MVII. Afterward

Recall that in Dorothy Denning’s piece “The Future of Cryptography,” she indicated that, contrary to Tim May and the Cypherpunks, crypto-anarchy was neither inevitable nor widely affirmed as desirable.

It is interesting to note that Denning denied the inevitability of crypto-anarchy largely as a part of her advocacy of “key escrow,” one of the technical schemes for maintaining official “backdoors” through which governments could decipher otherwise encrypted communications in the course of legitimate law enforcement efforts. The Cypherpunks (among others) relentlessly and, as it happens, correctly and quite successfully denigrated key escrow as an unworkable scheme, one that would be disastrous from both a security and a civil liberties standpoint.

Although she did not make this argument herself, it is instead ultimately because she was right to deny that crypto-anarchy was widely affirmed as desirable that she was right likewise to deny it was inevitable. In the piece itself, however, Denning seems to worry most palpably that despite her misplaced faith in key escrow Tim May might be right after all to expect the momentum of technological development itself to eventuate in a rough-and-tumble crypto-anarchic near-lawlessness he might desire himself but which she and most others would deplore.

Like Shirky, Denning seems to credit the possibility that encryption technologies might impel social architectures in directions that would yield outcomes few would desire outright. In Shirky’s piece, an extraordinary amount of the weight of this premise is borne by the modest assumption that “once a user starts encrypting messages and files, it’s often easier to encrypt everything than to pick and choose.” But I submit that however convenient it might seem to routinely encrypt and thereby control the scope of all file-sharing practices, this would likely produce unacceptable sequestration effects in the distribution and circulation of content onto the internet, the whole point of much of which is to be as widely and freely available as possible. To value openness is to value serendipitous effects of collaboration that cannot be either perfectly predicted or even modestly assured, and to accept a real measure of uncertainty, vulnerability, and expense in exchange for promises that cannot be fully characterized and may not be fulfilled.

In an “Afterword” appended to the 2001 re-publication of “The Future of Cryptography” Denning says of her original article that it “is overly alarmist.” She re-assesses with clear relief and perhaps some small measure of smug satisfaction, the social significance of encryption in general and of May’s crypto anarchist vision in particular, saying that “[w]hereas encryption has posed significant problems for law enforcement, even derailing some investigations, the situation in no way resembles anarchy. In most of the cases with which I am familiar, law-enforcement succeeded in obtaining the evidence they needed for conviction. The situation does not call for domestic controls on cryptography, and I do not advocate their enactment [any longer].”

I regret that Denning’s re-assessment here was not an occasion as well for her to revisit for long the earlier moment in which these technologies inspired such dread and desire in her and in so many others who contemplated their developmental trajectories into the near future in which we now live. Denning’s re-assessment in her “Afterword” feels rather like a dismissal of the concerns that once so forcefully exercised her imagination. So, too, Shirky’s suggestions about routine encryption utilities humming in the background of everyday online architectures, however interesting and useful they may be, really amount to a quite profound domestication of the Cypherpunk’s vision, to the extent that he would propose as a “success” for them anything short of the arrival by way of these utilities of the crypto anarchy they desired and expected to come to pass.

Quite a few questions remain for me. Why did the rather implausibly drastic social transformations the Cypherpunks incorrectly anticipated as looming inevitabilities especially compel the attention of so many people who otherwise consummately understood the technical and scientific dimensions of the technologies with which the market-libertarian crypto-anarchists concerned themselves? What models of agency and dignity are expressed and consoled in the delineation of these fantastic expectations and idealizations? How does the manifest Cypherpunk preference for technical over political interventions in the service of the achievement of desired social ends connect to other currents in the culture and politics of the so-called information age? If it is true that the crypto anarchists’ moment has come and gone, can we say for sure that it is gone for good? And where on earth did this peculiar sensibility come from?

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