The Demise of Legality

In an essay called "The Twilight of Legality," John Gardner theorises the demise of legality in the modern age. He describes the increasing invasion of legislative regulations in every aspect of life. Think, the complicated and mistake-prone process of filling out your taxes, requirements to link government IDs to your bank account, or intellectual property rights and their muddy disputes. Gardner sees this barrage of legal paraphernalia as antithetical to democratic justice and freedom. He c...

 Juridification is the Enemy of Legality

Modern governments, their hands increasingly tied by the robber-barons of global finance, often try to assert their power with their feet: by kicking out at another high-profile social problem, real or imagined, with another big policy initiative. Usually they come up with an accompanying raft of new laws. Legislative incontinence prevails. Not only is much of the legislation futile and even counterproductive from the start, we are also left with ever more relics of now-forgotten reforms. Bet...

 Gaming Produces a Meditative State

Your brain, in other words, may not consent to be trained. But t will improve a few of these key skills if you let it enjoy a few hours of the first-person shooter BioShock. Recent research, the 2012 re noted, has revealed action games' positive effects, not just on attentional control and emotional regulation, but also on decision making, "mental rotation" (the ability to create a mental image of m object and manipulate it in three dimensions), and the ability to switch rapidly between compe...

 Metaphysical Knowledge is Passive, Science Proactive

What science actually does is to show that any natural object we please may be treated in terms of relations upon which its occurrence depends, or as an event, and that by so treating it we are enabled to get behind, as it were, the immediate qualities the object of direct experience presents, and to regulate their happening, instead of having to wait for conditions beyond our control to bring it about. Reduction of experienced objects to the form of relations, which are neutral as respects q...

 The Implications of a Facebook Bankruptcy

One reason companies like Facebook should be interested in what I am proposing is that planning a regulation regime is better than morphing involuntarily into a dull regulated utility, which is what would probably happen otherwise. Suppose Facebook never gets good enough at snatching the “advertising” business from Google. That’s still a possibility as I write this. In that event, Facebook could go into decline, which would present a global emergency. It’s not an outlandish scenario....

 The Importance of Antitrust

...governments and communities have to establish and enforce strong antitrust laws--which is basically fighting any group that gets too large and usurps power. Antitrust fosters decentralization of power, whether from government or business hands. Right now, antitrust authorities are already cooperating across borders in a number of cases, including worldwide companies such as Microsoft and Beoing. But it's hard for any establishment--including governments-to enforce antitrust with enthusiasm...