You don’t need to go around looking for flaws in Patchwork. It’s Moldbug’s one big utopian crackpot moment. IMO there’s literally hundreds of reasons (chief among them being how easily humans can be misled by “free-market” manipulation) why most patches would devolve into really ugly, totalizing and rather stable corporate slavery (think singing the Wal-Mart anthem every morning and needing amphetamines just to get ahead), gradually resort to mind control technology, or just stay poor despite the law of comparative advantage because they started out as a collection of outcasts.
OR, in the extremely unlikely event that it all went fine and humanely, it could create so much wealth and peace that the elites would be drawn to Universalism simply as an attractive value/goal system (shaped like the forager mind, not like a ruthlessly efficient machine), and dismantle the borders and such. Or something else. It is really so poorly thought out that it’s not worth criticizing, except as mediocre science fiction.
(of course, given any kind of singularity it’s all rather irrelevant)
I strongly disagree with this. Also I had to check out what a Bircher is:
The John Birch Society is an American political advocacy group that supports anti-communism, limited government, a constitutional republic[1][2] and personal freedom.[3] It has been described as radical right-wing.
That’s ridiculous.
Moldbug doesn’t approve of constitutional republics! ;)
You don’t need to go around looking for flaws in Patchwork. It’s Moldbug’s one big utopian crackpot moment. IMO there’s literally hundreds of reasons (chief among them being how easily humans can be misled by “free-market” manipulation) why most patches would devolve into really ugly, totalizing and rather stable corporate slavery (think singing the Wal-Mart anthem every morning and needing amphetamines just to get ahead), gradually resort to mind control technology, or just stay poor despite the law of comparative advantage because they started out as a collection of outcasts.
OR, in the extremely unlikely event that it all went fine and humanely, it could create so much wealth and peace that the elites would be drawn to Universalism simply as an attractive value/goal system (shaped like the forager mind, not like a ruthlessly efficient machine), and dismantle the borders and such. Or something else. It is really so poorly thought out that it’s not worth criticizing, except as mediocre science fiction.
(of course, given any kind of singularity it’s all rather irrelevant)
“Crackpot moment”? Moldbug might have lucid moments, but Bircher crackpottery is the mainstream of his political writings.
I strongly disagree with this. Also I had to check out what a Bircher is:
That’s ridiculous.
Moldbug doesn’t approve of constitutional republics! ;)