[Lancaster] [Fwd: Re: Twitter]

[mp]

Meant for the list:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Lancaster] Twitter
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:10:06 +0000
From: mp <mp at aktivix.org>
To: Ken Hough <kenhough at btinternet.com>


Ken Hough wrote:
> MP, at al,
> 
> As a fairly mature (at least in terms of years) cynic/realist, I am 
> disappointed in the way that otherwise intelligent people continue to bang on 
> about 'rights' and 'freedom'.

I also agree on this cynical level, and I agree to the problematic
nature of rights and freedoms as well from anarchist, irrational and
anti-democratic perspectives.

That said, however, it remains difficult to achieve anything
collectively without some level of agreement or "institutionalisation"
in the abstract. At a minimum some sort of syndicalisation or
federation. Individuals have somehow to be connected to each other and
to the whole. And vice versa. Social organisation concerns that. Rights
have for some time now been a way for agreements to be made.

The GPL is precisely such a good example - not just for software -,
because it treats individuals and the collective in a novel manner: the
configuration between the individual and the collective is very
different under the GPL from what it is like under exclusive, private
property rights as they are known in the capitalist economy.

The aim of the Free Software Foundation is to establish the social
values of the hacker community that they have articulated i the GPL, the
social relations that are encoded in the GPL as a human rights issue.
That is how they work on an idealist level, in the lobbies and so on.
That is their business, but probably also to some degree this list is
part of that movement. At any rate...

Getting real - notwithstanding any ideological, theoretical or cynical
reservations - also means to work with the stuff and institutions that
make up the world. When it comes to software and other infrastructure,
such as roads, canals and satellites, it makes sense, I think most would
agree, in the light of past experiences, that to maintain such
infrastructure as de facto public or collective (or whatever term is
useful to distinguish it from the despotic rule of exclusive private
property), is a good idea. That a park is public means you have a right
to enter and the "state" a duty to not make that impossible for you.

...

The suggestion that without Microsoft's questionable business practices
there would have been no Internet is pure speculation - but what is
known is that it wasn't until 1995 that Microsoft came to really embrace
the Internet as one of the last key IT players. The conventional,
capitalist reasoning that says that only private interest can generate
progress obviously means that Debian and Apache are impossible.

What we can presumably also learn from current financial crashes - and
the way that they keep deepening - is that huge, central powers -
whether Lehman Brother or Microsoft, super tankers in the sea or nuclear
power stations - are dangerous, inflexible, slow moving entities. Poorly
designed. It is advisable not to keep all your eggs in one basket. A
system designed to concentrate powers enourmusly in one place is
generally, these days, considered harmful, as it were. These systems are
founded mainly on private property rights.

In that sense rights do exist - private property rights, very well
defined and muchly discussed the last 7-800 years, beginning with
peasant movements demanding something like them and in the end the
capitalists taking them for themselves. Those rights exist: in the law
books, in our social relations and so on. Breach them and feel the
effect. They make our world - structure our world in the way that they
do, because they largely determine the basic aspects of research,
innovation, development, production, circulation and distribution of
almost all economically significant goods and resources - until Free
Software came along. With a new rights concept.

Rights thus exist in the abstract - they are written down in human
language - and they exist in the particularities of the social relations
that they give rise to. It is here also interesting to take note of the
fact that privacy, which we might think of as a good thing for the
people, it was really instituted as a means to protect corrupt
politicians and protect private interests from public scrutiny. The two
kinds of rights are philosophically and structurally compounded.

I see what you mean, Andy, that rights don't exist in the abstract, but
I think that is an unfortunate use of the term abstract. Rather, rights
are exactly abstract - like all other ideas and most knowledge that are
not directly intuitive and experimental - and that therefore there will
always, like between any other signifier and what it signifies - be a
discrepancy. But they are also manifest in a very real way in social
relations.

The signifier is calculable, exact, while the signified is incalculable
and elusive. This problem - in terms of the analogous gap between
justice and law - has been widely discussed the last hundred years in
legal and political philosophy and forms also the legal basis for the
concept of state of exception, terrorism laws and things like
Guantanomo. Because the law can never be just, it is (violent) force.

That means that there will always be great potentials for differences in
opinions, taste etc., even about pretty much the same thing among pretty
much like-minded people. Such tensions have been central to philosophy
at least since the Romantics revolted against reason and rationality
being used as the foundation for the introduction of the private
property rights with which reason and rationality go hand in hand
philosophically and which determines most of our lives. Those rights
have decided - as self-fulfilling prophecies - that we are
self-interested rational agents. So we have become a lot like that - you
are what you eat. There is, however, no such thing as a natural state of
humans and no bigger charlatan, as Emma Goldman famously said, than the
one who invokes the concept of human nature. Unless, perhaps, we say
that human nature is adaptable and can be squeezed into any form
(something we seem to share with rats and cockroaches).

Private property rights are one of the most central manifestations of
the system (largely liberal philosophy) that believes in the exact
nature of rights and of representation in political parliaments. It is a
package deal.

So, while it is obvious that there will always be differences in
opinions, it does not mean - at all - that there no rights in the world
and that no further rights can be won or the ones already instituted
lost. Despite philosophical incoherence and a horrific past and present
of corruption, rights do exist, for better and worse, until we can bring
down the state and organise society in another way.

What I mean is that it is futile to discuss whether rights exist or
whether they can be changed, won or lost. Denying that rights exist is
denying our very history in the modern period. We can discuss whether
they should exist and whether it is a good idea at all to have such
imprecise, forceful things. Stallman is on a crusade to reform one of
them: copyright. He found a way to reconfigure it, by adding some
ingenius subclauses (or software distribution terms) that shift the
emnphasis from exclusion to distribution, thus rearranging the way in
which the individual, who still gets her attribution, relates to the
collective. Instead of self-interest and exclusion, the core of private
property, the core of the Free Software model is cooperation and
sharing. As rights attach to the object that they are organised by, they
also circulate with them and perpetuate the core aspect. Thus Free
Software has given rise to a lot of derivatives with a sharing and
cooperation focus. Private property has given rise to more greed,
extreme greed even (and climate change).

We stand at cross-roads between a sharing culture or a greed culture -
between life culture and death culture.

Did you really read this far?

-mp







> 
> It seems to me that in the real world there are no 'rights' to anything. By 
> general consent and the odd war or two, we eventually manage to agree to 
> grant our selves certain PRIVILEGES which may be and often are withdrawn.
> 
> Fact: There are no rights in this world.
> 
> In the eyes of some, 'freedom' means being 'free' to do whatever one wants. 
> Unless one were to be the only individual on earth (or at least in the 
> locality) this clearly isn't workable. Our actions impinge on others so as to 
> curtail their views of 'freedom'.
> 
> Unfortunately (or not?), the human species doesn't function like colonies of 
> ants where individuals always act for the benefit of a colony. With notable 
> exceptions such as Ghandi, we are driven by self interest.
> 
> We are not an altruistic species! Major advances in human endeavours are 
> driven by the possibility of personal gains. Unless we were to be genetically 
> re-engineered, this is unlikely to change for a very long time.
> 
> Yes, I know advances are sometimes initiated by farsighted persons, but 
> development is invariably driven by the possibility for commercial, 
> political, or military gains. Such enterprises might well benefit a 
> community, or perhaps even a majority.
> 
> For example, it would be difficult to argue that Bill Gates and the eventual 
> commercial clout of Microsoft didn't bring about the widespread and 
> economical availability of our PCs and some of the 'freedoms' that we enjoy 
> today. Of course, not everyone is happy with this. 
> 
> That's not to say that I condone all of the present or past ruthless business 
> practices of that company, but it is as a result of their success that we now 
> have easy access to personal computers, the Internet, etc, and hence the 
> opportunity to even consider making related choices wrt 'freedom'. THIS WOULD 
> NOT HAVE HAPPENED without the degree of success that Microsoft have had.
> 
> So let's get real!
> 
> I believe that we should consider ideals/goals for ourselves and for society, 
> We must also recognise that others are likely to hold to other ideals and 
> ideas as to how to work towards these.
> 
> If your own view of 'rights' and 'freedom' is to succeed, then you must 
> convince others that they too will benefit.
> 
> Ken Hough
> 
> 
> On Friday 20 February 2009 18:18:38 mp wrote:
>> Mike Dent wrote:
>>> Sorry I had to come back in on this.
>>>
>>> The Internet was developed by universities and military to provide a
>>> means of communication between their sites, I am sure you all know that.
>> This is a very simplistic perspective on a series of complicated
>> convergences of factors (from Greek poetry, Roman rhetoric and medieval
>> mystics, through Babbage, to phone systems, information theory and so
>> on), the most important one of which, perhaps, is the development of the
>> Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (http - or the World Wide Web), which was
>> very explicitly crafted for freedom of use (this is not equal to
>> gratis!): http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144
>> http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/06/7127.ars
>>
>> Read Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web for his own story of the last leg.
>>
>> See also this comprehensive article about network neutrality:
>> http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?70+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+51+(spring+2
>> 007)
>>
>>> Since when did that infrastructure become something that should be free
>>> and we should have a right to use? Or, have I got the whole thing wrong
>>> and you guys do not expect it to be your right to use those networks for
>>> free?
>> There is no such thing as a free lunch anyway - however, this is a
>> matter of freedom. So far we all pay for a hole into the internet by
>> giving money to Richard Branson or someone like that.
>>
>> You have an odd approach to the issue of "rights". I have already
>> spelled it out, but here goes again: rights don't drop from the sky,
>> they are not something you "have" unless you fight for them. If not
>> hundreds of thousands of people had died for the rights you enjoy now,
>> you wouldnt have them. This also includes the right to private property
>> of which I imagine you are an supporter. The middle classes, no matter
>> what one might think about the bourgeoise/capitalist revolution, secured
>> the rights you enjoy to live, if you do, in your own house and
>> accumulate wealth under your roof and in the bank.
>>
>> Also, once gained, rights still have to be maintained. They can be
>> eroded very quickly; for instance most privacy rights gained in
>> processes that began a bit more than a hundred years ago are
>> disappearing through such draconian laws as the UK Terrorism Act 2000.
>> More background on privacy here:
>> https://knowledgelab.org.uk/Privacy&Surveillance
>>
>> Rights and civil liberties struggles in general are inter-generational
>> processes. You fight today for your children's rights tomorrow, but with
>> your attitude there won't be any, since you neither seem to want any,
>> nor to realise that they are not given or naturally correct/incorrect.
>> They are social constructions - we choose to make them or we don't. If
>> you prefer to have a closed down Internet I can't for the life of me
>> understand where you are coming from, unless you just want to provoke
>> mindlessly.
>>
>>> When did it get the fluffy name Cyberspace or cloud or such things, does
>>> that make it easier to claim our rights on it?
>> Cyberspace as a term predates the web. However, reification and myth
>> making are crucial tools in the historical struggles for civil liberties
>> and freedoms. For sure.
>>
>>> It is a network of wires and routers/switches that people own. Do we not
>>> have to pay for the use of that equipment or pay for the power to run it
>>> all, the manpower to install it?
>> You miss the entire point here. It is not a question of payment - so
>> Richard is right, it seems: you have the wrong end of the beer/speech
>> stick. I refer to previous post for clarification about what is at
>> stake. That said, I do think it should be free to use, like the library.
>> In fact it is a library.
>>
>>> Perhaps in future we will have a internet tax licence to pay, every time
>>> your packets need access to another country you will have to pay tax on
>>> for that country before they proceed, kind of funny but I guess it could
>>> happen :)
>> That is pretty much what is on the cards - but I fail to see the funny
>> part?!
>>
>> -m
>>
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