He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is. (1)

               1. Look both ways before you cross the street.
               2. Check to see how deep the water is before you dive.
               3. Don't take others' medicine.
              [...]
               Rachel's rules are the distilled and simplified wisdom of experience,
               products of the infinite series of trial-and-error learning. Most have
               exceptions, from accepting a friend's aspirin to politely pretending to
               like a hideous wedding present, and we expect to apply them
               selectively. Rachel's rules assume, rather than override, our personal
               knowledge. We may choose to violate them, with or without a good
               reason, and to bear the consequences that naturally follow. (Maybe
               we're just curious about what happens if you eat old mayonnaise.)

               Most of our public debate over rules, by contrast, is about making
               such detailed prescriptions into mandatory, no-exception laws. These
               rules are rigid and drained of local knowledge. The consequences of
               breaking them flow not from the actions themselves -- whose results
               may be neutral or even positive -- but from external law enforcement.
               The rules establish narrowly defined categories for all times and
               circumstances, hindering progress based on new combinations. (2)

              There are many dynamic systems in the world, many areas of life that
               evolve and improve through trial-and-error learning, from "digital
               organisms" that evolve better computer programs to global financial
               markets, from adaptable architecture to international science. Looking
               across these various processes, we can find patterns in their
               fundamental rules, though we can fully apply those patterns to a
               specific case only when we understand that particular system.

               The great weakness of Habitat... was that its
               residents could not themselves create new places or objects within its
               virtual world. Nor could they build "their own little pockets of the
               universe," with their own rules. Allowing participants to add new
               objects or places meant letting them create software code that would
               then enter other participants' computers. That, says Morningstar,
               would require "inviting people inside trust boundaries that you just
               generally couldn't trust strangers in."

               Dynamists seek not a world without rules but a world in which 
               rules govern the appropriate level of life. 

In this model, how does one gain the competence to control? Conventionally, the ability is equated with personal status (e.g. as the 'owner' of the subscription list) or with the 'responsibility of the job' (that is, the fear of subsequently losing the position to someone else) if one who was 'out of control' as one of the hoi polloi is elected to 'serve.' The implicit 'top-down' ethos remains intact either way, whether expressed as 'its my list, if you dont like it, you can leave,' or as 'replace me if you can do better.' In short, if someone 'needs' to be in control, the converse of this proposition is that the subscribers 'needs' to be controlled -- the possibility that the hierarchical structure itself defines the need, and that subservience just as much as dominance is a product of this demand is rarely examined.

Yet what one finds in the Internet is a (rapidly growing) manifestation of true anarchy. Whether 'information wants to be free' or not, the fact is that for every attempt to impose structure, there is a vigourous attempt to oppose it with a (hardware) logistic or (software) strategic 'workaround.' Lists, and listowners, are in place, but 'backchannel' discussion goes on freely among participants; 'cross-posting' may be declared 'inappropriate,' but blind-copying and undisclosed-recipient 'aliases' abound. List owners can not afford to be entirely autocratic, lest they upset the 'sense of community' felt by others. Why then does this spirit of comraderie not lead anywhere? Why has 'democracy' apparently become merely a euphemism for an 'anything goes' (until someone puts a stop to it) attitude, not a sufficient basis for social organization? (If one yearns to re-experience grade-school 'recess,' one need only look in on any of the innumerable Usenet newsgroups.) (3)

Struggle or straggle?

As long as the flow of information was limited, the institutional pattern of information channeling was also limited; Church and King could handle it nicely. The 'orneriness effect' of humanity, however, has never been limited, continually increasing the amount of info, and the distribution of people who might have it; thus, its encroachments on the fixed order led to such things as Guilds and Parliaments, and from there to business management and civil service, and on to temporary labor pools and drive-by voting. (4)

The clearest cross-section of this 4-dimensional information dissemination pattern, of course, is the history of education. From a very specialized tuition (mainly drills of whom was begot by whom) for noble scions and monastic (or Masonic) oblates, the concept grew into skills-based training -- how to fit a wagon wheel, or reckon sums, or find the appropriate legal precedent or scriptural commentary -- from which we now have 'just-in-time' productivity (aka lifelong 'learning to learn') and televised debates. By way of comparison, one can consider the evolution of the 'high (king's) way' into the network of commercial routes, into omnipresent vehicular access. In both cases, the (social or technical) engineers have been in 'catch-up' mode for 500 years (more or less); unable to conceive or execute anything but prescriptions of 'more of the same', they have always been a day late and a dollar short, while the traffic in (and the trivialization of) practically everything (including papyral indulgences of the failure to grasp what education is about) continuously burgeons.

This is not to say that there is a 'solution' to the 'problem', or even that there ought to be a better 'plan'; only that the overwhelmingly dominant experience of the population at large has been with durable public structures which are inadequate and constrictive, and that therefore there has grown up a dep conviction that competition for scarce resources, be they parking spaces or seats at college, is an innate principle of civilization. At the same time, and by the same mechanism, peoples' expectations are conditioned to exceed their realization, in perpetuity -- and all the 'administration' can do, again, is to formulate bigger 'infrastructural' schemes and higher levels of 'organization' even more remote from effective citizen action. By political (pertaining to policy) prayers to Success and Prosperity, we have brought about an Age of Discontent on the individual level; under the spell of 'democracy,' we have conjured the Kingdom of Expertise, complete with ranks of professional courtiers and jesters and minions, not to mention its mercantile agents, the Mr 'Don't worry, be happy' Micawbers and unctious Uriah Heeps.

Into this worldview, enter the Internet. The dam at the booby bin is burst, said Pogo prophetically, and just in time too, say I, tho the effect is one of reverse (c)osmosis: 'culture' is not being swamped, but sucked into the heady mailstrom of 'cyberspace' while for once, the earthly, institutionalized powers that be find they can visualize only too well what the social effects might be. After generations of obedient struggle, millions of 'users' are discovering the freedom of 'connectivity' (albeit shy, as yet, about venturing outside the conventional paradigm of shopping); the shackles and shucksters of failure (which is the statistical equivalent of competition) are falling away. As knowledge superceded wisdom, so information is supplanting knowledge, and (e.g. Green) social engagement is outstripping social engineering. The wisest move in a long time by USG was the concession of the cobbled-together 'administration' of the net to a quasi-governmental body; ICANN may be suborned by purely commercial interests, but at least it is one giant step closer to being susceptible to the influence of ordinary netizens.

One other giant step remains, needless to say: what are those netizens to do if the nascent structure is to succumb to virtual democracy?

The proposition is placed before the honorable members of this virtual house: the only thing that can be done is to delineate a clearer statement of our desires than the 'forces of evil' with all its legions of doomsayers can concoct for us. Do they say time is of the essence? We say no, it is meaningless in an asynchronous world. Do they say the net must be regulated? We say no, thank you, we'll regulate ourselves. Do they say pornographers and child molesters will corrupt everything Americ(atm) stands for? We say, where were you standing 40 years ago when TV raised its ugly head?

Time flies like a banana

However, the essence of the argument boils down simply to this: once faith or trust in the hierarchy is disrupted, there is only one place from which to build up any similar one: the bottom, the radix, the 'native' talent of humans to know grass from grain, or gas from gain. Compared to past efforts to construct a 'new society,' cyberspace offers the opportunity to simulate one -- or many -- building and rebuilding as seems most fit. Compared to time-bound models, 'virtual reality' can operate independently of time: bodies need not age, how one gained the experience one brings is not critical, and certainly our words can indeed be long remembered here. Where once there were continual shortages of skills and materials, here one has a surfeit of the necessary ingredients: the very 'words' one 'speaks,' the 'text' one 'writes.' (6)

At the same (internal) time, one therefore holds both the lock and the key. How to make a world of words, when every habit associated with them is inverted? In time-bound life, words stand as the poor persons's luxury; here, one needs to take each one seriously to avoid cascading confusion on confusion. In TBL, everybody at least believed they could speak for themselves, even if noone was listening (the essence of 'free speech'); here, the 'self' is trivial to nonexistent - and everybody can listen. The modus vivendi TBL is to 'address the issue' and largely ignore how the issue is to be described to another; here, the issue is as plain as day and the task is to persuade people to see it. In short, we are already at work -- continuously from the outset and on into eternity (so to speak), building/ seeking the trust, that these 'speech-acts' may be understood by you, dear reader. (I claim no monopoly here; parallel efforts are being made by many others across cyberspace.)

Nor iron chains

Morningstar's concept of 'electric community' may have an additional level of freedom built in for the users to play with, but the code by which it runs still follows thoroughly fixed rules. The proposal I offer -- that everything is negotiable -- necessarily implies that while your (prior) rules are your own affair, we negotiate (communicate) our (current) rules as we speak; that 'rulemaking' is indeed all we can do, for the self-evidently 'real issue' is love, agape, trust, affinity, as you wish. Distingushing 'information content' from its 'container,' context from content, rule from freedom works for commerce, for solving problems, for everything except trust.

Until ICANN comes to understand this, its concept of administration will be fatally flawed. Nothing in cyberspace can force us to do its bidding, although I expect we may see years of wrangling and adjudication of precious bits of evidence -- "See? People don't know they (inter-)operate on trust" -- that its not their technical place to educate us. What do netizens have to do? We have to do that ourselves, for the ignorant we shall have always with us, even in the robes/ robots of office.

Notes

    This is Blake's explicit reply [in the First Series of There is No Natural Religion, 1788] to the Lockean-Hartleian proposition on which revolutionary thought was grounded. When Godwin wrote, 'We are all of us endowed with reason ['Ratio'], to compare, to judge and to infer,' Blake had already written,

'Man by his reasoning power can only compare & judge of what he has already perceiv'd.' 

Godwin's rationalism was the essential ingredient in his doctrine of necessity... Blake saw at once that a universe so conceived supplied no rationale for poetry, and to sensation he therefore opposed 'the Poetic or Prophetic character' as the source of real knowledge.
    In the Second Series, which carries on from this conclusion, Blake denies the finality of 'all we have already known'; that is, the sum of knowledge granted by the senses, or by experimental science, that small bound body of certain physical fact which is the jealous possession of positivism. [A.N.] Whitehead has said, 'the true rationalism must always transcend itself... A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions. This was the case with science.' Blake was trying to say exactly that:

 'The bounded is loathed by its possessor.'

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