Some recent posts at Techdirt have me thinking of some basic questions, about the pace of change and the continuing battle between cops and robbers.

In successive entries, we have dismissal of new anti-crime ideas from the banking industry, copyright cops taking on tricks of online robbers, and the same industry trying to push DRM technology onto analog devices. (I know, the order should be reversed, because the last item was written first, and the first last, but what can you do?)

In many ways robbers have natural advantages over cops in technology crime. Cops have to stop everything. Robbers only have to succeed once. But that's misleading, because once a robber is caught they're "in the system" -- you only have to be caught a few times to have your life ruined.

Robbers can also use many open source advantages, sharing tips freely while cops obsess over secrecy, engaging in innovation while cops have to maintain standards.

These are some of the concepts John Robb deals with in his Global Guerillas blog. How popular must an uprising become before it becomes impossible to take down? Put in terms of more ordinary crime, how many must oppose a law before it becomes virtually unenforceable?

What cops, and civilization, fear more than anything else is that the answer to that question drops as technological sophistication rises. They see civilization as digital, either existing or not existing.

This is the great false assumption of our time. It's false in two ways.

First, technology does increase the need for consensus, rather than narrow majorities, in order to hold society together, because the percentage of "objectors" needed to threaten society does go down as technological sophistication increases. This is not a bad thing. In fact, consensus is far more stable than democracy. Consensus is what keeps the Internet together.

Second, civilization is analog, not digital. The alternative to the absolute triumph of law and order is not chaos. We're talking about a much more complex structure. A certain amount of chaos must be acceptable in order for progress to continue. Shrinkage is natural. We work to balance shrinkage with costs in all our enforcement efforts. It's the only rational way to go.

American assumptions, about the need for corporate "war rooms" , about democracy being enforceable at the point of a gun, or the false choice of absolute control or absolute chaos, are behind America's failing relations with the world.

Consensus, open source, and an analog messiness are being pitted this decade in a grand experiment against democracy, security, and order. In this struggle, Americans are the bad guys. We are losing. We will lose. We deserve to lose. Because our assumptions of the world are just plain wrong.