Questions of size...

[Ken Brown]

Jim Choate wrote:

> The behaviour of the leading proponents of crypto-anarchy when faced with
> 'non-compliant' behaviour is clear evidence of why the philosophy doesn't
> work.

Hang about!  No-one has shot at you, confiscated your computer, tried to
block or bomb your nodes, sued you, complained to any government 
officials about you, or written any nasty letters to your mother. All
that has happened is some complaints. You can carry on doing what you
want, if you want to put up with others having a lower opinion of you.
They can carry on doing what they want & if their opinion gets low
enough they can ignore you.

If anything this is evidence that anarchy does work, at least in the
limited-harm domain of a mailing list.

Any functioning political anarchy would have to have more local,
personal social sanctions on behaviour than an authoritarian  society,
not less. More one-to-one sanctions, peer-to-peer political interaction,
(RAH might have called it a geodesic political culture if he hadn't got
this strange Marxist idea that politics is just an emergent property of
economics :-)  A state society can rely  on one-to-many flows of
political or social pressure, the government & big business can deal
with people as the masses. A natural outgrowth of the one-to-many
techniques of cheap mass communications (OK, maybe Hettinga is  right
after all).  The cypherpunks list is a sandpit of many-to-many
communications, a realm in which anarchy is the natural, technologically
favoured, form of social control. And complaining about the behaviour of
others is exactly the sort of social control you'd expect to see
happening in an anarchy. 

Anarchy is a great way to organise mailing lists, peasant villages,  and
regular evenings at the pub.  Maybe it's a great way to organise
large-scale industrial societies as well, it remains to be seen. But
anarchy doesn't have to mean nobody tells you what to do - it just means
that no one person (natural person like a king, or corporate person,
like a state) tells everybody else what to do.  In anarchy everyone is
free to tell you what to do, and you are free to ignore them. Until you
piss them off once too often of course...


Ken Brown (wow! an on-topic post for once!)