Why many in the US are calling for the internet infrastructure to be classed as a public utility as pretty much every smart country has. The holding company then sells access to wholesalers (Verizon etc) who sell to customers and no one has a lock on any locale.
The image of the Wild West lives as an enormous staple metaphor (or should it be metaphorical staple?) in the U.S. approach toward the entire digital world, including all of the incidental (and hugely consequential for many indigenous nations) displacements that occurred along the way.
If one wishes to understand the U.S. approach toward the digital world, as a historical case model with a forward-looking eye, the WW can be fertile ground to understand such an approach, particularly if one wishes to improve on that historical perspective.
What do you mean? Wasn’t the war effort a triumph of government rationing, deficit spending, conscription, and centralized control of production?
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The conventional depiction of the Wild West as a metaphor leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding of what the actual power structures were and who profited from the chaos. I believe that the classic railroad robber barons are a much better metaphor for how the US approaches the digital world (and, well, everything really) – ostensibly following the principals of free-market capitalism, but in reality and behind the scenes, a small number of rich players working to stifle anything more than token competition and eliminate smaller, independent players by any means necesssary.
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Hi drmajorbob,
Thank you for providing me with a chance to clarify. I was not specific as to the century. By WW (= Wild West) I was referring to the 19th Century, as opposed to WWI or WWII in the 20th century.
In his comment devinganger addresses the railroad barons of the 19th century. Forgive me for my assuming the history of the WW would be more apparent. Thank you devinganger for your post.
There are extensive parallels between the 19th century expansion of U.S. railroads and the expansion of the digital world in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Both expansions treated and treat their respective realms as wide-open, virgin territory, -in the 19th century- available and open to anyone of European descent (completely oblivious to the existence of indigenous nations or entities).
Just as the internet today has become the emergent avenue for transporting not only data, but an almost infinite (and expanding) range of goods and services, the 19th century railroads increasingly provided a similar service to our expanding nation.
The parallel, as devinganger points out, is how the railroad robber barons carved up western markets, as he points out:
I could not have said it better.
In particular, where multiple railroads occupied congruent territories (such as Chicago), there was intense competition to carry passengers and freight, and freight rates were kept low. Where there were few, and in many cases only a single railroad servicing a particular town or region, rates could be extraordinarily high.
In some cases, it cost more to ship a short distance than cross country. Such was the background that set the stage for much of the anti-trust legislation that resulted in actions such as the break up of Standard Oil. We had learned from our prior collective experience.
My initial post was referencing that late 19th century period of open commercial warfare that reappeared in the virtual digital land-grab that has created our own 21st century barons, with a corresponding patchwork of service (or lack thereof) when those barons have succeeded in stifling market competition in service to their bottom line.
I can imagine that the conquest of interplanetary space will provide a similar opportunity for revolutionary expansion for this and for centuries to come.
Clearly, there were and are benefits the nation has experienced from the revolution of both the early 19th century railroads and from the 20th/21st century digital revolution. I am suggesting there may be limits we need to consider for our current revolution, and our past may provide a guide to those limits.
scrive
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You mean… Native Americans populated the vast plains of the Internet, before the White Man started to surf? I had no idea.
Also, a lot of Chinese immigrated in the 19th century, building the railroads you mentioned.
But I get the picture in general. Some companies became way too powerful. Stifling competition, gatekeeping the public, even inventing their own rules who we’re allowed to hate. Time for some healthy monopoly break-ups. Should’ve been done ten years ago, but it’s never too late.
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Capital = money and capitalism is worship of money. If it makes someone a profit, it is sacrosanct.
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Well, that works the same way with Socialism, but due to its proven inefficiency there’s usually less profit for less people involved. Power has a tendency to accumulate (as long as humans are present).
I’m 100 percent for a free market. But I’m not so delusional to think it somehow magically regulates itself, certainly not past a certain point (monopolies, I’m looking at you) and in a way that it restricts itself. It doesn’t.
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You think slavery was efficient? It certainly was capitalism. Today’s minimum-wage slavery and burgeoning inequality may be efficient, but it’s destroying our social fabric, too.
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Why are we talking about slavery now? Slavery preceded money (= capital), and it mostly (was) ended when Capitalism just started to take off. I don’t even disagree with you, there are far too many people working their asses off and still hardly survive. That’s not okay.
Slaves were bought and sold for money.
Yeah, no. I’m not gonna ruin my Saturday with history lessons. Thanks, but no thanks. (Of course they were bought and sold with money when money was around. Later. Much later.)
I have no problem with capitalism per se. But there is ethical capitalism and unethical capitalism. The later is born of greed and corrupts what it touches.
For example making medicine a for profit business is a very bad mistake. Same with the penal system. Others could be listed.
But there is also healthy capitalism that benefits society.
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I’d say it’s as good or bad as the society (= the state) allows it to be. One is pretty good at generating wealth, the other at making and enforcing rules. Once you put both eggs in the same basket or even let them swap roles, disaster is inevitable.
I don’t know.
Socilist countries:
Germany
Neetherlands
Denmark
Sweden
Norway
The list is EXCEEDINGLY long. One thing they have in common. Happier people. Better health systems, better roads (drive an autobahn), less poverty, longer life expectancies, higher democracy index. They seem extremely efficient to me.
I’m not against capitalism. Even in socialist countries capitalism thrives in industry, but workers get treated as human beings amongst other benefits.
I fear the average American (apologies to my US friends) has no concept of what socialism is and confuse it with communism or authoritarianism. To them, I point out your roads, military, etc, examples of socialism.
As for capitalism, when a restaurant relies on paying a server $2.15 per hour, that reeks of extreme inefficiency (and modern slavery)
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Actually, there’s a very strong case to be made (and it has been made academically) that capitalism and modern chattel slavery go hand in hand. They both arose at roughly the same time through the workings of the various Western mercantile companies that expanded into Africa and Asia, and slavery formed a large portion of their profits (to the point where the English monarchy, the Anglican church, and even the Quakers were involved in and making large amounts of money from the chattel slave trade.)
And yes, the form of slavery that came about with these early capitalist companies (they’re where we got the concept of stocks and stockholders, for example) was very much unlike almost all of the forms of slavery seen before.
It’s no surprise that as the forces of abolition gained the upper hand, capitalists found other ways and means to effectively force their laborers into situations that were merely legal forms of slavery. It takes government regulation and unions to counteract this trend.
I personally believe that the strongest societies and economies are those that combine principals of capitalism and socialism to form a stronger alloy than either can produce by itself.
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These countries have all benefited from a Europe that has had no wars since WW2 and thus a very reduced military budget that could be spent on domestic programs. (Sweden has not been in a war since 1814.)
But recent events have caused great anxiety at their diminished military capabilities and they are heavily dependent on the USA to protect them.
So in one sense the reason these countries can even afford social programs is because the USA is spending American money to defend them instead of on their own social programs.
Love him or hate him Trump was right in that the EU had to start footing the bill for their own defense. The US could then use that saved money for its own people.
Once the EU has to start spending money on defense like the US does, will they still be able to continue with their current programs? That will be an interesting balancing act.
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So… the Roman Empire was socialist? 
Yes, and checking the temperatures outside right now where I live, a very strong case can be made that global warming got cancelled. Academically, not scientifically.
My favorite plant is the facepalm. 
But all of you brought up good points. Should others pay for your comfort and security if you’re able to? No. Should you be able to afford a good and healthy life with only one job? Hell, yes! And the list goes on and on. There’s a lot we agree about. Just not the terms.
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Horse hockey. As a writer, you should know that words mean things.
Global warming never claims that all temperatures everywhere go up and there are fewer (and less severe) cold weather events. It claims that the average global temperature is rising, which means more thermal energy is in the system, which means we are going to have more severe weather overall – including unprecedented cold fronts and polar vortexes caused by the disruption of the semi-stable weather patterns and ocean currents that our forecasting models and climates have enjoyed for the past several hundred years.
Nobody is going to force anyone else to actually understand the terms and concepts under discussion, but if one doesn’t, one’s attempts to contribute to the discussion are probably going to be ineffective.
(Of course the Romans were in no way socialist. They created and maintained their roads so they could easily move their legions around and maintain control of their empire, and so trade and commerce could move more easily. Nazi Germany – definitely no example of socialism – did much the same things. The American freeway system came after WW2, as our government saw the peacetime and war benefits of such a system and invested public funds into creating such a system of roads here for us. The creeping expansion of toll systems along the freeway system is the intrusion of capitalism and the need for profits above all.)
So you understand the concept of a too small sample size and how it affects understanding the bigger picture. Good. Don’t be Global Warming.