------BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE------ Mr. Wells-- Goodbye, best wishes. I'm guessing, but I think you're making a mistake in leaving, both for yourself and about us. We are not being irresponsible. We have a different, serious, view of how the world should be made into a good place. We can only "set the tone," as you say, if what we are saying is founded in truth and competence. The personal part of this letter continues after the philosophy. - -----BEGIN PHILOSOPHY------ There are tools available to protect privacy, and protect ourselves, that don't require much cooperation of others. People should adopt these tools, and also methods, habits, knowledge and attitudes. One good attitude is a basic awareness and self-responsibility. One is that insults and taunts are only words. Yes, on a personal level, in a group of friends, in a society that is still basically functioning, there are many important issues of how people should treat each other, and how a good environment should be established. But cypherpunks is addressing, and experimenting with, a more basic, raw level of things. The technical and nasty issues are every bit as urgent as the personal and ideal ones, and we constantly need to (and try to) relate them. It's bad to ask social conventions of niceness to take over jobs that people should--have to--take care of consciously for themselves. It distributes responsibilities and burdons unfairly. It is unwise in that it won't work. It seems to give play to a kind of self-delusion. And to recommend it as a course to others is to send the sheep to feed the wolves. It's to hang on to a picture of society with a false happy-face front that's crumpling behind--for all of us. There's a basic level of self-protection that people have to take care of for themselves, or higher-level social goals don't have a chance. People not protecting themselves actually increase harmful activities--besides small criminals there are whole industries of parasitism--*because* people feed them in sheepish trust. We're not talking guns or martial arts here, just purely protective things like crypto and a little dose of reality. A realistic sense of what neighborhood one is walking in, for instance. Like the cypherpunks neighborhood. Here we're trying to experiment, get a sense of the worst of what could happen, imagine ways of dealing with it. And we've been openly like this since we started. Here is how I see the situation with Detweiler: I sympathize with his pain (to the extent I can follow it). I try to be friendly to him. There have been others offering support who he could have talked with instead of the people he picked fights with. Some people shouldn't have been so nasty to him. But he should have gotten a reality check a long time ago about how rough we play here--it's not very rough!! There's no way we could have been expected to know that he wouldn't, and it is not our responsibility to police each other into treating him supportively. That doesn't mean we are building an unsupportive, hostile world. We are playing worst-case-scenario with each other just so that we can have a world that is not like that. You construe the list owners' *allowing* rjc to continue posting to be *condoning* it. That's a bad thought path. To suggest that they step in, in the kind of matter we're talking about, is not a good model for how a world should be run, and it's egregious in terms of the atmosphere we want in our own group.
In an uncontrolled environment, there is little that can be done to further an appropriate attitude. One can reinforce the good and censure the bad. And hope.
(And give people tools, knowledge, and ideas to protect themselves. And develop methods that actively shrink the opportunities for bad behavior.) Cypherpunks is purposely a model of an uncontrolled environment, including its worst aspects.
Privacy is a *social* phenomenon, not a technical one.
The convention of respect for privacy is social. It's based on a more primitive and basic ability of people to *get* privacy if they need it. The latter is breaking down, making the former increasingly a charade behind which things can get worse. But in the process of fixing things, the ground rules--in terms of which new social conventions will have to grow--will change. Things will seem rude to people stuck in old ways of looking at them.
There is no sense in creating tools for privacy unless one also works for a society in which the deployment of these tools makes sense.
Although I can't imagine a situation where deploying privacy tools doesn't make sense, I agree that we should keep our social goals and issues in mind. I'm surprised you imply that we aren't doing that. But society has to be built on good foundations. - -----END PHILOSOPHY------ I think some of the things you suggest we do, amount to hiding from the important problems. I hope (mostly for our sake) that you aren't doing that yourself. I guess this list can seem very rough without a sense that the people are ethical and serious, and that the roughness is there for a purpose. I hope you can come around to believe that of some of us and tolerate the rest. We need people who can help think about what we're aiming for, and what it will be like for humans in the worlds we propose. Once in a while it helps to have someone to protest a thoughtless post. bye, -fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham) quote me ps i restrained myself from all the twelve step phrases i thot -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a aKxB8nktcBAeQHabQP/d7yhWgpGZBIoIqII8cY9nG55HYHgvtoxiQCVAgUBLMs3K ui6XaCZmKH68fOWYYySKAzPkXyfYKnOlzsIjp2toust1Q5A3/n54PBKrUDN9tHVz 3Ch466q9EKUuDulTU6OLsilzmRvQJn0EJhzd4pht6hanC0R3seYNhUYhoJViCcCG sRjLQs4iVVM= =9wqs -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----