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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:03
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
Fri, 15 Jan 1999 10:43:43 -0500
At 3:29 AM -0500 on 1/15/99, Jamie Lawrence wrote:
> Oh man, am I really up to dealing with an argument with
> Hettinga?...
Buck up, man. You can do it. I know you can. :-).
Seriously, seeing you write well-thought-out stuff, for the first time in
years, about "what it all means", is considerably refreshing. Long may you
wave, and all that.
As for why I'm so loquacious all of the sudden, I'm just in a ranting mood
on this topic, I guess, and I thought I'd stretch my legs a bit. It was
getting stuffy, anyway.
> Wrong. I hate to drop into dreamy terminology, but I do think that
> the early experiences on the Cypher punks list bears this out:
> community is as important to the current rush for the net as the
> exchange of valued bits for valued items/information.
Absolutely.
But, sir, how do you *pay* for that community?
The iron begging bowl is as dead as any other government subsidy, and
government subsidy is exactly how the internet existed before the people on
cypherpunks figured how to pay for it.
The first cypherpunks figured out, no, knew from the outset, that state
control of the net was not what they wanted, no, was evil, and they set
about freeing the net from that control. What enabled them to even think
this way, from the very beginning, was digital cash. Financial cryptography.
What set the cypherpunks world-view apart, what made it so attractive to
newcomers, was that it was not, as Pete Townsend said, "hail to the new
boss, same as the old boss", but that, with financial cryptography to help
you pay for things, it was possible to have *no* boss, and for the first
time since people stopped being nomadic, or at least since midieval Iceland
and Ireland.
> I've been on Cypherpunks as long as most (I won't dispute it if
> I'm wrong, but I think I predate you, Bob),
I'm sure you were. Most of the interesting people were here, saying
interesting things, long before I got here. That, as you say, is what
attracted people like me, who knew nothing about any this stuff to the list
in the first place.
> and until about a
> year and a half ago, it was all about a core interest attracting
> people who had (or at least thought they had) something to say about
> that interest. About cross pollenization, critique, and shared goals
> (in baser terms, dick waving, castration, and glory: there's a reason
> even for alpha male behaviour, from time to time). Cypherpunks went
> to hell for reasons we all know, but the fact remains that the reason
> it gained momentum (no laughing from those who worked at Sybase) is
> that it was a community.
Well, new ideas, and the emotions that new ideas engendered, certainly,
including tagging your emotions to people based on their email message. If
you call that a "community", fine.
> Now, there's a lot to be said for defining community as a group of
> entities with somewhat compatible economic goals (was Marx the first
> to publish on that one explicitly? No, probably Machiavelli), but
> that isn't nessessary nor sufficient for a sustainable community.
Actually, if I remember right, the word "economics" as we currently define
it, didn't even exist in Machiavelli's time, some 200 years before even
Adam Smith. As for Marx, he thought that everything was economics, when it
wasn't social class. Actually, when it wasn't politics. :-).
As far as "sufficient for a sustainable community" goes, I beg to differ.
The resource always comes first, and the social structure comes later.
That, of course, was the problem with Marx to begin with. He put the cart
before the horse. Politics does not create reality.
The very reason we started to have cities was because we could concentrate
food at the intersection of trading routes. Even selfish predators like
bald eagles, and grizzly bears, form "communities", complete with social
structures, when there is a concentration of food, like during a salmon
run. Self interest always creates emergent societies, same as it ever was.
On cypherpunks, the "food" was new information, and, more important, that
information was so orthogonal to most people's daily experience, yet so
coherent, that it was very attractive.
*That*'s why a community emerged. What Tim and Eric had to say was so
compelling, and was a jumping off point for a huge undiscovered territory
of other ideas, and the internet made it so accessable, that cypherpunks
was, like the garbage dump at Yellowstone, an "attractive nuisance" for a
lot of very bright people. Some of them quite solitary, and "selfish",
otherwise. People like myself, and of course. And others who will remain
nameless. :-).
> The net as we have known it wouldn't exist (in either the decades-old
> form many of us miss, nor in the current 'rich-media' flavor) without
> the novel communication vectors it encourages.
Agreed. However, you still have to *pay* for it, and on this list, how to
pay for without any control of a nation-state, without the control of
*anyone*, was to me the central result of what started as a quest for
privacy.
I am probably wrong, but I think that I was the first person here who came
here not for ideological reasons, but because I had something I wanted to
sell, for cash, over the net (software, long forgotten and obsolete), and
Chaum's blind-signature algorithm was the way to do it. The people who
could talk about digital cash, with any accessability at all, were all on
this list.
Politics, and "community", came much later. Politics, anyway. :-).
Politics and "community" emerge from economics. It's that simple. Physics
creates communication structures, and social structures map to
communication structures, and economics -- trading, goods, information,
power, for mutual benefit, between two otherwise selfish and unrelated
people -- is the primary human social bond besides the need to procreate.
Orang-otans live alone, remember, because the food in their environment is
so diffuse. They have a much smaller need for commerce, in all senses of
the word.
I figured that very view of reality on cypherpunks, along with all the
other stuff which I consider the foundation of the way I now look at the
world. That makes my history, if you will, on cypherpunks very valuable to
me, emotionally, but the reason I *stay* is selfish. There's something in
it for *me* to be here. It is information. cypherpunks is a waterhole of
information, and that's why the "community" is here.
> I suppose I'm simply arguing that commerce (be it in the form of
> geodesic WYSIWYG Zaibatsu encrypted DropLets or double entry True
> Name transactions) wouldn't exist without a base of many thousands
> of shared interest groups, and that that same base exists externally
> and orthogonally to the commerce element.
And I say you have it completely backwards. That resources build
population, and thus social structure and "community".
The net allows us to "congregate" in a single "place" to get *information*.
It is the act of being in a single "place" which bumps elbows against each
other and creates the social structures we call community.
> Whew.
That wasn't so bad, was it?
> >And it was the cypherpunks, before all others, who understood that the most
> >efficient way to do digital commerce on a geodesic public internet is with
> >instantaneous, bearer-settled, auction-priced sales of digital assets. [...]
>
> >[...]They
> >understood, because, of course, that's what they wanted it to do in the
>first
> >place. [...]
>
> I hope that future readers will go to the archives to verify such an
> affirmation of agreement on "the Cypherpunks" part with Hettinga's
> assertion.
As long as the second bit isn't taken out of context in conjunction with
the first. The first I think the world will find is exactly what happened.
The second clip above refers to the fact that cypherpunks, wanted to wrest
their personal privacy back from the state, to "smash" the state, though
probably not in the Marx envisioned, and discovered something even more
fundemental than simple privacy: property without laws, which of course, is
the key to economics without laws.
> [Go, go, gadget crypto!]
Say 'amen', somebody.
> >So, the crypto-war is over, now, except for the shouting. The state is a
> >bugbear. It's a monster in the closet. It just doesn't matter anymore. You
> >can't legislate physics.
>
> You know, Bob, you sound a lot like Tim did a few years ago here,
I'm honored you say so. Where do you think I got it from?
> aside
> from the fact that Tim is a better writer
Can't help you there. Blame it on a mid-1970's suburban St. Louis public
high-school education. (And too much Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson) I'd
call my education the very nadir of American educational history, but, I'm
afraid it got worse after that...
> and (most of the time) quite
> a bit more realistic.
Also stands to reason. I have a state-school philosophy degree, and he's a
genius up-from-the-bootstraps semiconductor engineer-cum-physicist. :-).
> Just thought I'd point that out.
And so you have, hope it made you feel better.
How's that for communitarianism?
Cheers,
Robert Hettinga
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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'
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:03