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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