The time and manner of invention and evolution do not yield to government nor even recognize its purview. I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the internet will not abide government and I really don't want it to have to come to a head in the form of violence.
Think about it this way: Seven generations hence, do you really think that internet will be a triviality to be 'regulated' by cronies?
Also, cars are the archetypal example of externalized violence that must be countered with government violence. They impose violence on the public and the environment by spewing pollution into the air, and create externalized risk for everyone in their vicinity.
As I'm sure you already suppose, an anarchistic assessment of this results in a different conclusion.
Road construction is the archetypal government activity. You go back to 3000 BC and look at ancient Egypt's sophisticated infrastructure. How did they do it? Government. And compare that to what contemporary societies without government have left us. Pottery fragments.
In other words, I assert that the time for peace without government is ahead, not behind.
"Wenzhou has become one of the richest cities in China under a regulatory regime that borders on anarchism.... for the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure."[1]
[1]https://reason.com/archives/2011/11/15/chinas-black-market-c...
Well you must be rather young and have no idea of the history of the Internet that some of us here have lived through (or you're old and are just oblivious).
All changes to the Internet's root zone need approval by the US Department of Commerce. That's because the Internet is an invention of the US government. It is government's purview since it's government's creation.
You can go out to an audience of laymen and probably fool them, but I remember when there were hosts still manually mapping name to IP in /etc/hosts, before switching over to pointing to sri-nic.arpa. As do others here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're just ignorant of what you're talking about, as opposed to being deceptive. Either way, this is the wrong crowd to try to fool with this - many of us were there when it happened.
I find your position to be equivalent to saying that, because the government dropped an atomic bomb on people, it invented periodicity and the nuclear forces and retains perpetual say-so over their function and mechanics.
"The law" is subject to incredible debate and scrutiny - this is the reason, for example, for constitutional courts. It is also the basis for revolution.
What if more than one entity claims to be the legitimate government? Then what is 'the law'?
Merely reading the federal register is not sufficient to inform someone about the particulars of the law.
Please - read the essay and see if you are find "the law" to be a matter of fact.
Not debated, but only after the fact when challenged. Laws are passed by popular consent, even when they contradict previous laws and they tend to stand for far longer than they should because taking down bad law takes years. You're discussing an ideal "law", I'm discussing actual law. Take gay marriage, illegal for how long... despite always violating the constitution; it just took that long for the courts to acknowledge the discrimination that was going on.
And no, I'm not going to read a few thousands words because you're unable to make your point yourself.
My point is fact, and stands: law doesn't require reason to exist. Yes, eventually, after many decades, reason may find its way into the law, but that doesn't dispute my claim.
This is ridiculous. Not every matter of conversation - especially one so enormous as "what is the nature of law?" can be answered in an HN thread.
There's nothing wrong with reading a few thousand words of a crucial essay to educate yourself. That's what you need to do to be able to think clearly about big topics.
Reading the law will only just get you started. It makes sense to read The Federalist Papers, The Communist Manifesto, The Republic, and many other cornerstones of thinking about this instead of demanding that someone distill thousands of years of thought into a HN comment.
> My point is fact, and stands:
It isn't and doesn't. I asked you a simple question in my last comment that you haven't answered that, for your purposes, may well "make my point": What about a situation in which two different entities both claim to be the legitimate government? Or a society in which large numbers of people regard a government as illegitimate? Or who regard particular laws as beyond a purview which they recognize for government?
What then is "the law?" How many different places to you need to look to find this one law?
This isn't a big topic, I stated a fact, I'm sorry you're unable to cope with that.
> Not every matter of conversation - especially one so enormous as "what is the nature of law?" can be answered in an HN thread.
Fortunate then that we are not discussing the nature of law.
> It isn't and doesn't.
Yes it is and yes it does.
> What about a situation in which two different entities both claim to be the legitimate government? Or a society in which large numbers of people regard a government as illegitimate? Or who regard particular laws as beyond a purview which they recognize for government?
None of those questions are relevant to the point I made and serve only as an attempt to move the goal post because you're unwilling or unable to restrict yourself to the point I'm making; I reject this attempt.
There is no discussion to be had here, I stated facts, not opinions to be debated; it is a fact that laws need not be logical to be passed, you're being a child to deny that; we're done. Whatever your higher point about law is, I don't care.
The question is whether the statement "Legal is the default state for devices that don't use public roads, public airwaves, etc" is a form a No True Scotsman. You are saying that the answer is "no," because this concept of "legal" is something that you attribute directly to the statutory authority of government alone.
The goal posts haven't moved. My hypothetical describes perfectly the state of the internet today: a bunch of governments claiming authority various realms, and worldwide confusion about what 'the law' is or how it is defined and decided.
You won't be taken seriously by saying, "I have decided that a huge open question in political science is just a simple matter of declarative fact that I need not consider." I mean... do you not realize how ridiculous you sound?
If this 'simple fact' that 'the law' is so easily defined and understood as a 'popularity contest' is self-evident enough to warrant this kind of 'case closed' mentality, then why have the greatest minds in the field been wrestling with it since ancient Greece?
If you refuse to consider the question, then of course you get to make up the answer.
So go ahead. The answer can be "yes," "no," or "unknown" depending on your mood, and you'll always be correct.
Your laziness vis a vis reading the seminal works of law has not only the consequence of making you seem stubborn and misinformed for the purposes of this discussion, but also unfit to be an effective citizen generally.
If you can't bring yourself to participate in even elementary academic discussion, why even visit this site? Just to raise your blood pressure?
> There's no reason that roads and airwaves need to be managed by violence.
I said the law doesn't require reason; that's a fact, it does not, unreasonable laws happen all the time. So you don't even have the question right, it's no wonder you can't stop blabbering on about unrelated ideas. This was never about the nature of law, you simply fail to realize that.
That breaks the HN guidelines, as you know. Please comment civilly and substantively, or not at all, even when someone else is being a jerk.
You can't post uncivil attacks like this here, even when someone else is being a jerk. Please don't do it again.
This is a pretty ridiculous concept.
It would just encourage dodgy entrepeneuers to rapidly produce disruptive products without any care for safety or public benefit. Some things need to be thoroughly tested before releasing them into the public e.g. milk formulas, vaccines, cars otherwise they could kill masses of people before anyone has a chance to stop it.
And in fact a place already exists with lax regulations: China. And look what's happened there over the last few decades. So bad in fact that the public desperately looks to Western countries for food and health products.
Regardless, the state is no friend to the environment.
And as I said to the other commenter, I don't think it's reasonable to hold up China, a huge and corrupt state with no meaningful rights to expression, as an example of innovation sans government.
But it isn't, so that proposal doesn't mean anything; if you want self driving cars, you must convince government to allow it. Vehicles require state approval, you can't drive an unlicensed vehicle and the state won't license vehicles they don't know are safe and haven't been approved yet.
> I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the internet will not abide government and I really don't want it to have to come to a head in the form of violence.
It's abiding by government just fine.
Is it?! It seems to be increasingly in a state of tension as governments flailingly attempt to censor and surveil.
Content whose distribution is prohibited on "copyright" grounds is very widely available. My understanding is that drugs and illicit pornography are available on ongoing dark net markets, which are now stronger and more numerous than in the silk road days.
Jobs are routinely outsourced as remote work to the other side of the world, in violation of the spirit of labor laws.
The EFF and other organizations are in a constant cycle of litigation to ward off more impotent laws that threaten to criminalize or civilly sanction already widespread behavior on the internet.
In what ways is the internet abiding the government?
Then, with mechanisation drive-through lattes and texting, a little too many kids were crushed to death, with their severed limbs thrown in the air into their parents’ faces — so we had to change that state of affairs. We ask people to prove they realised they were sitting in armoured tanks, and make sure those tanks acted like expected. When the expectation is “you can go back to texting and sipping your latte, your tank will swerve when needed” that bar is, expectedly, incredibly high.
You are more welcome to introduce any self-driving vehicle that is not independently powered with so much energy that it can kill on impact: clubs who make recumbent bikes are a good example of where to look for hackers in that area.
However, roads and traffic is one area where even the most limited government fan will typically agree that regulation provides benefits well outside the cost. Well regulated road networks provide large economic benefits even to people who don't directly use them.
I see bungling, overpriced and late construction projects. I see utter callousness toward the environment. I see a relentless yielding to more and more and more cars along with cordoning off of pedestrians. I see languishing rails, with road-based competition receiving an effective subsidy (and also no competition at all on the rails, with amtrak, also government-subsidized, having an effective monopoly for passenger traffic).
There is no doubt in my mind that the internet will do roads better than government.