Responding to msg by doug@OpenMind.com (Doug Cutrell) on Fri, 9 Sep 12:36 PM: Your critique has elicited some of the best responses I've seen here. There is still, indeed, the task of proving that cryptoanarchy is not itself a play for power by those who write and master its cryptographic code. But better to test that in the public arena rather remain hidden and protected like the state secrecy of governmental cryptography. The state will probably fiercely oppose it, not least by stigmatizing cryptoanarchy and impugning its motives by exaggeration and distortion. (It is worth recalling that classical black anarchy, the secret, lethal version as distinguished from open black flag type, is used by despots to justify their ruthless measures. Black anarchists, as agents of despots, mingle with avowed flag-wavers to spy and provoke acts that lead to repressive crackdowns. Black anarchists never announce themselves as such but may freely admit to being "anarchistic" as a wild-eyed subterfuge. Inept provocations sometimes reveal them but the most able are never detected.) I may be helpful to read one writer's view of how cryptoanarchy may be lumped with and targeted like other stigmatized groups whose attributes it may claim: Quotes are from: "Stigma, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity", Erving Goffman, Simon and Schuster, 1963. pp. 143-45: DEVIATIONS AND DEVIANCE One such deviation is important here, the kind presented by individuals who are seen as declining voluntarily and openly to accept the social place accorded them, and who act irregularly and somewhat rebelliously in connection with our basic institutions -- the family, the age-grade system, the stereotyped role-division between the sexes, legitimate full-time employment involving maintenance of a single governmentally ratified personal identity, and segregation by class and race. These are the "disaffiliates." Those who take this stand on their own and by themselves might be called eccentrics or "characters." Those whose activity is collective and focused within some building or place (and often upon a special activity) may be called cultists. Those who come together into a sub-community or milieu may be called "social deviants", and their corporate life a deviant community. They constitute a special type, but only one type, of deviator. If there is to be a field of inquiry called "deviance," it is social deviants as here defined that would presumably constitute its core. Prostitutes, drug addicts, delinquents, criminals, jazz musicians, bohemians, gypsies, carnival workers, hobos, winos, show people, full time gamblers, beach dwellers, homosexuals, and the urban unrepentant poor -- these would be included. These are the folk who are considered to be engaged in some kind of collective denial of the social order. They are perceived as failing to use available opportunity for advancement in the various approved runways of society; they show open disrespect for their betters; they lack piety; they represent failures in the motivational schemes of society. Once the core of social deviancy is established, one can proceed to peripheral instances: community-based political radicals who not only vote in a divergent way but spend more time with those of their own kind than is politically necessary; the traveling rich who are not geared into the executive's work week, and spend their time drifting from one summering place to another; expatriates, employed or not, who routinely wander at least a few steps from the PX and the American Express; the ethnic assimilation backsliders who are reared in the two worlds of the parent society and the society of their parents, and resolutely turn away from the conventional routes of mobility open to them, overlaying their public school socialization with what many normals will see as a grotesque costume of religious orthodoxy; the metropolitan unmarried and merely married who disavail themselves of an opportunity to raise a family, and instead support a vague society that is in rebellion, albeit mild and short-lived, against the family system In almost all of these cases, some show of disaffiliation is made, as is also true of eccentrics and cultists, providing in this way a thin line that can be drawn between all of them and deviators on the other side, namely, the quietly disaffiliated--hobbyists who become so devoted to their avocation that only a husk remains for civil attachments, as in the case of some ardent stamp collectors, club tennis players, and sports car buffs. Social deviants, as defined, flaunt their refusal to accept their place and are temporarily tolerated in this gestural rebellion, providing it is restricted within the ecological boundaries of their community. Like ethnic and racial ghettos, these communities constitute a haven of self-defense and a place where the individual deviator can openly take the line that he is at least as good as anyone else. But in addition, social deviants often feel that they are not merely equal to but better than normals, and that the life they lead is better than that lived by the persons they would otherwise be. Social deviants also provide models of being for restless normals, obtaining not only sympathy but also recruits. (Cultists acquire converts too, of course, but the focus is on programs of action not styles of life.) The wise can become fellow-travelers. p. 25: STIGMA AND SOCIAL IDENTlTY Often those with a particular stigma sponsor a publication of some kind [list cypherpunks?] which gives voice to shared feelings, consolidating and stabilizing for the reader his sense of the realness of "his" group and his attachment to it. Here the ideology of the members is formulated -- their complaints, their aspirations, their politics. The names of well-known friends and enemies of the "group" are cited, along with information to confirm the goodness or the badness of these people. Success stories are printed, tales of heroes of assimilation who have penetrated new areas of normal acceptance. Atrocity tales are recorded, recent and historic, of extreme mistreatment by normals. Exemplary moral tales are provided in biographical and autobiographical form illustrating a desirable code of conduct for the stigmatized. The publication also serves as a forum for presenting some division of opinion as to how the situation of the stigmatized person ought best to be handled. Should the individual's failing require special equipment [crypto?], it is here advertised and reviewed. The readership of these publications provides a market for books and pamphlets which present a similar line. It is important to stress that, in America at least, no matter how small and how badly off a particular stigmatized category is, the viewpoint of its members is likely to be given public presentation of some kind. It can thus be said that Americans who are stigmatized tend to live in a literarily-defined world, however uncultured they might be. If they don't read books on the situation of persons like themselves, they at least read magazines and see movies; and where they don't do these, then they listen to local, vocal associates. An intellectually worked-up version of their point of view is thus available to most stigmatized persons End quotes