Miron's Weblog » Politics http://hyper.to/blog Fast Forward Sun, 22 Aug 2010 05:33:21 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 How I stopped worrying and learned to love technofixes http://hyper.to/blog/link/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-technofixes/ http://hyper.to/blog/link/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-technofixes/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:35:36 +0000 miron http://hyper.to/blog/?p=88 Peter Thiel writes regarding the failure of Democracy to preserve freedom and some possible technofix strategies. He includes are thoughts about creating freedom in Cyberspace, Outer space or on the high seas. I think it would be interesting to build certain distributed Internet apps that could change the dynamics of freedom, including reputation systems, gifting/barter systems and user-controlled Internet apps.

Peter’s article resonated strongly with my experience and my interpretation of history. As I see it, Democracies suffer from slow erosion of freedom over time, much like the increase of entropy in a closed system or overgrazing in the tragedy of the commons. Legislated freedom acts like a public good – and as such is under-produced.

I also agree with the thesis that technology seems has strong effect on the production of public good. This is especially true of communication technologies, such as the printing press, phones and the Internet.

There are several technology projects I am interested in that could change the dynamics of freedom:

Distributed reputation systems – such as described in Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – would allow fluid transmission of reputation information, enabling ad-hoc decentralized organization.  It would reduce the dependence on monolithic institutions / walled gardens, such as eBay, Amazon, credit bureaus and other systems that enable centralized control.

Gift/barter economies with distributed record keeping – such as described in Bruce Sterling’s short story Maneki Neko or as practiced at Burning Man.

User-controlled Internet apps – allowing people to own their data and applications rather than ceding control to third party application providers. It would be a step further in the evolution of open-source, and it would parallel the aims of the AGPL.

Interested in any of these? Please drop me a note.

(Note: the term Technofix is usually used pejoratively, but I like it.)

Update: Michael Anissimov writes about Peter’s article and muses about the differences between socialism and libertarianism being moot once scarcity is reduces by advanced technology.  I tend to agree.

H/T: Nanodot

]]> http://hyper.to/blog/link/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-technofixes/feed/ 1 Freedom is generative http://hyper.to/blog/link/freedom-is-generative/ http://hyper.to/blog/link/freedom-is-generative/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:53:41 +0000 miron http://hyper.to/blog/?p=81 I’ve been thinking about what we learned about freedom from the open-source movement.

I think one of the more important benefits of freedom is that it is generative. You can glue things together in ways that create completely new things. For example, you can take the Internet, existing computers and the ability to write software (originally the Mosaic browser) and create a whole new ecosystem – the World Wide Web.

What if you didn’t have the freedom to transmit arbitrary data on wires? You’d have the telco monopoly and no Internet. If you couldn’t talk to anybody you want? You’d get the original walled-garden AOL. If you couldn’t write arbitrary software?

But there’s nothing specific to software in this lesson. What if you couldn’t freely associate? If you couldn’t invest in arbitrary ideas? If someone else made the decisions for you?

Another question is how much could we go beyond the current state of affairs. I think we could have significantly more freedom in technology and obtain much richer outcomes.

For example, if reputations systems were not stuck in walled gardens, such as eBay and Amazon seller ratings, we could have a global reputation system. Such a system will be immensely more useful, since it could be used to guide us in every interaction rather than just the current 1%. I would guess that such a system could guide you to interesting content and interaction with uncanny accuracy. Such a system would have to be decentralized and user-controlled to protect the users’ interests.

Another promising direction is the Google Android phone OS. If you buy one of the unlocked ones (also known as dev phones), you can re-compile and install the OS and any applications you want. Google maps is one mobile killer app, but there will be more, and I would guess the truly groundbreaking ones will not pass the iPhone store gateway keepers. (see here, here and many others).

I sometime pay a price for being an early adopter and eschewing closed solutions. Yes, the iPhone is very slick and music from the iTunes store was tempting even when it was all DRM. But I think in the long term open solutions will be much more valuable. The original AOL was nice for the time, but it’s dead now.

]]> http://hyper.to/blog/link/freedom-is-generative/feed/ 1 Obama really thinks warrantless wiretapping is OK http://hyper.to/blog/link/obama-really-thinks-warrantless-wiretapping-is-ok/ http://hyper.to/blog/link/obama-really-thinks-warrantless-wiretapping-is-ok/#comments Sun, 25 Jan 2009 01:39:58 +0000 miron http://hyper.to/blog/?p=79 Wired reports that Obama’s administration sided with the previous administration in a federal court filing. To all the people that said Obama’s FISA vote was political expediency – you were wrong – it’s policy.

H/T: Slashdot

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Not much hope there.

]]> http://hyper.to/blog/link/obamas-doj-appointment/feed/ 0 Bill Joy for CTO of the USA? http://hyper.to/blog/link/bill-joy-for-cto-of-the-usa/ http://hyper.to/blog/link/bill-joy-for-cto-of-the-usa/#comments Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:26:07 +0000 miron http://hyper.to/blog/?p=57 Apparently, John Doerr recommended Bill Joy yesterday as the USA CTO to Barak Obama.

Misguided relinquishment anyone?

Excerpt from Joy’s article “Why the future doesn’t need us”:

These possibilities are all thus either undesirable or unachievable or both. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.

This could be pretty bad.

H/T: slashdot

Update: Slashdot reports that Bill Joy is not in the running anymore. Haven’t looked at the two that are, yet.

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