Quite a statement.Obviously too much here to discuss in any detail, but I would say this may be over-pessimistic. A trip out to Elmhurst Queens may be very eye-opening. Elmhurst has over 120 languages and 150 nations represented. It's a chaotic, dirty mess but it's also a hell of alot of fun...authentic cheap foods of the various immigrant groups are available (with few or no Americans in sight).
But the point is, there's so much diversity, and everyone is pretty much focused on grabbing some chunk of the perceived American dream, there's never a chance for any real ethnic strife to get going. Muslims live next to Christians, Hindus, Jews and distinctly "other", and there's no problem at all. (Traffic, health, and other laws are almost completely ignored, however, and there's mutually shared random street crime of course.)
As far as I'm concerned, most strife boils down to the perceived economic interests of the concerned parties, and apparently ehtnic/religious/whatever differences are just a mask for these simpler problems. As a big for instance, racism during the slavery days was really a way to allow for economic explouitation of "human resources"...slavetraders of course searched for Biblical and Darwinian justification of their actions, and codified them into their "religion".
My hope (which may be pretty foolish I admit) is that strong crypto, cheap chips, cheap bandwidth and other empowering techno-tools might be the great equalizer, hopefully eliminating a lot of the abovementioned crap.
At the same time, I know that "differences" can very quickly cause someone to be "personna non grata" in most human endeavors. And I could yammer on here for another bunch of paragraphs but I'll spare us all...
From: Jim Choate <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: The CDR as a Cliological experiment
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 17:20:38 -0600 (CST)
I've made it no secret that my primary purpose in supporting the CDR as a
distributed network of remailers was to create an environment to
demonstrate the xenophobic behavior of individuals, a cliological
experiment in human psychology. It has behaved just as I predicted it
would (and not at all like the CACL folks predict such a ensemble will
act, if anything it has proven time and time again that even they don't
follow their own preaching.).
The list was originally created as a single mailing list, at some point
the original list was moderated by its operator. As a result Igor and I
created the CDR so that no one person or site would ever have that sort of
control ever again. Critical to the agreement was that no participant of
the CDR backbone would filter -any- traffic on the backbone. Free speech
being considered a critical component for any realistic discussion in a
modern society.
I've always held that this is a idealistic and short sighted view. That in
fact such views as 'democracy' (which I heartily support by the way) are
in fact counter-intuitive and run contrary to human nature.
Over the years since then we've seen the backbone grow to something like
seven (7) nodes in the US and several independent lists in other
countries. As time progressed we've seen each of the nodes develop a
distinct 'culture' with no indication that 'free speech' was really what
very many people wanted. We've seen individuals (or small groups) mount
both open and covert attacks on the various 'free speech' nodes in hopes
of shutting them down.
In other words, it is human nature for people to form 'tribes' or
zaibatsu. That in fact, this aspect of human nature is what drives the
vast majority of conflict in any and all human cultures. As the 'reach' of
each culture expands the conflict increases. It's further clear that
technology and globalization don't mediate these effects, if anything they
may in fact exacerbate them.
As a result we see actions like Igor Chudov's at algebra.com who act
unilaterally to limit such speech. Igor filters all traffic from SSZ but
he has never asked to be removed from the SSZ feed (even though I've asked
several times about the host of bounces that I receive - that rather
speaks for itself I think with regard to cooperation).
The vast majority of people are not interested in 'getting along' or 'live
and let live', they are interested in creating an environment where the
acceptable views and activities are limited (usually pretty severely).
This problem will only become more clear as the differences in the
potential technology admitted by the cosmos, that available to governments
and companies, and that available to individual become unity.
--
____________________________________________________________________
We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
we see them as we are. www.ssz.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Anais Nin www.open-forge.org
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