As Dot-Coms Go Bust in the U.S., Bermuda Hosts a Little Boomlet

[Tim May]

At 3:46 PM -0500 1/10/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 12:22:52PM -0500, John Young wrote:
>>  The full story of crypto is yet to be written, in particular its
>>  deceptions, perhaps a piece by Vin McLelland, one by
>>  Declan, one by Tim May, if not by distributed cyperhpunks
>>  not quite so malleable as solo individuals given privileged
>>  access on the condition that . . .
>
>True. As a journalist, I do my best to avoid those conditions. I think
>of them (probably not an original thought) as entangling alliances.
>
>I could easily cobble together a book proposal that would include
>chapters by cypherpunk types; I'd edit. I've been thinking of writing
>a book for a while -- even had meetings with publishers in '96 -- but
>it would take too much time. Editing would be far easier.

I hope you don't do this. There have been several of these kinds of 
collections--a guy at MIT has done at least a couple of them (I 
forget his name, though three of my short pieces are in one of his 
books: the books cost $40-60 or so, for a damned paperback, which is 
why I don't have my own copy. Even at this high price, they don't pay 
for submissions and they don't even give out copies to contributors!).

What you'd end up with is a printed collection of a bunch of 
mini-rants or survey articles, whose total verbiage is just a tiny 
snapshot of the field.

There's probably a role for a good book on, say, "digital money," 
with a mix of overview articles and detailed articles. This would be 
a _lot_ of work, and the editor would need to be well-versed in the 
field.

But not a book on "Cypherpunk" themes. Too many seemingly-unrelated 
areas, too much background to cover (ironically, compared to digital 
money, but I think this is so).

And Yog help you if you end up just putting together whatever junky 
stuff people are willing to submit.
>
>>  What about that timing of CRYPTO release and the NSA
>  > show?
>
>Ah, it was a lackluster show and not that important.
>

I didn't see it, but I assume it was like most of the past t.v. shows 
on the NSA and codes and such: Discovery Channel, History Channel, 
BBC "Horizon," CNN, etc. These shows are easy for producers to put 
together: lots of shots of radomes and antennas and NSA buildings, a 
tour of the Cryptologic Museum, some obligatory juicy stuff about 
Enigma and Turing, interviews with talking heads about the need for 
blah blah, and so on.

Feh.


--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