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The Ralph Reed-Redmond connection
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[04/12/00]

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[04/07/00]

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His moment comes during the discussion following the dinner speech on Wednesday night. Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes.

After the speech, Zimmermann puts up his hand, and of course Stephenson calls on him. It's clear Zimmermann has "gotten" the speech. He doesn't go so far as to endorse anything like "social structures," communities of trust, neighborhoods of understanding -- no, of course not. Zimmermann has been staunchly against laws, rules, regulations: anything that could be considered a form of social coercion. But he does admit that perhaps code is not enough, that he never intended encryption, by itself, to work. "I never meant PGP to be the defense of a lone libertarian," he says.

It is a huge admission, in its way, from a programmer who has championed code as a way to save us. But if this libertarian is not "lone," he is with some other libertarians, presumably. And what are these more-than-one libertarians doing? Organizing? Petitioning their government? Creating zones of social trust? Zimmermann is a man who defines the word "loner"; he has a tight manner; one doesn't imagine he's spent a lot of time working on his empathy or inner doubts. He probably doesn't even let himself realize the implications of what he's just said.

"Let the record show," Stephenson says carefully in reply, "I never said the word 'libertarian.'"

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Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, will indeed say the word "libertarian." He will say it on Thursday night, when he is the recipient of an EFF Pioneer Award, given every year "to honor significant contributions to the advancement of rights and responsibilities in the Information Society."

Berners-Lee can't be there, but he has sent a videotape with his thanks. He feels honored, is genuinely grateful.

And then he looks less happy. Berners-Lee starts thinking about what has happened to the Web since he dreamed it up: e-commerce, big corporations, money. "Libertarians are used to fighting the government," he says, "and not corporations ..."

This must be very difficult for him to say. For the libertarians in the audience to hear that business and free markets may not be the bringers of unalloyed good ... To imagine that a business is something to be fought, not respected ... No. Better to go off, leave the thought, don't say anything more.

But he can't somehow. Another unhappy thought comes: "I know we don't like regulation where we can avoid it, but ..."

And there he surely must stop. Bad enough to imagine fighting a corporation, but to do it with regulations? Regulations, meaning laws, meaning government? He has crossed into libertarian anathema.

Why has this techno-hero raised the specter of libertarianism? Theoretically, Berners-Lee personifies the "lone genius" technology ideal: While working as a consultant at CERN, he went off by himself, just for his own amusement, and coded up what we now call hypertext. Theoretically, he has every right to believe that somebody else will go off alone, just for his or her own amusement, and solve the problem of corporate control of the Web.

But it seems he has recognized a changed world, where neither he nor some other programmer can do it alone. "We have to make sure that when people go to the Internet, they get the Internet," he says, meaning the real Net, the true one, the original -- whatever that might mean to him, or us. Somehow, even if it means laws and rules and governments, we must find our way back to this idyll. We must route around the new bad corporate Net, or create a superset of it, or an alternative. Or something.

Next page | Crypto pioneer Whitfield Diffie sees the light about librarians and labor organizing