Thoughts on the New Counterculture

What ever happened to the 60s counterculture, anyway?

This is taken from a rant on Facebook, and since I doubt anyone who doesn't know me on Facebook so much as glances at this blog I hope you'll forgive my repetition.

I think what happened is they matured enough to understand that if they waited 20, 30, 40 years they could pull off a gradual revolution, insinuate themselves in public thought and politics quietly. They were cooking frogs. The problem is their communist ideal was loudly dying all over the world while they were trying to push it over here. Communism is entirely discredited, it's been proven to not only be a bad idea, but to have monstrous consequences. We don't have to talk about theory anymore, we have fact and evidence, 60 million people dead to man-made famine and government mass murder.

These other guys who have insinuated themselves on the right, former yuppies and the counter-counterculture - 60s & 70s new conservatives - have an entirely different outlook. They look back at Italy and Germany and they say to themselves, "if they'd just got this one thing right, or not done that other thing, we'd all be speaking German right now". They're wrong of course - a thorough view of the Third Reich shows us that it was facing systemic collapse from the inside. Even if you set aside the obvious evil of any totalitarian regime it's plain to see that they're all doomed to failure. If you doubt that, go ahead and show me the last nation that achieved totalitarianism and lasted more than a few decades. The problem is it's not so obvious because people's view of that piece of history is murky at best, so it can sound seductive. It can even be talked about openly in the right circles, and it's basically taboo to call people on it and point out what their social-economic model is based on because any time the word "Nazi" is used in a sentence it's automatically deemed hyperbole. They're the real danger, not the Marxists, but I digress.

From my perspective though, and a lot of old hippies learn this the hard way as they're trying to chill with the younger crowd, is that the new counterculture is not socialist. We're not all about peace and love and understanding. We share some ideas about civil liberty with the hippies, but we also believe in personal and economic freedom. The new counterculture is libertarian at a fundamental level. Sometimes we're lead to believe this or that is a socialist ideal; the anti-copyright people for instance. That's not socialism though, that's about the individual - I have the right to do what I want with my hardware and my property. More importantly I have privacy, and if I have that copycrime is unenforceable. Copyright is inherently collectivist, as it asserts the right for one to control the behavior of many for the supposed benefit of "all", which in the collectivist context always means the ones doing the controlling.

So where are we going? We're too cynical from 20+ years of pervasive advertising and pop culture to fall too deeply in love with dear leaders like Obama, that's why the youth counterculture is dumping him like a hot potato. We're also not stupid enough to be contrarian and destructive for its own sake like the punks and stoners from the last couple decades. A lot of us get subverted and reprogrammed in college by liberal professors but at our core we understand what we are - anti-authoritarian, independent, self-interested. We're all about doing unto ourselves, about personal choice, about looking out for number one and getting the hell out of the way of other people's lives. Not because we were taught that way, but because we were taught the opposite - peace, love, sharing, that we are put on this earth to serve and care for one another. I guess that's the shitty thing about moving your culture into the mainstream, you start being the Man that everyone else is trying to stick it to.

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Ponzi Scheme? Try protection racket.

In reply to http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/climate_change/time-to-end-the-multigenerational-ponzi-scheme

There's a simple reason why there has been no market solution to pollution. At the dawn of industrialism, wherein real libertarian capitalism was transformed into corporatism, the industrialists influenced governments to place a moratorium on liability for pollution. That means people, as individuals or as a class, cannot seek legal damages due to the actions of polluters in a meaningful fashion. If an industrialist built a factory down the street from my house, covering me in soot, filling the air with stench and ultimately giving my whole family lung cancer I could not sue him for damages to the value of my property or my health.

Thus polluters were given free reign to destroy public health and local environmental quality, and unknown to the people of the time to eventually set us on the path to global catastrophe. If this hadn't happened he cost of operating a gross polluting industry after legal liability would be ruinous, and thus they would not get built and would not exist and we would not be having this conversation. From the onset they would have been forced to innovate in ways that reduced pollution and used energy more efficiently, or to give up on their industrial pursuits. That was seen as a problem to be avoided at the time of course. Clean technology existed at the time; renewable energy and the chemistry necessary to burn fuel cleanly or else capture the pollution predates the industrial revolution. It's only taken the past 200 years to make that technology efficient enough to profitable when the alternative, gross environmental destruction, is protected from liability.

Note what happened here was that the state got in bed with industrialists to *bar* the natural, decentralized, market-driven solution, in this case legal liability, in order to support the desires of the few over the needs of the many. This is *not* capitalism. This is not what free-market capitalism would have engendered, because in free-market capitalism the state may not insulate a private company from liability for damages they caused.

Subsequent efforts at government intervention, such as the creation of the EPA, failed and continue to fail because we place the power in a handful of authority figures to sort out the mess and make the right decisions. Even with the best intentions the regulators act on flawed information force-fed to them by lobbyists who are working, secretly or openly, on the behalf of the industry that is ostensibly to be regulated. The outcome is that regulations favor the interests of the most successful lobbying group, always to the detriment of the competition, the public, and the environment.

So my solution is not the government; the government keeps screwing it up. First they created the problem through regulation on liability, then they deepened it by attempting to address it with more regulation and doing so poorly. I say get the government out of the way and start dividing up the liability. Let's add up the number of cars, factories, cigarettes, and other air polluters in, say, the city of Los Angeles and hold their creators proportionately liable against the costs inflicted on the public in terms of medicine, property devaluation, and the constant cleaning necessary to remove the soot and grime and repair the physical damage. The government doesn't need to help here, it just needs to leave the court system open to handle all the class-action lawsuits. It can spend all that EPA money on hiring new judges to handle the cases instead. Forget carbon taxes and cap-and-trade; forget clean energy incentives. Legal liability is far more terrifying and far more effective at keeping industry in line.

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Everybody Should own a Copy of the Anarchist Cookbook

I think you, and everybody you know, should make a point to find and read a recent edition of the Anarchist Cookbook, cover to cover. No, wait, hear me out. I don't say this because I think we should all be prepared at any moment to become violent revolutionaries. I say it because I think it's important to know how easy it is to make a weapon, and then to contemplate a much deeper point that is implied by this fact. Why, exactly, don't people do it?

If you don't know what the Anarchist Cookbook is, it's a collection of recipes for making everything from hacking tools to working guns to bombs out of household items. The original Anarchist Cookbook was a physical book written in 1971 as a protest against the Vietnam War (you can read more about it in the Anarchist Cookbook Wikipedia entry). Sometime in the more recent past it found its way onto bulletin board systems, then to IRC, FTP archives, p2p, and intermittently the world wide web. From there it evolved into a sort of wiki project before there was such a thing as a wiki; contributors added their own recipes and the best made it into highly circulated releases that are still easy to find today. Some, if not most, of the recipes are unreliable or more dangerous to you than they are to your hypothetical victim.

I think it's important for everyone to read this book for a very simple reason. The Anarchist Cookbook illustrates how easy it is to create deadly weapons out of common materials. Your average radio-detonated IED, for instance, carries around a 15 dollar material cost. For less than the price of a ticket and a bag of popcorn anyone could easily kill or harm every attendee in the theater. It doesn't take a genius to make weapons, either. It might require a good high school education to design some of these devices but any literate 5 year old could easily follow the directions. Furthermore it's impossible to prevent or even provide reasonable restrictions on creating them. You'd have to take away people's rights to clean their homes, bleach their laundry, open their garage doors from afar, scrub their dishes, change the oil and break fluid in their cars, fertilize their gardens, etc. without licensing from authorities for the appropriate materials. Obviously that's not a world any of us wants to live in.

Now step back for a moment and consider the view of the world as presented to us by the government and the media. One in which we are surrounded on every side by dangerous criminals and terrorists. People from whom we need protection by paramilitary police forces, no-warrant wiretapping, and restrictions on the purchase of any conventional weapon, not to mention a third of the entire global budget for military spending here in the U.S. The question posed to us then is: why don't massive terrorist attacks happen every day? Why are there not mad bombers slaughtering innocent people in every small town across the world? Why do we not don full body armor and CBRN protection gear every morning before checking the mail? Plainly it is not because it is difficult to cause death and destruction, a skill mankind perfected in the bronze age and hasn't really improved on since.

Could it be, perhaps, that human beings are not as stupid, violent and dangerous as we are lead to believe? Could it be that despite the availability of the raw materials and pertinent information to cause mass murder there are just not that many motivated murderers? Could it be that we are safe not because of massive government intervention, who are powerless to protect us from our own household items and the looming danger of the terrorist weapon warehouse known as "Home Depot", but because there are just very few people who have the desire to hurt others? Maybe we don't need all this "protection", all this anxiety, after all. Maybe safety is impossible but danger is highly improbable and that's the simple equation that describes risk in our daily lives.

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