Message from a Parallel Universe
Tim May
tcmay at got.net
Sun Apr 15 19:26:24 PDT 2001
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
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