On Friday, March 22, 2002, at 10:37 PM, dmolnar wrote:
> Digression aside, Hakim Bey asks in _TAZ_ the question "where are my
> turnips?" By this he means "when are computers going to deliver on the
> revolutionary promise?" When will we be able to use computer networks to
> exchange goods that people *actually care about* ? When will I be able
> to
> trade something I have (knowledge about esoteric aspects of relativised
> cryptography, say) for some concrete strange *physical* goods I want
> (Cuban hallucenogenic fruits, controlled substances, organic turnips)?
> (See, the information-only goods don't count. they're not REAL ENOUGH.
> Besides, what kind of revolution is it when the only benefit is free
> Britney Spears songs?)
Hakim (whom I've never met, but, IIRC, Eric H. met him at some "Reality
Hackers"/"Mondo 2000" party...Hakim is not his real name, IIRC) is too
short-sighted.
First, as you allude to, information-theoretic goods are in fact _very_
real. Some examples:
-- the $400 I just paid this morning for a Mathematica license upgrade
(so they say warez versions are floating around...I have neither the
time nor the knowledge to search)
-- the incredibly expensive math books out there ($160 for just one slim
volume!)...can't wait to find them in downloadable form...until then, I
surf the free sites, the pages (The topics I've been surfing the Net for
the past few days are connected with category and topos theory...plenty
of free sites...John Baez (yes, related) has great resources. The Web is
not the garbage heap it's sometimes portrayed as.
-- speaking of downloadable books, check out the e-books newsgroup,
including the "flood" one (not near my newsreader right now, so don't
have exact name). Not too long ago someone posted every novel by
Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, King, Clarke, etc. in .txt form. Someone else
posted them in .pdf form and/or the .lit form MS favors. NOTE that every
one of these books is still under copyright...and these books sell for
$5-20 each in official e-book form (supposedly meant to be read on
Palm-type devices, etc). A great way to get a very complete science
fiction library for free. Oh, and these floods include vast numbers of
other authorsI've seen a few thousand full, modern novels posted in
the past couple of months.
(Now tell me these are not "turnips.")
Continuing on with examples:
-- all the usual credit rating info, background info, etc. These are
being mined, exchanged, traded on the Net (by professionals, companies,
others.) These are very valuable turnips.
-- information useful in making money, real money...the bubbles and
busts of the past several years have been fun times to be on the Net
most of the day, reading and watching and then buying and selling.
-- and tell me that Ebay and Amazon are not places where turnips are
bought, sold, and traded.
And so on. More and more things of interest...in my world...are going
over the Net. Hakim can be forgiven for writing in 1989 that the Net was
not delivering.
(Some of us wrote more optimistically back then. We weren't writing
books, just shorter pieces. We knew Ted Nelson, Eric Drexler, all those
familiar names. And we could project natural trends. Hakim drifted into
his drug/hermeneutics/deconstruction reality even as engineers were
actually building the future.)
>
> He's asking this in _1989_. WHERE ARE THE TURNIPS IN 2002?
All around. And not just in Brittny Spears junk.
Surfing the Net yesterday, I realized Pat Metheny was about to perform
in Santa Cruz that very night. So I went. Great. Some months back, I
recollected that a test launch out of Vandenburg was coming up. I did
some quick searches, found the launch was scheduled for 10 minutes away,
stood out on my deck and watched the rocket arc up over Big Sur and head
out over the Pacific.
These are trivial examples of how the Web is delivering real turnips.
And then there are 30 Heinlein novels sitting on my hard disk (whoops,
what I meant to say is "Which I downloaded as part of my research on how
severe the copyright violation problem has become.").
And more good stuff is coming. Forget about MP3s as the end-all and
be-all.
> Recently we saw this question echoed by Morlock Elloi -- are there
> compelling reasons to ask for privacy and anonymity, besides the fact
> that
> a bunch of (unemployed) cypherpunks are True Believers? A more pointed
> way
> to put it would be "have the technologies we've argued about for the
> past
> ten years *actually* changed **anyone's** lives?"
A more flippant answer would be: those who don't want these technologies
for privacy and untraceability obviously are not being forced to use
them. The fact that "Morlock Eloi" is using that nym is telling,
however. Clearly _he_ decided to use these technologies.
And, though I have said it many times, the tradeoffs are economic: value
of thing or act being hidden vs. cost of being caught. (I wrote about
this in det
