Posted by
Steve Smith on
Sep 14, 2013; 12:11am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Urgent-skype-vulnerability-tp7583763p7583816.html
Marcus/Glen/et alii -
I just listened to Amy Goodman's
interview
with Robert Riech on his new film, "Inequality for All". I
was caught enough by the following statement he made to look it up
and consider it further (cut and pasted from the DN! website
transcript):
This economy is not working for
everyone. And one of the points we make in the film, which I
have been writing about, but the wonderful thing about the
film is that you can dramatize something, is that the economy
is not something out there, it is not kind of a state of
nature, the economy is a set of rules. It is based upon,
basically, rules that are decided upon by our democracy. And
if our rules are generating outcomes that are unfair, that
don’t work very well, that don’t spread enough of the gains of
economic growth to enough people, we change the rules.
Responding to your well bent (kinked?)
thread on Skype Vulnerability which segued into discussions of
Anarcho-Capitalism and Open Source:
If we know this is/will-be the case, then
why press for absolute transparency at all? Why not be
anarcho-capitalist and allow for the opacity of some,
strategically allowed, opacity?
The anarcho-capitalist will try to extract every bit of value from
any vocabulary they own or influence. It's fine for them to try
to do that, but it is also fine to make them obsolete.
...
Most anarcho-capitalists aren't that, of course, they are
capitalists, and expect public investment to be there to protect
their IP for them, through copyrights, patents, and so on. The
GPU vendors want an interface like OpenCL so that they can keep
people away from the actual design. That's annoying, and
misrepresents the concept of `open' for their own selfish
purposes.
Lastly, it's also important to realize
that your egalitarian concept of of the diverse overlapping
communities _might_ turn out to be naive or overly simple. If
we think in terms of gaming, there should arise some seriously
competent gamers who pool resources into a very small (and
controllable) cabal that has a better understanding of the
entire stack than anyone else. And, not only will the
transparency _not_ assist the rest of us schlubs in keeping that
cabal honest, it will _prevent_ that because the cabal can hide
behind the illusion of transparency.
But it is ok if there are schlubs, if provided one chooses to be
one. Membership in the cabal comes from cognitive investment,
not capital.
They can always say things like "It's all
on the up and up! The source code's out there. Check it
yourself." ... all the while _knowing_ that without their
billions of dollars in assets we normal people cannot "check it
ourselves". Hence, perhaps similar to "green washing", the good
gamers will use our own ideology against us.
I've worked on a variety of types of code, and I don't find I need
to appeal to individuals controlling teams of people and domain
experts to understand the parts I'm interested in. There's a
scale free property to good codes that makes it possible to
understand them. Understand the goals, inputs, the outputs, and
starting building out an understanding.. If there is no source
code it is much more difficult (but not impossible).
Marcus
I was left wondering if Marcus' arguements about Open Source don't
apply well to Governance and Economics. The Stick and the Carrot of
any society seems to be it's Legislation and Policy and it's
Economic System.
Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting "code development"? And
isn't Economics the primary execution environment for that code? It
seems like much of our discussion about transparency in government
and accountability is not unlike demanding that we be able to read
the code that is being executed. Democracy itself is the act of
writing code; the rules of execution of everything from government
itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, OS) to economics
to criminal justice (exception handling?)
IS there a large enough contingent of aspiring "technocrats" such as
ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a
phase change? Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our
technosphere, but Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become
incredibly powerful just as the *very ideas* of Democracy and then
Free Markets once were themselves.
Just a thought...
- Steve
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com