Pit Schultz on Sun, 12 May 96 05:41 MDT


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re: distribution


John Perry Barlow wrote:
>There are many on this list who are so wedded to their notion of the
>invincibility of the Bad Old Boys that they would rather surrender without
>a fight than consider a world in which the Enemy was truly beaten.

as soon as the bad old boys with too much money will get eaten
by the digital revolution, forced by a push-button-democracy 
to give big parts of their 'virtual property' to the bright
side of the net (online libraries, education projects,
access for all), as soon as institutions like Net Prawda will
split into a flock of independent desktop offices, as soon as
an unstoppable shadow economy of anti-copyright and ring exchange
emerges, as soon as Cyberspace gives the slightest answer to real
world problems of unemployement, pollution and hunger, as soon
as certain databases are forced to go public, and RSA-128 gets
legal worldwide, as soon as monopolies crack down, or even one of
these utopias will get real, i will try to believe in The Net as 
"an intrinsic leaning in the direction of greater freedom
because of its highly distributed, bottom-up characteristics." 
(Internet Society)
Before, i like to prefer to be sceptical about giving up
a relativly young democratic constitution. Your freedom is not
automatically mine. But there might be a common ground.

# Pit Schultz, Kleine Hamburger Str. 15, 10117 Berlin, pit@contrib.de


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