
The Barlow Knife - entwife
https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-john-perry-barlow-1947-2018
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DanielBMarkham
_In a mere twenty years, we have gone from fears of the Government controlling
the Internet to fears of the Internet controlling the Government._

We have? Last I checked, countries were turning off the internet when there
are protests, the Chinese are taking the internet and turning it into a
Panopticon of enormous scope and scale. Countries everywhere are swooping in
and picking up whatever data they'd like from ISPs and social media providers.
And the ISPs and social media companies are helping them do this. Cell
carriers are turning your location data into another profit center.

Government intrusion hasn't gone anywhere. Anybody worried about the current
landlords controlling the net are just worried about the caretakers. You could
eliminate all of them tomorrow and the problem wouldn't go anywhere. (The root
of the problem is that data, once collected, can go anywhere and do anything.
There's no way of putting the genie back in the bottle.)

It bothers me to see people focus so much on Facebook or other companies like
that. They're just the tip of the iceberg, and if you don't define the problem
right, you have no chance of getting the solution right either.

------
rlad
I met Barlow in 1995 in Cannes at the digital conference (the name of which I
forget) that was held there, where I was trying to get international
distribution for a product I'd created. We had dinner together at a funky
restaurant up the hill which might have been called the Flying Saucer.

We'd met at a cocktail party earlier that day while I was arguing with Nicolas
Negroponte after a talk he'd given where he had claimed that the internet
would automatically route around any barrier. I was telling him that the
Chinese were bound to put in border routers or firewalls blocking their
citizens from accessing content they didn't want them to see.

Barlow chimed in and said that I was right and that we had to stop that from
happening everywhere. Negroponte didn't want to hear it.

Now it turns out we were both right: the Chinese and others try to block data
with varying success and the Internet still to some extent routes around it. I
wish there was less of the former and more of the latter.

------
vixen99
Thank you. Always wondered about what it was and never checked.

"Mary gave him a bran-new "Barlow" knife worth twelve and a half cents; and
the convulsion of delight that swept his system shook him to his foundations.
True, the knife would not cut anything, but it was a "sure-enough" Barlow, and
there was inconceivable grandeur in that - though where the Western boys ever
got the idea that such a weapon could possibly be counterfeited to its injury,
is an imposing mystery and will always remain so, perhaps. \- The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer

~~~
analog31
Amusingly, I came here to post the same quote. My first pocket knife was a
"Barlow," and it wouldn't cut anything either.

------
jancsika
> He reminded us that “there has always been a relationship between the
> performer and the audience that hasn't been well mapped,” and that “you
> would never claim to own your friendships.” Then two of the currently
> wealthiest plantation owners on the Internet stepped in and became so by
> doing just that.

I think "wealthiest plantation owners" misses the point.

Suppose someone were to magically "free" everyone's Facebook data onto some
kind of IPFS-like datastore. Now we have symmetric access to our data freed
from the bonds of the property model.

Now what do we do?

Our current understanding of the dangers posed by the mere existence of such a
datastore is so limited that symmetric access _still_ wouldn't give us any
reliable defense against short or medium-term exploitation.

Perhaps "things of an informational nature" should be treated with care until
we figure out to make it cost more than $0 for an adversary to turn them into
weapons.

------
Kenji
_In a mere twenty years, we have gone from fears of the Government controlling
the Internet to fears of the Internet controlling the Government._

Speak for yourself. I have no fear at all of the internet controlling the
government, whereas the government controlling the internet already happened
all over the place.

