Re: I'm leaving cypherpunks

[fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)]

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Mr. Wells--

Goodbye, best wishes.  I'm guessing, but I think you're making 
a mistake in leaving, both for yourself and about us.

We are not being irresponsible.  We have a
different, serious, view of how the world should be made into 
a good place.  We can only "set the tone," as you say, if what we 
are saying is founded in truth and competence.  The personal part 
of this letter continues after the philosophy.

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There are tools available to protect privacy, and protect ourselves,
that don't require much cooperation of others.  People should adopt
these tools, and also methods, habits, knowledge and attitudes.
One good attitude is a basic awareness and self-responsibility.  
One is that insults and taunts are only words.

Yes, on a personal level, in a group of friends, in a society that
is still basically functioning, there are many important issues of
how people should treat each other, and how a good environment 
should be established.  But cypherpunks is addressing, and 
experimenting with, a more basic, raw level of things.  The 
technical and nasty issues are every bit as urgent as the personal 
and ideal ones, and we constantly need to (and try to) relate them.

It's bad to ask social conventions of niceness to take over jobs
that people should--have to--take care of consciously for 
themselves.  It distributes responsibilities and burdons unfairly.
It is unwise in that it won't work.  It seems to give play to
a kind of self-delusion.  And to recommend it as a course to 
others is to send the sheep to feed the wolves.  It's to hang on 
to a picture of society with a false happy-face front that's 
crumpling behind--for all of us.

There's a basic level of self-protection that people have to take
care of for themselves, or higher-level social goals don't have
a chance.  People not protecting themselves actually increase
harmful activities--besides small criminals there are whole 
industries of parasitism--*because* people feed them in sheepish 
trust.

We're not talking guns or martial arts here, just purely protective
things like crypto and a little dose of reality.  A realistic
sense of what neighborhood one is walking in, for instance.

Like the cypherpunks neighborhood.  Here we're trying to 
experiment, get a sense of the worst of what could happen,
imagine ways of dealing with it.  And we've been openly like this
since we started.

Here is how I see the situation with Detweiler: I sympathize with 
his pain (to the extent I can follow it).  I try to be friendly to
him.  There have been others offering support who he could have
talked with instead of the people he picked fights with.  Some 
people shouldn't have been so nasty to him.  But he should have 
gotten a reality check a long time ago about how rough we play 
here--it's not very rough!!  There's no way we could have been 
expected to know that he wouldn't, and it is not our 
responsibility to police each other into treating him
supportively.

That doesn't mean we are building an unsupportive, hostile world.
We are playing worst-case-scenario with each other just so that
we can have a world that is not like that.

You construe the list owners' *allowing* rjc to continue posting
to be *condoning* it.  That's a bad thought path.  To suggest 
that they step in, in the kind of matter we're talking about, is 
not a good model for how a world should be run, and it's 
egregious in terms of the atmosphere we want in our own group.

> In an uncontrolled environment, there is little that can be done
> to further an appropriate attitude. One can reinforce the good
> and censure the bad. And hope.

(And give people tools, knowledge, and ideas to protect 
themselves.  And develop methods that actively shrink the 
opportunities for bad behavior.)

Cypherpunks is purposely a model of an uncontrolled environment,
including its worst aspects.

> Privacy is a *social* phenomenon, not a technical one. 

The convention of respect for privacy is social.  It's based on
a more primitive and basic ability of people to *get* privacy if
they need it.  The latter is breaking down, making the former
increasingly a charade behind which things can get worse.  But 
in the process of fixing things, the ground rules--in terms of 
which new social conventions will have to grow--will change.  
Things will seem rude to people stuck in old ways of looking at 
them.

> There is
> no sense in creating tools for privacy unless one also works for
> a society in which the deployment of these tools makes sense.

Although I can't imagine a situation where deploying privacy
tools doesn't make sense, I agree that we should keep our social
goals and issues in mind.  I'm surprised you imply that we aren't
doing that.  But society has to be built on good foundations.

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I think some of the things you suggest we do, amount to hiding 
from the important problems.  I hope (mostly for our sake) 
that you aren't doing that yourself.

I guess this list can seem very rough without a sense that the
people are ethical and serious, and that the roughness is there 
for a purpose.  I hope you can come around to believe that of
some of us and tolerate the rest.  We need people who can help
think about what we're aiming for, and what it will be like for 
humans in the worlds we propose.  Once in a while it helps to
have someone to protest a thoughtless post.

bye,
-fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)
quote me
ps i restrained myself from all the twelve step phrases i thot

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