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* Tom Mahon on the new feudalism
Issue #58
April 2014
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Contents
FEATURES
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The New Feudalism and the Common Good
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by Tom Mahon
We may be facing a critical decision point, when we settle who is to be master, the tools or the makers.
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ISSN: 1948-3562
—i—
The New Feudalism and the Common Good
Returning Beauty, Truth, and Goodness
to Technology
The recent revelation that 85 individuals have the combined net worth of 3.5
billion people confirms that we’re now living in a new Feudal age.
by Tom Mahon
Just as in the old Feudal system a millennium ago where power was based on
ownership of real property (land), so in the New Feudalism power is based on
ownership of Intellectual Property (IP).
The tools we create should serve the deepest needs
of human beings. Can it really be that our deepest
needs are war and toys?
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forum [U1].
A case in point is Mark Zuckerberg’s achieving a net worth of $80+ billion in
less than a decade by getting people to expose themselves to a universe of
marketers and surveillance agencies.
When Steve Jobs died, Apple had $100 billion in cash on hand but was using
slave labor in China.
Top Google execs fueled their private jets at taxpayer expense.
And nothing speaks to the extravagance of the digital elite more than their
desire to embed themselves into silicon systems in a “technological singularity,”
hoping to achieve immortality by 2040.
Tbe “Information Age” now seems largely controlled by those who know the
price of everything, but see no value in what can’t be monetized.
And so it goes… too few with too much, and too many with too little. “Things
fall apart; the center cannot hold,” as Yeats said.
If this is going to change—and it must, because the imbalances in our political
and economic systems are unsustainable—we need to recognize that global
wealth inequality and the digital revolution go hand in hand and feed off each
other.
The mutual interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are creating an economy
requiring a few highly-skilled “knowledge workers” to write the algorithms for
“smart machines” that replace much human labor. And so the middle
class—essential for a just and civil society—is dying before our eyes.
To distract them (us), we’re bombarded with “entertaining” images of violence
and salaciousness, to hold interest until ads come on to incite our greed and
envy.
Meanwhile global e-finance creates instruments so complex they are beyond
human comprehension, and as evanescent as pixels on a screen. You can
become a hedge-fund billionaire in five years if your router is faster by a
nanosecond that anyone else’s.
With every heavily promoted “next new thing,” cracks become wider. The
Internet of Things (IoT) will connect everything to the Cloud. But there is
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little talk about the monumental energy requirements, never mind the risks
of widespread crashing or hacking on a global scale.
Up to now, much digital technology has been about promoting the individual:
personal computers, iProducts, personal ID numbers, MySpace—and we’ve
loved it.
But now global civilization is moving from the natural, the analog, into a
privately controlled digital world.
And a worst-case scenario is taking form: Innovation promotes automation
(machines replacing humans). With diminished income, the unemployed or
minimally employed are nevertheless constantly urged to consume, while at
the same time under surveillance by increasingly paranoid elites in business
and government. And if the economically disenfranchised take to the street,
the regime deals very harshly with them (evidenced by the ferocity brought
down on the Wall Street Occupiers).
It’s time for a grassroots educational program to raise peoples’ recognition of
how the greatest communications revolution in history has been subverted to
enrich and empower the few at the expense of the common good.
Time is running out. The Internet, which promised to be a great equalizer,
may lose its “net neutrality,” and become a sandbox for the wealthy only.
So, first we need to recognize the tight link between the current global
economic-political regime and a technology imperative that fails to see any
values beyond “working to spec.”
Secondly, we need to rethink the nature of tools themselves. Technology exists
to serve us; we’re not here to serve our tools. “Windows for Dummies” misses
the point: the problem is with bloated code, not with the consumer.
We teach “the scientific method” even in primary school. But we also need
to develop programs in “technology literacy” at an early age so people are more
conscious of tools’ effects. (Technology literacy is not about teaching how to
program software, but rather about raising awareness of how our machines
program us.)
Tools are how we leverage limited human ability for maximum effects. There’ve
been four stages in the development of leverage over time: of our muscles (the
six tools of classical antiquity); our senses (the telescope and microscope that
enabled the scientific revolution); our brains (current Information Technology);
and a growing leveraging of a moral force (Gandhi, Dr. Marin Luther King,
Nelson Mandela, etc).
So much of our tool use now is dedicated to the extremes of trivial “cool stuff”
or deadly “smart weapons.” We do not need to abandon the many, obvious
benefits of our new technologies. But we do need to find, urgently, a middle
path in our silicon society between the extremes of trivial and deadly; one that
honors the two gold nuggets of ancient wisdom: the golden mean (moderation)
and the golden rule (compassion).
The Classical world understood that science was the method by which we
discover the truths of nature. And technology was how we make beautiful
objects and undertake good works. And they understood science and
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technology, when exercised in a value-driven context, are the means to beauty,
truth, and goodness.
For all the gee-whiz aspects of the digital revolution, it’s time to reintroduce
common sense and a sense of the common good to end this new Feudal order,
nonviolently, and replace it with a new Renaissance that—I know from
personal encounters—was the intention of the people who started this
revolution not so very many years ago.
About the Author
Tom Mahon has written about technology for over 40 years, most of that time in Silicon Valley.
He wrote the first published novel set in Silicon Valley (The Fandango Involvement, 1981), and
a non-fiction book, Charged Bodies: People, Power and Paradox in Silicon Valley, that was
recognized as a book of the year by the Computer Press Association. Since the early 1990s, he
has spoken and written widely on the need to reconnect technical capability with social and
ethical responsibility. Mahon’s writings have been published in The Wall Street Journal, Electronic
Engineering Times, and Business 2.0. Information on his eBook, Reconnecting.calm: Finding
common ground for science, technology and values, is at www.reconnectingcalm.com [U2].
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