{"id":5368,"date":"2010-09-13T17:19:48","date_gmt":"2010-09-13T21:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=5368"},"modified":"2021-05-07T18:29:09","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T22:29:09","slug":"qotd-an-alternate-history-we-might-have-suffered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/09\/13\/qotd-an-alternate-history-we-might-have-suffered\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: An alternate history we might have suffered"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Thought experiment: imagine an Internet in which email and web addresses were centrally issued by government agencies, with heavy procedural requirements and no mobility — even, at a plausible extreme, political patronage footballs. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that?<\/p>\n

I was there in 1983 when a tiny group called the IETF prevented this from happening. I had a personal hand in preventing it and yes, I knew what the stakes were. Even then. So did everyone else in the room.<\/p>\n

Thought experiment: imagine a future in which everybody takes for granted that all software outside a few toy projects in academia will be closed source controlled by managerial elites, computers are unhackable sealed boxes, communications protocols are opaque and locked down, and any use of computer-assisted technology requires layers of permissions that (in effect) mean digital information flow is utterly controlled by those with political and legal master keys. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that?<\/p>\n

Remember Trusted Computing and Palladium and crypto-export restrictions? RMS and Linus Torvalds and John Gilmore and I and a few score other hackers aborted that future before it was born, by using our leverage as engineers and mentors of engineers to change the ground of debate.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Did we bend the trajectory of society? Yes. Yes, I think we did. It wasn\u2019t a given that we\u2019d get a future in which any random person could have a website and a blog, you know. It wasn\u2019t even given that we\u2019d have an Internet that anyone could hook up to without permission. And I\u2019m pretty sure that if the political class had understood the implications of what we were actually doing, they\u2019d have insisted on more centralized control. ~For the public good and the children, don\u2019t you know.~<\/p>\n

So, yes, sometimes very tiny groups can change society in visibly large ways on a short timescale. I\u2019ve been there when it was done; once or twice I\u2019ve been the instrument of change myself.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Engineering history”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2010-09-12<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thought experiment: imagine an Internet in which email and web addresses were centrally issued by government agencies, with heavy procedural requirements and no mobility — even, at a plausible extreme, political patronage footballs. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that? I was there in 1983 when a tiny group called the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,10,41,15],"tags":[590,1235,186,686,58,322],"class_list":["post-5368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-liberty","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-engineering","tag-esr","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-futurism","tag-internet","tag-nannystate"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1oA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5368"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65607,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5368\/revisions\/65607"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}