Is Cyberspace Rich Enough?

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

L. McCarthy wrote:

> Lately, I've had the feeling that majordomo@toad echoes my epistles only back
> to me. None of the longer pieces I've written has elicited so much as a flame 
> from Eric, Perry, or even James in a while.

Should I feel left out by not being mentioned in this set? Or
relieved?

In any case, I agree that most responses are mostly reactive. Though
in defense of the Cypherpunks list, not nearly so reactive as are many
groups. Lots of lists and groups are dominated by in jokes, non
sequitors, and other ephemera. At least this group quite often gets
into meaty issues.

> I've encountered an insidious hazard of high-volume lists (such as this) that
> probably snares other people too. It's altogether too easy to sit at one's
> mailer and merely react to whatever comes along. Obviously, if everyone did
> this all the time, nothing of substance would ever be accomplished. It's
> therapeutic, IMHO, to step back regularly, refocus on one's long term goals
> w.r.t the group, and push new initiatives.

Like a lot of you, I try to do this regularly. If people are
interested, they'll follow up. If not, they won't. Think of it as
evolution in action.

It so happens that the latest theme I've been thinking about is ready
to spring on you folks. If you respond, so be it.

That theme is this: Is cyberspace, or the Net/Web/Etc., sufficiently
rich or complex to meet our needs?

By "rich" or "complex" I mean in terms of "places to go," of "degrees
of freedom." For example, the multiplicity of routing paths for
messages, via remailers explicitly and via the underlying routing
options the Internet itself offers implicitly, gives certain major
advantages that a centralized system vulnerable to "choke points"
would not have. (The Internet gurus will likely jump in at this point
and blather about how this is isn't so, how they could shut down the
Internet in several minutes with just their Leatherman tool and a few
O'Reilly books, but my point is not that it isn't _possible_, but that
the direction in which the Net has moved is generally one that makes
shut-down harder than more centralized alternatives.)

By our "needs" I mean roughly the Cypherpunks goals of privacy, free
choice, cybernetic free association, virtual communities,
anarcho-capitalism, etc. (Quibblers can dispute any of these, but
clearly most active posters on the list advocate some vector made up
of many of these diverse elements.)

So, what am I getting at?

Consider how the abstractions of the World Wide Web, URLs, HTML, HTTP,
and Web browsers have *increased the size of cyberspace* rather
dramatically in just the past two years. More places to visit, more
interconnectedness, more difficulties in controlling access to stuff,
etc. Home pages containing banned material are proliferating (a la the
Homolka-Teale ritualistic cannibalism trial in Canada, the Scientology
material, and so on--this is not the place for me to recap this).
Sure, ftp sites used to do this pretty well; in fact, I'm considering
ftp sites in this "evolution" toward greater complexity (in the
richness sense).

(Actually, cyberspace is partly getting "bigger" and partly
"increasing in dimensionality." Dimensionality of a space can be
related to how many neighbors one has....think of the two nearest
neighbors one has in a 1-D space, the 4 (or 8 if diagonals are
considered) neighbors in a 2-D space, the 6 in a 3-D space, and so on.
Arguably, if one has "100 close neighbors" in a space, it is roughly a
50 dimensional space. An equivalent formulation is in terms of the
radius of the n-sphere that everyone fits into. For example, the "six
degrees of separation," the 6 "handshakes" that separate nearly any
two people in America, suggests that American society is in some
important sense roughly a 15-17 dimensional space, because in some
sense all 250 million Americans "fit into" a hypersphere of radius 3
(diameter 6) when the dimensionality is around 17. (Or slightly lower,
as the slight corrections to V = r ^ n have to be included, which I'm
not bothering with). What "increased connectivity" does is to increase
dimensionality, about as one would expect from our usual metaphors
about "a multidimensional society" and "the world is
shrinking"...indeed it is shrinking, even as the absolute volume
increases.) 

What Cypherpunks should be pushing for, in my view, is this increased
dimensionality. More places to stick things, more places to escape
central control, and more degrees of freedom (which has a nice dual
meaning I once used as the working title for a novel I was working
on).

Is Cyberspace already rich enough (= high enough dimensionality) so
that central control cannot be reestablished (to the extent it ever
existed)?

Many of this think that it probably already is past this point, that
the "point of no return" has been reached. After all, the Soviets
couldn't stop samizdats, the Chinese couldn't stop fax machines, and
the Americans can't stop drug use, so what hope is there in
controlling modems, crypto, cellular phones, satellites, Web links,
stegonography, terabytes of data flowing unobstructed across borders,
and so on. Just to "stop the Net" would disrupt the entire financial
system, which not even Clinton or the next (Republican) President
would be tempted to do....they might as well launch a nuclear war as
try to shut down this "anarchic" ( = high dimensionality) system.

But can we do more? One of my own wishes is to see hundreds (nay,
thousands!) of remailers, as these act as "teleportation booths" which
can dramatically increase connectivity. (They can increase the
connectivity in a different way that just straight connections
can...they "stitch together" otherwise visibly-connected regions with
unobservable connections, a desirable thing.)

What else?

* Lots more remailers. Run out of accounts, not just "remailer
machines." Accounts allow trivial proliferation of more remailers.

* Web access remailers. Like the "anonymous anonymous ftp," why not
explore combining Web systems with remailers? (Not so great for
browsing, of course, but there should be some interesting
possibilities.)

* More offshore sites, members, etc. This increases connectivity and
increases the "regulatory arbitrage" we so often talk about.

* Local corporate computer nets are "extra rooms in cyberspace," and
thus are harder to search. The equivalents of "rat lines" (in which
drugs are kept in one apartment and retrieved through a hole in the
wall, thus delaying/foiling searches and kick-in-the-door
raids....think of how technology makes all this so much easier).

* digital cash is of course of central importance. It glues commerce
together, but also greases it (a dual metaphor, not a mixed one). In
terms of the "richness" I'm talking about, it incentivizes the
colonization of cyberspace, the expansion of this space, and the
general richness.

* Alternative Nets, like FIDONet, are often lost in the discussion of
"the Net," but perhaps we should take much greater interest in these
alternatives. They make a crackdown harder, they lessen the dangers of
a single-point attack, and they provide "genetic diversity" for
building future Nets. (I'm not saying Cypherpunks have the time,
expertise, or incentive to work on this, but just reminding folks that
the Internet is not the end all and be all...)

* More users, more education, more articles....all increase
dimensionality, by expanding the space (e.g., key software on more
machines, accessible by more people, more home pages, etc.).

And so on. Increase the richness of cyberspace. More places, more
avenues, more rooms, more more. Make sure there's a "there," there.

Well, I've written too much, and as folks have noted, long posts get
fewer responses that do short ones, especially flamish ones.

Personally, I think there are fewer long essays and analyses for the
same reason there are fewer large predators than grass-munching
herbivores.

--Tim May


-- 

..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
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