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Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computationDoctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computationPosted Dec 31, 2011 22:31 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation by ibukanov Parent article: Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation
> But those laws would be unenforceable from the day one and would just fail the same way the Prohibition failed.
No.
I think that such laws would actually be very successful. The same way that the war on drugs is very successful.
The problem here is one of perception. If a person assumes that the the purpose of the war on drugs was to actually stop people from using drugs, then it's a failure.
However if you take the approach that the purpose of the war on drugs is to; erode civil liberties, vastly increase the size and scope of law enforcement, create numerous lucrative opportunities to profit from political corruption, create new and very profitable multi-billion dollar industries funded by involuntary payments from the general public, oppress and restrict minorities, exert political control and pressure on other countries in North and South America, create funding sources for CIA operations abroad, and create new subclass of American citizens without the ability to vote or carry firearms (among other things).... then the war on drugs is incredibly successful on all counts!
Beyond a doubt, then, the 'war on drugs' is one of the most successful government policies in the late 20th century.
Just like the 'war on terrorism' is shaping up to be one of the most successful government policies of the 21st.
The reality is that the true purpose of government laws governing the internet, like SOPA, is that they want to be able to control and monitor then ability for citizens to communicate with one another and control wide-spectrum political speech. Just like how they are able to control it on television and radio.
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Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation Posted Dec 31, 2011 22:48 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Wow, that sounds like a lot of mustache twirling. Aside from the lobbying from the prison industry to drive more business, I would call the rest of your points unintended consequences. Of course where these consequences benefit someone they are not likely to work very hard fixing them and the citizenry who is most affected by the negative consequences is not organized enough to fix it. Just because someone figures out how to benefit doesn't mean they caused the conditions.
UN-intended? Posted Jan 1, 2012 12:38 UTC (Sun) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] > I would call the rest of your points unintended consequences.You might feel like skimming over Zion's Elders' Protocols (yeah, conspiracy and all that) to have a better guess at "unintended" -- e.g., No. 17 is directly concerning this thread. It's been hastily and then thoroughly disclaimed but the fact is that the text was either written by a genius foreseer -- or was actually an overheard genuine plan. I'm yet to see another workable explanation for the observed correlation being a honest scientist. Still, care for FEMA camps -- the folks unhappy with general purpose computations and communications are unhappy with conscious general public in the first place. It is not the devices who decide but humans.
UN-intended? Posted Jan 1, 2012 19:23 UTC (Sun) by Corkscrew (subscriber, #65853) [Link] Dude, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a pastiche of every penny-dreadful villain in existence at the time they were forged. The author did not need to be a "genius foreseer"; he just needed to write a list of everything that could go wrong with a country and then find a way of blaming a hated ethnic minority for it (or simply imply that a link existed - e.g. #17 does not actually give any implementation details). The reason it sounds convincing is a little thing called "confirmation bias": basically, if you throw out enough statements, people will only remember the "hits" and forget the "misses". This is one trick TV psychics use to dupe their audiences. You might as well look at the recent pace of technological progress and blame Syndrome from The Incredibles.
Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation Posted Jan 1, 2012 17:09 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
>Wow, that sounds like a lot of mustache twirling.
Maybe. But facts are facts.
> Aside from the lobbying from the prison industry to drive more business, I would call the rest of your points unintended consequences.
Whether or not they are unattended consequences is a exercise for academics and historians. But don't fool yourself, they are the consequences and that is what matters. We can't judge laws by what they intended to do, but only what they actually accomplish.
Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation Posted Jan 3, 2012 14:20 UTC (Tue) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link] We can't judge laws by what they intended to do, but only what they actually accomplish.Actually, you have to judge the intent too. How else do we make better laws in the future? Or are you simply jumping to your logical conclusion by ignoring the intent and that legislation just doesn't work, period, and cannot work. (Maybe it's not your position but there are some anarchists and certain civil lib types that do feel that laws cannot work beyond maybe natural law) That's part of what we want judges to do, interpret the laws. There are bad laws and good laws. There are unintended consequences and then there are intentional loop holes.
Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation Posted Jan 1, 2012 2:43 UTC (Sun) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
> The same way that the war on drugs is very successful.
I suspect that the reason that the war on drugs has not failed yet is that the drugs it supposes to fight are not as widespread as alcohol consumption. With the Prohibition the scale of law violation was much bigger. So I would give SOPA max 10 years or so before the tech industry in US finds it such a pain so it would bye the politicians to abolish it.
Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation Posted Jan 1, 2012 17:34 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> I suspect that the reason that the war on drugs has not failed yet is that the drugs it supposes to fight are not as widespread as alcohol consumption.
You are probably wrong about that. Most people have no idea how vast illicit drug sales are on a world wide business.
Right now it's _VERY_ safe to say that the international drug trade dwarfs the international trade in steel and textiles.
> So I would give SOPA max 10 years or so before the tech industry in US finds it such a pain so it would bye the politicians to abolish it.
No. This will likely not happen. The only hope we have is that we can apply political pressure right now to prevent SOPA from passing. The way the system is setup is that it's nearly impossible to get rid of laws once they are passed.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that law enforcement for these things is not like email filtering rules or something like that. There is no blanket application of the rules that affects all people and all situations. Laws are very selectively applied and this is done by design. The government would not be able to function properly without it. So you cannot depend on financial damage to internet industries to provide pressure to eliminate the law. The law will be selectively applied in order to avoid this fallout.
This is very common in financial laws. Every time a economic crisis comes along the politicians tend to pass a lot of laws and rules in order to appear that they have the ability to control the situation in some manner. These laws require bureaucratic upkeep... departments need to be financed to check compliance, prosecution and courts need to be financed, etc etc.
So these laws typically have fuses or time limits built into them in the form of budgetary controls. The congress will provide financing for 3 or 5 years and then after that they will need to pass another bill to pay for the enforcement. If at the end of that time period the uproar has died down then congress will just not pass a new bill and the enforcement of the law will die off.
This is VERY common. This is typically how it has worked for about 70 or 80 years now.
In the case of SOPA it will exist as a 'Sword of Damocles' hanging above the head of anybody that runs a popular blog, tries to engage in serious political debate, or engages in competition with a politically connected media corporation.
On the face of it the law is lubricious. The idea that somebody posting in the comments or forums on a website could post a link to a video and have that website shutdown based on a simple accusation is insane. It seems like it's unmanageable and poorly designed.
But the goal of the law is not to punish websites for having stupid users that violate the terms of the website.. it's just a tool that can be used to apply pressure to organizations that want to 'rock the boat'.
Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation Posted Jan 3, 2012 7:37 UTC (Tue) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Furthermore, selective application moves power from those who in principle should decide law (elected politicians) to others (lobby-groups, private investigators, police-officials).
And that is a major danger of "everyone is guilty but few are prosecuted" type laws. They give those with the power to decide who to investigate enormous power. Afterall, if everyone is guilty, this means the power to decide who is investigated is, essentially, the power to select who is punished.
Copyright law is probably the most grave example currently. I would guess that 80%+ of people in the 15-35 age-bracket are guilty of violating it during the last year, especially in those jurisdictions where there's not even an exemption for copying for private use. Yet a miniscule fraction of these people are ever prosecuted.
The ones who decide who is investigated, can thus more or less choose to point at any random young person, and have excellent odds of ruining that persons life, if they so choose. And that's not a good situation.
It would actually be an advantage if *all* (or atleast a substantial fraction) of copyright-infringement where prosecuted: this would make the craziness visible, and I suspect the end-result would be an adjustment to make the law itself substantially more sane.
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