* There are a lot of parallels to Acemoglu and Robinson and their Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which puts a strong emphasis on inequality. This seems like a decent review:
* "Forming and coordinating groups is the hard problem of the human condition; the reason we have religions and corporations and criminal undergrounds and political parties."
Weirdly contradictory, if forming groups is hard, why are there so many religions, corporations, etc? Forming groups seems to be exceedingly easy and it is perhaps human to want to be part of something larger even if its nonsensical or bad for us.
* "Of course, the power of crypto to organise surveillance-resistant communications lines protects everyone from the coercive power of states: not just nice activist groups that want a fairer society, but also whacked-out white supremacists and Islamophobic conspiracy theorists."
Kind of feels weird to take a shot at "Islamophobic conspiracy theorists" when Islamic terrorist groups are the very "insurgent groups" he's talking about and probably as effective as any other group at using this tech.
Finally, just kind of disagree with the premise. If tech made the Saudis rich, if it is empowering the Zuckerbergs and the Erdogans of the world, then there's nothing inherently good about it. Technology only gets applied within a larger social context, which is why it's not the tech that matters but the civic institutions and social morality which discourages invasions of personal rights and greed which are what really matter. Robert Putnam has some really interesting stuff on this.
1. Fundamentalist Islam is a "delusional superstition".
2. "Modern insurgent groups" -- the most famous of which all follow the said "delusional superstition" -- are the good guys.
3. Even though fundamentalist Islam is a "delusional superstition," "Islamophobic conspiracy theorists" are still "whacked out".
And Doctorow probably sees himself as religiously tolerant, despite all this. This is why you want to check on your beliefs from time to time, to make sure they're not contradictory.
(And I forgot to mention the part where Saudi Arabia's wealth comes from technology; Doctorow's using "technology" to mean Internet technology, high-bandwidth transmission, and the like, not oil wells and internal-combustion engines.)
>the Jews can pretend that they aren't playing up a minor holiday just so their kids don't feel bad around the solstice
Who's pretending? We know that's what we're doing. The real thing going on is that in the Diaspora we play up Hanukah because we're playing down the High Holy Days, Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot -- which are actually the religiously important holidays.
If you visit Israel, society basically shuts down for varying lengths of time around all of those, depending on how long the religiously prescribed holiday actually is, what restrictions it entails on observant lifestyles, and how quickly it's followed by another holiday.
If we tried this in the Diaspora, we'd all be fired for taking too much time off.
* There are a lot of parallels to Acemoglu and Robinson and their Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which puts a strong emphasis on inequality. This seems like a decent review:
http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/2006/01/book_rev...
* "Forming and coordinating groups is the hard problem of the human condition; the reason we have religions and corporations and criminal undergrounds and political parties."
Weirdly contradictory, if forming groups is hard, why are there so many religions, corporations, etc? Forming groups seems to be exceedingly easy and it is perhaps human to want to be part of something larger even if its nonsensical or bad for us.
* "Of course, the power of crypto to organise surveillance-resistant communications lines protects everyone from the coercive power of states: not just nice activist groups that want a fairer society, but also whacked-out white supremacists and Islamophobic conspiracy theorists."
Kind of feels weird to take a shot at "Islamophobic conspiracy theorists" when Islamic terrorist groups are the very "insurgent groups" he's talking about and probably as effective as any other group at using this tech.
Finally, just kind of disagree with the premise. If tech made the Saudis rich, if it is empowering the Zuckerbergs and the Erdogans of the world, then there's nothing inherently good about it. Technology only gets applied within a larger social context, which is why it's not the tech that matters but the civic institutions and social morality which discourages invasions of personal rights and greed which are what really matter. Robert Putnam has some really interesting stuff on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital