The Long View: An Army of Davids
Self-assembling nanobots are vaporware, a concept without even a glimmer of actual technology behind it, so its is appropriate that they are used to advocate for libertarianism, a political philosophy without a constituency.
Nonetheless, I could not help but reflect by the time I finished the book that, in some ways, this is a remarkably crippling ideology. To put it briefly: an army of Davids is not an army, but the ideal of an army of Davids makes it difficult to recruit a real army and could make it impossible to finance its supply.
John J. Reilly’s review of Glenn Reynolds An Army of Davids [Amazon link] could have been titled: Why I am not a Libertarian. It is one of my favorite pieces of contemporary political philosophy that John ever wrote.
Instapundit is very impressed by the fact that progress in electronics makes it possible for individuals to create audiovisual products that could have been made even a few years ago only by large organizations. He notes that more people are working at home, particularly if they are doing work that can be largely confined to a PC. From this he extrapolates a variety of points about “disintermediation,” which in this case means buying products from wholesalers instead of through shops, and generally performing services for yourself that once required the help of experts. The latter principle is quickly applied to the schooling of one’s children and the protection of one’s person and property: the Army of Davids, it seems, should carry actual guns.
When I got to the argument that the new public space is a sort of shopping mall where people can sit in comfy chairs and work from their laptops while sipping coffee, I began to reflect on the old saying that it cost a lot of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty. Yes, the “infrastructure” that some professionals use can be confined to a laptop that weighs a few pounds, and it is true that such people often don’t commute at all, and that they are perfectly capable of schooling their one or two kids. They can certainly buy rifles to take out intruders who venture uninvited onto the lawns of their quarter-acre lots. Why can’t the government get off the backs of these people?
The trends that Reynolds was talking about have only intensified in the last decade. The starkest contrast was made evident with the disruption of SARS-CoV-2 on Western economies. There are professionals who have enjoyed not having to commute any longer, who can comfortably work on their laptops at home. This is contrasted with those to must be physical present to work, deemed essential workers, which they are, but nonetheless an average gap in class and status has been made evident.
However, one might note that the work from home piece is turning out somewhat more popular than the school from home piece of this particular package.
John J. Reilly wrote this review in a fascinating period, shortly after the peak of blogging, but before social media really got started, which meant he could say this with a straight face:
The development of the Internet, and especially of the World Wide Web, as a medium of mass communication facilitated the dissemination of wild rumors, but it also facilitated their correction. More important, the Internet allowed for the immediate and verifiable critique of news reports from the mainstream media that in any other era would have been incontestable.
In an era in which social media has now almost completely displaced the news, the dynamic is now quite different.
The second point is that the power of small-group self-coherence is not a new thought, and it is by no means necessarily conducive to personal empowerment. All of the 20th-century’s great totalitarian states had their huge bureaucracies of secret police, each producing miles of paper records on everything the glum-faced citizenry did or didn’t do, and each overstaffed with armies of O’Briens eager to instruct on the error of his ways any hapless comrade who fell into their interrogation rooms. How very Mainstream Media, you might say, and you would be right. All the real tyrannizing was not done by the hierarchies, but by the “pack,” by the block committee, by the workplace committee, by people you knew and who took care to know you. The bureaucratic institution was invented precisely because impersonality is a medium of liberation. Bureaucracies have their faults, but they are favored over time because the third dimension of hierarchy affords their members room to breathe.
In previous conditions, informants tended to be people you knew, who also knew you. Once the purportedly libertarian Internet came into nearly universal use, it enabled mass, impersonal denunciation to become a feature of our lives. This is not an obvious improvement.
I wish John had lived long enough to have something to say on these matters. I’m sure his take would have been as interesting as this one.
An Army of Davids:
How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths By Glenn Reynolds
Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2006
289 Pages, US$14.99
ISBN-10: 1-5955-5113-1
What we have here is a brief for transhumanism through the power of self-organization.
The author, Glenn Reynolds, teaches law at the University of Tennessee, but is known throughout the cybernetic noosphere as Instapundit, perhaps the most read of all bloggers. He also sells rock-and-roll produced in his home studio and brews his own beer. These latter activities, and especially the beer, are linked through Libertarian free-market economics to the quest for immortality and the colonization of the Solar System. The free market, you see, is just a special case of self-organization. The ability of things to organize themselves horizontally, without hierarchical command, is the basis of nanotechnology, the technology of very small and even molecular machines, which will allow us to transcend our human nature and terrestrial habitat.
None of the explosion of enthusiasms we meet in this book is ridiculous, except the Build-a-Bear shops as a new economic model, and all of it is fun to read about. As a regular visitor to the Instapundit blog, I was surprised by the degree to which the book is not simply a compilation of diary entries. The merits of the books thesis are another matter, however. There are, no doubt, ways in which the author’s technological optimism is justified, and free-marketeers are quite right when they insist that an economic system is essentially a system of information exchange. Nonetheless, I could not help but reflect by the time I finished the book that, in some ways, this is a remarkably crippling ideology. To put it briefly: an army of Davids is not an army, but the ideal of an army of Davids makes it difficult to recruit a real army and could make it impossible to finance its supply.
There are several reasons why Instapundit got where he is today, one of which is that, on some topics, he is manifestly correct. It really is true that the industrial era had created a monstrous concentration of control over public information, based on the huge and expensive infrastructure required by the print and broadcast industries. You do not need to be very old to remember when “the news” was what three television networks and four or five major newspapers had to say. Today, as Instapundit points out to about a quarter-million readers per day, the monopoly has been broken. In the US, this process began with “talk radio,” an unintended side effect of the broad deregulatory program that began under the Carter Administration and accelerated under Reagan. The program included the banking system, the airlines, public utilities, and various forms of telecommunications. Under pressure from the Supreme Court, deregulation came to include the Fairness Doctrine, which in theory required broadcasters to air a variety of viewpoints on any public issue, but which in practice gave the Federal Communications Commission the power to limit what could be said.
Talk radio is still a kind of broadcasting, of course, with necessarily limited input from the audience, so that the broadcasters and the radio personalities are quite capable of putting out crank notions without being called to account for it. The development of the Internet, and especially of the World Wide Web, as a medium of mass communication facilitated the dissemination of wild rumors, but it also facilitated their correction. More important, the Internet allowed for the immediate and verifiable critique of news reports from the mainstream media that in any other era would have been incontestable.
The great example of this property of the Internet was the discrediting of alleged memoranda from the Texas Air National Guard that reflected badly on President Bush’s military service during the Vietnam War. CBS news anchor Dan Rather insisted on the documents’ authenticity, despite hourly mounting evidence, generated on the Web by bloggers with access to forensics expertise, that the memos were recent forgeries. Rather lost the argument despite the reluctance of other mainstream media to report on the critiques.
More recently, there was a bipartisan Congressional attempt to pass an immigration bill that would have granted universal provisional residency rights to illegal immigrants before any stricter border-control measures were in place. Members of Congress obfuscated the actual contents of the bill, as did editorial writers and some news outlets, but the outcome was the same as in the Dan Rather Affair: the establishments were defeated. New media, particularly those hosted by the Internet, have made it very dangerous for public persons to say contradictory things in different fora, as well as to say things that are demonstrably (that is, “linkably provable”) to be contrary to fact.
These episodes are what Instapundit chiefly means by an Army of Davids: people who organize horizontally, without direction from above, in order to exchange information and correct each other’s accounts. The networks that result are ephemeral, efficient, and quite often correct. Good markets have always worked like this, but now the networks can operate globally, and the information they process can be about a great deal in addition to money.
Still, the Army of Davids principle becomes more problematical the further away we get from financial markets and television news.
Instapundit is very impressed by the fact that progress in electronics makes it possible for individuals to create audiovisual products that could have been made even a few years ago only by large organizations. He notes that more people are working at home, particularly if they are doing work that can be largely confined to a PC. From this he extrapolates a variety of points about “disintermediation,” which in this case means buying products from wholesalers instead of through shops, and generally performing services for yourself that once required the help of experts. The latter principle is quickly applied to the schooling of one’s children and the protection of one’s person and property: the Army of Davids, it seems, should carry actual guns.
When I got to the argument that the new public space is a sort of shopping mall where people can sit in comfy chairs and work from their laptops while sipping coffee, I began to reflect on the old saying that it cost a lot of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty. Yes, the “infrastructure” that some professionals use can be confined to a laptop that weighs a few pounds, and it is true that such people often don’t commute at all, and that they are perfectly capable of schooling their one or two kids. They can certainly buy rifles to take out intruders who venture uninvited onto the lawns of their quarter-acre lots. Why can’t the government get off the backs of these people?
Well, because in some ways the post-urban world that Instapundit describes lives at the end of a supply and manufacturing system that is quite as huge and infrastructure-intensive as the one that supports the International Space Station he so rightly despises. For instance, the Internet is not a free-standing device. It is one use of systems of cables and power plants and, still, really big computers. It takes a lot of manpower and crudely physical stuff to keep that the components of that system in repair and unstolen. For that matter, it takes a lot of lawyers to keep it legal. Instapundit sometimes makes disparaging comparisons of the train to the automobile: the train is a high-cost early industrial relic that limits choice, while the automobile is a relatively cheap network component that facilitates choice. In reality, though there are arguments to be made about the kind of transportation best suited to each locality, the automobile system is not the light-infrastructure option. It is a good bet that no previous civilization has invested as high a percentage of its capital in its ground transportation: petroleum, refineries, factories, armies, and not least the roads themselves, which have to dominate every city and which have to go everywhere else to make the system useful. That last is, actually, an important point about networks in general: they tend toward self-similarity. In this context, it means that cars tend to eat their destinations.
Instapundit does promise the end of industrial civilization. This will be the work of nanobots, tiny robots on the molecular scale that will, in principle, be able to make anything out of “sunlight and dirt,” or at any rate, out of an energy source and raw materials. Again, this is a matter of self-organization: rather than being directed by a central intelligence like the robots at a factory, the nanobots will organize themselves horizontally, like bloggers critiquing a supplemental appropriations bill submitted by a leftist senator, to synthesize chemicals and to assemble large physical structures. That is, after all, what DNA does when it builds bones and flesh.
And speaking of bones and flesh, less speculative applications of nanotechnology will allow the repair of humans at the molecular level, thus in effect curing old age. More important, it will allow the genetic reprogramming even of adult individuals, thus permitting people to choose to surpass the capabilities of homo sapiens. Speaking as a law professor, Instapundit finds constitutional warrant for these most ambitious exercises in body sculpture in Griswold v. Connecticut, the US Supreme Court decision that found a personal right to bodily autonomy and consequently struck down a law forbidding the use of contraceptives, and in Lawrence v. Texas, which applied much the same principle to strike down a law against sodomy.
Instapundit has done a fair amount of pro bono legal work to help private entrepreneurs commercialize manned space travel, all this with an eye to the human (or post-human) colonization of the solar system and beyond. He has many cutting things to say about NASA. They are mostly true, and they do support his thesis that government has become a hindrance rather than a help in many promising fields. In any case, he feels that extraterrestrial colonization is necessary for human survival, because the power of self-organization can be used by evil people, too, and indeed can amplify the consequences of mere accidents. With all this excitement on Earth, it would be a good thing to get some of our eggs into other planetary baskets. To that, one might respond that spaceships, like cars, eat their destinations: a technology that can deliver Mormon colonists to Vesta can also deliver a hydrogen bomb from the Extinction Now League, but that’s another issue.
Finally, or at any rate eschatologically, there is the advent of the Singularity, which cannot be more than a few decades distant. The changes we have described above, all unforeseen and unplannable and accomplished from the ground up, feed on each other and accelerate. We see this particularly in the advance of artificial intelligence, soon to equal the human mind and probably absorb it. The Singularity is the period when the pace of change transforms human life in a fundamental way.
To this we must say that, for a man with a taste for homebrew technology, Instapundit has very little sense of when he is reinventing the wheel. Perhaps the origins of the concept of the Singularity are addressed in some of the many URLs we are given as references, but the fact is that Henry Adams came up with an analogous idea 100 years ago (extrapolating from coal-use statistics rather than Moore’s Law) and Teilhard de Chardin with another version about 50 years ago (it’s a commonplace that Teilhard’s “noosphere” is a premonition of cyberspace, though Fr. Teilhard had a metaphysical objection to AI). The current incarnation of this idea is Ray Kurzweil’s (whom Instapundit has interviewed; we get a transcript) and his version is as interesting as the earlier ones.
I am still inclined to accept the notion of the acceleration of history, too, but how do we apply it? I think that a man brought forward from the world of 1900 to 1950 would be stunned in many ways. I think that a man brought forward from 1950 to 2000 would be a little disappointed. Yes, the price of bandwidth and memory have fallen dramatically in the past 20 years, but do not comfort me with more capable computer games. Where is my flying car?
Perhaps more seriously, Instapundit never quite acknowledges the fact that small-group self-organization antedates the Internet age and works just as well without it. He endorses the idea that the best way to fight terrorism is for the citizenry to act “as a pack, not a herd.” The prime example he gives of this was the self-organization of the passengers aboard Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, who prevented the hijackers from crashing the jet into the White House or the Capitol, all of them dying in the process. There are two things to say about this point.
The first is that the behavior of the passengers aboard Flight 93 depended on commonalities of culture and background that Instapundit’s Libertarianism works to subvert. A passenger cabin full of Libertarians might reasonably have been less keen on the idea of self-sacrifice. Even if the idea occurred to them, a common frame of reference, indeed a common education, would be necessary in order to negotiate a plan of action. That is just the predicate that a niche-riddled Libertarian world would not possess.
The second point is that the power of small-group self-coherence is not a new thought, and it is by no means necessarily conducive to personal empowerment. All of the 20th-century’s great totalitarian states had their huge bureaucracies of secret police, each producing miles of paper records on everything the glum-faced citizenry did or didn’t do, and each overstaffed with armies of O’Briens eager to instruct on the error of his ways any hapless comrade who fell into their interrogation rooms. How very Mainstream Media, you might say, and you would be right. All the real tyrannizing was not done by the hierarchies, but by the “pack,” by the block committee, by the workplace committee, by people you knew and who took care to know you. The bureaucratic institution was invented precisely because impersonality is a medium of liberation. Bureaucracies have their faults, but they are favored over time because the third dimension of hierarchy affords their members room to breathe.
Regarding immortality and transhumanism, Instapundit cites and refutes various arguments to the effect that these things debase the human condition, are unethical, or are otherwise contrary to God’s will. I do not find the critiques he cites very persuasive, either. Regarding immortality in particular I would say, “Go for it!” However, I would suggest that if immortality were really possible for people, or even for mammals, then we would see a few examples of it here and there in nature. It is one thing for a biological property to be selected against: like, for instance, albinism. It is another thing for it never to occur.
There is also this: everything connected with Griswold v. Connecticut seems to be a Darwin Award winner. Instapundit says there would be no objection to a society of immortals, where there are hardly any deaths and, consequently, hardly any births. Well, okay, but cultural milieus that embrace the autonomy principle of Griswold tend to implement the second part of the equation before they have the immortality issue fully addressed. Since this tends to extinction, it might be wise to reconsider the principle before doing anything drastic.
As for industrial nanotechnology, Instapundit is probably correct about the potential for new synthetic materials, as well as about many of the medical applications and for agriculture. Still, as Instapundit knows, making a car from sunlight and dirt would be really hard. It would be hard, if for no other reason, than that it would take a long time. We already make chairs out of sunlight and dirt, or at least the material for them. It takes about five years to grow a harvestable tree. How long would it take to grow a chassis using only the ambient temperature as a power source?
The deeper difficulty, though, is that it may be a mistake to regard self-organization as the basis of a technology. Lots of things self-organize: the atoms in the periodic table, the snowflakes in a blizzard, the spiral nebulae in the sky. I suspect that the origin of life will turn out to be a tour-de-force of self-organization: not quite a miracle, but a predilection of matter so improbable as to fatten further the dossier of anthropic coincidences. What all these things have in common is that you don’t get to make this stuff up. Self-organization reveals preexisting landscapes of the possible. The landscapes are all you have to work with. So w [I have no idea what was supposed to be here, even the Internet Archive version has this partial sentence BIE]
We see the irony in a theory of human empowerment based on a rejection of planning and hierarchy in favor of a strategy of networking and self-organization. The noosphere, like the atmosphere, is a world with emergent properties that could not have been predicted from its history or its component parts. It does things its users never imagined, and which they often do not recognize they are causing. The noosphere has its sunny days, its local thunderstorms, and sometimes its regional hurricanes. By and by, I am sure, we will find that it also has its ice ages.
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