From: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 08:50:05 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Social Transformation, Not Tax Evision
Message-ID: <2.2.32.19960429142827.00727a88@popserver.panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

That's not a threat.  It's a promise.

Cypherpunks have many different political and ethical views.  Like other
denizens of the Net, some tend towards libertarianism.  In fact, some of us
argued five years ago or more that the culture of the net was inherently
libertarian because making realistic threats of force was difficult over a
communications medium.  People just hang up on you.  Since the best way to
get on in electronic interactions is to offer something somebody wants and
use third party guarantor systems to assure the payment in cases where
payment is required, people would get used to non-coercive mechanisms of
exchange and this would shape their general attitudes.

Note that 95% of the world's population were once peasants bound to the
soil.  They had zero status.  They were born one place and were stuck there
until they died.  This was ordained by God.  When the age of reason and the
machine came along, the productivity and hence the value of peasants
exploded.  They were able to leave the land and work in factories.  Even
though they looked like they were worse off, the earliest factory workers
were vastly wealthier than they had been on the land.  The ancien regime was
destroyed by technology.  

Since then, we have experienced the Century of Death during which national
states murdered more than 100 million people.  In 1995, the Government of
the United States collected under threat of force some $1.4 Trillion in
exactions.  More than any government in the history of Mankind.  Today's
regimes seem as natural to us as did the former arrangements which bound the
peasants in thrall.  They are ordained by God.

Once the peasants had an out, they flocked to the cities and they continue
to do so today in the Third world.  Some of us on cypherpunks merely predict
that when freed of the restraints imposed by the modern nation state,
today's "peasants" will do the same.  For the factory and the city
substitute cyberspace.

Social systems that are "ordained by God" are often discovered to actually
be sustained by secular power and when the balance of power shifts...

DCF

"God fights on the side with the heaviest artillery.  These days MarketEarth
has the heaviest artillery."

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2

iQCVAwUBMYTRMYVO4r4sgSPhAQEufwP/bmZyYmNpBAMDJcAQ+enFvZDeCZwcMtvi
1wCuUsRvLmUcNlgYzDyVB22Pu03hi5TwG2+juFIMJ+QYJwCgApMtqI/lixlnuiuB
SGua/yATB/AJ+Yg+l/cd8uY4GLKTWENlvlfFq1gMcqlRSGf+niAfalmvmoeTeBxv
fBwG4T2MGoo=
=NWDL
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----