Strong Crypto is about the Burnoff of Useless Eaters

Tim May timcmay at got.net
Tue Dec 9 10:48:34 PST 2003


On Dec 9, 2003, at 7:45 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 04:27:38PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>> Everyone agrees that big corporations are oppressive,
>> bureaucratic, inefficient, etc.   No one more so than the
>> management advisers to big corporations.
>
> I'm not sure I'd agree that big corporations are oppressive. How?
> I once worked at Xerox and had a splendid time. Didn't feel "oppressed"
> at all.
>
> As for bureaucratic and inefficient, perhaps, but I've seen 50-people
> organizations devolve quite well. I suppose it all depends on your
> frame of reference. If you mean, "I can find perceived
> inefficiencies," I'm sure you can. But if they become too inefficient,
> well, over time competitors will rise to take advantage of those
> inefficiencies. Xerox can be an example here as well. This is just
> common sense.
>

Indeed, the fact that James Donald starts off with the chestnut that 
"everyone agrees that big corporations are oppressive, blah blah" fits 
with his earlier comment that everyone in the 60s supported Ho Chi Minh 
and had posters of Che Guevarra on their walls.

Maybe in _his_ world, this was so. Many of the former leftists now on 
the list have claimed that they have left their leftie baggage 
behind...others have not even made this claim, saying they remain 
committed to "social justice" (a code phrase for using force to take 
the property of some to redistribute it to others).

I say that in most cases, "once a leftist, always a leftist." The taint 
of thinking in terms of "social justice" never fully leaves them, hence 
the nattering about "big corporations as oppressors" and "monopolies" 
and "fair trade, not free trade." It's just socialism in another guise.


More to the point, this shows why the libertarians and futurists who 
started having meetings and a mailing list as the "Cypherpunks" really 
do have nothing to do with the "anti-globalists" and "big corporations 
are oppressive" people of today. I don't recall any of the attendees in 
1992 claiming they were "forced" to use Sun computers (which many of 
them were doing), or Unix (ditto), or Intel (some of them), or Apple (a 
few of us). True, we hated the software patent which had been granted 
to RSA, but this is an issue of patent and intellectual property issues 
(and software patents had just started to be granted only a few years 
earlier, marking a change in how things had been done for centuries in 
America and most of the developed world). Arguing that the RSA 
algorithm should not have been patentable is not the same as lefties 
arguing for social justice and restrictions on who one can buy or sell 
from!

Intel is a very big corporation. If people don't want to buy their 
flash memories and support chips and microprocessors, they are not 
forced to. Apple is a big corporation...ditto. Microsoft is a big 
corporation...ditto (and yes, it is easily done...I do it). (I don't 
any of my work on either Intel processors or Microsoft products...I do 
own a copy of Microsoft Office, but I rarely use it, and could quite 
easily _never_ use it.)

Coca-Cola is a big, global corporation. Don't like Coke? Don't drink 
it. Don't like sugar being fed to kids via Coke? Mount an advertising 
campaign about the dangers of sugar water. Don't like the idea of Coke 
being introduced into China and thus corrupting a billion Chinese? The 
anti-globalists want governments to step in and interfere with choices. 
They are social planners.

And so on, with Ford, Siemens, Toyota, Daimler-Benz, Olivetti, Great 
Wall Computer Company, Red Hat, Costco, AMD, Aerosptatiale, Procter and 
Gamble, Boeing, etc.

Nattering about patents and copyright is a secondary issue. Nothing 
Microsoft currently "owns" as intellectual property (and I am putting 
"owns" in quotes because I'm not claiming that their ownership claim is 
either valid, is supported by anarcho-capitalists, or would survive in 
a strong crypto world) stops _me_ in any way from doing what I am 
doing. As I said, I don't use either Intel or Microsoft products. 
(Ironically, some government agencies now _require_ that submissions 
and contractees use Microsoft products! The same too-powerful 
government which tried to use the legal system to break up 
Microsoft--and only succeeded in collecting a shakedown tax of billions 
of dollars to be spent by the burrowcrats!--is requiring the use of MS 
Office. The City of Sunnyvale, to name one example, requires that all 
members of the public, and corporations, submitting items to City 
Council meetings must present them as PowerPoint files.)

Nor does Intel's 83% market share of the desktop/laptop microprocessor 
market stop alternatives. Intel has an 83% market share because people 
buy that many desktop and mobile systems. Duh. No one is holding a gun 
to their heads (the anti-globalist lefties, including many here on this 
list, argue otherwise...they are wrong). People are free to buy 
processors from Motorola, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, AMD, Thompson, TI, etc. I 
watched Intel's competitors try to wrest control of Intel's dominance 
in several ways:

-- there was the Japanese TRON project, massively-funded by the 
Japanese government and supported by NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Toshiba, 
and all of the other giants of the Japanese chip industry (remember 
when the Japanese were seen as 1- feet tall and invincible and how they 
would swallow up Intel as well as Pebble Beach?)

-- there was the consortium of DEC, MIPS, Compaq, and a bunch of other 
companies to come up with the "industry-standard alternative" to Intel, 
AMD, Harris, and others in the x86 camp. (BTW, where were the antitrust 
regulators when this collusive attempt to drive a wedge into Intel's 
dominance was being hatched? Answer: government ignores what it chooses 
to ignore and persecutes what it chooses to persecute.)

-- and each of Intel's direct competitors were, without the collusions 
above, fighting intensely to displace Intel. Had one of them succeeded, 
as easily might have been case in some alternate history, the 
anti-globalist lefties would now be arguing for the break-ups of 
Motorola and Sun so that poor little Intel and Microsoft could be given 
a fighting chance.


And so on, for all of the examples. Don't like Ford? Don't buy from 
Ford. Think McDonald's is "too global"? Don't eat at McDonald's.

Companies are not permanent. They rise and fall, they come and go. In 
fact, of the Dow 30 Industrials, the very measure of Giant Corporation 
capitalism, take a look at how many of those on the list several 
decades ago are still on the list.

Twenty years ago the anti-globalists (such as they were back then, 
before lefties discovered this as their new raison d'etre) would have 
been nattering about the need to break up Digital Equipment 
Corporation, which utterly dominated the corporate minicomputer market 
(crushing the likes of Data General and even IBM, which was seen as a 
dinosaur). But DEC got absorbed in Compaq, a company which barely 
existed back then, and then Compaq got absorbed into H-P, which is 
struggling.

Joseph Schumpeter called this the process of "creative destructionism," 
the process of companies forming, evolving, dissipating, dissolving, 
the surviving staff and ideas (memes) forming new companies, new 
ensembles. Long after Boeing and Airbus are gone, new aircraft and 
spacecraft companies will form. Long after Intel and IBM are gone, new 
electronics and nanotech companies will form.

The difference between corporations and governments is vast. 
Governments don't give choices. Governments don't allow competition. 
Governments enslave people and send them to fight wars with other 
governments.

That the "anti-globalists" have lost sight of this and are instead 
holding their silly rallies and marches to "stop job export to China" 
and "force a living wage" and "break up Microsoft" shows they have 
nothing whatsoever in common with what strong crypto and untraceable 
communication and digital money will do. The official protests against 
the WTO natter about unfair wage practices in the so-called developing 
world, but the real issue is just what it has always been with 
protectionism.



News flash to all the lefties on this list who think these technologies 
will somehow bring about the socialist paradise they want to see: 
strong crypto means no government goon can take money from those who 
work and save and give it to others who failed to study, work, and 
save. Programs like "welfare/AFDC/WICC/social programs" boondoggles. It 
may mean, if we are lucky, the death and burn-off of tens of millions 
of useless eaters.

This will be a GOOD THING.

Of course, those who choose to participate in the new digital economy 
will do well. To paraphrase the saying, "On the Net, no one knows 
you're colored."

This is what strong crypto and a "True Names" world means. Do the math.

For all the lefties here, you should've known this for years and years. 
Enough of us have talked about it. And it was obvious to me in the 
early days (which predate CP by several years, of course (cf. the 
"Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988) that strong crypto would usher in a 
world where no liberal traitor like John Kennedy could steal my money 
to send to some negroes in Washington so they could buy more malt 
liquor and breed more "chilluns."

Good riddance to bad rubbish. The Crypto Revolution will burn off tens 
of millions of useless eaters.


--Tim May





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