-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I should say, at this point in things, that I've never complained at all about Brin's heralding some mechanical ubiquity of *observation*, per se, any more than I complain about the market, celestial mechanics, or the weather. You can't fight Moore's (or Metcalfe's, or whoever's) Law, and all that. I *do* think that observation done by people of their own property (call it supervision, I guess), is much better than observation by states of their own citizens (call that surveillance). In fact, I would go far enough to say that the former is just plain common sense, and the latter is the very definition of totalitarianism. Apparently, as "Somebody" observed below, Brin likes to split the difference fine enough between those two things to get considerable intellectual mileage out of the issue. His finger in my eye about lying, coupled with a long list of book-jacket blurbs, is probably part of that act as well. Since he's going on about false dichotomies, maybe I should trot out the philosophy department joke from my Mizzou undergraduate days about there being two kinds of people, those who think in dichotomies, and those who don't... :-). Adolescent appeals to first-semester informal fallacies aside, I (as most people behave, even if they don't explicitly believe it), really do think that ethics, much less politics, comes after physics, and not the other way around. For me that means that Coase's theorem -- the internal cost of transfer-pricing an asset on a firm's books versus the transaction cost of buying and selling those assets in a market -- applied to the coming "geodesic economy" of internet-based information and professional opinion, or even physical force, in a world of ubiquitous financial cryptography on geodesic networks, will eventually determine "firm" size in those markets, monopoly, oligopoly, or commodity markets or, more properly, monopoly (the USA and other state force monopolies) versus monopolistic competition (Burger King versus McDonald's, using "marketing", trademarks and patents to differentiate themselves) versus perfect competition (a grade-A soybean is a grade-A soybean, a bit is a bit is a bit, buy the cheapest bit). Put in less Proustian terms, the *market* for such things will determine which side will prevail: Monopolistic surveillance with the "consent" of the "governed", versus the supervision of private property by a whole swarm of individual market actors. It will not be decided, as some people seem to want, Dr. Brin among them, apparently, by having two "monkeys" fight it out in an internet zoo cage somewhere about who gets to control some pile of intellectual bananas. Just so people do know what I think about the actual outcome, of economic progress, not the monkey-cage fight, it's this: Someday we'll have a race to the bottom. We'll have instantaneous, auction-priced, cash-settled, yes, Virginia, pretty much anonymous, markets for anything digitable -- anything that matters, in other words -- and that branded monopolistic competition, much less monopoly, even for force, will become increasingly less a fixture in our daily lives. In that case, if someone uses their own camera to observe us walking down the street, it wouldn't matter much, just like it doesn't matter much now. Of course, being interested in the effects of transaction cost on ownership structure, I'd go one further and expect that they'd even charge us a whisker's bit of cash to walk on their sidewalk as well, if it ever got cheap enough for them to do so, but that's just me. Toward that end, I suppose, Dr. Brin can, um, fling, all the names -- and all the appeals to authority -- he wants to at me, and I wish him well in his further efforts to terrify the public. It's an ancient and honorable way to make a living (see my .sig, below...), especially in a world where the net, and crypto, and, quite frankly, libertarian/anarcho-capitalism, which are the political-economic results of the first two bits of physics, have blown all the old space-opera scenarios out of the water, especially the "can't we all just get along", command-economy, top-down, "liberal", enlightened-erst-feudal, government-is-good-for-you, space-opera scenarios. ;-). Personally, I'm still much more interested in *doing* things -- finance using internet bearer financial cryptography, and even some of the tools in Wayner's book -- than I am with *talking* about things anymore. But, if the, ahem, market's any indication, :-), I may not have a choice. In which case I *will* probably be writing more, and doing less. Coming soon, to a monkey-cage near you? Here's hoping that finance will be, um, conserved, instead... Cheers, RAH - --- begin forwarded text
Bob - I'm not sure if you copied David separately/Bcc on your reply, and I've dropped Cc:s to some of your lists that I'm not on, and I missed your original message that David flamed you for which you're flaming back about, but.... Perhaps I've missed some really critical things the time or two that I've read "The Transparent Society", or projected too much liberarian hype into my reading, but to me the big points were - Moore's Law, etc., will make networked cameras so appallingly cheap that that they'll be pretty much universal. It'll do it to other information technologies as well, but the public has an easier time understanding what a camera means than a database, so that's the one to focus on when you're writing popular science. - Usual digressions into what Moore's Law and cheap and universal mean, and some implications about the realism of expecations of privacy that need to be said slowly for people who haven't spent years talking about geodesic economies and therefore don't get it (:-) - Lots of people will be watching you on cameras, either because they feel like it, or because they're watching something else and it's too much trouble to not watch you at the same time. And you'll be watching lots of people or things, for similar reasons, and realistically there's not much that'll stop it. - The government will be watching you, like it or not. Brin spends a while discussing the issue of whether we should try to stop them from doing so through legislation, but basically views it as a lost cause for economic reasons, and all the related reasons of power, convenience, control, etc. (I don't remember how much time he spent on the "even if they ban government from watching you most of the time, they'll always give themselves exemptions even if they bother following the rules, so just get used to it" issue, but it was there. Video's too cheap.) - We might be watching the government, or we might not, and the government are the only major group that can easily make it hard to watch them, because they can throw you in jail if you get in their face, and they've got enough control over their actions to make it difficult to watch them. THIS IS WHERE WE NEED TO FOCUS AS CITIZENS, because if you don't force them to do their work in the sunshine, they won't, and because getting them not to watch you is a lost cause. - Cypherpunks technologies are mostly a lost cause, because Bad Guys (mainly the government) will use them to do their bad things, whereas they can put cameras in your ceiling to watch you type your passwords, hide bugs under your bed (next to the Communists) to listen to the conversations you're having on your EnCryptoPhone, etc. Making sure the government is maximally watchable is more important, and if you say you're allowed to hide your actions, they'll make sure they're allowed to hide theirs, and they're better at this organized coercion thing than you are. Perhaps I'm putting words in Brin's mouth, especially about the latter, but it has seemed to have been the major bone of contention between Brin and various Cypherpunks. Meanwhile, Big Brother *is* increasingly watching us, even if in GeodesicWorld nobody else has bothered paying enough to watch hi-res videos of most of us very often, and BB is trying very hard to make himself much less accountable, because if we can see where George is, we can question him, and if that happens, the Terrorists Have Won... (Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has been promising heavy scrutiny of the Worldcom Debacle, if nothing else because they're so pleased to have dishonesty from somebody who's not in the Oil Business or Military-Industrial Complex for a change.) At 12:54 PM 06/25/2002 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
I should say, at this point in things, that I've never complained at all about Brin's heralding some mechanical ubiquity of *observation*, per se, any more than I complain about the market, celestial mechanics, or the weather. You can't fight Moore's (or Metcalfe's, or whoever's) Law, and all that.
I *do* think that observation done by people of their own property (call it supervision, I guess), is much better than observation by states of their own citizens (call that surveillance). In fact, I would go far enough to say that the former is just plain common sense, and the latter is the very definition of totalitarianism. ... Put in less Proustian terms, the *market* for such things will determine which side will prevail: Monopolistic surveillance with the "consent" of the "governed", versus the supervision of private property by a whole swarm of individual market actors. It will not be decided, as some people seem to want, Dr. Brin among them, apparently, by having two "monkeys" fight it out in an internet zoo cage somewhere about who gets to control some pile of intellectual bananas.
participants (2)
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Bill Stewart -
R. A. Hettinga