Voyage From Yesteryear

What Hacker News says

1. pdfernhoutApr 2025
   In theory, a general strike is always one more check on political power: "What would a general strike in the US actually look like?" https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/what-would-general-str... "Calls for a general strike in the US are growing. It's important to understand how to organize one, given their key role in overcoming tyrants around the world."

   Also from there: "Calls for mass disruptive action are coming from unlikely places, like Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, an organization normally associated with legal action through the courts. When Romero was asked in a recent interview what would happen if the Trump administration systematically defied court orders, he replied, “Then we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”"

   For a science-fiction version of a general strike and related resistance, see James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "The story was republished in other Eastern European countries where its depiction of nonviolent resistance against authority proved popular. In 1989, Hogan attended a convention in Kraków before travelling to Warsaw to meet the publishers of the magazine serial and draw out the money he had been paid. However, inflation following the collapse of the communist regime had reduced the value of the money in the account to just $8.43. Hogan concluded: "So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest, that was my tab for toppling the Soviet empire. There's always an easy way if you just look.""

   Of course, opinions across the political spectrum still widely differ on whether what is going on is good or bad (including opinions and priorities related to "identity politics"). Will those sentiments change as political things continue to play out (for good or bad) and get to the point where there becomes a broad sentiment for a general strike? Frankly, I don't know. For example, a lot of people think it would be a good thing to reshore manufacturing in the USA which hopefully also might eventually lower prices for manufactured goods (at least relative to wages). But whether current political actions will accomplish any of that is up for debate, as is whether reshoring manufacturing will bring back lots of good paying jobs to the USA or whether reshoring instead will just bring more automation and more wealth concentration. Some people may be willing to wait and see, while other people may have a specific opinion and may want to act politically on it.

   As G. William Domhoff wrote decades ago in "Who Rules America": https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_freshstart.h... "Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up. On a less positive note, many ordinary white workers have priorities that they put ahead of economic issues. As all voting and field studies show, a large number of average white Americans do many things based on their skin color. They often vote Republican, for example, especially in the South. They protest against affirmative action programs. They live in segregated neighborhoods. White Americans also often vote their religion -- that is, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics who vote Republican are members of non-college-educated blue-collar and white-collar families. In terms of their economic situation, and their need for unions, they should be for the Democrats, but many of them aren't."

   So, whatever one's economic opinions, the "identity politics" of it all is a separate issue (as above).

   Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics "Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, intelligence, and social class. The term encompasses various often-populist political phenomena and rhetoric, such as governmental migration policies that regulate mobility and opportunity based on identities, left-wing agendas involving intersectional politics or class reductionism, and right-wing nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic "others.""

   Some parts from that long article I found especially interesting:

   "Criticism of identity politics often comes from either the center-right or the far-left on the political spectrum. Many socialists, anarchists and Marxists have criticized identity politics for its divisive nature, claiming that it forms identities that can undermine their goals of proletariat unity and class struggle. On the other hand, many conservative think tanks and media outlets have criticized identity politics for other reasons, such as that it is inherently collectivist and prejudicial. Center-right critics of identity politics have seen it as particularist, in contrast to the universalism espoused by many liberal politics, or argue that it detracts attention from non-identity based structures of oppression and exploitation."

   "Sociologist Charles Derber asserts that the American left is "largely an identity-politics party" and that it "offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn't offer a contextual analysis within capitalism." Both he and David North of the Socialist Equality Party posit that these fragmented and isolated identity movements which permeate the left have allowed for a far-right resurgence. Cornel West asserted that discourse on racial, gender and sexual orientation identity was "crucial" and "indispensable", but emphasized that it "must be connected to a moral integrity and deep political solidarity that hones in on a financialized form of predatory capitalism. A capitalism that is killing the planet, poor people, working people here and abroad." Historian Gary Gerstle writes that identity politics and multiculturalism thrived in the neoliberal era precisely because these movements did not threaten capital accumulation, and over the same period "pressure on capitalist elites and their supporters to compromise with the working class was vanishing." The ideological space to oppose capitalism shrank with the fall of communism, forcing the left to "redefine their radicalism in alternative terms"."

   Identity politics is a complex topic, and how it is playing out specifically in the USA is a complex topic -- as is how it seems to relate to recent changes at the NSF including grant terminations.

   For the USA to heal as a nation, we need to figure out a way to transcend divisions -- including divisions related to identity politics.

   Disclaimer: A NSF grant that was terminated last week has directly affected my family.

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2. kmacleodJan 2025
   Voyage from Yesteryear (1982), James P. Hogan is my favorite. Essentially, yes, the robots can do better once shown but people create because it's enjoyable and, where desired, robots produce copies or maintain. The robots in this case have also been instructed to encourage human leadership and stay out of the way of it.
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3. pdfernhoutApr 2024
   To support your point that we we make choices among alternative, see this document I put together circa 2010 with about 50 alternatives -- some good, some obviously bad -- we can use to address the socio-economic changes needed to maintain healthy human communities in the face of increased automation: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

   It covers a bit of the history which you alluded to earlier in a previous post, such as the "Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964. But the root of all this thinking go way back -- whether to the original communal Christians in the face of the Roman Empire, various Utopian communities (including ones inspired by Charles Fourier) to Marxism, Socialism, Luddites, resistance to "Enclosure Acts", Henry George, Elizabeth Magie (her educational cautionary Landlord's Game ripped off in part as dystopian Monopoly), Bucky Fuller, Bob Black ("The Abolition of work"), Ursula K. Le Guinn, James P. Hogan, Paolo Soleri / Arcosanti, Marshal Sahlins, Amory & Hunter Lovins, John and Nancy Jack Todd of The New Alchemy Institute, Martin Ford, and many more. Not all the alternative ideas worked out or even got started for all sorts of reasons, but there are a lot of alternatives are out there.

   See especially: "The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization" https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dictionary-of-alternatives-978... "'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism', is the orthodoxy of the twenty-first century. All too often, ordinary people across the world are being told that the problem of organization is already solved, or that it is being solved somewhere else, or that it need not concern them because they have no choices. This dictionary provides those who disagree with the evidence. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."

   Indeed, I was in a way surprised (and yet also hopeful) in reading all the comments here in that many people are slowly rediscovering all these ideas for themselves as the issue grows more pressing.

   For some other ideas on improving and transforming current organizations, see also this other resource I put together: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

   Essentially, I have been dealing with "AI/Robotics Anxiety" for about forty years, and collected many ideas for coping with it along the way. I'm working in a broader document more specific to that which I may put up on my website at some point.

   Ironically, while I won awards for robotics projects before attending Princeton as an undergrad, and my undergrad work at Princeton in AI and cognitive psychology helped inspire WordNet which led to Simpli and the core of Gogole AdSense, it was maybe conversations with Jeff in passing at Princeton about the potential to use robots in commerce and space exploration --- which I doubt he remembers -- that might have had the biggest impact of my career to-date in a robotics sense given Amazon and its emulators. Not to take any credit away from George or Jeff in terms of their specific vision, hard work, improvisations, and persistence in the face of adversity, and also to accept that a place like Princeton can be a Brian-Eno-style "scenius" where ideas bounce around and transform as they are reflected on and refined by different people with different perspectives. https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/ "There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds. What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others."

   But I am a bit sad about the results so far though, given how robotics, AI, and other automation are turning out to do so much damage in practice to so many people's lives when used from a scarcity-oriented mindset. It was always my intent -- especially having read so much sci-fi like Isaac Asimov robot stories, "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon, and also James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" and also his "Voyage from Yesteryear" -- that way more positives than negatives would come out of the abundance that robotics, AI, and other automation (including information technology) can provide.

   A related video parable I made on such themes circa 2010: "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

   As with my sig (first sent in an email to Marvin Minsky) of "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity", I have realized -- as Einstein suggested about nuclear weapons or Lewis Mumford about technology in general or James P. Hogan essentially says through his novels -- it takes change of heart and mindset to realize the benefits of what is possible using automation without otherwise creating a terrible human calamity.

   An example of things going wrong is creating problematical working conditions when automation is used to make humans work like micromanaged robots centralizing wealth for a few people. Related US DOL citation for Amazon essentially for not automating enough: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osha/osha20230201-0

   As I've reflected on, if you get up in the early morning in the dark and turn a light on in the kitchen, the light may seem so bright you can't look at it even as it even as it makes it possible for you to get your day started. And by the time the sun comes up and lights your entire home and landscape, you may forget the kitchen light is even on because it is no longer noticeable relative to the surrounding broad illumination. Gary Kildall no doubt faced that with CPM. So that is kind of how I see the comments overall on the story. The sun is coming up as millions of people are starting to think about robotics, AI, and other automation and its likely near-term effect on themselves and society, and all the "bright lights" from decades past are just not noticeable from all the ongoing thinking and chatter. And that is maybe a good thing -- even if there are still ideas from then which might be useful now and will either be remembered, reread, or rediscovered.

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4. pdfernhoutApr 2022
   Sadly your point may be correct about automation being used right now more to control people more free them (even as technologists including me had higher hopes decades ago, e.g. Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

   You may find of interest this essay on "The Mythology of Wealth" on economic mythologies used to justify social pyramids and with a small elite at the top: https://web.archive.org/web/2007*/http://conceptualguerilla....

   See this online book by Marshall Brain on robots being used to concentrate wealth (see especially the chapter "Robotic Freedom" from which this text comes): https://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation "The Concentration of Wealth: If you look at our economy as a whole, you can understand why robots have the potential to be so disruptive if we do not handle their arrival properly. ..."

   And what is often ignored is that as automation -- especially computing -- makes it possible for one person to do more, even if a human is still needed in an economic loop somewhere, it weakens the financial bargaining position of many other humans (assuming demand does not rise as fast as capacity) who must trade their labor for kanban-token-like ration units (i.e. fiat dollars) in order to survive or maybe in some cases thrive.

   So we don't need full automation for all this to be very disruptive economically. And we are already seeing some of this as people with less tech or other skills are falling by the wayside economically and their marriages and lives are disintegrating (or never happening in the first place) and they turn to drugs to relieve the pain and so on leading to "deaths of despair". That is something we may see greatly accelerate as driving is automated given how important economically driving jobs are to many people with just a high school education.

   But even highly rewarded skills today can become rapidly obsolete through technology (like a radiologist reading x-rays or a broker trading stocks). And eventually programmers may see that happen to their livelihoods too.

   Of course, revolutions often turn out to be different then expected, as usually it is the best organized who take power (like in Iran durign the 1970s, the students revolted bu it was the better-organized religious hardliners who ultimately prevailed). Related Zinn: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us."

   But when you have robots guards (e.g. in the movie "Elysium"), then who cares about human revolts?

   Still, there is cause for optimism (also from Zinn): https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/optimism-uncertain... "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability."

   See Marshall Brain's novelette "Manna" as a fictionalization of wealth concentration and total surveillance from automation and an social alternative. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

   See James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" for an inspiring vision of alternative. https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesp...

   Or Theodore Sturgeons's 1956 "The Skills of Xanadu" about the two-sided coin of freedom/subservience and technology: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v12n03_1956-07/page/n117/...

   Or this essay I put together around 2010 mentions lots of alternatives (both good and bad ones): https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

   Ultimately though this comes down to a need for a change of heart as implied by my sig (amplifying and expanding on what many others like Albert Einstein and Bucky Fuller have said): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

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5. pdfernhoutApr 2022
   The "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" website has not seen fit to post yet a comment I made there a few days ago on "Russia may have used a killer robot in Ukraine. Now what?": https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russia-may-have-used-a-kille...

   So I will put a copy of what I posted there here on HN, since it is relevant to the bigger picture of killer robots:

   I've thought about how to mitigate the risks of (potentially self-replicating) autonomous military robots and other potential WMDs since the 1980s when I was a visitor at the CMU Robotics labs of Hans Moravec and Red Whittaker, and also from taking classes with Frank von Hippel, Steve Slaby, George Miller, Gerry O'Neill, and Jim Beniger at Princeton, and from hanging out a few times with Freeman Dyson at the IAS and also talking with Ted Taylor (who Freeman Dyson put me in touch with) -- as well as talking to many other people and reading widely on this and related issues (both non-fiction and also insightful fiction, like James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear). My thoughts on this are summarized in an essay I wrote in 2010 on my website "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism".

   Essentially, political controls will likely ultimately fail in the long-term given that parties to the (unlikely-in-any-case) political agreements have big incentives to cheat as long as they view the world in zero-sum competitive terms. As Freeman Dyson has explained in his book "Weapons and Hope", as long as the capacity to build WMDs remains they will always be a potential issue regardless of what treaties exist. The capacity to build such things eventually will always exist in an advanced technosphere. Right now it is relatively easy to build bioweapons and drones, and much harder to build nukes (which potentially might get easier with new advances in physics and material science). Frankly, we are doomed if we depend on political treaties alone to deal with this. What might succeed is ultimately a change of heart to A Newer Way of Thinking (like Albert Einstein and others like Donald Pet have talked about). Such a change of heart will involve emphasizing mutual security, intrinsic security, and achieving abundance from all through wise use of advanced technology. It will be a cultural change that makes the biggest difference, where in the long-term various political agreements might at most just reflect a global change of heart and perspective.

   On a practical basis, tools that reflect a newer way of collaborative thinking like Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (Jeff Conklin) and Convergent Facilitation (Miki Kashtan) may help groups a lot in thinking of better solutions that address the needs of everyone. Better Free and Open Source Intelligence tools widely deployed may also help everyone make better decisions and avoid disasters like Ukraine.

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   To that end of a change of heart and perspective towards a newer way of thinking, here are the main points from that essay:

   Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?

   Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?

   Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?

   These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...

   Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...

   There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

   The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

   We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") ... and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...

   Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ...

   --Paul Fernhout "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

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6. pdfernhoutJul 2020
   You're welcome. One optimistic-ish sci-fi book I've re-read several times when I need a lift is "Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan from around 1982: https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesp... "The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond? The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"

   As your point implies, authority is given by the people. The same point is made in the US Declaration of Independence about "consent of the governed": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed

   As is shown (fictionally) in Voyage from Yesteryear, if many people stop obeying like with a general strike (at least until full automation) or just by walking away to new opportunities in a different part of the system, then authority comes under pressure to respond (hopefully positively) or it will eventually will collapse. A similar point is made in the chapter on the "Ghands" in the 1962 sci-fi novel the The Great Explosion" by Eric Frank Russell who live by the adage "Freedom can say "I won't"".

   The same has been true throughout human history as explained in Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure" where he shows how centralized governance has collapsed many times in human history as whatever problems emerged in it (often from external pressures like droughts or plagues leading to systemic stress) caused most people to just walk away back to the wilderness to live off the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Civilization

   For good or bad, walking away is not much of an option these days given large populations, global surveillance, and also WMDs like nukes and plagues and so on that could be unleashed accidentally or on purpose if power centers collapse.

   Collapse of power centers in modern times is also often problematical regarding what comes next -- when most people can't walk away -- is usually the next-best organized group taking over. For example, students in Iran could eventually overthrow the US-installed Sha -- but then better-organized religious hardliners took over in the resulting power vacuum (which is probably not what most Iranian students had in mind for their future). Or, as other examples, the USA could relatively easily overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi in Libya -- but the resulting power vacuums have created politician and humanitarian disasters which have been very costly to the USA (especially in Iraq, costing trillions of dollars to US taxpayers -- although as a bunch of defense companies have made billions that may have been part of why it went forward despite many people pointing out what was likely to happen: https://www.wanttoknow.info/warisaracket ).

   Related humor: "Monty Python: What have the Romans ever done for us?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djZkTnJnLR0

   Of course, power centers also tend to actively disrupt any possible other power centers. See the "Old Guy" Cybertank novels for some graphic sci-fi accounts of that in one.

   Or for the real world, see for example Noam Chomsky's "The Threat of a Good Example": http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.h... "No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ... As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars. There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" "

   As you say, people in power have little reason to embrace change -- since their power derives from the status quo. Related on "Orthodoxy" by G. K. Chesteron: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.x.html "We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. ..."

   Classically, people have "organized" via a certain sort of social process, such as documented in "Politics the Wellstone Way: How to Elect Progressive Candidates and Win on Issues": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/234876.Politics_the_Well...

   One can wonder how effective such classical organizing is anymore given tightly controlled (by money) major broadcast media. And even if that was somehow circumvented, then as with Bernie Sanders (twice), the establishment has other ways of preserving itself like by convincing candidates to drop out of the race.

   Then there are other possible ways of disrupting such organizations vulnerable to things like, say, small plane crashes involving key organizers. Wellstone died in a small plane crash, which of course might have just been an accident despite suggestions to the contrary: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/10/well-o29.html "Wellstone’s death comes almost two years to the day after a similar plane crash killed another Democratic Senate hopeful locked in a tight election contest, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, on October 16, 2000. The American media duly noted the “eerie coincidence,” as though it was a statistical oddity, rather than suggesting a pattern. One might say, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, that to lose one senator is a misfortune, but to lose two senators, the same way, is positively suspicious."

   Another idea other than "organizing" that fits with what you wrote on spontaneous mass cooperation is "quorum sensing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing "In biology, quorum sensing is the ability to detect and to respond to cell population density by gene regulation. As one example, quorum sensing (QS) enables bacteria to restrict the expression of specific genes to the high cell densities at which the resulting phenotypes will be most beneficial. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In a similar fashion, some social insects use quorum sensing to determine where to nest. Also, quorum sensing might be useful for cancer cell communications too. In addition to its function in biological systems, quorum sensing has several useful applications for computing and robotics. In general, quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system in which the components have: (a) a means of assessing the number of other components they interact with and (b) a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected."

   Ultimately, if systems of power refuse to negotiate new terms for support by the governed when circumstances change, either they will be successful at suppressing dissent by whatever means or they won't. But if centers of power are going to fail, the longer they fight change, often the worse the failure, and the less the existing power may have a say in the new order (for good or bad).

   Still, in the past, some power centers (typically organized around control of a key resource like water) have lasted for thousands of years (such as the Egyptian Empire) -- so people in power can always hope they will be part of the next Ancient Egypt. As G. William Domhoff writes regarding "four main organizational networks -- ideological, economic, military, and political -- as the building blocks for power structures": https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/theory/four_networks.html "Before civilizations emerged, there may have been "inverted power structures" in which the rank-and-file could discipline would-be dominators through gossip, scorn, shunning, and if need be, assassination (Boehm, 1999). Only where river flooding allowed the possibility of alluvial agriculture, in conjunction with close proximity to geographical areas that encouraged different but complementary networks, did the "caging" of populations make possible the development of the fixed power structures of domination and exploitation that have characterized all civilizations. The strong egalitarian tendencies that characterized pre-historic social groups were submerged when power seekers could build on a religious, economic, military, or political base to gain control of others."

   I've been hopeful for a Universal Basic Income eventually to soften the worst extremes of the USA's current economic system for many people (as part of a healthy mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned activities in society). But given that the obvious solution was not tried on an even temporary basis for the pandemic despite multiple congress people endorsing monthly payments for the duration, it seems like the USA is still not quite there yet -- even if closer than ever, given increased public awareness of the idea. For example Kamala Harris: https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1271151635549556736 "Roughly 44M Americans have filed for unemployment over the past 12 weeks. That’s why @BernieSanders, @EdMarkey & I introduced a bill to give $2,000 monthly payments to people throughout this crisis. Bills didn’t stop just because we’re in the middle of a pandemic."

   Rashida Tlaib, AOC, and other Congressional representatives have similar ideas. Instead of those ideas, the USA quickly threw trillions of dollars at wealthy people: https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-bailouts-tradit...

   G. William Domhoff has some other interesting thing to on his website, stuff sometimes many years old, like: https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_why.html "Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up. On a less positive note, many ordinary white workers have priorities that they put ahead of economic issues. As all voting and field studies show, a large number of average white Americans do many things based on their skin color. They often vote Republican, for example, especially in the South. They protest against affirmative action programs. They live in segregated neighborhoods. White Americans also often vote their religion -- that is, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics who vote Republican are members of non-college-educated blue-collar and white-collar families. In terms of their economic situation, and their need for unions, they should be for the Democrats, but many of them aren't. It is these alternative issues, both positive and negative, rooted in their own lives and experiences, not a false consciousness created by the capitalists' ideological hegemony, that explain why most Americans don't rebel -- or even vote their pocketbook -- most of the time. In short, the theorists of consciousness may be serious thinkers, and they work at a level that is very attractive to most leftists, but they are wrong when it comes to understanding why positive social change does not happen. They have misconstrued the problem, which has to do with structures of power and life circumstances and the compelling nature of everyday life, not the chains of consciousness. They have misunderstood everyday people, and in effect blamed them for the failures of the left, even though at the theoretical level it seems like they are blaming the overwhelming powers of the dominant class or power elite. They have made the people the problem instead of considering the possibility that what the left offers does not make any sense to most people."

   Outrage and destruction resulting from unhappiness and stress is one thing; coherent collective action to some positive ends is another. Destruction is relatively easy compared to making things better. It's OK to be angry or sad as recent protesters in the USA must be feeling, but as Mr. Fred Rogers sings, "What do you do with the Mad that you feel?" And as Domhoff suggests, that can be a difficult question about how to change things to make them better for more people without making things worse for lots more other people.

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