“What Color Are Your Bits?”, 2004-06-10 (; backlinks; similar):
[Philosophy piece attempting to explain, via an amusing analogy to classic RPG game Paranoia, to programmers how the rest of the world sees information: as tainted, in a dualist immaterial sense, by their history.
Two bits are not identical even if they are identical, because they may have different histories; these are recorded and enforced by consensual society-wide hallucinations, such as intellectual property law.
This may be insane, like in Paranoia, but that is how the human world works, and why many clever copyright hacks will fail.]
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