Message from a Parallel Universe

[Tim May]

At 7:49 PM -0500 4/15/01, Aimee Farr wrote:
>Tim May wrote:
>
>  > >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.
>>
>
>*laughter*... that is damn funny. Tim, this is not to say that I don't
>respect your fiendish intent.

And my point is a very serious one: saying that "anarchy" cannot work 
in markets is not much different from saying anarchy (uncoerced 
transactions) cannot work in areas where in fact uncoerced 
transactions are the _norm_.

It's much like the school choice issue. People in the U.S. tend to 
treat their local public schools as immutable consequences of the 
system we live in. Regardless of the issue of how bad schools are, 
etc., this is simply not true.

Try replacing "school choice" with "grocery store choice."

"How will parents ensure the nutritional needs of their children if 
this "nutritional anarchy" is allowed to replace our orderly system 
in which households are assigned a regional grocery store and 
nutritional standards are satisfied?"

As I said to Ray Dillinger, the mistake many make is to try to solve 
the whole problem, the whole enchilada. They balk at the complexity 
of transforming an economy into an untraceable digital cash and 
pseudonym economy. Well, this is crazy.

Better to think about selective markets bypassing U.S. or Saudi or 
French regulatory control. And not just by U.S. businesses moving to 
France, and vice versa, which only "slows down" the regulators, but 
to  make the leap into cypherspace.

Which markets? Not for me to worry about, except to consider some 
examples to see how things _might_ evolve.

Anarchy is much more the norm than people think.


--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns