Various important geeks, led by the ubiquitous Joi Ito (an interesting Japanese-American investor-agitator hybrid) are attending the Madrid terror conference and have come up with a sort of anti-terror charter which they're calling: The Infrastructure of Democracy: Strengthening the Open Internet for a Safer World. This is a terrific and concise statement of what I called the EIE (Emerging Internet Ethic) the other day.
It's studded with the kind of unsupported assertions that structure geek thought too: "Open, transparent environments are more secure and more stable than closed, opaque ones" and "The Internet empowers people to communicate and collaborate across borders and belief systems" for instance. These nostra are motherhood and apple-pie for tech thought leaders – assumptions that the Internet generation takes for granted but which badly need some supporting evidence. Still, I'm being unnecessarily cynical: they're better than the top-down alternative, better than blunderbuss diplomacy and better than indefinite house arrest.
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