Cypherpunks, I was twiddling the dials on my Hartle-Witten BraneNet, and I received this message from a parallel negative tension brane universe. Apparently there is a group similar to our own group in this world which is at this quasi-time debating "literary anarchy." Here's an excerpt:
Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 15:53:24 -0700 To: cypherbranes@lne.com From: Aimless Fargone <clueless@lawyers.org> Subject: Literary Anarchy Cc:
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.
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