stopping war without using weapons
Aug. 19th, 2012 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI was just thinking about war and the peculiar kind of insanity it represents.
Without the danger of people attacking other people nobody would need weapons and armies. But those weapons and armies, because they can be used to attack others, cause other people to want more weapons and armies. It is circular. It creates itself as its own justification.
In view of this, is there any non-violent way to eliminate war?
A. E. Van Vogt wrote a series of science fiction stories and books around the idea of weapons that can't be used aggressively and that will only operate in a defensive situation. They were ingenious stories, but unfortunately quite impossible, at least perhaps until we develop AIs that are smarter than humans and able to make moral judgements.
I wondered if there was something more practical that could do the trick. It hit me that we already have something which makes it very difficult or even impossible to conduct war: free and open information. And the best tool to give us that is the internet. Unfortunately all governments around the world are currently engaged in efforts to subvert the internet. They want to lock down and censor the net, while at the same time allowing "security" agencies unrestricted ability to snoop on all ordinary citizens. This is exactly the opposite of how information should be flowing. Government should be completely open and unable to keep secrets, but citizens should be allowed true privacy.
The rationale for censoring the net and for widened snooping powers are generally the same: the presumption of guilt. We are all to be considered criminals and only exonerated by proof of innocence, and then only provisionally and temporarily. At the same time the government and "security" agencies -- the very people who lie to us about wars and actually conduct wars -- are to be considered trustworthy!!!
This is so wrong. We keep having to fight rear-guard actions all the time as the monsters who want to lock us out of the net and criminalise us all attempt to pass one flakey law after another. We need to put an end to this. It is too dangerous to risk losing the one real tool we have that could possibly end war.
We need to find a way to stop these bastards in their tracks and make it so they can't ever do it. But how?
Unfortunately a second, more insidious change is taking place in the internet, where big internet service providers keep buying up smaller ones, removing one of the net's key features: decentralisation. When we have internet equivalent of a Murdoch controlling the vast majority of the net then governments won't need to pass laws -- they will already have defacto control of the net. And then we will have Syria everywhere and nobody will be safe communicating on the net. In Syria the use of encryption on the net is enough to have you jailed and tortured.
Without the danger of people attacking other people nobody would need weapons and armies. But those weapons and armies, because they can be used to attack others, cause other people to want more weapons and armies. It is circular. It creates itself as its own justification.
In view of this, is there any non-violent way to eliminate war?
A. E. Van Vogt wrote a series of science fiction stories and books around the idea of weapons that can't be used aggressively and that will only operate in a defensive situation. They were ingenious stories, but unfortunately quite impossible, at least perhaps until we develop AIs that are smarter than humans and able to make moral judgements.
I wondered if there was something more practical that could do the trick. It hit me that we already have something which makes it very difficult or even impossible to conduct war: free and open information. And the best tool to give us that is the internet. Unfortunately all governments around the world are currently engaged in efforts to subvert the internet. They want to lock down and censor the net, while at the same time allowing "security" agencies unrestricted ability to snoop on all ordinary citizens. This is exactly the opposite of how information should be flowing. Government should be completely open and unable to keep secrets, but citizens should be allowed true privacy.
The rationale for censoring the net and for widened snooping powers are generally the same: the presumption of guilt. We are all to be considered criminals and only exonerated by proof of innocence, and then only provisionally and temporarily. At the same time the government and "security" agencies -- the very people who lie to us about wars and actually conduct wars -- are to be considered trustworthy!!!
This is so wrong. We keep having to fight rear-guard actions all the time as the monsters who want to lock us out of the net and criminalise us all attempt to pass one flakey law after another. We need to put an end to this. It is too dangerous to risk losing the one real tool we have that could possibly end war.
We need to find a way to stop these bastards in their tracks and make it so they can't ever do it. But how?
Unfortunately a second, more insidious change is taking place in the internet, where big internet service providers keep buying up smaller ones, removing one of the net's key features: decentralisation. When we have internet equivalent of a Murdoch controlling the vast majority of the net then governments won't need to pass laws -- they will already have defacto control of the net. And then we will have Syria everywhere and nobody will be safe communicating on the net. In Syria the use of encryption on the net is enough to have you jailed and tortured.