[tt] [silk] Anarchy

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Udhay Shankar N <udhay at pobox.com> -----

From: Udhay Shankar N <udhay at pobox.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:33:41 +0530
To: Silk List <silklist at lists.hserus.net>
Subject: [silk] Anarchy
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Reply-To: silklist at lists.hserus.net

I found Danny O'Brien's latest musing thought-provoking. Comments?

Udhay (Danny, are you out there?)


http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2008/07/19#1216510740

2008-07-19»
wide anarchy»

Prompted by Dave Birch's talk on digital money at OpenTech, I've been 
going on a long mental escapade through my own political roots, and the 
history of the Net.

I think that it's inevitable that the dominant explanatory context and 
the direction of successful advances in technology and society heavily 
influence the politics one subscribes to. I grew up cheerleading 
microcomputers and later the Net, and lived through the vindication of 
their (material) success, so I'm naturally going to be a fan of 
decentralisation -- actually, that's a pretty empty statement. I don't 
think anyone actually comes out as against decentralisation these days. 
Nobody says "Me, I'm a big fan of increased concentrations of power." 
It's like being against democracy -- by the time you've explained why 
you have your doubts about it, no-one is listening to you any more. The 
main question on this topic in our time is not "is decentralisation good 
for the body politic?" but "how much of it should we have?".

Which is not to say that the conventional answer would be "a lot". 
People get rather shifty if you start on any project of power dilution, 
because such projects represent a loss of control to almost anyone who 
matters in the current system: even Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition want 
something to remain loyal to. You can disagree with the direction a ship 
is taking without wanting someone to come along and pull out the 
steering mechanism (or replacing the captain with a voting committee of 
the passengers).

Decentralisation deliberately pulls power away from the center. Either 
it works, and total control ebbs away. Or it doesn't, and power gets 
re-concentrated in entirely random (or worse, actively dangerous) hands. 
Since almost anyone making a decision to decentralise has at least some 
access to the current levers of power, that makes it an unpleasantly 
radical decision to make.

Those who first built the Net and first to be drawn to it (the two 
groups are inextricably merged) were fans of decentralised power 
structures.(One of my favourite second-hand stories of the early years 
of the Net was from someone who wasn't involved, but was around the 
research labs at the time. He claimed that the ARPANETters were always 
the flakes who everyone else avoided; obsessives out to pursue an idea 
that no-one else took seriously. If you wanted to have tenure in 
computer science, you stayed well away from packet-switching loons back 
then. He may have been bitter.)

If you're a real fan of decentralisation -- and your sole lever on 
power, as a packet-switching loon, is designing and distributing 
instruments that deliver decentralisation to everyone -- the question 
"how much" becomes much more pertinent. Just how far can and should you 
take this? What happens when you turn all the dials to 100%?

Anarchy is the answer to that question. The truly hardened advocates 
would then say: "And would that be a bad thing?"

Those hardened advocates, in the middle history of the Net, were the 
cypherpunks. The strongest statement on their position was -- is -- the 
Cyphernomicon, and in particular Tim May's Cypherpunk Manifesto: a 
prediction and prophecy of a radically-decentralised world, created 
inevitably by virtue of the widespread use of strong cryptography.

Would it be a bad thing? Just as it's hard to cheer on extreme 
centralisation of power as a good thing, it's hard to imagine complete 
elimination of central power as a good thing. I'm not saying that you 
can't advocate for it: in fact, most people in liberal democracies in 
our times default to advocating for it, with the assumption that it'll 
never get so far as to turn into something horrific (or transformatively 
beautiful). Call it a lack of idealism, call it a failure of creativity. 
It's just hard to imagine it. Go on: imagine a world without 
governments. Despite what John Lennon (or Vladimir Lenin) claims, it's 
not easy at all.

I've been thinking a lot about that difficulty, because I think it 
illuminates what we want from decentralised power, and what we think the 
practical limits are. It also challenges us to see beyond them.

One of the most vivid positive descriptions of a world under the 
Cypherpunk model of anarchy would be David Friedman's Machinery of 
Freedom. But Friedman's book is a series of arguments, not a vivid 
picture of daily life in such an environment. The closest he gets is a 
depiction of what he says is a close equivalent to the 
anarcho-capitalist vision, medieval Iceland.

Right now, I'm intensely enjoying S. Andrew Swann's Hostile Takeover 
Trilogy, a space opera which includes as its backdrop an anarchist 
planet of Bakunin. It's a great counterbalance to re-reading these 
broadly positive depictions of extreme decentralisation: Bakunin is a 
rough and vicious world, the sort of anarchy that most people would 
imagine would follow the collapse of an all-powerful State. On the other 
hand, it also paints a strong picture of sympathetic characters who 
rather like Bakunin's backdrop. They remind me of the cypherpunks. Is 
that what extreme and irreversible decentralisation would lead to: a 
world order only a cypherpunk could love? Or a place where ultimately, 
any group could find comfort and freedom?



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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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