I have much to say about Brin’s attacks on “dogmatic libertarians,” by which he means followers of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand who worship property too much, but watch the video first and then continue on below for my commentary.

I’ll state right up front that I do not think of Brin as a libertarian, much less as a heretical one (as he describes himself). To the extent that he is right on anything, he’s not telling libertarians anything new. As for the rest, I’ve seen enough on his blog and various social networks to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t understand the actual positions held by principled libertarians (as opposed to the bizarre straw men he’s concocted and attributed to us) and that it’s impossible to carry on a civil, constructive conversation over the internet with him about libertarianism if you disagree with him on the subject. Although he says in the video that he doesn’t want to insult, after he’s already insulted, if you dare to challenge his views about “dogmatic libertarianism,” prepare to be mocked and insulted and misinterpreted and talked past.

Brin says, “The issue should not be government. It should not be unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property,  which is the path that the libertarian movement has gone down.”

I have no idea what he means by “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property” and I’ve yet to see him give a clear explanation of this magic-talisman phrase he bandies about like a Hammer of Refutation. I can’t imagine what problem he sees in upholding private property rights. He seems to think our “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry” somehow leads to oligarchy, but I’m at a loss as to how it is supposed to do so. I can only assume he thinks it means we must uphold “rights” to even unjustly acquired property, but this is simply not so.

The phrase is also code for “Hey, man, let’s be practical; sometimes one has to make compromises, break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Those who want government solutions to perceived problems hate it when libertarians stand on principle and refuse to budge. It drives them into uncivilized fits of apoplectic, frothing rage.

Brin also seems to think that so-called “dogmatic libertarians” have lost sight of the importance of competition and transparency and whatnot. Uh… No. No, we haven’t. I don’t know where he gets this stuff from. We see private property rights as making fair and creative competition possible in the first place; and we value fair and creative competition greatly, especially those of us who see intellectual property as illegitimate government grants of monopoly privilege that can only be enforced by infringing on the pre-existing rights of others to their physical property.

“Libertarians need to be reminded that, across 6,000 years, the greatest enemy of free enterprise, of market enterprise, innovation, creative competition… have always been oligarchs,” says Brin.

No… No, we don’t. But mayhaps you need to be reminded that all forms of government, not just the one labeled oligarchy, are ultimately ruled by oligarchs. It’s in the nature of the state. You know… that organization you said we shouldn’t concern ourselves with. Theory and history show us that it is through the state that oligarchs acquire and exercise their power. Without it, they are impotent. It is the state, always ruled by oligarchs, that has been the greatest enemy of free markets, free enterprise, innovation, and fair and creative competition.

In the video, Brin lays out a plan to rein in government growth, corruption, and “abuse.” Here’s a summary: Let’s draft 10,000 average Americans into a pool every year. Excuse Brin’s poor choice of words; this “draft” is one that can be refused without penalty (although an opt-out system is an unnecessary hassle for people and is frowned upon by savvy Netizens). We’ll then do background checks on this pool of candidates to winnow it down to a list 1,000 trustworthy, loyal citizens who can keep their mouths shut. Give them security clearances and arm them with a badge that let’s them get in any door in the United States of America — you read that right, any door. They are tasked with watching the watchmen. There will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” Brin suggests a mere month in jail. The idea being that spending a month in jail will be a price worth paying to patriots in order to bring truly heinous acts of government out into the light so that they can be stopped.

What was interviewer Tim Cavanaugh’s response to all this? “Huh. Okay.”

That’s it?

This didn’t immediately strike him as a terrible idea? He didn’t think or, better yet, say: “Gee, this can’t possibly go wrong.” Not a single problem with the proposed system immediately sprang to mind that he could ask Brin to address? Or did Cavanaugh just not want to ask the celebrity any tough questions?

I’ll just toss a few ideas off the top of my head into the ring for consideration:

1. Who is going to administer this new system of citizen-watchmen — the lottery for the draft, the background checks, security clearance decisions, and so on? Oh, that’s right — the government. Despite Brin’s talk about non-governmental, or market, solutions to problems, his proposal is a government solution to a government problem (government failure).  What? You need me to flesh the implications out for you? Okay…
2. It means the creation of a new bureaucracy or ratcheting up an exsiting one. Either way, a WIN for big government and more spending! That’s what we libertarians are fighting for!
3. Who’s to say the penalty won’t be ratcheted up over time like the income tax? Thus decreasing the risk to government officials that their secrets will get out?
4. The selection process couldn’t possibly be rigged or gamed, could it?
5. No citizen-watchman would ever take a bribe to keep quiet,  surely.
6. Or stay mum in the face of threats to himself or his family… right?
7. Brin’s proposed system entails acclimating Americans to increased government surveillance of and deep-probing into their public and private lives. Oh, and revisit #4-6 in light of this. Worse, it might come to be seen as a patriotic duty to accept such scrutiny from the government.
8. Brin says there will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” I hope he’s only referring to classified or top secret, not unclassified, information here. Let’s take him charitably and assume he is; how much do you want to bet that this will lead to more and more aspects of government becoming classified so as to have the threat of the penalty for revealing what is seen hanging over the citizen-watchmen’s heads for matters of less and less importance to the “national interest”?
9. The system Brin proposes is likely to make people more complacent about government in the same way and for the same reasons that democracy fools them into believing they’re ultimately in charge and that regulations encourage them to abdicate responsibility for the quality of the goods and services they buy, for their own safety and security and that of their families, and so on. “Hey, man, there’s a system in place to make sure our representives and public servants do what they’re tasked with doing and to weed out corruption and bad secret policies and stuff. They have enough volunteers. I don’t need to waste my valuable Celebrity Apprentice–watching time worrying about it. Did you see what happened last night? Aubrey O’Day is soooo right. She’s the only one with any talent on her team. Nobody else every has a creative.”
10. Brin doesn’t  mention monetary compensation for being a citizen-watchman. Is it likely that as many as 1 in 10 draftees will not only accept being drafted but pass the background checks to qualify for a security clearance? A much larger pool than 10,000 might be needed. And might there not be a selection bias in who chooses to accept the responsibility after being drafted? No potential for abuse there?
11. What if the citizen-watchmen are generally okay with things libertarians would deem heinous? In light of the direction this country has been headed lo the past couple centuries, this isn’t much of a stretch, is it?
12. Brin says that citizen-watchmen will be able to get into any door in the United States. Any door. I hope he means any government door, not really any door.
13. Let’s face it, Brin’s proposal is a pipe dream. The Powers That Be will never let it happen and the American people are not really interested in that level of transparency in their government — not enough to make Brin’s plan a reality, at least. And Brin has the gall to mock and blame “dogmatic libertarians,” the lapel-grabbing (lolwut?) Rothbardian and Randian wing of the movement, for the Libertarian Party failing to make headway (more than 1%) at the polls in presidential elections.
14. Brin’s citizen-watchman program will be funded by taxes, and taxation is theft. Oh, sorry, did I grab your lapels too hard?

I could go on, but what’s the point of continuing to kick a dead horse?

[TLS]

It’s been a news-heavy month. Here are a few more tidbits:

• Yesterday, Tor/Forge announced that it will make all of its ebooks completely free of DRM by early July 2012. This is a momentous and welcome change. Tor/Forge is a genre imprint of Macmillan, one of the Big Six publishers. It’s the first of these publishers to cave to author and cusotmer pressure on DRM. It may have helped that Macmillan is not a publicly traded company. Cory Doctorow believes more Big Six publishers are sure to follow; he’s “had contact with very highly placed execs at two more of the big six publishers.”
• Last month, James Cameron promoted private deep-sea exploration. He’s also partnered with Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and Ross Perot Jr., to back private space company Planetary Resources. Immediate plans are to design and build low-cost robotic spacecraft for survey missions. The firm, founded and chaired by Peter Diamondis (creator of the X-Prize Foundation) and Eric Anderson, hopes to then build on this technology and begin mining Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) within the next ten years. For an extended explanation of how and why Planetary Resources can succeed, read Phil Plait’s post on the Bad Astronomy blog. We live in exciting times for the exploration and exploitation of space.

• Mike Masnick of techdirt has the story of some obscure author suing the developers of the game Assassin’s Creed for allegedly stealing his idea. What idea, you ask? Why, genetic memory, of course! This is such an old trope, it’s like those clueless people accusing Disney’s John Carter (of Mars) of ripping off Avatar and Dances with Wolves. Genre tropes are not covered by copyright, and even if they were — screw copyright. (Not that the illegitimacy of copyright somehow greenlights plagiarism.)

While Prince and the rest of the world anxiously counted down the final seconds of the millennium — when Y2K Godzilla would destroy Cobol and Fortran systems — Dallasite Mitch Maddox was about to take part in a bold experiment.  Beginning January 1, 2000 he would legally be known as DotComGuy.

This project — to the delight of geeks, nerds, and voyeurs alike — involved living and working exclusively from home.  No more traffic jam drudgery or cubicle farm shenanigans for Mitch.  No more TPS reports or water cooler gossip. And while telecommuting was hardly a new phenomenon, corporate sponsorship from the likes of 3Com, Travelocity, and UPS made him the envy of all those who had just read Cryptonomicon or LARPed as Neo.

After all, who would not want free money to goof around on the computer all day?  It was like taking candy from a baby.

This was also at the height of the dotcom bubble.  When ordering fresh food from Webvan was considered the New Normal and the DJIA was supposedly on its way up to 36,000.

However less than two years later, Mitch would legally be known as Mitch again and product placement gurus would have to find a new Ed Pekurny and Truman Burbank to spy on.

Small Steps Towards Cybernetic Fusion

A quadriplegic named S3 in medical literature (Simeral et al, 2011) was recently noted for having successfully been part of a medical project to test brain-computer interfaces (BCI).  For over 1,000 days, her brain has played host to a tiny set of electrodes that have enabled her to perform “point-and-click” tasks on the computer.

Granted, there is literally a world of difference and several orders of magnitude between moving a mouse as S3 has done and navigating and raiding in World of Warcraft but the precedent has been empirically shown.

And while it appears we are decades away from thawing and repairing cryonically suspended brains, let alone curing paralysis, S3′s seemingly marginal freedoms could quite possibly be a tour du force for a new spin on a Neuromancer-style world.

Peas in a Sci-Fi Pod

Lee Majors and Herb Wallerstein have more in common than the cult following of their respective television shows.  In the early-to-mid ’70s, Majors portrayed Steve Austin, a government pilot who is critically injured in a plane crash.  In a risky experiment, medical doctors implant six million dollars worth of bionic gadgetry that revive and enhance his life and various brain functions in particular.  His transformative operation also served as the inspiration for the show’s title, The Six Million Dollar Man.  Adjusted for inflation, this is equivalent to roughly $30 million today.

Several years earlier, Wallerstein served as a director for the original Star Trek series.  In the sixth episode of the final season, Commander Spock is kidnapped by a group of aliens.  Spock’s brain is removed and fused with a computing machine where it is used — among other things — to control the alien’s planetary life-support system.

The term Wallerstein brain is just one of many neologisms for the same idea of an isolated brain, ex body.  For instance, while Spock’s brain is placed inside the alien’s Eymorg Controller, Richard Nixon’s head is placed inside glass covered vat in Futurama.

Even the late Robert Nozick (1974) contributed to this corpus with his philosophical-cum-physical experience machine that used simulated artificial reality to study hedonism.

Synthesis

During the heyday of the space race, Werner von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, and even former US vice-president Spiro Agnew thought that humans would begin colonizing Mars by the 1980s. Yet it has been nearly forty years since the last time any Terran-based complex life has touched down on the moon and in the prevailing decades only a couple hundred or so people have flown to an altitude beyond 100 kilometers.

Nearly two years ago astrophysicist Paul Davies (2010) proposed that despite its dangers, a one-way trip to Mars could solve the problem of human deep space exploration.  He along with other commentators noted that for a fraction of a return trip, it was technologically possible to undertake and economically viable given the in situ materials of the planet.  And given the continued enthusiasm for sci-fi related entertainment, that there could plausibly be numerous, qualified volunteers.

Similarly, given the enthusiasm towards mind-uploading, brain-computer interfaces, intelligence amplification, and the technological singularity, would there be volunteers for a Wallerstein brain?

Legalized Decapitation

Assuming that there would be volunteers for an irreversible brain-transplant, what would the financial costs be for developing the necessary machines to keep a healthy brain alive outside of the body? What would the legal ramifications and procedures be for what amounts to decapitation?

To answer these questions, there are several potential development paths that may unfold in the future.

The first of these involves seasteading.  Seasteading is a term independently created by Ken Neumeyer (1981) and Wayne Gramlich (1998).  It is a portmanteau of homesteading and “the sea,” and in most cases “the sea” is defined as the High Seas or international waters.  The specific reason for such distinction is that pursuant to most international law and international treaties, all activities that take place more than 200 nautical miles (nm) from a sovereign shore are considered immune to a sovereign’s jurisdiction.  Or rather, there is no entity that currently holds de jure jurisdiction over territory outside the 200 nm.

In theory, if you anchor in the High Seas, you axiomatically begin to homestead the area as yours. In practice (de facto), many sea lanes and territorial waters are patrolled by friend and foe alike, irrespective of state affiliation.  Current non-state entities include Blueseed, an IT startup anchored off the coast of San Francisco; Women on Waves, a non-profit organization that enables abortions near countries that prohibit them; and private radio stations such as those portrayed in The Boat That Rocked.

Another potential disruptive development could be location arbitrage via charter cities.  Economist Paul Romer (1990) has spent the last decade developing their legal and theoretical framework and is close to implementing them in the real-world.

In essence, Romer’s model is grafting the successful free-trade zone paradigm (e.g., Shenzhen, Incheon, East (Pudong) Shanghai) within a nation-state that is seeking to jump back into world trade — with a slight twist.  The twist is, although the zone would nominally be within an existing state, the rules, laws, and governance within the city would be developed by a third-party country (e.g., Canada, Switzerland).  It is within these zones that Romer and other developmental economists are hoping to attract world-class talents and skills to relatively stagnant states.  The first of these is already germinating in Honduras.

A look at the field of cryonics could also be instructive in both legal and practical considerations.  Despite 35 years of existence, the industry is still relatively small in part because none of the companies have a real marketing department.  In fact, all told less than 300 patients are under managed care by the three leading providers combined.  The legal framework is one of the impediments, due to the fact that cryonic suspension is only legal after a patient is declared dead.  Attempts to bypass the law by use of voluntary suicide or physician-assisted suicide amounts to murder and, thus, are declared illegal by the courts.

As a consequence, the medical team involved in suspension is fighting a potential losing battle against brain decay and that is something that does not look good on marketing brochures.  And even if a cryonics operation is considered legal in one jurisdiction, permanent storage and maintenance of such cryonic chambers has been a political hot potato.  For instance, in 1993 Alcor moved their offices from one jurisdiction (California to Arizona) due to earthquake risks; however, upon transferring their patients, they had to receive legal approval under the revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act.  And following a high-profile celebrity case in 2003, the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, received a cease-&-desist order prohibiting it to conduct medical operations for six months. The order was subsequently rescinded and the Institute was then regulated as a licensed cemetery.

If brains could be successfully transplanted into computer systems via the Wallerstein method, the physical jurisdiction question is paramount for future survival — after all, you no longer have legs to move yourself and are thus dependent on third-parties.

Thus, in the event that an entrepreneur creates a company offering brain-in-a-jar services, where could such a company legally operate?  The answer, at least at this time, seems to be the aforementioned seasteads.

Bootstrapping to the Singularity

Why would anyone volunteer to undergo this risky operation?

The motivations could be numerous and while the nature of the physical isolation within a computer system may appear emotionally daunting, the selection pool of individuals could be broad. For example, anyone who uses a computer for both their work and leisure activity would conceivably have less difficulty adjusting to living in a rudimentary digitally synthesized world compared to a fireman, forest ranger, welder, plumber, or someone who manipulates and interacts with the physical environment on a continual basis.

Thus, potential candidates includes but are not limited to: programmers, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, computer-aided designers, digital artists, writers, lawyers, accountants, actuaries, architects, librarians, philosophers, psychologists, financial analysts, and economists.

How many of these individuals would be willing and able to volunteer for such an operation?

Perhaps a small subset of accountants and lawyers might find it attractive to start a round-the-clock billing firm as they would have non-stop access to digital libraries. Similarly, many scientists who conduct meta-research may find solace in their ability to focus without any circadian distractions.  Maybe a subculture of programmers and engineers wanting to permanently forgo trips to the bathroom. Or maybe even retirees, unwilling to try cryonics, but still wanting to bootstrap themselves to a pre-singularity event.

In fact, as both critics and proponents are quick to point out, a technological singularity is not necessarily a given. Something may prevent it from taking place, so what other viable options are capable of prolonging your life better than a Wallerstein brain?

On the Seven Seas

At this time, the start-up capital necessary to build a vessel (e.g., a large barge) capable of safely storing and running electronic machinery at sea is prohibitive and in the reach of but an affluent few. However, given the incentives for profit (e.g., $100,000 one-time transplant fee), an entrepreneur could put together a business plan for potential venture capital.

In terms of geographical considerations, the equator may be an ideal location for a few reasons.  First, both storms and waves are relatively regular and predictable throughout the year.  Second, it is statistically one of the least cloudy regions on earth, thus creating ideal conditions for powering photovoltaic solar panels indefinitely.  While the added cost of paying for an underwater sea cable to an equatorial location may be relatively costly, the added savings of not having to continually transport and ship fossil fuels and maintain combustion engines may make up the difference.

The final piece is the digital synthesizing machine itself.  At this time, there are no publicly known cases of brain transplants.  In the event that they do occur and that it is possible to fuse the brain stem into a computer system, this would raise a number of questions.  How would an operator handle biological maintenance? What about potential intelligence amplification (e.g., increasing brain storage capacity or instant recall)?

As there are both mechanical and digital prosthetics for nearly every human sense, are there any inherent technical limitations for permanently tapping into the five senses and artificially synthesizing a digitized real-world experience? Could it be done for $30 million — the current inflation adjusted cost for Lee Majors — or would it require Apollo-sized budgets?

Or will all of this remain relegated to campy science-fiction television shows and Hollywood green screens?  If Source Code is any indication of the near-future, perhaps we may already know some unwitting volunteers trapped in a Vingean Cookie Monster.

Synthesis

Each year, millions of people throughout the world already vote with their feet and their pocket books by moving across jurisdictions.  And due to continued financial and political uncertainties at the macro level, skilled workers may soon have the option of living in a variety of micro-states, including seasteads and charter cities.

Similarly, over the past decade, numerous physically handicapped volunteers have rediscovered human sensations, including sight and sound.  Quadriplegics are now able to communicate to the rest of the world vis-à -vis brain-computer interfaces (BCI).  Through continued medical and technological progress, volunteers might also have the option of fixing or even improving upon physical limitations, including the permanent removal of sleeping, bodily functions, and even caloric intake.  Thus, given the continued development of BCI and other digital prosthetics, skilled workers, driven by financial and political uncertainty, may volunteer and become Wallerstein brains; and perhaps brainstead the Seven Seas.

[An earlier version of this article was originally presented on August 17, 2011 at the Shanghai Rationalist Society.]

Bibliography

Davies, Paul. 2010. “One way ticket to Mars.” Cosmos Vol 31.

De Grey, Aubrey. 2007. Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime. St. Martin’s Press.

Ettinger, Robert. 1962. “The Prospect of Immortality.” Retrieved July 2, 2011.

Gramlich, Wayne. 1998. “Seasteading — Homesteading on the High Seas.” Retrieved July 2, 2011.

Kurzweil, Raymond. 2005. The Singularity is Near. Viking Publishing.

Neumeyer, Ken. 1981. Sailing the Farm: A Survival Guide to Homesteading.

Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books, New York, 1974, pp. 42–45.

Romer, Paul. 1990. “Endogenous Technological Change.” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 98, No. 5, Part 2: The Problem of Development: A Conference on the Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Systems. (Oct. 1990), pp. S71–102.

Simeral, J.D., Kim, S.P., Black, M.J., Donoghue, J.P., Hochberg, L.R. 2011. “Neural control of cursor trajectory and click by a human with tetraplegia 1000 days after implant of an intracortical microelectrode array.” Journal of Neural Engineering. 8 025027 doi:10.1088/1741-2560/8/2/025027

Vinge, Vernor. 1993.  The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. VISION-21 Symposium.

• Amazon vs. Apple And The Agency 5: Let’s Get The Facts Straight (Indie Author)
• The Worst Article About The eBooks Anti-Trust Suit (Mike Cane’s xBlog) — Is it worse than the Mashable article I dissected? Let me know what you think.
• Don’t Be Fooled: Big Publishing Hates Competition (Let’s Get Digital)
• Publish and Perish – Clueless Publishing CEO’s Enjoy an Intimate Dinner (The Passive Voice) — Did you know 16 states also filed antitrust suits against Apple and the Agency Five (as they are apparently being called)? Hey, those AG’s gotta do something to get re-elected! Look below the excerpts for PG’s advice to CEO’s on how to meet without risking an antitrust lawsuit. Utterly ridiculous the obstacles and waste forced on the market by the state.
• Monopoly Power Makes You Fat, Dumb and Slow (The Passive Voice) — I like this one mainly for this quote:
  

  Absent stringent government protection or physical boundaries that protect the monopoly, the long-term effects of overly-dominating a market tend to weaken the company or companies involved. If competition is permitted, the bloated and inefficient monopolist can present an easy target for an innovative and flexible competitor.

  PG’s conception of monopoly is not rigorous, however, and he overlooks the fact that what made Microsoft an aggressive monopoly is intellectual property, that government grant of monopoly privilege that has no place in a free market.

• Cut in E-Book Pricing by Amazon Is Set to Shake Rivals (The Passive Voice) — The NYT article PG quotes is worthless, but read his observation at the end as well as the first comment on the post; they highlight an important characteristics of leftist critics of Amazon.
• The Agency Model Sucks (A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing) — J.A. Konrath does the math to demonstrate that authors make less money under the agency model. It’s bad for customers and authors.
• The biggest problem facing book publishing (The Domino Project) — Perfect for the publishers, not for anyone else, not even the authors they publish. Otherwise, I tend to like what Seth Godin has to say about publishing.
• Death To The Gatekeepers: Bezos Talks Innovation In The Publishing Space (TechCrunch)
• Jeff Bezos’s Top 10 Leadership Lessons (Forbes) — Big Publishers in particular, take note of how customer-centric Bezos’s leadership lessons are, and also how focused on adaptability and innovation.
• Live From Washington, DC: The Space Shuttle Era is Over (Thank God); Let the Private Space Race Begin! (Reason’s Hit & Run) — Good bye, space shuttle. Good riddance. So long, and thanks for all the waste. Amateur hour is over and now it’s time for the Space Age to really begin, led by savvy entrepreneurs and funded by visionary capitalists.
  
  
  Is it me? Or is this Reason piece trying too hard (TTH) to be hip and funny with all the pop culture references and whatnot?

Get this: The federal bureaucrat who last month started the litigation against Apple and book publishers for ebook pricing is the same person who, back in the stone age, represented Netscape in its lawsuit against Microsoft.

Recall that Microsoft was trying to give away its Internet Explorer to computer users for free. Netscape went nuts and got the government to clobber Microsoft for being so nice to consumers. It put the company through litigation hell and even demanded that Microsoft change its operating system code to untie it from IE.

The person’s name is Sharis Pozen, and she is acting head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division and a political appointee of the Obama administration. She claims that she is threatening state violence against Apple and publishers for pricing collusion — and that it’s her job to protect consumers.

Interesting. She began her career trying to protect the rights of an old-line company to rip off consumers. To her, a price of zero was unfair competition. She was sure that a browser should be a paid product. The progress of history flattens that argument. Today, dozens of companies beg you to download their browser for free. Browser use is all over the place, sort of like a free market. There is no Microsoft monopoly, contrary to the overheated predictions.

Given that history, one might suppose she would retire from public life and maybe go into flower arranging or something. Instead, she is still at it. Last year, she denied a proposed merger between T-Mobile and AT&T that would have improved your cell service. This year, she says that a deal between publishers and Apple is harming consumers, so she has to act.

Government had absolutely nothing to do with inventing the ebook. It didn’t invent the ereader, either. The Nook, Kindle, iPad, and all the others were purely the products of private enterprise. So too the distribution system that makes millions of titles instantly downloadable with a quick click, storing your downloads in the cloud. The whole apparatus has given new life to the book itself, and represents a bigger shift in publishing than even the printing press.

But we are supposed to believe that Sharis Pozen knows exactly what the prices of ebooks should be. She knows how the contractual relations between publishers and distributors are supposed to work. She knows when there’s competition and collusion. She knows how to protect the consumer against high prices because, of course, we stupid consumers are all sitting here completely clueless about whether $9 or $14 is too much to pay. We’d just mindlessly let go of our money, scammed by private enterprise, were it not for Sharis Pozen looking after our interests.

There is no arrogance in this world to compare with the government bureaucrat’s.

There is no way that any mortal can know in advance how ebook pricing should work. For years, people tried to create a profitable market in selling PDF downloads. Some firms succeeded, but only in a limited way by selling to large institutions, and even then, the product add-ons had to be pretty impressive: fancy searches, large collections, citation help, and more. This model never penetrated the retail sector.

Why? It’s hard to say for sure, but in hindsight, one might speculate that the PDF format just isn’t very consumer friendly. It is fine for many purposes, and miraculous by any historical standard. But in the end, it was not commodifiable on a mass scale.

Then came the ebook. It had an HTML structure that allowed fonts to be increased and decreased. It allowed instant search. Navigation was a snap. It mimicked the page turn of a physical book. It was lightweight. For all these reasons, and probably some reasons that I haven’t thought of, the ebook became commodifiable. I never would have believed it, but there it is.

I know that I’m hooked myself.

But how does pricing work? A conventional government model would examine costs and presume that prices are marked up along a preset path. This model has a superficial, if fallacious, plausibility with physical goods, but it is wholly irrelevant to digital goods. With digital goods, in which the marginal unit cost of each additional item is effectively zero, the price is, very obviously, nothing but a point of agreement between buyer and seller, having nothing to do with costs of production.

So it’s anyone’s guess what the final price of an ebook ought to be. The market dictates this. At first, publishers were selling on a wholesale model and letting the distributors determine the prices. As the distributors do with physical books, they were pushing prices lower and lower, and the publishers started to complain.

That’s when Apple shifted to an agency model of pricing. The publisher sets any price and the distributor takes 30 percent. That way everyone can make a profit. This also allowed smaller publishers to get involved. Even a sole proprietor can get involved and push out ebooks to the world.

So what’s the problem? Apple and Amazon have made it part of their contractual relationships with those using their services that they do not want to be undersold by another company. And why? Of course they want the business, but more tellingly, they are trying to incentivize producers to bring down prices in the interest of making deals.

This is standard procedure in Web pricing. If you are using a service, the service wants to be able to offer the best deal available. Actually, Amazon and others have been doing this for many years. The service user can accept or reject the deal.

Here’s the thing. If this is not the right model, it will hurt the service it delivers. Others can compete. Authors and publishers can establish their own systems. Markets work these things out for themselves. In this case, it appears that Amazon is the only complaining party: it does not want Apple to gain a foothold.

Stabilization is Chaos: “Monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown.”
— F.A. Hayek, 1932

The ebook market is brand-new, for goodness sake. It is going to go through many changes before it is settled — and actually, here’s to hoping it never settles! Ceaseless change in economics and life is a good thing.

But bureaucrats don’t see it that way. They want to freeze everything in place and make all things conform to their model. And if Sharis Pozen had her way, we would all be paying Netscape for the opportunity to surf the Web. So much for caring about the consumer.

[LFB]

SF Gateway will be publishing online in ebook form a catalog numbering in the thousands of out-of-print backlist books from its authors. Including “the classic SF pulp writers of the Golden Age right through to modern award-winning authors,” SF Gateway purports to be “the largest library of digital Science Fiction and Fantasy ever assembled.” All of these titles will naturally be directly interlinked with author and title entries in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, so the encyclopedia will serve as a handy way to spur sales. The SF Gateway site will also serve in part as a social network, which is another clever idea — build up an online community around the encyclopedia and that large library of sf&f ebooks. You can read more about it in the pdf press release.

Also in the last news roundup, I mentioned some innovations in publishing. Here is some more info on a couple of them:

• One of those innovations is a crowdfunding model like Kickstarter but just for books, called Unbound. Business Week’s Bobbie Johnson has an interesting article on it. Unbound doesn’t seem to be doing so well, but that’s not because the crowdfunding model doesn’t work for books. It’s working fine on Kickstarter. Read the article to see what Kickstarter got right but Unbound got wrong: transparency, authenticity, less niche and more international.
• Angry Robot isn’t the first publisher to introduce an ebook subscription model. I had forgotten about Baen’s Webscriptions: currently $18/month gets you a minimum of 4 (usually 6 or 7) ebooks per month. Also, be sure to check out the Baen Free Library.

I also recently ran across an innovative marketing platform for those who go the indie publishing route. Moses Siregar, co-host of Adventures in Scifi Publishing, recently launched Indie Author Rockstar, which is intended to help indie-published authors showcase and promote their own and each other’s work. There is talk around the web about the need for gatekeepers or quality filters or curators in online publishing, to help readers find the gems amidst all the crap. A traditional publishing house is not the only way to do this. Perhaps Indie Author Rockstar will provide another successful model. Read about how it works.

Along the lines of helping readers find the good stuff, Gizmodo has an article about new software that can detect fake reviews with 90% accuracy. Here’s to hoping online stores like Amazon put it to use soon.

But author Dean Wesley Smith takes issue with the idea of traditional publishers as quality filters in “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: New York Works as a Quality Filter.”

Finally, a list of interesting links:

• “It Was Never About The Money, Stupid” by Rick Falkvinge (TorrentFreak)
• “The Inevitability Of Techno Moral Panics: But Think Of The Children” by Mike Masnick (techdirt)
• “E-book Pricing 101” by Jim Milliot (Publisher’s Weekly)
• “The State of the Tablet and Ereader Market” by Jolie O’Dell (Mashable)
• Ebooks cause “Paperback Publishers [to] Quicken Their Pace” by Julie Bosman (NYT)
• “Why Borders Failed But Barnes & Noble Survived” by Yuki Noguchi (NPR)

I’m not privy to what angle the article or articles will take, but I presume the cover is referring to the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle program without a government replacement. But why need that mean the end of the space age?

Private space initiatives are picking up, though unfortunately at least some of them are being subsidized by the US federal government. But surely the relevant writers and editors at the Economist know this.

So what then is the cover implying? That without significant government involvement and decisive leadership, humanity can kiss the dream of space exploration and colonization goodbye?

Maybe they’ll also argue that the recent financial crisis, mounting government debts, and sluggish “recovery” are also factors in the premature death of the space age (thanks governments of the world!).

But still… There’s an awful lot of finality in that declaration: The End of the Space Age. Call me an optimist, but I don’t think the dream is dead yet — at least not for good.

There’s more than a whiff of sensationalist journalism here, I think, probably to drive sales and page views. Dare we give them the benefit of the doubt and suspect the motivation behind the declaration is to intentionally stretch the truth in order to shock people into saving the dream before it’s too late?

What do you think?

Update

So here’s the lead article: “The end of the Space Age: Inner space is useful. Outer space is history.”

And here’s another article from the issue: “Into the sunset:The final launch of the space shuttle brings to an end the dreams of the Apollo era.”

And here’s a retrospective: “From the archive: America’s shuttle shuffles towards launch.”

I might update this post again or blog a new one with my thoughts on the articles later on. But in the meantime, what say you?

because according to this quote cited by Gregory Benford in his happy-birthday letter in Locus Magazine (January 2008), he claims that “there are some general laws governing scientific extrapolation, as there are not (pace Marx) in the case of politics and economics.” Well, far be it from me to disagree that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but Clarke is wrong here. Sir Clarke, you may be 90 years old now, and happy birthday by the way, but it’s never too late to acquire a firm grasp of sound economic theory.

As disappointing as it is, it’s not surprising that he had a natural-scientistic bias against economics. Sadly, he died only a few months after my post.

In a more recent article in the Sri Lanka Guardian, more of Clarke’s economic ignorance is on display:

While researching for this article I came across a searing indictment by Clarke on the American capitalist system. After observing that the structure of American society may be unfitted for the effort that the conquest of space demands he continued, “No nation can afford to divert its ablest men into essentially non-creative and occasionally parasitic occupations such as law, insurance and banking”. He also referred to a photograph in Life Magazine showing 7,000 engineers massed behind a new model car they had produced as ‘a horrifying social document’. He was appalled by the squandering of technical manpower it represented. All this indeed makes one wonder whether he really was a closet socialist.

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. — Murray Rothbard

Maybe not a socialist, at least not of the Marxist variety, but there’s definitely a technocratic central-planner streak in there. Now, there may be government policies that divert more people to work in the legal, insurance, and banking professions (particularly legal) than otherwise would in a free market, but somehow I think Clarke has in mind here a more general dismissal of the value of these professions — which is just silly ignorance.

As for so many engineers working on automobiles rather than spaceships and space elevators, well, there’s just more money in it, bub. Deal with it. And, quite frankly, as much as I dream about space exploration and colonization, I’d rather keep driving ever-improving cars than make do with horse-and-buggy for who knows how long while the nation’s resources are diverted to centrally-planned space projects that will undoubtedly waste vast resources and trillions of dollars and may not come to fruition in my lifetime. So sue me for having high time preference.

But in my old blogpost I did identify some good quotes from Clarke, again reported by Benford:

“[F]or the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.” Sounds more American than British to me.

“[E]xact knowledge is the friend, not the enemy, of imagination and fantasy.”

Here’s one that evokes, for me at least, the evils and waste of war: “All this effort, all this death, when we could be building the staging area for a seaborne space elevator.” But Clarke probably had in mind using the state to direct all that effort and money toward his pet space elevator.

In his May 2008 memorial letter for Clarke, Benford added two more quotes that I like:

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

“New ideas pass through three periods: It can’t be done; it probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing; I knew it was a good idea all along!”

[TLS]

A recent xkcd comic illustrates these points well:

The flying car and the personal jetpack were popular dreamed-of products in the last century. I remember That 70′s Show episodes in which the father, Red Foreman, complained about lacking the flying cars that his generation had been promised and daydreamed about having a robot servant and a personal jetpack. There’s even a band called We Were Promised Jetpacks. Gizmodo has a list of 10 technologies we were promised and never got. As if to underscore my point and the xkcd comic, the title of the post is 100 Years of Failure.

Comic strips like the one above and this clip of Louis C.K.’s “Everything is Amazing and Nobody’s Happy” routine help to put things into perspective for us:

The technological wonders human beings have thus far created are amazing. And while we still don’t have flying cars, personal jetpacks, robot servants, and most of the things Gizmodo mentions, human beings have made amazing technological progress in other areas. Moreover, merely a couple of years after Gizmodo’s post, video phones finally are starting to become mainstream and Google is making progress on self-driving cars. And we’re closer to getting the robot servants. Already it is possible to buy robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers, albeit of limited functionality and for hefty sums.

On the other hand, to take Louis C.K.’s position overly seriously, or too literally, would be to fall into another kind of self-delusion and complacency. If everything is already amazing, why bother to act to improve things at all?

Comedic license aside, it is not really the case that everything is amazing. One area in which Louis C.K.’s comedic social criticism falls flat is his discussion of air travel. To some degree, he has a point. It’s amazing that we can make trips in a matter of hours that used to take years, while flying through the air. But the complainers that he criticizes have a point as well. There are myriad ways in which nanny state and police state regulations and interventions make air travel not only an inferior experience to what it could be in a free market but oftentimes a downright miserable experience. And I fear governments, particularly the United States government, will do the same to space travel.

But even the things that already are amazing can be still more amazing. Amazing does not mean perfection. We can generally still find reasons to act to improve our situations, to exchange a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory state of affairs. Android phones are amazing, but they get better with each new OS version release and every new product cycle.

Futurism and science-fictional speculation employ our imaginations to extrapolate from our present circumstances and knowledge in order to create visions of the future. Sometimes these visions are of the “if this goes on” type: dystopian warnings about dangerous present-day trends. Others are optimistic and hopeful, depicting the values — material and spiritual — that we wish to see realized. And still others fall between these two extremes, perhaps merely curious and speculative.

In any case, futurism and science-fictional speculation provide us with visions of the future that can motivate us to act to avoid or realize them. In this sense, they are specialized practices of activities we engage in every day as a matter of course. Without the ability to imagine better states of affairs, we would not act. And I, for one, also happen to enjoy futurist predictions and science fiction, despite their perils.

Avoiding the perils of futurism and science-fictional speculation requires a bit of wisdom, the wisdom to keep things in proper context, which entails the flexibility to shift perspectives when it is called for. It requires dialectical thinking.

• NASA’s Ares rocket dead, but Congress lets you pay $500 million more for it: It’s all about pork (protecting jobs in a legislator’s home state), political wrangling over the federal budget, and the inherent inability of politics and bureaucracy to have the flexibility and alacrity of private enterprise.

The future of computing is near:

• 1,000-Core Chip Could Make PCs 20 Times Faster: The fastest consumer processors such as Intel’s Core i7 are limited to 6 cores, but “Scottish scientists have built a 1,000-core processor, claiming it will run 20 times faster than today’s chips while using less power. Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede led a research team at the University of Glasgow to create the futuristic processor using a programmable chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA).”
• Super Memory Breakthrough: Store Every Movie Made This Year on Your Phone (With Room to Spare): “IBM says they have made a significant leap forward in the viability of “Racetrack memory,” a new technology design which has the potential to exponentially increase computing power. This new tech could give devices the ability to store as much as 100 times more information than they do now, which would be accessed at far greater speeds while utilizing “much less” energy than today’s designs. In the future, a single portable device might be able to hold as much memory as today’s business-class servers and run on a single battery charge for weeks at a time.”

Here is the money quote:

This is the essential weakness of a centralized approach to innovation: the notion that it can be a planned and systematic process, best directed by a kind of central intelligence; that it is simply of matter of assembling all the best minds and putting them to work in unison. Were it so, the future could be planned and executed in a scientific manner.

Yes, Bell Labs was great. But AT&T, as an innovator, bore a serious genetic flaw: it could not originate technologies that might, by the remotest possibility, threaten the Bell system. In the language of innovation theory, the output of the Bell Labs was practically restricted to sustaining inventions; disruptive technologies, those that might even cast a shadow of uncertainty over the business model, were simply out of the question.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.