Well, this was fairly annoying and I think made it harder to dig out the gold from Tim May's poop. And in a way, this was self-defeating from a topple-the-state point of view.
My point was (and sometimes is) that our beliefs about Economics, capitalism, and politics are to some extent irrelevant in the light of a techno-determinist point of view (Riad Wahbi pointed this out a few posts ago). In that context, raising some questions about some of the accepted notions about capitalism wasn't (for me at least) necessarily an attempt to "fight" the crypto-anarchic view/goal/partyline May seemed bent on establishing, but rather to suggest that even groups or individuals with ostenibly very different goals might be able to embrace a crypto-approach towards achieving their aims. In other words, it should be considered a good thing if leftists or liberals or Jihadists utilize well-formed crypto...that can actually only accelerate whatever's down the pike. And opening the discussions up a bit for such not only keeps away the philosophical inbreeding of some lists, it might actually start something amongst adherents of that point of view.
And hell, if there's a way to maintain a left-wing stance without that eventually resulting in me having to put in 14 hour days in People's Shoe Factory Number 14, then more power to 'em....I think it's probably too late even for some 21st Century hyper-Stalin to sieze control of both wireline and wireless internet now... but again, who gives a crap. Crypto's probably already passed the point of no return, no matter what kind of State George Dubya continues to unleash on us.
-TD
So...how many years before it's possible for an online group to anonymously fun, order up and drop-ship weapons on a besieged people trying to maintain their national sovereignty?
From: "R. A. Hettinga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: current status of cypherpunks, tim may, etc. ?? Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:40:50 -0400
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At 3:37 AM -0400 4/11/04, Riad S. Wahby wrote: >Apparently he's still to be found posting on various Usenet groups. >RAH knows more about this than I do.
Obviously, Tim was on usenet long before he, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore started this list on toad.com after the first physical cypherpunks meeting 11 years ago last fall.
Because some spam-defense techniques require the absence of usable email addresses, and because Tim has changed his addresses more than once over the last few years, you can go on groups.google.com and just search for "Tim May" in the author field -- don't forget the quote marks -- and see everything he's posting now. He's usually in the local Bay Area groups, and on Misc.Survivalism, though I haven't looked in about a month or so. As we just saw in a previous forward from usenet, most of the stuff he posts there makes me cringe, like his later stuff here, but, obviously, Tim's as smart and as creative as he's ever been.
Even though when I showed up here, 10 years ago sometime in May to learn how to do cash transactions on the internet, Tim regularly and thoroughly jumped up my ass about my various ideological impurities and deep flaws in my character :-) (it was ever thus, I got used to it, and I hopefully learned to give back as good as I got), there was, invariably, something useful in almost all of his posts here.
This, in spite of, to me at least, the increasing preponderance of deliberately provocative cruft he trolled around here, presumably in boredom, just to piss people off.
Obviously, though more civil, and, frankly, productive, this list isn't the same since Tim left, not the least because this list was, for all intents and purposes, his creation, by dint of the sheer amount of time he put into it, if nothing else.
As most people here know, I've long been interested in influence and reputation, and I once introduced Tim at a Mac_Crypto conference in terms of the magnitude of his influence, which is, frankly, much more considerable than people really understand. Tim thanked me for a "nice introduction", and, while I was being quite cordial, this being one of the few times we got along, "nice" was pretty orthogonal to my point.
Tim May, whether he likes it or not -- understands it completely or not -- has literally invented, discovered, a new form of emergent social order. More properly, in learning that property can be controlled by cryptography in a manner *independent* of biometric identity, he was the first person to understand that the control and market-auctioned transfer of property could be achieved without the need of the force-monopoly of the state. The result is something which is, by definition, anarchy.
Tim called it crypto-anarchy, since it required the use of strong cryptography on public networks to happen, but I don't think even he understood just how far the idea could go. His concern was more immediate. Like freedom, privacy is an inherent good, and anything that maximizes both privacy and freedom maximizes the good in the world. All the structural possibilities that resulted were just gravy. It's probable that his hatred of the state came first, long before his discovery of cryptography as a means to that end, but the effect is the same whether, like me, the crypto changed his opinion of the state, or, as was probably Tim's case, his opinion of the state led to his discovery of crypto as a means to get what he wanted.
One way or the other, Tim and other early cypherpunks really did discover a way to make physically real the yearnings of libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and other free people throughout the ages, by using, for the first time in more than a thousand years, technology and markets instead of manifestos, politics, philosophy, or, in the case of libertarians, somehow-constrained government and monopolistic force.
I think that this didn't happen fast enough for Tim, and he devolved to hoping for some disaster to force his new world into being, and failing even that, he began to advocate more, I suppose, "traditional", methods of getting what he wanted: those involving force, without regard, unfortunately, to reason, much less economics.
It was upsetting, infuriating, to watch, but, after a while, we realized that Tim was, after all, a free man. He could do what he wanted with his time and resources, and it wasn't our right to tell him to do otherwise, no matter how negative our opinions were of his behavior.
As for the more personally repellant of his beliefs, we have to remember that he advocated something that most of us have come around to over time, something that many anarchocapitalists have talked about before Tim May did, that discrimination in transactions and hiring of *any* kind is a *right* of free people in markets, foolish consequences or not, and that it's only wrong when governments force that discrimination onto everyone, like they do in Jim Crow, Nazi Anti-Jewry, or Apartheid laws.
Tim's collapse from that rationally-derived belief in the economic necessity for freedom, including individual discrimination, into the language of "Aryanism", and the advocacy of mob-violence, (something that is guaranteed, paradoxically, to degenerate into state-controlled force in in almost all historical cases, speaking of chimneys), again paradoxically, only puts his original point into even starker relief.
Personally, like his coming to cryptography because of his hate of the state, I think his now-overt racism emerges from his (*claimed*, remember; he's said that "Tim May" is a pseudonym more than once here ;-)) Virginia upbringing, and that his adoption of anarcho-capitalism as a political philosophy might have been the result of some inherent racism, but that's just armchair psycho-babble voodoo on my part. The point is, his opinions in that regard are now morally repellant, and that's a shame, because before he got to this point where his anger overtook his capacity to reason, he was, in fact, making sense.
So, to me, at least, whatever Tim and company did before or after doesn't matter so much as what they did here on cypherpunks in the early days. Lots of people's lives (mine, for instance... :-)) auger-in after what others consider to be their most memorable and productive accomplishments. Even a man's *own* opinions of the events of his life change over time, so who knows what Tim thinks about his time here, and whether it was worth it or not.
Nonetheless, as Phillip K. Dick said once, reality doesn't change when you change your mind.
If it all works, if it has a basis in economic fact, that people in general get more stuff cheaper and live longer and happier by being completely free of *any* government in their lives, and they get to that point by using strong cryptography on public internetworks, Tim May may well be remembered for the rest of history as having discovered the substrate of a new society. Something, I believe, on the order of the advent of agriculture and cities, and lots of us here were around to watch the initial promulgation of those ideas, even if we were not around (in my case, at least) to witness their actual discovery.
And, maybe, some of us will be around not just to *watch* it happen, but to *make* it happen as well.
Without sending a "bunch of useless eaters" "up the chimneys", as Mr. May seems to fondly hope for, these days.
Cheers, RAH
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-- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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