Glen and Marcus -
Once again, I think you have outdone yourself on this topic... I wrote
one of my long-winded missives and was about to send it when this
response came in and decided not to corrupt the dialogue with (too many
of) my own odd twists:
Let me just say that I think human agency (which is probably just a
specific if interesting example of agency in general, of life itself)
lives entirely in a high dimensional manifold of information with the
implied gradients. OF COURSE we try to manipulate the channels through
which information flows in our artifacts (governments, organizations,
communication systems, etc.). OF COURSE we don't want other agents
(especially powerful, somewhat mindless, aggregate agents, such as the
NSA, Mossaud, even Google or Amazon) to have too much transparency into
our own information milieu (our actions, our preferences, our desires,
our intentions) nor to maintain too much opacity into theirs (especially
when it references *ours*).
I very much agree with Glen's point here that it isn't open v closed, it
is more/less open/closed relative to some ideal or some existing
system. I don't fully appreciate Marcus response invoking A/D and D/A
converters... I think the question of discrete v continuous is always
an interesting one but I don't think that was Glen's point?
- Steve
Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 09/24/2013 11:47 AM:
I see open source it as qualitatively different than the subjective
openness one experiences in a large organization where there may not
be day-to-day impediments to getting the information that is needed
to do a job, but there are weak or complicated relationships reaching
outside the organization. [...] However, non-flat organizations
where people give up the option of opening (or, in the case you
cited: closing) certain channels means they may be less free in
exchange for other benefits. The morons you mentioned just failed to
calibrate to their environment.
Were I to allow myself to think in terms of disjoint "open" versus
"closed", I would agree. But I don't think they are disjoint, even in
the case of open source (e.g. GPL to BSD). There are all sorts of
gradations, some of which map well to legal structures (contracts,
statutes) and some of which don't.
In the case of the 3 event types: 1) improper individual actions, 2)
[ab]use of privileged access, and 3) information hiding, channels
aren't open or closed, transparent or opaque. They're translucent. A
good case to consider is the "black" budget of the intelligence
community. Even before Snowden's leak, that budget was really just a
very dark gray, not completely black. On the other side, an open
source OS like Ubuntu is really a very light gray (due to the
inclusion of some non-free drivers as well as the sheer size of and
variety within the distribution). To some extent, what makes the
obfuscator competitions (and cryptography) so interesting is the
navigation between closed and open.
And I think the same can be said of both subjective and objective
measures of organizations. And what makes human systems so
interesting is their very dynamic ability to navigate between closed
and open. You can see very subtle opening/closing of channels in
almost any human interaction, pairwise or one-to-many. It's
certainly what drives humor, that balance between banality and wisdom,
literal vs. metaphoric, transparent vs. opaque.
The primary qualitative difference I see is (merely) that humans are
distinct from their artifacts. But that difference is a lot like
"life" or "porn". You know it when you see the difference between,
say, a piece of code and the programmer who wrote it. But to sit back
and _define_ the difference so that it applies generically can be
problematic.
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