Layerleth
Convective thought. I've approached this point often but didn't quite hit it before.

Amid all the fake hullabaloo about surveillance by governments, AppleGoogle, etc, one important factor isn't being discussed.

Surveillance or monitoring can be a good thing or a bad thing. How can you tell? By the number of layers.

A living thing is PACKED with surveillance of all types. All of it is layered and modular. Each cell monitors its DNA and its inputs and outputs. Each tissue monitors the quality and survival of its cells. Each organ monitors the condition of its tissues. The entire organism monitors the organs and the outside world.

A profit-making business (before the evil era of Share Value) keeps track of its customers and suppliers. If the business is small, like a one-celled organism, the monitoring will be direct and layerless, which is fine in that situation. Larger corporations like carmakers formerly monitored their customers indirectly through dealers.

A functional nation monitors its provinces. Each province monitors its counties. Each county monitors its townships. Each township monitors its cities.

A functional computer program surveils its top-level classes or methods. Each method surveils its subroutines. Each subroutine keeps track of its own variables.

= = = = =

Layers tend to prevent tyranny because each module can ONLY control the pieces that it innately understands and empathizes with. A subroutine understands its own variables. A township understands the culture and geography and economy of its cities. A car dealer knows the peculiar tastes of his own customers. Each layer's decisions are tailored to advance and improve its components, because the layer itself improves when the components increase their quality.

In a layerless system like NSA or EU or Windows 10, the top controllers have total access to everything that happens everywhere. The top controllers can't possibly understand or empathize with the culture of Tirol or the workflow of a graphic artist. The only thing they understand is TOTAL OBEDIENCE TO THE MIND OF THE CONTROLLER. Their governmental decisions or UI/UX decisions are guaranteed to make life EXTREMELY DIFFICULT for Tirol or the courseware-maker. This is completely irrelevant to the top controller.

Labels: defensible spaces, Leth

  ¶ 3:03 AM