not all roads lead to Rome. Wait, was Rome where I was going?

I’m taking Constitutional Law right now. We are learning about constitutional theory (among other things). I was thinking earlier about how Cass Sunstein‘s model of minimalism could be good for consensus building in Occupy/commune general assemblies as well as a framework for all the people determined that their theories must fit into some sort of Hegel–Marx–Nietzsche collage. Instead, it produced, well, whatever this is. I could hold onto the post and make it more coherent, but past experience on the blog shows I won’t actually come back to it. During my failed attempt to not “waste” massive amounts on this, I came across post-left anarchy and some other stuff about politics. Whatever this thing is I’m thinking about that is minimalism, it can probably be tossed in with post-modernism. If you think I’m wildly misguided either in how I discuss any of these theories or my own theory, feel free to leave a comment. Chances are I will be reading some stupid case about the UCC or NIED and not have time to respond. Side note: if the UCC doesn’t make you consider anarchy, nothing will.

For me, anarchy and socialism are inseparable from punk rock and the semantic arguments around all three remind of of this Bomb The Music Industry! song. As Stephen of Cyberunions recently said, anarchists are all over the place. My desire not to get into a semantic argument mostly explains my “post” prefix, though the issue is bigger than that. (EDITOR’S NOTE: the original title had “post” in it)

For a lot of people, for obvious reasons, unions and industry go hand-in-hand. I don’t know much about manufacturing, so I’m not going to comment on how close we may be to replacing factory workers with robots. Logistics aside (and that’s a huge aside), I am going to posit that that’s a good thing. I’m also going to suggest that we, as a society, still learn to make things in the event that a hostile alien race (or demagogue/despot/nihilistic robot) is able to disrupt electronic activity. Whether it is a good thing or not, it’s likely to happen. The rise of the middle class in China will push the slave-traders back to Africa if we/they let them. Eventually the same thing will happen in Africa and then what will the capitalists do? I’m guessing robots.

Then what?

Machines can make drinks, buy maybe they’ll never be able to make it “just the way you like it.” Surely a machine can, using facial/voice recognition software, bring you food and drink.

How many people do we want to have the power to make robots? Will people divide along the lines we do now where there are Mac robots, MSFT robots and a continuum (hardware/software) of different types of DIY robots. Will it be part of our civic duty to learn how to build and program a robot?