On Dec 8, 2003, at 11:08 AM, Freematt357@aol.com wrote:

In a message dated 12/7/2003 10:58:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, timcmay@got.net writes:

...

My generation was very active, on all sides. The droids born after about 1980 are mainly followers. Probably what the nose rings are for.

Hey Tim, why don't you continue your activism and make an attempt to get your writing into more places where generation X might find it. If they are truly droids surely you with your grand intellect could be become their pied piper, leading their revolution.

You might feel better venting to the cloistered culture here on CP, but what good does that do?

By the way, I spent a lot of time writing and polishing an essay which Vernor Vinge and his editor wanted for his collection "True Names--and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier." My article, "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy" was one of the longest in the book (probably the longest, though I haven't checked) and was the best distillation of things I wanted to say. The book was delayed a couple of times, and came out several years after I expected it to, but that's the publishing world. Frankly, this article has wider exposure than nearly anything else I could have written. The book is in bookstores everyplace I've checked, and it will be available in used copies for many years to come. I expect this is wider exposure than had I done a series of articles in Gen Y-favored mags. And other versions of my essays have appeared in books like "Building in Big Brother" and that ilk (collections of articles and essays). These books have almost certainly reached anyone needing reaching, as if the Net and the Web were not enough. In contrast to the situation in 1992-3, anyone even remotely interested in crypto now has ample exposure to the Cypherpunks meme. Any search entry in Google on the obvious topics will return numerous hits on articles, postings, mentions, etc. (I disagree with the claim made here today that the Cypherpunks archives need to be kept better...I find articles I want using Google, which has indexed nearly every month of every year. If their are gaps, the best approach is for sites to mirror their contents, not for any kind of formal upkeep of the archives.) Finally, neither I nor other Cypherpunks control when some journalist will give us publicity. The wave of publicity in 1992-4 came for obvious reasons: Kevin Kelly was writing for "Whole Earth Review"on crypto and also was helping to start "Wired," so he got Steven Levy to do a cover story. A writer at "The Village Voice" saw a posting of mine on sci.crypt (saying that Trimble Navigation had just received a patent on the Pythagorean Theorem, a spoof on the wave of software and algorithm patents) and sent me e-mail. This led to his big piece on crypto and Cypherpunks. And so on. As the Yippies of the 60s knew so well, press coverage covers breaking news, either real or by stunts. So the ""RSA in 4 lines of Perl" got a brief blurb, as did my "BlackNet" thing. Stego has gotten a couple of blurbs. No big cover stories in recent years, save for that other big stunt, the offshore gun platform used as "HavenCo.' (And for an interesting read, see Ryan Lackey's presentation at Defcon this year--use Google of course--on how the HavenCo folks used deception to convince the reporters that HavenCo was a viable operation.) Fact is, "we" could probably get a squib in "Wired" if we pulled some stunt like showing up at the Ninth Circuit for some crypto hearing wearing gorilla suits. Newspapers and magazines like media events and good photos. It's all bullshit. Anyone interested in crypto and liberty has a flood of information, including numerous ways to find our lists if he wants to. This was not the situation in 1992, for various obvious reasons, and at that time there was a lot of pent-up demand for the stuff. (When Eric and I called the first meeting, we already knew of a bunch of people in the Bay Area interested in the general topics...the usual suspects who had read Heinlein, Ted Nelson, Hakim Bey, who were readers of "Reality Hackers/Mondo 2000," who went to the Hackers Conference most years, who were on the Extropians list, and who knew about PGP. It was no accident that we hit the ground running.) Me, I spend most of my technical time lately with Haskell. Not writing encryption programs--which are plentiful already in Haskell, as in many languages--but thinking about the issues I've talked about here before. In particular, using monads to implement stateful entities, the connection between continuation-passing style (CPS), capabilities (as in E), and monads. I especially admire the work of, believe it or not, a Goth follower living in the Netherlands: Frank Atanassow. And the work of John Baez, a mathematical physicist, Jeremy Butterfield, a philosopher/programmer doing an implementation of quantum logic in Clean (a close relative of Haskell), and a bunch of others. (By the way, a company in the Beaverton, OR area called "Galois Connection" (a pun, for those who know the math) is doing a crypto library under contract to the NSA, perhaps others. Their library is written in Haskell, interestingly enough. I don't know how it compares or overlaps with Wei Dai's crypto library. But I found it interesting that that some of my own thoughts on this were already being developed by a company.) This is a lot more interesting to me that struggling to get the current editors of "Wired" to stop thinking of crypto as "tired" and write another story about us. Whether my current stuff "reaches" the 20-year-old dropout skatepunk and convinces him to Fight for Liberty! is not of interest to me. Nor is it my task to write the Next Great PGP Version. Life is too short to sacrifice it for the Good of the Herd. Saying I should find ways to spread memes to the Gen Y nosering crowd is no different than the tired old idea that I should be funding worthy Cypherpunks. (Luckily, I don't hear this as much as I did around 1997-99, during the Bubble.) --Tim May Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." --Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.