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

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Greg Burch <gregburch at gregburch.net> wrote:
> 
> Sasha and I -- and many others -- used to dream big dreams about the
> convergence of these technologies. (As a personal note, Sasha's death
> was a punctuation mark for many, many people in that old core group,
> but that's another, even more painful topic.)

Yes, at that point our musings and speculations stopped being such and
many of us were shocked into doing something in the real to make things
happen.

> 
> Thinking back on the world we imagined being implemented with
> AnarchoCyphertopian(c) technologies, it seems in hindsight there were
> two phenomena that we didn't foresee with enough clarity -- terrorism
> and spam.  And they seem like they are related in an important way. 
> They are both examples of a class of users of such technology that
> have no consideration for secondary values; they sacrifice everything
> else to achieve just one aim that is all-important to them and that
> are complete spoilers for all other members of the user community.  I
> like the sound of what you've written -- "agoric throttling" -- is
> that your term, Eugen?  At any rate, it seems here in this after-age
> of 2005 that the problem of the "totalistic user," the user willing
> to burn the community to achieve a single goal, has to be solved.

The barbarian at the gate problem rears its ancient head. How is a
villager to make the pillager pay more for his loot than it is worth?
In the real, we have guns to shoot perpetrators in self defense. We
have police and courts and jails to deal with those that escape
victim-dispensed justice.

In the virtual, there are measures available to force spammers to eat
up processing dealing with bogus responses. Most spam-combatting
sofware is purely deflective in nature, they don't repond with
pro-active measures to disable a spammer, they simply filter it out.
Net terrorism (primarily in the form of virus dispersal), being
distributive in nature, is even harder to deal with. Anti-virus
software is, similarly, merely prophylactic in nature, it doesn't do
anything to track viruses back to their source. Such a guided missile
technology should be implemented.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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