Not a Stand Alone Post

Clarifications:

Virtual communities:

Virtual has the meaning quasi-real; that has changed a little bit since it’s misapplication
to the internet. However, the connotation remains. Therefore a better term to describe what we are looking for is cyber community, to help clarify that we are talking about a real community – not something like a community.

Cyber community:

Differs from traditional communities by a) losing the necessary condition that the members
be proximate, and b) that cyberspace is employed for community interaction instead of proximity.

Okay, but what’s a community:

Definitions abound. I propose: a group whose social cohesion is maintained by giving where the giving is motivated by identification with other members. This identification will probably be shared aims/values/interests in cyberspace, but could also be shared experiences/pasts. The giving will likely often be describable as support, where the support is not offered in trade but as a matter of course; trading itself may occur, thought the choice to prefer trading within the group is itself a giving (of prosperity).

Corporations:

The above definition of community means that corporations do not automatically qualify, and therefore do not automatically qualify for cyber community. However, there may
be cyber communities between members of a corporation, eg workplace cliques. There may also be cyber communities between leaders within a corporation or between corporations, ie collusive oligarchy.

Arguments:

Free cyber speech:

The argument is made that since it is a right to verbally (or textually) speak in languages
opaque to others, that there is no non-arbitrary reason to except cybertronically encrypted speech from the right to free-speech. This argument is pretty good, but does allow room for further thought. The right to speak in another language may be a right because it is actually commensurate with global semantics – in the case of a crime for instance, a translator may be brought in. Speaking in cyber-crypt may be better compared to someone knowing a common tongue with the authorities and another language for which the authorities have no translator. If the police need to question this person about a crime and the person chooses to only speak in the untranslatable tongue, that may be considered as refusal to cooperate – which in rights language, pa**** beyond the right to free speech. In which case, encryption would be covered by free speech until a crime is committed in which case the encryption may be required to be translated as part of an investigation. (And don’t assume it’s a bum investigation!)

However, the above argument-counterargument would suggest that cyber-crypt should be protected by free-speech in the absence of criminal investigation.

In Canada, despite it being commonplace, we are legally prohibited from ‘smoking’. We can however, go to Amsterdam and go nuts. The internet is like Amsterdam for information. Whatever laws your country has about information, you can go to the net and go nuts. The implications of this are huge.

It gives as huge negative freedom, to a great degree freedom from law and enforceability of law. This exacerbates the need for virtue in my mind; it is up to us to be ethical, we can’t simply fall back on outside rules to direct or justify our conduct. Heck, it may be that we need something like the net’s anarchism in order to realize our ethical selves. As Robert Paul Wolff has noted, to be ethical in the first place requires doing what you think is right; obedience, even to good laws, is therefore unethical because obedience is motivationally mutually exclusive from acting for the reason that you think it is right. (and no, there is no internal-inconsistency escape by deciding that what you think is right is to be obedient. That would be conceptually prohibited in that way that deciding that what is right is to be unethical is conceptually prohibited.)