Esther Dyson wrote:
>
> Trying an anaolgy:
>
> The character string is land; the name is akin to real estate improvements. You
>should be able to own the improvements to the land you have made - the value you have
>created - but what about the underlying land? How do you/Should you - keep them
>separate? Is there a public right of way?
>
> Where does the metaphor break down? How does it work? (And note that there are lots
>of arguments about land, too!)
I might do the analogy differently, since it's easier for me to conceive
of an island as place where people try to improve their lives and
develop exports by making investments of labor and capital. Looking at
it this way, it seems the problem has to do with maps.
Let's imagine a place called Iplandia.
The ability of Iplandia's people to sell their exports depends in part
on how well people from other places are able to navigate their way to
Iplandia. For the preceding few decades, Iplandia would send emissaries
to other places, and pass out flyers saying "visit Iplandia." Iplandia
finally became a regular stop for all the world's navies, and all the
ship captains had maps with Iplandia clearly marked. There were a few
pirates at sea who would try sell cruises to fake Iplandias, but those
pirates didn't have an island of their own, so they were always on the
run.
Then a revolutionary form of space travel was invented, and a whole new
system of maps was needed. Instead of requiring space travelers to use
latitude and longitude to find their destination (since latitude and
longitude occasionally get changed in this imaginary world), someone
thought of putting up giant billboards in orbit. Fly up to the
billboard, and it sends you down to the proper latitude and longitude
for the name on that billboard.
Putting up billboards in space is cheap... very cheap compared to what
it took to build Iplandia. Iplandia likes the revolution in space travel
since it offers the prospect of A LOT more visitors. In fact, the very
existence of this new form of travel means that lots of people are
visiting lots of more places. Some new islands (actually, just a bunch
of rafts) like Amazonia attracted huge numbers of visitors just by
orbiting a very prominent billboard. Pirates and pornographers, a mobile
group by nature, adapted very quickly to the new form of travel.
But the oligarchs of Iplandia realize that all those years of passing
out flyers and making sure that the old sea captains knew how to find
them may be for naught. So they start investing in billboards and
billboard search engines, but they don't know how it's going to turn
out. People start floating little rafts around Iplandia and orbiting
huge billboards almost directly overhead, confusing other people who
actually meant to go to Iplandia.
Iplandia's oligarchs would like an easy way to blast the pirate
billboards out of the sky (or, even, better, control the whole sky over
Iplandia as far as the eye can see), but the current law among islands
was written in a way that it pretty much only lets Iplandia pluck the
pirate rafts out of the sea.
Now, the people who invented the new form of space travel were heroes at
first, but they're starting to become less popular. Their main concern
has always been just safer and faster space travel. When they invented
the billboard system the idea was to be able to launch lots and lots of
free billboards that didn't crash into each other. They were kind of
unhappy about the fact that their designated rocket company began making
piles of money when it started by charging for launching billboards. So
they started inventing a way to hang billboards at new altitudes.
The space travel inventors weren't thinking much about pirates until
Iplandia's oligarchs asked for help. When the oligarchs heard about the
new orbit altitudes being invented they were worried that problems with
the raft people would only get worse. Now prospective visitors would
have an even harder time finding Iplandia.
So the inventors tried to accommodate the oligarchs, and they all said,
"OK, Lets write up a system of 'no-crashing' rules for billboard space.
We'll write those rules so that the old sea maps and the new space maps
work better together than they do now. And maybe we'll have some space
cops and courts like the ocean has."
This was a little surprising. The inventors were the ones who supposedly
wanted things to be free or at least super cheap in the first place, but
there's always been a rumor that the oligarchs want things to be more
expensive (especially for the raft people). And now they're working
together?
Still, it's not that surprising when you think about it. Almost
everybody wants to be an oligarch. The raft people, too.
And that's where things have been for the last few years.
Craig Simon
(getting real carried away this morning)
