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At 5:59 PM -0400 on 5/27/02, Dave Farber wrote:
> We can no longer endure what you have
> tolerated. We will not allow you to be passive spectators at our
> steady destruction, or to content yourself with pro forma gestures.
> We are forced to make your survival depend upon our survival. Our
> problem must become your problem. The people who attack us are your
> coreligionists and your fellow nationals, and you are better
> situated to deal with it than we are. Root them out, or we will
> destory your cities as our cities have been destroyed. It has come
> to this, and we have no alternative. In three days we will destroy
> one of your cities in retaliation.
And this, boys and girls, is how empires are created.
I do not doubt this would work, and, frankly, it may be the West's
only recourse for survival, someday, as detestable as it may be.
Rome, or the British Empire, as Churchill notes in my .sig, below,
wasn't built in a day. Empires are built by winning every time
someone picks a fight, and, later, by picking fights on purpose and
winning those, too, until, sooner or later, you don't win enough
fights and you stop being an empire.
I'm not sure what will break this cycle of power-inflation, but I
like to think that Peter Huber's geodesic networks create, in turn,
geodesic societies. That Moore's law reduces transaction cost --
price discovery, transaction execution, clearing and settlement -- so
much, as Coases' theorem tells us, that firms -- and political units
- -- become more efficient when they operate in recursively smaller
units over time. That spinning off companies makes considerably more
money than merging them, which is true, even now. That smaller
companies create the newest, most high-paying jobs, and by far the
most shareholder wealth, true even now. That just like mechanization
changed agriculture into an industrial enterprise, and information
technology turned manufacturing into an information enterprise, true
even now, geodesic networks will reduce information technology into a
"wetware" enterprise, where information, ("software" as Nobel
Lauriate Kerry Packer calls anything you can copy) becomes
asymptotically cheaper like commodities and manufactured goods did
("hardware"), and that the only thing that will matter is knowlege,
non-replicable *decisions* about things. Wetware.
Finally, that profit and loss will be become so molecular, if you
will, that it will be driven to the device level instead of at the
level of state-created "persons" called corporations. That markets
will replace monopolies for physical force. That software like
network and financial cryptography protocols will replace laws and
guns as a way to absolutely control property, financial or real,
commodity or production.
On the other hand, it may be that there is no solution but to ride
the tiger until we can't hold on anymore, no matter what the
consequences are. Maybe life is just like that. It certainly has been
that way from the time we became sedentary around wild grass crops in
the fertile crescent tens of millennia ago, learned agriculture after
that, and built cities at the intersections of our trading networks.
We've been building ever-increasing power-hierarchies, cities,
nations, empires, from then until the present day, Building larger
and larger social hierarchies until those "networks" can't handle the
load and crash, rebuilding in the rubble of the collapse, bigger,
better, faster, cheaper, as time marches on.
Lots of people on the net are working on the former scenario, and so
am I. I agree with Huber that, contrary to recent evidence :-),
Moore's law increasingly makes networks geodesic instead of
hierarchical, and that process, in turn, creates *dis*economies, not
economies, of scale, and that, sooner or later, as the processing
density per square meter of civilization increases, we'll get better,
faster and cheaper, all without getting bigger "firms", if you will,
political or otherwise. All without increasingly larger nation-states
killing millions of innocent civilians in the process, like they did
to obscene excess in the last century. Without billions of people
this century if the trend continue, just, as the obscene joke about
the dog goes, because they can.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"...our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid
possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force,
often seems less reasonable to others than to us." -- Winston Churchill,
January 1914
