Eric has been blogging away about his useful Perry Barlow Paradox. I’ve been avoiding commenting because I’ve been too swamped with small, profitless alligators to give the topic the thought it deserves.

So I’m giving up on thinking and plunging in instead.

First, is John Perry Barlow’s last name Perry Barlow or Barlow?

Second, Eric’s Paradox seems to me to be generally right and a great way of putting something important: “The internet, in its current form, moves everything that touches it toward the public domain.” This is true the way “Information wants to be free” is true: Often, but not always. And it’s true the way the law of gravity is true: We can still jump and walk uphill.

Eric has used the Paradox to knock my notion that we have a default right to anonymity on the Internet. I replied with an elaboration of where I think the right comes from. Eric apparently is unconvinced.

I am likewise unconvinced that agreeing with the Perry Barlow Paradox, means giving up the struggle to preserve our anonymity on the Internet. The fact that things tend towards the public domain on the Internet doesn’t mean that it’s good for everything to be in the public domain. Nor does it mean that everything inevitably has to be in the public domain.

Doc has taken up the cudgels and I love everything he says in his blog entry except his conclusion. DigitalID is not going to empower consumers so that we actually become customers again. The Big Boys want it because they see that even if the customers are in nominal control of their own IDs, the economic power is so unevenly weighted that we will have to give up our ID info in order to engage with them. It seems to me that anonymity is a much more powerful weapon against the predations of corporatism.

DigitalID is forking the Internet into private and public spheres. We should be so unhappy about this that we fight against it, not declare it to be a law as inviolable as those of physics. Norlin’s admirable Perry Barlow Paradox should be a clarion call, not Taps.

Categories: Uncategorized dw