[zooko@zooko.com: freedom of communication will cause more wars]

[Kragen Javier Sitaker]

A comment on a recent kragen-tol post, which I hope to be able to
respond to soon.

----- Forwarded message from zooko <zooko at zooko.com> -----

Cc: Josh Wilcox, Nathan Wilcox,
	Sebastian Kuzminsky,
	Amber O'Whielacronx,
	Olene Harris, Ron
From: zooko <zooko at zooko.com>
Subject: freedom of communication will cause more wars
To: Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen at pobox.com>

Kragen:

I just read your note "freedom of communication will stop wars" [1].   
I remember being very excited about the Internet (and BBSes) in 1992  
+/- 1, and telling a bunch of people on a Greyhound bus all about  
this new freedom of communication and how it would stop all wars.   
However, subsequently there have been several wars among people who  
had some of those networks, and I've watched the development of this  
freedom of communication and the use of it closely, and I'm more  
skeptical of that hypothesis.

A related meme is the "McDonald's theory of world peace".  There was  
a period of several years after the fall of the Soviet Union when  
anti-war capitalists would state that there has never been a war  
between two countries, both of which hosted a McDonald's fast food  
restaurant.  The argument was that the spread of capitalism into a  
country is inevitably tied with the spread of freedom of speech,  
wealth, other Western ideas, etc., and that the people of such  
countries were too well-read, fat and happy to support going to war  
against each other.  This theory, too, has been disproven by example  
(I think the first counter-example was NATO's bombing of Serbia in  
1999) as well as undermined (in my own head) by further analysis.

Three countervailing considerations undermine my belief in such  
theories nowadays:

1. The power of filtering helps people to consume an information diet  
which only reinforces their current beliefs.  You may think that Fox  
News is divisive and inaccurate (e.g. the famous study which showed  
that people who watched Fox News were much more likely to believe  
several untrue things about 9/11 and the Iraqi war [2]).  But the  
bias and filtering effects of Fox News are probably much smaller than  
that of web sites avidly consumed by people who think that Fox News  
is too liberal and therefore don't watch it.  Then there is even more  
powerful filtering in use nowadays: consider the set of pages read by  
one individual, which set gets filtered through his friends and  
people he respects (by blog, e-mail, IM, texting), and by automated  
filtering tools customized for him.

2. The power of social networking facilitates smaller and more  
dispersed sets of people to bond and form a unified, loyal-to-one- 
another group.

3. The power of modern secure, robust, cheap, efficient  
communications is useful for actual war operations.

These are all more true with Internet-style decentralized  
communication and with automation in the hands of the end-user than  
with 20th-century style mass communication.  By this argument,  
Internet-style communications should lead to less empathy between  
opposing groups compared to mass communication, rather than more, and  
to more and smaller groups which are antipathic towards others, and  
to easier and safer attacks on others.

By the way, this line of thought argues that the Internet encourages  
war among sub-national groups -- it doesn't necessarily follow that  
it encourages war among nations.  But I'm currently more interested  
in the prospect of war among sub-national groups.

See John Robb for many ideas along these lines, richly bedecked with  
current examples, e.g.:

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/02/henry- 
okah.html

Needless, I hope, to say: I think of this hypothesis as likely, not  
because I want it to be true or find such prospects appealing, but  
simply because I find it plausible.

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-February/ 
000880.html
[2] http://tahoebs1.allmydata.com:8123/uri/URI%3ACHK% 
3Az76adrcsxcud72oqjw62dzbuyy% 
3A57plpxz3skec4qnbhe43pzdfe2hjg5lh44wsfqxzg7y7klub2syq%3A3%3A10% 
3A319262?save=on&filename=IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf

----- End forwarded message -----