http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/251-300/00283_geeks_and_spooks.html I think the funniest part I've found so far is: That is the ISLANDS IN THE NET scenario: where the sinister digital underground takes over some penny-ante country like Grenada, and we make every form of piracy locally legal there, and then we just run up our black skull-and-crossbones on the website, and we start selling WINDOWS for nine dollars ninety-five cents. We'll encrypt every bit of data going in and out, so nobody will even know what we're up to! We'll have these key-sharing digital networks of trust, where all the cool people will have our crypto power-handshake, and it'll be like it was when we were selling pot to each other in the dorm in Berkeley, only, like, on a cosmic scale. And this is where it just starts to get good, because we rebel crypto-fiends will be exchanging messages, and conducting all kinds of business, and negotiating electronic contracts, with people we don't even know and who we're even never gonna know. If we need a hundred kilos of black tar opium, we just hit the F1 function key, and some guy from Sinaloa or Medellin or the Northern Alliance, whom we know only as QX5773 at blacknet dot org, he accepts our anonymous electronic funny money, and he ships the drugs to us to a dead drop in a giant freight container, along with some illegal refugees, and some pirated Gucci handbags, and all the stolen UNIX code we can eat! It's crypto paradise! For we have created a totally liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures: books, movies, computer games, trade secrets, government secrets, business software; it'll all be sucked down into the black hole of the churning crypto mill, and the State will wither away. Wow! That said, he actually has some good things to say and it is an interesting read. toby
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