At 11:38 AM 1/16/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
I've been thinking a lot about the problems and opportunities that are coming up as more and more "spiders" (Web searchers, crawlers) are indexing directories and files on systems they can find.
Second, what is out there in spiderspace is incredibly useful for building dossiers, for compiling correlations, and for doing competitive analyses.
All of these capabilities might seem to increase the control opportunities of others but for the fact that our opportunities for independent interaction have increased much faster. All the modern control technologies have been blown out of the water because of the single significant fact that a network creates more connections than anyone else can block. And this is true whether that network is called a "market" or an "Internet." Liberty can be defined as an opportunity to complete "transactions." Control may be defined as the capability to block another from completing "transactions." The "lowest chained serf in the fields" has few opportunities to complete "transactions" or to make choices. Even if his legal status were different, the fact that he is bound to the soil by necessity if not law restrains his liberty. He can't go anywhere or do anything. If he is in a lightly populated place like the Northern Europe of old, his "world" contains about 100 people. If he is in a densely populated place like a Chinese river valley he still only has about 1000 people in his village to deal with. Nature constrains his choices so much that only a minor effort by "society" is required to completely restrain him. A modern market and a modern telecoms infrastructure is so vast and is made up of so many potential links that it takes a major and very expensive application of human force to even slightly restrain other people. Since each of us can buy from or sell to, talk to, form attachments with literally millions (and soon billions) of other people (and companies and software robots, etc) the opportunities for others to control us are limited. Very expensive prisons, criminal justice systems, credit bureaus, and employment records systems are inadequate to keep us from doing much of what we want. Which is why an allegedly "controlled" world seems a lot less controlled than the world of the past. Among all of the potential "transactions" that we can choose to complete (T) are a subset of transactions (t) that give us outcomes closer to what we actually want. In the past, the best representation of this transaction space was T=t=1. The total transactions were very limited (subsistence farming in the place and among the people of our birth). We were stuck. Today we are approaching a situation in which for all practical purposes T=~ and t=~ and the all of the possibilities make the match between what we want and what we can get very close. So if one government or one employer or one friend is not "right" for us, there are millions more where that came from. We aren't there yet but we are getting there. No matter how peculiar your exact nature, there are so many markets and people out there that very few people on earth will be unable to find a niche. If your needs are esoteric, you may have to shop around a bit but all these great search tools sure make that easier. Thus if I write something that upsets a government or an employer, there are other governments and other employers (including myself in both cases). In fact, I am likely to find some "small, deeply disturbed following" that actually likes what I have to say. There are an awful lot of people out there. It's like the Bill Mauldin cartoon featuring a skinny, ugly, GI with a funny big curl on his head driving through an Italian hill town full of ugly, skinny people with giant curls on their heads -- "Gee, my Daddy told me I'd find a place like this." That village is already part of Market Earth (tm) and is (or soon will be on the Net). With the millions of choices each of us has, restricting those choices quickly becomes impossible outside of prison and prisons become ever harder to maintain because of cost and countermeasures. (The Soviet Union, for example). DCF "An ISP that restricts access isn't an *Internet* Service Provider but rather a proprietary online service."