Dude! It's wired!

[Tim May]

At 11:23 PM +0000 12/24/00, Steve Thompson wrote:
>Just recently, I bought the current issue of Wired.  I've not looked at the
>magazine much since some time in it's second or third year of publication, and
>of course now I remember why.
>
>Anyhow, as I was chuckling at the endless stream of articles and 
>advertisements
>telling us how wonderful it will be when we can finally enjoy ballroom
>dancing as we fly about between cities and countries in great big dirigibles,
>I noticed a single paragraph in one article which brings to mind a question.
>On Page 181, Bruce Sterling wrote,
>
>	"I think the intermediating people running the means of
>	production need to be exterminated -- a lot of them are
>	basically war criminals.  I want to empower designers.
>	I want them walking across the landscape like a colossus."
>
>I'd like to know if Mr. Sterling has eaten Mr. May's brain.  I note 
>that I haven't
>seen him posting here of late.

I haven't been posting here a lot for various reasons.

First, the quality of the responses has not been good. It seems 
repartee and tired Nazi vs. Stalinist debate is the norm, with 
Choatian physics and Choatian history filling in the gaps.

Second, and perhaps related to the first point, a lot of folks have 
retreated to the safety of filtered lists, where Lewis and Perry can 
screen messages for them. (Though I have noticed that a lot of 
_political_ messages get cross-posted from Perrypunks, where they are 
not supposed to exist, over to Cypherpunks. So much for the safe 
haven of having list.monitors limiting "off-topic" discussion.)

Third, "been there, done that." Most of the topics surfacing now have 
not new topics. Most topics were beaten to death by 1993. In fact, 
most of the tangentially-crypto stuff is actually _less_ interesting 
than the stuff in 1993 was. See the topics in 1992-1994 and compare 
them to the topics in 1998-2000.

Fourth, as with my new .sig, the election has caused me to "move on," 
at least until the direction of things is determined.

As for what Bruce says in the above quote, nothing different from 
what he's been saying for decades.

He speaks of liquidating middlemen, I speak of liquidating tens of 
millions of welfare varmints, useless eaters, and politicians.

And for this they call him a visionary and me a Nazi. Go figure.

--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns