
The Metamovement - phreeza
http://umairhaque.blogspot.com/2011/10/metamovement.html
======
phreeza
I'm feeling a twinge of regret for posting this. I was hoping for more meta-
discussion but it seems most comments are making more of a political point
about a particular movement. Which, in retrospect, I suppose was to be
expected.

Our HN etiquette is preventing any full scale flames, but I feel my post
wasn't very constructive anyway. I'll think twice before posting things like
this next time.

~~~
Cushman
I for one would like to thank you for posting it-- I've been thinking about
these things a lot lately, and it's good to see I'm not the only one.

From my perspective, the underlying point -- which it seems the IMF is
starting to realize -- is that there exists a _fundamental_ tendency for
things to even out over time, and this tendency is as valid in economics and
social policy as it is in thermodynamics, and for the same reason: any extreme
action necessitates an extreme reaction. One can't exist without the other.
Wealth sitting in a bank account accomplishes no more than gas sitting in a
tank; to get work done requires _movement_ of energy from high-energy
(wealthy) states to low-energy (poor) states. Equalizing inequalities.

What that means is that actions you take that affect other people in turn
affect you; helping someone else will come back to help you, and screwing
someone else will come back to bite you in the ass. Maybe a hundred years ago,
a tycoon could rip somebody off and be reasonably confident he would be dead
before the social consequences of that action caught up with him. We don't
live in that world anymore; thanks to the Internet, if I screw somebody today,
or do something nice for somebody, I might find myself getting screwed or
helped -- in a completely unrelated but causally connected way -- _next year_.

I think this is something that hackers _get_ intuitively. For example: Say I
invent a new programming language.

If I'm Sun in the 90s, I'm thinking about my profits. Developing a language
costs time, and time is money. I want to lock down the IP tight, not to
control it, just to make sure people pay me my fair share for the development.
This works, for a while, and I earn back my investment; but the programming
community explodes, my proprietary system can't keep up, and I get left
behind. I eventually relicense the technology as FOSS, but it's too little,
too late. I get bought.

If I'm an unemployed hacker in 2009, I don't have any illusions about making
money from the project. I release everything for free. Three months later, a
hundred people are contributing to the project. Six months later, it's a
thousand. In two years, the first commercial projects using my language
launch, and I'm using them. I've directly benefitted my own life-- all without
seeing a cent from it.

Five years later, I'm employed as a consultant advising on my own platform. I
still contribute to a dozen other FOSS projects and help people online; what
I'm selling I'll gladly give away for free. According to the fundamentals of
economics, my time should be worthless. But people who can afford to pay me
for it, not out of altruism, but because they understand it's an investment in
our community that will definitely pay back tenfold, whether or not that value
winds up in their ledger books or someone else's.

This isn't speculation; we're watching it happen. Companies in the tech
industry who are always willing to spend a little more on an interesting idea
that probably won't pay off-- well, it usually doesn't. Sometimes they go out
of business. But the ones that do pay off pay off _big_ , creating whole
industries, and carrying the rest of us along for the ride. The people who
went out of business have no trouble finding investment capital for their next
crazy idea.

Meanwhile, the industrial powers who only got big by eating each other, the
old giants of manufacturing and finance^, companies who have been so obsessed
with cutting costs to boost quarterly profits have been quietly (and not-so-
quietly) running themselves into the ground, taking their entire industry and
economy down with them.

^And, yes, I'll say it... Government.

~~~
lionhearted
A very nice comment, insightful and inspirational, just one point -

> What that means is that actions you take that affect other people in turn
> affect you; helping someone else will come back to help you, and screwing
> someone else will come back to bite you in the ass. [...] ^And, yes, I'll
> say it... Government.

I like the sentiment of your comment and 100% agree about doing good deeds on
an individual and business level. Unfortunately, the point about doing nice
things doesn't always scale to a governmental level.

History backs this up quite clearly - when you capitulate even a little bit to
demands due to unrest, you almost always get more unrest within 5 years. It's
how the British Empire lost the 13 Colonies.

See, legitimate grievances do have to be addressed, but unfortunately
addressing them in response to protest creates hugely empowered people
fundamentally hostile to the government that capitulated. These people's power
stems from their ability to extract concessions under rebellion or threat of
rebellion, so, humans being what they are, they'll inevitably rebel or
threaten to rebel after a short honeymoon period.

The solution is pretty clear in the history books - crack down brutally on the
leadership, wait a suitably short amount of them, and _then and only then_
redress grievances. That way, the people who are actually suffering have their
needs fulfilled, but you don't have a class of organizers feeding and fueling
further unrest and riots.

That particular policy has worked consistently throughout history. Crack down,
_then_ redress grievances and help the people. There's notable examples it
working effectively across all eras and continents. Redressing and hoping that
rioters are satisfied and don't continue without the crackdown doesn't work.
Neither does cracking down without fixing problems.

This doesn't make the position ethical, moral, aesthetic, or what should be
done. But it does seem to be the best way to fix problems without setting off
a cascading cycle of violence and revolution.

~~~
william42
Can you elaborate more on the circumstances in which it happened?

~~~
lionhearted
If you want a number of examples, contrast how the British treated the
American complaints and dissent against them, vs. how Washington and the
American leadership treated dissent and rebellion among their ranks.

The Americans executed a number of people who rebelled against the Continental
Congress / Washington's Command, whereas the British were lenient. A very
thorough treatment of this can be found in Chernow's "Washington - A Life"
which is a very thorough biography/history.

You could also look at the Sengoku Era of Japanese history for many examples,
you could compare Napoleonic France with the Neapolis Revolts in the same era.
You could look at how Rome treated its protectorates and dependencies, as well
as Britain (most of the time, America being a strange exception).

Abraham Lincoln's treatment of the Confederacy would be another example. Crush
them, then bring them back into the fold.

Or compare the Pacific Theater of WWII vs. the Vietnam War from America's
perspective... Japan was better-armed, better-trained, with superior forces
than the Vietnamese, and the Americans were worse-equipped and more hastily
trained at that point. The Japanese were easily equivalent guerrilla fighters
to the Vietnamese. Yet America went total war and crushed the Empire of Japan
(then rebuilt Japan intelligently - crushing without rebuilding creates a
potential Nazi-Germany-after-Versailles situation)... whereas the American
leadership tried some "moral leadership" insanity in Vietnam instead of total
war.

Again, I'm not _advocating_ any of these things. This is meant to be more
descriptive than prescriptive, but maybe I'm being sloppy with language. But
treating Hanoi in the 1960's the way they treated Tokyo in the 1940's would
have seems like it would have likely secured a demilitarized and protected
South Vietnam from the Northern Forces.

Maybe they couldn't have totally destroyed the communist forces and taken the
North, but they absolutely could have fenced off the South and stopped the
Khmer Rouge genocides from ever happening (they started the same year America
withdrew - this isn't a coincidence). Millions of lives would have been
better, more like South Korea than North Korea.

The examples in history of this abound. Leniency and concessions provoke more
unrest. Crackdowns without redress eventually lead to the dam bursting. Doing
both together tends to resolve the situation most often.

------
sp332
I think a mass of disappointed people with no particular goals is very easy to
manipulate. They're very vulnerable to someone hijacking their movement,
telling them what they want, and then giving it to them.

~~~
Jach
You mean like the tea party? (Not meaning to flame, but it looks that way to
me from the outside.) Though I think masses of people in general are easy to
manipulate; disappointed people just provide a certain attack vector instead
of others that are just as effective.

On the article: I thought the article was annoying to read in the pop-out
slideshow style usually reserved for picture galleries. It's also an
interesting idea to suppose that all the protests are inter-related however
loosely. To me that just sounds a lot like people fearing the end of the world
"because we have more natural disasters now than ever" when in fact they're
just being informed about them more.

~~~
zdw
Not to Godwin the conversation, but I'm guessing that the OP was referring to
Hitler's pre WWII rise to power.

~~~
sp332
Nope :)

------
Volpe
I'd like to believe this article. That there is some kind of movement
occuring. But more likely people just get upset when they run out of money,
and everyone is running out of money...

~~~
yuvadam
Hold on. You really should read up on the recent uprisings in Spain, Greece,
Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Israel, London and more recently, Wall Street.

This is not about 'people running out of money'. This is about an entire
generation coming to the understanding that current political dogma is
absolutely against their future.

Looking at this issue through the narrow perspective you describe is the same
old-school thinking that misses the whole point.

~~~
Volpe
What are they about then?

Is there more democracy? No.

Are there more freedoms? No.

Is there less money? Yes.

What's this movement about?

People are losing jobs, the lower-socio economic groups are the first to feel
this. Students are among them, and they are also the most 'active' (in
activist sense), and thus we hear about it.

If the world was flush with cash and countries were all in massive surplus,
would we still have these protests? I don't think we would.

------
pdelgallego
> The Arab Spring is part of the Metamovement; the London Riots were part of
> the Metamovement;

The Arab Spring, or the Madrid rallies are not the same thing that the London
riots. The last one was mainly looting and arson attacks, while the other were
pacific demonstrations demanding more democracy.

~~~
dy
I lean on the side that these are related events. These events seem to be
catalyzed/centered around youth that are disengaged from any sense of
traditional growth norms in their society and when given an opportunity, lash
out against that system. In the Arab uprisings, that system was represented by
repressive governments, in the UK it was the upward-mobile consumerist
culture.

I was also under the impression that the UK looting was opportunistic until I
saw the press around OccupyWallSt. The way these things sound from inside
versus how they are portrayed by the media are worlds apart.

"A riot is the language of the unheard." MLK

------
pnathan
The US 'Tea Party' initialized as a populist dissent against the concept of a
government, disconnected from the people, imposing arbitrary regulations on
the people.

I don't know if I'd want to draw a deep connection between the Tea Party and
the Arab Spring. I think, in general, the swing is towards populism right now.
Obama's big wave came from his populist appeal.

 _pre-flame-shield_ Yes, I know that there was astroturfing. But I know a
number of people who genuinely adhere to those ideas.

~~~
nickpinkston
I think we can say that the Tea Party traces its lineage to Ron Paul's
Campaign for Liberty - which was totally NOT AstroTurf. Then Republicans
warped everything, and we got the Tea Party - my dad is a firm believer in
them. I know that...

~~~
pnathan
At the time when the Tea Party wave first hit here, it was very much not a
mainstream Republican Party idea. The people that I knew who it drew in were
typically Libertarian or Republicans dissatisfied with the Republican Party
leadership.

~~~
nickpinkston
Yes, this is exactly what happened. Tea Party both drives and get driven in
the national conversation. Unfortunately, all the best stuff about them:
social liberal policies, banking reform, and non-interventionist foreign
policy got driven out.

Now it's all: "No taxes!", "Let 'em starve!", etc.

------
chipsy
My observation of this movement(in the OWS iteration) is that it is more about
discussion than about action. Although there is a form of rebellion against
broken systems, spurred by economic conditions, acts of protest come secondary
to the debate of "what next."

In the same way that we embark upon exploratory or research projects, this
movement casts a broad net to educate people and find consensus, rather than
seeking hotbutton issues and partisan politics. In that light, the idealistic,
open-ended messages are actually extremely powerful, as they are invitations
to join and learn means of accomplishing the goals.

I see it as Endless September, version 2.0.

------
cwp
Wow. Regardless of the merits of his political thesis, that is some excellent
writing.

------
pasbesoin
Another Blogspot blog that pulls s/a resource/resources/ from blogblog.com and
is completely invisible with NoScript enabled. (Google's own LatLong blog, in
its current format, is another.)

I suppose I should look, myself, but is anyone familiar with this situation?
Having Blogspot "disappear" for us paranoid types would be annoying.

EDIT: Took a glance. Ugh. Wall of scripting and apparent (in my biased
opinion) obfuscation. Off to better things...

------
GnarfGnarf
Funny, it wouldn't load in Firefox 3.6.18. Had to go to IE.

(Why am I not on FF 7? Aardvark and RoboForm not compatible yet).

------
draggnar
This is the coolest blog design I have ever seen

