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Anarchism can never even exist, let alone work, because it defines itself in a fundamentally nonsensical way.

It distinguishes itself on the principle of 'non-coerciveness'. But coercion is written into the fact of physical scarcity: if someone wants that food, then someone else cannot have it. Any organisational notion that does not represent that scarcity as constraint on behaviour is useless. It simply fails to address the problem.

What anarchism then does is to confuse and obscure this, or just wish it away. The motif of 'decentralised organisation' is a contradiction in terms: there cannot be structure without some constraint. If every local grouping is always free to decide the rules, then there are no rules. If everyone is free at every transaction to invent their own money, then there is no money. Plus, everyone making up new rules will not scale. (And no, people will not just naturally, magically, happen to agree.) Organisation is essentially hierarchical in its basic one-to-many informational form: there must be some single pattern followed by multiple elements.

What anarchism could sensibly propose instead is more sophisticated democracy: ie, better forms of feedback from participants to rule generation. We cannot avoid rules/structure, but we could more responsively, iteratively, steer the the construction of them.

Always good to see a zero-CSS website. The true zen-master style of web production ‒ many tacitly aspire to its purity, yet few are able to shake off worldly temptations to attain it.

Software is not all made up out of thin air -- you do not 'choose your own gravity'. The equivalent of phyical laws in software are computational/algorithmical, logical laws.

For example, sorting cannot be done faster than O(n log n) -- that is as hard and objective as anything physical. (In fact, one would think it is even harder in some sense, since it is so purely logical.). Software is built within algorithmic constraints.

This is, well, shallow propagandising guff. It promotes an agenda but diverts criticism with mythologising illusion.

Markets fail in various ways. Should we just let that happen? -- and just have 'faith' in the wonder of 'freedom' etc.? As Stiglitz says, a common reason why 'the invisible hand' is invisible is because it is not actually there.

What is this 'theory' Naur talks of? It is not a nebulous feeling or sensation, it is something complex, articulate -- something 'built'. But how can something with logical structure be at the same time inexpressible? There is a contradiction lurking there.

Imagine you are 'building' one of these 'theories', to make some software. How do you know it is correct? The only way is by testing it against the world, and to do that it must be expressed. And any part that is not expressible cannot, for that reason, be a usable part of the 'theory'. (It is more basic really: a 'thing' in your mind, that cannot be expressed, is not really a 'thing' at all.)

The reason programmers are not simple replaceable resources is not because some kind of 'theory' thing is not expressible, but because making software requires certain significant practicalities of effort, knowledge, and skill.

Naur's article is based on a contradiction:

On one hand, a 'theory' is described as something completely internal and irreducible: "the theory, is not, and cannot be, expressed" (quote from PATB)

But on the other hand, a 'theory' is applied to external objects: "if viewed in relation to the theory of the program these ways [of changing it] may look very different, some of them perhaps conforming to that theory or extending it in a natural way, while others may be wholly inconsistent with that theory" (quote from PATB)

These cannot both be true. A 'theory' cannot be wholly internal if it is applied to things. If something external conforms to it to some degree, then that thing is to that degree an expression of the 'theory'. What else is an expression? And, a 'theory' cannot be irreducible if it applies to things that are reducible. If it matches something -- like software -- that is complex and determinate, it must itself be analysable into determinate properties or patterns or structure.

Since 'theory' is used to make actual software -- something that can fit or diverge from it -- 'theory' must have a substantial, and complex, objective part.

So instead of this confused term 'theory' we should think of something like a material: programming is the engineering-design of structures in a particular abstract 'material'.

That does not change the article's conclusions about programmers not being 'replaceable components of production'. But it gives a better viewpoint of the activity: not merely some obscure inaccessible idea of human thought, but some lead on the part of it that is objective and that we can get hold of and hopefully build some understanding of.

That argument, commonly associated with Hayek, quite trivially does not make sense.

If the information is unknowable, then it cannot play any role economically. If it is unknowable, the market itself cannot act upon it either. The idea lurking here is of inarticulable knowledge or inexpressible information -- and it is a contradiction in terms.

Hayek's big point -- in 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' -- is really this: an economic system is a cooperative system, a cooperative system requires networking/sharing information, and money and markets are a way to convey and share information.

Hayek does not prove that centralisation is impossible, nor does he prove that money and markets are the only means to run an economy. An argument based on information is not going to get you there -- rather the opposite in fact.

Later in that article, Hayek says -- about gathering dispersed knowledge etc. -- (not) "likely" rather than "never", and also says "it is just conceptually possible". That is the sensible view: if the market is performing a computation, then any sufficiently powerful general computer could emulate it and any sufficiently good network could transmit the relevant information around. Indeed, with enough power you could process more information than the money-market system.

And that is actually where we are now. When there is a pocketable networked computer for every human on the planet, that rather blows away the idea that we need money to solve the 'economic calculation' problem. The money-market system is already obsolete, it will just take some time to evolve away from it.

As Landes and Posner say in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law' (Conclusion, p422, s3) (2003):

"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."

And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.

Now, the main purpose of copyright is to get the best trade-off in production level and access to goods. So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?

> losing 'potential income'

What does that even mean? Really, what? If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!

The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)

If plenty of music is being made, so what? If certain businesses cannot make so much money, tough luck on them -- they should get out of business. That is the market.

The purpose of copyright law is to ensure good amounts of production for the public overall. It is not there to help certain rent-seeking companies make money.

The copyright industry has been 'crying wolf' for ages. No-one should listen.

We do not even know that very large amounts of piracy would be bad -- the market would probably reconfigure and adapt.

We should increase people's ease at getting and using informational goods (by reducing artificial restrictions) and see what happens -- yes, observe the actual evidence.

That question has been answered: we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!

So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically -- more goods are more widely available.

This is quite pointless because it essentially cancels out. To get a cooperative structure you have to give away surplus -- that is, people with more have to give it to people with less.

Yes, redistribution! That seems a dirty idea in a substantial part of USA politics. So 'pay it forward' chains are a peculiar thing: they summon the feeling of cooperation, in an acceptable way, without actually being effectively cooperative.

If they made lots of money, good: they offered a service the public wanted. As far as that basic model goes they added value into the economy.

Anyone who wants to claim there is something actually materially bad there needs to provide evidence that some harm was done to the economy -- show that the public lost-out. That would be really quite interesting, because economic research seems to have had difficulty doing that so far.