Re: A Cyberspace Independence Refutation

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

At 06:13 AM 2/16/96 -0500, lmccarth@cs.umass.edu wrote:

>> I'm waiting.  Then I'll have to call all the way to Montreal to log on.
>
>So much for the-net-as-I-know-it, where people don't have to call outside
>the country just to log in to the net. Most of the people I want on the net
>are very unlikely to do this.

But what we think of as "phone calls" are likely to be digital and flat rate
as well so calling distant points won't involve much of a hit.

>I'd be interested to see the documentation of the number of peasants in 
>the U.S. (or elsewhere) who have done anything like this. Documentation of
>the number of peasants who could manage the technical details would also
>be interesting.

Actually, it only takes a million or so out of the world population to make
restrictions impossible.  That will certainly be achievable.  Configuration
need not be difficult if the technically aware produce easy installation
software and  I think this is being done.  In any case, once Windows
96/Windows NT is stable enough with genuine multithreading we'll be able to
do a nice background TCP/IP setup with a point and click interface.  If the
capability to do something people want to do (communicate freely) exists, it
*will* be used.  Enforcement doesn't work.  The Great Enemy would need to
remove the capability.  But they are not doing that.  They are encouraging
the move towards a more communications rich environment not towards a lesser
one.

>And of course, all peasants have plenty of disposable income to spend on
>long-distance phone charges....

No more long distance.  Haven't you heard.  The "production cost" of a New
York to London call is currently less than 2 cents a minute (most of that
for billing) AT&T charges about 50-100 cents a minute.  That sort of markup
can't survive.

>Duncan Frissell writes:
>> We (some of we) don't want the housing or the school funding either.  I
>> certainly consider slave schools to be the most common form of child abuse
>> in the world today.
>
>That's nice, but are you seriously claiming that the portion of the average
>set of voters in a Congressional district that strongly agrees with you on 
>those issues matters a whit in a Congressional election ?

No.  But I do claim that their view doesn't mean much in an age in which
politics is being replaced by markets.

Look.  Coercion-based systems like government depend on a power balance
tipped far in their direction.  They start to break down as individuals and
small groups gain levels of power that are more equal to theirs.  If we can
overturn one of their commands with five minutes of keyboarding, that
command can't stand.  The stability of past systems was based on the fact
that 90% of the population couldn't do anything no matter what happened.
They had to stay where they were and grow food or they would starve.  It's
not hard to rule people in that situation.  We aren't in that situation any
more.  We can move and communicate and buy and sell and the government can't
do much about most of it.  They depend on our acquiescence and the freedom
of communication we have weakens their hold on that acquiescence.

DCF