the Computers and Society A AC 0 ]K4 ag.o.ra (~g'o-l"o) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . n. A marketplace in ancient Greece, customarily used as a place of popular assembly. For members of this popular assembly, we invite short, substantive communications tightly-focused around a single experience, issue or theoretical point within the scope of this publication. Private Property, Domestic Tranquility, and Computer Technology I am often asked by friends and acquaintances how I was able, in my mid-thirties before I married, to live under one roof with my parents and sister. Of course, our very tight-knit family and the traditional Jewish cultural practice of leaving the nest only upon marriage are mentioned, but these are only part of the story. The other part is private property. It is a commonplace among libertarians that social peace is enhanced by private property and that property held in common invites disputes and threatens both privacy and liberty. As I show here, the same is true within the home. Once, we all shared a single telephone line, albeit with several extensions. My friends would call late and awaken others in the household, and use of the line by any of us precluded similar use by the rest of us. The solution was clear: Each of us obtained a private line. Although I have had my own phone line since 1982 when call waiting was not yet available and answering machines were not the commonplace they are today, I appreciate both technologies, while others in the household find them intrusive, even offending. The replacement of property held in common by private property thus prevents disputes that cannot even be foreseen when the replacement is decided upon. To give a second example, my Dad finds air conditioning most uncomfortable, while I cannot survive New York's summers without it. With one air conditioner in the centrally located study, there simply was no pleasing both of us. Again, the solution was clear, and I obtained my own air conditioner. Perhaps the most common example of the peace-enhancing effects of private property within the home is separate radios and televisions, so that no one is disturbed by the use or volume of these or feels shortchanged by the choice of station and its programming. Society rightly places a premium on "sharing," but what is meant is giving, lending, or loaning; true sharing is often best avoided both in society at large and within the home. Or so it was until computer technology came into the household. Those of us who were in at the dawn of the computing age remember the advent of "time-sharing, parallel processing, and other advances in operating systems techniques and hardware that allow multiple users to share the same machine, with each process impervious to the existence of all the rest. More recently, this technology has come into the home, with the result that one can have virtual privacy with true sharing. I'm thinking of the ability of two users with very different tastes to share Windows and yet have very different settings and desktops via the Windows logan feature. And, those sharing don't even have to trust one another much; everything from files to one's desktop can be password-protected~perfect to keep sibling rivalry at bay. My wife and I share a desktop, but even we make full use of Netscape's Profile Manager--that way we can pop our respective servers with our respective user names, keep our respective identities and signatures on outgoing mail, and keep separate (and different) mail folders with individualized filters. We also have our own home pages and bookmarks. DSVD, a relatively old technology, allowed users to be on the phone and send files back and forth; now ADSL technology allows complete telephone use while surfing: Another source of friction removed. As for WordPerfect, it's very easy to write a macro--executed by pushing a button or entering some keystrokes--so as to set some or all of the preferences the way each of us likes them. CRTL-L for Lyz; CTRL-J for Joseph; what could be simpler or more peace-assuring? --Joseph S. Fulda 48 Computersand Society, December 2000

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