Proprietary Code (PC :-) has a place if people are willing to put up with it, but then most people don't realize there are alternatives. That old Freedom vs. Security thing seems apropos here. Many people are quite willing to put up with a little less freedom for a little more security. I'm not sure where I come down on the issue of whether or not those who are so disposed deserve neither. Sometime I empathize a lot with the libertarians, but given our millions of years of evolution, largely as a communal species, I suspect that libertarian thinking is mostly an adolescent point of view.
Gary Sent from my PC email client (Mail.app) running on a PC OS (Mac OS) running PC hardware (MacBook Pro) - geez, what a hypocrite I am :-) On Sep 13, 2013, at 7:11 PM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote: > Marcus/Glen/et alii - > > > > I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert Riech on his new film, > "Inequality for All". I was caught enough by the following statement he made > to look it up and consider it further (cut and pasted from the DN! website > transcript): > This economy is not working for everyone. And one of the points we make in > the film, which I have been writing about, but the wonderful thing about the > film is that you can dramatize something, is that the economy is not > something out there, it is not kind of a state of nature, the economy is a > set of rules. It is based upon, basically, rules that are decided upon by our > democracy. And if our rules are generating outcomes that are unfair, that > don’t work very well, that don’t spread enough of the gains of economic > growth to enough people, we change the rules. > [...] > Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting "code development"? And isn't > Economics the primary execution environment for that code? It seems like > much of our discussion about transparency in government and accountability is > not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code that is being executed. > Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of > everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, > OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?) > > IS there a large enough contingent of aspiring "technocrats" such as > ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase > change? Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but > Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just as > the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves. > > Just a thought... > > - Steve
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