On Friday, March 22, 2002, at 10:37 PM, dmolnar wrote: > Digression aside, Hakim Bey asks in _TAZ_ the question "where are my > turnips?" By this he means "when are computers going to deliver on the > revolutionary promise?" When will we be able to use computer networks to > exchange goods that people *actually care about* ? When will I be able > to > trade something I have (knowledge about esoteric aspects of relativised > cryptography, say) for some concrete strange *physical* goods I want > (Cuban hallucenogenic fruits, controlled substances, organic turnips)? > (See, the information-only goods don't count. they're not REAL ENOUGH. > Besides, what kind of revolution is it when the only benefit is free > Britney Spears songs?)
Hakim (whom I've never met, but, IIRC, Eric H. met him at some "Reality Hackers"/"Mondo 2000" party...Hakim is not his real name, IIRC) is too short-sighted. First, as you allude to, information-theoretic goods are in fact _very_ real. Some examples: -- the $400 I just paid this morning for a Mathematica license upgrade (so they say warez versions are floating around...I have neither the time nor the knowledge to search) -- the incredibly expensive math books out there ($160 for just one slim volume!)...can't wait to find them in downloadable form...until then, I surf the free sites, the pages (The topics I've been surfing the Net for the past few days are connected with category and topos theory...plenty of free sites...John Baez (yes, related) has great resources. The Web is not the garbage heap it's sometimes portrayed as. -- speaking of downloadable books, check out the e-books newsgroup, including the "flood" one (not near my newsreader right now, so don't have exact name). Not too long ago someone posted every novel by Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, King, Clarke, etc. in .txt form. Someone else posted them in .pdf form and/or the .lit form MS favors. NOTE that every one of these books is still under copyright...and these books sell for $5-20 each in official e-book form (supposedly meant to be read on Palm-type devices, etc). A great way to get a very complete science fiction library for free. Oh, and these floods include vast numbers of other authors....I've seen a few thousand full, modern novels posted in the past couple of months. (Now tell me these are not "turnips.") Continuing on with examples: -- all the usual credit rating info, background info, etc. These are being mined, exchanged, traded on the Net (by professionals, companies, others.) These are very valuable turnips. -- information useful in making money, real money...the bubbles and busts of the past several years have been fun times to be on the Net most of the day, reading and watching and then buying and selling. -- and tell me that Ebay and Amazon are not places where turnips are bought, sold, and traded. And so on. More and more things of interest...in my world...are going over the Net. Hakim can be forgiven for writing in 1989 that the Net was not delivering. (Some of us wrote more optimistically back then. We weren't writing books, just shorter pieces. We knew Ted Nelson, Eric Drexler, all those familiar names. And we could project natural trends. Hakim drifted into his drug/hermeneutics/deconstruction reality even as engineers were actually building the future.) > > He's asking this in _1989_. WHERE ARE THE TURNIPS IN 2002? All around. And not just in Brittny Spears junk. Surfing the Net yesterday, I realized Pat Metheny was about to perform in Santa Cruz that very night. So I went. Great. Some months back, I recollected that a test launch out of Vandenburg was coming up. I did some quick searches, found the launch was scheduled for 10 minutes away, stood out on my deck and watched the rocket arc up over Big Sur and head out over the Pacific. These are trivial examples of how the Web is delivering real turnips. And then there are 30 Heinlein novels sitting on my hard disk (whoops, what I meant to say is "Which I downloaded as part of my research on how severe the copyright violation problem has become."). And more good stuff is coming. Forget about MP3s as the end-all and be-all. > Recently we saw this question echoed by Morlock Elloi -- are there > compelling reasons to ask for privacy and anonymity, besides the fact > that > a bunch of (unemployed) cypherpunks are True Believers? A more pointed > way > to put it would be "have the technologies we've argued about for the > past > ten years *actually* changed **anyone's** lives?" A more flippant answer would be: those who don't want these technologies for privacy and untraceability obviously are not being forced to use them. The fact that "Morlock Eloi" is using that nym is telling, however. Clearly _he_ decided to use these technologies. And, though I have said it many times, the tradeoffs are economic: value of thing or act being hidden vs. cost of being caught. (I wrote about this in detail several months ago, and a few years ago. "The millicent ghetto" and why all of crypto and untraceability needs to take this into account. Fact is, some people spend thousands of dollars flying to the Caymans or Switzerland or wherever to establish relatively private bank accounts. Most people don't. Most people, the stereotypical Joe Sixpacks who have "nothing to hide," are content to keep their money in passbook savings accounts that their neighbor the teller can see anytime she wishes, and to have no real passwords on files or computers, and to tell friends passwords so they can share accounts. The fact that _most_ people don't use offshore banks means nothing for whether such services are desired by _some_. (It's one of my main theses that for way too long the focus of crypto proselytizing (yuck) has been on convincing T.C. Mits that he needs to use crypto. B-o-r-i-n-g! The "high value" uses bring users who will be receptive to exotic and interesting new approaches. Again, plot "value of secrecy" against "price of secrecy.") > Well Tim's already partially answered this in the word "Napster!" Some > 19 > year old went and changed the world, created something even nontech > friends of mine not only *could* use, but *did* use. **all the time**. > Never mind that Eric Hughes had a design for something similar with his > Universal Piracy Network; this guy actually did it and the world is > fucking CHANGED because of it. Black Net did this, and actually worked. Real keys, too. In 1993. I'm not declaring the implementation was optimum, but publishing into a pool (e.g., Usenet, e.g, alt.anonymous.messages) has many advantages over trying for a low-latency Web-centric solution, pace ZKS. Again, tradeoffs in value and cost. A pool approach for short messages and relatively small items is a lot cheaper and more secure (because of some tradeoffs) than being able to send DIVX movies untraceably. If you want the bandwidth to untraceably send gigabytes, it's going to cost. Not a lot of users want to pay the overhead...nor should they (in terms of PipeNet models). > > We can point to anon remailers as well; if it gets the Church of > Scientology gets hot and bothered and causes them to ruin the lives of > random people and Cypherpunk tech can stop that, well ain't that a good Ironically, the original NOTS publications which triggered the 1995 escalation were done through Cypherpunks remailers. (I wrote about the use of remailers for publishing Scientology secrets in my paper "Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities," for a conference in Monte Carlo in Feb. '95.) CP technology doesn't "stop that," in the obvious senses. > Now we have a vision from Adam Back, the vision of a privacy > protecting independent media enhancing "storage surface" which will > allow > niche REAL REPORTING to survive in a censorship resistant fashion. I > think > it's a **beautiful** vision. Not to take anything away from Adam Back, but Ross Anderson has been publishing results in this area for a long, long time. So have others. I applaud all the various napstering efforts. We now seem to be in roughly Phase 3 or 4. (Phase 1 was Napster. Phase 2 were the Sons of Napster, including Freenet, Gnutella, Morpheus, and perhaps MojoNation. Maybe MN was Phase 3. Phase 3 or 4 is BitTorrent and all of the other various nascent ideas.) The metapoint of my last article was that people must accept that an untraceable system of this kind of power pretty much necessitates their _own_ untraceability in developing and releasing the system. > What I get from Hakim Bey in TAZ at this point is a skepticism about the > idea of computers as enabling the Temporary Autonomous Zone. In their > place, he has the usual bullshit about how it's all about "becoming" and > all about presence, spontaneity, self-defintion, and so on. Because he's not an engineer or designer...he caught glimpses of the future, couldn't see how they would actually unfold, and so drifted into the usual mumbo jumbo and magical thinking about these ideas being metaphors for internal self-becoming. The value of Heinlein, of John McCarthy, of Vinge,... is to say "OK, cool ideas. Now, how might we build such a thing?" (A note on Neal Stephenson. Obviously another builder, with real computer experience. And yet even he got some important things utterly wrong. How could he have missed the point that if Hiro Protagonist is immensely wealthy and powerful in the Metaverse, he certainly won't be living in a shipping crate at LAX in meatspace. Any Columbian infotrafficante worth his bytes could figure a hundred ways to "launder" information out of cypherspace and into meatspace. I tagged Neal on this at a Hackers Conference...and he agreed.) > > So what is missing from the computer networks of today that gets in the > way of this real social change that people have been proclaiming > forever? > or did the amazing change happen and I just missed it? Is there > something > about our current networks that actively HINDERS the TAZ? > > hell, is the temporary autonomous zone still what "cypherpunks is > about"? There's a reason TAZ was on the earliest reading lists in '92. It's a facet, like True Names, like Ender's Game, like Snow Crash, like Shockwave Rider, like a bunch of other books. A way to expand horizons. I think we went off the rails way back, as people got interested in crypto but never grasped the consequences of being able to "bobble" private spaces, of a world in which cyberspace is "reified" by the act of creation and ownership, where the "walls are held up" by the strength of mathematics. This is NOT some handwaving bit of jive. This is real. Cypherpunks was not about Choatian gibberish about fighting corporations. It was not about getting Marge Sixpack to use PGP to protect her privacy. It was about applying the rich collection of crypto concepts and protocols (a LOT more than simple encryption) to incorporate or reify into constructed realities that will form the future for many of us. My vision hasn't changed. It didn't change through the "t-shirt phase" (when several Cypherpunks t-shirts were produced and sold). It didn't change through the Vulis and Detweiler phases (precursors of Jim Bell, CJ Parker, Mattd, and other nutcases). It didn't change through the "corporatization" phase (a dozen variants of digital money, including Cybercash, Digicash, forgotten e-wallet companies, ad nauseum,....and a dozen variants of encryption companies, signature companies, etc.). And so on. There were lots of phases, each mutating the directions slightly. Each of these phases has siphoned people off the list...as they went off to found and work at their startups, or other people's startups. And most of these companies failed. (I'm not knocking failing at a startup, as a general point.) The outlook for a few decades off remains one dominated by the inescapable conclusions of the early days: crypto is very inexpensive and we can build systems which laws are powerless to block. (Insert usual points and metaphors here about forks in the road, genie out of the bottle, bobbling of data, creation of private space and virtual communities, the role of discretionary communties, private law, etc.) Despite crackdowns and setbacks after events like 911, despite waning interest as the "coolness factor" of crypto wore off years ago (when PRZ wasn't prosecuted, for example), and despite the dot com implosion which took a lot of flaky business plans into oblivion, the fundamentals are better now than they were 10 years ago. Then we were hoping that the primitive GOPHER and ARCHIE tools would someday morph into something more closely resembling Nelsonian hypertext...and then we got the Web in mid-decade, and it was in many ways better than what systems like Xanadu could have plausibly delivered. I know what interests me. And if I'm the only person interested in it, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Anthrocryptology rules! The future's so bright, I gotta wear mirrorshades! --Tim May (and no, despite the sometimes fragmented prose, I haven't had a drop to drink. Just trying to type fast...so much of this has been said, but folks still keep missing the good stuff.)
