Welcome to the sixth week of our book club reading A Lodging for Wayfaring Men. We're reading one chapter every two weeks, so we'll today be discussing Chapter 3 (but in between-weeks we are having a look at the essays in Appendix A. They are short and accessible).
You can find the book club reading schedule here: #1582413
The story of people who are trying to build unstoppable, unregulated markets on the internet is really cool. Unfortunately, Rosenberg is not doing the best job of it. I often feel like he glosses over the most interesting parts and includes quite a lot of stuff that doesn't add much to the story at all.
For instance, I'm not quite sure what the purpose of the biomedical peptides "Brain Flush" storyline is. Sure, that's cool, too -- but why do the freedom market people also need to be inventing a thing that cures you from all your emotional baggage? And then there's the free love stuff.
I can see how it all kind of connects in the theme of regulation impeding humans from being as fully developed as they can be, but it's too widespread to do justice to any single storyline. I would love to see more character development or even discussion of ideas, the characters just don't need to be saving the world along quite so many verticals.
Still, Rosenberg doesn't fail to include a number of interesting points that made me stop and think. The greatest of these, at least in this chapter, was this:
But the Internet opened up a virgin territory for us. A territory that is a hell of a lot harder to control than a geographic territory. And because the basic structure of cyberspace is distributed, not centralized, we have a built-in advantage.
What we are doing is a natural progression of the digital revolution. What the governments are trying to do is to reroute the digital revolution, against its nature, to serve their desire for centralized dominion.
"The Internet must be protected. We can't let it become a tool of the old territorial rulers. So, we are building a center of private interactions, where rulers cannot intrude. It was a strange moment when several of us looked around and said to each other, 'Oh my God, we can't let this opportunity pass, and we are the adults. We have to step in adn see to this; we're here, we're able, and it has fallen to us."
I really strongly believe in this vision for the internet, and since I've been reading some of the archives of the Cypherpunks Mailing List lately, it doubly resonated. It seems that using the Internet as the home of truly free markets was developed in tandem with the internet itself. At the first meeting of the Cypherpunks they played a game that simulated using the internet for exactly this purpose #1609744.
The internet has been in full flower for many decades and bitcoin has been around for almost two, but for me at least, the question of whether such unregulated markets exist is still unclear #1608631.
So, what do you think: has the internet fallen to regulation, surveillance and control, or is there still hope that we can play the crypto anarchy game for real?
Internet seems easy to control? We often hear of other countries "shutting down the internet". My wife is currently in China and she wasn't able to use her Google account, and her VPNs were blocked.
Maybe satellite internet or mesh networks are the solution
Yes! That's the thing: we assume the internet is free and open because an overt attack on of hasn't been launched, but I wonder if we aren't like the frog slowly boiled.
I wouldn't consider "shutting down the internet" as easy control. That's a hell of a tradeoff to make.
My information is a bit dated at this point, but my impression is that most Chinese people know how to get around the Great Firewall of China.
I haven't read chapter 3. Would you say that Rosenberg is also a transhumanist, that is, someone who believes that the limitations of the body are something to be surpassed with technology?
Everyone's a transhumanist. The differences are in degree and specific applications.
maybe there's a more precise definition of transhumanist than the one I gave
I imagine there is, but it would still be almost everyone who meets it and the precision would have to be fairly arbitrary, probably to the point of being a strawman.
Hmm, at least this far in the book, yes. But its unclear to me how it will work out. And, its not so strongly put as is popular these days.
We won't really know if the free internet has won, until it is fully subject to attack. It seems like we're able to transact freely.
Well this is the thing I've been thinking about: Rosenberg expected full out attack from the feds, but maybe the more devastating attack is what we are seeing: regulatory wishy washiness, choking onramps and offramps, irregular prosecution where some people occasionally get very scary sentences, but most do not.
I don't think we are free to transact: many aspects of a trade are made very difficult at the moment.
How inherent to the technology is that, as opposed to being a result of people not wanting to take the tradeoffs?
My understanding is that you can buy pretty much whatever illicit material you want over the internet and it seems like transactions to people in sanctioned countries are trivially easy to pull off.
But I think I'm making the argument that there is a very big difference between
possibleandcommon. I think that we have all felt okay about our current level of oppression, but the reality is that many of us aren't using these free markets. Nor are we willing to extend ourselves enough to do so. It's easier to follow the channels that are permissioned and surveilled. And that's where a lot of the earlier cypherpunks maybe got it wrong: they thought there would be overt strong repression, when the government opted for inconvenience.No disagreement on those points
I think the choppiness of this subplot comes from this being a real-life invention. This is the cycle of all revolutionary technology. Someone with public sector experience and a private sector mindset uses classified information to make something nice and help people, so he gets driven out into the private sector where only based right-wing libertarians appreciate his idea, then it mysteriously emerges in the mainstream 30 years later. Thus the public sector is perpetually wasting 30 years of everyone's time, but somehow we get there eventually.
Interesting point. Perhaps I want too simple a story. I am curious to see where Rosenberg is going to take it -- I keep waiting for the real attack from the feds to come, because so far it has mostly been the freedom fighters in control.