To expand on this point: At 10:58 AM -0700 10/19/00, Tim May wrote:
Indeed. We used to have the reasonable expectation that nearly everyone on the list had some familiarity with the "classics." For example, Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom," Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson," Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," Vinge's "True Names," Card's "Ender's Game," Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," Brunner's "Shockwave Rider," and maybe even some of the writings of Spooner, Benson, Von Mises, Tannehill, Hospers, and Rothbard. These works helped to establish a common vocabulary, a common set of core concepts.
Not that everyone was a libertarian, let alone a Libertarian. But the core concepts were known, and those who didn't know about them were motivated to go off and look them up. We had fewer folks arguing for socialism in those days.
The point is not that people must be indoctrinated into the correct ideology, but that these and similar books captured the Zeitgeist of our times vis-a-vis cyberspace, the collapse of borders, the internationalization of commerce, etc. Throw in "Moore's law and the geodesic network" if your initials are the same as Heinlein's. It's not important that everyone read _every_ one of these books. But it _is_ important that they read and internalize at least _some_ of them. One of the advantages we had in the early days of the list, circa 1992-4, was that people were already fairly Net-savvy, else they wouldn't have started coming to meetings in the Bay Area, wouldn't have subscribed, wouldn't have been reading the early issues of "Wired," and so on. And many of the early list activists were from the Extropians list, where issues of anarcho-capitalism, Friedman, technology, etc. had been discussed many, many times. Those arriving on the Cypherpunks list tended to be those who felt the palpable sense that Things Are About to Change. As time went on, we started getting more and more clueless kids and people who wandered in because they'd heard that Cypherpunks was cool. Predictably, many of these were script kiddies and hackerd00dz who had inculcated views from their socialist schools that capitalism was doomed. Some of them made the transition to absorbing the message of "uncoerced transactions," many left. That so many of the books cited above are libertarian is not too surprising. It's really hard to imagine a world where strong crypto is ubiquitous where state power is increased, where transactions are coerced, and where taxes are high. I know of no serious books, for example, which argue this point. Of course, as regards the implications of crypto, they could try to find treatments of a more leftist point of view, and then argue those points here on the list. Some vaguely left-leaning anarchist material on "temporary autonomous zones," TAZs, is available. And some of the usual lit-crit stuff on postmodernism, Neil Postman, Hakim Bey, etc. Some of the early Cypherpunks were quite knowledgeable about these viewpoints. They were, however, views which were much more finely nuanced than the claptrap about how corporations need to be forced to help the little guy, blah blah. By the way, I could add several more books to the list above: Stephenson's "Snow Crash," Bey's "TAZ," Benson's "The Enterprise of Law," and Kelly's "Out of Control." There are more, obviously. And the past discussions on the list. And even my own Cyphernomicon FAQ. And the essays of Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, Dean Tribble, Mark Miller, Nick Szabo, Robin Hanson, and many others. But I recommend folks at least start with the "classics." --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.