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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]