On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 03:10:04PM +0100, Nomen Nescio wrote:Tim,
I AM GETTING TIRED OF SEEING CYPHERPUNKS RESTRICTING WHAT INFORMATION FLOWS AND TO WHERE IT FLOWS...
He is correct, of course. One of these days I'm going to get MailMan working, and resurrect cpunx-news.
This list shouldn't be drowned in forwards. It's a good way to drown discussion.
Not that there is much discussion, the cyherpunk meme doesn't seem to draw fresh blood too effectively. I'm seeing similiar trends across virtually all my mailing lists, so I presume it's the medium itself that it's in decline.
Both IRC and IM are of course even worse content killers than email.
I have several theories/conjectures about what is happening to mailing lists.
First, a lot of the younger folks--who used to be some of the fresh blood for lists like ours--are not users of mailing lists. I expect some of them don't even know such things exist. For them, IM is the norm. (And IM is mostly an interpersonal, chat format.)
Second, blogs seem to have taken over for many formerly active mailing lists. In some of the areas of interest to me, a dozen blogs are frequently read, including the ones with fairly active followup. And example is "Lambda the Ultimate," http://lambda.weblogs.com/, just one of many similar language and programming blogs.
(Personally, I think much is being lost in the shift away from Usenet and mailing lists towards these blogs. For while follow-ups exist for many of them, there is always the sense that one is participating in Dave Winer's blog, or Mitch Kapor's blog, or whatever. Further, many of the blogs take on a "my daily diary" and "random musings" tone. By the way, though I read the good blogs, like LtU, I don't post to any of them.)
Third, the explosion of mailing lists, Yahoo discussion groups, "pipermail" groups (such as the E language and "capabilities" folks tend to use), etc., has made many groups "subcritical." (Something we began to see half a dozen years ago, when Cypherpunks had a bunch of close competitors (cryptography, coderpunks, etc.), plus several lists run by Hettinga, plus a couple by Declan, and so on. Cross-posting to Usenet newsgroups was bad enough, but cross-posting to many mailing lists was a major pain. Especially as most lists are closed to outsiders, who can sometimes posts, sometimes not, but where context and followups are lost.)
Fourth, 9/11. A lot of people got very scared of saying what they think. Read the archives and note the drop-off in certain kinds of political discussion. Even some of the former nodes have vanished; my hunch is that many of those subscribed to the vanished nodes never bothered to find another node. (I have no idea how many subscribers the list has. The nodes I know of don't allow listing the subscribers. I would not be surprised if the subscription total has dropped below a few hundred. And of these, clearly only a few dozen regular posters come to mind.)
Fifth, relevant for our list, "crypto is tired." As in Wired's old "wired/tired" joke column (and of course "Wired" is _especially_ tired). Not that crypto is less important now than it was, but, plainly, some things expected have not yet happened, with little prospect of happening soon. And since the basic ideas have been discussed so many times before, in so many ways, not much excitement in discussing "dining cryptographers" for the 7th time, or "how to make PGP more popular" for the 16th time.
Sixth, the lack of news about crypto. No prosecutions of a "folk hero" like Zimmermann to pull in newcomers. No Clipper chip. No bans on crypto (at least not yet).
But even if crypto got trendy again, I just don't see the young students of today flocking to our particular mailing list. Too many other choices. Probably they'll read someone's daily blog....
One last reason, the most controversial one. When I was 40 I really had no difficulty dealing with the 20-year-olds. They seemed basically a lot like I was when I was their age. But something has changed. Maybe it's me, maybe it's not. But now, at the age of almost 52, I find dealing with most of the people in their 20s I encounter, even at CP meetings, much harder. Maybe it's their usually bald heads (seems many guys in their 20s shave their heads). Maybe it's the rings through their noses and eyebrows and lips and other places (shudder). Maybe it's that openly embrace "geekiness" without actually having a solid foundation in math and physics and such. And probably it's that when I was 40 I was not _that_ much older than the people in their 20s...but now I am older than their own parents!
Whatever, I find when I talk to these newcomers with their bald heads, their piercings, their Linux geek talk, I have almost nothing in common with them.
And, as many have noted, very few of the "kids" today are libertarians (either small L or large L). This was the fertile ground Cypherpunks started in (myself, Gilmore, Stewart, Sandfort, etc., whether or not they called themselves libertarians or not).
This shows up in the fact that protests against global capitalism draw vast crowds of young people, and even several subscribers to our list have nattered on about the dangers of globalism and free trade.
In other words, politically-speaking, Cypherpunks is out of tune with what most twentysomethings seem to believe.
--Tim May "As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later convinces himself." -- David Friedman
