On Dec 9, 2003, at 7:45 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 04:27:38PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
Everyone agrees that big corporations are oppressive, bureaucratic, inefficient, etc. No one more so than the management advisers to big corporations.
I'm not sure I'd agree that big corporations are oppressive. How? I once worked at Xerox and had a splendid time. Didn't feel "oppressed" at all.
As for bureaucratic and inefficient, perhaps, but I've seen 50-people organizations devolve quite well. I suppose it all depends on your frame of reference. If you mean, "I can find perceived inefficiencies," I'm sure you can. But if they become too inefficient, well, over time competitors will rise to take advantage of those inefficiencies. Xerox can be an example here as well. This is just common sense.
Indeed, the fact that James Donald starts off with the chestnut that "everyone agrees that big corporations are oppressive, blah blah" fits with his earlier comment that everyone in the 60s supported Ho Chi Minh and had posters of Che Guevarra on their walls. Maybe in _his_ world, this was so. Many of the former leftists now on the list have claimed that they have left their leftie baggage behind...others have not even made this claim, saying they remain committed to "social justice" (a code phrase for using force to take the property of some to redistribute it to others). I say that in most cases, "once a leftist, always a leftist." The taint of thinking in terms of "social justice" never fully leaves them, hence the nattering about "big corporations as oppressors" and "monopolies" and "fair trade, not free trade." It's just socialism in another guise. More to the point, this shows why the libertarians and futurists who started having meetings and a mailing list as the "Cypherpunks" really do have nothing to do with the "anti-globalists" and "big corporations are oppressive" people of today. I don't recall any of the attendees in 1992 claiming they were "forced" to use Sun computers (which many of them were doing), or Unix (ditto), or Intel (some of them), or Apple (a few of us). True, we hated the software patent which had been granted to RSA, but this is an issue of patent and intellectual property issues (and software patents had just started to be granted only a few years earlier, marking a change in how things had been done for centuries in America and most of the developed world). Arguing that the RSA algorithm should not have been patentable is not the same as lefties arguing for social justice and restrictions on who one can buy or sell from! Intel is a very big corporation. If people don't want to buy their flash memories and support chips and microprocessors, they are not forced to. Apple is a big corporation...ditto. Microsoft is a big corporation...ditto (and yes, it is easily done...I do it). (I don't any of my work on either Intel processors or Microsoft products...I do own a copy of Microsoft Office, but I rarely use it, and could quite easily _never_ use it.) Coca-Cola is a big, global corporation. Don't like Coke? Don't drink it. Don't like sugar being fed to kids via Coke? Mount an advertising campaign about the dangers of sugar water. Don't like the idea of Coke being introduced into China and thus corrupting a billion Chinese? The anti-globalists want governments to step in and interfere with choices. They are social planners. And so on, with Ford, Siemens, Toyota, Daimler-Benz, Olivetti, Great Wall Computer Company, Red Hat, Costco, AMD, Aerosptatiale, Procter and Gamble, Boeing, etc. Nattering about patents and copyright is a secondary issue. Nothing Microsoft currently "owns" as intellectual property (and I am putting "owns" in quotes because I'm not claiming that their ownership claim is either valid, is supported by anarcho-capitalists, or would survive in a strong crypto world) stops _me_ in any way from doing what I am doing. As I said, I don't use either Intel or Microsoft products. (Ironically, some government agencies now _require_ that submissions and contractees use Microsoft products! The same too-powerful government which tried to use the legal system to break up Microsoft--and only succeeded in collecting a shakedown tax of billions of dollars to be spent by the burrowcrats!--is requiring the use of MS Office. The City of Sunnyvale, to name one example, requires that all members of the public, and corporations, submitting items to City Council meetings must present them as PowerPoint files.) Nor does Intel's 83% market share of the desktop/laptop microprocessor market stop alternatives. Intel has an 83% market share because people buy that many desktop and mobile systems. Duh. No one is holding a gun to their heads (the anti-globalist lefties, including many here on this list, argue otherwise...they are wrong). People are free to buy processors from Motorola, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, AMD, Thompson, TI, etc. I watched Intel's competitors try to wrest control of Intel's dominance in several ways: -- there was the Japanese TRON project, massively-funded by the Japanese government and supported by NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and all of the other giants of the Japanese chip industry (remember when the Japanese were seen as 1- feet tall and invincible and how they would swallow up Intel as well as Pebble Beach?) -- there was the consortium of DEC, MIPS, Compaq, and a bunch of other companies to come up with the "industry-standard alternative" to Intel, AMD, Harris, and others in the x86 camp. (BTW, where were the antitrust regulators when this collusive attempt to drive a wedge into Intel's dominance was being hatched? Answer: government ignores what it chooses to ignore and persecutes what it chooses to persecute.) -- and each of Intel's direct competitors were, without the collusions above, fighting intensely to displace Intel. Had one of them succeeded, as easily might have been case in some alternate history, the anti-globalist lefties would now be arguing for the break-ups of Motorola and Sun so that poor little Intel and Microsoft could be given a fighting chance. And so on, for all of the examples. Don't like Ford? Don't buy from Ford. Think McDonald's is "too global"? Don't eat at McDonald's. Companies are not permanent. They rise and fall, they come and go. In fact, of the Dow 30 Industrials, the very measure of Giant Corporation capitalism, take a look at how many of those on the list several decades ago are still on the list. Twenty years ago the anti-globalists (such as they were back then, before lefties discovered this as their new raison d'etre) would have been nattering about the need to break up Digital Equipment Corporation, which utterly dominated the corporate minicomputer market (crushing the likes of Data General and even IBM, which was seen as a dinosaur). But DEC got absorbed in Compaq, a company which barely existed back then, and then Compaq got absorbed into H-P, which is struggling. Joseph Schumpeter called this the process of "creative destructionism," the process of companies forming, evolving, dissipating, dissolving, the surviving staff and ideas (memes) forming new companies, new ensembles. Long after Boeing and Airbus are gone, new aircraft and spacecraft companies will form. Long after Intel and IBM are gone, new electronics and nanotech companies will form. The difference between corporations and governments is vast. Governments don't give choices. Governments don't allow competition. Governments enslave people and send them to fight wars with other governments. That the "anti-globalists" have lost sight of this and are instead holding their silly rallies and marches to "stop job export to China" and "force a living wage" and "break up Microsoft" shows they have nothing whatsoever in common with what strong crypto and untraceable communication and digital money will do. The official protests against the WTO natter about unfair wage practices in the so-called developing world, but the real issue is just what it has always been with protectionism. News flash to all the lefties on this list who think these technologies will somehow bring about the socialist paradise they want to see: strong crypto means no government goon can take money from those who work and save and give it to others who failed to study, work, and save. Programs like "welfare/AFDC/WICC/social programs" boondoggles. It may mean, if we are lucky, the death and burn-off of tens of millions of useless eaters. This will be a GOOD THING. Of course, those who choose to participate in the new digital economy will do well. To paraphrase the saying, "On the Net, no one knows you're colored." This is what strong crypto and a "True Names" world means. Do the math. For all the lefties here, you should've known this for years and years. Enough of us have talked about it. And it was obvious to me in the early days (which predate CP by several years, of course (cf. the "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988) that strong crypto would usher in a world where no liberal traitor like John Kennedy could steal my money to send to some negroes in Washington so they could buy more malt liquor and breed more "chilluns." Good riddance to bad rubbish. The Crypto Revolution will burn off tens of millions of useless eaters. --Tim May