All quiet on the western front

[James A. Donald]

    --
On 2 Jul 2003 at 9:45, Tim May wrote:
> But things have been quiet for months now, except for 
> occasional bursts  of Unix-related security cruft.

The technology is known, it has become depressingly apparent 
that imminent world change by means of this technology is not 
in the cards right now, what is left to say?

The cypherpunk agenda is in fact making progress in boring 
routine ways -- increasing real world use of encryption, 
various complicated boring routine measures to improve 
security.  Digital currencies have plateaued by some measures, 
but I think uptake will continue.   At present, digital 
currencies do not give you any privacy from the currency 
issuer, but in practice monitoring is expensive, and low 
monitoring issuers tend to out compete high monitoring issuers. 
No issues of Chaumian cash have succeeded, but Chaumian cash is 
the ultimate in low monitored, irreversible transactions, so as 
Hettinga is fond of arguing, the trend is in its favor, but 
immediate change is not in sight.

With americans, and the english speaking west in general under 
attack, the tendency is to rally around the state.    Anarchism 
is not as popular as it was, not as cools as it was, when 
enemies are trying to kill us, and the state is trying to kill 
our enemies.

> Every day brings new reports of surveillance plans, 
> suspensions of the Constitution, more statism.

It is war.

> Side note, worthy of a longer article: It may be literally a 
> generational thing, as libertarianism tended to be. The 
> anti-state "activists" of the 70s and 80s were influenced by 
> the antiwar movement
>  of the 60s, but were still somewhat libertarian. Many had 
>  read
> Heinlein, Rand, Rothbard, Hayek. The early Cypherpunks folks 
> were generally conversant with the ideas, and receptive. I 
> conjecture that the "new crop" is more into body piercings, 
> skin art, and anti-globalism (when it comes to corporations 
> and trade, but not when it comes to world government). In 
> other words, Cypherpunks is like several other Baby Boom 
> "degenerating research program.")

You are suffering from old fogyism.  "Ah, teenagers today are 
so rotten and selfish, not like we were."  This reminds me of 
the indignant complaints about the fact that at the recent 
woodstock, so many young women were naked and semi conscious on 
GHB.

Do you remember the original woodstock?

If you do remember, you were not there.

You think the "reefer madness" hysteria was laughable?  They 
recently gave some poor sucker a sentence of several hundred 
years for "raping" girls by giving GHB, although his home 
movies seem to show the alleged rape victims enthusiastically 
jumping him.

The fact is that our generation turned into the generation we 
were revolting against, only ten times worse.   That is what 
went wrong.  Four times the hypocrisy, ten times the jail 
sentences.  It started when those boring puritan Leninists took 
over SDS (Students for a democratic society) in 1963, 1964. All
that terribly solemn do gooding in the 1962 Port Huron 
statement, and the next thing you know instead of "Sex drugs 
and rock and roll", we hear that heterosexuality constitutes 
sexism and Andrew Luster is being abducted from a foreign 
country as if he was general Noriega.   If he had jumped out of 
the bushes, sawed a nine year old's arms and legs off, and then 
raped her, the government would not have had him kidnapped in 
order to get him.

Teenagers have not changed, instead we have become those old 
fogies we revolted against.  We did not realize that the port
Huron statement turned us into young fogies, the doddering
senile washed up old bolsheviks. 

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         James A. Donald
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