On December 17th, 1989, Romanian troops fired on anti-government protesters in Timisoara; on Christmas day, dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife Elena were executed. More than 40 years of Communist rule and nearly 25 years of personal rule by Ceaucescu came crashing down in a week and a day.

When US President Ronald Reagan urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this [Berlin] wall” in 1987, few expected that wall to actually come down only 2 1/2 years later. Heck, few expected it to come down any time soon on the day that it did come down, 20 years ago next week.

For that matter, it was only six months from the election of Abraham Lincoln to the opening shots of the “Civil” War. Six months for one nation to become two, and for the two to go to war against each other!

When things political fall apart, they have a way of doing so incredibly fast.

Unlike many, I’m not inclined to just dismiss the predictions of Russian academic and former KGB agent Igor Panarin who thinks that the United States is on the verge of disintegration as a coherent nation-state.

Although some of the logic underlying Panarin’s forecast is … well, not exactly logical (California becoming province of China because most laptops are of Chinese manufacture, for example) … there may be some “there” there in the general outlines.

The wishful “one nation, indivisible” thinking of those with a nationalist mindset aside, the United States is a hodgepodge country: 300 million people scattered over 3.8 million square miles of non-contiguous territory.

For awhile after World War II (the most important domestic effect of which may have been putting English over the top as a “common language”), cultural homogenization — a McDonald’s on every corner and the latest sitcom one-liner told around water coolers from coast to coast — seemed unstoppable.

But it wasn’t. Anyone who lives in or visits a reasonably densely populated metropolitan area can attest to the fact that discrete cultural communities tend to separate themselves out from the larger whole, asserting their own identities and holding to their own customs and languages. It’s not so much that “national identity” is inimical to that process as that it’s irrelevant to that process. Within minutes of my own home in suburban St. Louis, I can find communities where Spanish is the predominant language; communities of Indian expatriates; communities of Bosnian Muslim refugees. They’re in America; they may even be “American” in one sense of the word or another. But they’ve also got their own things going.

And, of course, there’s the “Internet effect.” These days, it’s as easy for the average person to watch Al Jazeera as to watch Al Bundy, or to indulge any number of other interests that even two decades ago would have required extensive travel and a large bankroll. As our ability to establish meaningful relationships without reference to geography expands, our reasons for clinging to relationships based solely on geography diminish.

This whole trend of history is at odds with the notion of “national rule” by 537 politicians in one city on the Potomac … and the ties that bind us so are visibly fraying.

The media scream “polarization!” as the Washington establishment attempts to drag the entire country one way or another on this or that issue, and the cry is believable: A considerable portion of the populace is always dragged kicking and screaming regardless of which way that might be.

State legislatures are beginning to formally assert “10th Amendment” claims against federal power, and they may even make those claims stick. They’ve scared the federal politicians into writing “opt out” provisions into ObamaCare, at any rate.

Is it really such a giant leap from what’s already happening to the idea of the whole thing tumbling down, with its constituent parts reassembling themselves — or not — in various ways?

I don’t think it is. It’s happened before, here and elsewhere, more or less convulsively, and I see no reason to believe that the United State as currently configured is immune.

I don’t know if 2010 is the year, as Panarin predicts, but I think it’s coming. And when it does, I’m cautiously optimistic that people in at least a few odd corners (New Hampshire? The Colorado and Wyoming Rockies, perhaps?) will resist any meaningful reassembly of the machinery of state.

In last year’s election campaign Obama came across as vaguely more friendly to open-culture than the alternatives, among other things supporting “fair use” reform of the DMCA and opposing requirements for ISP data retention (both issues on which Hillary waffled).  As somebody put it, “Obama’s a Mac and Hillary’s a PC.”  Even the U.S. Pirate Party endorsed Obama as the least evil candidate.

But if recent events are any indication, Obama’s stance on the preexisting digital copyright regime is that of Rehoboam:  “My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins.  For whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke.”

It was a safe bet something was up when Obama refused to discuss—for “national security” reasons, of course—the terms of the forthcoming Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a secret copyright treaty).  Now the Internet chapter has leaked, according to Cory Doctorow, and “It’s bad.  Very bad.”  Among other things:

It requires ISPs to “proactively  police” user-generated content for copyright violations.  This effectively puts the legal onus on hosting services for enforcing digital copyright, resulting (according to Doctorow) in liability issues that will destroy the business models of services like Blogger and YouTube.

This “proactive policing” means, in particular, requiring DMCA-style “takedown notices” as standard practice in all signatory countries, and requiring automatic takedown and cutoff of Internet service on accusation—not conviction.  As we’ve already seen in the U.S., takedowns are a virtually 100% effective form of censorship, since ISPs typically respond immediately and with a complete lack of due process.  It will also impose DMCA-style restrictions against breaking DRM on the whole world, even when it’s for an otherwise lawful fair use purpose like making content you already purchased more usable to you.

Most commentators seem to agree that, if this is enforceable, it will effectively destroy what’s variously known as Web 2.0 or the writeable Web.  If the treaty is literally and effectively enforced, it will mean a return to the Internet of the 1990s, when most websites were high-tech sales brochures and/or PR  handouts for large corporations and government agencies.  Or as one commenter under Doctorow’s post put it, “The problem with the Internet is that it is not TV. This will be fixed by ACTA.”

The good news is, it’s probably not enforceable.  If it’s ratified by the U.S. in its present form, I expect non-signatory countries all over the world will become web-hosting havens and instigate a mass exodus from signatory countries, and for this to give the biggest push yet to mainstream adoption of anonymizing services.  And as a commenter at Doctorow’s BoingBoing story points out, in an age of local wireless meshworks, ISPs have a lot less power than they used to:

“OH FOR CRYING OUT LOUD PEOPLE!!!  Just open your wireless port, call it parasite.net, and then set yourself up as an ‘ISP’ with an FTP, web server, torrent tracker, etc. If you can convince enough people in your area to create access points and mirrors of the content we’ll eventually cut out the telecoms and have a truly distributed data and communications network.”

I’m not enough of a techie to know whether that would work, or even entirely what it means.  But I share Arthur Silber’s gut reaction (Silber cited that comment himself) that this isn’t the end of the world.  Charles Johnson once posted, on Rad Geek blog, a “Cat and Girl” cartoon in which the girl lamented the election of George W. Bush and all the horrible laws that would likely be passed under his leadership.  The cat responded, “Since when do we obey the laws?”

There’s a country that already has all these draconian rules on paper:  China.   How’s that been working out for them?

One thing I do believe:  These people and everything they stand for are doomed, no matter how much damage they cause on the way down.  We’re rats in the dinosaurs’ nests, waging Fourth Generation Warfare against those dying monsters.   We’re agile and resilient, and we treat their surveillance and censorship as damage to be routed around.  As their lumbering bureaucracies spend hundreds of thousands of committee man-hours fighting the previous war, adding new concrete to the Maginot Line by the thousands of tons every day, we’re turning on a dime thinking up new ways—cheap ways—to destroy them.   We will bury them.

In the meantime, we’ve reached a point where “the authorities” need to get a lesson in their own impotence, loud and clear.  We need to treat laws like these with the contempt they deserve, and break them every chance we get.  The people who draft such filth behind closed doors need to learn the meaning of the words “HELL NO!”

According to ABC News on November 4, recent Republican wins in gubernatorial elections in both New Jersey and Virginia prompted Ohio congressman John Boehner to say:

“There’s a political rebellion going on in America, and what we saw last night was just a glimpse of it.”

Mind you, Boehner is not referring to New Hampshire’s “Free State” (although I heartily support the movement, the name is oxymoronic and self-contradictory – rather like saying “White Black” or “Alive Dead”) Project, the throngs of consistent non-voters, or the content of this website. What he’s suggesting is nothing less than so preposterous a notion that a return to the GOP side of the coin in government at any level is some kind of victory. To wit, that yet another flip-flopping in the endless conundrum of idiocy involved in electoral politics makes some kind of substantial difference.

News to Boehner (not that he doesn’t, at root, know it already): Shifting power from one group of usurping thugs to another constitutes nothing of any value at all. Voting and elections will not eliminate taxation. It will not increase individual liberty. These endless dispicable goings-on can only and exclusively produce the opposite result. To lend any legitimacy to political government in any form – by voting or otherwise – is to essentially endorse bullying, thievery, kidnapping, and outright murder – so long as those committing such tyrannical atrocities are in the employ, at taxpayer expense, of course, of a government.

This scatalogical conclusion cannot hold water whenever even a modicum of reason and compassion is applied to such a notion. It is, at day’s end, only a lunatic or a psychopath who believes that it’s perfectly all right to impose services (that’s right, impose, since taxpayers have no real choice to choose to not purchase services that those in government propose to provide whether anyone in particular wants or consents to them or not) literally under the threat of property seizure, imprisonment, and even death. Yet, through the tragedy of government-controlled tax financed public schools, mass media, and mass conditioning – to say nothing of outright armed intimidation – this view is the prevailing one amongst American society. It is only, at present, organizations such as Center for a Stateless Society and other free-market anarchist groups who are truly speaking out in a way that proposes real and effective “change” – certainly not the Obamanoids and other hardline statists whose every solution stems from ever growing and more intrusive government…an institution that relies almost exclusively on violence for its survival.

Yes, there is a political rebellion going on in America – but not the phony one espoused by John Boehner. It’s happening right here at C4SS and other similar websites. It’s happening whenever more people become principled non-voters. It’s happening whenever people quit their government jobs, never to go back. It’s happening whenever people find practical means of withholding money from the government. It’s happening in the increasing attention this subject and philosophy is getting on the Internet – the core of modern alternative media. It’s happening every time someone becomes thoughtful and decides to set down the violent gun wielded by the State in lieu of respect for the liberty and property of others. This is where the real political rebellion is happening.

And wherever and whoever you may be, I’d like to invite you to join us in evolving your mind, and changing the world.

Gene Quinn, a patent lawyer and IP-hawk, has recently challenged the anti-IP movement — in the tone of a belligerent drunk announcing he can lick anyone in the bar– to back up its contentions with facts and arguments.  Such facts and arguments are lacking, he taunts (in an Eric Cartman voice?), for the obvious reason that none exist.

When people like Stephan Kinsella call his bluff, Quinn generally manages to weasel out of it.  Most recently, Quinn was scheduled to debate David Koepsell, but at the last minute cancelled because he (ahem) got sick.  Quinn, in lieu of the original debate format, later participated in a pathetic exchange of soundbites on the Laura Flanders show.

The weightiest of Quinn’s “unanswerable” points is the supposed insufficiency of marginal cost-based pricing for recouping high R&D costs.

Quinn’s argument assumes an obsolete industrial model, and ignores the extent to which the capital-intensiveness and overhead cost of innovation itself are themselves affected by IP.  Patents can tip the balance between alternative business models, promoting an artificially high-capitalized, high-overhead, bureaucratic model of R&D.

Patents are one way of dealing with R&D cost.  But another way is modular design, which economizes on development cost by reusing the same R&D effort for a particular module or platform over a wide family of products.

Open source, P2P design models may also be considerably cheaper because they are more agile (see Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”); for example, homebrew CNC machine tools generally achieve Factor 10 or Factor 20 cost reductions over their proprietary equivalents.

Patents also tip the balance toward less agile forms of production in another way:  the legal process of securing a patent is an enormous outlay that can only be amortized by large-batch production.

And the process of gaming the patent system diverts R&D dollars into some very wasteful avenues.  For example, most drug R&D cost goes, not to developing the version actually marketed, but to securing patent lockdown on all the major possible variants (so a competitor won’t market a rival drug).

Artificial property rights are a source of additional capitalization costs and overhead.

Also, studies have shown that the total productivity benefits from the cumulative effects of incrementally tweaking designs, and all the other Hayekian stuff that goes with a tinkerer observing a technology in operation and fiddling with it, outweigh those from major generational leaps.  So an IP regime that incentivizes major generational leaps, while erecting transaction costs against derivative development, seems of questionable benefit.

Defenses of both patents and copyright based on the inadequacy of marginal cost pricing to recoup up-front outlays are wrong-headed in another way.

The only effect of abolishing IP is to do away with monopoly rents from design or content ownership as such.  It doesn’t affect the rents that result from the transaction costs of setting up production, or from being first to market and knowing one’s market better than the competition.

These things, which all fall under the head of what Chris Anderson calls “freemium,” are sources of value that would exist even without rents from IP as such. So it’s still possible to make money from being first mover, and from the authentication advantages that come with being identified as the product’s developer; you just can’t make as much money from it.

High among “freemium” services, for the majority who value time and convenience along with bare price, is authenticity:  buying a copy that’s certified to be complete, defect-free, and in the format you need.

And in general, the person who originally develops a product is likely to have a better knowledge of his market, and be in a better position to profit from an ongoing relationship with his market as he develops products geared to their particular needs — especially if he also serves the market through customization and customer support.

Shakespeare worked without copyright, which meant he made money by actually performing the plays with his theater company.  That meant, in turn, that he got lots and lots of little piles of money from keeping on writing plays and performing them, instead of collecting a big pile from a one-hit wonder.

BTW:  Most of Shakespeare’s work was done on the folk culture model, with heavy reliance on mashups from other storytellers, and hence would be illegal under modern copyright law.

In the realm of physical production, the first company to develop a new product will have first-mover rents for the time it takes to duplicate the process.  After that, it will have rents from customer goodwill.  That goodwill will include the common sense assumption that the company will be best at offering upgrades to a product it originally developed, and will probably be the most reliable source of customer support.

To sum up:  the producers who find themselves being driven out of business by competition based on marginal cost are generally the corporate dinosaurs who CAN’T survive without monopoly rents on IP, because they really are too stupid to think of any other way to make money.

In theory, government exists to protect those whom it “serves” — to defend their rights at home, and to guard against invasion by the armies of other governments which (once again, in theory) would violate those rights rather than merely becoming the new monopoly provider for their defense.

In practice, however, government policy tends toward the opposite. At home, the defense of — or even minimal respect for — rights is routinely sacrificed on the altar of “defense” against foreign enemies; abroad, governments work together to coordinate in support of each others’ rights violations.

If two governments are seen cooperating, it’s a good bet that they’re negotiating a treaty to regulate away your right to trade across borders (which themselves are nothing more than imaginary lines on the ground, drawn by politicians to make this kind of thing “necessary”).

If two governments are seen at loggerheads, you can safely bet that the rights and welfare of their respective subjects have little or nothing to do with the argument, and that in fact those rights and that welfare will be the first items on the chopping block when as the argument escalates to sanctions, sabre-rattling and possibly war.

Case in point: The US trade embargo on Cuba. For going on 50 years now, the rights and welfare of both Cubans and Americans have taken second place to the alleged desire of the US government to topple Fidel Castro’s communist regime.

I say “alleged,” because the real purpose of the embargo from the US standpoint certainly isn’t to “protect” the US from Cuba, which hasn’t represented a significant military threat since the Soviet Union blinked first in the “missile crisis” of the early 1960s. Nor is it to bring down Castro, whose regime has benefited immensely from it. Rather, its real purpose is to pump anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Florida — held in sway by an “anti-Castro dissident industry” whose principals are far more interested in amassing wealth and influence in the US than in actually liberating Cuba — and subsidy-seeking sugar producers (who don’t want to have to compete with Cuban sugar imports) for campaign money and November votes.

And while Castro’s regime and that of his successor, his brother Raul, have always talked a good anti-embargo game, they’re Johnny on the spot and ready to escalate tensions with the US any time it looks like the matter is up for serious reconsideration. From their standpoint, El Bloqueo may be the single best guarantee of their continued hold on power. It gives them a ready-made foreign enemy — an enemy to blame for the failure of Castro’s socialist revolution and an enemy to wave at its subjects as a military threat against which those subjects must stand united.

What would be the result of an end to the embargo — assuming, as it is never safe to do, that both governments were actually willing to drop it into the wastebasket of history?

On the economic side, consumers and non-rent-seeking producers in both countries would benefit. Sugar in particular would get cheaper in the US as American producers were forced to compete in an open market instead of being “protected” from Cuban cane. Goods of all types would get cheaper in Cuba as American imports which only have to be shipped across 90 miles of ocean arrive to compete with their European equivalents. Producers in both countries would have new markets opened to them, and capital from both countries would have new, competitive places to flow to.

On the political side, citizens of both countries would regain at least some freedoms their governments have denied them. Freedom to travel. Freedom to trade. Freedom to engage with each other. Only the two regimes would lose, and the things they’d lose — opportunities to indulge in control and corruption — are things they were never rightfully entitled to in the first place.

The beneficiaries of the embargo are the politicians of both governments and their rent-seeking paymasters. The rest of us take it right on the chin. To understand any government policy, ask the question the Romans asked when looking into lesser criminal matters: “cui bono” (”who benefits”). The actions of the ruling class are seldom undertaken for the benefit of the ruled.

Mike Gogulski: Hillary Clinton is a Terrorist [mp3, 1:30].

Podcasters, radio producers and all other media are welcome to replay this clip in its entirety in their productions.

I think one of the more telling points against the drug war is just how hypocritical the states involved in the Drug War are.  The key government players are under absolutely no illusion that they’re helping to combat drug use.  Rather, the state—especially the U.S. national security state operating abroad—has exactly the same interest as any other organized crime lord in keeping the stuff illegal:  it keeps the price up.  The higher the price, the more money outfits like the CIA can make selling the shit to fund their favored thugs.

Of course there are some useful idiots in Congress, the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, etc., who actually take this shit at face value.  The more naïve Drug War supporters in Congress and the state legislatures play the role of Baptists in this classic Baptist/Bootlegger scenario.  But the real players in the Drug War, the people inside the loop, the people who really matter, want drugs kept illegal for the same reason Al Capone supported Prohibition.

From the Golden Triangle of Indochina, to crack cocaine funding for the Contras, to the latest revelations about the CIA’s ties to Walid Karzai’s opium operation, the story repeats itself like the leitmotif in a Wagnerian opera.

When Rothbard said governments were mafias, it wasn’t just a figure of speech.  Keeping it in mind is a useful antidote to the whole pink-ass “Policeman Dan is always your friend” culture that too many suburban white folks have absorbed.

Along the same lines, if you find yourself continually shocked by every new revelation (like recent news of Karzai) that yet another loathsome international gangster is on the CIA payroll, you might want to reevaluate your view of the world.

Any time the American state and its pet media (see Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s  propaganda model of the media) attempt to manufacture a pretext for war by whipping up a moral panic about the latest Hitler-of-the-Week, be prepared to discover that he’s actually been on the CIA payroll for decades.

Regarding the propaganda model,  by the way, think back to cable news coverage of the Russia-Georgia thing last year.  In all that talk about “Russian aggression,” how many times do you recall anyone reminding the audience that Georgia actually started the whole thing by invading a province whose independence was guaranteed by treaty, even firing on Russian peacekeeping troops?  Did anyone mention the role of the International Republican Institute, National Endowment for Democracy,  or Soros Foundation in engineering color coded revolutions like that of Georgia?  Or put those color-coded revolutions in context as an attempt by Oceania to encircle Eurasia?  Uh huh—I didn’t think so.

The U.S. national security community helped engineer the coup that  put Saddam in power.   You know how they’re always bleating that he “used weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors”?  Um,  yeah, sure—he used them against neighbors like Iran back in the 1980s; and guess who the U.S. was backing in that war?  Like the joke goes, the U.S. government knew Saddam had WMDs because it saved the receipts.

If Satan were a CIA client and either outlived his usefulness or stopped taking orders from Washington, you can be dead sure the next day you’d see a presidential spokesman at the podium, or Gen. Powell briefing the Security Council, breathlessly announcing all the terrible,  terrible stuff they’d “just discovered” was going on in Hell.   And then a photo would resurface of Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with the Devil twenty years before.

Virtually everything you see about the world in the mainstream press is as scripted as the Five-Minutes Hate in 1984.

Once again:   Free your minds!  Policeman Dan is not your friend.   And what the U.S. government does overseas has nothing to do with “freedom” and “democracy.”  It’s all about propping up a system of power—and in doing so, the American state has installed or defended some of the worst monsters in history.

No, this isn’t a column on religion. It’s a column on government. But confusing the two is an eminently forgivable error.

Reports the New York Times:

The federal stimulus program has saved or created nearly 650,000 jobs through aid to states, infrastructure projects and federal contracts, the Obama administration claimed Friday morning, adding that officials believe they are on track to meet their goal of 3.5 million jobs over two years.

Creating! Saving! Two things that supporters of government would have us believe it’s all about, but which sound an awful lot like the acts attributed to God by believers:

For Obama so loved America that he gave his only begotten Stimulus, that whosoever believeth in it should not be laid off, but have everlasting job.

The main difference between government and religion is that while religion must be based primarily on faith, there’s actual evidence available for evaluating the claims of government. And those claims are inevitably found wanting.

God created man, the Bible tells us, out of nothing more than dirt and a breath of fresh air. He took inert substances and gave them life. He made things of no particular value into things of great value.

Government does the opposite. To the extent that it “creates” anything, it does so at the expense of better things. It devalues everything it touches. In order to “create” a job that pays $50,000 a year, it takes many multiples of that $50,000 out of the pockets of people who were already creating jobs with it.

Even taking President Obama’s lowball estimate of his “stimulus” program’s cost — about $800 billion — at face value, and giving his jobs figure undue credence, those 650,000 jobs were created (or, to include his fudge, “saved”) at a cost of about $1.2 million each!

Let’s make some very rough and broad assumptions about an average job here — assumptions which I’m pretty sure will make the “stimulus” figures look better, not worse, than warranted.

Let’s assume an annual salary of $50,000 (that’s higher than the actual per capita figure), plus another $50,000 in non-salary costs — the “employer’s share” of payroll taxes, employer-sponsored insurance and bennies, the pro rata cost of running the human resources operation that hires the individual employee, etc.

That brings the cost of a single job to a nice, round $100k.

So, if I give you $1.2 million and tell you to go forth and hire, keeping a fat $200k salary/bonus for yourself, you should be able to “create” ten jobs. Congratulations. You’re ten times as efficient as government, if only half as well paid as Barack Obama and without his extensive package of fringe benefits.

Or, to put it a different way: If Obama is the Messiah, his salvation program requires that ten souls be consigned to hell for each pair of feet set upon the streets of gold he claims to be paving.

And that, friends, is the good news. The bad news is that the actual cost of the “stimulus,” according to various think tank analyses, may have been four times the cost advertised by the White House.

Government doesn’t “create” jobs, nor does it “save” them. It doesn’t perform miracles. Rather, it performs stage magic. It makes things — things like money and jobs — disappear (into its lovely assistants’ pockets) through sleight-of-inefficiency. This is not done for the benefit of the audience.

Fellow C4SS commentator Tom Knapp reported a few weeks ago on an activist at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh who was arrested for using Twitter, from a hotel room, to inform demonstrators of police movements.  Tom pointed out that next time the organizers, typical of all forms of networked resistance, will adapt their tactics accordingly by setting up their comm station on the other side of jurisdictional lines.  And of course activists of all sorts, across the whole spectrum of movements, will adopt the lessons for their own.

This is the kind of thing John Robb and Jeff Vail regularly blog on.  Resistance movements are governed by the same dynamic as the open-source software community, as described by Eric Raymond in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”  Innovations are developed rapidly by self-managed individuals, independently — stigmergically — and then those innovations that prove themselves useful are rapidly adopted by the entire network.  In hierarchies, the inefficiencies of organizations are multiples of all the individual inefficiencies of their members; in networks, they’re contained and bypassed as the innovations of the most efficient are adopted universally with zero transaction costs.  That’s what “Fourth Generation Warfare” is:  asymmetric warfare governed by the developmental ethos of Linux.

The same principle governs file-sharing and DRM.  According to Cory Doctorow, the music industry assumes its DRM only has to be good enough to thwart the average user, because the geeks capable of cracking it are too insignificant numerically to bother taking measures against.  But thanks to network culture, once the geeks crack it, anyone capable of using Google or going to a torrent download site can benefit from their expertise.

Networks enable widespread and rapid adoption of innovations developed by a few, much more efficiently than the formulation of “best practices” by enormous bureaucratic hierarchies.

The generals in the giant bureaucracies are always busy fighting the last war.  The TSA bureaucrats expend tens of thousands of committee man-hours to make sure nobody can ever hijack a plane again, or hide explosives in their shoes, or smuggle in explosives in shampoo bottles — stuff that Al Qaeda would never try twice anyway, because they turn on a dime to come up with the next thing the TSA bureaucrats haven’t thought of yet.

This is part of a much broader phenomenon.  David Ronfeldt, formerly a Rand analyst who wrote about Netwar back in the ’90s, uses a TIMN typology to classify forms of organization:  Tribes, Institutions (i.e. hierarchies), Markets, and Networks.  The central transistion of our time is from the dominance of Institutions to that of Networks (I would argue that it’s a transition from a limited toleration of markets within a bureaucratic/institutional framework, to the free coexistence of markets and networks).

We see hierarchical institutions challenged, and soundly beaten, on every side by the new network culture.

Cops are terrified not only that activists are Tweeting their movements at demos, but that — in a world of ubiquitous cell phone cameras — they’ll be on Candid Camera next time they pull a Rodney King.  Every time a surly drunken cop assaults a bartender, or cops publicly urinate during a Police Day parade, they wind up on YouTube.

Large organizations of all kinds are learning what the Streisand Effect is all about:  when institutions attempt to suppress embarrassing information on the Web, their very attempt to suppress it winds up attracting publicity beyond their worst nightmares.  Just to take a couple of recent examples, consider 1) Trafigura’s attempt to prevent The Guardian, by court injunction, from reporting a Member of Parliament’s question (!) about their dumping of toxic waste in Africa, and 2) Ralph Lauren’s attempted use of DMCA letters to suppress mockery of the freakishly photoshopped model in one of his ads.  In both cases, the lawyers found out what it must have been like for Pharaoh’s charioteers with the Red Sea crashing over them; they caved in a matter of hours.

In labor relations, corporations that have successfully fought off union drives for decades have found themselves in the public fishbowl, thanks to efforts like those of the Imolakee Workers and the Wal-Mart Workers Association. Corporations are terrified that disgruntled employees are not only networking on the Web, but leaking embarrassing documents to Wikileaks, setting up CompanyNameSucks.Com websites, and mass-emailing the company’s dirty laundry to suppliers, outlets, consumer groups, and investigative journalists.  Cultural monkey-wrenching is a classic asymmetric warfare tactic:  both devastating and virtually risk-free.

Professional journalists profess outrage at the lack of “fact-checking” among bloggers and Internet journalists.  But in fact it’s the Web journalists and bloggers who ARE the fact-checkers.  Now when a conventional journalist puts out copy regurgitating for the the ten thousandth time that (say) “Saddam kicked out the UN inspectors in December 1998,” it’ll usually be a blogger publicly drawing attention to the lie and correcting it, with a hyperlink to the truth.  The Web’s fact-checking function is done on the same adversarial model that governs Wikipedia.  The real reason conventional journalism is so hostile to the Internet is that it’s being held accountable by real fact-checkers for the first time.

Large, hierarchical organizations everywhere, for the first time since the rise of unidirectional broadcast culture, are just starting to learn that they’re living in a world where we can talk to each other –  and THEY CAN’T SHUT US UP.

Within such organizations, employees and subordinates who have grown up in the network culture view bureaucratic authoritarianism as damage to be routed around.

As I’ve written before, the 20th century was the era of the large organization; by the end of the 21st, there won’t be enough of them left to bury.

Not that I make it my business to contact politicians at all, but I happen to be a member of an excellent organization called Gun Owners of America (which, yes, does lobby governments as opposed to an equally superb organixation, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, which does not), and GOA was recently pushing legislation in Congress to provide for nationwide concealed carry reciprocity. That is, so long as one is in compliance with the firearms “laws” of one’s “state” of residence (don’t worry, I’m getting to those quotation marks), then one would be able to carry concealed in every other government jurisdiction without interference. This would even apply to residents of (like myself) Vermont, or Alaska, in which no license or permit is required from government to exercise this most basic provision of self-defense. All well and good.

Predictably, the measure didn’t pass – though not by as wide of a margin as one might’ve prognosticated. One of those spoilers was Vermont’s very own Senator Patrick Leahy. Thus it was that I received a letter through the U.S. government postal monopoly. Here, in part, is what Leahy had to say:

“I ultimately decided to vote against the nationwide concealed carry reciprocity amendment because I believe that the Federal Government should not be dictating local policy to the states. I would similarly oppose any effort by Congress to limit state laws authorizing citizens to carry concealed firearms or to enter into reciprocity agreements with other states. Many states already do a commendable job in providing reciprocity with their sister states, and I believe the states are in the best position to make these determinations. No state is exactly the same and when the Federal Government forces policy of such a local nature on state governments, we unduly ignore a state’s right to govern its people.”

I want to stop right there. Let’s go back to those quotation marks I was talking about, and let’s examine just how very big the problem we’re dealing with here is. Whether we’re talking “laws” or “policy,” all we’re talking about are the opinions of politicians backed up by a bunch of bureaucrats’ guns. Nothing more. We’re not talking about gravity, solar radiation or the heat death of the universe. We’re talking about just a bunch of arrogant politicians and their deranged ideas. As for “state,” what is one? Can I touch it, see it, throw a rock at it? In short, it’s nothing but a fictitious concept. An ephemeral nonentity. You might as well be talking about the tooth fairy or the Great Pumpkin.

So now let’s plumb the depths of the good senator’s intellect. A great place to start is with that last statement: “…a state’s right to govern its people.”

Wow. Okay, let’s see: A fictitious concept has now in the senator’s mind been personified into actually having a right, like an actual person, to do something that no person has any legitimate “right” to do – namely, govern “its” people. He can actually admit the non-human, fictional nature of the “state” while ascribing a “right” to govern to it in the same breath.

I really enjoyed Leahy’s cameo in The Dark Knight when the late, great Heath Ledger – in the guise of the nefarious Joker – put a knife to the senator’s throat at a fundraiser put on by Bruce Wayne/Batman. I wasn’t even all that disappointed when the Joker chose not to eviscerate him. This utterly reprobate lapse of logic, however, I find not nearly as forgiveable. Particularly when you contemplate the widespread, devastating, and heinous ramifications of this kind of twisted thought. All government everywhere is predicated on this essential lie; this evil distortion of truth.

Leahy goes on in his letter: “I realize that you feel strongly about this, but I think this is an issue on which we will have to agree to disagree.”

Some truth, finally.