Two related links over at Smart Mobs:
The ability of everyday people to communicate peer-to-peer without routing their messages through a central authority is a direct challenge to, err, central authority. They want to monitor and tax your communication. Fully distributed systems like Skype, KaZaA and BitTorrent challenge that ability.
The distribution of smarts to the network edges is going to be a major test for (small ‘l’) liberal democracy (which is somewhat incomplete in both the above countries.) Will the rights of the individual right to communicate freely survive the entenched interests of the powerful central bureaucracy?
I wonder if the First Amendment in the US will mean anything in a world where you can say anything you like but you’re deprived of the means of getting the message to its audience. Are we witnessing a re-run of the McCarthyite era, with the reactionary forces of copyright, indecent speech and monopolies of content and distribution? The communist era was about centralized vs. distributes control of economic resources. Is the central control of information resources the new communism?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:54 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/187.