About

The goal of the Linux-Society (LS, dating back to the mid-90s as a professional club and tech-mentoring group) has been a purely-democratic Information Society; many of the articles are sociological in nature. The LS was merged with Perl/Unix of NY to form multi-layered group that included advocacy, project-oriented learning by talented high school students: textbook constructivism. Linux has severe limitations such that it is useless for any computer that will, say, print or scan. It is primarily used for webservers and embedded devices such as the Android. (Google is high-invested in it).

Technology is problematic. During the heyday of technology (1990s), it seemed it had the democratic direction Lewis Mumford said it should have in his seminal
Technics and Civilization.

Today, we are effectively stuck with Windows as Linux is poor on the desktop and has cultured a maladaptive following. Apple is prohibitive, and all other operating systems lack drivers, including Google's Android, an offshoot of linux.

In the late 90s there was hope for new kernels such as LibOS and ExoOS that would bare their hardware to programs, some of which would be virtual machines such as Java uses. Another important player was the L4 system that is a minor relation to the code underlying the Apple's systems. It was highly scientific but fell into the wrong hangs, apparently, and has suffered from having no progress on the desktop. There is a version, "SE" that is apparently running in many cell phones as specialized telecom chips, but is proprietary. SE's closed nature was only recently revealed, which is important because it is apparently built from publicly-owned code as it is not a "clean room" design it may violate public domain protections, and most certainly violates the widely-accepted social contract.

Recent attempts to enjoin into L4 development as an advocate for "the people" have been as frustrating (and demeaning) as previous attempts with the usual attacks to self-esteem by maladaptive "hacks" being reinforced by "leadership" (now mostly university professors).

In short, this leaves us with Windows, which is quite a reversal if you have read earlier posts here. But, upon Windows, we have free and open software development systems in the forms of GTK+ (the windows usually used on Linux) and the Minimal GNU Windows (MinGW and MSYS) systems. It is very likely this direction that development should go (that is, on Windows) such that s/w can then be ported to a currently-valid microkernel system that includes a driver system that can be adapted by hardware developers to reuse of their windows and apple drivers.

From a brief survey of L4, it appears that the last clean copy was the DROPS system of the early 2010s, was a German effort that used the Unix-like "OS kit" from an American University.

If we are going to be stuck on Windows, then it seems that a high level approach to free and open systems integration, such as creating fully transparent mouse communication between apps so that they can seamlessly work together as a single desktop (rather than deliberately conflicting). This would be very helpful for GIMP and Inkscape, both leading graphics programs that are strong in the special ways, but suffer from an inability to easily interrelate.

Another important issue is the nature, if you can call it that, of the "geek" or "hack." Technology is formed democratically but "harvested" authoritarian-ly --if I can coin a term that Mumford might use. Authority is plutarchy: a combination of aristocracy and oligarchy that is kept alive after all these millennia by using, or maligning, the information society as a part of the civilizing (or law-giving) process that embraces the dialectic as its method. Democratic restoration, that is to put humanity back on an evolutionary (and not de-evolutionary) track, I think, will require the exclusion of the "geek" from decision-making. As is, the free/open s/w culture attempts to give leadership to those who write the most lines of code --irrespective of their comprehension of the real world or relationship with normal users. We need normal people to somehow organize around common sense (rather than oligarchic rationalism) to bring to life useful and cohesive software and communications systems.

Interestingly, the most popular page on this site is about Carl Rogers' humanistic psychology, and has nothing to do with technology.




Friday, January 07, 2011

Contemporary-versity

Singly the most important thing is freedom of speech, and this is what distinguishes the Wikiversity (WV) from the Wikipedia (WP).  In the WV it is encased in the concept of original research, or OR.  Obviously I am referring to cold fusion (CF), but I am also talking about my research on the WP that has given real insight into the underlying mechanisms of humanity's big problem of hate.  (It seems reasonable to assume that energy-hungry humanity would have implemented it decades ago!)

Having said that, the successful anti-free speech strategy has been to utilize free speech itself as the vehicle for limiting it; this strategy is not only universal, it is so successful that it has consistently installed the non-productive in positions of control over normal productive populations to operate them un-empathically as a single organic mass in every single case--even in revolution!  (In keeping with free speech, it is necessary at this point to overtly state that free speech does not include the right to censorship.  This has to be stated in this way because censors are unable to view omnidirectionally; they are defective in this way, and, as a result, are pathologically biased and, hence, undesirable here--or anywhere else.  If there is information removal, it has to be done by consensus; three un-consensual removals lead to a lifetime ban, with previous bad-will being the enforcer.)

A concrete example
I cannot go forward without a concrete relevant example; I am forced to be critical to be logical.  Slogging through the mess of CF, I came across what I have recently identified as the reactionary rebellion within the open forum to dominate the open form, (Mumford's Democratic Technic), for the benefit of elite (Mumford's Authoritarian Technic) or the oligarchy to everyone else: Several of the cold fusion supporters compare themselves to Socrates.  Socrates is inseparable from Plato, and Aristotle spills the beans by taking credit for others' work, especially Hippocrates, and then convinces Alexander that non-Greeks are objects like "plants to be cut down."  It is impossible to be a humanist and a genocidal racist simultaneously as each requires radically different neural constructs; Aristotle was faking; he was as mentally isolated as Plato was. While their self-comparisons with Socrates and the Platonics may seem narcissistic, it is far more than that, it is clever.  By playing the outsider or underdog, they can follow the path of those who established Western Civilization; he is attempting to take the well-trodden revolutionary path to domination.  It does not matter if he, himself, believes in CF; his absurdity is his power; if he is challenged he will behave absurdly, precisely as Ayn Rand's characters do in the Fountainhead: her rebel oligarchs who seek to crush the unfeeling, corrupt mass of humanity.

That this strategy should actually work comes as a surprise to the average person as it is so counter-intuitive.  Key to understanding this strategy is perceiving of it is a picture within a picture.  Athens used a "naval tax" (based on its successful naval defense of Greece) to build the Parthenon, its democratic forum.  It implemented (Mumford's) diffuse tribute collection system that Rome would later use to build its Empire.  In other words, to build its democracy, Athens had to rip-off Sparta using tribute collection, or taxes, giving the Socratic-Platonic school (or the Academy from which all education descends) the rationale for treachery against the democracy of Athens (that unruly mass!) to, quite significantly and ultimately, create our Western oligarchy on behalf of the Spartan aristocracy.  The Confucian structure of Asia must be the same; we specifically know from the Vietnamese revolutions that the exam-filtered Mandarins viewed the normal, productive population as a nameless organic mass to be exploited; normal minds don't think this way, but will have to soon, as time is running out for humanity.

Restoration of humanity
Because Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle gave us such simple structures, each of us intuitively knows what to dismantle.  We also know that we as normal people can provide for ourselves all the basics (good-tasting food, attractive clothes, comfortable dwellings, and stimulating entertainment) except one: medicine (or perhaps, Medicine).  Socrates' oligarchy has successfully created a monopoly from this, the very thing we need for life, even though the majority of medicines come from the shamans of the forests.  Another related important monopoly is Education, which is of course, closely related to Medicine as it controls not only the factual information, but, more importantly, the certification system.

To be able to move past the misnamed "modern" but wholly ancient system, to our also misnamed "post-modern" contemporary system, we have half of what we need: an Education system!  From this we can build a Medicine system specifically targeted at the oligarch's core medical monopoly.  Also keeping the basics of food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment moving forward in the fashionable post-modern mode of "DIY."

To succeed we have to assure that we do not fall into Socrate's or Rand's "picture within a picture."  We need to assure that our rebellion is not an oligarchy in the making bringing us full circle back into the present state of disaster.  The solution therefore is not retaliation for all the evils of oligarchy and aristocracy (collectively the elite), but, as we showed this summer at the Rainbow Gathering, to find level-appropriate highly-productive niches for all--especially the mentally ill.  This applies especially for the overly intelligent (executive functioning) obsessively-compulsively driven (with broken brain networks), so that they don't attempt to succeed where they cannot by grabbing power because they cannot collaborate and hence be normally productive. 

Therapy
This theraputic solution has a problem; because available production positions are diminishing as a result of oligarchic expansion, there are fewer and fewer available productive niches for the defective oligarchs.  Such positions were increasing through the 1950s and 60s, but the growth of the elite and guardian structures has shrunk the productive layer until finally it was shipped out of the country.  We though we had a solution by implementing (this) information technology; but the oligarchy cleverly reversed this effort to create productive positions in the US, the "new economy," by handing information technology over to an especially hateful uber cast on the opposite side of the planet--possibly deliberately to halt this path to productivity for the defective oligarchs.  They, the oligarchs, understand their minds far better than we, the mass of normal people, ever will; they will always be a step ahead of our normal attempts at therapy, as it is their disease that we seek to cure, and especially because we are forced to practice within their maze-like structure.

What we have to understand is that people don't deliberately do bad things, they lack the ability to function at the top levels that wholly natural organisms do.  They synthesize as Plato did rather than organize as normal people do.  Evolution shows us that each organism operates at its full capacity; any mutations will result in an inability to pass along mutant genes, and also probably death.  We in society can prevent these unfortunate deaths, typically from starvation, but we tend to allow the mutations to reproduce, creating a humanity that may be as much as 20 or 30 percent defective, especially in terms of emotional communication and brain networks.  This kindness has to continue and increase, but the mutant reproduction must stop.  As Jon Scot showed us, "evil" is not so much evil as an absence of "good."  People can only function within the scope of their abilities; the high-intelligent whose executive are cut off from their lower ancient empathic constructs because of damaged neural pathways really need to live within their emotionally limited scope, as otherwise they will hurt the normally functioning majority.

In other words, the therapeutic strategy is that nobody gets hurt.  But finding productive niches for the compulsively-driven will prove problematic as production in the West has been halted and handed over to ill-prepared agrarians in Asia (who don't as of yet understand the concepts of critical inquiry into the morality of production) by the compulsively-driven.  This creates a possibly insurmountable problem that reminds me of violent revolution: struggle for the means of production.  I cannot imagine a solution that is non-violent as every attempt at non-violence in the global arena has met with violence from the globalist guardians through swat teams, billy clubs, arrests, and tear gas; and reverse violence from the rear by so-called anarchists who are merely terrorist egotists, and in my experience, fascistic themselves.