Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19

[Tim May]

On Dec 8, 2003, at 11:08 AM, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 12/7/2003 10:58:00 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> timcmay at got.net writes:
>
>> My generation was very active, on all sides. The droids born after
>> about 1980 are mainly followers. Probably what the nose rings are for.
>>
>
> Hey Tim, why don't you continue your activism and make an attempt to 
> get your
> writing into more places where generation X might find it. If they are 
> truly
> droids surely you with your grand intellect could be become their pied 
> piper,
> leading their revolution.
>
> You might feel better venting to the cloistered culture here on CP, 
> but what
> good does that do?


By the way, I spent a lot of time writing and polishing an essay which 
Vernor Vinge and his editor wanted for his collection "True Names--and 
the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier." My article, "True Nyms and 
Crypto Anarchy" was one of the longest in the book (probably the 
longest, though I haven't checked) and was the best distillation of 
things I wanted to say. The book was delayed a couple of times, and 
came out several years after I expected it to, but that's the 
publishing world.

Frankly, this article has wider exposure than nearly anything else I 
could have written. The book is in bookstores everyplace I've checked, 
and it will be available in used copies for many years to come. I 
expect this is wider exposure than had I done a series of articles in 
Gen Y-favored mags.

And other versions of my essays have appeared in books like "Building 
in Big Brother" and that ilk (collections of articles and essays). 
These books have almost certainly reached anyone needing reaching, as 
if the Net and the Web were not enough.

In contrast to the situation in 1992-3, anyone even remotely interested 
in crypto now has ample exposure to the Cypherpunks meme. Any search 
entry in Google on the obvious topics will return numerous hits on 
articles, postings, mentions, etc. (I disagree with the claim made here 
today that the Cypherpunks archives need to be kept better...I find 
articles I want using Google, which has indexed nearly every month of 
every year. If their are gaps, the best approach is for sites to mirror 
their contents, not for any kind of formal upkeep of the archives.)

Finally, neither I nor other Cypherpunks control when some journalist 
will give us publicity. The wave of publicity in 1992-4 came for 
obvious reasons: Kevin Kelly was writing for "Whole Earth Review"on 
crypto and also was helping to start "Wired," so he got Steven Levy to 
do a cover story. A writer at "The Village Voice" saw a posting of mine 
on sci.crypt (saying that Trimble Navigation had just received a patent 
on the Pythagorean Theorem, a spoof on the wave of software and 
algorithm patents) and sent me e-mail. This led to his big piece on 
crypto and Cypherpunks. And so on.

As the Yippies of the 60s knew so well, press coverage covers breaking 
news, either real or by stunts. So the ""RSA in 4 lines of Perl" got a 
brief blurb, as did my "BlackNet" thing. Stego has gotten a couple of 
blurbs. No big cover stories in recent years, save for that other big 
stunt, the offshore gun platform used as "HavenCo.'

(And for an interesting read, see Ryan Lackey's presentation at Defcon 
this year--use Google of course--on how the HavenCo folks used 
deception to convince the reporters that HavenCo was a viable 
operation.)

Fact is, "we" could probably get a squib in "Wired" if we pulled some 
stunt like showing up at the Ninth Circuit for some crypto hearing 
wearing gorilla suits. Newspapers and magazines like media events and 
good photos. It's all bullshit.

Anyone interested in crypto and liberty has a flood of information, 
including numerous ways to find our lists if he wants to. This was not 
the situation in 1992, for various obvious reasons, and at that time 
there was a lot of pent-up demand for the stuff. (When Eric and I 
called the first meeting, we already knew of a bunch of people in the 
Bay Area interested in the general topics...the usual suspects who had 
read Heinlein, Ted Nelson, Hakim Bey, who were readers of "Reality 
Hackers/Mondo 2000," who went to the Hackers Conference most years, who 
were on the Extropians list, and who knew about PGP. It was no accident 
that we hit the ground running.)

Me, I spend most of my technical time lately with Haskell. Not writing 
encryption programs--which are plentiful already in Haskell, as in many 
languages--but thinking about the issues I've talked about here before. 
In particular, using monads to implement stateful entities, the 
connection between continuation-passing style (CPS), capabilities (as 
in E), and monads. I especially admire the work of, believe it or not, 
a Goth follower living in the Netherlands: Frank Atanassow. And the 
work of John Baez, a mathematical physicist, Jeremy Butterfield, a 
philosopher/programmer doing an implementation of quantum logic in 
Clean (a close relative of Haskell), and a bunch of others.

(By the way, a company in the Beaverton, OR area called "Galois 
Connection" (a pun, for those who know the math) is doing a crypto 
library under contract to the NSA, perhaps others. Their library is 
written in Haskell, interestingly enough. I don't know how it compares 
or overlaps with Wei Dai's crypto library. But I found it interesting 
that that some of my own thoughts on this were already being developed 
by a company.)

This is a lot more interesting to me that struggling to get the current 
editors of "Wired" to stop thinking of crypto as "tired" and write 
another story about us.

Whether my current stuff "reaches" the 20-year-old dropout skatepunk 
and convinces him to Fight for Liberty! is not of interest to me. Nor 
is it my task to write the Next Great PGP Version.

Life is too short to sacrifice it for the Good of the Herd. Saying I 
should find ways to spread memes to the Gen Y nosering crowd is no 
different than the tired old idea that I should be funding worthy 
Cypherpunks. (Luckily, I don't hear this as much as I did around 
1997-99, during the Bubble.)

--Tim May

Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; 
perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." 
--Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.