Re: Voluntary Governments?

[Jason W Solinsky <solman@MIT.EDU>]

> Jason,
> 
> There's a thread on the (legal) list Cyberia-L  about the 
> privacy of government information and how to legislate the 
> rising demand for this data (and parallel 'Net info).
> 
> The initial post of the thread is e-mailed your way.

The post you sent me exemplifies the multi-facited nature of personal
information. While my earlier post was based on the acquisition of
demographics, the Cyberia post was primarilly relevant to information
used for direct marketing and personal investigation. It seems to me
that for these latter two needs (as with the former), cyberspace offers
some solutions that would likely not be economically sensible otherwise.

In the physical realm, marketing and investigative data is frequently
gathered without the aid of the people from whom it is being gathered.
Even more frequently, these people receive no compensation for the information
which they supply... to structure a system otherwise would be economically
inefficient [The most you'll see are polls that promise to enter you into a
sweepstakes or give you a cupon if you fill them out.] The result is that
marketing and investigative firms acquire more information than they need
[if it costs nothing and it might be worth something, you get as much of
it as you can] to accomplish their tasks.

I'll send to this list a copy of my post on the future of advertising. It
suggests a marketing (and potentially investigative) mechanism in which
the consumer retains as much of his/her privacy as is theoretically
possible given the needs of the marketer and is compensated for the rest.

> Behold the legal mill of a "nation of laws" finely grinding an 
> issue.  Nitty-gritty skill.
> 
> The apparatus to legislate, arbitrate and enforce laws of 
> "voluntary government" will probably require as many 
> bureaucrats, attorneys and LEAs as the present system unless 
> there is a reduction in our dependence upon governments of all 
> sorts.

I think that the competition implied by the voluntary nature of
cyberspatial government can be counted on to dramatically reduce
the cost of legislation and arbitration. As I envision it, the
primary function of cyberspatial governments will be enforcement.
This is what the citizens [read customers] are paying for.

It seems to me that this is not unlike government before the "modern era".

JWS