Examples of How the Internet is Weakening States

AJ — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 15:11:57 GMT

These are just a few off the top of my head:

- By teaching more people economics through sites like mises.org, the dramatically lower barrier to publishing, and the huge increase in free discussion with people outside one's reference group. Education is breaking free from the regulated school and university system. Media is breaking free from traditional consolidated (and in some areas state-controlled) sources.

- By lowering the barrier to entry for opening a business, which anedotally seems to turn people more libertarian.

- By enabling freer speech and assembly, including online coordination, flash mobs, etc. (on the flipside, it's easier for states to keep tabs on people)

- Through 3D printing, which will likely soon enable more distributed access to arms

- By slowing the move toward global government by interfering with plans for a global carbon tax by weakening the climate change arguments by breaking the publishing monopoly:

Kakugo:
For over a decade the editors of the major scientific publications have willingly censored any criticism of the "officially approved" model. Accademic credentials didn't matter: widely respected statistics professors and climatologists had their works turned down for not embracing the dogma or even not embracing it with enough enthusiasm. It never happened before, or at least not a scale as seen in the last decade. This heavy handed censorship is what made many (myself included) very suspicious: wrong theories and models are regularly printed and confuted. That's what peer review is there for. The scientific community tossed ungodly amount of money and untold manpowers hours to investigate the Pons/Fleischmann claims of "cold fusion" in a Pd(Pt)/H2 system and nobody objected. Science is all about trial and error and debate. However the editors had one very, very big problem: the Internet. In recent times you don't need to publish a paper onNature or another paper journal for it to be "official": you can put it on the Internet and make it freely available. There's now even a formal system to quote Internet articles which is accepted (albeit grudigingly) academically. That's how people became aware their doubts and second thoughts were shared by many of their peers. The small problem became a huge problem in the wake of the Climategate Scandal: contrary to popular opinions the real "smoking gun" were not the emails but the statistic models, heavily based on data "cherry picking". These models had never been made wholly available before, a huge no-no in peer review on which editors willingly turned a blind eye. As an Australian statistics professor tasked with examining the data said "Forget the smoking gun; this is a whole WMD arsenal with fingerprints all over it". How did the aforementioned editors reacted? They ignored the whole scandal, though their reputation suffered and Internet publishing is now threatening their previously unassailable position.

Any more?

Political Theory

Examples of How the Internet is Weakening States