We Cannot Separate The Air That Chokes

One Can Imagine The Government's Problem. This Is All Pretty Magical Stuff To Them. If I Were Trying To Terminate The Operations Of A Witch Coven, I'd Probably Seize Everything In Sight. How Would I Tell The Ordinary Household Brooms From The Getaway Vehicles?

The One Thing That I Know Government Is Good For Is Countervailing Against Monopoly. It's Not Great At That Either, But It's The Only Force I Know That Is Fairly Reliable.

The Real Issue Is Control. The Internet Is Too Widespread To Be Easily Dominated By Any Single Government. By Creating A Seamless Global Economic Zone, Anti-sovereign And Unregulatable, The Internet Calls Into Question The Very Idea Of A Nation-state.

If Someone Like Karl Rove Had Wanted To Neutralize The Most Creative, Intelligent, And Passionate Members Of His Opposition, He'd Have A Hard Time Coming Up With A Better Tool Than Burning Man. Exile Them To The Wilderness, Give Them A Culture In Which Alpha Status Requires Months Of Focus And Resource-consumptive Preparation, Provide Them With Metric Tons Of Psychotropic Confusicants, And Then... Ignore Them. It's A Pretty Safe Bet That They Won't Be Out Registering Voters, Or Doing Anything That Might Actually Threaten Electoral Change, When They Have An Art Car To Build.

New Solutions Win By Virtue Of Adoption, And They Don't Get Adopted If They're Bad Solutions.