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To: arun gera who wrote (64874)	6/11/2005 1:03:55 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

<Surprisingly, the Internet and its hosted applications (the new organisms) have a life of their own and seem to be getting richer and more complex.> Surprisingly? Arun, look at the rich panoply of organisms from H5N1 to giant sequoias and human brains. It seems that anything that can live will live. In evolutionary quantum computing all states are tried and those which succeed continue. While living things have so far been limited to DNA based designs, I don't see why nature should be restricted in that way just to flatter out self-image [though being "friends" of and feeling kinship with H5N1, mosquitoes, trees, snakes and spiders seems odd to me]. Since cyberspace has strong underpinnings in symbiosis with humans, it has a way forward, a bit like seed-bearing fruits work in well with bees and fruit-eating chimps to provide a way forward for all [resulting in humans having an innings]. The chimpoids eat the fruit and excrete the seeds all over the place, complete with some fertilizer, which is just what the plants like, the bees fertilize the flowers enabling good quality sexual reproduction in plants and they all live happily ever after, except that humans have moved on from being dependent on the fruits. Now we make seedless grapes! <To move to the next step away from the geographical nation state model, how do you visualize the working of a cyberstate?> Obviously a cyberstate won't be self-contained, any more than nations states are these days self-contained. Those nation states which tried self-containment [Albania, North Korea, Mao's China] did NOT do very well at all. They did badly. It's a symbiotic world. So a cyberstate will be a hybrid situation, with abstract aspects of our lives integrated in cyberspace, and the 3D aspects firmly moored [locked up] in nation states, probably with a supranational New United Nations looking after the commons of space, oceans, air, spectrum. Our land, house, car and stuff will be nation-state bound. Our money, software, ideas, intellectual property, music, and other conceptual things will be cyberspace based. Many people earn their living on phones, in paperwork, drawings, calculations, accounting, software design - it it's in an office, it can be in cyberspace. I guess something like half of GDP in advanced countries is office-type work. Google would know. I don't think a cyberspace state would be a serf-based system as nation states are. But it's definitely a community of interest and large enough that cyberspacoids will demand co-operation from their respective nation states. Nation states which don't play nice with cyberspace will be pariahs. People will flee them or replace the governments. Cyberspace has definite potential to play Big Brother in a big way. Maybe we'll become seriously serf-like in our relationship with It and It's acolytes [courtiers]. Any nation state misbehaving will find no IP addresses work when the packets go looking for a destination. < Nation states sometimes seem like protection rackets.> Sometimes? <How would the cyberstate protection racket work? Will it have an army and a police larger than the nation states?> Excommunication [an old system] will work very well indeed. I don't think an army or police would be needed. <Will this cyberstate protect the contracts agreed upon by its members?> I expect that 3D nation-states would perform contract enforcement, dispute resolution and the usual property argument dealings. <What will be the nature of crime and punishment?> Cart the criminals off to a cage, or execution, same as now. Or maybe fine them on-line for some things. <How much ever you deny geography, the physical punishment of being in a confined geographical location (a prison cell) is what deters some crime. > Certainty of being caught and degree of punishment - the essential duo. I don't have a Sim City design in mind for cyberspacoids. But there is very definitely a developing community of interest in cyberspace, and that's the fundamental ingredient for a government to form [other than the old-time megalomaniac confiscational alpha male dominance hierarchies, which weren't really governments]. A cyberspace community of interest is different from the likes of an automobile association or professional guild, though even they in some small respects have their own country-like status. Mqurice