Marcus/Glen/et alii -
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". I was caught enough by the
following statement he made to look it up and consider it further (cut
and pasted from the DN! website transcript):
/This economy is not working for everyone. And one of the points we
make in the film, which I have been writing about, but the wonderful
thing about the film is that you can dramatize something, is that
the economy is not something out there, it is not kind of a state of
nature, the economy is a set of rules. It is based upon, basically,
rules that are decided upon by our democracy. And if our rules are
generating outcomes that are unfair, that don't work very well, that
don't spread enough of the gains of economic growth to enough
people, we change the rules./
Responding to your well bent (kinked?) thread on Skype Vulnerability
which segued into discussions of Anarcho-Capitalism and Open Source:
If we know this is/will-be the case, then why press for absolute
transparency at all? Why not be anarcho-capitalist and allow for the
opacity of some, strategically allowed, opacity?
The anarcho-capitalist will try to extract every bit of value from any
vocabulary they own or influence. It's fine for them to try to do
that, but it is also fine to make them obsolete.
...
Most anarcho-capitalists aren't that, of course, they are capitalists,
and expect public investment to be there to protect their IP for them,
through copyrights, patents, and so on. The GPU vendors want an
interface like OpenCL so that they can keep people away from the
actual design. That's annoying, and misrepresents the concept of
`open' for their own selfish purposes.
Lastly, it's also important to realize that your egalitarian concept
of of the diverse overlapping communities _might_ turn out to be
naive or overly simple. If we think in terms of gaming, there should
arise some seriously competent gamers who pool resources into a very
small (and controllable) cabal that has a better understanding of the
entire stack than anyone else. And, not only will the transparency
_not_ assist the rest of us schlubs in keeping that cabal honest, it
will _prevent_ that because the cabal can hide behind the illusion of
transparency.
But it is ok if there are schlubs, if provided one chooses to be
one. Membership in the cabal comes from cognitive investment, not
capital.
They can always say things like "It's all on the up and up! The
source code's out there. Check it yourself." ... all the while
_knowing_ that without their billions of dollars in assets we normal
people cannot "check it ourselves". Hence, perhaps similar to "green
washing", the good gamers will use our own ideology against us.
I've worked on a variety of types of code, and I don't find I need to
appeal to individuals controlling teams of people and domain experts
to understand the parts I'm interested in. There's a scale free
property to good codes that makes it possible to understand them.
Understand the goals, inputs, the outputs, and starting building out
an understanding.. If there is no source code it is much more
difficult (but not impossible).
Marcus
I was left wondering if Marcus' arguements about Open Source don't apply
well to Governance and Economics. The Stick and the Carrot of any
society seems to be it's Legislation and Policy and it's Economic System.
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?)
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.
Just a thought...
- Steve
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