*Some Incomplete and Scattered Thoughts* I missed some of the discussion and will have to catch up once I get the number of unread emails I have at least less than the current year :P but I don't see why true transparency wouldn't affect people becoming dominant through a better understanding of the system - would not that understanding be public knowledge if indeed all parts of the system were transparent? Unless we are talking about gut instinct / intuition, in which case inequality is probably unavoidable.
> Proprietary Code (PC :-) has a place if people are willing to put up with > it, but then most people don't realize there are alternatives. That old > Freedom vs. Security thing seems apropos here. Many people are quite > willing to put up with a little less freedom for a little more security. > I'm not sure where I come down on the issue of whether or not those who are > so disposed deserve neither. > I think Mr. Franklin's point was that you get what you deserve (which is true only in narrow contexts) and they will certainly get neither. In other words, if you want something done right, do it yourself :P > Sometime I empathize a lot with the libertarians, but given our millions > of years of evolution, largely as a communal species, I suspect that > libertarian thinking is mostly an adolescent point of view. > Many people would agree with you, but I also think the whole point of community is that we keep each other "in check", that is, on the path towards some goal. We can't do that if we don't have the freedom to be different from one another, which requires some degree of autonomy. It's like balancing an ecosystem. At the risk of mixing metaphors, there have to be enough wolves to keep the sheep in check but also few enough to keep them from hunting the sheep to extinction (of both populations). No, I think that definitely mixed the metaphors / crossed the streams. Oh well. Anyway, my point was that adolescence is often claimed to be one of the most formative parts of people's lives, along with maturity, if/when that comes along. > Sent from my PC email client (Mail.app) running on a PC OS (Mac OS) > running PC hardware (MacBook Pro) - geez, what a hypocrite I am > As I think you were heading towards with your previous comments, one shouldn't be faulted for the shortcomings of the system wherein one resides, in this case the consumer computer market that makes a couple sub-prime setups most convenient. > I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert > Riech<http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/13/inequality_for_all_robert_reich_warns>on > his new film, "Inequality for All". > > Still puzzling over that title, but then I was in and out of the room while my parents were watching the show. > Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting "code development"? And isn't > Economics the primary execution environment for that code? It seems like > much of our discussion about transparency in government and accountability > is not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code that is being > executed. Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of > execution of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, > system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?) > > I find it interesting and maybe (or maybe not) significant that criminal justice seems to have a less clear role in this analogy. Perhaps this relates to how varied the number of opinions one can find regarding it's purpose are? > Is there a large enough contingent of aspiring "technocrats" such as > ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase > change? Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but > Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just > as the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves. > > I think several related projects have been discussed on this list (FOSS Estonian voting software, Citizens Elect [right name?]), but I think none of them get at what you are saying. I think the problem is that (like microchips and the computers that play a major role in designing / building them) society is a lower-level construct which produces the higher-level construct of technology, and (unlike microchips, perhaps) we want / expect society to work even when tech does not, rather than the other way around (with some exceptions, I suppose. Zombie <http://www.kabar.com> knives<http://zombietools.net/tools/>? I can't really think of any non-trivial examples. I guess some more realistic survival gear like water filters). -Arlo James Barnes
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