Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy

[William Waites <ww@styx.org>]

Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net> writes:

> Federated small groups with voluntary structures that analyze and
> iterate. [...] The trouble is the western left has mostly abandoned
> this strategy in favour of third party "advocacy" or "mobilizing" or
> other punditry and doesn't want to be on the same team as the global
> left.

These days I spend most of my time in some sort of no-man's land between
theoretical computer science and applied mathematics. I don't know much
about the philosophers that you quote. I think you are relying too
heavily on names and labels at the expense of simple ideas which might
make what you are saying inaccessible to many people. At least for
people like me with memories like sieves through which famous names
immediately fall, it can be difficult to keep track of what you are
talking about.

Nevertheless, I think I can recognise the pattern that you are
describing.

The kind of iterative process that you describe can be observed
throughout nature. It's a way of doing optimisation. There's something
that we want to optimise, perhaps a personal notion of fitness or
well-being in the game theoretic sense, perhaps out of a sense of
altruism it's the average fitness of the group, or the society or the
world. It would be useful to articulate specifically what you think
we should be optimising for -- I don't think that you have done that.

Your iterative process is a kind of evolutionary algorithm. The system
is far too complicated to immediately know what immediate action is
going to make things better, so we try a strategy, evaluate the fitness,
change the strategy a bit (or completely), and repeat. We can change
strategy smoothly, a little more of this, a little less of that, or we
can mutate the strategy radically. We can copy what appears to us to be
the strategies that are successful. Over time, generations, the
prevailing strategies shift and the global landscape changes. This is
nothing more than the process of evolution. Bacteria do it, virii do it,
animals and plants do it, all organisms including humans do it.

Humans are a bit different because we can consciously change strategies.
This means change can happen on much shorter time-scales than, for
example, genetic evolution.

Can we see why pundits of western left as you put it appears to be stuck
in a local optimum? Well, that's just it. There's not a huge amount of
pressure to do things differently. Small changes in strategy don't
appreciably change where we are, and where we are is pretty comfortable.
Large changes tend to become very uncomfortable very quickly. We are in
a deep potential well with very tall and steep sides. The energy needed
to get out of it is very large indeed.

Discomfort far away is hard to feel here. To the extent that we are
conscious of it, any local change that we make has at most a small
effect on it on the time-scale on which we make decisions and change
strategies. This small effect is not enough to get us up and over the
sides of the well to some place different.

So here we sit at the bottom of the well. The western left as you
describe it cannot be a source of change.

QED
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