Michael Lorrey wrote:
>
> J. Maxwell Legg wrote:
> > I contradict this. Sure the basic political unit may reside in the
> > individual but isn't the individual. The individual may be a type of
> > political unit but hardly *the* basic one. I would be happy to accept
> > that another basic political unit maybe an abstract conflict of some
> > sort. I don't say all conflicts because right now I'm installing a
> > network and have irq conflicts; - unless you accept that my relationship
> > with the net is political.
>
> Politics is interhuman relations, just as TCP/IP is a protocol by which means
> individual computers communicate. A computer by itself has no need of TCP/IP,
> just as an individual hermit (RObinson Crusoe) has no need of politics. When one
> individual meets another, and they interact on an ongoing basis, a protocol to
> exchange data is needed. This is politics. The difference between socialism and
> libertarianism is like the difference between the network concepts of
> server/client versus distributed networking. A Mainframe is like a Socialist
> State, and the people are mere terminals, while a Libertarian Network is all PC's
> interconnected and sharing data on an equal basis.
>
It looks like you tacitly agreed with an abstract concept like *conflict*, *protocol*, or whatever, as being the basis of politics and not the individual per se. Btw, my own personal preference for a hypothetical future is robo-socialism which is unlike your definition of a common garden state sponsored socialism, so please don't pin your prejudice on what robo-socialism under nanotechnology could be and as to your analogy of whether its a network computer or a local intelligent PC doesn't matter to me. The point of robo-socialism, as I define it, is a two-way Survey Society which usurps and redefines the role of the state so that the negative connotations of the surveillance state are counteracted by the positive connotations of a Survey Society. It is not a one person one vote system and isn't majority rule. It is one feature - one ranking; - resulting in independent component analysis and feedback. Such a large group of corresponding public AI systems primarily impacts secrecy as in David Brin's transparency.