[109240] in Cypherpunks
Re: FC: The Justice Department's antitrust division? Try Viking
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Sun Mar 14 20:27:57 1999
In-Reply-To: <19990314204445.GXRY8805@alaptop.hotwired.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 18:16:44 -0500
To: declan@well.com, politech@vorlon.mit.edu, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net,
Digital Bearer Settlement List <dbs@philodox.com>
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
At 3:48 PM -0500 on 3/14/99, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> I have an opinion piece on pB5 of Sunday's Newsday that likens the
> Department of Justice to 9th-century Viking raiders who are plundering
> peaceful and profitable foreign lands. That's why Bill Gates has refused to
> settle.
>
> The article:
> http://www.y2kculture.com/mccullagh/newsday.031499.html
Of course, you're giving Vikings, or at least the Norse, a bad name by
comparing the Clinton Justice Department to them. :-).
If you haven't done this already, go read Njal's Saga, a story about a 9th
century Icelandic blood-feud, someday, just for fun. :-). The 1960 Penguin
translation by Magnusson and Palsson buries all the geneology (which the
Norse apparently used as a shorthand for personality and reputation) down
in the footnotes, and the result is a great read.
From reading Njal's saga, you can see why David Friedman liked
turn-of-the-other-millenium Iceland so much. It's also easy to see what he
means when he said the Norse were more a society of (private!) lawyers than
they were warriors. Notice I said private law, not legislation. Even murder
was a tort, requiring compensation, on pain of outlawry. Outlawry was bad
thing to have happen to you, because anyone could kill you without having
to pay compensation, or course. I'm sure that the Clinton anti-trust guys
are mere pikers by that standard of legal motivation. :-).
In addition, in 10th century Iceland there was only one public "employee",
a guy whose job it was to recite the laws, one quarter of them a year, from
memory, at the Allthing, the yearly gathering where trade, and disputes,
were settled, occasionally with largish military manoevers :-). Even more
fun, this guy also had the right to edit out the laws out he didn't like as
he spoke them every year. In other words, if he didn't speak a law at the
Allthing, it wasn't a law anymore.
I also agree with Friedman when he observes that the sagas only recorded
extraordinary events, like killings, and that's why the resulting narrative
so bloody. If you apply any resonable chronology to the story -- the Norse
considered the Sagas as much drama-cum-video-rental as history, so things
can get rearranged in the retelling -- time gets collapsed around the
violence with, apparently, lots of farming and trading in the meantime.
Amazing what happens when everyone's armed and trained to use deadly force
to defend themselves.
Kind of like the "wild" American west, where, contrary to what they teach
us in school, the ubiquity of firearms made for a very polite, and,
apparently peaceable, population. But, that's a historical analogy to
torture some other time.
The comparison of working anarchistic societies like "dark-age" Iceland to
the modern internet is a valid one, as well.
The use of reputation sanction as a curb to (most) behavior excess
certainly works, if my "kill"file is any indication, but it's going to get
teeth, sooner or later. Economic compensation for internet "injury"
already happens, rather brutishly, using meatspace torts right now, but I
think the idea will really take off with enough bearer transactions on the
net. In addition to people having to use heretofore "free" services like
email and even TCP/IP at the time of use, those who injure others on the
net and don't honor their obligations to compensation will be shunned, just
like they were in Iceland. The inability to do business on the net will be
the financial equivalent of a death penalty, forcing miscreant keyholders
to delete them and build a new reputation, at considerable cost, with
another key.
Whatever tragedy there is left of the internet "commons" is, of course, the
tragedy that nobody owns the "commons". Yet.
Cheers,
RAH
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
