Slashdot Mirror
Regulation by Architecture
Erasei writes: "With all of the goverments around the world trying harder and harder to regulate what their citizens do on the net, this
article has some interesting ideas. While the text was written in 1998, points like the one made here are still interesting: The extent to which the surveillance capacity of cyberspace is limited, and where permitted made controllable by user choice, is perhaps the single key issue in the regulation of cyberspace." This is a very insightful article, despite its age (I'd read it before, but it bears repeating). This article, and Lessig's work generally, puts the lie to the myth that the internet cannot be regulated. Coincidentally, there's an article on this same subject in the NYTimes today. Discusses how the structure of online sites affects the discussion that occurs there. Good reading.
Imagin a society where the governing officials were just teenaged idiots whose only job was to admin a few Linux boxes runing perl and mysql. The people submit propositions to the LegaslatureSlashCode, and those that get mod'd up are passed as law. Certain "privilledged" citizens who've been respected by their peers (and had laws mod'd up) get bonus points. All citizens meta-moderate the law moderation in order to curb out the unwanted moderators. We would call this society... FUDland.
Someone you trust is one of us.
From the New York Times article:
On other sites, a group of regular users rank the value of contributions, and the rankings then determines their place on the "bulletin board." How well that works, however, is an open question. When Mr. Sunstein tried to intervene in a discussion of his own book on a techie Web site called slashdot.org, his contribution was given a very low ranking. "I think maybe they didn't believe I was the author of the book," he said.
I looked up this posting. His post number was something like 171/178. Funny that the guy wrote a book about this kinda stuff, but doesn't have the first clue about getting modded up: POST EARLY!!!
We should ask, who is the real constituency of freedom, and how do we, if we are members of that group, preserve the good name of freedom from being co-opted by essentially fascist forces selling the idea that true freedom is just the freedom to be entertained by their media (Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, owns television networks and a soccer team), while burning their oil (Bush's biggest contributor has been Enron) and eating their GM food?
First, we should recognize who the real constituency is. For example, trades which require personal freedom in order to be performed well produce more than their share of true advocates - music, visual arts, some varieties of programming, and even once-upon-a-time cattle ranching (which is why Bush baby poses as a rancher) - "don't fence me in." And we should add to this group the other staple of the frontier, the dance hall woman/sex worker.
Now, it's not hard to see that, even in our most sophisticated cities, it's easy for politicians to get a significant section of the population worked up about the danger of all these libertine sorts, trying to lure their children into museums and libraries and other places of idleness, off the assembly line of birth-school-marriage-work-death. And it's not too hard to find examples of, for instance, artists with destroyed lives attributable to their flirtation with serious freedoms - their sometimes desparate hunger for degrees of freedom and inspiration which can be fleeting and evasive.
To prevent freedom, it's technologies - particularly the psychotropic - are severely restricted. Back when radio was briefly free, in the late 60's, the broad public fears of such technologies were eased by the great and obvious beauty of the musics produced by artists whose minds were made freer by, and whose work celebrated, these means. Hoping for a revival of free and inspired musics seems polyannish at this point, after even mp3.com has gone down in cynical grovelling.
It's easy to see how Brand and Barlow, producers of the 60s psychotropic culture, fastened on the liberatory potential of computers and networking. And how programmers, being for the most part young, dependent on their creativity, and with one unfortunate exception without real power, appreciated what freedom could do for them.
But where do we go now? The fascists, having co-opted "freedom" to their ideology, can't easily disown the positive valuation of the term - if we can but wrest its meaning back it can be a powerful trojan. But how do we define freedom with such care that the concept doesn't seem to sanction a corrupt mobster like Berlusconi or Gates??
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
[from the NY times article] So, since the Net is an open architecture that anyone can tap into, those who attain power within that structure will use that power to attain more power until they control everything. Sort of like what happens in meatspace.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I don't think the issue here is whether or not the net CAN be regulated.. If the governments/companies put enough money towards anything, anything can be accomplished. Regulating the net is just a matter of money. However I think that the real question should be this: should the net be regulated? Personally, I think that it should not. I could get into a very long debate about that one, but I'll save it for now.
If God gave us curiosity