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Design of a Digital Republic: Part 1, Goals

posted by janrinok on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the dream dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

While the Net has certainly scored a point or two against the State, the State has scored a lot more points against the Net. If the State wants your domain name, it takes it. If that's independence, what does utter defeat and submission look like?

Worse: whatever state tyranny exists, it's obviously dwarfed by the private, free-market, corporate tyrannosaurs that stalk the cloud today. We can see this clearly by imagining all these thunder-lizards were actually part of the government. "Private" and "public" are just labels, after all.

Imagine a world in which LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and the NSA were all in one big org chart. Is there anyone, of any political stripe, who doesn't find this outcome creepy? It's probably going to happen, in fact if not in form. While formal nationalization is out of fashion, regulation easily achieves the same result, while keeping the sacred words "private enterprise."

How do today's technologists win freedom from State control?

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:19PM

    by VLM (445) on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:19PM (#257226)

    The government doesn't need any particular business

    In the sense that if company A fails to donate $1M to re-election campaign, company B will likely come along and make the donation for them. Also see the revolving door between .gov and .com.

    In a fully centrally controlled economy like the USA its not useful to differentiate between .gov and .com anymore anyway. Its a mere technicality to get hung up on. In the soviet American system, the .gov is the .com and the .com is the .gov and the general public has no oversight or control over either.

    Also its US centric, at least theoretically the NSA operates in USA-interests, but about 95% of the worlds population doesn't live in the USA and only coincidentally occasionally aligns with USA interests. So your analysis is pretty good from a solely USA perspective, but having the NSA gather all of AirBus's internal communication and sneakily hand it to campaign donor Boeing is not all that useful from a Frenchman's perspective, for example.

    Essentially the NSA and "big american internet companies" are damage and the internet will route around them, with more or less fanfare, eventually.

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