Cypherpunks are...
mattd
mattd at useoz.com
Mon Dec 31 05:59:33 PST 2001
"... probably not the well-armed, high-tech, drug-taking, survivalist,
martial-arts, black-marketeering, tax-dodging, life-extensionist,
freethinking, paper-tripping Discordian master criminals that a composite
of archive cullings would suggest. I think they are mostly spiritually
restless materialists: macho contemplatives locked into day jobs. They
dream of escape -- of "vonu" (invulnerability to coercion by withdrawal
from society); of the High Frontier (space colonization); of life extension
to tide them over till a better day. They long for the big score. They take
hope from the cyphernomicon that parade's their contempt for normal life as
they portray fantastic possibilities always presented according to a
patented formula of tough-minded realism. The typical C/punks reader is, I
conjecture, a surrealist trapped in the body of an engineer."
Still...probably most crypto-anarchists would offer a similar reply to the
charge that they are utopians. Namely: what is truly utopian is to imagine
that somehow the government can hold massive power without turning it to
monstrous ends. As Rothbard succinctly puts it: "the man who puts all the
guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central
government and then says, 'Limit yourself'; it is he who is truly the
impractical utopian." Is not the whole hirstory of the 20th century an
endless list of examples of governments easily breaking the weak bonds
placed upon their ability to oppress and even murder as they see fit?
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