Kent Crispin wrote:
Toto, thanks for your thoughtful comments. Your touching defense of Tim is interesting.
I don't think it's so much a case of defending Tim as it is that Toto is an old mangy dog who is losing his eyesight and biting at everything that comes into his limited range of vision.
Contrary to what you might think,
Assuming what others are assuming gets to be a nasty little cyle that leads you to sitting alone with two beers in front of you, arguing with yourself and finally getting mad enough at the *other* guy to drink *his* beer, too.
I really don't have anything against Tim May, and I do go read things he (or others) have written in the past.
Apology accepted.
As to his legacy, and the legacy of cypherpunks in general, that remains to be seen.
The "legacy" already exists, whether it is recognized in the future, or not. Even a fruit fly has a legacy which is important to certain scientists.
None of the cypherpunks are in a position to be able to judge very well, because they are so close to their favorite issues that of course they look very large.
Group discounts should be used for saving airfare, and not for lumping people (especially anarchists) into one mass and discounting their thoughts and opinions. I get tired of hearing how an individual's ability to 'judge' an issue increases with his lessening knowledge of it, or interest in it. Perhaps we need more retarded legislators and world-rulers in order to properly test this theory.
But it isn't a certainty that any of the predictions of crypto-anarchy, for example, will come to pass. It is possible that the surveillance state will win.
Spank yourself, throw some cold water on your face, and take a look around you. The average person is not allowed to move an inch without taking a number and/or waiting for it to be called. "What were once vices, are now habits." The medium *is* the message, and today's mental medium is DoubleSpeak. The age-old "number's racket" is no longer a "criminal enterprise," but is, rather, a "government sponsered charitable institution" (or was; I have no idea what the current DoubleSpeak for it is). My personal view is that the war on DoubleSpeak was lost when we allowed Ronnie Rayguns & Co. to name a weapon of mass destruction "The Peacekeeper." If we had risen up and slaughtered a few hundred politicians at that time, then mental freedom would have had a slim chance of survival. Anyone who claims that 1984 hasn't arrived and thrived because we do not yet have loudspeakers on the streetcorners blaring, "You are not getting fucked by the government...You are not getting fucked by the government..." The surveillance state has already won, the only question is whether or not there will be a revolution. For God's sake, man, take a look around you. The surveillance state has ruled for years in the places it counts most--in the medium and in the message. The government is only solidifying ground already held with their further intrusions into areas of freedom and privacy, as well as extending their reach into the latest medium, the Net/WWW. Media content is ruled by the few and the powerful, and the masses are ruled by the media. You are permitted to speak out against government policy only if you have Freedom of Speech Permit #900873.7b and post a $50,000 Non-Incitement to Terrorism bond. The battle for freedom and privacy is mostly about governments and corporations fighting over each other having access to *their* secrets, not the common man and woman's secrets. Their fight over the common people is only whether they will be controlled via key escrow or cookies. Name any issue and you will find it surrounded by a plethora of laws regulating when, where, and how it can be spoken about. The only thing that makes Jim Bell (the lunatic, speed-freak, drug addicted tax-dodger whose convictions seem to have mostly only taken place within the confines of media-reality) special is that he spoke loud enough to get some government and media attention. Most people are like dogs with their tails between their legs, who take vain pride in the decent, law-abiding "character" they display in whimpering, somehow managing to forget that the reason they no longer bark is because they were beaten every time they did so.
More likely, of course, the world will go in a direction that will surprise all of us (except that Tim will tell us he considered the possibility in a paper he wrote back in the 1970s). What will look portentious and what will look pretentious 10 years from now is hard to judge...
Personally, I am in favor of absolute personal privacy, but I don't define that to include economic dealings -- as far as I am concerned, business or economic privacy is at a lower level of concern than personal privacy.
And having a small burning rod shoved up your ass is "at a lower level of concern" than having a large one shoved up there? Are you being held hostage in a tower of intellect?
This puts me at odds with the prevailing libertarian bent of cypherpunks, of course. However, I was thrown off my stride by the high level of downright hostility so common on this list. Like most people, I tend to respond in kind.
This list is one of the few places where the dogs still bark (and bite, as well). Smarmy "gumming" of the logic and opinions of others on this list will not get you many doggie bones. My personal pet peeve is the fucking happy faces that abound in posts everywhere. If you can't figure out whether a comment is an insult or humor, then take it as an insult, because any professed difference between the two is only an illusion. I suppose that it is only a matter of time before I walk into a happy-face factory and start blowing people away at random. A barking gun is only the final result of years of govement and societal suppression of our natural instinct to bark loud and long when intruders invade our personal space. Or perhaps I will walk into a happy-face factory and just bark at them. If they fail to recognize the humor in my actions, then I suppose that I will have to grab a mask and "put on a happy face." After all, the medium is the message. TruthMangler