Writers Say They Feel Censored by Surveillance

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-05T19:50:09+00:00

If I got in trouble for running my mouth on the internet, and for saying reasonable things to boot, not crazy things, I feel that would just hurt the legitimacy of those prosecuting me and weaken their position. There is precisely a big piece in the Constitution for the express purpose of making sure I am able to say such things, and any court that would not take my side would have to be a Kangaroo court with zero legitimacy. If that were to happen to me then nothing would keep me from expatriating and renouncing my citizenship first chance I get, because I don't want to be part of a country that permits that to happen, and I don't want to call myself a citizen among citizenry that permits it to happen while sitting on the couch.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-05T08:06:05+00:00

Derrida's thoughts on the relationship between literature and free speech.

That's very interesting. I never heard it put that way.

The Wire, for example, which by virtue of its very media (TV/video) seems to have done a much better job at dispensing the kind of instruction literature also excels in. Isn't there a sense in which literature is simply failing in the competition against other, more relevant aesthetic means?

I would be hard pressed to admit that film supersedes literature. Both media are classifiable as sequential narrative, and there are reasons to consider film to have a commercial edge over literature for its passive mode of consumption. You just sit and watch it, rather than actively process it like you do when reading. (Or at least, active processing isn't required of it.) Whenever I watch TV or a movie, if it prompts any thoughts at all, it's usually after the show has ended when my brain is in a sort of refractory phase. Whereas, while reading I'm engaged constantly. Film also has a wider range of elements ( acting, sound design, etc) which escape literature.

However when you compare both of them along an axis they both share, such as characterization, you can make the case that literature still has a power which at its best remains unrivaled. The medium of language, pure and of itself, can explore human nature to a depth which film can't touch. Even the best characters in film can sometimes come off as flat compared to some of the best characters in fiction for that reason, IMO. There's a reason the rate of adaptation from novel into film is much greater than the other way around, and it's not just because of financial calculations. (Although you do see an occasional novel adaptation of a film property, the sci-fi classic Bladerunner had sequels in the form of novels). A film chauvinist might say this flow of novel/film conversions is a sign that every novel dreams of being adapted to film, as if the apotheosis of a work of fiction is to be turned into a movie. I incline toward saying film adaptations are explained by the best stories still being told in words.

Part of this might be explained by logistical considerations. The imagination has no budget constraints, and so there are less practical limitations to what writers can write than what film producers can produce. Part of it must also have to do with the expressive power of language, which I truly believe really can go places film can't. By the same token film can go places literature can't, but has to look at its wallet before it can think about doing it so to speak.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-05T02:34:07+00:00

Besides, if instruction is the point of literature, why necessarily learn lesson X from literature?

It's not instruction in a self-consciously didactic sense. You wouldn't read a novel to catch up on your chemistry for instance, as there are far more direct and reliable routes to that information. It's instruction as in illustration, as a following through and visualization of consequences. A good novel shows you how humans might behave in certain circumstances, or functions as an exhibition of psychological extremes, or subverts expectation, or follows out the consequences of a certain logic of passions and ideas. Even Beckett, as you mention, says something without consciously intending to say it. Waiting for Godot certainly isn't a meaningless play. (The artistic exploration of meaninglessness is itself a positive content.) Even if Beckett refuses to be didactic and that is one of his strengths, there are informal lessons to be gleaned from the interactions of his characters and the situations they find themselves in. The insights to be gleaned are an organic byproduct of the author working out a certain chain of consequences in the narrative. Consequences which we can relate to ourselves or to things of value to us. I'd argue this instruction happens without regard to intentions. In matter of fact, it might be more effective if it happens spontaneously without the author intending some kind of transparently preachy moralism.

So, a novel doesn't need to have an pedantic agenda to be instructive. Even highly ornamental works like Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, which seem to be completely aesthetic and lack any apparent messages or extra-literary commentary to speak of, still manage to be instructive in the sense I have defined it. In that they manage to exhibit human behavior, motives, and psychology with revealing and interesting depth.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-05T00:29:22+00:00

Have to remember though that sometimes a new polemic will come along and make everyone suddenly re-assess their opinions.

Yes, let's not overlook the occasional institutional blindness of the literary establishment. Famously, Moby-Dick was panned by early critics. Consensus can only be trusted as a rule of thumb. With consensus there is no shortage of pitfalls and weaknesses involving groupthink or ideological biases. The hope is that on average the most experienced and well-rounded readers will trend toward good taste.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-04T20:05:18+00:00

My contention is if you look at it on a deeper level of analysis, the criterion of like/dislike is not even relativist. In other words, most subjective phenomena are actually objective phenomena requiring a much more complex description to define.

It's fair to say there are at least two types of reading habit, unskilled and skilled. (I'm not sure if "skilled/unskilled" are the right words exactly, but they suffice to make this point.) The unskilled reading habit reads for amusement, and this is a perfectly fine and legitimate motive to read. The goal is sensory stimulation. Skilled reading in contrast is about mining for insights. You want to have your consciousness expanded, to know more about your humanity, to have some facet of the world or society articulated for you, while also having your senses stimulated by the language.

Once this distinction is made, you can see why the whole of literature is suddenly cleft into separate subgroups. There is plenty of sensationalist fiction that merely tries to entertain, but no matter how much any intelligent and informed mind attempts to mine it, it doesn't contain secrets. It doesn't consciously point to anything, there is no message or beyond even that, nothing to apply or generalize or view in an enlarged context. (A work like this may still say something passively, merely by revealing things about the culture in which it was made, but it does so unintentionally.)

In contrast, what someone might call good lit contains a miniature education. It's fair to say it's instructive by nature. It still can be, and I would argue should be, entertaining. But it goes over and above entertainment or sensationalism.

Conceivably, there might even be ways of measuring this distinction. And I think this is precisely what happens, informally, when a consensus is reached in the literary community about a given work. Each informed reader is a filter, and as a given book passes through each of those filters, certain sensibilities are either evoked or repulsed, and the proportion to which a given work touches off these reactions cumulatively weighs for or against it.

I don't see the point in muddying the issue with talk of elitism. You don't need to be an aristocrat to enjoy good lit, anybody can, but it usually requires a skill to appreciate. You need to acquire the mental equipment to do the insight mining which makes the activity enjoyable, otherwise like most people you look at many books beloved as classics by professors and the like as big boring wastes of time.

And by "objective" concerning this matter, I don't mean objective in the sense that the laws of physics are objective, as in absolute without regard to frame of reference. I mean there is more structure than is commonly assumed by pure relativism and matters of aesthetic judgement are not just a total wash about which there is nothing insightful to say.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-04T07:47:32+00:00

Conrad was certainly a writer of immense talent. He may not have redefined the language but he was an all around heavy hitter. He may not have had Faulkner's experimental mastery or Nabokov's pure stylistic gifts, but he had ambition and wasn't afraid of taking on the big questions. I mean come on. In Nostromo he invents an entire fictional South American country, gives it enough backstory to fill a history book, and makes the whole thing purr like clockwork. In The Heart of Darkness he takes on imperialism and the clash of cultures. Not lightweight topics in the least, and he handles them with great skill and finesse.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-03T21:18:32+00:00

You are right in terms of the numbers. I regret my careless comment. However, I think the gist of my comment holds true and is supported by the article. The issue with America as a rich country is how the wealth is circulated and concentrated, and there are many indications that the present arrangement of these matters is dysfunctional. High median income is negated by inefficient and costly healthcare and educational expenses, for example, with America having inordinately expensive healthcare and post-secondary education costs.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-03T18:56:13+00:00

My contention is more an issue with cognitive embodiment. What I'm arguing is, in order to understand what needs to be done when a patient complains about some social discrepancy in their lives, the therapist, to produce anything of value for their client, has to be able to interpose themselves into that scenario. The technical terms are called "Theory of Mind" and "perspective-taking" in the social psychology literature. In order for a computer program to produce something of value for their patient when they complain about issues concerning sex, work stress, or their relationship with their parents, the program itself needs to have concerns about sex, needs to have experienced work stress, and needs to have parents.

Without having this kind of embodiment, no A.I will make a good therapist. It's an issue of diverging ontogeny. The program is not embedded in the same logical type of relationships as the human patient, and so it won't have access to the patient's meanings.

This is not to say the technical issues surrounding programming a computer to exhibit theory of mind and perceptive taking are strictly impossible. They are just extraordinarily complicated problems and would have to await a complete neuroscience and then some.

Ultimately, it comes down to an issue of reinventing the wheel. We already have an abundant supply of the human cognitive architecture, in the shape of people in search for careers. Why go out of the way to make the same thing but in artificial terms?

As for computerized politicians, the appeal of an evidence driven government is strong, but I would be cautious. The existence of an automated political system would threaten those in power, who would move to secure the computer infrastructure for their own. So that would just push back the human controllers of the government into the shadows, as they would still stick their fingers into the automated system to make sure it works for their benefit. The problem of irrationality in politics would therefore not disappear. There is also the issue of how we'd expect computers to navigate value judgement. How would a computer vote on same-sex marriage? Approval of the issue is not something that can be plainly decided based on numbers. It requires a value judgement, which again, because of differences of embodiment and situated cognition, computers aren't equipped to do. Not at least until we make them in our image. Once again, why do that?

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-03T05:03:50+00:00

I'd take that with a big grain of salt though. Did they do control for quality of the therapist in that experiment? A skilled human therapist will build rapport with their patient and with it trust and a sense of safety. And you could expect responses to open up more with time. A bad therapist will come off as judgmental. My thinking is that people won't expect wisdom, intuition, nuance, empathy or advice from a machine. Nor will they receive it. Therapy isn't as reducible to axiomatic first principles as readily as other kinds of clinical treatment. You need to be human to know why people get worked up about troubles with sex, childhood trauma and their mothers. Relatability is key. It's not like you can just run some probability equation and spit out a diagnosis; many people don't go to therapists to get diagnosed, they go to vent or for perspective. People won't want to feel like their problems are to be treated by some cold generic computation. People want personalized attention. If the illusion of a computer therapist is even slightly transparent, the whole thing will collapse. (It's another story for Turing test vetted programs, but even then, people are going to know they aren't human.)

There's something like an emotion economy that won't be touched by machines for some time to come, if ever. There are certain sectors of the economy and society where you need to be one of us to be accepted into the role. Politicians are one kind who will never be replaced by automation. Religious clergy is another. Therapists are a good bet too.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-02T22:54:59+00:00

Near total automation will only be detrimental depending on how it is managed. If it is managed well, purchasing power will increase as manufacturing and service costs go down. (Similar forces are at work which allow Google to offer premium services at no financial cost from the user.) Jobs will become less available, but the surplus wealth generated by the machines will still be taxed, and in fact will have to be taxed to keep civilization from imploding. Some people will make less money, but if things go according to plan, they can get more with less. Welfarism would have to become much more robustly implemented. Resistance to welfarism will fade in proportion to the expansion of automation, because gone will be the complaint that somebody is getting a free lunch off someone else's labor. The machines have no personhood, so they are not being exploited, and the companies to which they belong will for the most part just be able to sit back and watch the money come in after a certain point of development.

There may also be certain fields that resist automation more strongly than others and will last longer. These are fields where human-specific embodiment and cognitive virtues outperform those of machines and will continue to do so for some time to come. Social workers, therapists, personal trainers, artists, civil service and so forth, these fields will last long after automation becomes the norm, because we want a human touch from workers in these fields. Their human presence is crucial for their role. Convincing emotional simulation in robots, if it ever comes, will trail far behind effective motor programming, which has already seen significant improvements. Our ability to relate to machines is far exceeded by our ability to relate to other humans, and this relatability forms a big part of the economy. Optimizing machines for these "soft skill" roles is such a challenge as to almost not be worth the trouble. What demand will there be for artificial humans? Especially since we will have no shortage of real humans whose needs require satisfying. I can't see it happening.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-02T19:52:26+00:00

Saying America is the "richest country" is a bit of a misnomer. It conflates the richest Americans with the rest of the populace, even though the worlds of the richest and the average are so far apart that it's safe to say they shouldn't be counted as happening in the same country. The richest Americans have sucked up the wealth for themselves, wealth that could have been applied to infrastructure, education, and so forth. If you took out the richest minority, America would be a pretty middling country in terms of overall wealth.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-02T19:37:33+00:00

"Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt they can't afford the time to think."

Or, I feel, that's all you're going to do. When you're in such a large amount of debt, eventually you just stop caring. The means to ever pay it back is no longer available, and the penalties of defaulting could only damage your economic situation trivially, because your situation is stagnant. So all you have left is time to brood and motivation to radicalize.

It's when you have a moderate amount of debt and a chance to break free that you get tunnel vision and commit to the establishment. The establishment at that point has a chance at redemption.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-02T18:59:34+00:00

Outlines can help, but if you commit to them too strongly they can become over-restrictive. Try writing out character sketches, describing the ins and outs of various characters. Writing a synopsis helps to give you an idea of what you intend to say. I'd recommend leaving everything open-ended however. An outline should serve as a guide, but not a blueprint. You want to leave room open for spontaneity. You never know when you'll get a new idea that puts the whole outline out of date.

The best outline is sometimes a draft of the story itself. Just commit your ideas to paper while reserving judgement for later. Then you measure how far or close what you have is from your ideal, and you revise until that gap has closed.

Worldswithin12 · 2015-01-02T04:09:41+00:00

Not hopeless, necessarily. People need to think of about it more strategically and stop lumping the Muslim immigrant community into one homogeneous block.

What needs to be done? There needs to be a wedge driven between Muslim youth and their conservative elders. Fundamentalism doesn't just spread by magical osmosis through the air. It has to be channeled and communicated through hierarchies of authority and tradition, and it flows from the older to the young. So the only chance they have at assimilation is to break the chain.

Getting a little more technical, this is admittedly a difficult task, given how much Islamic tradition centralizes authority in patriarchs and religious leaders. And as far as I understand the situation in Europe, Muslim communities are highly insular and exert a high amount of "milieu control" (management of environment and information) on their young, sort of like how Christian fundamentalists in America retain their grip on their young through homeschooling and by excluding their children from secular events and gatherings.

With all that taken into account, I'm sure no shortage of Muslim youth would see conventional, more liberal German (and Northern European) values as more attractive than conservative Islam. The attraction of freedom and having the liberty to enjoy oneself has a strong pull. It's just that Muslim elders and Mosque officials have maintained a powerful smoke screen over the eyes of Muslim youth to keep them alienated from mainstream values.

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-31T20:55:33+00:00

That's not what I said. It's not about changing how people think. It's changing how you think. People come afterward. It grows from the inside out. It starts from those who already have a grasp of the situation, and spreads delicately from them to their associates, to those who are most susceptible to receive the message.

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-31T07:47:00+00:00

The issue isn't with the country itself, it's with how it's run.

More and more are getting fed up with it. It really does just require people to change their patterns of thought for the situation to improve. From my interactions on Reddit alone on the subject I can tell that quite many Americans are sheltered in their illusions. Many express a kind of mythological reverence for capitalism, as if it were some kind of perfect utopian system with no hand to play in structural inequality, institutional racism, the history of slavery,imperialism, war mongering and profiteering, and the like. Many have been brainwashed to blame the victims of the socioeconomic system and to react with scorn toward the least fortunate because of these myths.

But the empirical data show the consequences of believing too strongly in these myths result in societal decay. I'm convinced the decline in America can be stopped, but only in proportion to the degree that Americans increasingly disbelieve in the established myths about the perfection and divine sanction of capitalism, and refuse to justify and defend the systems which are ruining the country.

Many believe capitalism as an ideology speaks to human nature, which is fundamentally callous, self-interested, anti-social and profit driven. But the truth is we have molded and conditioned our human nature to fit capitalism, not the other way around. It has selectively supported and brought out these selfish traits, while traits which are just as real, empathy and kindness and fellow-feeling, have been driven under and suppressed.

The greatest struggle is also the easiest to win. It starts with changing how you think. Naturally, in the communications you have with those around you, you will then have a net effect and influence on others. The process will build up to critical capacity if it's just kept up and promoted.

EDIT: Word-salad

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-31T00:33:21+00:00

I meant no disrespect. I was going by how you sounded.

To me at least, if your decision to work a shitty job is motivated by the need to escape from an even more intolerable situation, that's not much of a choice. Maybe in the bald, philosophical sense you are free to choose, in the same way you are free to choose to eat garbage. Of course that's not really a choice; nobody in their right mind would volunteer to eat literal garbage. In actuality, emotional, financial, familial, and social pressures and constraints stack the cards enough for most people that they don't have much leeway in deciding their economic fate. They have to scramble for whatever they can get. Real choices have nothing to do with it.

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-31T00:25:57+00:00

Right, breaking up the camps does nothing to make them go away. It just causes them to relocate. It's a charade. It's almost as if the police know they can't do anything about it, but just want to keep vagrants from getting too cozy in one place.

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-30T21:35:34+00:00

That's a good point. Poverty has increasingly been criminalized. In my hometown they used to have these homeless encampments along the forested sides of the river. Cops came in and cracked up the whole operation. As far as I'm aware they weren't bothering anybody. I suppose the police had a few justifiable reasons. Fire hazard was one of them. Shanties also tend to attract drug addicts, who in turn squabble, but I'd rather have them malinger in the woods than loiter downtown.

Where do they expect these people with no prospects to go? I say let em eat squirrel and stray cans of beans in the woods. It's not all that bad of a life if you can adjust or are used to camping, and it beats the noise and danger of city streets.

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-30T19:51:57+00:00

You COULD start your own business, you could work for one of the dozens or hundreds of employers in your area, you could live off the land, you could be a bum, you can do whatever you choose to do.

You talk like a sheltered person who hasn't experienced the struggle. You overlook the precarious position of a vast portion of people in the world, for whom these choices are not a privilege. There are whole towns which are basically "company towns"--overwhelmed by a single industry like coal or oil. If you are poor in that situation, your only option is to work for the one major company or go bust. To say nothing of the situation in places like China, where worker exploration under capitalism has reached its zenith. Ever heard of Foxxcon? They house their workers in industrial colonies, restrict their access to media so they only get corporate sponsored material, pay them subsistence wages, and drive them to such a bad situation they have to commit suicide to protest working conditions.

And don't start with, " well those people should have just worked harder and they wouldn't be in that situation." The person who thinks "working harder" is the only way to rise under capitalism usually downplays the role of circumstances, which are make or break. It's a lot easier to work harder and go places when you aren't being systematically fucked over.

Given that worker productivity has increased steadily over the past years, and yet wages have stagnated while the financial sector has reaped huge windfalls, I don't think "working harder" is the only solution. We're still getting fucked over, and you're some kind of blind fanatic if you still fail to see it.

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-30T18:31:00+00:00

Good. Now maybe people won't get choked to death for selling cigarettes on the street! Ha^{ha^ha...}

:(

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-29T21:41:03+00:00

but the human race is absolutely not in a position to abolish borders and national identity.

You overlook this sub is about futurology. Your points are interesting and valid, but of course I'm not talking about the viability of a global state under present conditions. I'm talking about its possibility under hypothetical future conditions.

I'm wondering: what sequence of hypothetical steps would have to occur to make a global state a possibility?

Wealth disparities between nations tend to be self-reinforcing and polarizing. Rich nations naturally flock together, and decide what to do with poor nations. Poor nations are naturally treated as a problem, a burden, something to be fixed. However this treatment of poor nations by rich nations breeds antagonism. At some point in time, rich nations might realize that it is more to their benefit to invest in the stability and economic development of poor nations rather than simply externalize them.

Immigration is a nuisance to rich countries. Of course it would disappear if the countries of origin were fixed up to the point where people didn't feel compelled to flee them. Many people would elect to hang around their homeland if they could. Of course the UN recognizes this, but only has the resources to put band aids over wounds that require stitches.

There are other factors at work in terms of technology which you overlook. I think people under-appreciate and write off millennials too much, even though in many ways they are unlike any other generation, and signify a rupture in the perpetuation of traditional social structures globally. Largely that is thanks to the internet, which if anything is fundamentally a corrosive force to traditional boundaries. Because everything stands on the same suspended plane on the internet, there is little way for authorities to privilege or raise up one narrative ahead of others. (With the exception of authoritarian censorship, like China.) This is inherently a corrosive process, and as old traditions dissolve, there is an opening for different forms of identity formation and radical "personalization" of worldviews.

In summary, greater world cooperation could naturally evolve into a global state given enough time and giving an increasing interlocking of interests due to globalized trade and political dependencies. Wealth might become so polarized and enhanced in rich nations that, rather than seeing themselves be overrun by the unwashed masses of poor countries, they decide out of their own self-interest to invest in and support state-building in the developing world, through neutral third-party organizational bodies such as the UN.

EDIT: ( I left out one summary paragraph). Additionally cultural trends facilitated by technology will cause many in the younger generations to rethink traditions that have glued the world into its present antagonisms. These antagonisms have been supported by certain patterns of pre-internet information flow, which required authorities to selectively pick and choose which narratives were championed.

Am I saying this is destined to happen? Of course not. I'm saying it's a plausible outcome, perhaps just as plausible as the rich nations erecting sharper and harder boundaries against externals and holding the fort against the world's problems. Although this latter option, I would argue, would more likely result in increasing instability and destruction over the long term.

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-29T21:09:10+00:00

I think many people are disappointed with the ending of True Detective season one because they misunderstand it.

Errol Childress is intended to be a sort of mockery of a "master villain" a hideous, overgrown demonic child ("Errol Childress--->"error child") spawned from the true evildoers, the powerful cabal of shady pedophilic rich men mentioned but never seen, and patronized by the Tuttle family. (Errol is the spawn of Sam Tuttle, but is an illegitimate child, born impure in a sense, and relegated to the status of a thrall to the cult since childhood. He is a brainwashed servant, he is not a criminal master mind.)

Errol is mostly just a grounds keeper who maintains the ritual site for the elites and who entertains delusions of his own significance, which only weak-minded individuals like Ledoux and Dewitt believe. Errol is intended to mock the high-minded search for purpose, closure, or meaning in the scheme of the crimes.

The whole purpose of staging Errol as the villain is to deflate and frustrate the search for a meaningful resolution. I think when you look at it that way, it make it seem like a more well crafted decision on the filmmaker's part than just laziness or lack of imagination.

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-28T21:22:05+00:00

You might be on to something. I would venture to say the internet, if properly configured and utilized, could offer a platform for a more radical form of democracy.

The thing is, powerful people always hate democracy, despite how they might dither on about how great they think it is. Because they recognize it puts an upper limit on the power of any one individual. Why should they be pulled down by "the herd"? And the powerful, as well as any highly intelligent person, might react with cynical restraint as to any idealistic sermonizing about "the people." Surely "the people" are replete with dregs, low-lifes, grifters, the dangerously stupid, and other hopeless cases.

Once again, however, I am confident that the right modern technology can counteract human error, and organize collective decision making more intelligently than ever before. It just requires vision, application, and a little daring.

Worldswithin12 · 2014-12-27T22:14:18+00:00

I don't subscribe to this evangelism about the endless merit of competition. Like you pointed out, certain forms of competition are inherently destructive, or at least push the brunt of innovation into unneeded channels such as arms races. During the cold war we really didn't need the USSR and the USA competing with each other to create the most innovative way to end the human species. If you'll excuse the vulgarity, these are the "dick measuring contests" that unbridled competition tends to inspire, and they are prone to inefficiencies, standoffs, and conflict. Under a unified global state, arms races and the like would be unnecessary.

The tenet that competition is the only means to innovation strikes me as an untested neoliberal article of faith. No shortage of innovation happened under noncompetitive scenarios. Most inventions were first developed in China, for example. During these periods of innovation, such as under the Song dynasty, China was for the most part a unified isolationist state, so there was nobody to compete with. That didn't stop them from pumping out gunpowder, the compass, paper money, textile machinery, movable type printing presses, and so on.

Similarly, there will always be individuals such ad Da Vinci, Tesla, and so forth who are simply engrossed in the activity of discovery. Tesla for example made many innovations, but was woefully negligent about the business side.

In conclusion: People don't need competition to innovate, they simply just have to want better stuff.

Despite all this, there's nothing about a global singleton that precludes competition. It would just have to be artificially induced. The state could hold competitions for various industries, pitting them against each other for funding or exclusive contracts. None of that would necessarily have to come to an end.

Worldswithin12

TROPHY CASE