Anonymous wrote:
Like I said before, P2P, Crypto, WiFi and cheap chips will turn everything upside down.I'm curious as to what makes you, or anyone on this list, think that these technologies by themselves will cause any sort of political upheaval. Lawrence Lessig has talked about how technologies, as long as they're created and controlled by people and corporations operating within the laws and boundaries of some country, can be regulated to express the will of governments. Your MAC address is already sent out in every packet that your machine generates, so with that, a "snoop" could tell a whole hell of a lot about what you're doing. What's to say that these technologies are not going to be shaped to meet the needs and wants of the transnational corporations that run our government?
I think that Bruce Schneier's terse comment just illustrates the flippant attitude that lots of geeks have towards politics, and that lots of people have also. Just because geeks know a lot about technology, doesn't mean that they're impervious to the massive propaganda and mind control that goes on in democratic societies to keep the rabble out of the political process.
I just have a hard time seeing the bridge between armed rebellion against the largest military power the world has ever known, the U.S., and some new networking technologies that are being designed for cisco to make more money. Even beautiful open source efforts like p2p and linux that actually express the will of the people are starting to get onto the radar of U.S. legislators, who see the danger it poses to the traditional power structures. Unless all those free software programmers are prepared for armed rebellion when their right to share code is taken away, I'm not sure its all going to mean much.
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michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer
people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted mail preferred
"Be the change you wish to see in the world"
-Mahatma Gandhi
