Sender: Vigdor Schreibman - FINS <•••@••.•••>
On Tue, 19 Sep 1995, Cyber Rights wrote:
> Sender: "Craig A. Johnson" <•••@••.•••>
>
> On 14 September Kurt Guntheroth wrote:
>
> > "Free market" capitalism has the same advantage as the internet; distributed
> > control. Nobody makes central decisions about load or content on the
> > internet. Nobody makes central decisions about price in the market.
> >
>
> What, pray tell, is "distributed control?"
>
> The statement is cruelly ironic in that increasingly, it will be the
> "market" that makes decisions about "load" and "content" on the Net.
> That's what AT&T/BBN, MSN, MCI/Delphi, etc. are all about. So, we
> will have entities not only controlling content, but "making central
> decisions about price" as well.
Craig,
Lots of stuff going on about the way control is exercised in a system of
action like the Net. I suggested to journalist Jerry Landy over the
weekend that the subject was terribly important for people to understand,
and both this list and the online-news list (which I responded to in
detail) have immediately taken up the issue. The comments you made to
Kurt in this message, were helpful in clarifying your ideas about the
subject, which I greatly appreciated.
In short, "The structure is the message" as Majid Tehranian explains in
his book Technologies of Power 236 (1990). The general planning theory
behind this important idea was given quite convincingly two decades
earlier by Hasan Ozbekhan, chairman of the Department of the Social
Systems Sciences, at the Wharton School.
Now all we have to do is design the information and telecommunications
infrastructure with this theory of contol in mind, to best serve the
economic, social, and environmental needs of our civilization in a
balanced way.
Vigdor Schreibman - FINS <•••@••.•••>
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