Cypherpunks: From Jim Bell to Snowden

Once upon a time, the topic of cypherpunk (or crypto-anarchism, to use a more formal term) was the most technologically advanced and daring form of protest in an era when the internet was just beginning to influence the lives of average city dwellers. Unlike many popular views and hopes of that time, this philosophy had very practical goals, closely tied to personal and public safety.

These people even made it onto Wikipedia:

Cypherpunks are an informal group of people interested in preserving anonymity and cryptography. Originally, cypherpunks communicated through a network of anonymous remailers. The group’s goal was to achieve anonymity and security through the active use of cryptography.

They worked on broad concepts of internet existentialism and, arguably, laid the foundation not only for our modern understanding of anonymizers and Tor, but also for hacker movements, online activism, and independent journalism like WikiLeaks. Incidentally, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange openly identifies as a cypherpunk.

At their peak, the network of crypto-anarchists discussed public policy regarding cryptography alongside practical conversations about mathematics, computing, technology, and cryptography. No one knew what any particular community member did in real life, but everyone understood: in the growing race to control the population online, you had to defend your rights yourself, using encryption technologies for the benefit of future generations.

“Trust, but verify”: The unique ideology of cypherpunks found practical application in purely mathematical principles of “trust verification,” which are still used today, for example, in blockchain technology so beloved by the head of Sberbank. In fact, every well-known cryptocurrency today, starting with the famous Bitcoin, is the brainchild of programmers and engineers who considered themselves part of this movement.

Know your heroes. Anonymously.

Password: cypherpunks01

Chasing after the latest gadgets flooding the modern high-tech market, we’ve stopped seeing them as a threat to our privacy. The “Internet of Things,” which flickered on the horizon at the end of the last century, occasionally worried futurists and tech prophets. But once it invaded and replaced our comfort zone, feeding human laziness and offering a helping hand to every little cog in the system, those worries faded into the background, left only to quirky guardians of anonymity and cybersecurity. That was a mistake.

News stories like “a corporation’s high-tech factory and its ultra-secure internal network were hacked through a lobby coffee maker” are already becoming part of our reality, no matter how much we deny these incidents or justify the invasion of our privacy by ever-present household tech spies. After all, they already know everything about us, right?

Back in the 1990s, cypherpunks warned us, the people of the 20XXs: privacy and anonymity are eroding, with important pieces constantly being cut away and replaced by what would later be called Web 2.0, paving the way for an absolute information society where everyone has access to the smallest details of everyone else’s life—down to flesh, feelings, and thoughts.

Now imagine this picture with the addition of neuro-computer interfaces and control chips. Ray Kurzweil promises this by 2030, and some say even sooner.

“Our children already live more public lives than we do.”

Cypherpunk as a Way of Life

Who are these people who see anonymity as an inalienable human right? In my 2012 book “Enigmania,” I described the image that emerged from the discourse of the late 1990s and was polished by the end of the 2000s.

Drawing parallels with the evolution of the cyberpunk genre, one could say that crypto-anarchism also underwent a kind of “quantum leap.” The typical early cypherpunk was a passionate activist, feeling responsible for the future of internet communications and the rise of Big Brother methods thanks to cheaper surveillance, data storage, interception, and analysis technologies. Think of a young Snowden at a phone company, understanding how switching works and what it means to transmit data through the fiber-optic veins of virtual subreality. There was a sense of anticipation for great upheavals and a feeling of being part of something grand—the building of the future. People dreamed of the prosperity technocracy would bring, but also of the dangers: a dissected society of hamsters with omnipresent life-loggers, imposing the sticky consciousness of a prisoner constantly under the control of faceless, ruthless overseers anywhere in the world.

The modern cypherpunk is more like an undercover agent, increasingly taking a defensive stance. Many aspects of public control that seemed nearly impossible yesterday are already somewhat outdated today. What will happen tomorrow when neural networks get involved? Thanks to a few brave whistleblowers, even users far removed from the world of anonymizers are now frantically editing their personal data on social networks—the very platforms they entrusted with everything about themselves. Clumsy political interference only spurs the inattentive into action.

Alexander Bard, in one of his books, coined a great term to describe the mindset of the Internet generation after the death of subcultures: “divids”—conscious schizophrenics, constantly searching for a new “mask” to reflect their unrealized desires and hopes in online worlds. This phenomenon shocks older generations, who were taught the opposite: complete consistency of names, faces, and personal characteristics in all documents and social networks. Today, even schoolchildren realize that the more disconnected fragments of identity a person can maintain online, the more successful they are.

In a way, the fight to remain anonymous in these worlds is noble and could be seen as an attempt to absolutize the social value shift observed by Bard. The ability to cut the strings connecting a rigid, still-hard-to-change body and its many virtual “operating systems”—strings already used by IT corporations for covert surveillance and targeted marketing—is increasingly important.

But behind the crypto-anarchist movement lies another important idea: uniting all these conscious schizophrenics of the new society into something unified, communally solidary, yet still retaining the traits of European individualism. Shared “public” accounts for one-time use with identical logins and passwords, remailers transmitting the network’s most valuable resource—inspirational ideas… This strangely resonated with the same hidden strings that once echoed the ideals of youth subcultures, some of which were almost the only way for gifted and talented potential hikikomori to socialize—a group now filling the internet.

Somewhere among these streams of ones and zeros, identifying us by name and entry point, I’m floating too.

The Point of No Return

According to cypherpunks, the danger of de-anonymization in the information society became real when interactions between people stopped being ephemeral. Just read the “Cypherpunk Manifesto” from twenty years ago to see that almost everything has come true—surveillance of “every car,” Big Data, highly efficient analysis of massive data sets thanks to AI, and an unprecedented drop in the cost of memory storage.

Even if you live an extremely cautious lifestyle, sooner or later you’ll end up in someone’s camera lens, automatically uploading its informational debris to social networks, from which machines can easily extract your personal data. Even your mood, based on your facial expression, can be analyzed in percentages—free, no SMS or registration required.

And yet, this struggle still matters today, when drones with 4K cameras fly overhead, hungry for digital content in the form of new likes and followers, and tomorrow, when refusing to be identified by these drones could become a state crime. If, of course, the controlling groups still have the nerve to call themselves “states.”

“The country of victorious cyberpunk” is a more fitting name than ever. To push through any restriction or empower any supervisory body at the legislative level, you just need to create a society that won’t protest or defend its rights. We didn’t even notice how closely technological capabilities became tied to political actions. This is exactly what the old manifestos and cyber-visionary prophecies warned us about: we don’t need a New World Order society where censorship and control dictate our behavior. We don’t need to feel the silent presence of the state in bed with our loved ones. We don’t need targeted ads eavesdropping on our conversations through locked mobile phones.

Unfortunately, as in the past—which now seems primitive to us—the true scale of the problem only becomes clear to the masses when it’s already too late. Although, by that time, the possibilities of cyber-dreams and the bandwidth of neuro-computer interfaces may be so sweet and tempting that there won’t be anyone left who even wants to venture into that dangerous and unfriendly place called “offline.”