Getting into a position of power requiring submission to the power hierarchy that grants power is a very keen insight. It means you are subject to all the corruptive forces everyone in those positions of power are also subject to. People will let you into positions of power if you wear their chains.
"Then you must become powerful and choose to use that power for good" is almost directly from CGP Grey's own analysis/those two videos.
This is one of my favorite things on the internet, but it focuses on the positive side of the story which is that groups of people cooperating can defeat a bunch of people who cheat each other. That's a pleasant message.
Unfortunately, I think the corollary is much more important. What this clearly shows is that on an extremely fundamental level, getting cheated or cooperating with people who act in bad faith is what creates the cheating. If you tolerate bad faith, you ask for more bad faith behavior.
If you believe in personal agency and personal responsibility and don't believe in magical thinking, then it shows on a very mathematical level that your own weakness, the ability for someone to take advantage of you without consequences, is what creates defection rather than cooperation.
The lesson is clear, that if you want a world you want to be a part of, then you must become powerful and choose to use that power for good.
Rickover's final testimony to congress in 1982 speaks about this:
Corporate Power A preoccupation with the so-called bottom line of profit and loss statements, coupled with a lust for expansion, is creating an environment in which fewer businessmen honor traditional values; where responsibility is increasingly disassociated from the the exercise of power; where skill in financial manipulation is valued more than actual knowledge and experience in the business; where attention and effort is directed mostly to short-term considerations, regardless of longer-range consequences.
Political and economic power is increasingly being concentrated among a few large corporations and their officers - power they can apply against society, government and individuals. Through their control of vast resources, these large corporations have become, in effect, another branch of government. They often exercise the power of government, but without the checks and balances inherent in our democratic system.
With their ability to dispense money, officials of large corporations may often exercise greater power to influence society than elected or appointed government officials - but without assuming any of the responsibilities and without being subject to public scrutiny. Woodrow Wilson warned that economic concentration could ''give to a few men a control over the economic life of the country which they might abuse to the undoing of millions of men.'' His stated purposes was: ''to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried in our hearts.'' His comments are apropos today.
> I've read biographies of Rickover and not all people who lived through this time are complementary.
History is written by those who remain in power and Rickover was a man who embodied speaking truth to power. His career was largely ended when some corporate powers he spoke truth to finally punished him for his opposition.
Near the end of his career he mainly wanted to spend time promoting his own philosophies, however his anti "power" message was obscured via political spectacle and threatening corporate power ensured that those that wrote the history books made sure his accomplishments and philosophy faded into obscurity.
Thew way you are using this word is wrong. It might be cosmetic communism, but it's clearly a totalitarian state. You called the population slaves, which is very much not workers owning the means of production.
Communism is an end state, but no government gets there because once a force is strong enough to forcibly redistribute resources to people not powerful enough to take those resources themselves, the redistributors choose to redistribute the resources to themselves because they have unchecked power. Communism collapses into totalitarianism in almost the same way democracy collapses into oligarchy.
Communism is a description of a power relationship. It is supposed to be a re-distribution of power, but in societies that claim to have tried communism, resources get distributed for a time, but power does not. So you get distributed resources (cosmetic communism), but not distributed power (structural communism).
This then leads to the deeper problem. Communism becomes a scare word that means authoritarianism which taints marxist ideas, which taints socialism.
There is a balancing act. Too much re-distributive power -> power centralizes to those capable of redistribution -> unchecked power -> authoritarianism. Too little re-distributive power -> power centralizes in those who continue to consolidate their power -> unchecked power -> authoritarianism.
By using the word communism to describe authoritarianism, you damage the ideas necessary to prevent democracy from the same fate.
With recent events I’ve been thinking about Dune lately. Once you start to compare what happens in dune to what is happening now, it's rather unpleasant.
Prescience allows for the complete domination of humanity, but to some degree we already working on pre-prescience. Privatized intelligence companies have grown as part of our corporate surveillance state. These companies, like palantir, act as “truthsayers,” divining the state of reality from incredible amounts of information for those with the money to buy it. America has companies that rival countries in terms of power, and these intelligence companies that service them can act as king maker and influence, subtly or directly, with some very giant levers.
The US government is closer to the Landsraad, each house is a corporation, each CEO a duke or baron.
Peter Thiel is likely the reverend mother architect of a recent messianic rise to power.
I am not 100% sure exactly what the Bene Gesserit were supposed to represent, but on a deep level I think they represent intelligence agencies like the CIA.
Social Media has a lot of overlap with “the voice.” With A/B testing various groups with divisive messages, to see what divides most effectively, it creates a means of control. Nobody was commanded to show up on jan 6, but the “command” to do so was heard. This is very in line with frank Herbert’s idea of what the voice was. A/B testing messages on humans at scale is like learning the voice.
We now have Cameras, RF Receivers (blue tooth/driver's license detection), phone backups, website logs, and a host of other surveillance all centralized, maybe not directly, into the hands of private intelligence. With all these sources of information we are getting closer and closer and closer to prescience. We are still limited by computing power to make sense of all the data, but the god emperor of dune was not. With the rise of AI, we now have the potential for a thinking/processing agent with no sense of morality to be assigned to every single individual, in order to carry out the absolute crushing of any nascent dissent before it can become cohesive enough to threaten those in power.
We are dangerously close to uncheckable totalitarian rule. When our rulers do something we don't like, they will laugh and say "what are you going to do about it?" Every potential weapon purchased will be fed into their "prescient" machine, so will every communication with another individual, and every use of transportation. When your personal AI agent determines you are at risk of "doing something about it," an example will be made of you.
The 5g modem itself is expensive due to (I assume) licensing. Just look at the difference between a 5g iPad or not: $200 and the watch which is $100.
It's not just the part itself but its context. You are asking for engineering to spend time figuring out how to integrate that into a current (potentially hyper-optimized) design, supply chain management, lawers, etc.
Additionally, in terms of alternatives, phones almost universally tether, you can buy specific 5g devices that you can fit in your palm.
You can buy a phone battery for $30 and run your phone all day no matter how hot you are running your phone.
It's expensive and complex to implement and there are plenty of good enough easily attainable alternatives, I'm not sure why a company would implement a niche product like that.
Getting into a position of power requiring submission to the power hierarchy that grants power is a very keen insight. It means you are subject to all the corruptive forces everyone in those positions of power are also subject to. People will let you into positions of power if you wear their chains.
"Then you must become powerful and choose to use that power for good" is almost directly from CGP Grey's own analysis/those two videos.
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy is another way of looking at it: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
The man in the Arena speech tickles these topics and is unfortunately now more relevant than ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic