June 2008 - cypherpunks-legacy

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by R.A. Hettinga 25 Jun '08

25 Jun '08

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Jun 25, 2008, at 2:57 AM, JP May wrote: >Note that here, by "Statism" I was specifically discussing the, let's call >it, post-monarchical-statism-period (ie, from, say, about 1800). (The post >began with killing off the kings and the industrial revolution...) Actually, the nation state starts "officially" with the termination of explicit religious control of politics and the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648. Cromwell, as you know, "killed the king", James, in particular, in 1649. The roots of industrialism are a little more murky. The scientific "revolution" is supposed to date to 1543, when Copernicus wrote "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres". Francis Bacon, who popularized induction and the scientific method, died in 1626, and the mathematization of science happened around the same time, with Descartes and analytic geometry, and, of course, Newton, with calculus. As Jim has noted here many times, Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" books are a marvelous place to immerse oneself in this period. Newcomen, as Stephenson points out, was building the first (though not that efficient) steam engine at roughly the same time (Hero of Alexandria built the first steam turbine in the first century AD, of course). Certainly the "hockey stick" phase of industrial progress was fully underway in the late 1700's/early 1800's. Personally, I think state control is as old as civilization itself. If not sedentarianism, certainly agriculturalism requires force to control geography, which, if not of necessity, certainly lends itself to monopolistic control of same, including the people who work that land and live in the cities that emerge a the intersections of trade routes. Human neurology prohibits "personal" relationships (call it trust, even) with more people than the size of the average hunter-gatherer band, say 16 or so to keep it binary :-), and any larger group size transmutes that "star", "peer-to-peer", "many-to-many", "sneakernet" topology into a full-blown hierarchy, with one route, "chain of command", whatever, through the network. Latency of communication controls the hierarchy's size, and the faster and farther news travels the bigger hierarchy can get. Cities beget empires -- hierarchies of cities -- and so on. Obviously, speed of communication actually determines the totality of control, as well. Fast "pony express" riders kept Ghengis in charge. Stagecoaches did the same for Napoleon. Packet shipping (the original kind :-)) enabled Brittania to rule the waves, the sun to never set, &cet. As lots of people here have heard me say before, :-), telegraphy, telecommunications in general, is where the fun really started. Real- time communication enables real-time control, and control, to paraphrase Lord Acton, trends toward totality. It all has to stop somewhere, of course, monadism of any kind is impossible, we can't all be one "stuff", much less one organization. You can't transfer-price all assets on the "books" of the same "company" -- as von Mises claimed, and, paradoxically, his disciples' avowed "scientistic" enemy, modern mathematical finance, proved -- you can only discover prices in auction markets, not calculate them with a committee, not even if that committee has guns to enforce its calculated "price". For totalitarianism, the beginning of the end, the "Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres", is, of course, the advent of a non-hierarchical communication architecture, paradoxically, or maybe not so, the result of legislative mandate in the 1920's. In exchange for "natural" monopoly over interstate, and thus pretty much all, American telephone traffic, government required American Telephone and Telegraph to provide ubiquitous, "universal" telephone service: all rural residences must receive telephones, not just the profitable residents of cities. Since manually-switched universal telephone service would require a substantial majority of American women to become telephone operators (certainly it wasn't a *man's* job ;-)), automated switching (direct rotary-dial) was not too far behind. As Peter Huber later noted in "The Geodesic Network", the lower the relative price of switches compared to lines in a given network, the more nodes there are in the network, the more nodes are connected to other nodes, and the less hierarchical, the more geodesic, it becomes. Human switched networks, telephonic or otherwise, are hierarchical because human heads, the parts that do the switching, are expensive. Moore's law allows one to literally print switching machines, and so now we have the internet, the mother of all geodesic networks. There is no *one* route through a geodesic network, in fact, the number, the number of routes (and thus the value, as Metcalfe observed) increases as the square of the switching-node count. (Brains are, for the most part, geodesic networks of neurons, speaking of human neurology, but we'll leave that for some other discussion :-).) I claim -- and it's really not much of a leap when you think about it -- that our social structures pretty much map to our communication architectures. When our technology enables hunter-gatherer culture, our networks, and our social structures, are star-shaped. When we became sedentary near a wild grain source in the Middle East, invented agriculture, and eventually grew enough food to feed large urban populations, our networks, our social structures, became hierarchical. And, when humanity invented telecommunication, which forced us to mechanize, and then exponentially automate, switching, our networks became more and more geodesic. Presumably, our social structures, our markets -- even for force -- will become more geodesic as well. The social implications, if this all bears out, will be... interesting. :-). This is, why, of course, I'm such an advocate of digital bearer transactions. Book-entries require a hierarchy of accounts -- and state-enforced entities, notice --- in order to clear and settle transactions. There is only one "route" through a book-entry transaction settlement system. Like the old human-switched telephone system, it runs into Russell's paradox, and Goedel's result: It cannot be both consistent and complete at the same time without error. It cannot trend toward ubiquity without totalitarianism, for instance. Bearer transactions are more geodesic. Paradoxically, it is their anonymity, at least between buyers and sellers, which makes this possible. Anybody can trade with anybody, no matter *who* they are, because it doesn't *matter* who they are, and the trade will execute, clear, and settle safely. I call David Chaum the father of modern financial cryptography for this very reason. He invented the blind signature cryptographic protocol, and thus -- as Nick Szabo observed on cypherpunks -- the first digital bearer certificate. By the way, bearer transactions are as old a barter, which apparently started with australopithecus -- certainly trade was -- and book entry transactions are as old as writing, which was actually *invented* to do them, so none of this is new. Though, you note that book-entry transactions was invented at the same time as agricultural hierarchy -- and monopoly of force. :-) Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 9.8.3.4028 wsBVAwUBSGJ0osUCGwxmWcHhAQFH9gf/dIdZBJhZNA9F2+rMp/zcYiSnoH26izTu KRy9Ov4Q04RLb8HQb2D84CNgduS5kswdE7qZnV5+LmneMXzk9+pP37rKAzJcS181 aqXToZCzTRtXPKY1CPXzWdFiV8KnRweLuqN3v3LN2G4vG1SfocBDovXtd+ms9+4d zEYhLcTeGeV/+U3li9ypJ3cSFnnbqPvX9jrJxB3y9QjkkEDbQbSIQHQhyUseHjTF WFHcZXw2q+IQ8+ntUWPMSo04AH4Szpoh4AM4JpZV+EVyo0nG/N+wjawWx7EoV+8Y J6DLuCZonQsiHvvRveKu0qM5FPcztzXulAc79ZbxddY54hm2JWcj6A== =NDs/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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