From: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 17:42:44 -0700 (PDT)
To: zaid@hardnet.co.uk
Subject: Re: wired wankers
Message-ID: <3.0b28.32.19961023174854.0073fd78@ricochet.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



> ....seems like very few people know who or what cypherpunks are - good or
bad?

Doesn't matter if anyone likes it or not. "Cypherpunk" has no unambiguous or
universally understood meaning. It's a cute turn of phrase. They are/it is a 
mailing list. It is the subject of a manifesto written several years ago.
Sometimes people get together and talk about "cypherpunk" things.

Assuming that "cypherpunk" will ever have even as much clarity of meaning
as a 
term like "libertarian" is a mistake. It does not mean "people who agree
with you". The best description I can think of is that "cypherpunk" refers
to the intersection of politics, economics, and technology at the
micro/street level, and people who are interested in that or the macro
consequences of these micro changes. The fact that someone's interested
doesn't mean you can predict what they think about any of the constituent
subjects. Eric Hughes' "Cypherpunk Manifesto" puts a pro-liberty spin on
cypherpunkism, which isn't bad but did not predict the tension between
various factions/doctrines which has emerged, some of which are
anti-liberty or liberty-agnostic. The cypherpunks list has become a
discussion place for those various factions as well as a target for various
mass mailings and crypto-law-politics related announcements. Some
traditionalists (fundamentalists? :) continue to use it for discussions
related to deploying tools for privacy in a technological age but they're a
minority these days. One sect has split off to "coderpunks", seeking a
return to the more traditionalist focus. 

You can describe yourself as a "cypherpunk" if you want to but if you mean
"mailing list reader/participant" it's not especially interesting; and if
you mean something else you're adopting a label whose meaning is more like
a thermometer than a road sign.  


--
Greg Broiles                |  "We pretend to be their friends,
gbroiles@netbox.com         |   but they fuck with our heads."
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles |
                            |