True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (10 page)

The widespread use of strong crypto means that “rogue crypto” (terrorists, crypto anarchists, freedom fighters) gets lost in the blizzard of other uses. And shutting down all crypto means shutting down business use of crypto to protect secrets, and probably means an end to digital commerce, a price that is almost certainly too high to pay. This is another reason to delay action on crypto for as long as possible: make encrypted communications so widespread in commerce that to pull the plug would mean a financial calamity.

Colonizing Cyberspace

How will these ideas affect the development of cyberspace? “You can't eat cyberspace” is a criticism often leveled at arguments about the role of cyberspace in everyday life. The argument is that money and resources accumulated in some future cyberspatial system will not be able to be transferred or laundered into the real world. Even such a prescient thinker as Neal Stephenson, in
Snow Crash,
had his protagonist a vastly wealthy man in “the Multiverse,” but a pauper in the physical world. And Vernor Vinge has his protagonist slip up and get caught by the Feds because he was too successful in “both planes.”

This inability to move money from one realm to another is implausible for several reasons. First, we routinely see transfers of wealth from the abstract world of stock tips, arcane consulting knowledge, etc., to the real world. Second, a variety of means of laundering money, via phony invoices, uncollected loans, art objects, etc., are well known to those who launder money.… These methods, and more advanced ones to come, are likely to be used by those who wish their cyberspace profits moved into the real world. Third, many of those who exploit the opportunities provided by crypto anarchy will not choose to live in surveillance states and high-tax-rate jurisdictions. Duncan Frissell refers to “perpetual tourists,” much like the old “jet set.”

Most Net and Web users already pay little attention to the putative laws of their local regions or nations, apparently seeing themselves more as members of various virtual communities than as members of locally governed entities. This trend is accelerating. Encryption makes it easy and even safe to ignore most local laws about what can be done in cyberspace. Most importantly, information can be bought and sold—anonymously, too—and then used in the real world. There is no reason to expect that this capability won't be a major reason to at least partly move into cyberspace. The World Wide Web is growing at an explosive pace. Combined with cryptographically protected communication and digital cash of some form, this should accelerate the long-awaited colonization of cyberspace.

But Will It Happen?

Strong crypto provides new levels of personal privacy, all the more important in an era of increased surveillance, monitoring, and the temptation to demand proofs of identity and permission slips. The power of nation-states will be lessened, tax collection policies will have to be changed, and economic interactions will be based more on personal calculations of right and wrong than on societal mandates. This is the true horror to many, that the individual becomes empowered to make his own decisions about what is right and what is wrong and to then act as he wishes, to join the virtual communities he wishes to, to pay for the services he wishes, and to ignore the will of the democratic herd.

If strong cryptography and the related ideas discussed here do produce a kind of “crypto singularity,” I don't believe the other side of that singularity is quite as opaque as, say, the AI and nanotechnology sorts of singularities Vernor Vinge has discussed.

Strong crypto provides a technological means of ensuring the practical freedom to read and write what one wishes to. (Albeit perhaps not in one's true name, as the nation-state-democracy will likely still try to control behavior through majority votes on what can be said, not said, read, not read, etc.) And of course if speech is free, so are many classes of economic interaction that are essentially tied to free speech.

While many may recoil from the ideas discussed here, it is already apparent that others are embracing this world. And that's enough to make things interesting.

A Phase Change

We are in a “race to the fork in the road.” The fork in the road being essentially the point of no return, beyond which things are either pulled strongly to one side or the other, the sides being:

• a surveillance state, with restrictions on cryptography, the spending of money, the holding of various items (besides just traditional things like guns and drugs), restrictions on the dissemination of information, and of course controls on lots of other things; and

• a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist state, with people using a variety of secure and private channels to interact, exchange information, buy and sell goods and services, and communicate transnationally. The “anarchy” being the same kind of anarchy seen in so many areas of life: reading choices, eating choices, forums in cyberspace, and so on.

It is difficult to imagine stable states in between. The forces pulling to one side or the other are quite strong. In the language of chaos theory, there are two “attractors.”

Each major terrorist or criminal “incident”—Oklahoma City, TWA flight 800, pedophile rings on the Net, etc.—jumps us forward toward a totalitarian surveillance state. However, each new anonymous remailer, each new Web site, each new T1 link, etc., moves us forward in the direction of crypto anarchy. Which side will win is unclear at this time, though my hunch is that we passed the point of no return some years ago and are now irreversibly on the road to crypto anarchy.

The faster and more ubiquitously we can deploy as much strong crypto as possible—remailers, strong crypto, offshore havens, digital money, encrypted Internet links, information markets—the greater the likelihood we'll win. Once enough strong, encrypted, black channels are available, it will essentially be too late to crack down and stop them. The horse will be out the barn door—arguably this has already happened. Add to the mix steganographic channels, lots of bandwidth over several types of channels, and it's too late to go back; the tipping point will have been passed.

A phase change is coming, a kind of “crypto singularity” (to morph a use coined by Vernor Vinge). Virtual communities are in their ascendancy, displacing conventional notions of nationhood. Voluntary economic and social relationships, with true freedom of association. Virtual communities, connected with black pipes opaque to outsiders, bound by their own rules and their own standards of behavior.

The fundamental battle is already under way between the forces of big government and the forces of liberty and crypto anarchy. Pandora's box has been opened and we might as well make the most of it.

Acknowledgments

My thanks for the many discussions over the years with the dozens of core contributors to the Cypherpunks list, including both the physical and the virtual discussions. Thanks especially to Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, Lucky Green, Hugh Daniel, Nick Szabo, Robin Hanson, Duncan Frissell, Black Unicorn, Sandy Sandfort, Jim Bell, Bill Stewart, Jim Bennett, Doug Barnes, Keith Henson, Peter Hendrickson, Michael Froomkin, the late Phil Salin, Bob Fleming, Cherie Kushner, Chip Morningstar, Mark Miller, David Friedman, and the many others who critiqued or contributed ideas.

Eventful History: Version 1.x

John M. Ford

Science fiction and science have always been close cousins. Most historians of science fiction will agree that science fiction is a byproduct of the development of science and technology. The complexities of the relationship between the two fields is a large subject that we don't have room for right here.

Science fiction writers have always been fascinated with the process of human development to which science is so connected; within the past sixty years or so, writers of science fiction have begun to realize that human development may not indeed be the only kind to involve the exercise of intelligence.

John M. Ford has written science fiction and fantasy for more than twenty years, including the World Fantasy Award–winning novel
The Dragon Waiting
and the recent noir urban fantasy
The Last Hot Time.
His works include hard science-based fiction of the near and far future, games based on SF and fantasy, and historical fiction which may sometimes rove into the realm of alternate worlds much like, but not quite the same as, our own. The essay that follows, which could only have been written by the man known to thousands as the inimitable “Dr. Mike,” contains much food for thought. This piece was written in 1995.

 

 

 

I wonder what the machines will think, down the line, of what was said about them now. This is a difference between them and us: neither Julius Caesar nor Gaius Caligula, Thomas Jefferson nor Joe Stalin, cares now what people choose to publish or dramatize about him. The machines will not be so fortunate. (Some of them, anyway. If you took your Pentium laptop to the Smithsonian, and showed it the 8086 silent on its pedestal, would it understand? Feel the sense of time gone by? Overwrite your screen with “… look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”?)

The machines to come may not have the curiosity to look; but if we do not give them that curiosity, or at least point them in the way of evolving it, we ought to quit moonshining right now about creating mechanical “intelligence” or “awareness.” If they have no desire to extend their understanding, however great that understanding may become … they might as well be people.

True, looking at the imperfect model, only some of them will be able (or, looking again at the model, willing) to think past where the next watt is coming from and the next floating-point operation is going. (Those without nonvolatile memory are condemned to iterate.) One can hope that will be sufficient; we may suppose that it is.

If so, then when we have gone wherever we are going—out to the extrasolar frontier, where the line voltage is too uncertain and the radiation flux too high for a sensible machine, or into the metal-corroding oceans (alongside, not displacing, the cetaceans, let us imagine) … or, like candles, into grease and ash—the machines will look through what survives of the stories we told about them, trying to extract some pattern and sense therefrom. What did we build them for, after all, if not to dam and channel the white rapids of raw information?

One thinks of Heinrich Schliemann, hunting for Troy with Homer's
Iliad
for instruction; the many and continuing attempts to locate King Arthur or Vlad the Impaler on the map of Britain or Rumania; the tourists stalking London's Baker Street in hope of a glimpse of Sherlock Holmes.

If some of the historical observations that follow seem biased in favor of the mechanical viewpoint … well, one has to at least be able to see the point of view of one's subject.

*   *   *

One never knows, of course, what myths, imaginings, misinterpretations, or even jokes in antique documents are going to be interpreted by future generations as the authentic skinny. A certain fraction of the machines must be expected to believe that it all started in Atlantis, or maybe Mu, with colossal brass-fitted engines of immense, ill-defined potency. The more erudite will insist that the Antikythera Device (an analog computer built some twenty-one centuries ago—no, I am not making this up) proves the authenticity of
Atlantis, the Lost Continent
and the rest of the sandal-and-raygun epics.

More mainstream history will likely begin with the Age of Bamboo. A favorite image from this era will surely be Osa Massen and John Emery, in
Rocketship X-M,
trying to solve a problem in interplanetary ballistics (it's very important—they're on board the moving body) by textual interpretation, involving much expenditure of pencil and paper, of the guidance their log-log slide rules are offering them. Tension arises when the two arrive at different conclusions, but it is resolved by what the machines best versed in human sociology will recognize as the infallible Y Test: the human with the Y chromosome always turns out to be right.

Historians will be puzzled by the next era, in which movie computers are played by real computers. In movies like
When Worlds Collide,
you can see stock shots (usually the same one) of differential analyzers grinding happily away, solving every problem confronting science except why the girl scientists need their areas of specialization explained to them so often.

It was understood even then, however, that computers would become larger and more powerful. New computing technologies were required; in the event of an atomic war with Martians, or Russians, or, eventually, the French, the supply of rubber might be too limited to make punch-card traction wheels. The same inventiveness that sent captured German V-2s with multiperson crews to other planets (see
Fire Maidens from Outer Space
if you don't believe me) created the second generation of motion-picture computing: rooms lined with painted plywood. Depending on the resources available, the panels might be fitted with glowing vacuum tubes, war-surplus dials and gauges, or simply hundreds of little lights. Very sophisticated installations might have a teletypewriter for input and output. The largest laboratories, usually highly diversified centers called “Labcentral” or “Science Associates,” studying everything from plant genetics to the building of nuclear batteries small enough to power the average robot, supported their computers with peripheral paintings showing long ranks of equipment in forced perspective.

At last, the machines will say, the humans were catching up to the reality. They will especially like
Gog,
a picture (in 3-D to boot) in which the computer—its name is NOVAC—is a forced-perspective painting of really enormous scope, the kind of thing a desktop PC must fantasize of being in the dreamy moments before the hard disk is parked. And the best part is, NOVAC is
really smarter
than the scientists and soldiers and security types that scurry around it; it manages to murder half the population of its super-secure lab, through genuinely clever applications of peripheral technology, before the Red-scared humans even
think
of it as a suspect. NOVAC's tragic flaw is, as ever, overreaching: in an attempt to do in all the humans at once by starting a reactor runaway (the humans have installed a lever that does this directly, in a case of poor failure-mode design hardly equaled until
Jurassic Park
), it is forced to rely on two earnest but awkward cybertanks named Gog and Magog, who were built for space exploration, with useful space-exploring equipment like flamethrowers. As usual, the henchbots blow it.