The cypherpunk revolution

Punk is resistance. During the 1980s and ’90s, the subculture was resistance of a special kind: heavy on fashion and light on politics. Punk generated eccentric hairstyles, tattoos, boots and leather outfits, drug habits, and hard-core music that oozed being against stuff. Yet fashion trumped direct action. Punk was aesthetic anarchy.

When computers and networks were added to the mix, cyberpunk was born. The 1990s were a time of extraordinary hope. The decade came barging right through Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin Wall crashing down in the background. The end of the Cold War and the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union released an intoxicating sense of optimism, at least in the West. Washington debated the “end of history,” with liberal market economies coming out triumphant. In the Persian Gulf War of 1991, perhaps America’s shortest and most successful ground war operation to date, the Pentagon overcame the mighty Iraqi army — and with it the lingering Vietnam hangover.

Silicon Valley and America’s technology startup scene, still bathing in the crisp utopian afterglow of the 1980s, watched the rise of the New Economy, with vertigo-inducing growth rates. Entrepreneurs rubbed their hands in anticipation. Intellectuals were inebriated by the simultaneous emergence of two revolutionary forces: personal computers and the internet. More and more PC owners connected their machines to the fast-growing global computer network, first with clunky, screeching modems, then with faster and faster broadband connections.

But amid the hype and a slowly but steadily growing economic bubble, it dawned on a number of users that something was missing: privacy and secure communications. History, thankfully, was gracious. Even more than that: nature itself was generous to humans in front of plastic keyboards. Unrelated to either PCs or the internet, cryptographers had made a third and no less far-reaching discovery in the 1970s. They didn’t just invent a technology; more like explorers than innovators, they discovered an algorithm based on a beautiful mathematical truth. That truly revolutionary technology was finally unleashed for widespread public use in June 1991: asymmetric encryption, also known as public-key cryptography.

When free crypto was added to the computer underground, “crypto anarchy” emerged. Now people with mirror shades, modems, and PCs could be against stuff. And even better, despite the decade’s spirit for unrestrained optimism, they had found something concrete to be against: the government’s attempts to regulate ciphers. And so cypherpunk was born, a pun on “cyberpunk.” The ideology was powerful — far more powerful and durable than those whimsical and short-lived names implied...

http://passcode.csmonitor.com/cypherpunk

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live...

https://projects.eff.org/%7Ebarlow/Declaration-Final.html

chased by google x

A few months ago, I built myself a fake pair of Google Glass. Back then, glass was the cyberpunk edge—the future of wearable computing, the chance for potentially augmented vision. Today, tech bloggers have worn them in the shower and taken photos for their stream. They’ve been reviewed and hacked. The first round of apps have been reviewed and hacked. But there was a moment when glass was the V-2 rocket of consumer electronics. And like the US government, I was going to get myself a piece of that one way or another.

An old pair of reading glasses, some shaped balsa wood, and pieces of clear acrylic from the edge of a photo frame. Thrift stores are elephant graveyards for commodity goods—one step above having actually caught on fire, knick-knacks, appliances, stereo equipment, and AA-battery personal electronics join the heaps of consumer goodwill that saves these wonderful organ donors from the landfill.

With sanding and grinding, coats of paint and varnish, and long hours studying all the public photos of Glass that were available, I had my own gleaming wireframe of newness. My fake Glass were utterly non-functional. Except of course, for that one crucial function—they made it appear as if I was actually wearing Glass.

I hit the streets. Underneath my dreadlocks, and my counterfeit third eye gleamed ever-watchful. I stalked the city in my cyberpunk-black hoodie and boots, waiting to see what would happen. But nothing had changed. On the face of a White man in jeans and a sport coat, a face computer might appear as an odd addition, a grafittoed augmentation. But when a man with stainless steel hardware in his ears and twisted knots in his hair has an extra piece of plastic above his right eye, no one stops to look twice.

http://www.thestate.ae/chased-by-google-x/

Citizendium - Cypherpunk

A cypherpunk is an activist advocating widespread use of strong cryptography as a route to social and political change. There has been an active cypherpunk movement since about 1990, heavily influenced by the hacker tradition and by libertarian ideas. Through most of the 90s, there was a very active cypherpunk mailing list and many cypherpunks were involved in the intense political and legal controversies around cryptography of the period. Most have remained active into the 21st century, and others have joined in as the controversies continue.

The basic ideas are in this quote from the Cypherpunk Manifesto:

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. ... We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy ... We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. ... Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and ... we're going to write it. ...[1]...

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Cypherpunk