Fun & accurate, great set up, but wrong conclusions. The author ultimately paints a picture of western idealistic hacking & cybercommercial dominance, but they say this is enforced & backed by once unchallenged but quickly crumbling dominance of intellectual property rights & western legalistic dominion/Imperialism.
This worldview was an entertainable perspective in the preconnected era, in the age of standalone software. But the world today runs in an interconnected mode, is based on Services-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS). People & nations dont respect the terms of service & licenses because they're in obesiance to the Empire, they do it because they just want in on, want access to the great vast online places that will kick em out of if they start mucking with the terms of service. Companys operate in cyberspaces lightly regulated supranational domain, and states have minimal leverage they can apply to force behavior upon greater cyberspace. Notably, EU is very much at the frontier of layering in steep requirements & regulations, setting an example for the rest of the world that any state has the freedom to make demands & push around online entities in any way the state pleases; somewhat ironic given what a boon to liberty & possibility & enablememt the open framework of cyberspace has created.
Viewing the cyberspace we have as a legal framework the rest of the world accepts is false. The internet is a dumb pipe, is connectivity. Anything in the way of connectivity is quite literally anti-internet. No nation or state may have their own take, their own legalistic roadblocks that are internet: they winniw down the whole to make a lesser thing below the internet with their impositions. The privilege of being interconnected to the global whole comes with a realizatuon that you are connecting to other places that wont follow your rules. Contrary to what the EU has insisted upon for itself.
Putting aside the absoluteness lf Cyberspace supranationalism, I dont see the clash & challenge this article describes as real. The modern software world revolves around software running deep inside data centers, not on our personal computers. Other mations simply dont have the mainframes in their jurisdiction to boss around or use force against, so rebuffing their business is merely an impact on the bottom line. The legalistic modes are self enforcing, the terms of service dont need marshals to be enforced: we simply turn off access to violators, cancel their accounts. There has not been an opportunity for non-Western nations to misbehave or flout the supranational cyberspace standards, because the new things we want to use are online services, or deeply integrated with services. This isnt imperialism or legalism, it's just a matter of were the desireable software runs & what possibilities remain to those not running the data centers.
Changing topics again, peering at my crystal ball, one of the things i really enjoyed about this article was itcs setup & it's exploration of the mature of open source. Drawing my own projections, I think the value based western mode ultimately shines through. Individual empowermemt & embracing possibility, idealistic hacking, & the whole panolopy of values that embrace letting people get good, letting them explore- it creates positive vibrancy, is how energy & creativity sustain & maintain.
The EU can legislate to protect their people from FAANG because these companies do not have Carnegie level monopolistic influence like in the USA. I'm not sure of imperialism, but in congress, the more well-funded candidate wins over 90% of the time. Lobbying is also a legalized system of first world bribery, people talk about "taking the money out of politics", but it has always been this way. Money is a portable form of power, and it is fuel to political machines.
In fact, the Invesco QQQ Trust Series I fund, which tracks the top 100 nonfinancial public domestic and international corporations in the NASDAQ, is heavily dominated by tech. Of the top 10 holdings, 9/10 are tech companies, with the remainder being Costco. In the information economy, these companies have taken the place of the steel, oil, and railroad giants of the 20th century. Instead of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt, we have had Jobs, Page, Zuckerberg, and others. Of course this is a rotating cast, but the idea is the same.
So yes, accessing interconnectivity via the internet is more important to Europeans than the corrupted legislation of the US, but it's not like they don't have their own problems. Especially in regards to energy and the current conflict in Eastern Europe. The petrodollar is what props up the US economy, if Western Europe buys energy in anything other than US dollars, then our government cannot continue vigorously printing money without Weimar levels of inflation. That is really where imperialism comes into play, it props up the economy of Western Europe.
I agree that the ideas of exploration, self-education, and the drive of the individual is important to the Western and especially American tradition of technological innovation. In terms of individual empowerment, we also have the ability to delete social media accounts, to boycott companies like Amazon, and to use alternative search engines. In many cases, it is not a preference but a necessity to use an engine besides Google to sift through SEO optimized content and find the information I'm looking for.
This is in response to you and this article, because the narrative of Western decline is peddled so enthusiastically that it brings itself under scrutiny. If it was such a self-evident truth, then why does it have to be constantly pushed on us via mass media, via Wall Street billionaires, via foreign propagandists? Because it is a lie, it is a lie that serves the international ruling class, a global alliance of ultra wealthy oligarchs that are betting against their own people.
Yes, this has little to do with open source, but honestly this article has little to do with open source. It attempts to paint a historical narrative, which is the bread and butter of historically effective propaganda. To touch on this topic as this article has, open source and Linux in particular is great for circumventing tech monopolies like Microsoft and gaining full control and privacy over a machine that you own outright.
Similarly, boycotting tech giants, Amazon included, improves individual quality of life as well as living conditions for the entire nation. That is individual empowerment, speaking truth to power and making conscience decisions with your attention and consumption. Unless another Teddy Roosevelt comes along to bust up our tech monopolies and reign in the political influence of extreme wealth, this is really our only recourse to turn the tides and bring back real innovation.
That is what we need, real innovation, not frantic bids to explore and capture "data as oil" drilling sites. Innovation triumphs over brute force and human subjugation every time. That's what we need not just to protect our livelihoods, but to push the progress of humanity forward. Hewlett Packard, the birthplace of Silicon Valley, was not built on brainstorming ways to addict people to content aggregators and harvest their data.
It was bold ideas, real intellectual labor and not just psychological exploitation. Above all, technological innovation that contributed to the overall lives of mankind as a whole. It wasn't about exploiting, controlling, taking, but exploring, building, and contributing. That's the core idea of open source, passion and freedom. This is really at the core of the hacker ethos, freedom for the sake of freedom and innovation for the sake of wonder. The end result is a more free and open society. At the intersection of capital, the end result is an economy based on improvement and not exploitation. One is sustainable, the other is not.
> the world today runs in an interconnected mode, is based on Services-as-a-Software-Substitute
really now? the entire world?
> People & nations dont respect the terms of service & licenses because they're in obesiance to the Empire, they do it because they just want in on, want access to the great vast online places that will kick em out of if they start mucking with the terms of service.
you have discovered the old ways; many Empires of old operated exactly this way, with speech, coin, writ of passage, conscription and income stability, all checked at the borders, just in meat-space time, not nand-gate time.
> Viewing the cyberspace we have as a legal framework the rest of the world accepts is false.
wait, I have a catchy name for your insights "code is law." Well the "code" is new, not the "law".. your timer frame of reference only sees in seconds it seems. Law is quite old, and works socially in ways you are describing, as if only computer networks do that!
> Companys operate in cyberspaces lightly regulated supranational domain, and states have minimal leverage they can apply to force behavior upon greater cyberspace.
tensions between merchants (with ships post-1500) and stationary govt, are not new! West coast of Europe, top to bottom, check it out yourself.
> The privilege of being interconnected to the global whole comes with a realizatuon that you are connecting to other places that wont follow your rules. Contrary to what the EU has insisted upon for itself.
don't get me wrong, I appreciate this insightful rant, BUT. you are describing the "outpost" experience.. who is interacting with whom? via what format or forum? most people do not sit at the edges of civilization.
> Other mations simply dont have the mainframes in their jurisdiction to boss around or use force against, so rebuffing their business is merely an impact on the bottom line.
yes, cloud computing anxiety, agree this is serious among people who take power seriously. Not everyone is an artist or decadent Bohemian.
> The legalistic modes are self enforcing, the terms of service dont need marshals to be enforced: we simply turn off access to violators, cancel their accounts.
"we" LOL .. you must be pretty comfy to think yourself as immutable part of "we." Get ready, life may have some unpleasant surprises for you in the "free" world!
> This isnt imperialism or legalism, it's just ..
LOL - absolute control of vital access for others is not a mean scary arm of industrial-capitalistic-militarianism, its a big cuddly services machine, with instantly strict rules, thats all! not!
This worldview was an entertainable perspective in the preconnected era, in the age of standalone software. But the world today runs in an interconnected mode, is based on Services-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS). People & nations dont respect the terms of service & licenses because they're in obesiance to the Empire, they do it because they just want in on, want access to the great vast online places that will kick em out of if they start mucking with the terms of service. Companys operate in cyberspaces lightly regulated supranational domain, and states have minimal leverage they can apply to force behavior upon greater cyberspace. Notably, EU is very much at the frontier of layering in steep requirements & regulations, setting an example for the rest of the world that any state has the freedom to make demands & push around online entities in any way the state pleases; somewhat ironic given what a boon to liberty & possibility & enablememt the open framework of cyberspace has created.
Viewing the cyberspace we have as a legal framework the rest of the world accepts is false. The internet is a dumb pipe, is connectivity. Anything in the way of connectivity is quite literally anti-internet. No nation or state may have their own take, their own legalistic roadblocks that are internet: they winniw down the whole to make a lesser thing below the internet with their impositions. The privilege of being interconnected to the global whole comes with a realizatuon that you are connecting to other places that wont follow your rules. Contrary to what the EU has insisted upon for itself.
Putting aside the absoluteness lf Cyberspace supranationalism, I dont see the clash & challenge this article describes as real. The modern software world revolves around software running deep inside data centers, not on our personal computers. Other mations simply dont have the mainframes in their jurisdiction to boss around or use force against, so rebuffing their business is merely an impact on the bottom line. The legalistic modes are self enforcing, the terms of service dont need marshals to be enforced: we simply turn off access to violators, cancel their accounts. There has not been an opportunity for non-Western nations to misbehave or flout the supranational cyberspace standards, because the new things we want to use are online services, or deeply integrated with services. This isnt imperialism or legalism, it's just a matter of were the desireable software runs & what possibilities remain to those not running the data centers.
Changing topics again, peering at my crystal ball, one of the things i really enjoyed about this article was itcs setup & it's exploration of the mature of open source. Drawing my own projections, I think the value based western mode ultimately shines through. Individual empowermemt & embracing possibility, idealistic hacking, & the whole panolopy of values that embrace letting people get good, letting them explore- it creates positive vibrancy, is how energy & creativity sustain & maintain.