Re: [wg-review] Babel and the Tower

[Luca Muscarà <muscara@unive.it>]

Hi members,

I have been reading a good half of all the messages of this WG and browsed half
of the rest since Dec. 28th. Because of my very limited knowledge of relevant
issues and organisms and not wanting to add additional burden to the mailbox, I
have not written yet, still having been exposed to these flow of words there is
now something I wish to say and I hope you'll apologise me for non being too
relevant to the current debate or for not being technically too precise about
my proposals. There is probably more than an entire archive I didn't have time
to read.

The Internet seems to me like a good metaphor of our society and growing up it
has come to encompass all its worst contradictions; still, the Internet is one
of its most beautiful political expressions beyond our ability to realize its
entire political potential and should be used to improve human society.

While trying to keep up with the netizen promise of empowering single
individuals, I noticed in this WG a goodfaith attempt to impose older
schemes--inherited by older political paradigms, like democracy, consensus,
elections, polls, maybe for pragmatic reasons and/or in order to guarantee an
authority that past history has put on the ICANN, and its structures and
people.
Is this a necessary paradox ?  It seems to me we are flying too low to obtain
public creditability throughout borrowing the form of traditional and less
advanced forms of politics. We should try to get rid of these old
iconographies, use more imagination and maybe experiment something new.

Maybe it is not very pragmatic at the present point--you will apologize my
latin roots for these speculations--I hope you'll get my message anyway:

If the requirement to participate to the creation of consensus is to be able to
demonstrate the ownership or relation to a domain name, than I wish somebody
could theoretically grant each individual on Earth the right to get one,
including the preservation of this right for future generations.

The option of launching the widest of calls on the networks in order to realize
a first census not of the machines but of the netizens, before they could be
given the ability to agree/disagree/be unsure or propose changes to any
document, should be considered, once netizens have registered.

Anybody who has been participating to this WG should subscribe to the need of
implementing automatic procedures for facilitating collective writing of
documents beyond e-mail (considering also language issues) and adequate
semantics for archiving/ fast retrieval of relevant documents.

Because we express our psychology with language, paradoxically names are more
Babel-oriented than numbers.
Luckily enough languages are alive and do change, despite slowly, maybe the
Internet will accelerate these processes.
I have the feeling that ANY CHOICE will be attacked and criticized and will
result in a loss of power by the proponents, still I hope to be wrong and get
the ones I like in time.

We are grateful if the network was built in such a way that allows us to be
here now, but what we are doing of it bears great implications for the entire
society way beyond our range.

All the best in 2001,

Luca Muscara'



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