Thought-provoking musings about decentralization and cypherpunk, from Danny O'Brien

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: Randall Webmail [rvh40 () insightbb com]
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To: dewayne () warpspeed com; johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com; David Farber
Subject: Thought-provoking musings about decentralization and cypherpunk, from Danny O'Brien

From: Udhay Shankar N <udhay () pobox com>
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:33:41 +0530
To: Silk List <silklist () lists hserus net>
Subject: [silk] Anarchy
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I found Danny O'Brien's latest musing thought-provoking. Comments?

Udhay (Danny, are you out there?)

<http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2008/07/19#1216510740>

2008-07-19»
wide anarchy»

Prompted by Dave Birch's talk on digital money at OpenTech, I've been
going on a long mental escapade through my own political roots, and the
history of the Net.

I think that it's inevitable that the dominant explanatory context and
the direction of successful advances in technology and society heavily
influence the politics one subscribes to. I grew up cheerleading
microcomputers and later the Net, and lived through the vindication of
their (material) success, so I'm naturally going to be a fan of
decentralisation -- actually, that's a pretty empty statement. I don't
think anyone actually comes out as against decentralisation these days.
Nobody says "Me, I'm a big fan of increased concentrations of power."
It's like being against democracy -- by the time you've explained why
you have your doubts about it, no-one is listening to you any more. The
main question on this topic in our time is not "is decentralisation good
for the body politic?" but "how much of it should we have?".

Which is not to say that the conventional answer would be "a lot".
People get rather shifty if you start on any project of power dilution,
because such projects represent a loss of control to almost anyone who
matters in the current system: even Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition want
something to remain loyal to. You can disagree with the direction a ship
is taking without wanting someone to come along and pull out the
steering mechanism (or replacing the captain with a voting committee of
the passengers).

Decentralisation deliberately pulls power away from the center. Either
it works, and total control ebbs away. Or it doesn't, and power gets
re-concentrated in entirely random (or worse, actively dangerous) hands.
Since almost anyone making a decision to decentralise has at least some
access to the current levers of power, that makes it an unpleasantly
radical decision to make.

Those who first built the Net and first to be drawn to it (the two
groups are inextricably merged) were fans of decentralised power
structures.(One of my favourite second-hand stories of the early years
of the Net was from someone who wasn't involved, but was around the
research labs at the time. He claimed that the ARPANETters were always
the flakes who everyone else avoided; obsessives out to pursue an idea
that no-one else took seriously. If you wanted to have tenure in
computer science, you stayed well away from packet-switching loons back
then. He may have been bitter.)

If you're a real fan of decentralisation -- and your sole lever on
power, as a packet-switching loon, is designing and distributing
instruments that deliver decentralisation to everyone -- the question
"how much" becomes much more pertinent. Just how far can and should you
take this? What happens when you turn all the dials to 100%?

Anarchy is the answer to that question. The truly hardened advocates
would then say: "And would that be a bad thing?"

Those hardened advocates, in the middle history of the Net, were the
cypherpunks. The strongest statement on their position was -- is -- the
Cyphernomicon, and in particular Tim May's Cypherpunk Manifesto: a
prediction and prophecy of a radically-decentralised world, created
inevitably by virtue of the widespread use of strong cryptography.

Would it be a bad thing? Just as it's hard to cheer on extreme
centralisation of power as a good thing, it's hard to imagine complete
elimination of central power as a good thing. I'm not saying that you
can't advocate for it: in fact, most people in liberal democracies in
our times default to advocating for it, with the assumption that it'll
never get so far as to turn into something horrific (or transformatively
beautiful). Call it a lack of idealism, call it a failure of creativity.
It's just hard to imagine it. Go on: imagine a world without
governments. Despite what John Lennon (or Vladimir Lenin) claims, it's
not easy at all.

I've been thinking a lot about that difficulty, because I think it
illuminates what we want from decentralised power, and what we think the
practical limits are. It also challenges us to see beyond them.

One of the most vivid positive descriptions of a world under the
Cypherpunk model of anarchy would be David Friedman's Machinery of
Freedom. But Friedman's book is a series of arguments, not a vivid
picture of daily life in such an environment. The closest he gets is a
depiction of what he says is a close equivalent to the
anarcho-capitalist vision, medieval Iceland.

Right now, I'm intensely enjoying S. Andrew Swann's Hostile Takeover
Trilogy, a space opera which includes as its backdrop an anarchist
planet of Bakunin. It's a great counterbalance to re-reading these
broadly positive depictions of extreme decentralisation: Bakunin is a
rough and vicious world, the sort of anarchy that most people would
imagine would follow the collapse of an all-powerful State. On the other
hand, it also paints a strong picture of sympathetic characters who
rather like Bakunin's backdrop. They remind me of the cypherpunks. Is
that what extreme and irreversible decentralisation would lead to: a
world order only a cypherpunk could love? Or a place where ultimately,
any group could find comfort and freedom?


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