David Brin

When I read this, I sort of resist the idea. Which reminds me of the "Dogma of Otherness" by the scifi author David Brin: "Think about it. 'There's always another way of looking at things' is a basic assumption of a great many Americans." https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html

Reminds me of this fantastic short story by David Brin. http://www.davidbrin.com/tankfarm.htm

>Listen to your betters without question, for they know better than you. The entire Jedi thread throughout all of Star Wars is like that. An over 20-year old essay by David Brin goes into this at length. https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/starwars1.html I didn't love the sequel trilogy--though it was better than the prequels. (Although truth be told, the Phantom Menace and Jar-jar in particular so poisoned the well for the prequels that I think otherwise #2 and #3 would have been looked on more favorably. See also Machete order.)

I remember the plea from Neil Stephenson to move away from Dystopia and paint a more optimistic version of our future. https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2c2ztj/can_scifi_move_away_fro… Center for Science and Imagination https://csi.asu.edu/ https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/ http://www.davidbrin.com/

i was trying to remember Brin's politics & still dont have a good feel, but i quite enjoyed the review: https://www.davidbrin.com/politics.html this article is a great takedown of John C Wright's post. and bless his soul- i loved the Golden Oecumeme trilogy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Oecumene) so much when i read it, but yeah, John not only holds/held some dark scary views, he went so far as to create a good antithesis of hiw we might think. i wasnt aware Brin or others were replying but i was following John's blog. itcs awesome that we have such a great, enjoyable, still necessary rebuttal to an idea that's still scarily about. i do wonder what else might be added, ehat else we might say, but this is an awesome deacde old link to share, thanks.

David Brin covered this topic in a 1996 Wired article [1] and a follow-on 1998 book [2]. So far, we're not doing great on the "Accountability" part. Bruce Schneier disagreed with him in 2008 [3] (and probably still does). [1] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/fftransparent/ [2] https://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html [3] https://www.wired.com/2008/03/securitymatters-0306/amp

A great 2006 essay on the other side of this coin is "Why Johnny Can't Code" by David Brin [1]. From the lead paragraph: "BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming." The author ended up buying a used Commodore 64 for his son. He touched this topic again in his blog in 2011 [2] (scroll to "encouraging kids to program"; he also participates in the comment section). I personally think single board computers seem to keep tinkering and line coding alive. 1: https://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/ 2: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/06/milestones-leading-up-to-good.ht…

Feudalism is one of the standard memes of history, as per David Brin.[1] The essay is well worth reading, as well as the thesis that a new meme ("otherness") arose within Western Liberalism. In my mind Otherness is a saddle point, and worth investing in to protect.[2] [1] http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

This has been posted here before, but your comment put me in mind of http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html. Might be worth a quick read.

I think it erodes it very much. And while "by their actions a lot of modern-day CEOs and politicians could be described as incompetent and/or at least malicious if not outright evil", I also learned that a lot of times, it's the media that give this perception by misrepresenting their actions/motivations to people. And as for institutions, it's fun to laugh at them while living in a world almost fully conditioned on the ongoing competence of those institutions. Writer David Brin talks a lot about this in his article, "Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled With Idiots", which I'll strongly recommend here. http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/idiotplot.html

> surveillance works far better for the public as a whole. A good read on the topic from Dr David Brin, http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html

I'm going even further off-topic, but I saw a blog posting by David Brin where he describes the Culture as "a humanity-that-succeeds" - which is a description I loved. http://davidbrin.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/science-fiction-lament-then-op…

Even if you disagree with him (and to some extent I do), Brin was quite prescient on this topic. _The Transparent Society_ [1] anticipated most of this debate, 15 years ago, and it is well worth [re-]reading. [1] http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html

This isn't a story about all capitalism. It's a cautionary tale, a story of what happens when capital is not responsive to local conditions and social factors. This is why the concept of Triple Bottom Line accounting was created http://www.economist.com/node/14301663 . However, power in late American capitalism still stems from short-term decisions in finance, ignoring the issues of natural finite resources, ably conceptualised by the Rocky Mountain Institute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Capitalism:_Creating_the_Next_Ind… . I also recommend the writings of American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen from 100 years ago on how it is remote capital that increases the likelihood of businesses to have terribly deleterious effects on the physical, biological and social environment. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/438 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorstein_Veblen Change happens, and often it brings benefits: but unless we are mindful, as say Elon Musk attempts to be, in our desires to improve the world with our technolgies, then dystopias will follow. I can also recommend the various works of David Brin on the near to medium future, whose mind is quite as sharp as Musk's and other meta-systemic thinkers we know and appreciate. http://www.davidbrin.com/

> repurpose rockets in their whole Reminds me of a short sci-fi story: > The engines are part of the orbiter, so they can be brought home and reused. The solid boosters drop off minutes after liftoff and are recovered for refurbishment. Even the unmanned heavy-lift cargo launchers use the same basic system. But until our group came along, the huge external tanks were simply dumped, after fueling the shuttle to almost orbital velocity. > [...] The main purpose of the design is simply to keep the tanks from falling. The two massive ends of the Farm act like a dipole in the gradient of the Earth's gravitational field, so each deck winds up orbiting edge-forward, like a flat plate skimming. This reduces the drag caused by the upper fringes of the atmosphere, extending our orbital lifetime. https://www.davidbrin.com/tankfarm.htm

If the tech is there, in the long run the only question is: Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it? Privacy may have been a temporary phenomenon - a side-effect of the anonymity of cities/large crowds. You didn't have it in the mediaeval village, and you probably won't have it in the global village. (David Brin's been beating this drum for about three decades now - I doubt I could say anything he hasn't already said. https://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html)

I've been waiting for the Giving Plague to become real: https://www.davidbrin.com/fiction/givingplague.html

David Brin had some interesting thoughts about this inevitability back in 1996: https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/transparentsociety1.html (book was 1998 but portions were published earlier)

David Brin (sf writer) shoe-horned a scene into one of his books where a "terrorist" deliberately poisons a populist politician with a sci-fi drug designed to cure addiction to stop him from making angry speeches. Blog article from him here: https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/addiction.html

You've reminded me of David Brin's "Dogma of Otherness". http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html Basically this dogma of otherness is that in any discussion or situation, there is always room for another viewpoint. Everything is potentially valid. (This relates to tolerance, obviously). This dogma is thoroughly the product/manifestation of western liberal elitism. To borrow your words, it's not actually virtuous, but an exclusionary idea.

The SciFi novel "Sundiver" by David Brin is based around using a laser to dissipate heat from a manned spacecraft. Sadly thermodynamics mean it wouldn't work in reality. http://www.davidbrin.com/sundiver.html

An idea publicized and championed by David Brin in 1996 (!) http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html

Neat coincidence to see this on the front page today. On the train this morning I was re-reading David Brin's "The Deadly Thing at 2.4 Kiloparsecs". His 1984 article examining Earth's fairly regular mass extinctions and what might be causing them. As a new forward to the story, Brin mentions the OP-linked theory. Imho, the article still holds up well and you can read it here: http://davidbrin.blogspot.jp/2015/07/the-deadly-thing-at-24-kiloparsec…

I like science fiction author Dr. David Brin's idea of "Disputational Arenas," where issues are exhaustively and respectfully discussed in all their complex glory. http://www.davidbrin.com/disputation.html The Economist will host something like this, where an issue is presented in an online forum and thoroughly debated until a consensus is established.

Could be that one: http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety1.html

1998 is calling: http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html Also, from 1999, "You have zero privacy anyway, ... Get over it." (Scott McNealy - http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538)

My friend, you may be suffering from ALAS. http://www.davidbrin.com/givingplague.html

> North vs South, Red State vs Blue State, liberal vs conservative, religious vs secular. Whatever you want to call it, Americans - it seems - are separating themselves into two (or more) distinct and ideologically opposed groups. This is nothing new, of course, but what IS new (at least in my memory) is that there are fewer and fewer opportunities for common discourse. It's... honestly not as new as you think. Not even the lack of common ground bit. http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2014/09/phases-of-american-civil-war.htm… Creating common ground is the actual job of politicians. They're just bad at it. (Which isn't that surprising, given the sheer scope of the task and that a good number of them don't appear to realize it.)

Radical transparency? Edit: Of course not: it's a 'publish everything' model, so people can real time audit government behaviors. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_transparency#Radical_Political_Tr… and http://www.davidbrin.com/radicaltransparency.html for some description.

http://www.davidbrin.com/givingplague.html A very nice story of Brin based on the notion of a process of infectious agents "watering down" over time.