On Monday, January 14, 2002, at 11:08 AM, Trei, Peter wrote:
http://slashdot.org/books/01/12/27/1845203.shtml
'michael' has reviewed "True Names and The Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier" over on slashdot. I won't discuss the review or the book in detail other than to say that the book should be considered Required Reading, and the review is also good.
michael has this to say about our Resident Author:
"Timothy May, who is perhaps best known for his ranting posts about crypto anarchy, has a lengthy and astonishingly well-written essay titled "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy". The essay reads as if an editor with a firm hand extracted most of May's characteristic wild-eyed prose and yet kept the insightful ideas behind it - if only all of his writing was like this essay.
Typical of Slash Dot carelessness. I wrote that essay several years ago and it is essentially unchanged from what I wrote then. The words are mine. None of them are the words of the editor except in terms of light copyediting. Jim Frenkel, the editor, made a few changes, but they are hard to find. The changes involve deleting a few phrases he thought could be pared down. The writing, the organization, the phrasing, etc. is all mine. Dig up versions I posted several years ago if you don't believe me. (Due to his sending me repeated messages to "tcmay@got.com" instead of to "got.net," he only reached me this last go-round just days before the final submission to the printer. I made a few typo and vocabulary changes in the day or two I had and submitted the changes.) Sure, there's a difference between the writing style in my published articles (this one, the Imagina piece reprinted in Peter Ludlow's "Crypto Anarchy" collection, etc.) and in things I write for the Cypherpunks list. "Duh!"
It's a great introduction to what May means by "crypto anarchy". May is one of the most optimistic writers in the book, and he, as well as the other writers, believe that we are at a fork: either we'll move toward a surveillance state, or toward what May calls an anarcho-capitalist state, but the middle ground is unstable - we'll end up at one extreme or the other. May believes we're already firmly on the road toward anarcho-crypto-utopia."
I appreciate the reviewer thinking it's a good introduction and overview. I spent a fair amount of time organizing the ideas and trying to at least touch on most of the important ideas and applications. And to tie it in to "True Names," especially the "colonization of cyberspace" (or cypherspace) aspect. Namely, the role crypto and robust protocols will play in "holding the walls up" (in Snow Crash Multiverses, Habitats, and True Names immersive VRs) and in building digital economies in cyberspace. Crypto is about a helluva lot more than just PGP and RSA...it's about building the I-beams and sheetrock that will allow robust structures to be built, it's about the railroad lines and power lines that will connect the structures, and it's about creating Galt's Gulch in cyberspace, where it belongs. This is the "vision" that is what Cypherpunks is/was/should be really about. The low-tech jive about mere things like "e-mail privacy" was fairly banal ten years ago and is even more so today. Our physical Cypherpunks gathering on Saturday was not so great. Several reasons. But it shows the need to get back to a different focus. For example... The evening of the CP meeting was a huge and crowded party at Brad Templeton's house (Brad was the rec.humor.funny guy, then the founder of Clarinet, now some kind of honcho in EFF.) The Usual Suspect, including founders of companies and science fiction authors, lots of Apple and Sun employees, etc. Also the core bunch of E (the capability language, see www.erights.org) folks. And Eric Drexler, the nanotech guy. I had a fascinating chat with Shawn O'Connor, who doesn't choose to post to the CP list (I forget why not). The chat helped to crystallize some ideas I have; maybe I'll write them up soon. (Related to three pictures of crypto and financial instrument ontologies). This quiet, but intense, chat was worth more than any several "business as usual" Cypherpunks meetings. Thanks, Shawn! And consider posting here, please. The connection with the above-reviewed article is that more of this kind of "way out" stuff is in the article, less in articles here. Which is natural, as each article ("rant") here cannot be a self-contained tutorial on things which were laid out nearly 10 years ago. (Not claiming the work was finished then, or now. Just claiming that we must assume a certain amount of foundational things. This is one reason I used to urge folks like Faustine to do some homework and learn what we knew a decade ago, surely 5-6 years ago. Perhaps if she reads the "True Names" collection she'll be better able to contribute.) This is why books are still needed and why Slash Dot readers should think about learning to read them. --Tim May "If I'm going to reach out to the the Democrats then I need a third hand.There's no way I'm letting go of my wallet or my gun while they're around." --attribution uncertain, possibly Gunner, on Usenet