Re: Is Cyberspace Rich Enough?

["Richard F. Dutcher" <rfdutcher@igc.apc.org>]

One of the problems commenting on long thoughtful posts is the number 
of hooks, and limiting oneself to just a few.

	[delete lots of interesting stuff]

> 
> ... After all, the Soviets
> couldn't stop samizdats, the Chinese couldn't stop fax machines, and
> the Americans can't stop drug use, so what hope is there in
> controlling modems, crypto, cellular phones, satellites, Web links,
> stegonography, terabytes of data flowing unobstructed across borders,
> and so on. Just to "stop the Net" would disrupt the entire financial
> system, which not even Clinton or the next (Republican) President
> would be tempted to do....they might as well launch a nuclear war as
> try to shut down this "anarchic" ( = high dimensionality) system.
> 

Well, I certainly hope so.  But let's remember Poland in 1979, where 
"they" were desperate enough to shut down the entire phone system.  
It gained them only an extra 10 years of control, but it cost the 
Poles a *lot* of misery.

But "samizdat" raises an interesting economic issue around security.  
The Soviets paid just enough attention to the circulation of 
hand-written or typed copies to make sure people spent a lot of time 
and energy at it -- time and energy not spent on more obviously 
dangerous activity.   Compare the volume of Solzenhitsen's output 
before and after exile [let's not debate quality].  That didn't mean 
samizdat wasn't subversive and long-term dangerous -- but it was very 
expensive and absorbing to dissidents and potential dissidents.

But that's the situation cypherpunks [and friends :] want to put our 
hypothetical eavesdroppers [government or corporate] in.  Not exactly 
harmless, but spending a lot of time and energy being concerned with 
the chasing multiple carbon copies of samizdat novellas.


> 
> * Alternative Nets, like FIDONet, are often lost in the discussion of
> "the Net," but perhaps we should take much greater interest in these
> alternatives. They make a crackdown harder, they lessen the dangers of
> a single-point attack, and they provide "genetic diversity" for
> building future Nets. (I'm not saying Cypherpunks have the time,
> expertise, or incentive to work on this, but just reminding folks that
> the Internet is not the end all and be all...)
> 

I find that techno-illiterate Greens have very little trouble 
understanding FIDONet -- it's the kind of small-scale organizing 
within larger networks that a lot of progressive activity has always 
followed.  They find it very hard to believe that other kinds of 
techie nets are really secure in the long run.  It is, in fact, the 
level of activity that the Poles reverted to without the phone 
system ...

> Personally, I think there are fewer long essays and analyses for the
> same reason there are fewer large predators than grass-munching
> herbivores.
> 
> --Tim May
> 

Geez, I have enough trouble getting card-carrying Greens to use 
and/or develop good ecological metaphors without some 
crypto-anarcho-libber punk muscling into the territory!  ;-)


===================================
Rich Dutcher, San Francisco Greens
P.O. Box 77005, San Francisco, California 94107 USA

"That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves."
                          Kim Stanley Robinson, "Green Mars"

Greens, of course, only enslave plants - so weed-whackers work better than cops ...
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