Spiderspace, Privacy & Control

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

At 11:38 AM 1/16/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>
>I've been thinking a lot about the problems and opportunities that are
>coming up as more and more "spiders" (Web searchers, crawlers) are indexing
>directories and files on systems they can find.
>
>Second, what is out there in spiderspace is incredibly useful for building
>dossiers, for compiling correlations, and for doing competitive analyses.

All of these capabilities might seem to increase the control opportunities
of others but for the fact that our opportunities for independent
interaction have increased much faster.

All the modern control technologies have been blown out of the water because
of the single significant fact that a network creates more connections than
anyone else can block.  And this is true whether that network is called a
"market" or an "Internet."  

Liberty can be defined as an opportunity to complete "transactions."
Control may be defined as the capability to block another from completing
"transactions."  The "lowest chained serf in the fields" has few
opportunities to complete "transactions" or to make choices.  Even if his
legal status were different, the fact that he is bound to the soil by
necessity if not law restrains his liberty.  He can't go anywhere or do
anything.  If he is in a lightly populated place like the Northern Europe of
old, his "world" contains about 100 people.  If he is in a densely populated
place like a Chinese river valley he still only has about 1000 people in his
village to deal with.  Nature constrains his choices so much that only a
minor effort by "society" is required to completely restrain him.

A modern market and a modern telecoms infrastructure is so vast and is made
up of so many potential links that it takes a major and very expensive
application of human force to even slightly restrain other people.  Since
each of us can buy  from or sell to, talk to, form attachments with
literally millions (and soon billions) of other people (and companies and
software robots, etc) the opportunities for others to control us are
limited.  Very expensive prisons, criminal justice systems, credit bureaus,
and employment records systems are inadequate to keep us from doing much of
what we want.  Which is why an allegedly "controlled" world seems a lot less
controlled than the world of the past.

Among all of the potential "transactions" that we can choose to complete (T)
are a subset of transactions (t) that give us outcomes closer to what we
actually want.  In the past, the best representation of this transaction
space was T=t=1.  The total transactions were very limited (subsistence
farming in the place and among the people of our birth).  We were stuck.
Today we are approaching a situation in which for all practical purposes T=~
and t=~ and the all of the possibilities make the match between what we want
and what we can get very close.

So if one government or one employer or one friend is not "right" for us,
there are millions more where that came from.  We aren't there yet but we
are getting there.  No matter how peculiar your exact nature, there are so
many markets and people out there that very few people on earth will be
unable to find a niche.

If your needs are esoteric, you may have to shop around a bit but all these
great search tools sure make that easier.

Thus if I write something that upsets a government or an employer, there are
other governments and other employers (including myself in both cases).  In
fact, I am likely to find some "small, deeply disturbed following" that
actually likes what I have to say.  There are an awful lot of people out there.

It's like the Bill Mauldin cartoon featuring a skinny, ugly, GI with a funny
big curl on his head driving through an Italian hill town full of ugly,
skinny people with giant curls on their heads -- "Gee, my Daddy told me I'd
find a place like this."  That village is already part of Market Earth (tm)
and is (or soon will be on the Net).

With the millions of choices each of us has, restricting those choices
quickly becomes impossible outside of prison and prisons become ever harder
to maintain because of cost and countermeasures.  (The Soviet Union, for
example).

DCF

"An ISP that restricts access isn't an *Internet* Service Provider but
rather a proprietary online service."