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Wired Writer Imagines Google Island
theodp writes "The last thing Wired's Mat Honan remembered before awaking on the self-driving boat that dropped him on the island was sitting through a four-hour Google I/O keynote in Moscone Center and hearing Google CEO Larry Page promote a vision of a utopia where society could be free to innovate and experiment, unencumbered by government regulations or social norms. 'Welcome to Google Island,' a naked-save-for-a-pair-of-eyeglasses Larry Page tells Honan. 'As soon as you hit Google's territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws — or lack thereof — apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn't speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it.'"
Congratulations (?) to Wired's Mat Honan for inventing a subgenre that nobody wants.
What people invariably want is a state which has rules enforcing human rights, and little else.
That's not what most people want at all. Most people want roads, education, defense, a framework for business, etc. etc.
It's what Libertarians say they want. Though each wants only the human rights that happen to serve them individually.
We could do away with large swaths of the legal landscape and eliminate large parts of government, both local and federal, if we could just say "do anything you want, so long as you don't infringe on the rights of others".
The problem is that huge amounts of what we do infringes on others rights. There's very often a balance between rights of one person and rights of another. That's why an awful lot of those laws were created in the first place.