Scavengers of the Physical Universe | Hacker News Reader

Scavengers of the Physical Universe

mises.org

17 pointskiba14 comments

> "No reflection on this topic can fail to credit the market economy for what has happened to us. Despite every attempt by governments to hobble it, the digital universe as we know it was made by the market economy. It is a market-built world, which is to say, a world built by human choices, entrepreneurship, and service one to another."

The internet and the web were mostly built by government research projects -- as everyone knows. When someone seems to be so carefully and tendentiously writing that out of history, they start sounding like a nutty ideologue. It makes a disappointing end to the piece.

Google, Amazon, Firefox, and Linux?

Much of what we use today is maintained by private institutions, non-profit or not. Government may have built the technology, but it is the entrepreneurs that realize the benefits of the internet.

On the flip side of government inventions, we don't know what will happen if the government have not funded the creation of the internet. It's the unseen of history that will forever elude us.

I believe that academia, with their interest in information technology, would have invented the internet in one form or another.

An example of what could have been: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?_r=2&#...

Addeinum: http://mises.org/daily/2211

This mises.org article explain my view far better than I could.

> Much of what we use today is maintained by private institutions, non-profit or not.

Agreed.

> Government may have built the technology, but it is the entrepreneurs that realize the benefits of the internet.

Agreed. Both the public sector and the private sector played an important part. Entrepreneurs built on the foundations provided by DARPA (tcp/ip internetworking) and CERN (http and html), and we're all the better for it.

> On the flip side of government inventions, we don't know what will happen if the government have not funded the creation of the internet.

What we do know is the walled garden approach of private sector companies at the time, such as Compuserve. We also know that Tim Berners-Lee tried to get private sector hypertext vendors interested in the WWW, but none were interested.

The unknown are far more important than what we do know. It is the unknown that blind us rather than the known. A library with lot of unread books are far more valuable than a library filled with books you already know and read.

What you have demonstrate is just one scenerio amongst many, with some unwritten assumptions built-in.

To think that you know enough the operational mechanism of history to predict alternative path of history is hurbis.

Anybody can come up with reasons for past events, because we have hindsight. However, it takes real talent to be able to predict the trends of history.

That other mises article also couldn't help ending with:

> "In other words, government involvement accounts for the internet's continuing problems, while the market should get the credit for its glories."

It is a, rather juvenile seeming, monomania -- that is quite off-putting.

Government, or some cooperative superstructure, has a place, as does some kind of market. Although it seems to me that the internet and its goodness exemplifies cooperation more than market, and I expect many others would agree.

There's far more to a libertarian than just free markets. They're all for (peaceful) voluntarism of any kind.

Indeed. If the market economy had had its way in the early 1990s, we wouldn't have open access and HTML, but islands of walled garden networks (MSN, AOL, Apple eWorld) running closed binaries.

(That scenario would probably resemble the mobile phone market quite a bit. "Sign up for MSN, get a free Dell PC and 2000 free online minutes! * Incoming email messages now just $0.03 each + $0.99/megabyte for attachments.")

I was under the impression that the world wide web eventually force the walled gardens ISPs to connect to the rest of the internet.

However, I could not found details to support or disprove what I said regarding this matter.

All I could get from my useless google searches is this ancient 2005 thread and it was about AOL connecting to IRC and usenet(in the second post): http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/7630.htm

A very interesting article. I have an affinity with the ideas he expounds in his article, but I don't get the connection between that and the libertarian apologia at the end. In particular he seems to have missed the fact that the internet would probably not be here without (a lot of) government funding.

Great essay. But what about scavengers of the digital universe? I used to relentlessly keep local copies of digital stuff---a lot like the Russian guy in the story, but with files instead of junk---but now I've slowly learned to let a lot of that stuff just live in the cloud. Why do I need a local copy of every song ever when I can listen to anything I want in a few clicks anyway?

Are we moving away from scavenging digital stuff too, or is that just me?

I think we are just getting adjusted to the specifics of "digital goods" in light of the internet.

"Digital hoarding" is using same logic we use upon physical items. Except that, when what you need is also kept in millions of copies on the internet, you realize you don't actually need to store it locally.

The story of the russian friend reminds me of this article I read yesterday. In it the grandmother who starved evading the Nazi's came to America after the war and stockpiled food even though it was abundant:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/20/jonathan-...

I like this essay and it has some similar points just like PG's stuff essay.

It also contains the genesis of why I am yet optimistic about lifestyle and environmental issues; with less stuff, you need less storage space, less housing, and less waste. With less stuff there's less stuff to move around. With more technology even moving that stuff around might simply be nuclear or solar instead of coal.

Having exploded out of the 1950s with the ability to make lots of stuff, and having had the Russian in the article's reaction writ across a society, I think we've actually seen the peak materialistic consumption for an average 1st worlder now. We've only just begun down the curve but I think it can and will get a lot better.

It's really, really important that we not stifle innovation; where we are now is not sustainable, but where we are headed can be. (And it won't even require massive sacrifices; how the modern-day Puritans will bitch!)

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