Usable electronic money may be the most important outcome of a sudden grassroots takeover of the formerly esoteric and forbidden field of codes and ciphers … There are certainly many potential uses of encryption that the cypherpunks’ own ideological leanings blind them to, and that will have to wait until encryption technology enters the mainstream – as it certainly will.
A pretty good society needs more than just anonymity. An online civilization requires online anonymity, online identification, online authentication, online reputations, online trust holders, online signatures, online privacy and online access. All are essential ingredients of any open society.
Our primary difficulty in comprehending the global mind of a network culture will be that it does not have a central “I” to appeal to. No headquarters; no head. That will be most exasperating and discouraging. In the past, adventurous men have sought the holy grail, or the source of the Nile, or Prester John, or the secrets of the pyramids. In the future, the quest will be to find the “I am” of the global mind, the source of its coherence. Many souls will lose all they have searching for it – and many will be the theories of where the global mind’s “I am” hides. But it will be a never-ending quest like the others before it.
The particular thoughts of the global mind – and its subsequent actions – will be out of our control and beyond our understanding. Thus network economics will breed a new spiritualism.
As very large webs penetrate the made world, we see the first glimpses of what emerges from that Net – machines that become alive, smart, and evolve – a neo-biological civilization. There is a sense in which a global mind also emerges in a network culture. The global mind is the union of computer and nature – of telephones and human brains and more.
Most of the cost is in the end terminal. Does [universal service] mean that every user gets a Cray (supercomputer)? Does that mean everyone gets a free course on how to set it up and use it? This isn’t the phone, where you pick up and stick it on your ear – there are significant skills required.
Certainly the Internet didn’t invent threats, defamation, copyright infringement and other illicit speech. But with its anonymous remailers, the Net does enable speakers to avoid apprehension and punishment for such illegal utterances. Banning online anonymity would go much too far, stifling the 99 percent of legitimate speech in pursuit of the 1 percent of criminal speech.
It would be folly to let the capability to do electronic surveillance be completely overridden by technology. It’s a much safer bet to put it into the system so that we can do it, to make sure that we have good procedural checks and laws to govern the use of that.
[People talk on the Internet] in encrypted conversations for which we have no available means to read and understand unless that encryption problem is dealt with immediately.
[The Exon proposal] puts the entire Internet community at an absolute Rubicon in terms of how the Internet will be treated. Will it be like dial-a-porn regulation or [looser], like print models? It’s a long-term issue.