We are not Consumers, We are the People, as in We The People
katzr.com
katzr.com
Notice that the author is attributing words in a blog post on thehill.com to "the government and my democracy".
Congress is a black box to us. I've read the text of CISPA, and I don't think it's unreasonable, but you have to trust the people using it, and we don't. That pretty much ends the conversation.
My friend has been working as a PA in a law office that's involved in health-care legislation. We recently had a fight about Internet regulation-- copyright. He took the position that we should write good legislation before somebody else skews it in their favor. I agreed, but I thought it was premature. You write the legislation now and you risk things like nation-wide lock-in to IE6. Software takes time, and the Web's immature. Right now, it's very noisy, it's not private, it's socially chaotic, and it's not quite secure enough - online elections, anybody?
That said, the things that IT touches tend to become more open in the long run, and eventually that'll include Congress. I don't know if CISPA is a good bill, but I don't think it helps to make a cause against it either. If we care this much, we need to participate in the writing of the laws. If we can't do that, then the Web isn't ready yet, and Congress stays a black box.
EDIT: brevity
Given that laws mean whatever those in power say they mean, the test is not whether you find the text reasonable, but rather whether they can find the text to mean something you would find unreasonable.
Sorry for the snark, but my point is laws are always like that, and there needs to be some trust somewhere. (The system is supposed to be structured that you may trust the system, if not the books- checks and balances and whatnot) If you have nothing you can trust, you're up a crick without a paddle.
Then you're totally and utterly screwed. Ordered civilization is built on trusting our civil institutions. Not necessarily individual people, but the institutions as a whole. Once that trust is evaporated, the civilization is done for. You become Bangladesh instead of America.
I don't think we're there yet. I think the impression is built more on fearing what you don't understand. But if you think we are there, that you can't trust our institutions in their capacity as institutions, then it's time to move because there is no coming back from that.
As for fearing what we don't understand, perhaps it's more rejection of what we do understand. "Reasonable" laws get abused and turned against the people. As for trust, what's wrong with writing the laws to assume less trust of institutions?
No law that has any utility can be written in a way where you can assume you don't trust the institution enforcing it. It's like writing an OS kernel assuming you can't trust ring 0 code.
More concretely, why shouldn't judges, prosecutors, and police be bonded?
The point is, however: There is no reason not to insist on the same guarantees for government offices. There is nothing magical about trust in government or of fallible people working for government. It can be bonded, insured, and rated like any other transaction where significant liabilities may need to be covered.
I have been tossing around the notion that a lot of laws should have a built-in trial period. I haven't been able to figure out how it could work, or grasp the consequences, but a way to automatically turn off a law unless it's converted into being permanent might be nice.
"Such term does not include the purpose of protecting a system or network from efforts to gain unauthorized access to such system or network that solely involve violations of consumer terms of service or consumer licensing agreements and do not otherwise constitute unauthorized access."
I get that people need a reason to grandstand, but can we grandstand about something more worth grandstanding about? Right now there is some big evil oil company trying to figure out how to get away with taking the cheapest measures possible to protect water resources in the course of fracking activities. There is some coal company pushing yet another iteration of the total bollocks that is "clean coal technology." Can we make noise about something like that instead? Because that's actually going to have repercussions and effect people, unlike the wholly imagined nefarious terms of CISPA.
Where does it mention that the government views citizens as consumers? From what I understand, it says that government would have access to data about consumers, as in 'consumers/customers of private businesses'.
Anyone can misunderstand or misread something, I don't blame the author. What's irritating is how many upvotes this has and how many people have piled on.
Citizen America was an experiment in rational government that succeeded with flying colors in some ways (secularism, increasing confidence in popular government) but struggled immensely with the division-of-labor question, ultimately falling into bitter conflict (then war) over slavery.
Producer America started with the Industrial Revolution (which solved division-of-labor issues) and ran through the Gilded Age, and ultimately fell apart with the Great Depression, which taught us how bad things get for everyone if people can't buy the things being produced by industry.
Consumer America started with the New Deal and Keynesian economics, reached its cultural height in the 1950s-60s, and is now unraveling because it's unsatisfying and culturally empty. Also, the foreign policy (need to justify this hyperconsumptive lifestyle in which people eat 3x as much meat and do 2x as much driving as makes sense) has been horrid, to the point that even most Americans don't support it.
Cosmopolitan America is driven by a generation of people who see themselves as global citizens and want to improve the rest of the world through organic, democratic, and compassionate means (no more "bomb 'em till they love us"). Also, it seeks to allow more people to have involvement in production. It turns out to be a very unrewarding existence to be a corporate drone whose only real contribution to life is to consume (especially as those pointless, menial jobs get cut, thanks to technology).
What we're seeing now is the conflict between Consumer vs. Cosmopolitan America.
Cosmopolitan America, if it exists as a mass paradigm, is at this point mostly aspirational. Our entire culture and economy revolve around consumption. Most jobs are in service, not production. It is difficult to be a citizen of the world when the world is so disunified -- see attempts to do anything of use to combat global warming.
Meanwhile, capital is doing its very best to coopt any nascent consciousness of Americans as producers rather than consumers. You can see how quickly, for instance, hipster culture, which started out as anti-consumer (thrift stores, reclaimed industrial spaces, living in the cracks of society producing art instead of having normal jobs) was commodified and turned into fashion, and people who were drawn to hipsterdom were channeled into more appropriate avenues for buying.
Keynes/Galbraith didn't fail so much as it was abandoned. The thing that peaked in the '50s/'60s was the large monolithic corporation ( as more in Galbraith than Keynes but still ...).
People drive too much to change land use. It's about the cost of a square foot of housing as a function of distance to where one works.
Cosmopolitan vs. Consumer sounds an awful lot like GenX/Millenial vs. Baby Boomer. It's still consumerism, it's just iPhone consumerism. I rather like Robin Hanson's "farmer/forager" model better.
I'm pretty sure I won't like what I find.
Words matter; "citizen" is a more restrictive class of people than "consumer."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/19/anonymous-blackout-...