From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Wed May 12 1999 - 17:33:30 MDT
From: Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se>
>> A wind up router?
>
>I think this is the way to go. Especially wind-up satelite
>phones. Wind-up PCs and phones are more liberating here than TVs and
>radios, since broadcasting is still a centralized process. Free access
>to information and communication is a very liberating technology that
>makes many current dictatorships untenable or at least weaker. It
>doesn't necessarily topple them (that is in the end up to the
>citizens) but it gives more power and ability to the individual
>people.
Yes, indeed. Power to the people puts the idea of immortality (can you live
forever?) in perspective.
But who gets to decide who will live forever? Obviously not everyone will
get to decide for themselves.
>Of course, dumping stuff like this is no miracle cure, you need to
>provide good information through it, ideally ensure that the users can
>control their own information and set up their own (virtual)
>institutions.
Do virtual institutions have less trouble setting up than other institutions
do? I ask because several of my correspondents deny that virtual categories
exist at all. (So far I've managed to ignore or sidestep them.)
>In the case of Serbia (not that I have the least interest in debating
>that affair), there seems to be some evidence that most of the
>population is being fed a highly biased view of what is happening
>through state media (unlike us, who just get biased media - but at
>least can choose between them :-) and are actually quite misinformed
>about what is happening. Here widespread access would undermine the
>propaganda. But it wouldn't necessarily change the core problem;
>people in Greece, who have access to much freer information, are still
>strongly pro-Serbian (for historical, political and cultural
>reasons). People won't turn into rational, nice people by having
>communications technology - but it likely makes it harder to suppress
>rationality and easier to get useful information to and from
>elsewhere.
If you want to know about the situation in Serbia, I recommend you contact
daliborm@EUnet.yu
He has some first hand experience with it.
Cheers,
--J. R.
CEE CEE Rider:
Conservative Existential Empiricist
Consilient Extropian Environmentalist
(with a pancritical rationalist predilection)
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