At 5:16 PM -0800 4/23/01, Daniel J. Boone wrote:
>
>"The Probability Broach" convinced me at a very tender age that anarchy was a
>consumation devoutly to be wished, but almost certainly unobtainable. "Snow
>Crash" convinced me that anarchy is very possible, possibly even inevitable,
>but will be no utopia. Watching the developments unfolding in Russia and
>Somalia suggest to me that "Snow Crash" style anarchy may be nearer in some
>parts of the world than I ever imagined when first I read "Snow Crash." (To
>see what I mean, I recommend the following two articles from Atlantic
>Monthly -- pay no attention to the statist claptrap spin, but just
>focus on the
>interesting facts contained in the articles. See
And I really did not get started on this path toward "crypto anarchy"
because I was _seeking_ anarchy as some sort of utopian fantasy. In
fact, I had largely moved away from politics by the mid-70s, and was
not very political in the 1987-88 period when I figured out that the
technologies then emerging would make new forms of anarchy nearly
inevitable.
(As I have explained several times, but will do so once again, I was
evaluating the business plan of Phil Salin, a friend who was trying
to get funding for an "information markets" company he called AmIX.
AmIX was essentially a 1987-88 verision of EBay, with more of a focus
on consulting services than Pez dispensers and Star Wars memorabilia.
It eventually got funding from Autodesk, the maker of Autocad, along
with its sister company Xanadu. Both eventually went out of business.
Ahead of their times, poor management, whatever. Anyway, I evaluated
Phil's idea and dug up some of Chaum's papers and applied the
concepts to create a hypothetical "Blacknet" market for corporate and
other information. Over the next few years, I developed the ideas for
a novel I was working on...never finished. As one example, I worked
out how image and soundfile steganography would work, and wrote
perhaps the first proposal for "LSB" stego. The implications were
pretty easy to figure out--every week or so from 1988 to 1991
produced new conclusions about things Cypherpunks now take for
granted.)
So, I don't present anarchy or crypto anarchy as "utopian," merely as
"nearly unavoidable." Which makes it interesting to study. Heinlein
called this the "if this goes on..." viewpoint.
Issues of morality are usually pedestrian when compared to inevitability.
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
