From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Fri Mar 19 2004 - 06:23:49 EST
On 19/03/2004 02:04, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>
>
>>Why is an Anarchist asking to standardize something?
>>
>>
>
>Why not!? Can you elaborate on this? Myself, I am an anarchist sympathizer,
>and I have been deeply interested in a character encoding standard for
>nearly ten years now...
>
>Anarchism is against imposing forms of organization, non against
>organization itself. And standards are quite like the useful side of laws
>(the organization) without the harmful side (the imposition), so they should
>be welcome to anarchists.
>
>Obedience to laws can only be imposed with violence by a parasitical clique
>(cops, tribunals), whereas compliance to standards is achieved solely by the
>intrinsic usefulness and quality of the standard's design.
>
>_ Marco
>
>
>
But I guess anarchists would prefer the W3C kind of standard in which
each participant gets an equal vote to ones like Unicode which are
defined in practice by a consortium of large corporations - although in
principle an individual anarchist could buy voting rights. Come to think
of it, a not very large group of them with a bit of money behind them
could buy enough votes to outvote the corporations and destroy Unicode -
which they couldn't do in the W3C model.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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