AnarchoCyphertopian technologies (wasRE: [extropy-chat]Reccommendations for a mailing list)

[Greg Burch]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Samantha Atkins
> Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 4:01 PM
> 
> 
> Offhand i don't see why spam is a show stopper for these technologies.  
> What did  you have in mind?

I've seen figures recently indicating that spam has become a significant portion of all net traffic.  Bandwidth costs money and the greater the volume of spam, the greater the cost of bandwidth.  Furthermore, spam is simply like litter -- it's an eyesore and corrosive of community value.  It's not a show-stopper, but it's rising to the level of a social problem.

I remember the highway culture of America in the 1960s.  Most people didn't think twice about tossing small bits of trash out of their car windows.  It was a little act of externality that didn't have a set of potent social norms to correct.  Had this social norm not been changed, we'd be choked on garbage along our roads by now.  But it did change.  A combination of diligent public communication and the passage of a few laws with relatively light enforcement has largely changed American society's behavior toward road litter in most areas.  These days it's pretty rare to see anyone toss a piece of trash out of their car and our roadways are amazingly clean, given the level of traffic on them.

Spam is similar to raod litter in some ways -- it's effect on the value of a public good.  But spam is different in its source; most net users aren't spammers and it's not a problem where a slight change in the behavior of the majority of the population will fix the problem.

... I'm not suggesting a solution in the above -- just musing.

> Re terrorism and other incarnations of the four horsemen,  I don't see 
> that trading freedom, privacy and/or even having some wonderfully 
> useful tech for a bit of mostly illusory security against people doing 
> bad things using the system is a good decision.  Almost everything 
> useful can be used for evil purposes as well as good or neutral.
> 
> Would you say more on what you believe needs to be solved and the 
> tradeoffs involved?

One of the key elements of the modern salafist Islamic terrorist movement is its use of the internet for recruiting, and for organizing and publicizing its activities.  Without the internet, it would be almost impossible to carry out a global terrorist plan.  I remember that the paradigmatic "nefarious user" hypothetical pre-911 was almost always centered around a contract hitman.  I'm not suggesting that the use of the net by Islamic terrorists justifies destroying privacy or other key elements of the foundational values of the old Cypherpunks community, by any means.  I'm just saying that the negatives are greater than were imagined by most people before 911.

GB