Tech Envy

So lately it appears that the infamous Occupy-type protesters of the San Francisco bay region have now taken to throwing themselves under the wheels of Google buses as their new cause célèbre of the day. Which certainly prompts the question of what could possibly be so terrible about Google that would motivate these young people to take such careless risks with their own lives for the sake of making a political statement.

Their answer hinges upon the growing economic inequality and income gap in America, a trend they primarily attribute to the growing power and profits of giant tech companies concentrated along the west coast, many of which are headquartered in San Francisco. Yet as a victim of the income gap myself, and as a person who studies economics in great depth,  I feel confident in attributing the current structural problems of our economy to flawed government policy rather than the actions of private companies. Only governments can wield the legal authority to manipulate and distort markets through public policy, whereas private companies wield no greater power in the economy than to influence consumers to buy their products.

And yet the protesters of Google believe that their disenfranchisement is somehow directly correlated with specific individuals working within the tech sector, and that Google employees are somehow personally responsible for vastly complex global economic forces that no one company, nor industry for that matter, could possible have any direct ability to influence or control.

I find it immensely difficult to direct any anger towards a company that adds as much value to my life as Google does. Or pretty much any tech company, for that matter. If it were  not for computer engineers, I wouldn’t be writing a blog this very moment that has the potential to reach millions of readers. And were it not for the Internet, the protesters of the Occupy movement would not have been able to organize to the extent that they did, had they been able to organize at all. Could Tahrir Square have happened without the help of Twitter? I seriously doubt it. And so it seems evident, to me at least, that technology is an inseparable component of progressive social revolution in today’s world.

As a former participant in the Occupy movement, I value the communication tools that the Internet has put within easy reach, enabling me to find and communicate instantaneously with those people who share my values and interests. My self-education in economics and political theory would not have been possible without the Internet and search engines such as Google. Nor would I have been able to find and connect with other like-minded activists to form what ultimately became the Occupy movement, a movement which I’m sure many of these Google protesters participated in as well. As an activist and scholar, it makes no sense for me to reject those companies that created the social tools with which I empower myself.

There was a study done not too long ago where pollsters asked the public whether they would give up the Internet in exchange for a million dollars. And the answer of 99% of those asked? Absolutely not. Nothing, apparently, has created as much meaning, value or wealth for today’s world than the Internet, if the numbers in the poll prove correct. And something that no amount of money could ever replace is a very powerful entity indeed that ought to command respect from all those who rely upon it in their daily lives.

As far as the income inequality issue, let’s not forget that these tech workers didn’t end up becoming successful by accident, and that they worked super hard to get where they are in life, taking risks and making sacrifices that most others aren’t willing to attempt. And not only did they possess the raw brainpower to pull it off, but more importantly they decided to invest that talent towards ends that benefit humanity as a whole, rather than serve the basest of narrow self-interests and short-term profits.

As uncomfortable as it may be for some to admit, our undergrad college degrees aren’t worth much of anything these days. And while that has a lot to do with the faulty economics of excessive loans inflating the perceived value of a college degree, it’s also a function of the phenomena where technology is replacing many of the relatively low-skilled jobs that most of us once filled, myself included. Those with rare and highly specialized skill sets, such as tech and science workers, will always be in higher demand in the employment market.

Is this a hard pill for me to swallow? Of course it is. But at the same time, it’s forcing me to figure out how to adapt, to think creatively, to self-improve, to create something of value that is relevant to others; and in the process, hopefully help me redefine the concept of value itself, which ought to become a pretty big asset if I work hard enough at it. In essence, it is forcing me to evolve, thus enabling me to achieve something far greater than I was capable of before.

The Google protesters apparently feel that the Google techs make far more money than they deserve. And yet think about the vast, if not immeasurable amount of wealth these innovators have created not only for today’s generation, but for the future of our species as a whole. If anything, these protesters should be pausing for a second to ask themselves what sort of value it is that they themselves are capable of contributing to society, and in what ways they can adapt to the changing times to make that value indispensable.

Related articles

• S.F. tech companies’ civic image at stake as backlash grows (sfgate.com)
• 2013: The year we stopped trusting technology (salon.com)
• #Googlebus protest – What does it say about Oakland’s future? (oaklandlocal.com)

The Market Singularity

Though when we hear the term “singularity” we most often associate it with the technological singularity sermonized by techno-utopian-futurists at TED conferences, there are in fact an innumerable number of phenomena to which the term singularity can apply.

Take for instance the Occupy movement, which was a profound moment of social singularity whereupon a cluster of individual actors spontaneously converged upon a specific time and place, both in the digital and literal physical sense, to produce a singular event in the history of human social cooperation toward a shared collective goal.

In essence, the term “singularity” can apply to any type of scenario wherein a cluster of seemingly unrelated points converge upon a single event, or event horizon. Whereas the prior interests responsible for motivating the initial movements of each actor are individualistic, it is during that moment of convergence upon the common event that the motive becomes a collective one.

Given this broader definition of the phenomena of singularities, the event that this blog post seeks to explore in substantial detail is that of market singularity. Following the basic tenets of Friedrich Hayek’s “spontaneous order” and the more vaguely attributed precepts of the “self-organizing principle,” I will attempt to convey a brief outline of this concept’s basic structure before delving into its finer details in subsequent posts.

The concepts of spontaneous order and the self-organizing principle can be difficult to distinguish from one another, as both refer to achieving a state of “order from chaos.” In other words, a state of ordered equilibrium is arrived at through processes that are entirely spontaneous, anarchic, self-directed, and self-initiated. In this context, centralized and top-down approaches to achieving ideal states of organization for any system are not only unnecessary, but harmful to the organizing process itself.

From my perspective, it seems that the difference between the self-organizing principle and spontaneous order is that one is the cause, and the other the effect. The self-organizing principle is the cause behind which the state of spontaneous order results. I’m sure that other scholars will disagree and be quick to point out that drawing such distinctions is somewhat arbitrary if not outright tedious; but because I am specifically applying these concepts to market forces, I contend that splitting hairs may prove useful.    

The concept of the self-organizing principle in particular often applies to biology, whereas the phrase spontaneous order is most often used in the field of economics. In the case of biology, not only is self-directed growth the natural order of things as an immutable law of biology, but it is likely also the only means to an organism’s growth and participation in genetic evolution. To intervene in the natural order of self-directed biology is to interfere with the progress of evolution itself.

And so it is the same with the markets and social groups that manifest from the human biological sphere. Markets and other collective social phenomena flourish best when independent of any external forces that seek to redesign, redistribute, legislate, curb, control, or in any other way inhibit the natural evolution of untamed biological processes. Just as all natural living organisms on Earth experience self-directed growth driven solely by the DNA that contains the entirety of information needed for their survival and fulfillment of purpose as a species, so too do humans fulfill their inherent biologic and social destinies best through self-directed means alone.

Taken to its extreme, the self-organizing principle might allow unregulated market forces to combine with the tools of advanced internet technologies such as quantum and cloud computing, resulting in exponentially increasing speeds between economic transactions until they culminate into a moment (or several diverse moments) of unified market singularity. The stock market twitter phenomena of 2010 may in fact hint at some preliminary rumblings of an approaching social event horizon that I believe will have the potential to unleash the mechanisms of global market anarchism is such a way that it will no longer be possible to deny the beauty of the self-organizing market.

In the case of markets, the term “singularity” has the potential to be misread as an implication that all known market forces will converge upon a single culmination point, past which no further innovation or market evolution could take place. Where a static sort of idealism is achieved and no further meaningful innovation is thought to be possible. Yet this point, once reached, would not result in the end of economic activity itself, nor the final summation or goal of all prior economic activity leading up to this point. Rather, it would become a new starting point from which everyday economic transactions hyperdrive into an era of exponentially increasing returns upon the original investment of time and labor.

Before this hypothetical market event horizon, we were living in a world mired in regulation where the State constantly sought to monitor, control, and constrict the natural flow of human progress. Whereas the State cannot create – it can only regulate and redistribute – this was also a world afflicted by needless entropy, by endless penalties that stunted the full flowering of human potential.

It is very possible that in the near future we will live as one global society under an entirely voluntary system of social constructs created from the beneficial confluence of science, technology, and unregulated market forces alone, and where the traditional centralized social contracts once forced upon us by independent nation-states become the historical relics of a bygone era.

The event horizon is fast approaching where technology and markets will replace the need for centralized governance entirely, if they have not already done so at the moment of this blog posting. And it is the express purpose of this blog to attempt to speed up this inevitable process through the power of suggestion alone.

Note: This blog post was first published on Dec 9, 2013. When I logged in today to make some minor adjustments and add category tags, I discovered that an article claiming just about the opposite of everything I’ve just written was published just yesterday, Dec 12, 2013, on an exceptionally pessimistic concept termed the “econgularity” – a term apparently coined by a banker and finance professional that reads as a near-parody of my own hypotheses. Oh the irony of the timing. Is this further proof of the fast-approaching singularity, whether technological or otherwise? Only time will tell.

Related articles

• Cosmos and Taxis (marginalrevolution.com)