End of the line for Ireland's dotcom star

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 5:48 PM -0700 9/24/03, someone wrote: 

>>The mystification of identity is a hallmark of any hierarchical
>>society. 
>
>Is this quote original with you? I like it enough that I want to
>keep it around. I see you and others used similar variations before
>in c'punks postings. 

Yes. It's mine. The whole thing is original as of this afternoon, in
fact. Though the first part is probably 5 years old or so. Besides,
we've all been grabbing the same elephant, and repeating our stories
about it for so long, it all sounds familiar at this point. 


I came up with the "mystification of identity" bit while talking to
Carl Ellison and Perry Metzger in the lobby of a Usenix(?) conference
in Boston's theater district in 1997 (or '98) that Dan Geer got me to
do a luncheon speech for. (My theme was "DES is DED", if I remember
correctly, thanks to Mssrs. Gilmore and Kocher, which should date it
rather closely.) 

So, out in the hotel lobby, I'd talked about obeying all the laws and
still doing what we wanted because the law, and the rest of society,
was a "lagging" indicator anyway, and if we invented something useful
and effective it would have to make accommodations for progress. Carl
said something about how with the advent of decent projectile
weaponry, a peasant could kill a knight, confess in church, and kill
another knight the next week, "divine" rights of the aristocracy or
no. I thought about magicians needing true names to have power over
something, and popped off with "mystification of identity", which got
grins all around.

The "hallmark of a hierarchical society" bit I just though of today
because I've been plinking) at this book on bearer financial
cryptography and underwriting (kind of, don't hold your breath) I
want to do, and my hierarchy/geodesic riff is pretty much the central
thesis. Book entries are hierarchical, bearer certificates are
geodesic, we've created a geodesic network, and our hierarchical
organizational/social/political structures are (d)evolving into
geodesic ones along with it. Or at least that's my story, and I'm
sticking to it. :-).

The actual "Moore's Law creates a geodesic network" bit, of course,
comes from Peter Huber, though I'm not sure whether he thought it up
or someone else did. 

*That* kind of stuff I've been saying on cypherpunks just about since
I got there in 1994. That and bearer transactions, of course, though
apparently, Nick Szabo says someplace I osmotically appropriated it
from him, which I can't argue with, since I was on the same lists he
was on at the time, and, of course, most of what I "know" about this
stuff is just other people's stuff bolted together with the
occasional bon mot like the above. On the net, like any other serious
collegial setting, it's hard to know where your stuff starts and
others end. Nobody knows you're a dog, whatever.

Or, like the Robert Woodruff quote Ben Laurie's .sig says: "There is
no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind
who gets the credit."

Which, in my case, goes both ways, I suppose.

"A good artist borrows. A great artist steals," as Picasso liked to
say.

Invention is the mother of necessity?

Okay, I'll quit with the not-so-bon mots now. 

Besides, whaddya expect from public education and a state-school
philosophy major, wisdom, or something? 

:-)

Cheers,
RAH


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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