Jim Choate wrote:
The behaviour of the leading proponents of crypto-anarchy when faced with 'non-compliant' behaviour is clear evidence of why the philosophy doesn't work.
Hang about! No-one has shot at you, confiscated your computer, tried to block or bomb your nodes, sued you, complained to any government officials about you, or written any nasty letters to your mother. All that has happened is some complaints. You can carry on doing what you want, if you want to put up with others having a lower opinion of you. They can carry on doing what they want & if their opinion gets low enough they can ignore you. If anything this is evidence that anarchy does work, at least in the limited-harm domain of a mailing list. Any functioning political anarchy would have to have more local, personal social sanctions on behaviour than an authoritarian society, not less. More one-to-one sanctions, peer-to-peer political interaction, (RAH might have called it a geodesic political culture if he hadn't got this strange Marxist idea that politics is just an emergent property of economics :-) A state society can rely on one-to-many flows of political or social pressure, the government & big business can deal with people as the masses. A natural outgrowth of the one-to-many techniques of cheap mass communications (OK, maybe Hettinga is right after all). The cypherpunks list is a sandpit of many-to-many communications, a realm in which anarchy is the natural, technologically favoured, form of social control. And complaining about the behaviour of others is exactly the sort of social control you'd expect to see happening in an anarchy. Anarchy is a great way to organise mailing lists, peasant villages, and regular evenings at the pub. Maybe it's a great way to organise large-scale industrial societies as well, it remains to be seen. But anarchy doesn't have to mean nobody tells you what to do - it just means that no one person (natural person like a king, or corporate person, like a state) tells everybody else what to do. In anarchy everyone is free to tell you what to do, and you are free to ignore them. Until you piss them off once too often of course... Ken Brown (wow! an on-topic post for once!)