What, Me Worry?

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

I realize that Blacknet debate was eons ago in net time (100 to 1 
compression net time vs real time?) but I failed to stick my oar in 
because I was trying to cope with the 500 messages accumulated while I 
took an innocent weekend off. (Some of us don't have SPARC stations at 
home and *can* be swamped.) 

Aside from contract murder, which shouldn't be much more of a problem than 
it is now because most people still won't be worth the powder it takes to 
blow them up, I don't expect blackmail and dossier abuse to be more of a 
problem on Blacknet than it was, say, in 1925.

Why?  Because there may be fewer grounds for blackmail and the damage 
possible to a person's reputation will be greatly reduced because 
(to Moderns) reputations are much less important.

If you compare what a blackmailer might have threatened to reveal about a 
person in 1925 with what Madonna gets paid millions to do live on stage 
before thousands of people, you can see the problem.  What could one say 
about Ophra guests that is worse than what they say about themselves.

After all, it doesn't make much sense for a blackmailer to say to you, 
"I'm going to tell everyone that you are the practitioner of an 
alternative life style that they are teaching in the schools these days."

Reputation was significant in the past because people were stuck in one 
small community for their whole lives and they, their children, and 
grandchildren would have to be living with their neighbors for the next 
hundred years.  This sort of intimacy with "strangers" ended with the 
advance of technology, markets, and mass migration.

The nets can only make this worse as even the strangest individuals can 
find a home with their fellow "deviates" somewhere in cyberspace.

With the President a philandering, dope smoking, draft dodger; at least 
two cabinet jobs held by homosexuals, the mayor of New York an admitted 
tax evader; and the rather straight organization I contract for giving 
baby showers for the single mothers as they go off to reproduce; it is 
hard to see many grounds for blackmail.

Dope dealers don't much care if they are reported to the authorities.  
That is just another risk of doing business and they don't respect the 
authorities enough even to fear them.  The authorities are so swamped in 
any case that they find it hard to grab too many people.  Child molesters 
remain unpopular (unless they work for the local schools) but they seem 
almost alone in their openness to blackmail.

Bankrupts, drunks, drug addicts, homosexuals, single mothers, tax evaders, 
the politically incorrect, anarchists, people who run red lights, are all 
accepted as part of the glorious mosaic of American society.  Even if they 
are occassionally fired, the booming market for contingent employment 
means that they won't suffer much loss of income.  

Seems like Blacknet blackmailers are going to have slim pickins.

Duncan Frissell

"Jennifer!  Did Governor Clinton use a condom?"

   -- Unanswered question asked at Jennifer Flowers' March 1992 press 
conference.
--- WinQwk 2.0b#1165