[11821] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Information and Liberty
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gary Bolles (via RadioMail))
Thu Apr 21 08:19:57 1994
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 1994 00:13:41 PDT
From: Gary Bolles (via RadioMail) <gbolles@radiomail.net>
Reply-To: gbolles@nwc.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, stahlman@radiomail.net, brodsky@radiomail.net,
opfer@radiomail.net, Sam_Boyle@mcimail.com, gbolles@radiomail.net,
media15@radiomail.net, dbuck@world.std.com, aa@wired.com,
jswatz@well.sf.ca.us, 72241.274@compuserve.com
To: frezza@radiomail.net, sean@dsl.pitt.edu
Bill, you sound positively Reaganesque. Yes, let's get the government out of
the faces of all of those poor struggling virtual corporations yearning to be
free. Let's unshackle the fetters of multinationals who each already have the
gathered might to move their physical goods around in ways most advantageous to
avoid local tariffs, and will soon have the same freedom with their information
resources. And while we're at it, let's make sure we remove enough of the
checks and balances so that we can encourage the really-really-big-is-better
merger/LBO feeding frenzy that characterized the 80's so we can bake lots more
megamultinationals. Sure, we'll have some upheaval, but in the end it will all
settle down, our newly de-toothed government will slide into decrepitude, and
the superorgs that will now consider the U.S. a Sterlingian data haven will,
thank God and deregulation, control their own destinies.
Separation of state and economy was indeed radical, but it was also inevitable.
The surgical separation of church and state became necessary because their
respective values - moral guidance versus enlightened self-determination of
resource usage - were in the long run antithetical, and because enough people
realized that in an era of theological complexity there could no longer be a
single "church" with a single set of moral guiding principles. Church grumbles
now and then, but short of Armageddon the state should be able to resist major
encroachment.
But separating government and the economy sounds to me like verbal shorthand
for a free-market free-for-all. The wholesale removal of the admittedly creaky
checks and balances currently cattle-prodding the economy will simply create an
alternate matrix of de facto governments, an environment in which the
megamultinationals will simply become laws unto themselves. Think corporations
will on their own show any altruism or care if little things like personal
rights get stomped? Riiiight. Go live on a Superfund site for a while. I want
my profits, get the hell out of my way. Scratch it on the walls of the world:
unlimited liberty=greed.
It's relatively easy to toss the anarchists word-bomb into the dance and blow
all the structure away. Humans are doomed to follow the Sisyphusian "I don't
like it like this, so let's make it like that, how bad can it be?" mentality,
creating and destroying their own constructs. It ain't painless, but it's
human.
I think, though, there's a balance to be had here, an admittedly-complex
solution that neither so shackles commerce that it is unable to move and so
moves on, or that so unfetters commerce that, left to its own devices, tromps
on any semblance of structure in its own blind search for maximized profit on
goods and data. Given economic incentives, corporations can do much to ensure
market balance, to neither so fragment or so bloat that commerce isn't
strangled. And government can keep its collective hands to itself whenever
corporations freely agree to bind themselves to principles of balance,
redefining themselves as parts of the communities - physical or virtual - they
hopefully feel the obligation to live in.
----- Forwarded Message
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 1994 11:54:37 PDT
>From: Bill Frezza (via RadioMail) <frezza@radiomail.net>
Subject: Re: Information and Liberty
To: sean@dsl.pitt.edu
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, stahlman@radiomail.net, brodsky@radiomail.net,
opfer@radiomail.net, Sam_Boyle@mcimail.com, gbolles@radiomail.net,
media15@radiomail.net, dbuck@world.std.com, aa@wired.com, jswatz@well.sf.ca.us,
72241.274@compuserve.com
Sean,
<I *do* think that the government could set better policies to recognize
the rights of the individual...but it seems as though business has too
strongly influenced government to ever see much of a retrenchment to the
idea of a government of the people.>
On the contrary, the Information Revolution presents the perfect
opportunity to redress this balance and return us to those principles upon
which this country was founded.
Information, by its very nature, is difficult to control, sieze, or
suppress. Technology will make this not just more difficult, it will make it
impossible.
The tools that the government has traditionaly used to create a
symbiotic relationship with large corporations that deal in material
goods will just not be available when they try to co-opt virtual
corporations and fluid ad-hocracies.
These new cyber organizations know no boundaries and have no physical
property at risk.
The whole intent of my efforts is not to acknowledge and try to influence
the existing government/business alliance in hopes of gaining a few crumbs
through more "enlightened"
regulation. This path of active engagement, taken by organizations
like the EFF, is as doomed as the colonists efforts to seek redress
by petitioning King George. No, I am looking to do nothing less than
break this relationship altogether.
Perhaps this will take a generation but it is not an impossible goal.
The founding fathers succeeded in establishing the permanent separation
of church and state. This was an outrageous, radical, earth shaking
innovation at the time. It was a tremendous threat to the established
order. But it not only succeeded, it provided a model that freed the
minds of men world wide to unleash a flurry of productive innovation
never before seen on this planet.
Unfortunately, the Jeffersonian economic model was rooted in a
simple agrarian society. The founders did not go far enough in limiting
the government's power over the economy. They could not have
forseen the changes wrought by the industrial revolution.
We have witnessed now first hand the collapse of all large scale planned
economies. The evidence is in. There is no going back.
The next step in the pursuit of liberty is the permanent separation of the
state and the economy. Today this idea appears as radical and unreachable
as did the separation of church and state. It may never happen in material
goods but it CAN and WILL happen with information. This much is inevitable.
To bring this about we must first reach out to like minded people who share
this vision and have not compromised away their future playing pragmatic
politics-as-usual. We must embolden them to speak out. We must expose
those imposters that pretend to speak for liberty while forging new
chains and dependencies. We must then move forward with a positive plan
of education and "pamhpleteering" to prepare the minds of the people
for this new revolution. This is exactly what happend in the years 1735
- 1776, creating conditions that only awaited the spark to set the machinery
of revolution in motion.
I am considering forming a Cyber chapter of The Sons of Liberty to
begin this process. Is anyone out there interested in joining?
Bill Frezza
frezza@radiomail.net
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(Feel free to redistribute this message - but not my income.)
