What is your definition of “capitalist development”? What do you think of the idea that capitalist development may simply be a way of mutilating individual people into cells or parts and incorporating them into a larger group entity or organism, with money serving as the organizing lifeblood of this larger organism?

Also, what is your definition of “intelligence”? If money is ultimately just the organizing lifeblood of a larger group entity or organism, what does it mean to say that it “converges with intelligence”? Wouldn’t it just be like pheromones or electrical signals or something? Do pheromones or electrical signals in and of themselves constitute intelligence?

Under conditions of capitalist development, money converges with intelligence (which is perhaps not so far from ‘lifeblood’). In the ems world, as in innumerable other techno-commercial futures, this convergence approximates to identity: the wealth of a corporation is the intelligence it can afford.

This is interesting, because perhaps it reveals that capitalism is simply a way of mutilating individual people into cells or parts and incorporating them into a larger group entity or organism, with money serving as the organizing lifeblood of this larger organism. Is this true? If so, is it good?

If e.g. a UK conservative administration were to announce a sudden face-off with the Cathedral—”We wish to abolish the NHS within five years”—there would undoubtedly be enormous extra-legal ramifications. A large segment of the elite would stir up riots, violence and mortal threats. And in America, the recent talk of gun law reform was an elbow in the water; were it tepid, the Obama administration would have steamed ahead and abolished the right to bear arms. That riots and extra-judicial coercion are rare does not mean that they are unimportant to politics.

Riots are rare in the West is because elites know better, and have little incentive to stride over the invisible line. I think 1960s American political life was bizarre precisely because, due to a radical upwelling of impatience, this undercurrent of coercive game theory dramatically surfaced. The line moved beneath the older, relatively conservative elites’ feet, and being tolerant of countervailing power they chose not to violently repress the movement. The SOPA protests are a recent example of effectual, extra-judicial politics.

The position of these invisible lines is not identical to explicit law and political structure, although there is a strong relationship. To transform America from its current ethnic make-up to this third-worldish populace of 1.6 billion is to move the line, even if there were no universal-suffrage elections. Immigration is always a serious political externality, if not necessarily a bad one.

Also consider that in seemingly any polity, there is far from total private ownership of land. Can one imagine an England in which London, Portsmouth, the sea and The North are all privately owned by some person or corporation, who may dispose of the property as he would his house or car? Coercive game theory and economic efficiency both provide strong prudential reasons why this cannot be so. Therefore, there is not a choice between free-market immigration and statist border control, but merely two ways in which the state might dispose of its realm. One can scarcely express preferences about e.g. overpopulation, except through border control. Again, regardless of welfare democracy, this implies no automatic presumption in favour of open borders.

I wonder how you can write this sentence and both fail to notice and expect everyone reading it to fail to notice that Detroit, Newark and Stockton ended up “declining and financially strapped” precisely by internal migration of a different stock than that of the residents of those cities.

Hanson’s ‘weird ethics argument’, btw, is mainstream utilitarianism.