Jeremy wrote:
] While I appreciate the entertainment value, I think that
] "Sneakers" offers a futurist's vision of the situation. It's
] supposed to make you think ... but it's not trying to be
] "right."

I know, I was just trying to be funny... Perhaps a bad time as you seem to be dawning on some sort of revelation, but I couldn't resist.

] When I see the popular debate repeatedly circling around the
] same targets, bookending the variously weak and/or alarmist
] arguments with portentous excerpts from "1984", I am reminded
] of Flatland.

I must admit that I'm not sure what you're getting at with the juxtaposition you are making. I must still be thinking in 2D.

In any event, while that article's arguments may have been weak and alarmist (it was a liberal newsweekly) the perspective wasn't wrong. It doesn't matter if you've got a bunch of illegal mp3s in your ipod as long as you don't listen to them, but assuming that you do, we've got a problem, and probably an intractable one.

Total information awareness is a solution to the "problem" of super-empowered individuals that leaves a bad taste in my mouth for much the same reason that I don't like Bill Joy's book burning. It attempts to respond to the maturity of the individual by arming the state.

There are two ways that feudal societies handled the development of books. One was to become republican. The other was to become totalitarian. One response accommodated the increased power of individuals by providing a means to wield that power without resorting to violence. Its was a mature, realistic response to the situation, and ultimately successful. The other was an attempt to regress the empowerment of individuals through more effective "safeguards" that continued to buttress the old nature of the state. It was a way of band-aiding an obsolete system because that arrangement had certain benefactors, and it caused widespread human suffering where-ever it was attempted.

The reason Fukuyama is wrong is because we just empowered the individual again, by as much of a relative jump as we did in the 1500s, and we are going to have to through this process all over again. Some will wisely choose to find ways to ratchet down the concentration of formal power so that it comes in balance with reality, and some will choose to buttress the present status quo.

The danger I find long term, living in America as I do, is that we're the benefactors of the present arrangement, and so we are most likely to resist change despite our previous successes and the obvious reasons for those successes, and we're got guys like Fukuyama telling us that its not even something worth thinking about. So our ideas are all statist. Unfortunately, we're also on the cusp of this thing. I don't think I know of anyone who is coming up with alternatives. Other then maybe the cypherpunks.

RE: On Privacy