Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
It helps to remember that the buccaneers were all sailors, and a lot
of those benefits applied to King's ships as well: robust partying,
shares of prizes, good men could rise through the ranks (some early
captains could barely read) and even health benefits.
  

    
The original bucaneers began as guys who hunted feral cattle, smoked the
meat, and sold it in port.  I think the term 'bucaneer' even comes from the
French term for the smoked meat -- 'viande boucanee' -- and the jerky makers
were originally called 'boucaniers'.  The established important trade ties,
both in jerky, tobacco and sugar and not a little contraband.  Eventually
some of them established raiding parties and the rest is, if not history,
then lore.  But there's no question that as some of these folks were
castaways and deserters from European navies, they borrowed a lot of ideas
from their service with this or that royal navy.  So I'm not really
disagreeing with Brian here.

About Al Qaida, it just seems to me that it is one of the first contemporary
cyberstates, basically because it is an underground network with robust
economic interestes (ranging all the way to honey production), a stong
positical/religious ideology, and its own security/military services.  There
is some dispute about to the extent to which the various cell have used the
internet and encryption for communication, but there are reports that they
have employed a range of tools including steganography.  Fortunately, it
looks like Al Qaida's days are numbered, but if they had picked smaller
targets or eschewed terrorism altogether they might have flourished.
I think Al Qaida is probably just the first of many such networks, and
ultimately networks of that character are going to inherit the earth from
the nationstates.  For better or worse.
  

    
Um, excuse all the typos.
  

    
What's the future for nationstates, then? Do they persist alongside
these other networks? Do they barely fog the mirror (as in *Snow
Crash*)? Do they wither away?

To come at it from the front: can the proto-cyberstates, whether Al
Qaida-ish or cypherpunk-ish, do their thing without actual
nationstates?
  

    
I'm not a futurist, which is just as well because futurists don't have a
clue either, but I have to say that I like the _Snow Crash_ scenario in
which they barely fog the mirror ("Who's he?  He's the President of the
United States of America.")

But who knows, tribes and city states and monarchies are still with us.
It's hard to think of a governance structure that has completely died out.
  

    

I was just musing, as I read this book, that while some
of what makes up cyperspace is not so new (we had a
communications revolution around the telephone and
around radio), some of it is so very new that there
can be no way of knowing how it will all turn out.
And in that context, Peter, I think you are doing a
masterful job of presenting evidence and analysis on
several facets of cyberspace from several points of
view without trying to tie all together into answers.

Well done!
  

    

What is interesting me especially as I move along
through the book is the distinction between governance
of a purely online community, like the WeLL or the
LambaMOO, on the one hand, and governance of the
Web as it intersects the real world where "nation states"
are used to governing.

The former is probably a pretty good sociological study and,
as such, ought to be left undisturbed.  The latter has
implications for the society, country, and real world that
we live in.  I'd be very careful about upsetting the principles
and traditions that govern the real world just because we're
bedazzled by the possibilities of cyberspace.
  

    
About "upsetting the principles and traditions that govern the real
world," my instincts are to say that those principles and traditions
are of (at least) two types: some are nearly fundamental to our social
organization and very nearly not susceptible (or at any rate not
likely) to being upset, others are more superficial and get monkeyed
with all the time in the real world

I want to go back to some questions about enforcement mechanisms for
cyberstates. (We touched on this around post 13 or so.)

Peter, you said that it's easy to find enforcement mechanisms for
cyberstates (toading/account deletion being the example readily at
hand). There are two factors that I think make enforcement in complex
cyber-situations more difficult than you've suggested.

First is the problem of competing jurisdictions. As you've noted, this
is also a problem across the VR/RL divide. But in the cyberstate
dimension, it also perhaps raises some sort of "international law" or
"interstate commerce" sort of issues, since there's a worry about one
jurisdiction jumping the gun on enforcement relative to another's
preferences, or screwing around with someone else's packets for
advantage.

Moreover, the MOO-like situation is exceptional in that a wizard
controls the actions of the MOO server and so has a monopoly on toading
and other actions. Most situations would have more complex
interactions of power and code, and would require trust and cooperation
across geo- and cyber-spaces to take enforcement action. "If you won't
control your users . . ." to keep them from sending Spam, intrusion
attempts, running open mail relays, failing to patch holes in Microsoft
IIS, or whatever -- then there's a problem. (And we get enforcement
efforts with international-law-like issues, such as the MAPS Realtime
Blackhole List.)

If you need a question . . . enforcement is more complicated than you
let on above, so what do you say about that?
  

    
Shannon, I don't really see a clear distinction between laws withing
cyberspace communities and laws with "real world" consequences, mostly
because I don't see an interesting distinction between  the so-called "real
world" and the so-called "virtual world".  I'm inclined to agree with Bruce
that the better distinction is between laws that we are inclined to monkey
with and those that we aren't.  Probably the latter sorts of laws end up
being built into cyberstates without a whole lot of debate.

Bruce, about enforcement, there is an issue about what happens between
systems.  So, an ISP can control its own users but not those on another ISP.
 I see the intuitive force behind your question, but on the other hand, it
is easy enough to say "control your users or...we block your entire ISP".
Again, in practice I think that the real danger is that ISP's share
information about difficult users or blackball certain users or kinds of
users.  One classic case of this was the SamIam case, in which a user was
booted from MIT's MediaMOO for charges imported from LamdaMOO (this is a
case discussed in the Stivale article).  So again, I don't see enforcement
as a problem.  I'd be more worried about overzealous sysadmins.
  

    
But if the only possibilities are as harsh as blackholing traffic from
some IP blocks, I think that's a problem: it cuts those folks off from
traffic from your users, too, and "the Net" deteriorates into an
amalgam of more local networks. It seems to me that it's valuable to
have mid-range sanctions rather than only more-or-less capital
punishments, and that those mid-range sanctions require cooperation of
other parties (who may not be so bothered).

Your remarks remind me, though, of another issue I wanted to raise
from the very first chapter of the book. Barbrook's essay, "HyperMedia
Freedom," argues about the consequences of privatization -- and
capitalism itself -- for the development of the Net, based on
historical and other considerations. Contra arguments about state
censorship and the Communications Decency Act, he says that 

"For many on the left [and I take it that he means to include
himself], these multimedia corporations are the greatest threat to free
speech on the Net. As happened in radio--and later television--the
desire to attract a mass audience can be a far more effective method of
inhibiting political radicalism and cultural experimentation than any
half-baked provisions tacked onto the end of a Telecommunications Act."

and

"Freedom of expression on the Net is threatened not only by the state
but also by the market."

Do you find this way of thinking at all persuasive?
  

    

  re: #35 -- gawd, I wish people like Barbrook would stop and *think*
before they rant idiotically.  Yes indeed corporatization of the media
and the airwaves has been a great inhibition on free and diverse ideas
and expression -- but that situation resulted not from capitalism but
from the refusal to allow anything like a free market in spectrum to
ever develop in the first place.  I agree emphatically with him that
the multimedia corporations are one of the top two biggest threats to
free speech on the Net -- but this has nothing at all to do with anything
close to "capitalism" unless you redefine that word to mean something
more like "corporate socialism".

  Geez, people like that could be such great allies if they would just
pull their heads out of their posteriors, drop the standard rhetoric,
and *think* for a change.
  

    
I tend to agree with <rab> on this one.  We don't have anything close to a
free market operating in the domain of media.  I also have this idea, but
not yet a good argument for it, which is that the internet is just not a
very good vehicle for the delivery of vanilla content.  It is not just an
accident that we find so much fringe content on it.  I think there is a deep
way in which it is optimal for delivering fringe content and that it is with
this sort of content delivery that we are going to see some of the more
successful internet business ventures.  Again, I don't have an argument for
this.  Just an intuition.
  

    
Its interesting that some of the most popular "MOOs" or "MUDs" around
are the (totally proprietary) Massively Multi-User Role Playing
Games...MMRPGs. Another M abbreviation.

Participants in games like Asheron's Call or Legend the Bloodpledge
are in electronic realms which have their own currency, economic
systems, their own armies and police. The penalties are typically
confiscation of assets, temporary death (death in the game), or
permadeath (expulsion from the game).

There is an interplay between what is permitted by the wizards running
the game (the CoC or code of conduct) and what the population will
tolerate. Sometimes this can erupt into open revolt, such as when
online demonstrations were arranged in the Legend world, and people
stormed the (electronic) barricades of the game company. At other
times, the games wizards can be more lenient than the society they host
would like, resulting in frontier justice and people leaving the game
(taking their game fees with them).

Perhaps the same old RW dynamics of individual as citizen (subject to
the coercion of the state...to a point) vs individual as taxpayer (who
can move their money, and themselves elsewhere) are reappearing in a
new form.
  

    
Good points, Kirsten -- and we're back to the issue of what the users
choose as determining the order of things.

I'm intrigued by Peter's intuition about the inherent fringiness of
the Internet. One reason, I suppose, is that "vanilla content" is mass
content of the sort that is usually broadcast or mass mailed.
Broadcasting and and direct mail advertisers accept that they fail with
a lot of recipients, but aim to make up enough on volume that they
still have a satisfactory return. 

The interactivity of the Net works against that by setting up
expectations that cost more to satisfy than the costs of a boatload of
glossy brochures. The Net's relative "unchannelledness" works against
that by increasing the competition for attention.

Which is not to say that one or another "interactive television"
project or WebTV-like thing might not succeed in the massification of
the Internet audience.

Even then, barriers to entry may be low enough that "fringe" entrants,
who aren't so much motivated by financial return on investment
themselves, always have a place (and more effectively than in
meatspace).

Is that the start of the kind of argument that would please you,
Peter?

(Oh--and I don't have the book in front of me this time, but I don't
think Barbrook said "free market," just "markets.")
  

    
Bruce, that is a better argument for the fringe-friendlyness of the web than
I currently possess.  All I have is a story about sour cream containers.  It
goes like this (according to a packaging guy I once met):  Years ago the
Lilly-Tulip corporation had a profitable (i.e. good profit margin) container
that they sold to sour cream makers.  Question:  how do they sell more?  One
natural idea would be to sell the container for other applications -- dairy
products with more mass appeal (I neglected to mention that this was in the
1950's when sour cream was not widely used -- principly in certain ethnic
cooking).  I'm told that the Lily-Tulip people did something else; they
hired a number of cooks to come up with recipies that incorporated sour
cream and then distributed those recipies to "women's magazines".  Now what
is the moral of this story (if it is true)? I think it is that sometimes,
for reasons we don't understand, certain containers are optimal for fringe
content and that if you are in business with these containers you don't want
to sell them as vehicles for the delivery of vanilla content.  So it is with
the internet.
  

    
Kirsten, can you say more about the Legend world demonstrations?  That
sounds really interesting.
  

    
Peter, if I remember right, you're travelling today. I hope when
you're back online you'll tell us about the Crypto Anarchy and Al Qaida
talk you gave.

I'm also wondering what advice you have for aspiring anthologists.
You've written books and articles yourself -- how different is editing
other people's work, as you've done in the High Noon and Crypto Anarchy
books? Any pitfalls to avoid, or tricks of the trade you can share?
  

    
Peter,

The Legend demonstration was reported in this Time article:

http://www.time.com/time/interactive/entertainment/gangs_np.html

Legend is a strange phenomenon: an interactive virtual world based in
a real country - Korea -  in which a significant proportion of the
country's population participates (with some 2 million active accounts
of a population of 45 million).

As such, items in the game have real-world value, and betrayals in the
game can have real-world consequences (which is actually what the
article is mostly about).

This latter is in part due to the greater "communications spectrum"
offered by the virtual game world environment. Not can only can
participants read what people say in real-time, but they can also see
how they behave in a crisis and the game world gives an illusion of 3D
physicality (including gesture). So, people feel closer to each other
in the gameworld (compared to say a chatroom), but are still not
sitting face-to-face, which means that grave misjudgements can and do
occur.
  

    
Ah, it helps to get the name right. "Legend" is of course, "Lineage".
Apologies.
  

    
That's a fascinating phenomenon. Thanks. Anyone know of similar goings on in
"the West" over MMRPGs?

The use of force offline looks like an enforcement mechanism for an emerging
cyberstate. Here, again, we see the value of out-of-band communication!
  

    
That Lineage story is fantastic.  As far as I'm concerned, if people are
willing to pay "real world" currency for virtual weapons, or characters, or
information about characters, that is evidence that a real live economy has
emerged in that online world.

My talk was actually about this phenomenon, Bruce, but also with some stuff
about al-Qaida thrown in.  I gave a talk at a workshop called CHAOS
University, which is run by the Standish Group -- an IT consulting firm in
Boston.  It was pretty interesting, and there were lots of capable people
attending -- mostly CIO's.  I was just talking about some of the themes in
the _Crypto Anarchy_ book, and about the emergence of cyberstates with
robust undergroud economies and sovereign legal systems.  One can see how
the Lineage phenomenon shows this to be both possible and not too far off.
The point about al-Qaida was that it was a kind of prototype cyberstate and
that it was just the first of many to come (hopefully future versions will
be more benign).

I sat in on the whole CHAOS U meeting and learned quite a bit.  Disaster
recovery was a big theme, as you might imagine.  Obviously all data needs to
be backed up continuously (is one back-up enough?) and the whole idea of a
corporate headquarters is probably going to go the way of the dinosaur.  It
looks like large corporations are going to have an al-Qaida organizational
structure before too long (distributed etc.).
  

    

Hi, Peter...
could you run down how al Qaida is "cyber" and how it is older-style "cell"
structured?  Or are those the same?
  

    

>That Lineage story is fantastic.  As far as I'm concerned,
if people are willing to pay "real world" currency for virtual
weapons, or characters, or information about characters, that
is evidence that a real live economy has emerged in that online
world.<

I don't get that.  It seems to me players are paying "real
world" currency *in the real world* to enhance the entertainment
value of the online interactive experience.  I don't see that
as a real live economy *within* the interactive experience.

What am I missing?


   
  

    
<<I don't see that as a real live economy *within* the interactive
experience. What am I missing?>>

Actually, a number of players of Lineage and other MMRPGs do it as a
way to supplement their incomes. There is a ready market in hard-to-get
 items (e.g. look at Everquest items on E-bay), and there is a small
number of professional players who specialise in obtaining and selling
these items. They do this by any means necessary, not least deception
(which is permitted in the game world), hacking the game servers (which
isn't), but mainly by trade.

In this sense, money in the game can be translated into money in the
real world. The purchasers may purchase entertainment, the vendors are
doing it for the money. 

The kind of violence reported about Lineage has not been seen much in
the West, thankfully, perhaps because the game is designed to establish
feudal states which can impose taxes - whereas most western games
don't work that way. 
  

    
(And, Peter, what about your advice for aspiring anthologists?)