Cypherpunks Goals: Bad debate drives out good debate

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

(I sent this out on Saturday, apparently just after the Great Outage began.
I never saw it, so I presume few if any of the rest of you did either.
While we're only 200-strong now, down from our 700+ peak recently, I
suppose the most diligent and interested readers have by now managed to get
back on the list. The alternately clued readers will have to miss this
one.)


Cypherdenizens,

I guess it's a fact of cyberspace that well-reasoned, well-written
posts don't get the followup responses that clueless, inflammatory, or
otherwise controversial posts do. This has been driven home to me
recently as I sort many thousands of posts and many hundreds of
threads accumulated these last 19 months (and I deleted some of the
true crap long ago, so my sample is skewed toward the good stuff!).

I look at recent examples, like the analysis by Greg Broiles of what
"Cyperpunks write code" means, and I see no follow-ups. I look at the
thoughtful words of Harry Bartholomew, including a book review, of
what can go wrong in software and what this means for crypto protocol
tools, and I see no follow-up commnents. I look at Ray Cromwell's
detailed presentation of his WEB-based remailer, and I see only
comments by a few of us (me, Hal Finney, as I recall). Plenty of similar
examples.

What is going on?

Without getting into particulars, clueless posts generate flurries of
denunciations, "your mother codes in Fortran" insults, and alien abduction
responses. A nobody name Nabalandian drools all over the list,
mailbombs us, and generates several dozen responses. (Including from
me, so I'm not blameless.) The Detweiler Perversion nearly brought the
list to its knees for over two months recently. (And lesser flame
wars, involving Thomas Tso, Xenon, and now Nabalandian, have similarly
distracted us.)

Cypher version of Gresham's Law: bad posts drive out good posts.

(The same is being seen in talk.politics.crypto, with the neverending
Sternlight vs. Everybody Else dominating the traffic by a factor of
20-to-1. Detweiler recently reappeared (as tmp@netcom.com) and is back
to debating _himself_ and answering his own delusional posts.)

Some fine work is being done, both by those who are posting here and
by those who are apparently holding their counsel for the time being.
But the crumb bum posts are definitely winning out.

To be sure, posts by the stronger posters--who I won't name now--can
still generate significant debate, but not nearly as well as the
inflammatory posts can. (Part of this is predictable: the stronger
posts are often technically deeper, meaning that more of the reading
population feels unable to add signicantly.)

I hope there's something we can do about it.

I may start reposting, at not too frequent intervals, interesting
articles from the past.  "Golden Oldies," I called them on the
Extropians list. Newcomers to the list often publically speculate that
the old-timers are not "interested" in debating what drew them, the
newcomers, to the list in the first place....things like Clipper, PGP,
the loss of privacy, etc. What they may not realize is that many of us
have spent literally many hundreds of hours writing articles for this
list. That we have no wish to repeat the widely-accepted reasons for
why Clipper is bad, or why RSA has not been broken, or why income
taxes are about to become obsolete, is not surprising.

While I'm not predicting the imminent death of the Cypherpunks list,
it seems clear we have to stop the slide into inconsequential chatter
and paranoid speculation.

Cypherpunks write code. Or at least they work on ways to *make things
happen*. They don't fall into the trap both the Marxists and the
Libertarians have fallen into, of idly discussing theory and hoping
that somehow the glorious future will arrive. Cyperpunks understand
that the genie of strong crypto is out of the bottle and that a
relatively small number of people working on new tools and
capabilities can produce a phase shift of immense proportions in the
world.

There's work to be done, and I know of no other groups even one tenth
as prepared as we are to do this work.

Let us get on with it.

--Tim May

--
..........................................................................
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: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."


..........................................................................
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: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."