Making the Agora Vanish

[Sampo Syreeni]

On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Greg Broiles wrote:

>Even in a case where nothing goes wrong - e.g., both parties are subject to
>personal jurisdiction in the same place, they agree on the laws to be
>applied and the court which should apply them, and they have a clear
>pre-existing agreement covering their relationship - litigation is slow and
>expensive.

Which is one of the very reasons people hesitate to break contracts. It's
just more advantageous the concentrate on mutual cooperation. Plus,
anonymity even rids the parties of a possibility of confrontation, be it in
court or on the street.

>Does the failure of "the stick" doom us to lives of fear and hunger? No.
>Not at all - in fact, many of the people who enjoy themselves the most seem
>to be people who have learned to act on "carrot" motives, and to structure
>their negotiations and contracts with others so that they are operating not
>based upon fear, but upon mutual advancement and cooperation?

That's just the point. Anonymity might well create a new carrot leading
people to deceive. End-game performance and all that.

>Even higher-level or repeat transactions, where participants have some
>level of experience with one another, present each with an opportunity to
>injure the other while denying the other access to traditional legal means
>of redressing that wrong.

Yet one is left with more traditional means of redress, e.g. exposing the
other party to the public or the law enforcement, and the internal
bookkeeping mechanisms of the shadier markets themselves.

>It is true that there is a vast amount of almost-demand on the parts of
>risk-averse people who don't want to act for fear of being wrong - but
>there are a lot of people who have figured out how to get things done
>without depending on "the stick" that is the law, and are doing so already.
>It is the latter group of people whose needs must be met for a
>transjurisdictional commerce system to be successful - the former group can
>come along when they're ready, or not at all.

However, if the former group is large enough, as one suspects, it may well
repress any attempt to accommodate the needs of the latter. For instance,
legislative attacks on any widespread anonymity infrastructure are pretty
much a given when people, most of whom have precisely the kind of idealistic
conception of the legal system you describe, realize that law can't touch an
anonymous economy.

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy at iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front