My first reaction to the "Death of Cypherpunks" (Declan McCullagh's article in http://netlynews.com Feb 12, 1997) is that it is another example of "The Tragedy of the Commons." -- the (unsolvable) problem of unlimited access to a limited resource. Cypherpunks was also susceptable to the strange Internet phenomenon where people could be proud of their anti-social, bad behavior (flame wars, "grafitti" in the form of spam). For this reason, I suspect that the future of the Internet in general, and Cyphperpunks in particular, will require serious editorial control (as is done by the Risks and Privacy digests). The only other alternative I can see would be to limit membership -- but not limit what members might write. In the long term, I suppose we'll have sufficiently intelligent software agents that can recognize spam and flaming and invisibly delete them from our e-mail in-boxes. What bothers me more than anything else about the "solutions" I've seen proposed to the death of Cypherpunks is that they rely on technology -- and reject human judgement -- to solve what is, in reality, a social problem. (One can certainly make the same argument about the V-chip, browser porn filters, and similar hacks.) Having been "on" the net for over 15 years -- and with experience in both ends of the censorship/moderation problem (I'm probably the only Cypherpunks member to have had a book "banned in Boston"), I'm sorry that a handful of sociopaths managed to destroy this experiment in anarchy, but I suspect that this was inevitable. Martin Minow minow@apple.com ps: (From McCullagh):
But for the true believers in crypto-anarchy, only one solution is adequate: Usenet. "There is no 'nexus' of control, no chokepoint, no precedent... for halting distribution of Usenet newsgroups," Tim May wrote. That, in the end, is what defines a cypherpunk.
Nope: alt.cypherpunks will not be distributed to many sites that would accept an e-mail list. Also, it's too easy for the disgruntled to forge cancel group messages. I'm afraid that human judgement is still required.