Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!

I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here.

Tim May said:
> I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my
> posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's
> sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not.

Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this
month.  I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are
conclusive.  There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today;
42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list.  Forty people
cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted
to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email
message.  Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold.

If I was a social scientist I might want to run the experiment both
ways, or six different ways.  Name it this, or name it that.  I'm not;
all I want is something that works.  The cypherpunks list was unusable
for this kind of discussion, only a month ago.  It's usable now.

I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my
"censorship".  Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing
something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was
to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage.  *I* didn't
make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did.

Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is
now suggesting.  "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful
option.  Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete
suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track.  They
involved a lot more work than the previous setup.  I told him if he
was willing to do the work, we could try it.  As Dale suggests, I
wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and
passing judgement on the postings.  Sandy was, for a month.

The element I find most lacking from the whole discussion, until
recently, has been responsibility.  In an anarchy, *everyone* is
responsible; nothing is "somebody else's job".  Sandy felt
responsible, so he proposed something.  I felt responsible, so I
helped.  But a large part of the community sat on the sidelines and
criticized, without making attempts to make things better; indeed the
volume and tone of the criticisms themselves made things worse.
Unpaid labor for a peanut gallery of spoiled children isn't very
gratifying.  You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T.
Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the
night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South:

    The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people
    lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they
    returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings.
    The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of
    themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their
    children, seemed to take possesion of them.  It was very much like
    suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world
    to provide for himself.  In a few hours the great questions with
    which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had
    been thrown upon these people to be solved.  These were the
    questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education,
    citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches.  Was
    it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased
    and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters?
    To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of
    it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to
    find it.

Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom.
Your de-facto "leaders" have faced it for you.  It is a more serious
thing than than you expect.  All it takes it hard work and judgement.
Be responsible for setting your society's privacy policy -- without
knowing whether you are right.  Face the uncertainty and build anyway.
Shall I post you an Emancipation Proclamation -- as if you needed one?
Start a mailing list on another site!  Move this list to somewhere!
Create and nurture an alt group!  Make an independent moderated list
drawn from the unedited list!  Hold meetings!  Establish for it a
home, a funding, the rearing of newbies, education, citizenship, and
the establishment and support of philosophies.  Dead simple for people
as capable as us.  Just takes work.  Who's volunteering?  Just do it!

The experiment will be over in a few weeks.  Who's going to take over
deciding how to run the list, and running it?

If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto
community', for lack of a better term, then please do.  Otherwise, in
the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!".

	John

PS: Can we talk about crypto too?  It's clear from the last few days
of press releases that the pro-GAK forces are again working to confuse
novices into thinking that two very different things are the same
thing.  Last time it was "public key infrastructure" and "key
recovery".  This time it's "strong crypto" and "56-bit DES".  What
should we do about this?  Educate the public?

John Gilmore wrote:
> I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here.
> I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship".

I'll bet you are.

> Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is
> now suggesting.

He'd really like to, but...

> You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T.
> Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the
> night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South:

What we most remind him of are slaves.

> Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom.

Which freedom is that?

> If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto
> community', for lack of a better term, then please do.  Otherwise, in
> the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!".

i.e., stop saying what I don't want to hear and start saying what I
do want to hear, after all, it's *my* list.

I'm another long time list member.  I've posted before on a number of
occasions but not often.  And I was one of those who subscribed immediately
to the unedited list.  Anyway, herein my 2 cents.


John Gilmore writes:

> Tim May said:
> > I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my
> > posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's
> > sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not.
> 
> Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this
> month.  I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are
> conclusive.  There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today;
> 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list.

"Conclusively" this has shown only that most folks are willing to go
along with an experiment -- especially if it requires them to do 
exactly nothing.  The results of the moderation experiment itself
can't possibly be conclusive until the moderation has gone on for
much longer--a few months at least, possibly years.  Then, we'll see
how many people are willing to put up with the high volume over the
long term, even possibly in the absence of thoughtful essays from
long-time list members (like Tim) who have been driven away from the
list.

Even if it "survives" by that criteria, it may not survive in *my*
book.  There are only a handful of people whose posts make the
cypherpunks list worthwhile (IMO of course).  There're quite a few
others who contribute to the discussion but aren't themselves worth
the trouble (no offense intended to anyone; I would certainly count
myself in this group as well).

I don't deny that putting up with the noise on the list takes some
effort.  In fact, after years of surviving with only my 'd' key, I'd
finally been driven to install a procmail filter shortly before
moderation was announced.

Interestingly, since that point, it *has* become more difficult to
filter--but IMO that's because it's also gotten less interesting
(how do you know if you're filtering is successful?).  In fact,
lately I've begun to "filter" *all* of cypherpunks into an alternate
mailbox file, and find that I'm perfectly content to look at it only
every couple of days, and just pick and choose among the posts based
on author and subject.  I don't claim to be representative of the
average cypherpunk, but in my view, this is a bad sign--it indicates
a lack of compelling "content".  It might as well be a Usenet group--I
don't feel like a "member of the Cypherpunks list" anymore.  As the
list stands now, I would hardly even notice (or care) if I were no
longer subscribed.


> I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my
> "censorship".  Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing
> something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was
> to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage.  *I* didn't
> make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did.

Well, I did do something.  When the volume got too high for me to take
unassisted, I installed procmail to tailor the list to my own likings.
Many have been advocating it on the list for years.  I was just too 
lazy to do so until the pain of not having it finally got too high.

As for the signal to noise ratio, John hasn't made it worse, but he
hasn't made it much better either.  No offense is intended--John's 
posts were always at the top of my reputation list--but he posts so
infrequently that he falls into that "not worth subscribing for" group.


What was the problem with the list that finally required that somebody
"do something"?  Sure, the list was high volume.  And there were a
lot of flames and silly useless garbage.  But this is no different
than it has been for years.  And the Vulisgrams were no more (or less)
vicious or annoying than Detweiler's Medusa and S.Boxx rants from the
old days.

(The reason I personally could stand it [without procmail] back then
was that I wasn't on so many *other* mailing lists at the same time.)


> The experiment will be over in a few weeks.  Who's going to take over
> deciding how to run the list, and running it?

Can't we just forget any of this ever came up?  Drop the moderation, 
resubscribe the Vulis 'bot and go on as before.


> PS: Can we talk about crypto too? ...

Sorry, that would be off-topic; this list is only for discussions of
the cypherpunks moderation policy.  Maybe you could post something on
Perry's "cryptography" list though.  (:-)


-- Jeff

John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> writes:

> Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this
> month.  I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are
> conclusive.  There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today;
> 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list.  Forty people
> cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted
> to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email
> message.  Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold.

I just have to point out that you are ignoring some important factors
(though I do trust your intentions and believe it is unintentional).
I initially tried subscribing to all the lists, but the headers of the
edited and unedited lists were identical making it impossible to sort
the mail.  To make matters worse, some messages seem to have gone out
only to the edited list, and not to the unedited (particularly at the
beginning), so that, unable to come up with a decent filtering scheme
easily, I finally gave up and just subscribed to cypherpunks.

In general, unsubscribing and resubscribing to a mailing list is not
completely trivial.  In addition to the particulars of cypherpunks,
there are also the issues of what if your E-mail address depends on
the machine you send mail from and your unsubscribe request gets
delayed for confirmation.  What if the new list no longer works
properly with your mail filter and you end up with 1,000 pieces of
cypherpunks mail in your main mailbox, etc.  These are not
insurmountable obstacles, but they certainly provide a strong enough
disincentive for people to switching their list subscriptions that I
think the numbers you list above are meaningless.

Perhaps a better comparison would be to look at how many people
subscribe to the other two filtered cypherpunks lists.

> Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is
> now suggesting.

Well, you don't appreciate the content of the list, and you seem to
feel that many members of the list don't appreciate what you are
doing.  Why not shut the list down?  I can think of one reason:
cypherpunks seems to suck in a lot of crap, and might be keeping that
crap away from the coderpunks list.  Other than that, though, I think
killing this list would probably be a good idea.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

on or about 970204:0312 Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com> said:

+   Are mailing lists an example of "public goods" where private 
+   ownership is impossible, or should be avoided? ...

        yes, there is a requirement, even in a libertarian society, let 
    alone an anarchic society, for cooperation in the *commonweal[th]*.

        in otherwords, is there even such a social state as true 
    anarchy? (given the residents of planet earth, I doubt it.)

+   Is the desire for an anarchic community at odds with a desire for 
+   good use of resources?

        the individual desire for anarchy must exclude common human 
    "pride" and greed. true anarchy is poorly defined and understood by 
    most advocates.  

        the absolute need for common resources negates anarchy in the 
    popularly defined "description" of anarchy, solely because the 
    issue of community "responsibility" is in opposition to the 
    perceived: 'I can do anything I want.'

        In a "popular" anarchy, Jim Bell's assassination politics make
    perfectly good sense; but, a "popular" anarchy is not an _anarchy_.

on or about 970204:0621 John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> said:

+   In an anarchy, *everyone* is responsible; 
+     nothing is "somebody else's job". 

        Bingo! John's statement is the absolute bottom line!

        e.g.-  if you are walking down the street with thousands of 
    other people and you see a piece of trash (which obviously was 
    tossed by an obviously imperfect anarchist), _you_ pick the trash 
    up and place it in a waste container.  _you_ -not someone else who     
    is shirking _their_ common responsibility.

        anarchy is _not_ living on a desert island surrounded by piles 
    of McDonald's wrappers and empty coke cans. that is an individual 
    who elected to "escape" both society and {him,her}self.

        anarchy is only possible in an ideal world where _everyone_ 
    assumes not only responsibility for themselves, but for the common 
    good.  no malice, no greed, no need for assassination politics....

        John's quote from Booker T. is precisely the point:

            ...now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom 
            was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it.

    or maybe Bobbie McGee: "freedom is just nothing else to lose..."
    (BTW, written by a Rhodes Scholar)

    --
    attila out (for the moment)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3i
Charset: latin1
Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be

iQCVAwUBMvfD1b04kQrCC2kFAQGCRAP/TFNkLEtSKhEzksBCeT4r1pfZnIgwHkZz
QtlfSo8dKcQMBXJcdfJ58dklisFrolyLApcEYFO5E+v6XPH+SFe+DOOoMgGNfj1v
3qnL49ol2s34ioaJG3BFqy6JOJmL7eom0PleQrGWzko8mGM99dRBVgCRCLZMmWk8
4Uaqs5Ztkbw=
=112P
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----