Re: [Declan McCullagh: "A List Goes Down In Flames," from Netly]

[Martin Minow <minow@apple.com>]

My first reaction to the "Death of Cypherpunks" (Declan McCullagh's
article in http://netlynews.com Feb 12, 1997) is that it is another
example of "The Tragedy of the Commons." -- the (unsolvable) problem
of unlimited access to a limited resource. Cypherpunks was also
susceptable to the strange Internet phenomenon where people could be
proud of their anti-social, bad behavior (flame wars, "grafitti" in the
form of spam). For this reason, I suspect that the future of the Internet
in general, and Cyphperpunks in particular, will require serious editorial
control (as is done by the Risks and Privacy digests).

The only other alternative I can see would be to limit membership
-- but not limit what members might write. In the long term, I suppose
we'll have sufficiently intelligent software agents that can recognize
spam and flaming and invisibly delete them from our e-mail in-boxes.

What bothers me more than anything else about the "solutions" I've
seen proposed to the death of Cypherpunks is that they rely on
technology -- and reject human judgement -- to solve what is, in
reality, a social problem.  (One can certainly make the same argument
about the V-chip, browser porn filters, and similar hacks.)

Having been "on" the net for over 15 years -- and with experience
in both ends of the censorship/moderation problem  (I'm probably
the only Cypherpunks member to have had a book "banned in Boston"),
I'm sorry that a handful of sociopaths managed to destroy this
experiment in anarchy, but I suspect that this was inevitable.

Martin Minow
minow@apple.com

ps: (From McCullagh):
>       But for the true believers in crypto-anarchy, only one solution is
>   adequate: Usenet. "There is no 'nexus' of control, no chokepoint, no
>   precedent... for halting distribution of Usenet newsgroups," Tim May
>   wrote. That, in the end, is what defines a cypherpunk.
>
Nope: alt.cypherpunks will not be distributed to many sites that would
accept an e-mail list. Also, it's too easy for the disgruntled to forge
cancel group messages. I'm afraid that human judgement is still required.