6 ms·
I've honestly never really quite recovered from watching the dreams of the cypherpunks die so hideously and completely. I guess it's because the ideas / movemen
by trotsky 13y ago
I've honestly never really quite recovered from watching the dreams of the cypherpunks die so hideously and completely. I guess it's because the ideas / movement / whatever bubbled up when I was at that age when you think this is going to be the groundswell, my generation is going to cause a fundamental change in the world.
If you're unfamiliar, there was a strong meme in the late eighties through early/mid nineties among a certain set that the perfect storm of public key encryption (still wonderfully unbounded in our minds) and the emerging global network would be a nexus point for personal power in privacy, anonymity and security and in many real ways break down the bonds of the states. It's worth noting that this was about the time that the soviet union fell, and many in the know had gotten a first taste of global presence by hearing about the people in the streets via usenet before it made the news.
It wasn't that I was particularly a hard core believer or activist, at least compared to many I knew. But for those who understood what an immense impact the internet was going to have it seemed to everyone I knew - NSA, hackers, professors, that it was just how it would be. You couldn't hope to spy on pretty much anyone anymore when you could use perfect encryption to scramble a telephone call or an email. Kind of like when you knew everyone was about to have a touch phone.
I was ideologically aligned and mixed in such circles, nerds were still outcasts so not really too big a world, but my life was busy with other things - but I watched from a distance, fascinated with all the ideas and things to come. I'm not sure I've every really been more sure something was going to happen, at least to a very significant degree.
The government was sure too - that was when they came up with CALEA and people got upset but mostly scoffed - there was a real sense that they were just in their death throws.
Things got pretty busy, Internet boom. Company got bought by an agency, every big name anybody needed to be on the Internet yesterday. Was a blast though a bit of a blur - ended up in SF as the whole thing worked itself into a nasty hangover. Can't remember worrying too much about when the cypherpunks were going to win but still knew it had to be coming, err well it's just about adoption.
It really sucks to wake up after a bender and realize that you helped kill the dream that you were just waiting for someone else to make happen.
Working infosec as california recovered put me face to face with reality pretty early in this cycle. Not only was the thing I was so sure of totally not how it went down, with shift from relatively petty financial fraud and wankers to states and srs.bsns abandoning defense to focus solely of offense it's been very hard to square. It's hard to believe many people ever feel so sure about something that turns out so absolutely opposite.
Fuck, at least nobody killed rms.
- rayiner 13y ago> I've honestly never really quite recovered from watching the dreams of the cypherpunks die so hideously and completely. This is really what the rage on the internet is about. People like to pretend they're mad at the government overstepping its Constitutional boundaries, but what they're really mad about is the failure of their attempt to re-litigate the division of power between government and the people.
- _delirium 13y agoI think that's true, though there's a third axis, companies, which is a big part of that failure. One major change in the tech scene over the past few decades is that a significant proportion of us effectively went over the other side: many techies now work for companies whose goal is, as with the government, to collect data on people, construct profiles, and share it around as convenient. That left rather fewer (though still vocal) people working for the opposite goal of anonymity, non-trackability, and flexible/modifiable pseudonymous identities. It also made it much easier for the government to piggyback on that tracking infrastructure we ourselves are building.
- montagg 13y agoThat's a great point, and it points to a weakness that most privacy advocates don't really address very well: knowing more about you allows some companies to do things better for you. They have to answer the question, how do we provide the same awesome services while also preserving privacy?
- rayiner 13y agoIt's the conflict between two different paradigms for the internet. Cyperpunks want to think of the internet as a tool for trading ideas, potentially subversive ones. Most people think of the internet as a social or commercial space.
- _delirium 13y agoNicely put. When viewed that way, the internal "nymwars" at Google looks like a pretty direct culture clash between those paradigms: should G+ allow pseudonymous profiles to protect free exchange of ideas (possibly including stigmatized or even dangerous ones), or should it insist on real names, to reduce spam, trolling, and other trouble-making, and improve the quality of the data collected? It seems Google had a significant number of employees in each camp. But the market logic was pretty firmly in one of those camps and not the other...