A world where the tools of prying are transformed into the instruments of privacy. There is only one way this vision will materialize, and that is by widespread use of cryptography. Is this technologically possible? Definitely.
The obstacles are political.
Money is political, and that’s the starting point of economics, but, if our money and infrastructure is not private, we can’t be political…
Many of the unjust authorities in our present age (and past ages) originate from the interests of religious, corporate and political institutions; the interests of these institutions most often place a premium on money, power and influence rather than humans, common freedoms and our planet.
These interests are most often representative of financial equity that dwarf our own: in comparing the financial/material resources of a great percentage of Earth’s population to the corporate/political/religious factions ruining this world, the great majority of us are low life.
However, the unjust authorities of our world must live, act, plot, scheme and hoard their wealth in a high tech, highly digitized world that cyberpunks can rule, contest, change or pervade.
Technologies such as wireless internet, 4G/5G, IoT devices and Bluetooth mean the computerized world has (and continues to) spread. Almost anywhere you go, from the trivial to the critical, the machinery that supports human civilization grows ever more dependent on the resources of an every growing, digital phantom space.
Right now, knowledge is paramount to manipulating this digital phantom space that the world (and ruinous authorities) depend on.
Thanks to the Internet, the means to understand, and thus, mend, bend, break and create within this space are readily available. You may become adept regardless of who or what you are, and many of the contemporary masters of this space rose from the outcasts, the poor and the disenfranchised.
On so many levels that will be discussed in greater detail, skill in digital disciplines is now a form of liberation and the great equalizer of the common majority.
Those of us living low life high tech have an advantage that no community amongst the common populace is likely to have ever had.
If necessary, we can force positive change and awareness for the benefit of the great majority, as the ability to manipulate the digital spaces are largely a labor of interest and passion leading to skillfulness.
Current day, intelligence agencies enforce the interests of unjust authority through unethical, illegal means that are hugely ineffective at “defeating terror”, but are fantastic at terrorizing the populace.
For this they mangle the constitutional principals they are sworn to protect to pieces, ravaging the basic freedoms of the citizens they are sworn to protect.
Yet the 14 eyes intelligence machine is a continual failure in stopping the mass shootings becoming ever more commonplace; however, it is incredibly effective where social/political critics, dissidents, activists, or journalists are concerned.
Every person who gains competence in a digital discipline now has the potential to become a means to improve the world.
While they should never be spoon fed, encouragement and aid could be an investment in bettering your own world.
Whereas elitist attitudes may have been common in places that are the confines of these disciplines, this snobbery is bullshit we and the wider world can no longer afford.
It seems that despite protests and the petitions, Net Neutrality is destined to die; yet again, the detriment of the great majority serves to benefit the few.
How long before wealth can purchase or manufacture the means to dominate this space beyond our individual or combined abilities?
But how long before these authorities can wield some automated terror that nullifies one of the few remaining advantages of the populace?
Knowledge has carried our species through the ages; cooperation and communication have served as a multiplier that potentiates knowledge, hastening the growth of understanding and new knowledge.
An evolution of knowledge spurred by freedoms of cooperation and communication among the great majority of this planet must meet the challenges of tomorrow if we are to protec ourselves.
An infrastructure that allows fast, free cooperation, communication and transfer of knowledge from all corners of our world must be protected, supported, improved and encouraged if we are to survive, let alone thrive.
Currently, the Internet is the paramount frontier.
Whether through more traditional use of its resources or any future privacy/anonymity projects {ping coded} that may evolve from them, the Internet represents a communications infrastructure with a incredible degree of pliable, programmable resources already in place.
And these resources can allow an oppressed population to hold congress in any manner of ways, thus allowing a system of communication to be unpredictable with a minimum of development time/preparation.
Also, while the Internet has become a staple resource of the public at large, a huge percentage of the general populace are not fully aware of the extent in which their freedoms are at risk.
Regardless of any groups best wishes for common majority, any movement against an oppressive authority must also fight a war against that authority for the minds and hearts of the general populace.
The empathy, outrage and awareness of the general population (and a tyrannical institution’s fear of losing control of the general population) is often the best means to curtail outright and blatant trespasses of an unjust authority.
A Cyberpunk movement could change the world, and it has in the past; many defining events in the history of computer science involve the classical elements of Cyberpunk: individuals with minimal financial/material resources utilize their wits and innovations in the technology of their age to effect change in defiance of, or with little regard for, authority.
Throughout the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, The Cypherpunk movement clashed with the United States government in what has come to be called The Crypto Wars.
Among the issues the Cypherpunk Movement had with the United States government were federal interests/attempts to weaken and restrict strong cryptographic/encryption technologies.
Then there was the Clipper Chip: An NSA built, backdoored communications chipset that would have allowed federal employees to eavesdrop on telephone communications via key escrow.
The United States government had meant for the Clipper Chip to be ubiquitous in the telecommunications industry by giving the chip the capacity to encode (and decode) communications…
By 1995 the Cypherpunks were on their way to winning the most decisive battle of The Crypto Wars: in Bernstein v. United States, legal representation provided by the EFF aided one of the Cryptopunks own (djb, also known as Daniel J. Bernstein)in suing The United States over federal laws governing cryptography.
In 1995, Bernstein (djb) had wanted to release a research paper and source code associated with his Shuffle encryption system. At that time, US federal law placed cryptography on The United States Munitions List (alongside grenades, mortars and flamethrowers) which also made exporting crypto outside of the country (or releasing the source code of cryptographic programs) illegal without an export license from the US State Department (as a munition, management of crypto was the State Department’s responsibility).
In 1999 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had heard the case and ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment; US regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional, forcing the United States to gradually relax laws governing crypto until they finally met the legal standards of today in 2003.
For fighting and winning the battle for the freedoms of cryptography, the world owes the Cypherpunks (especially the founding fathers of the movement: Eric Hughes, Timothy C. May and John Gilmore) of the 1990s a huge debt.
The Cypherpunk have already designed the strategies for successful dissidence; they include acts of civil disobedience (example: Vince Cate’s international arms dealer webpage), widespread discussion and mailing lists across numerous specialized mail servers and innovation.
Innovation may have been the most important part of that dissidence; many privacy/anonymity, encryption and cryptography technologies were created or had their start with The Cypherpunks during The Crypto Wars.
As Jon Gilmore stated:
“We are literally in a race between our ability to build and deploy technology, and their ability to build and deploy laws and treaties. Neither side is likely to back down or wise up until it has definitively lost the race."
And Eric Hughes:
“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. … We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy … We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. … Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and … we’re going to write it.”
While techno-activism is huge in countering unjust authority and should be a huge part of a Cyberpunk Movement, there shouldn’t be any one path toward improving the lives of the populace.
Cyberpunk is about being lowlife and using high tech to create positive change; it is a movement about saving the little guy and fucking up the gears that have sent everything to shit.
The individual citizen should be empowered to defend their own digital existence.
Even a non-technical person can learn enough about cryptography, cybersecurity and privacy/anonymity programs to much improve their resistance against corporate/government spying/data collection online.
For the citizen concerned with self-defense/self-preservation, learning/applying cybersecurity basics are now just as relevant as training with the fists or firearm.
If an operation gives the populace a means to keep their digital existence safer, or better guard their privacy from exploitation by nations, an ISP or phishing, than that is techno-activism in the tradition of Cyberpunk as a movement;
If an operation aids someone in becoming a bit more informed about the boons of cryptography or cybersecurity, or if they learn something of the real costs of metadata or privatization/corporate overlording of the internet, then this is Cyberpunk techno-activism.
Even if an operation does not directly target an authority abusing power or influence, if the operation is effective in creating or changing a single person’s awareness, than that is a blow against all unjust authority.
Cryptocurrencies play a major role in the global financial ecosystem. Their presence across different geopolitical corridors, including in repressive regimes, has been one of their striking features. We can leverage this feature for bootstrapping Attac{less} communications.
At the bottom of it, information theory is really thermodynamics, and you don't get a free meal in terms of energy.
Information is energy, so by obtaining it, there will always be expenditure. In any network, that expenditure is bandwidth (which is, again, energy). Without anonymity, governments can use communication networks to track and persecute users.
A key challenge for decentralized networks is that of resource allocation and control. Network resources must be shared in a manner that deprioritizes unwanted traffic and abusive users.
This task is typically addressed through reputation systems that conflict with anonymity.
But they don’t have to.
In the Cyberpunk movement there is always a place for Cyberpunk media of all type(literature, movies, anime, manga, etc.); these resources are the fables, realities, prophecies and mythology of this community.
Science fiction has had an incredible effect on the course of Science, especially rigid disciplines such as the various branches of Physics.
Cyberpunk has had the same effect on many facets of computer science (especially hacking and cybersecurity)in a similar way.
Even the basic application of cybersecurity skillsets involved in the defacing of a website in defiance of some unethical corporate entity shares a parallel with many themes found in Cyberpunk fiction.
Cyberpunk media helps us confront the human and socio-political/socio-economic/inherent ethical issues at the heart of our interactions with technology, especially the possible implications on our individual and collective humanity.
Artists like Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Kubrick and Lucas had an effect on generations of scientists, many of whom have been among the greatest thinkers of our species.
Scientists have advanced our civilization by introducing us to miracles and horrors; in their methods and experimentation, many have drawn from the creativity and humanity of the science fiction they loved.
HG Wells is considered the “Father of Science fiction”, and his works have been cited as a pivotal inspiration in the development of many technologies.
In 1914, HG Wells book “The World Set Free” was released; in the book, HG Wells imagined a world in which scientists had unlocked the power of atomic energy and used it as a weapon of war.
In 1932, the physicist Leo Szilard read The World Set Free and became Wells inspired by Well’s vision of atomic power.
By 1933 Hitler had come to power and Szilard, a Jewish Hungarian fled to London, England; that same year, the immigrant physicist had an epiphany while waiting at a traffic light: Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction, thus realizing the manner in which humankind could tap and unleash the immense power of the atomic nucleus.
By the end of 1933, he and Enrico Fermi (an Italian-American physicist who would win The Nobel Prize in 1938, called “The architect of the Nuclear Age” and “The Architect of the Atomic Bomb”) would patent the idea of a nuclear reactor that same year.
By the end of 1939, Leon Szilard drafted the Einstein-Szilard Letter (signed by his friend Albert Einstein) warning US President Franklin Roosevelt of the potential for atomic weapons, which resulted in the Manhattan Project.
Cyberpunk has sometimes been described as an aesthetic; while aesthetics have their place, Cyberpunk being defined by an idea of aesthetic components is a disservice to the importance it could play in today’s society.
Given the realities/scope of state surveillance, any established aesthetic could also be dangerous, as it could become a means of control or quantification , while defined aesthetic is by itself unnecessary to illicit the change this world may need.
This is not Cyberpunk 2077 where everything should look cool over all else; this is Earth 2025, and if the little guy (low life) doesn’t start using technology to even the odds and build awareness (high tech) then we are likely fucked.
Wearing bomber jackets and sunglasses at night amongst rain, steamy neon-drenched cityscapes won’t be enough to save {y}our world.
Cyberpunk is now. History has its eyes on you…
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abradeux
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