From: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 94 14:31:48 PDT
To: frissell@panix.com (Duncan Frissell)
Subject: Re: Cyberspatial governments?
In-Reply-To: <199408301906.AA22809@panix.com>
Message-ID: <199408302123.RAA22479@walker.bwh.harvard.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Duncan writes:

| (Might I suggest that we adopt the typographic convention of using an upper
| case 'G' to spell Government when we are speaking of The Great Enemy and a
| lower case 'g' to refer to things like self government or corporate
| government or engine government.)

	As Eric likes to point out, the Government is not a huge,
monolithic enemy.  It is a multitude of huge enemies.  If you think of
it as a single entity, you will often miss the subtelties in its
actions.  If you don't understand why your enemy is doing what they
are doing, you will have trouble opposing it.

	If you talk about the actions of specific agencies, such as
the FCC, DEA, NSA, etc, you will see that much of their motivation
comes from bureaucratic turf wars.  Seeing 'Government' as your great
enemy is a damaging misnomer.

	I'm not arguing *for* government here, I'm simply pointing out
that seeing government as a monolith is like seeing any large entity
as a monolith.  Its really made up of small parts that interact in
strange & unpredicatble ways.

Adam