Along with coordination (agreeing about what to build) and duplication (making easily copied data scarce), the cypherpunk digital bank faced a third problem: adoption, or getting enough people to start using it. The cypherpunks set out to build markets and transaction systems—and the social prototypes to go with them—that would destroy every government standing in the way of a new encrypted society. They needed experimental communities, stories of marketplaces, and myths of the future to create the societal buy-in for their envisioned systems: the Other Plane, the permanent frontier, the Xth Column, BlackNet.
“He’s shown some interest in crypto things,” Timothy May wrote of Ted Nelson, a year after Autodesk spun Xanadu off, “and talked to some of us at a recent Hackers Conference about the implications.”1 The Hackers Conference was a “network forum,” a phrase the communications scholar Fred Turner used, in his history of countercultural computing, for gatherings where separate technical communities could collaborate, find ideas in common, and discover new shared projects.2 May gave talks and distributed papers about crypto anarchy at the Conference; Walker met the key figures from Xanadu there, which led to funding Xanadu and AMIX; John Gilmore discussed cryptography; Eric Hughes spoke about digital money; Rudy Rucker, a mathematician-writer who worked for Autodesk and bylined with Jude Milhon at Mondo 2000, presented on artificial life. Programmers and electrical engineers met “legal hackers”—lawyers, often connected with the Electronic Frontier Foundation—and “prose hackers” who wrote science fiction.3 One of these prose hackers was a mathematics professor from San Diego named Vernor Vinge.
Vinge wrote about thresholds. His theme was irrevocable lines in time or space, on the other side of which things are different. He wrote about “bobbles,” fields of stasis in which time is suspended; you step into one of them and then step out, a subjective moment later, indefinitely and irrevocably far in the future. He introduced the contemporary, popular version of “the Singularity” at a NASA workshop in 1993: a series of accelerating self-reinforcing technological breakthroughs, particularly in artificial intelligence, which immediately supersede all prior models and systems. “The imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence,” he explained, would lead to a sudden, consequent cascade of further breakthroughs, “an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.… It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules.”4 It was a barrier in the history of technological development, beyond which the world would swiftly outstrip human comprehension: a borderline beyond which lay the unimaginable.
Writing about telecommunications networks in his 1981 novella True Names, he envisioned computers acting as a threshold to another world, a virtual environment called the Other Plane. The goal of the hackers who operate there is to conceal their real identities, their “true names,” to protect themselves from dangers posed by the government, gangsters, and one another. Vinge’s protagonist goes by the handle “Mr. Slippery” as he tangles with the enigmatic and possibly nonhuman entity called the Mailman. The awkward locutions in Vinge’s dialogue around the Other Plane presage decades of attempts to police the border between online and off: “He has had no notoriety in the, uh, real world as yet.”5
Folktales and myths are full of mysterious thresholds, liminal spaces, and other realms with different rules: cross over into fairyland, east of the sun and west of the moon, for a night and return centuries later. Vinge drew on that narrative style, with his computer hackers taking up an adopted language of sorcerous metaphors (as some actual hackers did in fact do). Vinge’s hacker warlocks understood that—as in fairy tales and demonology—access to the real name of another gives you power over them. This is a classic folklore element (Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale type number 500, “Name of the Helper”), but it is also the practical experience of modern-day identity attacks and “doxxing,” blackmail, and strategies of identification and disclosure taken up by and against organizations like Anonymous. In such a world, names are power.
As a theremin-voiced unknown in a chador said to StJude in that loud, smoky club in 1992: “Actually, unmasking your real identity could be the ultimate collateral—your killable, torturable body.” When the prolific and inventive cryptographer and software developer Wei Dai introduced a digital cash project called b-money in 1998, he opened his proposal with “I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy … a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.”6
Vinge’s future in True Names is lively with the possibilities of digital cryptography—with one notable omission. The Coven, Vinge’s hacker cabal, can operate online without fear of identification and the “True Death” that could result (as opposed to the symbolic death of being dumped offline), free to prank and trifle with nations, companies, mafias—and financial services, who are particularly vulnerable. Toward the end of the story, when Mr. Slippery integrates his nervous system with the global communications network, he feels the movement of money itself as part of his omniscient surveillance: “No check could be cashed without his noticing over the bank communication net.”7 In Vinge’s future, disembodied minds roam through virtual reality Tolkien landscapes and see in ultraviolet through satellite sensors, but money is still money, checks are still deposited, funds laundered through account surpluses, and banks are still banks. There is no digital cash.
One night in 1993, before a discussion about nanotechnology, May wrote a brief piece of speculative fiction himself—one that took a step beyond True Names. In the style of Edgar Allan Poe presenting a Vernean sci-fi ballooning adventure as a real newspaper story—the doughty Monck Mason crossing the Atlantic in three days, published as ASTOUNDING NEWS! in the New York Sun in 1844—May wrote a straight-faced invitation to a secret organization called BlackNet. It began: “Your name has come to our attention.”
He had been pondering the idea, and the evocative name, since that conversation about AMIX with Phillip Salin in 1987. “I played the Devil’s Advocate and explained why I thought corporate America—his main target for customers—would shun such a system.”8 An information market implies an information black market, and by the early 1990s all the technological pieces but one were in place to realize it.
May’s fantasy of such an organization filled out the details of his invitation. BlackNet’s operators would never know their users, and their users would never know them. BlackNet would make a public key available, with which messages to them could be encrypted so that only they could read it—but there was nowhere to directly send such messages. Instead, the would-be client would post the encrypted message to a newsgroup or mailing list online, using an anonymous remailer to avoid being identified as the poster. (Newsgroups were public messageboards particular to the pre-Internet system called Usenet.) The BlackNet crew would monitor a handful of such newsgroups.9 The invite requested a description of the material to be sold, the potential value, a special public key for the reply, and “your payment terms.”
When the BlackNet group spotted a message encrypted for them, they would decrypt and read it. Since it was shared in public, there would be no way to directly connect the potential clients to the BlackNet market administrators. If they were interested, the BlackNet group would respond in kind, with an encrypted message posted through anonymous remailers to a public newsgroup or mailing list—an approach Miron Cuperman called the “message pool.” (At the time, Cuperman was a computer engineering student at Simon Fraser University with an AMIX account and an interest in “immortalcybercomputinglaissezfaire”; he would go on to adapt Bitcoin technology for institutional finance.) If the encryption and anonymous remailer systems held, this system could enable an untraceable two-way channel for the business of BlackNet.
It would be like a digital version of the cryptic back-and-forth of confidential personal advertisements in Victorian and Edwardian newspapers, when a single issue of the Times of London contained a message in alphabetic cipher (“Zanoni Yboko z jo wn m?”) and another in numeric code (“30 282 5284 8 53”), both published so the writer and their intended reader could not be linked by a third party.10 In the papers the codes were generally simple prearranged substitutions—readers solved “ozye wpe ud dpp jzf wzzv le logpcefdpxpye” almost as soon as it was published in the Daily Telegraph—but BlackNet was using a public key cryptosystem that was, if properly implemented, provably unbreakable.11
All the technology, all the tools, really existed to make BlackNet a reality—all but one. “BlackNet,” May promised, “can make anonymous deposits to the bank account of your choice, where local banking laws permit, can mail cash directly (you assume the risk of theft or seizure), or can credit you in ‘CryptoCredits,’ the internal currency of BlackNet.”12 This was an idea inspired by AMIX: CryptoCredits could be saved and spent on other secret information from other users on BlackNet. The CryptoCredits were a leap into complete fantasy, like the part of another Poe balloon-hoax story where Hans Pfaall’s fairly realistic balloon takes him to the moon.
Like Vinge, like Poe’s hoaxes, like the deeper shelves of speculative and utopian literature, May’s invite to a nonexistent organization was a story about a threshold that could be crossed into another kind of space. The other space was, deliberately, nowhere—announced, as Thomas Rid put it, by “an anonymous voice out of the emptiness of cyberspace.”13 This was not the accidental nowhere of Thomas More’s Utopia, which is situated somewhere specific in the world, off a cape and in a warm current. (More’s traveler Hythloday tells us exactly where Utopia is to be found, but someone coughs and More doesn’t hear all the words.14) The “Galt’s Gulch” of libertarian fantasy from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, stashed away in the Rockies with sci-fi gadgets to camouflage its existence, is based on the real town of Ouray, Colorado. BlackNet, by contrast, is a purpose-built nonplace: the only fixed point is an address associated with its public key: “nowhere@cyberspace.nil.”
The production designer Ken Adam created the War Room in Dr. Strangelove and a string of secret bases for James Bond movies, with their shark tanks, vast cartographic displays and control panels, gantries and missiles. In conversation with Adam in 2008, the critic Christopher Frayling raised the question of what the contemporary design of a Bond-villain set would look like. It wouldn’t look like a headquarters at all, he suggested; it would be a cell phone, perhaps a briefcase—not a fixed fortress, but an access point for a pervasive invisible network. Adam’s designs are a technological fantasy of mid-twentieth-century power expressed as modernist bunkers filled with employees in jumpsuits. May’s BlackNet invitation was just such a design for the 1990s: productive of paranoia rather than megalomania, it promised a population of potential spies working not through command-and-control hierarchies but ongoing double-blind relationships sustained by computer networks, encrypted data, and anonymous digital cash.
Working out of no place in particular, using preexisting networks, without base or territory, BlackNet could flow through the infrastructure of existing institutions like rainwater trickling down inside the walls of a decaying house. BlackNet, May wrote, “considers nation-states, export laws, patent laws, national security considerations and the like to be relics of the pre-cyberspace era.”15 BlackNet operated only in the future: in a new kind of nowhere.
Though written with tongue somewhat in cheek, with in-jokes for the nanotechnology crew he was about to address, May’s BlackNet invitation persisted. Forwarded and posted to other groups, it attained a brief notoriety and a lasting resonance, reappearing during the upheaval following the “Cablegate” disclosures on WikiLeaks almost twenty years later.16 It prefigured parts of the model of Julian Assange’s plan for WikiLeaks in his paper “Conspiracy as Governance”: to create a cryptographic framework for anonymous leaking that discloses information to the public while making organizations dysfunctional by turning every employee into a potential leaker.17
The cypherpunks were at once developers and users, living in and testing out a version of the future they anticipated—projecting themselves forward. Their mailing list itself was a prototype: not of a mailing list alone but of cypherpunk practices, including digital cash. The regulars on the list saw the flakiness of their own platform as something that had to be resolved for digital cash to be viable: a distant early warning signal about robust hardware. So were the meetings, the discussions, the games they played and scenarios they presented and fiction they wrote. The gathering of the cypherpunks was a launch apron for probes into future time. Together they could elicit, document, and explore “interesting emergent behaviors” that would arise in the future and work on the technologies themselves: “to experiment with them, see what kind of emergent behavior appears, see what kind of flaws and obstacles arise, see how they break, etc.”18
In the open source community, this has taken the form of what the science and technology scholar Chris Kelty calls “recursive publics.” Recursive publics work in constant reference to and modification of the very technologies that make them a public, hacking on the same tools by which they collectively hack. Lana Swartz has a related idea from studying cryptocurrency developers, the next step of the recursive public: “infrastructural mutualism,” groups who “value the ability to mutually build and support a collaborative platform upon which to transact, free from the prying eyes and inference of corporate intermediaries”—fertile environments for social prototypes.19
“Social prototype” is Fred Turner’s term. “These modes of gathering,” he wrote of Silicon Valley design practices, from start-up office space to Burning Man, “have technologies at their center, but they are also prototypes in their own right—of an idealized form of society.”20 Turner studied the prototyping practices of software engineering and argued that they didn’t just show off technical possibilities but pulled new groups of people together. They produced not just a thing but the kind of community that would make use of that thing. “These stakeholders can help bring the technology to market, but they also represent new social possibilities in their own right.”21 Indeed, part of Silicon Valley’s business in the early twenty-first century lay in identifying, cultivating, and packaging new kinds of societies, which happened to incorporate a product or a platform or a service: coworking and coliving, ephemeral photo messaging, holacracy, gamified fitness metric competitions, walking around in the evening looking for geotagged Pokémon creatures. The prototype builds on the past, on what is available, but it acts as a zone for modeling and performing a potential future: a kind of self-reflexive cosmogram. The space where people are working on computers was a distributed version of a neutrino-detecting bubble chamber, looking for tangible traces of intangible things, measurements of the immeasurable future.
“Cyberspace,” said John Perry Barlow, “is where you are when you’re talking on the telephone”—when you are “here” but absorbed in a somewhere-else mediated through a device. William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” as a future technological condition. (Asked about it in an interview in 1985, he said “Cyberspace is where the bank keeps your money.”22) Barlow imported the term to the present in the summer of 1990, on the very early West Coast social network the WELL—which had been created by Stewart Brand, previously seen watching people play Spacewar! Barlow was announcing the launch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a legal organization in the service of digital civil liberties. “In this silent world,” he wrote, “all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone.… It extends across that immense region of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi writer William Gibson named Cyberspace.”23 “That immense region” was the frontier of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Gibson’s cyberspace was a civic-infrastructural dreamtime dominated by megacorporations, public utilities, and (high above the grid) the remote galaxies of military systems. Barlow reimagined it as the promise of an enormous outside that was present and accessible from this world—the blank flip side of the map, open country for self-reliant homesteaders. Anywhere you could plug in a modem or get a packet radio signal, you could “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” like Huckleberry Finn. It was a crucial moment in what Fred Turner calls “one of the Internet’s founding misunderstandings”: that “the Internet was somehow a place”—and specifically an American place—rather than a set of interoperating global infrastructures.24
Part of the fantasy of this nonplace place, the network’s vast outside, lay in encrypted anonymity and the values it would produce. Tim May wrote that it would act as a “pressure relief valve: knowing one can flee or head for the frontier and not be burdened with a past.” It would cultivate a community (of sorts) that maintained the “frontier and Calvinist spirit of keeping one’s business to one’s self.”25 The program, instead of rural electrification, would be ruralizing electronic society into a lawless wide-open space, with reputations and nicknames, banditry, DIY technological self-reliance and self-defense, and sacks of untraceable money with no conventional banks in sight.
The intellectual high country was there to be claimed from the big ranchers, May said, as he read the manifesto Jude Milhon heard in Berkeley in 1992. “Just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.” In the BlackNet proposal, he put the mission in more extreme terms, citing two kinds of intellectual property that had been used to slow the spread of cryptographic technology: “Export and patent laws are often used to explicity [sic] project national power and imperialist, colonialist state fascism.”26
In 1996, Barlow published the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Written at the global power gathering in Davos, Switzerland, the prose was styled to be orated from horseback, suited to the windswept plateau of May’s open country: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.… You are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace.”27
This chain of metaphors, analogies, and references had nothing more to do with the factual history of the American West than Gibson’s cyberspace did with actual servers, telecom deals, or web browsers: they were historical fiction to complement the science fiction of near-future platforms like BlackNet. Settler frontiers, like that of westward expansion, were the product of state power, not an escape from it: made with legal frameworks and military deployment, naval and mercantile shipping, maps and political promises, and investment schemes and subsidies.28 They were in the service of expanding sovereignty rather than redistributing it. Mere accuracy was not the point, however. The stories the cypherpunks told were not true, but they were not wrong, either—because their task was not to make a historical argument but to convey a feeling.
The comparison juxtaposes two very different fantasies, the Wild West and Cyberspace, made stronger by the fact that they weren’t real but rather expressed a potential future mode of being. The imagined historical “frontier” could be all the more compelling because it was being put forward in the 1990s by engineers with PhDs who went to Sunday brunch at the Thai Buddhist Temple in Berkeley to discuss cryptography before a visit to the rifle range. (Barlow was an actual rancher on the Bar Cross Ranch in Wyoming, founded by his great uncle, so he came by his high-plains-drifter ways honestly.) “A new frontier, untouchable by outside, coercive governments,” May wrote. “Vinge’s ‘True Names’ made real.”29
That the digital frontier was a fantasy made it easier to map onto a dematerialized experience they predicted, the shared outside of the bodiless network interpenetrated with everyday life. “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live,” wrote Barlow, sounding like a Gnostic prophet: “Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.”30
Who would join the wagon train of bodiless settlers heading for the frontier of everywhere and nowhere, to build their economy on digital cash? “These are the areas often pioneered by early adopters, by those motivated by risk-reward trade-offs to adopt new technologies.”31 Present rewards were needed to draw people in, and places where experimental communities could provide cover for the genesis of the kind of groups that would thrive in this future space: people who had reasons for building out an unreliable, occasionally disastrous, sometimes dangerous network of covert money and value exchange.
May dubbed the shock troops of crypto anarchy, the currency holders of digital cash, the “Xth Column.” This was a mathematical play on the term “fifth column,” for a subversive community undermining a country from within in the service of an enemy power: his saboteurs and spies were represented by a variable, working on behalf of an unknown element. To recruit people into the Xth Column, he wrote, you needed outside pressure. The demand for restricted goods like illegal drugs would provide one of the drivers: cells of dealers, customers, and administrators, dead drops, and secret arrangements for vetting quality and reputation. (Decades later, Ross Ulbricht would directly credit this idea for inspiring his darknet market, the Silk Road.) But the appetite that really interested May was for suppressed information—for valuable digital data.
The cypherpunk community—whether on board with the whole crypto anarchy project or not—were all already in the “information liberation” business because their shared area of interest and research was heavily classified and policed. Gilmore, who started the mailing list, devoted himself to library research and Freedom of Information Act requests to declassify, digitize, and share the work of the cryptographer and cryptanalyst couple Elizebeth and William Friedman and the work of Ralph Merkle—last seen in this book as a Berkeley undergraduate working on cryptography in the 1970s, whose study of hashing systems would one day undergird Bitcoin. Relevant papers published in specialized academic journals had to be borrowed and photographed or scanned or, if it came to it, typed out by hand to share on the network.
“Cypherpunks write code,” said Eric Hughes, and they did so with the mind-set of people who knew about the history of secretly vulnerable cryptographic products being released without public review. They had the shared background, too, of Unix hackers who had circulated multigenerational photocopies of guides to the proprietary operating system, and phone phreaks writing out the lists of control tones published in Bell Telephone technical journals. Many of the cypherpunks were closely involved in the free/open source software movement, which took as a fundamental aim that software must necessarily be open—available for review, study, sharing, debugging, and improvement—and free: “as in ‘free speech,’ ” as Richard Stallman’s remark put it, “a matter of liberty, not price.”32 (In 1997, when May was speaking at digital privacy conferences about the importance of untraceable transactions, Stallman published a sci-fi story, “The Road to Tycho,” set in a dystopian society where the act of reading someone else’s book is theft, easily detected since all books are digital.)
There were other audiences for covert information: the overseas researcher without access to major libraries or publications, or the broker looking to engage in insider trading. The cheating student (“Back Issues of Tests and Libraries of Term Papers—already extant,” wrote May, “but imagine with an AMIX-like frontend?”). Lenders looking for illegal credit reports, insurers for health records, employers for criminal histories. Employees, quitting or fired, building a golden parachute from filched data and violations of NDAs. People interested in the how-to for overclocking a computer, growing hydroponic weed or producing methamphetamine, making free long-distance calls or fixing a refrigerator with a warranty-violating modification. Every cinephile was a potential recruit, every gamer, fan-subbing anime devotee, collector of old comics or reader of out-of-print books, every crate-digging record collector, jazz aficionado, bootleg-swapping curator of the Grateful Dead, every opera cultist (to whose illegal phonograph recordings we owe the only documentation of many early live performances)—to say nothing of pornographers and their customers.
Political activists, dissidents, leakers, and whistle-blowers were a natural fit, needing both access to suppressed information and the means to communicate secretly. Early anonymous online remailers saw their heaviest use by ex-Scientologists and anti–Church of Scientology activists swapping documents from the higher levels of thetan-hood. A landmark raid on an anonymizing Usenet system in Finland, anon.penet.fi, was conducted by Interpol at the behest of the Church seeking the identity of a particular leaker. The Finnish Internet technologist Johan Helsingius, who ran the remailer, warned at the outset of his project: “Well, if the police or the local Secret Service comes knocking at my door, with a court order to hand over the database, I might comply.”33 But what was the alternative?
“Short of having everyone run a public-key cryptosystem such as PGP,” he warned, “there is no way to protect users from malicious administrators.”34 PGP stood for “pretty good privacy,” software for encrypting and signing messages. It had been created in the context of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, whose members were often under domestic surveillance. Helsingius’s advice sounded like an argument in favor of “everyone” adopting just such a system—laying the groundwork for crypto anarchy through political protest. The cypherpunk technology entrepreneur Sameer Parekh, who would work on digital cash and financial cryptography, got his start transcribing Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience into an Apple IIGS as a high school student in Illinois in 1991, digitizing a landmark in the history of American dissidence to share online. (To this day, stumbling across a copy of Thoreau’s essay online you might find a note at the end: “Typed by Sameer Parekh.”) He turns up later on in this book at the launch of an offshore data haven on a theoretically sovereign gun emplacement in the North Sea.
All of these groups also had commonsense reasons to need something like a digital cash transaction system. Drug dealers, pornographers, piratical file sharers, and retailers of secret or illegal knowledge and their customers and supporters all needed tools for surreptitious commerce. Activists and dissidents needed ways to support the tools that made their work possible, and to take care of each other when circumstances turned against them. These concerns were not theoretical, as events in the years since have shown, from credit card companies blocking donations to WikiLeaks, to payment processors and donor platforms like PayPal and Patreon freezing the assets and blocking the transactions of “adult content” and sex workers.
There was one other community whose need for secret knowledge and digital cash was less apparent but would become more consequential—the immortalists. May discussed them at length: the students of bootleg medical research, seeking personal posthumanity, who were devoted to hoarding, sharing, and putting into practice life-extension and anti-aging techniques. Such a group would seek anonymous reputational systems for publishing forbidden scientific results and studies, and tools for rating secret clinics. They would need marketplaces for experimental pharmacology, offshore medical tourism, and support communities for illegal or unproven practices.
This community would require specialized financial tools: bizarre insurance schemes, investment tontines for groups whose members expected to either perish experimentally or live for centuries, and wills, investments, and the set-aside asset vehicles for people preparing for a temporary “metabolic coma”—that is, cryonically frozen to be revived in the future. They would need forms of money that could fund their experiments and bodily preservation, and enable savings, transactions, and payouts over the long, long term.
May’s description of them was partially fictional, but this contemporary group did in fact exist; the experimental money they planned and designed would be a step toward living forever. But digital cash still faced a set of fundamental problems that had not yet been overcome.