent on from beginning. Some have become more dependent on in recent
times. But when you look at prices of things like food and fuel and even water,
watch them as they rise so quickly. You realize that we're out of balance. And the
question is how do we get back into balance? Or whether we go by normal means or
by being forced to? I've been particularly interested in this concept of
globalization that we've been living in. The idea of shipping resources and
finished products around the world. And what things are going to look like when
that process ends. I guess I could say on the bright side. The bright side to me
I'm not sure if it'll be the bright side for you. But I think that the internet is
going to be around. I don't think we're going to have problems with electricity. I
think we'll get over that. We have lots of coal and we're getting better at
solar and other such things. So I was feeling that we're going to have an
internet, a vibrant internet internet. And it's going to be increasingly
localized, I think. And it's going to try to help us manage our resources as
best as we possibly can. And it's going to provide for us the employment
opportunities that we're going to need. Not necessarily in programming the
internet, but utilizing the internet to really try to save money or make money.
You see, I'm a libertarian. And if you don't know what that means, it means that
I don't really believe in governmental structures, socially engineering, our
circumstances. We've been doing that now for many decades. And I think we're
coming towards the end of that because ultimately the world is a world of
markets. We sometimes wish it wasn't, but it is because there are shortages of
things like beef, for instance. Beef is for most people in the world a luxury.
And more and more in the West, it's becoming a luxury as well. And it would be
nice if everybody could have beef every night for dinner, but
there simply just isn't enough to make that happen. So it needs to be priced
appropriately, which comes to this idea of the types of things we're
going to be doing in the future. You know, right now a lot of things are
legal. A lot of money-making ideas are legal. Things like selling your blood.
Even though we have blood shortages all over the country, you can't sell blood
in America. Which doesn't really make a lot of sense. You know, there's a lot of
people who very much need blood. And apparently their chronic shortages of
blood throughout the country. So it would only make sense that we would try to
incentivize people to part with their excess blood in order to save somebody's life.
This is one example of how free markets are blocked in the United States.
You know, another example is gambling. We have very unusual laws concerning gambling. I'm
strangely enough, all the states now are starting to legalize gambling to some degree or another
in a desperate attempt to get money from taxes and such. But, you know, gambling is another
highly regulated activity, which is also very profitable. And should probably be legal and not have
much government interference. So how do we get to this end result? I think we're well in our way
to breaking down many of these false restrictions of the government so the world have placed upon us.
That is, if the internet continues to be a free place, which I'm betting it will.
There are some people who don't want the internet to be a free place, but I don't know that
they're going to gain the traction they need to clamp down on it. And what I'm saying is that
there are going to be more and more markets evolving on the web. And I'm probably not telling you
anything you don't know already. You've probably noticed the proliferation of web applications
and web markets that are arising. Many of them doing illegal things like selling drugs.
You know, the recent Bitcoin controversy where, you know, there was an online drug dealer
willing to take Bitcoin's and send you drugs. That's a powerful concept, right?
Yeah, so open source software has done a lot of things. I remember what computing was like before
open source became popular. I remember buying application stacks, buying programming environments,
like Visual Studio for Microsoft. Yes, I did buy that once upon a time. It cost a few hundred
dollars. When they sold that in stores, you could go to a store and buy a programming language,
like Visual Basic. Of course, not many people really are going to do that.
Or in order to get, you know, powerful database software, you really had to be a large corporation.
You had to buy very expensive software like Sybase or Oracle. If you wanted to play the internet
game, you needed expensive Unix systems. That was in. This is now, now you do not need to buy almost
anything if you have the right skills. The programming languages are now free, like Python.
Perl, etc. The database applications are free, really free in every sense of the word.
And they're powerful and flexible. And they're allowing us to start markets that we just could have
never really ever expected for it going to happen. Think Craigslist. You know, we really didn't
know how Craigslist was going to adjust the entire living arrangement of the world. Craigslist
is run by very few people. And it runs its web presence on completely open-source software.
In their case, it's Perl, MySQL, Linux, and Apache. This allows them to displace the entire
classified industry worldwide. And they have done a pretty interesting job on it. The most
interesting thing to come out of Craigslist, however, was the sexual revolution that Craigslist
dropped upon us, not even sure if they were planning it or if they expected it. But it did happen.
According to their movie, the Craigslist movie, there was a documentary made on Craigslist.
It focused largely on the gay community in San Francisco. And how they started utilizing Craigslist
as an exchange of sorts to facilitate sexual encounters. This eventually migrated into the heterosexual
community and began the process of internet sex markets. Now, I don't know if Craigslist began
it. I know there were things before. There were some super high tech people using various other
types of messaging systems from what I understand. But Craigslist really put things into structure.
And before long, the process of prostitution took a particularly high tech edge.
This led many people to be nervous for a number of reasons. This went on for many years
until various organizations and such started making accusations about Craigslist. A number of
murders took place and accusations of trafficking and such things took place. But we do know that
that's how the free market works. Resources are allocated and money is exchanged for goods and
services. And what I'm arguing is that you're going to start seeing a lot more of this type of
thing happen. This is going to become perhaps our new economy. An economy that's going to be based
very much locally, very much around your neighbors. How valuable are you to them? You know, so far,
you've had to be valuable to a company who really saw the world as its market place. The
thing about these companies is that they actually don't need you anymore. They've outgrown you. They've
found out ways to just manage without you. I'm actually surprised sometimes that I actually
continue to have a job because these organizations are just becoming incredibly adept.
I know of one company, a financial services firm in Baltimore, Maryland.
And laid off one-third of its staff. And you're thinking to yourself, okay, one-third of your
permanent staff is now made redundant. Obviously, things are going to just start falling apart. The
wheels are going to start coming off the wagon. But after speaking to some people who remain there,
they explained to me that a month later, you really couldn't even tell the difference.
They had organized themselves through the use of technology and other such means that they
actually could reduce their workforce by one-third. This has been the case all over the world now.
We're starting to see companies just running extremely lean and doing a good job at it.
The next stage we're going to see now is governments becoming lean. There's always thought that
government employment was so stable, but apparently governments are not going to be able to afford
to maintain a whole lot of staff very soon. And this is going to mean all types of staff,
teachers, police officers, and other such things. And all the bureaucrats and paper pushers and
people who just don't even know that they exist, but they do and they draw a living.
What does that's going to mean is that we're going to have to start relying on each other again
at a local level. And I say that because I'm not a fan of globalization really. I like it
in some degrees, but I don't like most of what it is, which is the shipping of goods and services
around the world. When you have dinner and one part of your plate was floating in from Chile,
the fruits perhaps. The vegetables were trucked in from California. The beef was imported
from Canada. And other beef products were exported to China. Well, I just don't know how much more
of that we're going to have. The idea of all of this global trade requires an enormous amount
of energy, mostly in the form of oil, which is becoming scarce and expensive and it's impacting
the price and viability of all of these types of activities. So what comes into replacing things?
Well, what comes into replacing things are food that is growing much closer to where you are.
Food that is in season as well, all of these exotic fruits arriving to you in the middle of winter
might just not happen very easily in the very near future. I don't see this as necessarily a
bad thing, but it's going to take some adjustment on our part to manage this. And once again,
I think information technology, more of my SQL or Postgres databases are going to be erected to
help us do this more efficiently. How do we shop in groups? Right? Even where I live, you can buy
food and bulk like tomatoes. Of course, it doesn't make sense for one household to do this by a
box of 100 or 200 tomatoes. It doesn't make sense, but if you know how to do this and if you have
good, neighborly relations, you can combine all of your needs and redistribute appropriately.
So after when you're buying those tomatoes, you can come back to your community and you can
distribute them amongst families and everybody save money and get product.
Well, I think that's kind of what the future is going to look like.
This is going to be good because I think it's going to rebuild communities right now. Everybody's
very isolated, super independent. And that has a whole host of problems in and of itself,
but I don't think we're going to be able to afford that much longer.
Concerning schools, I think we're going to start seeing a paradigm shift there as well.
We've been worrying about our schools for so long that they don't perform and we seem to have no
control over them. I'm not particularly even happy with the school that my son goes to, even
though it's supposed to be so wonderful by whatever standard. I didn't like the schools I attended.
I felt I learned very few practical skills, very few skills that actually helped me in life.
And you know, I would like my son to be able to learn things that are valuable,
like personal finance management or proper nutrition management.
How is this going to happen? I'm making a guess.
Right now, homeschooling is becoming very popular. Many people are just not sending their children
to school. And married couples, one of the spouses will usually stay home and educate the child
themselves. And you can do this throughout the entire child's career. This has pluses of
minuses. I think there's kind of like a negative social aspect of that because kids don't socialize
as much, I don't think. But I think what we're going to see is homeschooling times 10. I think
people are going to start making homeschooled businesses where they take more than just their own
child, where they take several neighborhood children, and they run a communal health network.
My health, I really meant to say a communal education network, where you're intimately involved
with the nature of the education that your child gets. And it will be very personal, very local
yet again. Of course, the internet is also going to play a part in this. One pretty impressive
project is the Khan Academy. They've produced a web application which helps children learn
mathematics and such. And they put it together in a fairly fun way that children don't seem
to mind playing it. And these types of things in collaboration are going to be the solution to our
ever degrading governmental selections. All of this is going to happen under the radar because
and most, I'll just speak for the EU and the United States. Our governing structures are not
nimble enough to adjust with time as we see right now. The process of actually changing laws
such things can take decades or centuries even, or they probably just will never happen.
So, what I suspect will happen is that a lot of these types of activities are going to start
going underground. And people are just going to start to disconnect with the help of open source.
Yeah, you're wondering like, you know, what's the technology slant to what I'm talking about is,
you know, we are going to see your recurring theme. These MySQL databases and Postgres databases,
they're going to keep dancing in the cloud. And yes, I used to work cloud. I like the word cloud.
I know many people don't, but I do. I know it doesn't mean to everybody,
what everybody thinks it means, but it means enough to me that it's a web presence that is
universally accessible, rentable, however you want to put it. But these databases are going to
continue to dance in the cloud. And you're going to start seeing homeschools of 10, 20 or 30 children
organize on the web, market on the web, communicate on the web.
This is going to happen for food resources as well. This is going to happen for sex resources as well.
You know, looking at what's in the web right now regarding relationships and such,
it's just so interesting to me that the world has changed so much since I was a child.
Now it appears that a large proportion of people meet their spouses online.
Not sure how many it is with proportion, but they have heard large figures, maybe as high as 50%
maybe higher, who knows. But we know it's a lot, right? A lot of people are dating and
marrying and meeting and selecting each other through online marketplaces. Of course, this is also
happening in a non-marriage perspective as well in just raw sex, which is also being collaborated
into mySQL databases and Postgres databases. It's not the most interesting business idea arise.
It's called What'sYourPrice.com. A website where it's like a dating website, except for you pay
the person to date you. Fascinating concepts, right? In order to get a date with a person, you agree on a payment.
Well, it's a very new idea. I don't know if it will catch on or if it will survive.
I can see a lot of pitfalls in conflating love and money and such things, so business-like. But
nevertheless an interesting idea. This is all making everybody very nervous, the way that
the internet's making the world completely uncontrollable from central authorities.
And with reduced resources of the central authorities, you would think that they would come up with
better ways to manage themselves. But we're still more or less doing the same old-fashioned thing.
Trying to ban things like Craigslist, which eventually Craigslist did bring down its adult
section after pressure from the United States Congress and various groups. The idea of being
that with Craigslist, the adult section taken down, they've won some type of war. But of course,
if we think about it, we know that nothing was actually won by that. The Craigslist duplicates
or imitators multiply like rabbits almost. They're localized, they're national, they're international,
and really the market's so much more powerful than the central authorities. And it's going to be
very hard to see how we legislate or police many of these activities. Like drugs, for instance,
you know, the idea of buying drugs with bitcoins is just so astonishing to me that I don't even know
where to begin. I've never actually used a bitcoin before, but it's a fascinating idea and the idea
that somebody will send you drugs for bitcoin is absolutely amazing. We've been doing drugs in the
world for a long time. I mean, drugs go back to ancient times, every society in the world uses drugs
in the Middle East, they use something called cat, which I believe you chew, and it's supposed to
do something to you. In South America, they have various drug varieties, and in North America,
we have varieties as well. So we know that this is something that's been going on for a long time,
and we have very tremendous difficulties controlling people's actions. So you'd wonder why we wouldn't
take more pragmatic approaches to some of these problems. There are things that could be done,
things that would be humane and perhaps slower drug usage, but instead we generally just try to
outright ban everything and police it and place people in jail.
Oh, I mean, and the results of my argument is that without anything changing much these
MySQL and Postgres databases will continue to ever expand, and they'll expand into every aspect of
our lives pretty soon, and they're not going away. So that in combination with the decline of
globalization, could lead to a fairly bright future, or I think we'll have a little bit of
a stumbling point where it will have to make some serious adjustments. But I think in the end,
it's going to bring people closer together in a strange way. We're going to learn that we actually
need each other, that we don't necessarily need Walmart or Kmart, or whoever else, whatever
other faceless corporation is probably not going to have our best interest in my head,
hard because they don't even want to employ us anymore. There's disappointed that we can't
afford to buy any other stuff. So if we can't afford to buy their stuff, we're going to have to
buy stuff from each other, and we're going to have to perhaps even barter. I see a bright future
for bartering actually. I don't know what the state of courtesy is going to be in the future,
but bartering is definitely going to be part of the puzzle. Those who know how to do things
like fix roofs are going to volunteer to do so in exchange for some type of good or service,
like boxes of tomatoes, perhaps, or a live chicken. I know that sounds a little bit odd to
people listening, but many things that are happening to us now would have sounded odd 10 or 20 years
ago if you stopped to think about it. And things are only accelerating. We don't have to wait
50 years anymore for things to happen. Things are happening, changing within a year or two now.
We're starting to see the whole world change. Just look at Netflix, for example, in the way that they
have just decimated the rental business, just displace the entire thing. All of those are jobs
gone and Netflix will not be hiring all those people who will be displaced. These people will have
to find new things to do and they will actually. Especially once government benefits start to run dry
when safety nets begin to fail, things like Medicaid, stop working, things like unemployment,
insurance, funds, going broke. People will learn to do other things and I've got to tell you
that to a degree. I'm kind of looking forward to it. I mean, I don't want to be naive. I'm going to
suffer like a son of a bitch during the process. But if I actually make it through, I think that it
could be a much better planet, much more sustainable planet and a planet with much better
interpersonal relationships than one that we've seen, than the planet that we've seen for the
last hundred or so years. Well, thank you again for listening. If you've listened to this for R,
this is a dismal science and I look forward to speaking to you, perhaps in another month or so,
in the meantime, be safe.
I don't want to be no man for me. I have other work I want to get done. I haven't
traveled this far to become no man for me. No man for me.
Because I'm tired of it. I'm so scared of it that I'll never trust again.
Because a man can fake you. Take your soul and make you miserable and so much pain.
My friends think I'm alone, but I got secrets. I don't tell everything about the love I get.
I got a love in my bodies I swear in. He never does me harm, never treats me but
he never takes away all the love he has and I forgive him for a million times.
I'm never tired of it. I'm not scared of it. Because it doesn't cause me pain.
Like a man can fake you. Take your soul and make you. Never be yourself again.
I never want to be no man for me. I only want to be my own woman.
I haven't traveled this far to become no man for me. No man for me.
No man for me.
No man for me.
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