Re: <nettime> The Piran Nettime Manifesto

[John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>]

At 3:46 PM -0700 5/27/97, t byfield wrote:
>On Tue 05/27/97 at 10:05 AM -0600, John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org> wrote:
>
>> Wow. It sounds as if you folks had yourselves quite a time. Probably a good
>> thing I wasn't there...
>
>If I may ask: Why? I'm sure various people have various ideas about
>this, but fractionalism is one thing, but separatism quite another.

I think there is so much difference between the beliefs stated in the
"manifesto" and my own that I would have been enormously frustrated to find
myself so deeply at odds with the consensus.


>
>If "pan-capitalism" is "the natural state of things," then there's
>no point in talking about it: it has all the conceptual clarity of
>the word "stuff." I suppose you can evaluate "the natural state of
>things" in a positive way, but what you're pretty much saying that
>the world's a great place. Indeed it is--now what? Well, now we'll
>need to think about it in clear terms that convey *some* amount of
>specificity.

What I meant to say is that nature is itself a free market system. A rain
forest is an unplanned economy, as is a coral reef. The difference between
an economy that sorts the information and energy in photons and one that
sorts the information and energy in dollars is a slight one in my mind.
Economy *is* ecology.


.So let's do that... The notion that every regime that
>has imposed a planned economy has failed is clearly false: there's
>been a recent wave of collapsing governments in a specific region,
>and they followed a limited range of economic planning strategies;
>but they were never the monolithic bogey that the US made them out
>to be when they were in power--and nor were they the only examples
>of "planned economies."

Very well. Can you give me an example of a planned economy that seems to be
healthy...and appears likely to remain so for the long term?

> No amount of quibbling can change the fact
>that every major industrialized country imposes an incredibly wide
>range of procedures that serve to regulate their economies, and to
>do so with the aim of meeting very specific goals: *planning*. And
>they *all* do so through a range of techniques, which rely on both
>"incentives" and "coercion."

There is a lot of tinkering with industrial economies through regulation
and tax incentives, but I would say more of these techniques are in decline
and increasing low repute. Look at what is happening with
telecommunications worldwide. I don't know a single country that still
believes the PTT model is the way to optimize communications.

>Maybe that brings us full circle, to the
>claim that pan-capitalism is somehow "natural"; but if it does, it
>does nothing else--and leaves us wondering whether you're claiming
>that whatever you mean by "planned economies" was unique in all of
>world history as an unnatural creation of man.


I'm not sure that anything humans do is unnatural.In a sense, it's all
nature. But some our efforts are so mechanistic as to be
counter-productive. I would assert that planned economies have been about
as successful as many planned ecologies: tree farms, drained wetlands, etc.
Mother Nature is cruel, but she can be far kinder than the unintended
results of our best intentions.

Yrs,

John Perry




****************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation

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