At 7:49 PM -0500 4/15/01, Aimee Farr wrote:
Tim May wrote:
I get what you guys are saying about how maybe individual readers of books could decide for themselves like what books they could read. I even hear your point of view that government regulation of bookstores, writers, magazines, and libraries might be dispensed with in some far-off utopian future. But, like, I don't understand how it would work. How would people know what was the truth and what was a lie. You guys talk about these mysterious "reputations," but couldn't authors _lie_ about their reputations, couldn't publishers deceived the gullible? And what's to keep an author from pretending to be another author, or what's to keep him from copying the style and ideas of another writer? How would people even know what was important and what wasn't? And couldn't foreign intelligence agents write stuff that was uncontrolled, contaminating our value propositions? Really, punks, I'm just seeking a value proposition for why it is that this idea of "literary anarchy" would work.
*laughter*... that is damn funny. Tim, this is not to say that I don't respect your fiendish intent.
And my point is a very serious one: saying that "anarchy" cannot work in markets is not much different from saying anarchy (uncoerced transactions) cannot work in areas where in fact uncoerced transactions are the _norm_. It's much like the school choice issue. People in the U.S. tend to treat their local public schools as immutable consequences of the system we live in. Regardless of the issue of how bad schools are, etc., this is simply not true. Try replacing "school choice" with "grocery store choice." "How will parents ensure the nutritional needs of their children if this "nutritional anarchy" is allowed to replace our orderly system in which households are assigned a regional grocery store and nutritional standards are satisfied?" As I said to Ray Dillinger, the mistake many make is to try to solve the whole problem, the whole enchilada. They balk at the complexity of transforming an economy into an untraceable digital cash and pseudonym economy. Well, this is crazy. Better to think about selective markets bypassing U.S. or Saudi or French regulatory control. And not just by U.S. businesses moving to France, and vice versa, which only "slows down" the regulators, but to make the leap into cypherspace. Which markets? Not for me to worry about, except to consider some examples to see how things _might_ evolve. Anarchy is much more the norm than people think. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns