ORB Visualization
(soon)
3/4/2004 5:49 PM
Concerning the criticism that Safe Net concept is designed to restrict commerce, made by Brad Cox and Richard Ballard.
If I want to talk to my neighbor it should not be some third party's right to set up a business that extracts a charge from this "natural right".
In the current and anticipated software systems, the quality of social communication suffers greatly - in addition to having one or more third parties step in and extract a payment. I mean television and the national media. It is unhealthy, and this unhealthy-ness is perceived by many citizens to be due to capital forces that (mostly) just happen to not be grounded morally. Most capital forces are grounded, but not all.
I am hoping that the community of scholars will develop out the bead started on excellent technologies that have been distorted by market forces
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/MST/twentyfour.htm
I think you agree with the sentiment we are expressing, but others take the strong position that if anyone suggests that the market should NOT be able to do what ever the market wants to do with the public, then that person is a Marxist.
One can see these distortions as memetic reactions. These reactions simply do not characterize what we have proposed in the Safe Net concept.
Should prostitutes be profited from making a living at the expensive of disrupting the social norms? Of course not. The market does not decide these moral issues, people acting in common do.
Our sense is that you are spinning what I have said due to the economic stress that all of us feel within this community who has worked so long to transform computer science and education into something more functional and moral.
What we are asking for is a unity within the scholarly community at least on the notion of being civil to each other. If that can be shown then it is quite possible that some version of the 21st Century Computing and Networking and the National Project to Establish the Knowledge Sciences might be funding at the same time and within a new agency.