Re: George Orwell marries Ayn Rand

From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Mon Feb 05 2001 - 04:48:19 MST


On Sun, Feb 04, 2001 at 02:04:55PM -0800, hal@finney.org wrote:
> One big question is whether this situation would be stable. There seems
> to be an inherent contradiction in an Orwellian physical world where
> social controls are nearly 100% effective existing beside a libertarian
> virtual world where there are almost no controls whatsoever.
 
I'm trying to remember the appropriate quote from "A Deepness in the
Sky" -- something along the lines of "one of the strongest predictors
of the collapse of civilization in a solar system was the development
and deployment of ubiquitous surveillance technology".

As a point of note, the face recognition stuff deployed at the
Superbowl sounds very like a system the police have been testing in
Lewisham, London, for the past couple of years. I'd be surprised if
England -- starting with London -- isn't saturated with networked
cameras equipped with a modicum of face-recognition talent within the
next decade; they're already putting mobile cameras on buses as well as
the static-mounted cameras on buildings.

> We might see a desire to extend physical control into the virtual world,
> as with proposals that people submit to surveillance of their online
> activities, use encryption which can be broken by the government, etc.
> In recent years we have been moving away from these proposals, but this
> could change.
>
> Or, we could see that the libertarian electronic world undermines
> the authoritative physical one, as more of the economy becomes based
> on information. People would engage in economic transactions which the
> physical world can't monitor, and more importantly, can't tax. This was
> the original cypherpunk model but it remains to be seen whether this
> could actually work.
 
We're seeing an arms race gearing up right now. The sides in the
arms race are the intellectual property conglomerates -- publishers,
basically -- and the open source movement. There's a nasty streak of
absolutism in some recent US laws (the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act is a classic example) that tend to restrict rights; this is backed
up by various international bodies contemplating changes in copyright
conventions that are disproportionately favourable to large corporations
(at the expense of customary rights of access). These organisations are
backing technologies like SDMI which are intended to provide seamless,
wall-to-wall copy prevention from the hardware level up. On the other
hand ...

If you put *this* http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010118.html
together with *this* http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/16348.html
(purely by way of substantiation that Cringely isn't _purely_ spouting
hot air) and *this* http://www.opencores.org/ ...

We have the prospect, in a few years or so, of being able to print
off new cheap-as-paper computers that are open source in every respect
-- including the hardware and processors. As long as it's possible to
physically plug them into today's networks, it will be possible to defeat
the totalitarian power-grab of the copyright absolutists.

The trouble is, they're succeeding (by distortion of language and tactics
that boil down to lying) in conflating copyright violation with much
more serious crimes. Think before you use the term "piracy" to refer to
someone who copies a piece of software -- is what they're doing *really*
in the same league as hijacking a ship, stealing its contents, and raping
or murdering the passengers and crew?

One particularly mendacious tactic is to place an unsubstantiated but high
valuation on a piece of information. For example, ISTR Kevin Mitnick was
found to have downloaded a chunk of source code for a commercial UNIX
utility while breaking into some corporate computers. The police asked
the company what it was worth: they went to AT&T and said "what's this
UNIX thing worth?" and AT&T said "seventy million dollars". So that's
what Mitnick was charged with stealing -- completely ignoring the fact
that if they'd gone to the Free Software Foundation they could have
found functionally-identical software available for free!

This may well be symptomatic of a side-effect of our culture's move into
an information economy: our core values are changing, and there's
feedback from our concept of ownership. If software is 100% proprietary,
commercial, trade secret material, people can be charged with multi-
million dollar thefts for posession of the source code to "grep". On the
other hand, if software is free, there is no crime to prosecute in the
first place.

> Looking out farther, we have to throw nanotech into the mix, which would
> theoretically expand the range of things you could construct at home using
> just information. And before that we will be faced with "bathtub biotech"
> which is on the horizon if not here already, allowing people to cook up
> their own biotech cocktails at home using information found on the net.
>
> How do you feel about this Orwell/libertarian world? Does the existence
> of virtual freedom compensate for the possibility of increased social
> control outside your home? And do you think it would be stable, or
> would one side or the other win out?

I want to be free. I want access to information. I want privacy. There are
strong pressures to deprive me (and you) of all of these capabilities:
but assuming they're pressures arising from government is a dangerous,
and ultimately fatal, mistake. The pressures arise from existing power
structures, some of which are bureaucratic empires within government
departmenrs (seeking to perpetuate their employment) and others of which
exist in the private sector. As our (and their) value system changes,
that which nobody paid any attention to before (and which was therefore
free) becomes perceived as valuable. So a power grab is in progress. The
history of the past century doesn't encourage me to believe that the
little guys will win; if anything, the last half-century has seen the
triumph of marketing over individualism in the developed world.

-- Charlie



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