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Lastly this week: the internet. We all think of it as an improvement, as a part of daily life, even as a necessity. In the next decade, there will be tens of billions of devices – from thermostats to cell phones to parking meters to even cars – connected to the World Wide Web. These objects will not only be able to transmit data but transact, negotiate, collaborate and exchange value.
The question is how do we keep this secure? Cybersecurity is a growing concern from anyone who’s paying any sort of attention to the world. The internet is one of the last places that is highly under regulated.
And look – I’m not saying we should regulate the internet…at least, not the way you might think. But for every transaction there is value. Even now we have no real value system to assign to these transactions. The internet needs a ledger. It needs a way to score what’s taken place, who owes who what, and how to reconcile.
The internet is one of the last places that people can hide. For all of the visibility that internet affords us (think Facebook and other social media) there are still plenty of people that manage to stay hidden and disrupt things from the shadows. I’m not looking for a witch hunt, but those internet transactions need to be accounted for in a way that is transparent, secure, and dispersed with the ability to create and enforce contracts. There cannot be a central point of failure for such an enforcement, which is to say I don’t trust one entity, and certainly not the government to do this.
No, we need something. Too much regulation is (A net tha mu) anathema, —but no regulation whatsoever is the Wild West. Fan of freedom though I am, I don’t want a return to those days, and I don’t know many people that would.
This has implications beyond what we talk about on this show. The main point I need to emphasize is this: freedom in its extreme is anarchy. And while I value all of my freedoms, anarchy does nothing to preserve those freedoms. This is why we agree to sacrifice complete freedom to form society; this is why we collectively form a social contract. I give up complete and total freedom in order to be a member of society, so that my rights are collectively protected.
The internet is more or less (Ann r kee kull) anarchical —in many ways. We need a system for transacting from machine to machine and person to machine. This is the future. This is how society extends to the web. This is how an ever growing segment of our existence becomes safe, secure, and part of society, in the deepest sense.
More guns, less crime. Go out and get yourself a gun.