What I find interesting here is the interplay and mix between private, public, and governmental concerns.
In the physical space, in the states you're free to walk out into the public park, put on a hat saying something atrocious like "I hate cats!" and peacefully petition your fellow citizens to destroy all cats or something silly.
When we moved to printed distribution, there was still a clear bit of guidance; as long as you weren't directing people towards violence, you were good. Most newspapers were locally owned and would even be happy to print your letter to the editor about cats.
But now? We've got a foundation doing something like a regex match on domain names, we've got a criminal element hijacking computers, we've got various government-condoned organizations for managing tlds, we've got registrars. All of these are different types of organizations working in different countries and established for vastly different reasons.
I am reminded of two things. First, Thomas Paine made the point that it was better to live under a dictator than a complex system that hurt you. Under a dictator, you had a guy to point to when things went wrong. It was them! They are responsible for this awful thing! Under a complex system? There's nobody. Bad things just happen, and when you try to ask about it, each party can explain to you that they were working for good reasons to the best of their ability. There was a problem, but no reasonable way to discuss, diagnose, or propose fixes to it.
The second thing was a story from the 80s about a U.S. official, Raymond Donovan. He served fairly well in public office but was accused of some serious crimes. He was destroyed in the media. Then they found out he was innocent. He asked a famous question "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?"
I'm extremely happy this was resolved, but good grief, if I didn't know anything about the net, and my domain had just been set up instead of being in my control for 12 years, which office would I go to to get my domain back?
Either we own things or we don't. If every bit of our participation online is owned by somebody else, this should be a lot bigger deal than it is currently.
> First, Thomas Paine made the point that it was better to live under a dictator than a complex system that hurt you.
Interesting; can you point to the quote/source on that? (I'm also reminded of the Jobs quote: "Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards!")
I'm not sure one is "better", per se, but problems with complex distributed systems tend to be painfully intractable. Worse, I think human nature is to map such problems to narrowly-scoped villain narratives which feel tractable; and so not only does the root complexity go unaddressed, but great efforts are undertaken to thwart the alleged villains, sometimes making the real problems worse.
Blaming the dictator doesn't solve the problem. Sure, you could try to overthrow a dictator, but you can also try to fix a system, by talking to any of the people involved in it (or if there are no people involved, try to modify the system yourself, since there's no one to stop you).
This is the Fallacy of Gray. Just because neither option is perfect, doesn’t mean that one option isn’t better. It’s clearly easier for a bloc of concerned citizens to solve problems in dictator-land than in bureaucracy-land: in dictator-land, you just have to remove one (probably very unpopular) guy, while in bureaucracy-land, you have to... um...
In dictator-land, you first have to remove the dictator. You still have to actually solve the problem after removing the dictator.
It's easy to say "the dictator is bad" but historically getting rid of dictators without a specific and concrete plan for what to do afterwards has not turned out so well.
In doctor-land, you are trying to solve a particular problem with a particular patient, the assumption being that once that problem is solved, the patient will remain self-regulating.
In political-theory-land, you assume all actors are bad, are at least will become bad at some point in the future. The question then becomes *how can we organize our political structures so that if we can't prevent dying, can we at least provide guidance to the next government that follows?"
It naturally follows that the real goal is not solving problems: it is providing problems and solutions that people can accept. If nothing else, providing problems and solutions in terms that future generations can reason about.
In the physical space, in the states you're free to walk out into the public park, put on a hat saying something atrocious like "I hate cats!" and peacefully petition your fellow citizens to destroy all cats or something silly.
When we moved to printed distribution, there was still a clear bit of guidance; as long as you weren't directing people towards violence, you were good. Most newspapers were locally owned and would even be happy to print your letter to the editor about cats.
But now? We've got a foundation doing something like a regex match on domain names, we've got a criminal element hijacking computers, we've got various government-condoned organizations for managing tlds, we've got registrars. All of these are different types of organizations working in different countries and established for vastly different reasons.
I am reminded of two things. First, Thomas Paine made the point that it was better to live under a dictator than a complex system that hurt you. Under a dictator, you had a guy to point to when things went wrong. It was them! They are responsible for this awful thing! Under a complex system? There's nobody. Bad things just happen, and when you try to ask about it, each party can explain to you that they were working for good reasons to the best of their ability. There was a problem, but no reasonable way to discuss, diagnose, or propose fixes to it.
The second thing was a story from the 80s about a U.S. official, Raymond Donovan. He served fairly well in public office but was accused of some serious crimes. He was destroyed in the media. Then they found out he was innocent. He asked a famous question "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?"
I'm extremely happy this was resolved, but good grief, if I didn't know anything about the net, and my domain had just been set up instead of being in my control for 12 years, which office would I go to to get my domain back?
Either we own things or we don't. If every bit of our participation online is owned by somebody else, this should be a lot bigger deal than it is currently.