CDR: Re: Reading list

[Tim May]

To expand on this point:

At 10:58 AM -0700 10/19/00, Tim May wrote:
>
>Indeed. We used to have the reasonable expectation that nearly 
>everyone on the list had some familiarity with the "classics." For 
>example, Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom," Hazlitt's "Economics in 
>One Lesson," Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," Vinge's "True Names," 
>Card's "Ender's Game," Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," Brunner's "Shockwave 
>Rider," and maybe even some of the writings of Spooner, Benson, Von 
>Mises, Tannehill, Hospers, and Rothbard. These works helped to 
>establish a common vocabulary, a common set of core concepts.
>
>Not that everyone was a libertarian, let alone a Libertarian. But 
>the core concepts were known, and those who didn't know about them 
>were motivated to go off and look them up. We had fewer folks 
>arguing for socialism in those days.


The point is not that people must be indoctrinated into the correct 
ideology, but that these and similar books captured the Zeitgeist of 
our times vis-a-vis cyberspace, the collapse of borders, the 
internationalization of commerce, etc. Throw in "Moore's law and the 
geodesic network" if your initials are the same as Heinlein's.

It's not important that everyone read _every_ one of these books. But 
it _is_ important that they read and internalize at least _some_ of 
them.

One of the advantages we had in the early days of the list, circa 
1992-4, was that people were already fairly Net-savvy, else they 
wouldn't have started coming to meetings in the Bay Area, wouldn't 
have subscribed, wouldn't have been reading the early issues of 
"Wired," and so on. And many of the early list activists were from 
the Extropians list, where issues of anarcho-capitalism, Friedman, 
technology, etc. had been discussed many, many times. Those arriving 
on the Cypherpunks list tended to be those who felt the palpable 
sense that Things Are About to Change.

As time went on, we started getting more and more clueless kids and 
people who wandered in because they'd heard that Cypherpunks was 
cool. Predictably, many of these were script kiddies and hackerd00dz 
who had inculcated views from their socialist schools that capitalism 
was doomed. Some of them made the transition to absorbing the message 
of "uncoerced transactions," many left.

That so many of the books cited above are libertarian is not too 
surprising. It's really hard to imagine a world where strong crypto 
is ubiquitous where state power is increased, where transactions are 
coerced, and where taxes are high. I know of no serious books, for 
example, which argue this point.

Of course, as regards the implications of crypto, they could try to 
find treatments of a more leftist point of view, and then argue those 
points here on the list. Some vaguely left-leaning anarchist material 
on "temporary autonomous zones," TAZs, is available. And some of the 
usual lit-crit stuff on postmodernism, Neil Postman, Hakim Bey, etc.

Some of the early Cypherpunks were quite knowledgeable about these 
viewpoints. They were, however, views which were much more finely 
nuanced than the claptrap about how corporations need to be forced to 
help the little guy, blah blah.

By the way, I could add several more books to the list above:

Stephenson's "Snow Crash," Bey's "TAZ," Benson's "The Enterprise of 
Law," and Kelly's "Out of Control." There are more, obviously.

And the past discussions on the list. And even my own Cyphernomicon 
FAQ. And the essays of Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, Dean Tribble, Mark 
Miller, Nick Szabo, Robin Hanson, and many others.

But I recommend folks at least start with the "classics."

--Tim May
-- 
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon"             | black markets, collapse of governments.