In gold we trust - Some responses to Trevor's questions and comments:

About "noble" aims such as OLPC et al.

I checked on Competition Law/Antitrust Law. In particular, the Treaty of the European Community Article 87 lays down a general rule that the state may not aid or subsidise private parties in distortion of free competition, but then grants exceptions for things like charities, natural disasters or regional development.

So yes, there's no profit like no-profit.

About "trust."

Trust falls under the Common Law Legal System of Trusts, Wills and Estate Administration. In a trust arrangement, a settlor (also trustor or grantor) entrusts some or all of his or her property to people of his choice (the trustees), and the trustees become the legal owners of the trust property but owe a fiduciary duty to the beneficiaries, specified by the settlor, who are the "beneficial" owners of the trust property.

Anyone with a dirty mind can already see how such an arrangement or concept may be useful for less savory deeds.

One legal but potentially unsavory implementation is a board of trustees which manages all the companies in an industry "in trust" for shareholders who have entrusted their shares to the trustees in exchange for dividend-paying certificates. Not only does this diminish competition it also provides a mechanism for tax evasion and money laundering.

Wikipedia lists four major business trusts established in the late19th and early 20th century: Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Company, U.S. Steel, and the International Mercantile Marine Company. The latter two were bankrolled by JP Morgan & Co.

But there are new ways of pushing the economically and mentally damaging monopolism of business trusts. One is by establishing a platform and then controlling compatibility with them. The best way to do this is not through a board of trustees but rather through a "consortium." One recent example is the consortium pushing for standardization of Microsoft's OOXML format. Control of compatibility is also done through patents, which are pushed by founding members of the consortium into an open source / community development of a technology. When everyone in the opensource development community has worked so hard, the technology is promoted to a standard, which is then licensed to the industry but under conditions imposed by the protecting patent. So you're right that "what is particularly pernicious is the way some people promote "freedom" in ways that ultimately lead to enslavement." So watch out for Xandros, a founding member of the Desktop Linux Consortium (and watch out for this one too), which has entered into a collaboration agreement with Microsoft.

Under that Microsoft agreement, control of compatibility (which leads to monopolism) is nicely called Intellectual Property Assurance (they like to use niceties like trust, trustworthy and assurance). This says: "Through the agreement, Microsoft will make available patent covenants for Xandros customers. These covenants will provide customers confidence that the Xandros technologies they use and deploy in their environments are compliant with Microsoft’s intellectual property. By putting a framework in place to share intellectual property Xandros and Microsoft can speed the development of interoperable solutions. "

A more recent corruption of trust in its simplest definition is something called "trusted computing." This is promoted by the Trusted Computing Group consisting of Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP and AMD. Through "trusted computing", the TCG promotes a standard for a more secure PC. Again, if we check on what "more secure" means from the point of view of the TCG and from the point of view of the computing public, we can see that "trust" has been used to exploit the public and protect the competitors by destroying genuine competition.

A very good FAQ on Trusted Computing is here http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

At the heart of Trusted Computing is a combination of hardware, software and networks. Computer motherboards are embedded with chips that supervise the booting process, monitoring and approving hardware and software at boot-up. When the computer reaches the approved (trusted) state, the chip gives the operating system the keys to decrypt trusted software and data, thus ensuring that one has a system running only approved and trusted hardware and software. if updates are made to the system, the system must go on-line to a trusted network to be re-certified. Of course, the keys used to decrypt the system is never accessible to the user. Keys can also be made to expire in time - a bit like those Charlies Angels or James Bond films with the cassette tapes or some kind of disc burst into flames or melts after they've been played. The security and marketing potential in such things is enormous.

Trusted Computing already exists in some form in numerous electronic transactions that we make - banking, credit cards, web certificates. With nearly every aspect of modern life depending on computerization, the computer security market is going to be really big, and the global industry mafia (led by the US) is taking it all over.

The links between technology, economics, security and politics are really mind-boggling. Which is why people often find comfort in solidarity networks, entertainment, and campaigns. These create the feeling that something (perceived to be good if anything) is being done.

I think that philosophically, the weakness of global human culture is its alienation with the things that it creates and the consequence of a society where the landscape is dominated by the objects and artifices that humans keep creating, re-creating, documenting and re-distributing. I call this "decadence", when out of alienation, symbols are confused with the objects they represent because they give temporal happpiness and satisfaction - a perversion of fantasy and imagination in the futile pursuit of happiness.

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Fatima Lasay