
Electric Barons (2018) [pdf] - state
https://cryptome.org/2019/02/elbar.pdf
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voidhorse
I don’t know who the author is, but appreciate the pseudonym’s nod to HG
Wells, so excuse me if any of this is already known to the author.

There are some interesting ideas in this draft, but it won’t work as a paper,
in my opinion, until it enters into the wider intellectual conversation on
these issues—there’s been plenty of exploration of this theme prior to San
Fransisco’s current dire straits. For example, check out Langdon Winner’s
peice, _Do Artifacts have Politics_ which examines some of Robert Moses’s
infrastructural projects in NYC and their rather direct political and social
consequences. Obviously, that’s a bit different than the main thrust of the
argument which has to do with servers and decentralization of computing power,
but in general, exploring and subsequently citing works from the traditions of
the philosophy of technology, history of technology, and social and political
philosophy will help support the arguments in this essay, frame them within
the context of prior human thought on the problems and concepts, and help fix
vague and contentious use of terminology such as “ideology” with more
specific, domain motivated contents. Since it’s a draft this point is less
important, but the peice could also use a solid copy-edit.

Overall though, I’m very happy to see people are out there contemplating this
stuff, and it’s an interesting topic.

~~~
eternalban
I think you missed the point here. There is a straight line narrative of (a)
architectures of control and regulation; (b) informational asymmetry between
the public and intelligence agencies ["Germans", "1973"]; (c) reflection on
the possibilities afforded by software vs hardware cypher systems; (d) and a
critique of the du jour insistence of the "experts" against rolling one's own
cyphers.

> help fix vague and contentious use of terminology such as “ideology” with
> more specific, domain motivated contents.

It makes zero difference what is the "ideology" of the said barons. The point
is that the infrastructure of control is being placed and whatever that
ideology is, it is not 'representative' of the rest of us who have no choice
but to use those "artifacts".

