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Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism
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Civil Society
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Coercion and Force
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Corporatism and "Crony Capitalism"
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"Ecological Wisdom"
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The "Edge"
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The Fist
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Government and the Political Sector
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Luddites, Luddism, and Neo-Luddism
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Hackers and the "Hacker Ethic"
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The Market
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The Military-Industrial Complex
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Plutocracy
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Sociobiology
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Sustainability
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YETZER HA RA and YETZER HA TOV
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18th century folk commentary,
reported by Adrian Vaughn in
the New Internationalist letters column.
quoted here
Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons
"A reprint of Garrett Hardin's classic piece."
Excerpted from Science, 162:1243-1248, 1968.
"(Maybe, by some standard) you'll get your "fair share." But this outcome is a disaster. When you dined alone, you spent $6. The extra $34 of steak and other treats was not worth it. But in competition with the others, you chose a meal far out of your price range whose enjoyment fell far short of its cost. ...
And so we read of the freshmen congressman eager to cut pork out of the budget but in trouble back home because local projects will also come under the knife. Instead of being proud to lead the way, he is forced to fight for the projects, to make sure his district gets its "fair share."
Matters get much worse when there are gluttons and drunkards at the restaurant mixing with dieters and teetotalers."
"The tragedy of the commons predicts only three possible outcomes. One is the sea of mud (The resource in question is wrecked by uncontrolled use). Another is for some actor with coercive power to enforce an allocation policy on behalf of the village (the communist solution). The third is for the commons to break up as village members fence off bits they can defend and manage sustainably (the property-rights solution)."
"Can you believe that Melville Dewey once said, 'free as air, free as water, free as knowledge?'
Free as knowledge? Let's get real, this is the modern world --- air and water no longer come cheap!
Hey, you want breathable air, you better pay your air conditioner's power-bill, pal. Free as water? Man, if you've got sense you buy the bottled variety or pay for an ionic filter on your tap. And free as knowledge? Well, we don't know what ``knowledge'' is, but we can get you plenty of data, and as soon as we figure out how to download it straight into student skulls we can put all the teachers into the breadline and the librarians as well."
"The short-term interest in partitioning the Web lies in the hope of gaining supreme dominance of one of the resulting mini-nets. Capturing most of $12 Billion can surely be more attractive than capturing a small part of $300 Billion, even if your actions lead society as a whole to lose $240 Billion.
In contrast, the long-term prospects of proprietary strategies are dim, with the value of each mini-net dropping over time from $12 Billion to $10 Billion."
BERLIN -- Members of Germany's famed Chaos Computer Club gathered here this week expecting to celebrate the group's 20th anniversary by talking up the joys of hacking. Instead, they have been spending their time urging their fellow hackers around the world not to hack. Specifically, CCC leaders called on hackers not to attack the networks and websites of Islamic groups, no matter how upset they may be about Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. ... 'We ask people to remember that the Internet is a communication media', said CCC leader Andy Mueller-Maguhn, who is also Europe's representative on the ICANN board.
'In this situation, it's even more important to have communication. If there is no communication, because of denial-of-service attacks or whatever kind of technical means, then people don't even have a chance to understand the other side. And this would be a basis for escalation. And I think it's very important now to get in diplomatic mode.'
Steffen Wernéry, a founder of the CCC along with Wau Holland, sounded a similar note of caution. 'People are very angry, so I understand it', he said. 'But we hackers find that it's always a better way to let information free. The philosophy is don't hack networks or the free flow of information'. "
"One way involves establishing private-property rights and allowing markets to develop....
The second and more direct way is to have a strong central authority that regulates people's behavior and punishes deviations."
-- my links -- ed.
"The spam problem, though new in form, is an instance of a very old and familiar dilemma, which economists often call the tragedy of the commons. When any resource is both valuable and freely available, people tend to overuse it. Moreover, everyone anticipates that everyone else will overuse it, so everyone tries all the harder to get while the getting is good. The result is a run on the resource. The tragedy is that everyone's least-favored outcome -- the depletion or exhaustion of the resource -- is assured.
Centuries of theory and practice have unearthed two effective remedies. One is to appoint a conservator with the unique power to mete out the resource: say, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The other is to create property rights to the resource and allow a market to develop. What people own, they conserve."
"The market has its advocates. They’re called conservatives.It's important to note that many societies have not been particularly concerned about, nor good at, passing these things on undiminished to their children.
And the government has its backers. They’re called liberals. (Oversimplification [which I'm sure the writer intends], and references specifically late-20th-century USA definitions of the terms.)
But who’s looking after the commons — the vast realms of nature and society that we inherit together and must pass on, undiminished, to our children?"