MV. What Is Manifest

In “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy,” May’s contribution to a collection of essays paying tribute to Vinge on the occasion of the republication of the novella True Names, he is still making his familiar case, if in slightly different terms, but now well over a decade after offering up his manifesto’s initial assurances of impending revolution: “The combination of strong, unbreakable public key cryptography and virtual network communities in cyberspace will produce profound changes in the nature of economic and social systems.” That claim seems genial enough, after all, until he clarifies these “profound changes” more particularly in the next sentence as a matter again of the technological implementation of “[c]rypto anarchy… the cyberspatial realization of anarcho-capitalism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to consensually make the economic arrangements they wish to make.”

From the technological facilitation of secrecy, then, will inevitably arise a comprehensive privatization of the terms and institutions of public life.

Through just what steps, on the basis of just what assumptions does May keep arriving at such a radical conclusion? How is it that rather oracular proposals such as that “[a] phase change is coming,” are imagined to follow logically as conclusions from premises such as that “[s]trong crypto [May’s term for readily available, theoretically unbreakable computer-facilitated encryption techniques] provides a technological means of ensuring the practical freedom to read and write what one wishes to”?

Is it really the assumption here, then, that it is just the fact that not everybody everywhere is quite so free as they might otherwise be about what they read and write that stands as the solitary obstacle in the way of the otherwise inevitable and wished-for arrival of the “phase change” presumably embodied in the “realization of anarcho-capitalism”? Would a more perfect technological facilitation of secrecy really be enough to smash the state and suffuse societies with “unobstructed” commercial activity in the way May seems to pine for? Or has May simply consistently mistaken for logical inevitability what amounts to the intensity of the lure for him of some personally compelling, possibly idiosyncratic, desire of his?

“The State” –- which May rather quaintly seems to regard as a monolithic and uniformly dastardly entity rather than as any kind of densely multilateral co-ordinated congeries of both competing and co-operating socio-cultural institutions and state apparatuses –- “will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration.”

Curiously, May endorses the legitimacy of these concerns and provides scant comfort to those who would find them worrying. Instead, he quite enthusiastically elaborates: “Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet.” May offers no reassurances and proposes no remedies for these concerns, but simply recurs to his triumphalism: “But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.”

One of the most visible critics of the cypherpunk vision, Dorothy Denning, seemed for a time to be convinced by May’s account that the developmental momentum aroused by the emergence of especially public key encryption technologies threatened the institutions of legitimate governance in a way that might indeed be well nigh irresistible.

But for her the consequences of such a state of affairs were the furthest imaginable thing from desirable. “Proponents argue that crypto anarchy is the inevitable -– and highly desirable –- outcome of the release of public key cryptography into the world,” wrote Denning, sounding the alarm in an early essay. “Although May limply asserts that anarchy does not mean lawlessness and social disorder, the absence of government would lead to exactly these states of chaos. I do not want to live in an anarchistic society –- if one could be called a society at all -– and I doubt many would.” And so, while May himself may have drawn from a selective survey of emerging and projected technical developments the heartening if rash impression that the world around him was crystallizing inevitably and quick into the image of his heart’s desire, Denning’s own reading proposed its appalled antithesis: “[T]he crypto anarchists’ claims come close to asserting that the technology will take us to an outcome that most of us would not choose.”

In a section of his essay “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities” entitled “Implications,” May concedes that “[m]any thoughtful people are worried about some possibilities made apparent by strong crypto and anonymous communication systems.” It is difficult to imagine that Denning or many of his other critics would draw much in the way of comfort from the discussion that follows this admission. “Abhorrent markets may arise,” May admits. “For example, anonymous systems and untraceable digital cash have some obvious implications for the arrangement of contract killings and such.” (The insouciance of that “and such” inspires particular comfort, I must say.) As May continues on he seems almost to wax enthusiastic in delineating possible dangers: “Think of anonymous escrow services which hold the digital money until the deed is done. Lots of issues here.… [L]iquid markets in information… may make [corporate and national] secrets much harder to keep…. New money-laundering approaches are another area to explore.”

In the essay’s conclusion he takes up the theme again, no more reassuringly this time around. “Cryto anarchy has some messy aspects, of this there can be little doubt,” he jocularly intones. “From” what he has for some reason decided would amount to “relatively unimportant things like price fixing and insider trading to” what he has curiously decided are “more serious things like economic espionage, the undermining of corporate knowledge ownership, to” what we can all agree are “extremely dark things like anonymous markets for killings.”

Back in the “Implications” section of the piece, May follows his laundry list of worrisome criminal activities that might be facilitated by robust encryption techniques with a new paragraph beginning with the sentence: “The implications for personal liberty are of course profound.” The reader is possibly flabbergasted to realize that May does not mean this statement to summarize the obvious worry that all of the dangerous developments that precede it would seem to threaten personal liberty in a profound way, but to suggest instead that despite these threats encryption will nevertheless strengthen personal liberty just because, as he goes on to say next, “[n]o longer can nation-states tell their citizen-units [?] what they can have access to, not if these citizens can access the cyberspace world through anonymous systems.”

Later in his conclusion, May offers up this brief and unexpected argumentative digression: “Let us not forget that nation-states have, under the guise of protecting us from others, killed more than 100 million people in this century alone. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, just to name the most extreme examples. It is hard to imagine any level of digital contract killings ever coming close to nationalistic barbarism.” One wonders if it really is, after all, quite so hard to imagine globe-girding networks of criminal gangs managing to use technology to co-ordinate and accomplish acts of devastation comparable to those of the criminal states of the twentieth century. But be that as it may, it is certainly curious to say the least to see totalitarian brutality offered up as an argument for anarchic lawlessness! Part of what is surprising in this argumentative move is that it treats tyrannical and totalitarian violences as straightforward if “extreme” expressions of some more normal or even definitive governmental violence, rather than, as is more customary in accounts of these phenomena, a pathological violation of legitimate governance. May even seems to suggest that the more conventional expectation that good governments will properly protect their citizens from harms is in fact nothing but a pretense (“the guise of protecting us from others”), masking this deeper, more constitutive expression of violence.

It is unfortunate that May did not go on to develop this line of his argument at greater length or in any kind of systematic way. Suffice it to say, without more to go on, it would seem on the face of it to be easily possible at once to sympathize with May’s frustrations with the forms of nationalism, militarism, and totalitarianism he notes without likewise sympathizing with his advocacy of crypto-anarchy. And given his advocacy elsewhere of the technological facilitation of secrecy in particular to protect individual liberties, it would be interesting to hear more about the relation of his viewpoint to the many accounts of modern militarism for which it is in fact their secrecy that best characterizes militarist cultures, and in which it is the rise and consolidation of institutional secrecy (state secrets, secret treaties, secret ops, classified documents, black budgets, censorship, cover-ups, and the rest) that enables and abets militarism in its worst abuses. Further, given his advocacy elsewhere of technical interventions over political organizing or the democratic recourse to representative governance to achieve a more congenial social order, it would be interesting to hear more about the relation of his viewpoint to the many accounts of especially totalitarian violence that highlight the special role of modern technology in these unprecedented eruptions, systemizations, and administrations of violence.

Near the close of the essay May offers up an unexpectedly hesitant response to his own rhetorical question whether crypto anarchy, despite the worries and threats it would seem to entail, is ultimately a “Good Thing” or not. His answer, a stirring: “Mostly yes.” And a few sentences later comes a stunning parenthetic admission that shows the extent to which his rhetoric here relies on the constant complementary recourse to arguments from both inevitability and desire: “I don’t think we have much of a choice in embracing crypto anarchy or not,” he insists, “so I choose to focus on the bright side.” Now, given all that has come before it, of just what is this bright side supposed finally to consist?

Returning to the “Implications” section of the essay I am intrigued to note a paragraph in which May invokes inevitability yet again, but this time to make a somewhat different sort of case than has been usual for him elsewhere. “Something that is inevitable [under crypto anarchy] is the increased role of individuals, leading to a new kind of elitism,” he proposes. When he goes on to characterize this elite as “[t]hose who are comfortable with the tools described here [and who] can [hence] avoid the restrictions and taxes that others cannot,” it becomes difficult to avoid the suspicion that at least part of the appeal of crypto-anarchy for May is a matter of simple straightforward opportunism. He adds, in an oddly insinuating tone, that “[i]f local laws can be bypassed technologically, the implications are pretty clear.” As it happens, it seems to me that the implications of such a state of affairs are not the least bit clear, until we know first whether or not such a technologically empowered person is in fact law abiding or not. Once again, the claim of inevitability would seem to function for May more forcefully as an expression of desire than as a reliable prediction of actual outcomes.

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