MIV. Manifesto

Given his commitment to the idealized “capitalism” of market libertarianism, it is intriguing to note that Tim May’s most influential article, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” both begins and ends by genuflecting in the direction of another Manifesto, written in a considerably different discursive key. “A specter is haunting the modern world,” May’s “Manifesto” proposes in its opening words, “the specter of crypto anarchy.” And repeatedly in this and other texts, May assures his readers through comparable formulations that the extraordinary outcomes he sketches and predicts are not only desirable (to him) but are freighted with inevitability. “Technology has let the genie out of the bottle,” he proposes in an image that characteristically collapses confident prediction with heady wish-fulfillment. It is a potent conjunction of themes that he will offer up in countless variations throughout his writings.

“Computer technology,” May suggests, “is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner.” He continues: “Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name [a direct reference to the novella by Vinge, which he simply assumes his readership will recognize], or legal identity, of the other.” The widespread adoption of encryption techniques will either ineluctably prompt or will itself actually already constitute (just which is not entirely clear) nothing short of a “revolution,” he insists. By this term he means of course anything but the revolutionary event conjured up by the Marxian specter he subversively cites. May’s revolution emerges not through active political organization or social struggle or from the exposure of ideological mystifications, but would seem to arise for him instead more or less spontaneously as a straightforward entailment of the development and then use of new kinds of tools.

“The technology for this revolution -– and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution,” he writes, is “based upon public-key encryption… and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification.” I will expand on the technical details to which he refers in the next section, but for now I want to concentrate on May’s reliance here on the evocation of the sheer force of developmental momentum to render plausible his suggestion that we are “haunted” so palpably by the approach of what would otherwise surely seem an utterly implausible near-term near-total social transformation. “[O]nly recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the[se] ideas practically realizable. And the next ten years will bring enough additional speed to make the ideas economically feasible and essentially unstoppable.”

Needless to say, it is not true that everything that is economically feasible is thereby rendered an unstoppable destiny. Between feasibility and inevitability in May’s formulation there must reside at least one assumption that has not been articulated explicitly and which possibly has not yet been adequately interrogated. For example, perhaps May believes that once his crypto-anarchy has been rendered practically realizable as well as economically feasible it is sure to be unstoppable because such an outcome is, whatever appearances to the contrary, so very widely desired. Or perhaps he assumes that such an outcome is likely to be deemed desirable by people in a unique position to implement it. Or perhaps he expects this radical outcome to arise as a secondary consequence of other more routinely desired outcomes. Reading May’s statement now, well over ten years after its initial publication and wide circulation, there is no question that the looming locomotive whose gathering momentum had once so impressed his attention has subsequently veered somewhat off its rails somewhere.

May has suggested that his skewed citations of Marx in his own Manifesto were a bit of “whimsy” on his part. But his choices now seem to have been freighted with, to say the least, a certain fatality. Jacques Derrida has mischievously remarked in his Specters of Marx, that the “haunting” of Europe by looming Revolution registers a more distended than appalled “anticipation,” one that was and remains “at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated. It won’t be long,” he writes. “But how long it is taking.” The “specter” of crypto-anarchy, like that of revolution, still throws off sparks and portents for partisans, but the grip of its fascination has gone a touch languorous these days.

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