Wikileaks is the first concrete realisation of the crypto-anarchist dream: completely anonymous leaking, dealing blows to tyranny. (Source.)

I can't help but feel a bit depressed whenever I read something like that. Yes, Wikileaks is probably following the spirit of crypto-anarchy, but it is surprisingly lacking as far as the crypto part is concerned. You'd think that it would be using technologies such as Freenet to ensure that submitters cannot be traced and the Wikileaks site cannot be censored, or GPG keys to authenticate their releases, or HTTPS to serve their website (it's not working). Instead, Wikileaks is using ordinary technologies, and is trying to solve problems as they can. The most incredible thing is that it's working despite all this. (Of course, you still have to trust them when they say that they aren't tracing submitters, because they can't really prove that...)

(Yes, I know that using the right tools would have prevented Wikileaks from reaching a wide audience, and that this would probably have reduced their impact. I'm not saying that they should have used Freenet or anything; I'm just sad to notice that using the wrong tools seems to be good enough.)

Among the numerous social structures which you can think of, there are some which seem quite easy to create (essentially associations and companies). However, how are trade unions created? Banks? Insurance companies? Towns? Universities? NGOs?

The one big institutions about which people fantasize are countries: for some reason, people love to create micronations (probably because countries are supposed to be sovereign entities). Yet, that's not the easiest way to start, because it's kind of hard to get recognized as a country, whereas it is probably possible to create most of the other structures (assuming you live in a free country). How come nobody seems to be trying to create this kind of things and report on the result?

An important challenge in corporations is the issue of documentation: trying to describe and formalize all internal processes to ensure that the system is consistent and can withstand the departure of some staff members.

However, are there really organizations which have managed to document themselves so extensively that the documentation is really sufficient to make things work? I mean, imagine that all the staff in a factory suddenly disappeared. Would it be possible to replace them by new people, and get things running (allowing for an adaptation period during which the people get the time to read the documentation and find out what they're supposed to do, but barring any help from outside people)?

I think there really isn't any such system, and that the importance of oral tradition is still underestimated. (It feels quite strange when you realize that systems like big corporations, governments and such are all based on oral tradition, ie. on unwritten rules handed down from co-worker to co-worker, and that the sudden vanishing of a certain number of key people would perhaps be enough to bring them down.) Nevertheless, if such a system were designed and published, it would be, somehow, very beautiful in an abstract way (ie. to get this system running, put together the following number of people, and just follow the instructions...).

Which is worse: to take the time to say goodbye to a person, to a place, or to an activity, or to notice much later than, somehow, you stopped at some point to meet that person, to visit that place, or to do that thing?

I often notice things which I used to do and don't do anymore, and realize that there must have been one time which was the last one, and which probably didn't feel like it had any specific importance. Now, whenever I do something I haven't done for a long time and used to do regularly, I find myself wondering, "is this one of those last times which could have gone unnoticed?"

A lot of effort has been put in the design of interfaces which are simple to use, and people who try to sell computer products or services to you will usually present that as one of their main selling points. However, when you think of it, there really aren't that many people who try to create interfaces which are efficient, and efficiency doesn't sell at all.

This seems quite surprising. Simplicity and efficiency are usually two contradictory aims. For instance, it is usually faster to hit a key than to click a button (hence keyboard shortcuts), but you have to learn which key is mapped to which command, whereas buttons have labels which allow you to find out which one to click; displaying help messages take up screen space which is wasted for those users who already know how things work.

I am not saying that efficiency should always be favoured over simplicity. For tasks that you don't do very often, it wouldn't be worthwhile to spend the time required to learn an efficient interface. However, for tasks which you often do and which you will keep doing for quite some time (in my case: writing text, answering email, coding, etc.), learning how to use efficient tools is a profitable investment.

It is tempting to say that it makes more sense commercially to favour simplicity over efficiency because your product or service will have more casual users than hardcore users. This may be true, but it's not the whole story. Expert users are usually willing to pay more, and tend to influence other people, which makes it profitable to try to seduce them. Furthermore, outside of the computing world, things aren't always done that way. Piano keys don't carry labels, even though this could be useful for beginners. Bicycles aren't sold with the little stabilizer wheels you sometimes see on bikes for young children. Yet, webmails, social networking websites, operating systems and mobile phones usually have an interface which is simple but crippled, and that doesn't seem to bother in the slightest the numerous people who use them several hours per week...

I think that in fact, while the number of people who should theoretically invest time to learn efficient solutions is large enough, the number of people who are conscious of that need is much smaller. That's probably because society hasn't realized yet the quantity of time that people tend to spend on their computers, as compared to the time where computers weren't ubiquitous and where very few people used them. It's probably also because people tend to act irrationally and are unwilling to spend some time learning and recoup their investment later. Or perhaps because they are unwilling to acknowledge the time they spend on their computer, because they think it was somehow wasted.