Tweet
Ethics is the study of proper behavior.
I claim that the proper basis for a healthy ethos is a healthy community.
Some community of individuals will adapt over time a perhaps loosely bound set of guidelines for what is proper behavior within that community. Sometimes these rules may have a practical basis in the survival needs of the community and its members. Sometimes the rules may seem arbitrary, though can still contribute to the need for a community to form and maintain an identity and to distinguish group members from outsiders.
Traditionally, communities were geographically based. If you lived somewhere and co-operated with the others who lived there in ways familiar and acceptable to them, you could perhaps become one of their community.
Communities then formed based on certain interests, professions, intellectual disciplines, commercial interests or other common points of human interaction.
In each case, a healthy community will have some sense of history, some sense of membership (is he "one of us"?), and some sense of proper behavior. More respected "elders" of the community will commonly speak or act in support of that community's ethos.
Even in present times, over the Web, we see this. The "ethos" on each of Slashdot.com, lkml.org, iTulip.com and FreeRepublic.com (to name four "virtual" communities I have actively participated in) are diverse.
===
Where it seems we get into trouble is when the necessary ethics of a situation are imposed on its participants by outsiders, especially when those outsiders have powerful conflicts of interest. A healthy ethics arises endogenously from a healthy "community", that being hundreds or rarely more than thousands of free acting individuals actively joined in some common situation or endeavor, where everyone knows each other directly or seldom more than once removed. The number of affected or indirectly related individuals may be much larger, even billions. However the formation of an ethics (even an unhealthy one) occurs amongst no more than hundreds or thousands of humans participating in some sort of "community."
Even the Founding Fathers of these United States where I live fit that description, when they formed the constitutional republic whose deformation I now bemoan. The Founding Fathers knew each other, trusted each other (by and large) and had just been working in concert on some critical endeavors (the American Revolution and the preceding Articles of Confederation.
===
The core Internet infrastructure, such as encoded in the IETF's RFC's, is a product of such a community. It remains a strong and health community so far as I am aware, and is not, itself, seriously threatened by the antics of various national and mega-corporate interests to control the Internet.
I can almost always get an IP packet from wherever I am to any other connected point on the Web, in almost any location in the world.
The antics of the various tyrants of the world seldom threaten the Web at the lower layers, the infrastructure that is unnoticed by most users most of the time.
===
What is threatened is a layer higher, at the application, document, information and transaction layer as presented to the human users of the Web.
We face great controversy over the control of behavior on the Web as it might apply to such dubious actions as child porn, terrorism, fraud, theft, illegal drugs, treason, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The essential question is WHO should determine this.
The essential answer is that the proper basis for a healthy ethos is a healthy community.
However the group of participants in the World Wide Web (a few billion humans) is far too large and amorphous to form the basis for the sort of healthy community that could determine such ethics.
As a practical basis, a few end up deciding for the many.
===
For the lower level, RFC-specified, Internet protocols, this proper community did form, from the relatively small group of experts sufficiently versed in the new technology to participate meaningfully in its conception and development.
The people who accomplished this, and who still form the expert basis of a world-wide functioning Internet infrastructure, are people who, outside of their role in the Web, are relatively unheard of, powerless, nobodies.
That is as it should best be. This is an example of the Separation Of Powers, a principle that guided the writing of the U.S. Constitution. When some focus of power is determined necessary to provide uniform control over an element of society, it is best if that focus be held in its own separate and distinct body, dominated by people who have no other substantial authority, so as to avoid issues with a conflict of interest which inevitably occur when multiple forms of power reside in one individual or group. Separation of powers avoids the concentration of absolute power that, in Lord Acton's famous phrase, corrupts absolutely.
===
The essential problem is that we lack an independent and healthy community defining a proper ethos for the higher layers of the Web.
Instead the definition and enforcement of the necessary ethos for this layer has been assumed by an already all too powerful central oligarchy of governing nations, agencies and corporations.
This is a certain recipe for Absolute Corruption of this layer of the Web, in the name of protecting its users.
===
I have focused above on the Web, for that is an area in which I have some modest degree of expertise and experience.
I suppose that we humans have this same basic issue of determining a proper ethos in other "globalized" financial, political, commercial, scientific and economic endeavors. I further fear that the definition and enforcement of the necessary ethos for these other human endeavors has also been already been substantially assumed by an already all too powerful central oligarchy of governing nations, agencies and corporations.
===
I further suspect that The Daily Bell is correct in its central thesis that the Web is the very key to obtaining a healthy resolution to this problem of impending Absolute Corruption, imposed by an increasing Absolute Power.
For it is via means of the Web that the necessary communities may form a proper and healthy basis for a healthy ethos.
The freedom of discussion and community formation on the Web must be protected, at all costs. The lack of a reasonable alternative "Defender of Web Safety and Security" has delivered into the hands of some very powerful individuals and groups a very dangerous weapon. Once we grant the present authorities the power to "do the right thing to protect us" on the Web, we will have granted them the power to destroy the greatest potential threat extant to their continuing assumption of ever greater power.
I claim that the proper basis for a healthy ethos is a healthy community.
Some community of individuals will adapt over time a perhaps loosely bound set of guidelines for what is proper behavior within that community. Sometimes these rules may have a practical basis in the survival needs of the community and its members. Sometimes the rules may seem arbitrary, though can still contribute to the need for a community to form and maintain an identity and to distinguish group members from outsiders.
Traditionally, communities were geographically based. If you lived somewhere and co-operated with the others who lived there in ways familiar and acceptable to them, you could perhaps become one of their community.
Communities then formed based on certain interests, professions, intellectual disciplines, commercial interests or other common points of human interaction.
In each case, a healthy community will have some sense of history, some sense of membership (is he "one of us"?), and some sense of proper behavior. More respected "elders" of the community will commonly speak or act in support of that community's ethos.
Even in present times, over the Web, we see this. The "ethos" on each of Slashdot.com, lkml.org, iTulip.com and FreeRepublic.com (to name four "virtual" communities I have actively participated in) are diverse.
===
Where it seems we get into trouble is when the necessary ethics of a situation are imposed on its participants by outsiders, especially when those outsiders have powerful conflicts of interest. A healthy ethics arises endogenously from a healthy "community", that being hundreds or rarely more than thousands of free acting individuals actively joined in some common situation or endeavor, where everyone knows each other directly or seldom more than once removed. The number of affected or indirectly related individuals may be much larger, even billions. However the formation of an ethics (even an unhealthy one) occurs amongst no more than hundreds or thousands of humans participating in some sort of "community."
Even the Founding Fathers of these United States where I live fit that description, when they formed the constitutional republic whose deformation I now bemoan. The Founding Fathers knew each other, trusted each other (by and large) and had just been working in concert on some critical endeavors (the American Revolution and the preceding Articles of Confederation.
===
The core Internet infrastructure, such as encoded in the IETF's RFC's, is a product of such a community. It remains a strong and health community so far as I am aware, and is not, itself, seriously threatened by the antics of various national and mega-corporate interests to control the Internet.
I can almost always get an IP packet from wherever I am to any other connected point on the Web, in almost any location in the world.
The antics of the various tyrants of the world seldom threaten the Web at the lower layers, the infrastructure that is unnoticed by most users most of the time.
===
What is threatened is a layer higher, at the application, document, information and transaction layer as presented to the human users of the Web.
We face great controversy over the control of behavior on the Web as it might apply to such dubious actions as child porn, terrorism, fraud, theft, illegal drugs, treason, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The essential question is WHO should determine this.
The essential answer is that the proper basis for a healthy ethos is a healthy community.
However the group of participants in the World Wide Web (a few billion humans) is far too large and amorphous to form the basis for the sort of healthy community that could determine such ethics.
As a practical basis, a few end up deciding for the many.
===
For the lower level, RFC-specified, Internet protocols, this proper community did form, from the relatively small group of experts sufficiently versed in the new technology to participate meaningfully in its conception and development.
The people who accomplished this, and who still form the expert basis of a world-wide functioning Internet infrastructure, are people who, outside of their role in the Web, are relatively unheard of, powerless, nobodies.
That is as it should best be. This is an example of the Separation Of Powers, a principle that guided the writing of the U.S. Constitution. When some focus of power is determined necessary to provide uniform control over an element of society, it is best if that focus be held in its own separate and distinct body, dominated by people who have no other substantial authority, so as to avoid issues with a conflict of interest which inevitably occur when multiple forms of power reside in one individual or group. Separation of powers avoids the concentration of absolute power that, in Lord Acton's famous phrase, corrupts absolutely.
===
The essential problem is that we lack an independent and healthy community defining a proper ethos for the higher layers of the Web.
Instead the definition and enforcement of the necessary ethos for this layer has been assumed by an already all too powerful central oligarchy of governing nations, agencies and corporations.
This is a certain recipe for Absolute Corruption of this layer of the Web, in the name of protecting its users.
===
I have focused above on the Web, for that is an area in which I have some modest degree of expertise and experience.
I suppose that we humans have this same basic issue of determining a proper ethos in other "globalized" financial, political, commercial, scientific and economic endeavors. I further fear that the definition and enforcement of the necessary ethos for these other human endeavors has also been already been substantially assumed by an already all too powerful central oligarchy of governing nations, agencies and corporations.
===
I further suspect that The Daily Bell is correct in its central thesis that the Web is the very key to obtaining a healthy resolution to this problem of impending Absolute Corruption, imposed by an increasing Absolute Power.
For it is via means of the Web that the necessary communities may form a proper and healthy basis for a healthy ethos.
The freedom of discussion and community formation on the Web must be protected, at all costs. The lack of a reasonable alternative "Defender of Web Safety and Security" has delivered into the hands of some very powerful individuals and groups a very dangerous weapon. Once we grant the present authorities the power to "do the right thing to protect us" on the Web, we will have granted them the power to destroy the greatest potential threat extant to their continuing assumption of ever greater power.
Comment