WTO + SDMI = NWO

Andy Oram's latest article has a nice analysis of the future of intergovernmental organizations and the internet. He covers the PICS bait-and-switch, DVDs, and ties it all in with the actions of groups like the WTO and WIPO. The intertwining of government and corporations to limit freedoms on the internet is a topic that every internet user should pay attention to, but few do. I personally plan to cover this situation in as great a depth as possible on slashdot in the future - stay tuned.

who is the government?

Intergovernmental organizations do play a significant role nowadays, but we must remember that ultimate power still rests in national governments with their police, their armies, and their popular mandates.

Not quite true, if the national governments (meaning people that comprise them) become dependent (directly or indirectly) on various super-national bodies. One can argue that IMF removed Indonesia's Suharto by forcing him to conduct rather unpopular economic policies.

And, let's face it, there're more pressing problems than CDA - like the right to KNOW if your food was genetically engineered.

On the more sinister (conspiracy theory) note, what about IMF, World Bank and WTO being covertly led by the Trilateral and Bilderberg Commissions that are not elected in any way, but simply ARE OUT THERE?

...

The article makes several good points but I think it's ignoring the root issue here. As computer geeks we often can fully understand the implications of a new law passed restricting online access or a piece of technology with a way to uniquely and globally identify you. As such, we also have the ability to circumvent, limit, or work-around those things to maintain our own personal freedom and privacy. This is why most geeks, while upset over these developments, are not rioting in the streets. We can work around it, defeat it, or be aware of it and alter our actions accordingly.

Let me give you a common example - mp3 ripping and software "piracy". With a few exceptions (you may have one or two at work who are well known for it), most geeks don't have an issue with copying software or other information (audio) for personal use. It's a non-issue. So how come the average joe, after watching an SPA commercial is scared that the cops are already on their way to his house to bust him because he borrowed a windows 98 CD from a friend of his at work? Because he doesn't know that isn't going to happen. We have more information that he does. I know atleast 30 people off the top of my head that freely exchange their software with each other. Photoshop 5, ask john. Need Back Office, go to david. You get the idea. Am I a criminal? Yeah, probably. I simply happen to know the probability of the SPA even caring about my meager collection are about as good as MS winning the trial. You'll also note I'm posting with my e-mail address attached. I dare the SPA or RIAA to come over to my house. I know it would cost local law enforcement more in transportation and manpower than they would hope to gain by "busting" me.

This is the reason why the WTO is dangerous - we already have ways to circumvent it. Talks of creating digital havens outside of US or WTO control are already underway and servers are doubtless being setup as we speak. Information does not want to be free - it already is. The problem is getting the non-geeks to understand this. And that, my friends, is the heart of the issue.

Nothing new here...

It is pretty much accepted that SDMI has been, and always will be, DEAD. Users will never support a format that includes self-destruct "features". In fact, one of the SDMI folks wrote a message on MP3.com, which can be found here [mp3.com].

-Davidu

They're only hurting the lawkeepers

Imposing this kind of regulatory laws on the Internet will only harm the law-abiding consumers. They will do nothing at all against the trouble-makers. What, you can stop stuff like pr0n and whatnot on the Internet by monitoring who connects where, and cutting off traffic at routers, etc.? No way! They'll always find a way around it. Then what happens? You've crippled the Internet for the average user -- who has no part in "questionable" things like this. You've deprived the innocent user of his privacy so that ad companies can bombard him with spam and sell his personal info. But you've done absolutely nothing to prevent Internet crime and abuse. Those who abuse the Net will always find ways to work around any kind of "protection" you impose on the Internet.

Why does US allow citizens to have guns? Because by outlawing guns you only cause normal people to be more vulnerable. It doesn't matter whether guns are legal or not; criminals will always find ways to get them. The same goes for the Internet.

Subverting the process with external systems...

While I share the author's pessimism over the direction of global government, especially WRT filtering, I think there is room for hope based on the following:

• As the scale of corporations/governments gets bigger, the cracks get bigger - that is, more people and ideas slip through them, and fall out of reach. (The rise of free software, the distribution of MP3s, and the WTO protests are but the most obvious examples.)

• Those cracks, which corporations/governments might wish to fill in, are the expansion joints that make their existence on such a scale possible. To fill them in is to ensure collapse (a la the USSR).

• At some point, the system will self-correct in one of a few possible ways:
  • Mammals marginalize the dinosaurs. (Compare the computer industry in the pre-PC age vs. today.)

  • The leaders of the hierarchical system marginalize themselves. (That is, the decisions they make alienate a large majority of the people, who turn their backs on them. See Robespierre at the end of the Terror, or the Russian Revolution, or the American, or for that matter, the decline of Nike over the past few years.)

  • The system recognizes its fissures for what they are (an essential strain-relief mechanism), and gives up on attempting to seal them.

    Of course, the downside of this view is in recognizing that many people and ideas will get crushed by the system, unfairly and brutally, before things improve. Things may not get better for a long time either (a new Dark Ages, where wealth and access to tools of knowledge are increasingly restricted to a proportionally smaller slice of the population, is a distinct possibility - see tightening of IP protections, restrictions on "heretical" communications (e.g. encryption)), but ultimately, this too shall pass.

    -Isaac

my (knee-jerk?) reaction.

This article was meant to raise our awareness of real-world threats to our security, but the response of the slashdot community seems to be a little myopic. Don't focus on the fact that the author calls linux trendy (albeit many arguments can be raised as linux gains in popularity and moves in that direction), and don't discount it as conspiracy theory just because it mentions the NWO. The old guard sees the power of the Internet staring them in the face, and to them this digital manifestation takes the form of all the commies under the bed, the blacks being let into their schools, and the 'demoralization' of america that they have faced in the past century. All of these things were social and political changes that marked an era. People like Strom Thurmond, who continue to exist in our political structure, and people like all the liberals shouting protect the children, are struggling to control what they see to be the beast of revelations. To them the letter W = 6 and www is the mark of the beast. The government is being pushed by them as they strap on to pending legislation and continue to press their own laws through that would make every aspect of the Internet some Orwellian parody. They are trying to save their Old World Order if you will, by trying to chain change with laws in the name of safety, morality, and all those things we hold as right and reactionary. With the media's downplay of the political tensions in Seattle that resulted in the protests/riots that ensued, as well as the general spread of ignorance (along with AOL and Windows, sort of like a bundle...) most people don't pull the threads together and see whats going on. I think the author was extremely insightful and hope his article opened some eyes. One more reason for free strong-crypto, elimination of backdoors for the gov't., and why we should distance ourselves from things such as the EU, NATO, WTO, etc.

-just my two cents.

Trendy? How 'bout gratuitous WTO-bashing?

> One word in that article... that kinda peeved me. Trendy [being used to describe Linux]

Funny, this time last week, we'd have been kvetching about how $GOVERNMENTAGENCY was the problem.

Then a few yahoos trash Seattle yelling "help, help, I'm bein' repressed!" - and all of a sudden, old 60s-era journalists remember their drug-filled youths and decide that violent protest is trendy.

(Yes, violent protest. Were it not for the yahoos trashing downtown, the peaceful protesters would have been politely ignored as they always are. An ex-hippie journalist who grew up in the 60s can't write lines comparing Seattle to the Democratic Convention and Kent State incidents of his or her youth without the tear gas, pepper spray, and bullets to go with it. Violence == ratings, and if violence can be made trendy, the folks running the news organizations (obviously pawns of the WTO :-) can assure themselves of more violence in the future.)

And now that the smoke has cleared, those same journalists have realized that it's trendy to bash capitalism, so everyone with a left-leaning cause decides to do a s/$OLDBADGUY/WTO/g in their articles.

Don't like SDMI? Blame the WTO! Someone cuts you off in traffic? Blame the WTO! Now that's what I call trendy.

Someone questions knee-jerk WTO-bashing? Blame the WTO and accuse them of being part of the Conspiracy. Betcha that's trendy too.

Y'know what I wanna see being trendy? Geeks getting jobs, making money, maybe a few more millionaires through the stock option lottery, and then - if they still persist in believing the hype against global capital even after having benefitted so immensely from it - putting some of those dollars back into their communities and making a difference.

But success is never trendy, is it?

Revolution-proofing the elites

One interesting ramification of forcing nations into codependency is the resulting immunity of institutionalized power to popular revolution.

Revolutions are local affairs, instigated by people on the streets and swept along by physical proximity, excitement, and charisma. Revolutions are generally also mob actions. Even the most widely spread revolutions in history, such as those in the 1840's and the 1960's could be regarded as a series of "brush fires" rather than one giant, ongoing conflagration.

Popular revolt is dangerous to elites (that is to say the wealthy and the government) because they may not have sufficiently well organized propaganda to subvert them. Or, failing that, they may lack enough brute might to suppress them physically. Once a hierarchy topples, there is no failsafe for the elites. Their last card has been played and they wind up disgraced or occasionally dead. These local successes can inspire further uprisings in other nations with similar social structures. One excellent example of this is the French revolution as a reflection of the success of the American revolution.

However, with the introduction of a so-called "world economy" and "world government", local elites do have a second tier of defense. Namely, that a region that has become dependent upon interactions with other regions can be starved and ostracized into submission. For example, consider the remarkable conformity among third-world nations to austerity policies established by the IMF. Austerity may or may not work, but it certainly is not a popular economic path for locals, involving as it generally does the elimination of goods subsidies and social programs, and the granting of special privileges to large international businesses. Yet local potentates comply with the IMF because without the goodwill of the world community, upon which they are dependent, their countries would collapse.

Such co-dependent nations face only disgrace and economic disaster if a revolution occurs. Ultimately, the revolutionaries either toe the "international-friendly" line as will probably be the case in Pakistan, or they submit. Would-be revolutionaries in other regions observe this failure, and some of the fire goes out of them for their own uprising.

The elites, who are essentially fluid in the absence of international boundaries, retreat as they have always done to an amenable nation and agitate for harsher punitive measures against the now "rogue" state. This is precisely what has occurred in southern Florida, which is settled by many very wealthy Cubans.

This trend is certainly in the best interests of entrenched power.

-konstant

Re:...

Information does not want to be free - it already is.

• |pyrexD::Say|
• • goddam! naked eloquence of post bring tear to |pyreX::Eye| like big chief in
  • 
    sierra club tv spot
    |pyreX::Cry|
  noble sentiment make |pryeX::Soul| fly high

for this most cleverly constructed

• |karmA::Bait|

seen from mr. 11 to date. |n0::Shit|

People get the government and laws they deserve.

Warning: Excessive Ranting.

I have mixed feelings on this subject - on one hand, there's not much that joe blow can do about a government that he/she doesn't like - and every day, more guns get taken out of the hands of the people, which is what all policical power defaults to. Don't think so? Have a look at Seattle. You US guys should know that the bit about guns in the consitution wasn't about hunting. One of my favorite quotes goes something along the lines "a good government should be afraid of it's people".

Don't like the laws? Start protesting them. But, most aren't willing too, because when it comes right down to it, most people want to come home from their crappy job, drink there beer, sit in front of their cable TV, eat their dinner, and pass out. Until something interferes with that nothing will change.

The protests with the WTO are directly related to governments conspiring (at least from Joe Blow's perspective) to interfere with the "crappy job" bit. People, we all can't be programmers, and the average joe understands this completely. The middle-class medium-skilled jobs are the ones that get transferred to the third world, and those are also the ones most people work!

Software laws will largely become a side point if the current trends in open-source development keep doing. Linux has come a long way in 5 years - imagine what will happen in 15.

On other policical fronts, until the masses get connected in such a way that they can freely work together - something you need strong crypto for - not much is going to change. I know that personally, as long as the man doesn't bother me too much, my bank account remains intact, and I can buy a NSX when I want one, I'm not too concerned.

Kudos!

By Way Of Encouragement

Anybody who doubts that the citizenry can unilaterally take something back from government control need only tune their HF receivers to 27 MHz, then look up the history of that stretch of radio spectrum.
When over 10% of the American public owned CB radios, enforcement of the extant ill-advised rules for Part 95 CB Radio (ill-advised because the rules were appropriate for a VHF or UHF service with no over-the horizon propagation, not for the most interesting global propagation ham band at sunspot maxima) became impossible.
The result is a jungle in this case, but the impact on a government body of the stubborn mass refusal of a populace to comply with onerous regulations is so-far permanent: faced with the impossibility of obtaining funding for effective enforcement, the FCC backed off and effectively told CBers "don't bother other radio services." This, without a shot being fired, without any boxes of tea being dumped in the harbor.

Re:Revolution-proofing the elites

Real revolution isn't the mindless action of the mob, but rather the education and empowerment of the individual. Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian [aol.com], has written extensively on the subject of education and its popular use to produce followers rather than people who can be leaders in and of themselves.

More on the original topic, I recall a recent post here that said people don't like using tools that serve someone else's purposes. Crippling hardware and software is working against the design of the machine, impeding the progress of bits from point A to point B. Recall David Aucsmith of Intel:

The actual user of the PC -- someone who can do anything they want -- is the enemy.

To any entrenched elite, the enemy is those who can and do think for themselves -- and those who do for themselves without relying on the "elites" to guide them down the "approved" path of life.

Re:Revolution-proofing the elites

disagree with that. The power base, atleast in the US, is dominated by the upper middle class right now - NOT the established social elite

That's what they want you to think... :)

Keep in mind that the middle class is also the consumer class, and thus most susceptible to propaganda. Sound-byte warfare against insurrection is shaping up to be the real safeguard against grassroots movements, not tanks. See how easily the "powerful" upper middle class was turned against the Seattle protests by a simple bandying of the term "violent".

I don't disagree with you that the middle class has power. However, I stipulate that it lacks organization and driving will. Those things are supplied artificially by "elites" through news, entertainment, and commercials.

Anyway, don't expect a revolution from the middle class. The middle class is all about social stabilization, not overthrow. That's what the middle class is all about - giving poor people hope that they can be elevated to the middle class, and giving the middle class hope they can be elevated to the upper class. The middle class is one of the reasons 20th century society has been so stable despite yawning inequities between the richest and the poorest. It is a buffer of people who have a lot (but not too much!) to lose.

-konstant

I really dislike this sort of article

To me this article is really lacking. Certainly organizations like the WTO can do a lot of harm, but the fact of the matter is that globalization cuts both ways, both good and bad. Authors like this may have some pet ox gored, but the long term effects of globalization contain too many positive effects to ignore.

Global trade clearly benefits consumers in a lot of ways by making the marketplace more competitive. If a country is a low cost producer, or the goods they produce are of higher quality they should not be excluded from a market for nationalistic reasons. Consumers in Japan pay far more for food than in the US, and it is only because of government interference with trade that they do so. Surely there would be dislocation in the Japanese farm community if Japan imported more food - BUT the same money that is spent on subsidies not could be spent to restructure the Japanese economy, and the labor that is inefficiently spent on food production could be applied to far better value added activities that would ultimately result in improving the standard of living in Japan.

Concerns about WTO creating a more stable system of government are interesting - but what is the alternative? The 20th Century has been marked by the two greatest wars in human history. One of the great hopes of globalization is that it will make war obsolete. Nations will become interdependent and have far more to lose by going to war. The ultimate hope is that the productive capacities used to maintain armies at large fractions of GDPs in third world countries will be turned towards production of consumer necessities.

Many third world countries are concerned about globalization resulting in massive cultural changes. Certain globalization will result in cultural change. But what ways of life are worth maintaining at the expense of illiteracy, poverty and disease?

Globalization is often cited as a powerful force towards democratization and rule of law rather than law of ruler. It appears now that any totalitarian regime that engages in open competition will have powerful forces towards openness directed at it. Rampant inefficiencies due to corruption will be forced out of existence. Stong man governments (the Phillipines and Indonesia are powerful recent examples) will be forced out of power.

What are the downsides? Certainly in an interdependent global society some lack of local soveriegnty is lost. Is this a bad thing? In my opinion xenophobia and nationalism have been the two greatest forces for destruction over the history of mankind.

Losing the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest is painful, and should be avoided, but we should also work to prevent mass murder at the hands of despots. Is the sacrifice of a few trees to prevent a world war worthwhile?

I think so.

The fact is that we have an unusual opportunity to positively influence future history by globalization. The key is not whether we want to globalize, but to understand the reasons for it, and to manage our institutions to take advantage of the benefits.

One thing that people everywhere will have to get used to is that world organizations will have some unusual powers. It is impossible to manage a global economy with national level institutions. There will probably be a lot of problems at the start, and some xenophobic reaction to these problems. But the potential is worth it.

People on /. realize very well that the Internet is already beyond the regulatory capacity of any one nation. Even in China the government has found that it's goals of trade with the west are inconsistent with their desire to censor news. They are finding that their only choice is to favor openness because the alternative is the gulag and stagnation.

The future of mankind is with transparency at the world level, not with petty xenophobic nationistic views. The goals we need to be working for are making the international organizations needed for globalization transparent and open, while not being blind to the ultimate benefits of globalization.

anti NWO resortiments

NWO. what does that mean. "new world order" and what people usually mean
with that is globalisation and a shift towards a kind of world government.

i would say NWO (the shift towards some kind world government) is more or
less inevitable. we will have that in some form or another anyway. the
question is not if we want that kind of thing but how we want
it to look like.

• if national governments do not try to solve global problems on a global
  scale (and the most important problems are usually global problems) then no
  one will solve those problems. instead big corporations will more or less
  rule the world. small countries can not afford to object those big
  corporations.. "if you do not give us the right to pollute your environment
  we will take our $$$ elsewhere.." etc.. only very big countries could afford
  to object here.. the USA comes to mind. but unfortunately the USA is mostly
  in the hand of big $$$ corporations anyway because the political system
  allows bribery (lobbying, donating money to senators etc..) and is not
  really democratic.. so i guess big corporations are not unhappy with the
  status quo of competing national government. as long as there is no real
  international political power which could stand up against big corporations
  then they are the king of the hill...
  
  
• so to avoid the disadvantages mentioned above we need some political power
  that can operate on a global scale. we need institutions where these
  problems are discussed but moreover we also need institutions which have the
  legal power to do something about the problems. so international
  organisations are necessary. but we want them to be democratically
  controlled. until we have world wide voting this could be achieved if the
  national governments send representatives there and each one has votes..
  
  

so when arguing against international organisations like WTO etc: it is
important that people argue against the politics this organisation makes in
case it is too much oriented towards the interest of corporations but not
against the institution as a place where there would be power to do
something to control international corporations

an example: international corporation wants to produce something very cheap
and the cheapest way to produce it is in a way that pollutes our atmosphere.
now they say ask: "which country has no laws to prohibit the pollution about
the atmosphere" of course they will find one somewhere.. (bribing a senator
in the USA or going 3rd world country..etc.). now each sovereign small
country can say: oh but we will not buy these goods from this company
because they pollute the environment... but will they really do it? after all
it gives them competitive disadvantage compared to the other nations which
do not hesitate to buy that goods.. when it is a small country then they can
not do but buy.. (maybe they have a little bit more tax on it so they can
tell the environmentalists among the voters that they are doing something
but most of the time they will just buy it). would there be a powerful
organisation then they could just say "producing with this kind of
environmental is not allowed."

somehow the reason why we want supernational organisations is the same as
the one why we want workers unions => so that the people together are strong
against too much capitalism. and i guess most of the resortiments against
NWO is actually promoted by big corporations and right wing parties.
(together with a few left who are just to stupid to grasp it).

greetings from vienna, austria.

der mond.

Yes, he really said that.

I foudn the quote from this comment hard to believe, so I did a search, and sure enough: he really said it [zdnet.co.uk].

Boggle.
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