The Net and Work

As a follow on to the previous blog SOYMB now reads this report

Volunteers keep the net online and functioning, according to leading internet lawyer Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University.The way data is divided up and sent around the internet in many jumps makes it "delicate and vulnerable" to attacks or mistakes, he said. However, he added, the "random acts of kindness" of these unsung heroes quietly keep the net in working order.

The fragility of the internet's architecture was largely due to its origins, said Professor Zittrain.

"But they had an amazing freedom, which was that they didn't have to make any money from it.The internet has no business plan - never did - no CEO, no single firm responsible for building it. Instead it's folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to or because they were expecting to make money from it," he said. "This is a system that relies on kindness and trust"

One example, he said, was an incident in 2008 when Pakistan Telecom accidentally took YouTube offline. At the time, the Pakistan government asked Pakistan's ISPs to block the site, reportedly because of a "blasphemous" video clip. However, a network error caused a worldwide blackout of the site.Within two minutes, YouTube was completely blocked.
However,the problem was fixed within about two hours. This was down to a largely unknown group known as the North American Network Operators Group . NANOG is a forum for distributing technical information among computer and network engineers.

"They came together to help find a problem and fix it . It's kind of like when your house catches on fire," he said. "The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is that random people appear from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise."

Humans are not "naturally lazy". Quite the opposite. We need to exercise our physical and mental energies but, quite naturally, want to do this in a creative, pleasurable or at least meaningful way. What people object to is work that is boring, over-tiring or meaningless, but this is the only kind that capitalism has to offer most people in return for selling their mental and physical energies to an employer for a wage or salary. It is such work for an employer that people seek to avoid and which gives rise to the "humans are naturally lazy" argument. Yet even under capitalism, if people think work is creative or useful they will undertake it, even without requiring payment as witness the time and energy that many people put into voluntary work and into their hobbies and pastimes. In a socialist society, freed from exploitation and working for wages, work will of course still have to be performed to produce the goods and services to which people will have free access, but this will be a question of organisation, of fitting together the work that needs to be done and the people willing to do it in the quite different working conditions that will then prevail. The coming of socialism will not require great changes in the way we behave, essentially only the accentuation of some of the behaviours which people already exhibit today (friendliness, helpfulness, cooperation) at the expense of others which capitalism encourages. Capitalism has an all-pervading culture of violence, competitiveness and acquisitiveness, and people are under pressure to adapt their behaviour to this. In socialism this culture will disappear and people’s behaviour will no longer be shaped by it.