At 12:01 PM 11/27/00 +0100, Tom Vogt wrote:
David Honig wrote:
But the threat of coercion is not so abstract: you *do* see guns on the hip of every cop or park ranger you run into. And 'cop shows' detail the paramilitary forces ready to knock down your doors. I have yet to see free-ranging IKEA police threatening the citizens or constitution recently.
that's because corporations work more efficiently than governments. they use whatever does the job with the minimal cost. at the moment, it's armies of lawyers sueing critics to hell and back for some bogus shit. the government thoughtfully provides the weapons and thugs once you won in the courtroom.
rest assured, once the government stops doing so (e.g. by disappearing), corporations *will* start to raise armies of their own.
Hmm. Corporations are the equivalent of wealthy individuals. Nothing special about 'corps' as synthetics. So equivalent to, say, criticising a Mafia Don. In a Gibsonian future where governments aren't strong enough to defend everyone's rights, you'd have strong anonymity so the ability of wealthy entities to sue for slander would be gone. Corporations that make products would remain succeptible to tampering as well as bad press, though the tampering would be in a tamperer vs. tamper-resistant fox & rabbit technological arms race. ("I'll see your watermark and raise you two reverse engineers" :-) But yeah, everyone would have their own police if there were no common one. Hmm, That's an irony of anarchy, that it turns into a tessellation of police(d) microstates real quickly.