Re: t-shirts, imagery, and Cypherpunks PR

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Scott Northrup writes a wonderful crypto rant:

> I like it, but it doesn't emphasize the fact that we're fighting a war here, a
> war against government oppression.  We're fighting a guerilla war, here folks,
> on the future battlefield of cyberspace.  And like anyone fighting a dinosaur,
> we've got a big jump on the enemy in that we know our way around in this new

...part of this elided to save space....

> things may become.  Automatic weapons, the Anarchist's Cookbook (suitably
> corrected, of course), and other martial pastimes will balance our
> technological wizardry.

Wonderful!

> Hm.  It's not a particularly good imitation of Tim May's classic parodies, but
> it'll have to do for now.

A puzzlement! Two questions:

1. You mean you weren't serious, that this was meant to be a parody?

2. You mean you think my posts (and my rants) are meant as parodies?

I don't know which is more disturbing. In any case, I completely agree
with what you wrote. 

(I'll plead guilty to occasionally writing satires and parodies, but
most of my posts are meant seriously, even the occasional "rants,"
like where I get angry at gun control and midnight raids and suggest
we need to prepare ourselves for a "Branch Cryptidians" type of
situation. Perhaps I get too worked-up in these posts, but they're
certainly not meant as parodies.)

By the way, the mention of "The Anarchist's Cookbook" is quite
apropos: sitting on my bookshelf near me is a loose-leaf binder
labelled "The Crypto Anarchist's Cookbook," a collection of ideas and
plans I began in 1988, when I coined the term and distributed my
"Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" (available in the soda.berkeley.edu
archive).

(What's in the "Crypto Anarchist's Cookbook": Stuff on digital money,
information markets, data havens, bootleg medical research networks,
whistle blowing, using religions and games as legal cover for
encryption, schemes for an "electronic Democracy Wall," and the
"Labyrinth," a network of remailers I devised before learning of
Chaum's 1981 work and his "DC-Net" of 1988...I eagerly told Chaum
about my ideas for untraceable mail when I met him at the 1988 Crypto
Conference and he looked at me in a funny way and then told me he'd
invented these in 1981 and called them "mixes"! I was both crestfallen
and pleased, for the obvious reasons. Eric Hughes has suggested I
contact Loompanics Press--publisher and mail-order source of various
weird books, and a source you should all know about--about publishing
something like this. Some of the crypto books they publish ("Beyond
Decoder Rings") are really lame...some crypto anarchy stuff could
really find a market, I think.)


> If we give them an excuse, they'll crush us like bugs.
> 
> We can't be seen as crazed revolutionaries.  We have to be more like relatively
> harmless specialists in the field of privacy in cyberspace, explaining that
> technology has the potential to cause arbitrary badness, and we've got ideas
> about how to do things a different, better way.  We can be out on the fringe of
> normality, but if we're seen in the same light as [fill in your favorite
> trivialized group of wackos here], we're fucked.  Martyrdom is sexy and
> romantic, but rarely useful, and almost never ideal.
> 
> Do keep in mind that this entire message is my personal opinion about how to go
> about making the world a better place.  I'm not completely psycho about it, I
> don't think people with different ideas are stupid or even necessarily wrong.
> I just think the "conflict" meme is in danger of being given too much emphasis.

Boy, the debate about our mission is really getting interesting! I
applaud this debate, even if I disagree with Scott on these points.

As with the debate several months back over the _name_ of our group
("Cypherpunks" is seen as too subversive, too outre, by some, who
would prefer some name that is less threatening, such as the "Crypto
Privacy Association"), there are positives and negatives to be found
for each side.

I've already written too much today, so I'll leave it for others to
debate.

-Tim May, CPA   ("Oh, an accountant?" "No, I'm a crypto privacy
advocate." "Oh.")


-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it.