Redesiging a Broken Internet: Cory Doctorow [video]

The key point I heard, and I'll embellish a little further; -- legislators are passing laws like DMCA thinking they are merely trifling with entertainment options, but they are mucking with critical infrastructure, the central mediating artifact of our lives, maybe even the platform for our existence. Tread lightly.

Thesis: the high level problem is that general purpose computing (and general purpose manufacturing, like 3d printing) dramatically lowers production and distribution costs in the face of established and ingrained financial and societal structure. This expresses itself in multiple ways in the real world. The author tries to grapple with these but is always so far into specific cases that the root causes remain hidden.

1.) Cost of production and distribution is lowered below profitable margins for several large industries including entertainment and news media.

2.) Regulation of the means of manufacturing chains has been a useful tool for the governance of products, consumers and society (guns, drugs, chemicals).

3.) Lowered costs, where they can be gathered instead of passed to consumers, means high margin profit businesses (Microsoft's business model).

4.) With lower communication costs, 'services' are an emerging (and now very established) model to replace or pair with the 'restricted machine' model.

The problem is that pockets of accumulated Capital, established market leaders (and often entire industries), and conventional mechanisms of regulation are all trying to resist the giant transformational changes that the digital front could represent. They have succeeded for a full generation now and the new generation doesn't understand the terms of the issue.

This is not to say that this is a purely bad thing. These transformations completely upend the world. The US government (or whichever) needs to cope with these dramatic changes - either by softening them or by undergoing radical transformations itself. For example, one might think it's a good thing that guns don't cost $8, can be produced by anyone, or lack serial numbers and other forensic signatures.

To welcome the utopic world that Cory Doctorow (and I) espouse we need to figure out a way to structure society so that $8 anonymous guns don't represent a serious problem. Until there are solutions to that problem it is inevitable that legislation will do everything it can to balance the benefits of general purpose manufacturing with artificially raised costs and barriers to criminalized enterprises. Doctorow recognizes that the 'balanced' solution - 'services' and 'pseudo-general purpose machines' - are a bad deal. But he does not yet recognize that without answers to some difficult societal questions so are the others.

Comprehensible Examples from the news that show a trend of dangerous and inevitably technically incompetent control and surveillance.

Doctorow is a great speaker, well versed and full of citations and recognises that an educated populace and individual liberty are the true wealth of nations.

You might think such a seemless and high bandwidth delivery is well rehearsed but the same seemingly effortless intersections of facts and culture occurs spontaneously in the Q & A - as a speaker virtuosic.

The crypto wars, the copyright wars, the war for general purpose computing, chilling effects on vulnerability disclosure, drm, de-CSS - these define the limits of electronic possibility.

Freedom is being eroded by totalitarian feature creep - Doctorow is one of the few technological evangelists who realised this very early on.

Lets be clear here, CD is primarily a science fiction writer (feel free to look at info up yourself), not a programmer/engineer (like Richard Stallman), not a researcher (like Michael Geist), not an activist (many many examples we all know) or quite frankly anyone of any relevance. He's the new breed of self-aggrandizing web whore that gets himself shoe horned in "tech" sites or simply via his dumpster blog Boingboing. To stay relevant he takes popular internet news (say gamergate) and takes the most hardlined politically-correct stance on it. A great example of this would be how he recently co-authored a fictional book about a "female gamer". I mean... comon...

For the sake of the internet please ignore this person and support people who make a real difference. (I fully expect to be voted down for this by not brainlessly applauding these hipster heroes)