-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I should say, at this point in things, that I've never complained at all about Brin's heralding some mechanical ubiquity of *observation*, per se, any more than I complain about the market, celestial mechanics, or the weather. You can't fight Moore's (or Metcalfe's, or whoever's) Law, and all that.
I *do* think that observation done by people of their own property (call it supervision, I guess), is much better than observation by states of their own citizens (call that surveillance). In fact, I would go far enough to say that the former is just plain common sense, and the latter is the very definition of totalitarianism. Apparently, as "Somebody" observed below, Brin likes to split the difference fine enough between those two things to get considerable intellectual mileage out of the issue. His finger in my eye about lying, coupled with a long list of book-jacket blurbs, is probably part of that act as well. Since he's going on about false dichotomies, maybe I should trot out the philosophy department joke from my Mizzou undergraduate days about there being two kinds of people, those who think in dichotomies, and those who don't... :-). Adolescent appeals to first-semester informal fallacies aside, I (as most people behave, even if they don't explicitly believe it), really do think that ethics, much less politics, comes after physics, and not the other way around. For me that means that Coase's theorem -- the internal cost of transfer-pricing an asset on a firm's books versus the transaction cost of buying and selling those assets in a market -- applied to the coming "geodesic economy" of internet-based information and professional opinion, or even physical force, in a world of ubiquitous financial cryptography on geodesic networks, will eventually determine "firm" size in those markets, monopoly, oligopoly, or commodity markets or, more properly, monopoly (the USA and other state force monopolies) versus monopolistic competition (Burger King versus McDonald's, using "marketing", trademarks and patents to differentiate themselves) versus perfect competition (a grade-A soybean is a grade-A soybean, a bit is a bit is a bit, buy the cheapest bit). Put in less Proustian terms, the *market* for such things will determine which side will prevail: Monopolistic surveillance with the "consent" of the "governed", versus the supervision of private property by a whole swarm of individual market actors. It will not be decided, as some people seem to want, Dr. Brin among them, apparently, by having two "monkeys" fight it out in an internet zoo cage somewhere about who gets to control some pile of intellectual bananas. Just so people do know what I think about the actual outcome, of economic progress, not the monkey-cage fight, it's this: Someday we'll have a race to the bottom. We'll have instantaneous, auction-priced, cash-settled, yes, Virginia, pretty much anonymous, markets for anything digitable -- anything that matters, in other words -- and that branded monopolistic competition, much less monopoly, even for force, will become increasingly less a fixture in our daily lives. In that case, if someone uses their own camera to observe us walking down the street, it wouldn't matter much, just like it doesn't matter much now. Of course, being interested in the effects of transaction cost on ownership structure, I'd go one further and expect that they'd even charge us a whisker's bit of cash to walk on their sidewalk as well, if it ever got cheap enough for them to do so, but that's just me. Toward that end, I suppose, Dr. Brin can, um, fling, all the names -- and all the appeals to authority -- he wants to at me, and I wish him well in his further efforts to terrify the public. It's an ancient and honorable way to make a living (see my .sig, below...), especially in a world where the net, and crypto, and, quite frankly, libertarian/anarcho-capitalism, which are the political-economic results of the first two bits of physics, have blown all the old space-opera scenarios out of the water, especially the "can't we all just get along", command-economy, top-down, "liberal", enlightened-erst-feudal, government-is-good-for-you, space-opera scenarios. ;-). Personally, I'm still much more interested in *doing* things -- finance using internet bearer financial cryptography, and even some of the tools in Wayner's book -- than I am with *talking* about things anymore. But, if the, ahem, market's any indication, :-), I may not have a choice. In which case I *will* probably be writing more, and doing less. Coming soon, to a monkey-cage near you? Here's hoping that finance will be, um, conserved, instead... Cheers, RAH - --- begin forwarded text Status: U Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 09:54:02 -0400 From: Somebody User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Brin You're far from the only one who has aroused his ire, Bob...In fact, it occurs to me that he may deliberately write in the way he does (superficially fascist, with a few bows to libertarians where needed as long as the fascists get final trust/control and are trusted to let the powerless watch them) in order to have an excuse to whine and fulminate... <Somebody's .sig> - --- end forwarded text -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPRiZH8PxH8jf3ohaEQJR1wCg1zjeUE14/nPWsY/NyyKI2nCnvWQAniQg u0ynYdErEj7j5UNVGgoGhC9N =agqZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
