I'm actually not particularly a personal fan of stereotypical "Cyber-ideology." I find "techno-salvation" fantasies to primarily consist of trite, puerile escapism; and the communities constructed around them to be riddled with systematic failures. My above defense of "Cyberspace" is in kin spirit to defending free speech even for those blathering pure evil --- but in this case, the battle line is drawn beyond speech, at thought itself. Despite my low opinion of most "cyber-idealists," the logic underlying Lind's argument is too insidious to let slide. Basically, "because a free, idealized Cyberspace has never and cannot exist under the current order, folks should give up thinking/talking about it at all." I'm fine with arguing against the ideas of Cyberspace (or debating the likelihood of Star Trek or the FSM), but not eradicating the entire avenue of thought simply because it contradicts the ideology of current hegemonic corporate/governmental hierarchies.

This is precisely where philosophically touchy distinctions are most needed.

The physical embodiment of Cyberspace ("people doing stuff on computers") is indeed stuck under the same legal jurisdiction as "people doing stuff on X," whether X is paper, telephones, or roads.

The idea of Cyberspace (not new by virtue of chronology, but new by distinction from status-quo orders) is subject to law only so far as we permit jurisdiction of our minds --- and that is a border conflict that I have not yet conceded.

I'm not denying that the component ideas of Cyberspace existed *long* before computers --- but that doesn't mean the ideas don't exist. That desire for human connection that drove early anonymous phone connections still projects itself into contemporary ideas of Cyberspace. Maybe you'd prefer we called such things by different, less pretentiously dorky, names; perhaps give more credit to their pre-computer philosophical underpinnings --- as soon as you're appointed King of Language, you can declare whatever changes you want. For the people who discovered communities and ideas in the cyber-world (instead of the telegraph-world or phone-world), these were indeed new things to them, and transformative of their world beyond minor extension of the status quo (which, for most people, did not include anonymous phone friendships).

Indeed, replacing "Doing X" with "Doing X... with a computer!" changes nothing. Re-creating the old world a little faster and easier does not a revolution make.

But, perhaps people have found a few *new* things that they can do in "Cyberspace"?
"In the real world, everyone knows you're a dog."
To create new identities, fluidly and anonymously, independent of existing hierarchies of age, race, wealth, and power; to explore new social arrangements and communities built from these new synthetic identities; these can be transformative things.

That the word "cyberspace" exists (where "Fax Space" doesn't) demonstrates that something new was created: an idea. The computers and wires remain solidly subject to the old world's laws and regulations --- in this sense, there is no cyberspace. But the idea of cyberspace --- rather, the many ideas of many cyberspaces --- doesn't give a fuck that it was done... with a computer!

The physical embodiment of "Cyberspace" --- its computers, wires, and people --- is indeed, as Lind suggests, irrevocably bound to the material conditions of this world. To suppose otherwise; that Cyberspace offers some magical escape from the existing orders of our lives or from whatever powers control our cables and our bodies; is naive.

The idea of "Cyberspace," however --- the projection of human yearnings for a different order to the cosmos --- is far from fictional. Lind and fellow defenders of the status quo want to sleight us of the ability to even dream of other worlds outside the grim reality of our own. So long as the idea of Cyberspace remains chained to the physical material of Cyberspace, it will be trampled under the same heels that oppress all other material reality. But, turn those ideas outward to engage change in the world --- forget about freeing computers from the corporatocracy, but strive rather to free your neighbor --- and perhaps someday an emancipated Cyberspace can flourish in an emancipated world.

Keep in mind, German unification wasn't exactly an example of Helpless Commies rushing to the loving embrace of Unfettered Capitalism. The West German state already had strong worker protections, unionization, a fairly egalitarian public sector --- in other words, many of the "good parts" of Communism (without the authoritarian central planning bureaucracy), so East Germany wasn't thrown headfirst into the vortex of capitalist exploitation. Countries that follow the US "economic hit men" trajectory for economic development tend to end up quite differently from Germany's slow-but-steady absorption of the lagging East into a functional social-democratic society. The US prefers to mold countries more like Mexico --- a few mega-billionaires scattered between swathes of massive poverty in a privatized state, providing a pool of profitably cheap labor and extractable resources for Western investors. Korean unification guided by South Korean industrialists and Wall Street investors is likely to me much more "Mexico" than "Germany" twenty years down the road.

Lucky you. We don't all have the option of "peaceful death from old age" to avoid the next 30 years of dystopia, so some of us actually do care what happens.

20 years ago, there wasn't a highly developed industry devoted to tracking your every internet move for profit. Now there is. That changes a lot --- the HR drone 30 years from now may not recognize the "LinkedIn" brand-name, but they'll be able to pull up every bit of collected data, meticulously passed from tracking corporation to tracking corporation at every merger, to determine if your past life conforms to a suitably-exploitable profile.

"Just the right amount of fruit juice" means the amount that allows them to prominently display "Made with real fruit juice!" on the label, without incurring too much extra cost from actually including juice. "Just right" for a mega-corporation is always going to be starkly different from "just right" for human beings.

Oligopoly markets with a small number of players tend to end up effectively reproducing the market behavior of a single monopolistic entity rather than a "competitive" market. Engaging in fierce competition to produce the best service at the lowest prices hurts the profit margins of all involved parties --- no player really wants to initiate a price war, because it's mutually assured destruction. Instead, oligopoly participants tend to become "co-respective" rather than "competitive," coordinating actions to follow each other's lead without needing "official" collusion. The result is increasing prices and profit margins until the system as a whole equilibrates to the profit-maximizing price/production point that a monopoly would choose, instead of the profit-minimizing, production-maximizing point that an "ideal" (i.e. virtually non-existent) free market would find.

Note, of course, that grossly high gerrymandered wins indicate the gerrymandering was done by the opposing party. The "ideal" plan for gerrymandering is, e.g., to safely win by 53:47 in 8 districts, while losing 95:5 in 2. Consistent wins by 75:25 mean that your party is wasting a huge amount of voting power, favoring the opposition to win many more nearby districts with smaller (but still reliable) margins. In this example, Hispanics are being badly disenfranchised --- they all get concentrated into one "sure win" district, instead of being able to use this much lopsided voting power to win a whole bunch of surrounding districts with smaller but democratically representative margins.

But an inconceivably huge dick, which is a more interesting starting point for intellectual debate than Dawkin's straw-man tiny limp dick god.

My mistake for reading too much cynicism into your critique of Augustine. And I agree, his writings often do show marks of overly enthusiastic "fanciful interpretation" to "protect" the Christian faith. Apologetics is one of the areas he is famous for --- and I'm rarely a fan of apologists, because they too often discard introspective care and rigor for a more "convincing" narrative. Augustine did not have the advantage of later, more nuanced developments in textual criticism --- he was caught between seeing the scriptures as either falsehoods or "straight from God's mouth to Moses' hand" --- more nuanced intermediate positions (considering the cultural context of human authors, compounded by scribal redactions and translational difficulties, as factors shaping scripture) developed centuries later, that would have been a better fit for Augustine's analytical style.

Nothing in my post was meant to imply that the 3/5 compromise was a "bad thing" (especially in comparison to representation by full proportional representation) --- you seem to be projecting some assumptions onto my post. My intent was merely to provide a reminder that the wonderful "original constitutional" system that libertarians lust after was no freedom utopia --- though with many good points, it was a deeply compromised system that integrally embraced terrible oppression, which cannot simply be brushed aside to leave some perfect "Jefferson's real intent" guiding document. With gaping "liberty flaws" in the system as big as slavery, it takes a particularly strong kind of ideological blindness to think that our society's problems will be (mostly) solved by reverting to a mythical, purified version of the constitution.

I'm sorry for coming across in my preceding posts as if Augustine was blithely unconscious about the potential pitfalls of tying religion to flaky scientific claims. He certainly was attentive to this, as your quotes from him amply demonstrate. His concerns came from personal experience --- seeing cracks between Manichaean cosmological predictions and contemporary astronomical observations turned Augustine away from earlier attraction to the Manichaean community.

However, I still think you are wrong to imply that Augustine's Christian writings (using scripture for symbolic spiritual guidance rather than as a physics textbook) were created to "explain away embarrassing wrongs." The distinction is subtle but important: Augustine had concerns about the possibility of future embarrassment if Christianity became associated with scientific ignorance, but he did not enter into a religion already grounded on bad science and then "save" it from embarrassment by ret-conning its belief system. After being burned by Manichaeanism, I don't think Augustine was the kind of cynical, spiteful jerk who would seek out a new religion that was obviously wrong just so he could "fix it up" to more effectively fool other people. Instead, Augustine found a new religious community (orthodox Christianity) with existing practices and beliefs that weren't grounded on adherence to some logically flakey cosmology. Augustine's conversion into Christianity provides evidence that Christian theology of the time already offered the kind of nuanced, spiritual interpretations that would be attractive to an educated and analytical thinker like Augustine --- Augustine had no prior commitments that would encourage him to cynically aid Christianity in evading scientific embarrassment; if Christianity needed such evasive action in the first place, Augustine would not have joined.