At 02:19 PM 11/29/01 -0800, Tim May wrote:
Fact is, lists and other fora have lifecycles just like anything else. The peak for the list was no doubt in the 1993-4 period, when Clipper was hot news, and when many ideas were being exposed to lots of others
There is also the FAQ-ization of a contentful group. You yourself have (rightfully, usefully) pointed to your cryptnomicon tome and cypherpunk archives rather than regurgitate something already written.
Anyway, to those who wander away because the owner of "toad.com," a site that is not even part of the regular CDR system, declares us irrelevant I have just one message: good riddance.
The toadlist is infested with spam, and most posters have migrated to something more pleasant like lne.com (blessed be the lne.com folks).
And several of these lists are avowedly "non-political." How absurd. What's the point of a crypto list if there's no political angle? Yeah, maybe a handful of people want to chat about pure math and programming tricks...but not a lot, judging by the very low volumes of such discussions even on the "non-political" lists. And without political issues, what's the motivation to even talk about remailers, data havens, digital cash, etc.?
There are lists which are more exclusively technical. The value of this list is conversing with tech saavy futurists with an interest in social aspects.
The fact that John is now pulling the plug is one of the few surprises of recent years....I thought his site at toad had gone away several years ago! That's when he announced he was shutting it down. That he let it dribble on a dumping ground for those not smart enough to find the cyberpass.net, algebra.com, sunder.net, lne.com, or Choate's site doesn't mean his node was "the list."
Yes! His contribution was very useful and generous at a critical time, but it is not a negative thing at all that he closes that spamchannel.
But rumors of the death of Cypherpunks are greatly exaggerated.
Cypherpunks never die, they just get tarred and gzipped.