tHE LAST two weeks have been uproarius in the computer hobbiest world. Firstly there was the so called victory over the various anti-piracy bills set out by the US congress and secondly there was the FBI's moving to shut down Megauploads.
I'll address the second issue first because there's what we might call elementary stategic factors at play. (As an aside I thought the FBI's remit was domestic law and order and overseas operations were the responsibility of the CIA - in actually that was something that file sharers regarded as a loophole - namely the fact that the net is global and exceeds
national jurisdictions. It's something that is destined to be corrected eventually and in fact
It's an issue that the lawyers will solve but then it points to another issue. Microsoft lost many lawsuits but they were trivialities in that by the time the issue was resolved their opponents were long bankrupt. The same holds true with the record industry which at one time was being sued by over forty states - the operation was a success but the patient died.
As JP Morgan said to someone in similar conditions "The law is slow and weak but I am no and I shall ruin you." So while A there is no jurisdiction established and B there are no transnational laws in place this won't stop governments from proceeding to protect what they see as their interests.
The American civil war was between the manufacturing north and the agricultural south at heart and likewise we may suggest that the two major players in American politics are the oil industry and the entertainment industry - neither of which has been shown to be very altruistic. As Robert E. Lee might suggest the choice of ones allies may have to do more with where you come from then anything else. Coming from NYC I am more or less forced to side with the Media people because the Texans and their allies have been a disaster for the northeast.
FWIW you can draw analogies between the lackof control of goods and the financial crisis. In both cases the situation was formerly
controlled by the fact that the goods had to be physically present within national borders - something that is no longer the case. But this is not the issue I wish to address today)
As we know, victory in warfare is achieved when one side convinces the other that they cannot win. Any superior general will tell you that a large part of victory then is pyschological. In military theory there's sort of two poles of thought: the one which I
just referred to and the one that is sometimes associated with Clausewitz. His background was gained mostly fighting Napoleon and his theme was that if you're going to fight and win a war you have better be prepared to put lives and wealth on the line, for an extended period of time.
Let us retreat for a moment and refer to two primary axioms of warfare. One is that an attacking army ordinarily should outnumber the defenders by three to one. This is quite fungible and can be effected not only by the quality of the defensive structures but, importantly by the perception of the attackers by the defenders.
The second axiom, which is stronger is that a highly organized, highly trained and equiped unit with defeat a larger on without those advantages in most cases.
Referring again to Von Clausewitz, his most famous saying was "War is policy carried on by other means." Often this statement is not understood in it's true meaning. Ordinarily it is believed to mean that when economic and social policies between nations are not sufficient then war ensues.
To restate this however one could for instance say that when the war of the state against it's citizens no longer can be won then the war must be carried on against non citizens. The war of the state against it's citizens can also be understood as the war of property verses biological life forms.
It is a given for instance that people cannot be forced to obey the law. Society functions, to the extent it does, by people willingly going along with the legal structures of their society. The cops can't catch everyone, but they can catch enough to prevent most people from doing things that the rulers of the society wish to prevent.
Unfortunately this can lead to a very curious and paradoxical mind set. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't work.
For instance in the first world war Germany invaded France and the two sides lost millions of men basically in a stalemate over no man's and. In the second world war the mechanized forces of the Wehrmacht invaded France again and in a matter of weeks , with little loss of life, the war was over. As to which was the better outcome I am not to say.
Consider this on a smaller scale. You have a number of forces and you have been told to administer a medium sized city. You have two alternatives. You can go in as a quasi friendly force, which in turn encourages the resistance and results in the death of many people on all sides, or you can go in and immediately wipe out ten percent of the
population which ends the resistance and the blood shed.
The logic being (correct or not) that by applying force at first one save's lives in the long run.
Let's hope we never again have to make these sorts of decisions.
An offshoot of this paridigm is, of course The Blitzkrieg, and it's later day application the schock and Awe theories which are based on the idea of terrifying the opponent into immobility through superior and overwhelming firepower.
In politics this means you don't want to appear as a reasonable person - you want to scare the pants off the opposition until they are happy only to stay out of jail.
Much has been said of the seeming eagerness of the last century to engage in mechanized mass murder but it should not be overlooked how different warfare was prior to the last hundred years.
In the American Civil war and prior, people would go out on hill sides and watch the progress of the battles knowing that they were classified as non combatents and hence were out of the picture. Even if you happend to be in the way of
Shermans's march to the sea you had weeks or days to get the heck out of the way. In modern conflict the civilian has no such warning. At most one has a few minutes of air raid sirens
One of the amusing, or perhaps disturbing aspects of the annual meeting at Davos this year is that the problems are well known but there is no conflict between competing solutions. It's fascinating. One dares venture to guess the reason why this is is because the reality of the situation is not able to be borne into consciousness.
As Freud might say, "Everything that consciousness forbids our understanding of in it's true light must then appear to us as a joke."
The joke in this case is that nation's having lost the urge to go to war with each other have turned their sights upon their own people.
Of course, it's a nice war, thusfar at least and what is more it is a neccessary war, but it is war nevertheless.
The egyptians ruled great numbers of people for hundreds of years and when one looks at their portraits in stone they do not seem to have been an unhappy people.
To return to the first part of this essay though a strong, confident empowered class may rule over a much larger number of subjects. That's essentially what we are faced with.
This is the essence of the new world order.
But it is not difficult to suggest that systemic removal of all highly qualified and skilled individuals from the lower orders is the price that must be paid. Ideally, in the past there have been formats by which the talented could rise but the numbers do not encourage and as the brutal assessment goes "The first world war was bad but it did have the virtue of killing off a high percentage of the eropeopn aristocracy, especially the Brits.
Otherwise there will be attempted empowerment of the masses. I don't wish to sound Machevellian here - either way a price must be paid.
To repeat and I am not saying anything that is not said behind many a closed door- in order to control the masses they must be kept isolated from each other - they must never learn of their common interests or goals, lest in recognizing of their actual power they bring down chaos on all of us. That's the Burkean viewpoint, but Burke at least understood the impossibility of controlling the American colonies and limited his approach to the mother coutry.
Sometimes the devil you know is better then the one around the corner.
If you understand this immediately many things will become obvious - for instance the need to keep people as stupid as possible. The need to keep them frightened of imaginary monsters.
I jest that sometimes it seems the only way to bring about a paradise for ourselves is to create a hell for other people.
My basic feeling is that some sort of underground movement will arise because only by denying the current states the information needed to control the populations can survival for the masses at least have a chance. In the past the problem was solved by immigration of course, but, as any anthropologist will tell you it's not so simple. The people who move in will become the dominant group and those who are then displace become, er, leprechans.
It's not quite the golden rule is it?
