84/85: Transition from Government. Name: M.K. Ultra #9 (Mark Thompson) Date: Thu 08Jul93 01:59a One of the primary differences between a State and an anarchic form of social organization is that States and all existing institutional governments are heirarchies. An anarchic form of social organization is a network. Networks and heirarchies are opposites in the sense that horizontal and vertical are opposites. They're not polar opposites, but are orthogonal, so to speak. In a heirarchy, power is maximally concentrated, and in a network power is maximally distributed. It may be possible to implement some of the feedback processes that are currently embodied by institutional governments by replacing government with a densly interconnected communication network. The dominant media in current US society are Television and print. Both of these are read-only one-way media for most people. Broadcast centers and printing presses are closely held by an editorial elite that decides what goes out over those media. Publishing, however, has already started to diffuse more generally due to the availablity of desktop publishing technology. But this still utilizes a producer-consumer read-only type of product. Computer Bulletin Boards on the other hand, more closely resemble a telephone network. Although a BBS is under the editorial control of the person who owns a particular computer, there is almost no distinction between the producers and consumers of the information on the BBS. It's conversational and everyone can both transmit and receive information with every other person on the BBS. Imagine how uninteresting a BBS would be if only the Sysop could post and all you could do is call in to read these posts. That's what Television is like. That's why I rarely watch television. On the other hand, the per-capita consumption of TV is more than 6 hours a day. If those 6 hours were instead spent maintaining one's personal power relationships and participating in consensus decisionmaking ang political dialog via a multimedia computer network there would be a tremendous amount of intelligence and human energy available for the maintenance of a Stateless form of "government". What kind of enforcement power would such a government have? Primarily a network would have recourse to boycotts and ostracism as their primary disciplinary actions. These kinds of sanctions are only effective if there's a consensus that the person or group being censured actually warrants such treatment. People committing fraud would have a very difficult time in the face of such sanctions. But they would have access to the network to argue their case and defend themselves. People wishing to avoid being defrauded could access the latest info about fraudulent activities and persons and take these into consideration before they made any risky decisions. The current credit verification system works much like this, though it's organized as a read-only heirarchy. Much of international law works this way - for example the use of trade sanctions, a process that is effective, though slow. But consider how slow centralized government is in responding to emergent social problems. The time scale at which boycotts and sanctions work is just about right for processes involving millions of people. Networks are also very robustly resistant to corruption, since they have no central points to manipulate. Someone feeding bogus info into a network will rapidly be discovered. Attempts to sabotage a network are futile, since information or resources can be routed through any combination of nodes. Compare what happens when a television station is seized with what happens if someone were to try to confiscate every personal computer. A network is immune to coups or attack because it has no center. In the same way that parallel processing is replacing the use of single-processor computers, network organization and decisionmaking may come to replace heirarchies and centralized government institutions. ------------------------------