L. McCarthy wrote:
Lately, I've had the feeling that majordomo@toad echoes my epistles only back to me. None of the longer pieces I've written has elicited so much as a flame from Eric, Perry, or even James in a while.
Should I feel left out by not being mentioned in this set? Or relieved? In any case, I agree that most responses are mostly reactive. Though in defense of the Cypherpunks list, not nearly so reactive as are many groups. Lots of lists and groups are dominated by in jokes, non sequitors, and other ephemera. At least this group quite often gets into meaty issues.
I've encountered an insidious hazard of high-volume lists (such as this) that probably snares other people too. It's altogether too easy to sit at one's mailer and merely react to whatever comes along. Obviously, if everyone did this all the time, nothing of substance would ever be accomplished. It's therapeutic, IMHO, to step back regularly, refocus on one's long term goals w.r.t the group, and push new initiatives.
Like a lot of you, I try to do this regularly. If people are interested, they'll follow up. If not, they won't. Think of it as evolution in action. It so happens that the latest theme I've been thinking about is ready to spring on you folks. If you respond, so be it. That theme is this: Is cyberspace, or the Net/Web/Etc., sufficiently rich or complex to meet our needs? By "rich" or "complex" I mean in terms of "places to go," of "degrees of freedom." For example, the multiplicity of routing paths for messages, via remailers explicitly and via the underlying routing options the Internet itself offers implicitly, gives certain major advantages that a centralized system vulnerable to "choke points" would not have. (The Internet gurus will likely jump in at this point and blather about how this is isn't so, how they could shut down the Internet in several minutes with just their Leatherman tool and a few O'Reilly books, but my point is not that it isn't _possible_, but that the direction in which the Net has moved is generally one that makes shut-down harder than more centralized alternatives.) By our "needs" I mean roughly the Cypherpunks goals of privacy, free choice, cybernetic free association, virtual communities, anarcho-capitalism, etc. (Quibblers can dispute any of these, but clearly most active posters on the list advocate some vector made up of many of these diverse elements.) So, what am I getting at? Consider how the abstractions of the World Wide Web, URLs, HTML, HTTP, and Web browsers have *increased the size of cyberspace* rather dramatically in just the past two years. More places to visit, more interconnectedness, more difficulties in controlling access to stuff, etc. Home pages containing banned material are proliferating (a la the Homolka-Teale ritualistic cannibalism trial in Canada, the Scientology material, and so on--this is not the place for me to recap this). Sure, ftp sites used to do this pretty well; in fact, I'm considering ftp sites in this "evolution" toward greater complexity (in the richness sense). (Actually, cyberspace is partly getting "bigger" and partly "increasing in dimensionality." Dimensionality of a space can be related to how many neighbors one has....think of the two nearest neighbors one has in a 1-D space, the 4 (or 8 if diagonals are considered) neighbors in a 2-D space, the 6 in a 3-D space, and so on. Arguably, if one has "100 close neighbors" in a space, it is roughly a 50 dimensional space. An equivalent formulation is in terms of the radius of the n-sphere that everyone fits into. For example, the "six degrees of separation," the 6 "handshakes" that separate nearly any two people in America, suggests that American society is in some important sense roughly a 15-17 dimensional space, because in some sense all 250 million Americans "fit into" a hypersphere of radius 3 (diameter 6) when the dimensionality is around 17. (Or slightly lower, as the slight corrections to V = r ^ n have to be included, which I'm not bothering with). What "increased connectivity" does is to increase dimensionality, about as one would expect from our usual metaphors about "a multidimensional society" and "the world is shrinking"...indeed it is shrinking, even as the absolute volume increases.) What Cypherpunks should be pushing for, in my view, is this increased dimensionality. More places to stick things, more places to escape central control, and more degrees of freedom (which has a nice dual meaning I once used as the working title for a novel I was working on). Is Cyberspace already rich enough (= high enough dimensionality) so that central control cannot be reestablished (to the extent it ever existed)? Many of this think that it probably already is past this point, that the "point of no return" has been reached. After all, the Soviets couldn't stop samizdats, the Chinese couldn't stop fax machines, and the Americans can't stop drug use, so what hope is there in controlling modems, crypto, cellular phones, satellites, Web links, stegonography, terabytes of data flowing unobstructed across borders, and so on. Just to "stop the Net" would disrupt the entire financial system, which not even Clinton or the next (Republican) President would be tempted to do....they might as well launch a nuclear war as try to shut down this "anarchic" ( = high dimensionality) system. But can we do more? One of my own wishes is to see hundreds (nay, thousands!) of remailers, as these act as "teleportation booths" which can dramatically increase connectivity. (They can increase the connectivity in a different way that just straight connections can...they "stitch together" otherwise visibly-connected regions with unobservable connections, a desirable thing.) What else? * Lots more remailers. Run out of accounts, not just "remailer machines." Accounts allow trivial proliferation of more remailers. * Web access remailers. Like the "anonymous anonymous ftp," why not explore combining Web systems with remailers? (Not so great for browsing, of course, but there should be some interesting possibilities.) * More offshore sites, members, etc. This increases connectivity and increases the "regulatory arbitrage" we so often talk about. * Local corporate computer nets are "extra rooms in cyberspace," and thus are harder to search. The equivalents of "rat lines" (in which drugs are kept in one apartment and retrieved through a hole in the wall, thus delaying/foiling searches and kick-in-the-door raids....think of how technology makes all this so much easier). * digital cash is of course of central importance. It glues commerce together, but also greases it (a dual metaphor, not a mixed one). In terms of the "richness" I'm talking about, it incentivizes the colonization of cyberspace, the expansion of this space, and the general richness. * Alternative Nets, like FIDONet, are often lost in the discussion of "the Net," but perhaps we should take much greater interest in these alternatives. They make a crackdown harder, they lessen the dangers of a single-point attack, and they provide "genetic diversity" for building future Nets. (I'm not saying Cypherpunks have the time, expertise, or incentive to work on this, but just reminding folks that the Internet is not the end all and be all...) * More users, more education, more articles....all increase dimensionality, by expanding the space (e.g., key software on more machines, accessible by more people, more home pages, etc.). And so on. Increase the richness of cyberspace. More places, more avenues, more rooms, more more. Make sure there's a "there," there. Well, I've written too much, and as folks have noted, long posts get fewer responses that do short ones, especially flamish ones. Personally, I think there are fewer long essays and analyses for the same reason there are fewer large predators than grass-munching herbivores. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Cypherpunks list: majordomo@toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tc/tcmay