Szabo's works are brilliant, http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ etc.
They do contain a number of faulty foundations however, For example this classic essay 1997, which I admit, probably exceeds the sum total of my accomplishments, http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_9/szabo/index.html .. has some tragically wrong things in it, such as.. "Reputation relies on intermediaries to convey information." ...anybody care to discuss that here? (The empirical evidence of past behavior is all over the place and does not require intermediaries to observe. One might argue that persistence of facts in repositories are necessary. But persistent facts need not be warehoused by a service provider, let alone, an "intermediary" in trade. After all these millions of words the past 5 years one grows weary of all the different protocols, semantics, APIs, syntaxes, etc. and begins to wonder if it might be a good business to simply buy a generic storage device, install it in a concrete bunker in my backyard form a trust in perpetuity or for a term, for its maintenance. Vest control in some bigshots from churches and professional sports etc. around the neighborhood, sign them up as trustees. Call it, "A Facts Repository." Obviously FileNet and other megabucks corporations do this service for benefit of top-down corps. but there are 2 problem; a corporation cannot serve the interest of stakeholders, and corporations cannot anyways be trusted (as Ian pointed out this week in DGC Chat.) I submit, a corporation cannot have a "reputation" within the same definition of the word as an Individual. A corporation cannot be hurt. It can change policies, or disappear, and all its employees disperse to their next gigs. It is not hard to imagine a framework for federation with other persistent, timestamped facts repositories, or standard semantics for durations, or levels of service in facts storages. Many businesses today are physically, nothing but a bit repository (financial services, media, telecoms, etc.etc. etc.) I would argue that bit transport, itself, is not a business model. The internet is a bit transport and it is a lossmaking activity. Jack RIckard's chronicles of the economics of peering, in Boardwatch, 1997-98. There is a broad process underway in which these bit storages are collapsed, their custodians are denied their previous excess rents, i.e. rents above costs of physical storage. The remaining services are costing us $hundreds a month, all in. We cannot even make a transaction without paying for an obsolete financial services industry with its millions of employees. Who owns information in nature, anyway? When the peacock spreads its feathers in nature, the model erected in the mind of the observer is the observers' property. The owner of the eye, owns the model. When the individual pays for their instruments of perception, transport, and bit storage, then, they will be the owners of bits, by natural law, Todd the 1999 thing http://www.gldialtone.com/str.htm the 2000 thing http://www.gldialtone.com/fbc.htm the 2002 thing http://www.gldialtone.com/BackFenceLAN.htm
