-- On 2 Jul 2003 at 9:45, Tim May wrote:

But things have been quiet for months now, except for occasional bursts of Unix-related security cruft.

The technology is known, it has become depressingly apparent that imminent world change by means of this technology is not in the cards right now, what is left to say? The cypherpunk agenda is in fact making progress in boring routine ways -- increasing real world use of encryption, various complicated boring routine measures to improve security. Digital currencies have plateaued by some measures, but I think uptake will continue. At present, digital currencies do not give you any privacy from the currency issuer, but in practice monitoring is expensive, and low monitoring issuers tend to out compete high monitoring issuers. No issues of Chaumian cash have succeeded, but Chaumian cash is the ultimate in low monitored, irreversible transactions, so as Hettinga is fond of arguing, the trend is in its favor, but immediate change is not in sight. With americans, and the english speaking west in general under attack, the tendency is to rally around the state. Anarchism is not as popular as it was, not as cools as it was, when enemies are trying to kill us, and the state is trying to kill our enemies.

Every day brings new reports of surveillance plans, suspensions of the Constitution, more statism.

It is war.

Side note, worthy of a longer article: It may be literally a generational thing, as libertarianism tended to be. The anti-state "activists" of the 70s and 80s were influenced by the antiwar movement of the 60s, but were still somewhat libertarian. Many had read Heinlein, Rand, Rothbard, Hayek. The early Cypherpunks folks were generally conversant with the ideas, and receptive. I conjecture that the "new crop" is more into body piercings, skin art, and anti-globalism (when it comes to corporations and trade, but not when it comes to world government). In other words, Cypherpunks is like several other Baby Boom "degenerating research program.")

You are suffering from old fogyism. "Ah, teenagers today are so rotten and selfish, not like we were." This reminds me of the indignant complaints about the fact that at the recent woodstock, so many young women were naked and semi conscious on GHB. Do you remember the original woodstock? If you do remember, you were not there. You think the "reefer madness" hysteria was laughable? They recently gave some poor sucker a sentence of several hundred years for "raping" girls by giving GHB, although his home movies seem to show the alleged rape victims enthusiastically jumping him. The fact is that our generation turned into the generation we were revolting against, only ten times worse. That is what went wrong. Four times the hypocrisy, ten times the jail sentences. It started when those boring puritan Leninists took over SDS (Students for a democratic society) in 1963, 1964. All that terribly solemn do gooding in the 1962 Port Huron statement, and the next thing you know instead of "Sex drugs and rock and roll", we hear that heterosexuality constitutes sexism and Andrew Luster is being abducted from a foreign country as if he was general Noriega. If he had jumped out of the bushes, sawed a nine year old's arms and legs off, and then raped her, the government would not have had him kidnapped in order to get him. Teenagers have not changed, instead we have become those old fogies we revolted against. We did not realize that the port Huron statement turned us into young fogies, the doddering senile washed up old bolsheviks. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG zM6pUlk6ZJ3PNi5XRMFqgmuU2xj28x3t55x+IgFu 46aIWX5lC5VdjpVgTOT5JiMBx1VdJYnsZT/eVKQ2t