Re: Micropayments are Crap

["Stephan Vladimir Bugaj" <stephan@studioarchetype.com>]

There is too much traffic on the Cypherpunks list for me - personally - to be
able to follow a single discussion very consistantly (maybe I should write
better filters...).  So I will address your last email generally.  I agree
that many of my points are points about capitalism in general, but
micropayments are the latest capitalist craze and serves to  underscore
some of these problems.  Perhaps you are right that they can ameliorate
some of the problems of capitalism, but I think there is also a great
potential for abuse and profit bloating that will serve only to exascerbate
the problems.  Sometimes 'straw men' are needed to make example cases of
what *can* happen before people leap ahead without thinking, and can only
in retrospect commiserate with eachother about what did happen...  the FUD
that is associated with any new technology should be better analyzed by the
few who care about the future rather than those who just worship the future
to ensure that the decisions which are made by this almighty 'market'
(again, I distinguish this from either the 'people' or the 'consumers') are
the right ones.  Again, I realize the market does not oppose this idea, but
that doesn't mean that some people won't feel that the idea is being
'rammed down their throats'.  Sometimes people forget that technologists
and their venture capitalist backers aren't the best representative sample
of the world's population, nor are they a reliable source of objective
information about the correlation between the 'market' and the 'polit'.

Micropayments might be a great idea (though I see potential flaws which, if
addressed, would only serve to make the idea great in implementation as
well as in theory - yet people will resist addressing these potential flaws
and rely on hindsight to fix problems that do arise). I'm just proposing
the ridiculous notion that this and other technologies be preceeded by
forthought and public debate before their implementation.  No matter how
much one reifies techology, it all comes back to people in the end.


ttl
Stephan


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