Prolegomena to Any Future Historiography of the Cypherpunk Movement

Preface

On March 2, 2020, the journal Internet Histories published to its online first section the essay “Against technocratic authoritarianism: A short intellectual history of the cypherpunk movement” by Enrico Beltramini. The essay later appeared in Internet Histories Vol. 5, No. 2 (2021). This article was perhaps the first academic attempt at analyzing the history of the cypherpunk movement—and its fails miserably. Beltramini’s treatment of the cypherpunks is replete with unsubstantiated claims, plagiarized passages, and utterly nonsensical jargon, but the paper somehow passed “peer review.” The problem is that academic research on the cypherpunks remains completely under-specialized. Few academics even know about the cypherpunks, let alone actually study the movement rigorously. So when a few academics want to write about the cypherpunks and publish their work in academic journals, there are no peers available to review the work. Thus, at this stage, academics who write about the cypherpunks can pretty much say anything they want, no matter how insipid or incorrect. Beltramini’s essay demonstrates this fact.

Introduction

The cypherpunk movement, a loosely organized group of computer specialists and technology enthusiasts who advocate for the widespread use of digital cryptography, formed in 1992 in response to attempts on the part of the United States government to exert monopoly control over the use of encryption. The basic concern of the movement was that communication infrastructures had changed so rapidly during the second half of the twentieth century that personal privacy in communications and economic transactions faced an existential threat.1 Because digital information systems automatically revealed everything about the parties involved in a given communication or transaction, governments would be able to monitor citizen behavior to an unprecedented extent. For the cypherpunks, however, encryption made privacy possible in the emerging digital age, for it allowed individuals to protect their communications and transactions using mathematical laws.2

In the recent article “Against Technocratic Authoritarianism: A Short Intellectual History of the Cypherpunk Movement,” Enrico Beltramini provides what is among the first scholarly histories of the cypherpunks. Though the cypherpunk movement itself emerged in the early 1990s, Beltramini argues that they were the cultural heirs to the 1960s counterculture and the 1980s punk subculture. Focusing in on the cypherpunks’ origins in the San Francisco Bay Area, Beltramini traces a thread from the student protests and the free speech movement at University of California, Berkeley, through the underground puck rock scene, and to the cryptography specialists who founded the cypherpunks, a group he refers to as “perhaps the single most effective grassroots organization in history dedicated to protecting freedom in cyberspace.”3 Despite the differences between these various movements and historical periods, Beltramini draws on Theodore Roszak’s famous 1969 work The Making of a Counterculture to argue that they all shared a fear of and opposition to “technocracy.” From Beltramini’s perspective, the counterculture, the punks, and the cypherpunks—each in their own way—worried that the modern values of freedom, privacy, and individuality were being undermined in the transition to a post-industrial society in which bureaucracies rule and in which digital communication networks enabled governments and corporations to track and monitor every individual’s thoughts, speech, and behavior. In attempts to resist the development of an “Orwellian dystopia,” each of these movements reasserted their commitment to cherished modern values. Distinctively, the cypherpunks did so using mathematics, for digital cryptography promised to protect individuality, privacy, and free speech whether or not governments and corporations liked it. Acknowledging the anarchistic tendencies of the cypherpunks, Beltramini concludes that “one reason that anarchy became a relevant topic in the cyberspace arena is that cypherpunks detected a change in the nature of government, so that the government was no longer the expression of a democracy or of a capitalist society, but rather of a technocracy” (16).

Despite some of the possibly interesting insights and connections Beltramini offers, his “intellectual history” of the cypherpunks is deeply flawed from a historiographical perspective. The problems with Beltramini’s account begin at the very beginning: his sourcing (or lack thereof). “The current literature of the cypherpunk movement’s ideology is limited,” Beltramini states at the outset (2). “The best account” of the cypherpunk movement, he claims, “is probably the entry ‘Cyberlibertarianism’ in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication,” written by Lincoln Dahlberg.4 While I was unable to obtain a copy of the 2010 version of Dalberg’s entry cited by Beltramini, I did access an updated and expanded 2017 version, and in that version, Dalberg spends at most two paragraphs explaining the cypherpunk movement. Beltramini takes issue with Dahlberg’s apparent thesis that the cypherpunk movement was primarily politically libertarian, and thus this encyclopedia entry serves as the catalyst for Beltramini’s entire argument.

While Beltramini is correct to say that the literature on the cypherpunks is limited, it is not as limited as he makes it seem. The most striking omission from Beltramini’s sources is investigative journalist Andy Greenberg’s 2012 work This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeaks, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information. When This Machine Kills Secrets was published, it arguably became the standard account of the cypherpunk movement. As the book’s dust jacket says, “This Machine Kills Secrets is the first full account of the cypherpunks,” adding that it “definitely chronicles forty years of radical ingenuity.” One of Greenberg’s central aims is to show how Julian Assange—who has been described as “one of the most prominent exponents of cypherpunk in the world”5—largely received the intellectual inspiration for WikiLeaks from the cypherpunk subculture. To argue this, Greenberg’s work “tracks the ideals, the means, and the movement that WikiLeaks represents, extending from its predecessors decades earlier to the ideological descendants it has radically mobilized.”6

When This Machine Kills Secrets is placed in context, we can see that Greenberg’s work is not merely being hyped for marketability. Writing the year before the appearance of Greenberg’s book, Emeritus Professor and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University Robert Manne observed that “no mainstream journalist so far has grasped the critical significance of the cypherpunks movement to Assange’s intellectual development and the origin of WikiLeaks.” In a review of This Machine Kills Secrets, appearing in the New York Times Book Review, technology writer Evgeny Morozov notes that Greenberg “adopts a decidedly historical perspective and situates the ideas behind WikiLeaks in the heady debates about computing, privacy, and civil liberties that have dominated many an online conversation in the last three decades,” adding that this history stretches “from the cryptography revolution of the 1970s to WikiLeaks.”

To justify his own ostensible contribution to the literature, Beltramini asserts that the cypherpunk lineage is “vague and disputable” (2), but it is unclear how such a claim could be made while completely ignoring the (as-of-now) definitive text on the cypherpunks. Rather than vague and disputable, Greenberg’s account of the cypherpunks is exceptionally concrete and convincing, for not only does his account incorporate extensive interviews with many of the movements’ most important participants, it also successfully draws upon all the most important work on the cypherpunks preceding his own: Steven Levy’s Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age and Robert Manne’s “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary,” published in The Monthly, an Australian magazine of politics. It is impossible for any contemporary history of the cypherpunks to be taken seriously while avoiding the work of Greenberg. Beltramini’s avoidance of Greenberg is not accidental, for he cites Greenberg in another article on the cypherpunk Timothy May.7 Yet here, instead of showing how his history either expands upon or calls into question Greenberg’s account of the cypherpunks, Beltramini instead argues against two paragraphs of an encyclopedia entry.

In this essay, I offer a series of prolegomena intended to provide a foundation for future historiographies of the cypherpunk movement. On the one hand, I provide evidence and reasons for why Beltramini’s account of the movement is deeply flawed and highly mistaken. In a sense, much of my argument here constitutes a falsification of Beltramini’s two main arguments. Beltramini does not introduce any new primary source material to the historiography, and though he claims to offer a new interpretation of existing primary source material, I show that this is not true. By pointing to relevant primary and secondary sources, I reveal the debilitating limitations of Beltramini’s work.8 On the other hand, I offer two counter-theses in opposition to Beltramini’s arguments. First, while Beltramini argues that the cypherpunks are best understood as a product of Bay Area radicalism, I argue that they are best understood as a subculture inspired by cybernetics and cryptography. Second, while Beltramini argues that the cypherpunks are not all libertarians because one of the movement’s founders, Timothy May, was not libertarian, I argue that May’s undeniable libertarianism makes him an unfit example to substantiate that thesis. Instead, I show that the cypherpunks are not all libertarians by exploring the political thought of Julian Assange. Along the way, I raise a series of questions intended to chart new directions for future historical work on the cypherpunks.

My argument is motivated by two concerns. On the one hand, I care about the cypherpunk movement, both in its past and present iterations. I believe it is an important movement politically and philosophically, and for that reason it deserves rigorous historical attention. On the other hand, I am worried that Beltramini’s account will, if left unchallenged, become the standard scholarly narrative and thus mutilate the historical record, pointing other historians and students in the wrong direction. So, rather than let such scholarship distort histories of the cypherpunk movement before they have had the chance to develop in earnest, I am compelled to at least provide reasons why alternative approaches are more suitable than Beltramini’s. In doing so, however, I do not insist that the movement is beyond criticism, nor do I claim that the movement cannot be interpreted in multiple ways. Instead, I seek only to raise the level of rigor that such praise, criticism, and interpretation should meet. My approach is best summarized by an aphorism of C. Wright Mills: “I have tried to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.”9

The argument proceeds in three sections. The first section challenges Beltramini’s first argument, which claims that the cypherpunk movement is best understood as a manifestation of the San Francisco Bay Area’s long tradition of political radicalism. Combining a problematic interpretation of the San Francisco punk rock scene with a superficial political analysis pitting “technocracy” against “resistance,” Beltramini’s argument ignores the relevant primary and secondary literature and raises more questions than it answers. Because his history of Bay Area radicalism is so incredibly thin—comprised of only three sources—his account depends upon many weak connections and results in several contradictions. Drawing on the work of Andy Greenberg and Fred Turner, I argue that the cypherpunks ought to be understood as a distinct subset of a broader intellectual trend inspired by cybernetics.

The second and third sections challenge Beltramini’s second argument, which claims that the cypherpunk movement should not be understood as merely libertarian because Timothy May is not merely libertarian. To be sure, it is already well established that the cypherpunk movement is not merely a libertarian movement, and here I will provide further evidence that this is the case. However, Beltramini’s main premise for this—namely, that Tim May is not a libertarian—is false. Relying upon a false dichotomy between the thought of Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault and equating left-wing and right-wing anarchisms, Beltramini draws unsupportable conclusions about May’s unquestionably libertarian political ideology. In the second section, I show that May was indeed a lifelong committed libertarian who favored anarcho-capitalism as a social and political system. In the third section, I show that the cypherpunks were not all libertarians by turning to the works of Julian Assange, whose political thought combines intellectual eclecticism and cosmopolitanism with a critique of corporate power to provide a fundamentally non-libertarian iteration of cypherpunk thought.

Future scholarship on the history and political philosophy of the cypherpunks ought to take seriously the intellectual genealogy of American cryptographers, the relevant journalistic and scholarly accounts of hacker culture and cyberculture, and the extensive writing of all cypherpunks, including and especially Julian Assange.


Resistance or Cybernetics? Toward an Alternative History of the Cypherpunks

The first of Beltramini’s two theses about the cypherpunks is that the cypherpunks are best understood as a manifestation of Bay Area radicalism. The essay opens with the claim that the sources of cypherpunk political theory “can be recovered among the counterculture of the sixties and the punk rebellion of the eighties in the San Francisco Bay Area. These subcultures shared with the cypherpunks a line of thought that is skeptical of modernization and concerned about the emergence of technocratic authoritarianism” (1). To substantiate this claim, Beltramini relies on a mere three sources: Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, two speeches by Mario Savio (a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech movement), and Michael Foley’s Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.10 A full two-thirds of the article are spent summarizing these two books and two speeches, but the payoff is minimal at best, for all we get is a definition of the term “technocracy,” a few statements from Savio, and a conflicting account of the punk scene as both utopian and nihilistic. In this section, I review the two most important shortcomings of Beltramini’s argument, namely, his interpretation of the San Francisco punk scene and his far-too-simple “technocracy versus resistance” political mapping. Then I argue that the cypherpunks are best understood as a manifestation of one of three major intellectual trends within the history of cybernetics, the independent cryptography scene of the 1970s.

The first problem with Beltramini’s history appears in his discussion of the San Francisco punk scene. Beltramini argues that the punk scene bridges the Bay Area movements of the 1960s and the cypherpunks in the 1990s, arguing that San Francisco punk bands—including the Dead Kennedys—opposed “technocracy.” The most obvious gap in Beltramini’s use of the punk scene is that, outside of a suggesting that the punks saw the hippies as sellouts, he never demonstrates that the punks have any textual or personal connections or influences with the 60s radicals who came before them or the cypherpunks who came after them. Beltramini presents no primary sources to establish definitive connections between the three movements under discussion; his claims are not even substantiated by any quotes or examples from the band’s themselves. With the existence of songs like Dead Kennedys’ “Trust Your Mechanic,” which likens the increasingly bureaucratic and pharmaceutical-based nature of the U.S. healthcare system to automobile (read: machine) maintenance, there is a plausible argument to be made that the punks opposed technocracy. But as their lyrics attest, the Dead Kennedys’ criticisms were overwhelmingly directed at imperialistic U.S. foreign policy, the military-industrial complex, capitalistic hedonism and exploitation, the police state, and the emergence of the New Right and the Religious Right. Nevertheless, Beltramini does not even attempt such analyses. In Beltramini’s account, the only thing linking the three movements together is their shared geography. To make such an argument convincing, Beltramini would need to offer a substantial cultural history of the Bay Area, which he fails to do. Instead, his entire historical narrative rests upon one term: technocracy.

The second problem with Beltramini’s history is his mapping of the historical trends, specifically failure to distinguish between the New Left and the counterculture, lumping them together rather than attending to their relevant crucial differences. In Beltramini’s mapping, we have two camps: technocracy and those who resist technocracy. On the side of technocracy, there is the dominant Cold War culture; on the anti-technocracy side, there are the radical movements of the 1960s, specifically the New Left and the counterculture. Because he does not explain or posit any changes or modifications to technocracy, Beltramini offers us only one monolithic, transhistorical technocracy stretching four decades from the 1960s to 2000, with technocracy meeting new opposition in each decade—the 1960s radicals, the 1980s punk rockers, and the 1990s cypherpunks. But these movements share only two characteristics: (1) they all emerge in the Bay Area and (2) they all “resist” technocracy. This line of argument is circular, for it assume that they all resist technocracy in order to argue that they all resist technocracy. More importantly, this account leaves us with questions. Why did the 60s radicals seem to oppose technology as the cause of unfreedom under technocracy while the cypherpunks embrace technology as the means of freedom under technocracy? How did cryptographers even enter into this historical trajectory? Why did the punks seem to care more about politics than technology? Does the Bay Area only produce movements of resistance? If so, how to we explain the emergence of the Silicon Valley tech industry, which seems to be part of the technocracy? How do we explain the extensive, mutual connections between the counterculture and the nascent tech industry in the 1980s and 1990s? And how do we explain why the first-generation cypherpunks rejected the leftwing politics of the 60s in favor of predominantly rightwing versions of libertarianism?

Rather than accept Beltramini’s questionable claims about Bay Area radicalism and technocracy, a more fruitful historical understanding of the cypherpunks is possible if we forego dubious appeals to the San Francisco punk scene and instead acknowledge the cypherpunks’ intellectual debt to cybernetics and cryptography. The first step in pursuing this more compelling history of the cypherpunks is to rethink the relationship between the Cold War establishment, the counterculture, and the New Left. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Fred Turner argues that the New Left and the counterculture—“two somewhat overlapping but ultimately distinct movements”—differed in their approach to politics.11 The New Left believed that activism and agonistic politics were the key to social change, so the members of this movement started political organizations, such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and advanced political, economic, and social demands. The counterculture, by contrast, believed that the change would not come from political engagement but from the cultivation of a new consciousness, so the members of this movement sought to use music, art, drugs, and technology as means to achieving that new consciousness. Because this new consciousness could not be cultivated from within the confines of the existing system, the counterculture advocated “dropping out.” In philosophical terms, Turner presents the New Left as primarily materialist and the counterculture as primarily idealist.

In the late-1960s, a subset of the counterculture that Turner calls the New Communalists decided to move into the countryside of the frontier and southwest states to establish communes, and while it might seem intuitive to think the New Communalists were Luddites, they in fact dreamed of the day when computers would be part of the natural landscape. Inspired by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, many of the New Communalists went farther, claiming that computers and fiberoptic networks were seamless extensions of nature. These communalists were guided by a vision that someday a networked man-machine symbiosis would create the conditions for the new consciousness, allowing humanity to transcend itself. When this failed to happen in the frontier communes, the New Communalists made their way back into “straight” society through the emerging tech culture of Silicon Valley, where they found a thriving hacker culture building the technologies required for their own transcendence. The result was a movement of what Turner calls “cyberculturalists,” which updated the New Communalists’ cybernetic politics for the age of the personal computer and the internet.

Introducing cybernetics into the historical narrative, Turner provides a compelling map of the political landscape: those who relied on cybernetics for their worldview (the Cold War technocracy and the counterculture) and those that did not (the New Left). As Turner convincingly shows, Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics provided the intellectual basis for both the computer technology wing of the military-industrial complex and the New Communalists.12 Weiner envisioned a future in which a singular fluid system consisting of dynamic human-machine interactions would provide the technological key to human advancement. As Turner explains, this “vision of benevolent man-machine systems, of circular flows of information, would emerge as a driving force in the establishment of the military-industrial-academic complex and as a model of an alternative to that complex,” namely, the counterculture’s networked answer to oppressive hierarchy (21). Importantly, just as Beltramini knows of Greenberg’s work but consciously avoids it in his history of the cypherpunks, Beltramini is also familiar with Turner’s work, having cited it in his previous work, but seems to have knowingly left this scholarship out of his account as well.13 This omission is crucial, for Turner’s history poses an important challenge to Beltramini’s, allowing us to reconfigure, in a counterintuitive way, the intellectual and historical terrain under discussion.

While Beltramini’s overly simplistic account of Bay Area political culture leaves many questions unaddressed, Turner’s account points us in the direction of at least some answers. By noting the shared cybernetic assumptions of the military-industrial complex and the counterculture, Turner can explain why they offered two sometimes competing and sometimes complementary visions. By the 1990s, the New Communalists had spent over two decades romanticizing do-it-yourself hackers and computer hobbyists, and framed these seemingly independent technologists as, in the words of the subtitle to Steven Levy’s Hackers, heroes of the computer revolution.14 While Silicon Valley emerged from a synthesis of Defense Department funding and counterculture innovation, the New Left splintered and was largely defeated by the mid-1970s. And unlike Beltramini’s account, which lumps otherwise disparate movements under the nebulous rubric of “resistance”—a term that is never defined—Turner’s account substantiates the connection between the counterculture of the 60s and the cyberculture of the 90s by showing that specific personalities and groups were the key participants in each movement and that they continued to draw upon the same texts and express the same ideas through these three or four decades—the kind of compelling evidence that is missing entirely from Beltramini’s superficial analysis.

Turner does not address the cypherpunks themselves. In fact, given the close relationship between the cypherpunks and the cyberculturalists of the 1990s, Turner seems to almost go out of his way to avoid stretching his historical narrative in too many directions. But when the independent cryptographers of the 1960s and 70s are placed into context with the Cold War military-industrial complex and the New Communalists, we can carve out a third intellectual trajectory within the cybernetic movement and situate the cypherpunks in this historical and intellectual lineage.

In Crypto, Steven Levy traces the roots of the cypherpunk movement to the cryptographers of the 1960s and 70s, chief among whom are Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, who revolutionized cryptology.15 Cryptography, or crypto, is the ancient practice of encoding messages so they can be kept secret when sent to someone else. All militaries use crypto to keep their communications protected from enemy spying; likewise, any kid with a decoder ring has also used a version of crypto. In the United States, the government in general and the NSA in particular enjoyed a virtual monopoly on cryptography until the 1970s when people like Diffie and Hellman began publishing their revolutionary work. As Levy explains, “just about everyone in computer science back then who didn’t work for the NSA…knew almost nothing about cryptography” (168). “Unlike his peers,” Levy writes, “Diffie believed that technology should offer a sense of privacy. And unlike some of his hacker colleagues, whose greatest kick came from playing in forbidden computer playgrounds, Diffie was drawn to questions of what software could be written to ensure someone’s files could not be accessed by intruders” (10). Diffie struggled to get any of his peers interested in crypto (17).

During the early-1970s, when the New Communalists were busy moving to the countryside to establish their communes, Diffie was driving back and forth across the country meeting with everyone and anyone he could to learn more about the secrets of cryptography, secrets which the NSA was doing its very best to protect.16 Along the way, Diffie collected every text about crypto he could get his hands on, including “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems” by Claude E. Shannon, the father of information theory.17 Not only had Shannon’s work heavily influenced Weiner’s work on cybernetics, it also influenced those few cryptographers who were contemporaries of Diffie, including Horst Feistel and Walter Tuchman, whose cryptographic work at IBM would become the basis for Data Encryption Standard (DES), and Diffie’s soon-to-be partner, Martin Hellman, whose first publication covered Shannon’s work on crypto.18

In November 1976, Diffie and Hellman would publish “New Directions in Cryptography,” by introducing public key encryption to the world and causing a nightmare for the NSA. From its creation in 1952 to the mid-1990s, the NSA attempted to prevent any publications on cryptography, but in the 1970s, they lost control. The year after Diffie and Hellman’s paper appeared, Ron L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman published “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems,” introducing prime factorization into public key cryptography, now known as RSA after the protocol’s authors. The Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman paper was promoted in the August 1977 issue of Scientific American, a column that received thousands of letters in response.19 That Scientific American column would, in turn, inspire two of the most important figures in the history of cryptography: Phil Zimmerman, author of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), and Timothy May, author of the “Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto” and cofounder of the cypherpunk movement.20

Coming full circle, we can return to the dual trajectory within cybernetics observed by Turner and add a third trajectory of cryptographers and cypherpunks. Turner argues that two traditions of thought emerged from Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics: the military-industrial-academic complex and the countercultural New Communalists. But once we note the influence of Claude Shannon’s work on Weiner’s cybernetics, we can see a third tradition of thought emerge, a tradition that can be traced from Shannon’s 1949 paper to one of the founding documents of the cypherpunk movement. We can also easily distinguish the cryptographers from their counterparts. The New Communalists never seemed to have a problem with the political economy of the military-industrial complex so long as government funding was enabling their cybernetic vision for the future, but the cryptographers developed an intense conflict with the NSA, as James Bamford observes in The Puzzle Palace. As Robert Manne observes, “The deepest institutional enemy of the cypherpunks was the National Security Agency.” Likewise, the New Communalists seemed to celebrate the openness and connectedness of the emerging networked society because these features enabled a new consciousness, but cryptographers like Diffie and Hellman feared that openness would render traditional notions of privacy obsolete, thus threatening a core aspect of what it means to be human.21 Such important differences should temper any inclination to collapse these three traditions.

To be sure, far more primary source work would have to be done to establish these connections, and it may turn out that the philosophical and scientific differences between Shannon’s information theory and Weiner’s cybernetics (which lays the groundwork for general systems theory) require us to place the cypherpunk lineage outside of the cybernetic tradition.22 Nevertheless, bringing together Turner and Levy’s texts, we get a sense of how the cypherpunks fit into post-World War II intellectual history. Beltramini claims that the intellectual history of the cypherpunks is “vague and disputable,” but nowhere does he show that Levy’s Crypto fits this description, nor does he explain why Greenberg’s This Machine Kills Secrets, which is an elaboration on Levy’s work, introduces vagaries into this history. Unlike Beltramini, who links together three disparate movements under the exceedingly vague, undefined term “resistance,” Levy and Greenberg demonstrate their histories of the cypherpunks using concrete textual and personal connections. When Levy and Greenberg’s accounts are connected to Turner’s history of the counterculture, we get a far more compelling historical narrative, one in which the cypherpunk movement is made possible by the progenitors of information theory and cybernetics, thus rendering them the intellectual descendants of a postwar intellectual milieu that inspired the very computer networks the cypherpunks found so threatening to personal privacy.


Political Ideologies and False Dichotomies: Libertarianism and the Cypherpunks

Beltramini’s second argument is that the cypherpunk movement should not be understood as merely libertarian. To be sure, Beltramini is correct that the label “libertarian” is frequently applied to the cypherpunks. Not only has the cypherpunk movement and the cypherpunk mailing list been called “libertarian,” individuals including Whitfield Diffie, Tim May, Eric Hughes, John Gilmore, Phil Salin, and Jim Bell have all been impressed with that label in various places.23 I agree that the cypherpunk movement is not merely a libertarian movement, but Beltramini attempts to substantiate this claim in the most counterintuitive and unproductive manner, for he attempts to show that Tim May—arguably one of the most libertarian members of the movement—is not libertarian. In other words, Beltramini fails to distinguish the claim (1) that the cypherpunk movement is not merely libertarian and (2) that Tim May is not a libertarian. The first claim is true, but it is not an original claim on the part of Beltramini. The second claim is patently false, and Beltramini therefore tortures the evidence to fit his argument. Ultimately, Beltramini’s argument suffers from his failure to engage the literature, especially Greenberg’s This Machine Kills Secrets, and his reliance on a false dichotomy between Chomsky and Foucault. In this section, I demonstrate, first, that Beltramini’s claim about the cypherpunks not being merely libertarian fails to be an original contribution to the literature and, second, that his claim that Tim May is not a libertarian is completely unfounded.

The first problem with Beltramini’s claim that the cypherpunks are not mere libertarians is that it is completely unoriginal. Beltramini acknowledges that libertarianism is a part of the movement, but he emphasizes that the movement as such cannot be forced under that ideological label. “Certainly a libertarian ethos is an unmistakable thread in some of the most celebrated cypherpunk activists’ ideology,” Beltramini writes. “The libertarian label, however, reflects only part of the ideology of the movement.” He adds that “the libertarian label works more as an umbrella brand for diverse expressions of libertarianism, rather than a precise ideological place card” (2). While Beltramini claims to be arguing against Lincoln Dahlberg’s encyclopedia entry on “Cyberlibertarianism,” Dahlberg himself already makes the same exact point:

“Cyberlibertarianism,” however, is not in fact a singular thing. It is a name that encompasses a range of rhetorics and practices that are articulated by a multitude of actors and that are ever evolving in relation to contextual influences. This article has grouped this discursive array into a number of strands, differentiated in terms of the extent to which they emphasize civil or economic liberties, how much they wish to eliminate government, and how much faith they have in technology versus markets versus law and policy versus education to safeguard freedom on and through digital technologies.

Given this passage, it is unclear what Beltramini is correcting, as he puts it. If anything, Beltramini is extending Dahlberg’s claim, not correcting it.

Furthermore, Robert Manne also shows that the cypherpunks are not libertarian in “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.” Just like Beltramini’s failure to cite Greenberg and Turner, his failure to cite Manne’s work represents another striking omission. Manne observes that:

Almost all cypherpunks were anarchists who regarded the state as the enemy. Most but not all were anarchists of the Right, or in American parlance, libertarians, who supported laissez-faire capitalism…while the overwhelming majority of cypherpunks were… anarcho–capitalist libertarians, some were straitlaced Republicans, left-leaning liberals, Wobblies or even Maoists…The cypherpunks formed a house of many rooms. The only thing they all shared was an understanding of the political significance of cryptography and the willingness to fight for privacy and unfettered freedom in cyberspace.24

Beltramini might have explored the cypherpunk mailing list and examined the contributions of the Maoists, Wobblies, or liberals to the movement, offering an account of cypherpunk ideas that are unfortunately overlooked. Instead, he simply echoes the argument already made without giving credit to those who, like Dahlberg and Manne, made that argument first.

The second problem with Beltramini’s argument is that he claims Tim May is not a libertarian. Actually, Beltramini is not consistent on this point. When discussing May at the beginning of the essay, Beltramini says that “He was a libertarian,” but later in the essay, he says May was “a reluctant libertarian” (2, 12). It is not clear what “reluctant” could mean in this passage, but Greenberg’s work establishes that May was anything but reluctant about his libertarianism. “My political philosophy is keep your hands off my stuff,” May once stated. “Out of my files, out of my office, off what I eat, drink, and smoke. If people want to overdose, c’est la vie. Schadenfreude.”25 For May, this leave-me-alone disposition is “at the root of libertarianism more so than formal theories about the nature of man.”26 What’s more, May supported Libertarian party candidates his entire life. “In the 1972 presidential campaign,” Greenberg explains, “May’s first as a legal voter, he wrote in John Hospers, the first Libertarian to make it onto some states’ ballots. He would continue to vote Libertarian for the next forty years.”27

Furthermore, May himself declared that his philosophy of “crypto anarchy” is a technological way to push society toward an anarcho-capitalist state. In The Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman advocates anarcho-capitalism, explaining that it is a form of society in which all public services formerly provided by governments will be provided by market functions.28 For Friedman, anarcho-capitalism has the best chance of all forms of social organization to produce a libertarian society, one in which every individual is free to choose anything for themselves that they want without coercion, so long as they are not infringing on the rights or the property of others. May cites Friedman as an example of what he has in mind when he writes of anarcho-capitalism, and he follows Friedman in vociferously rejecting leftwing forms of anarchism. As May writes:

The anarchy here is not the anarchy of popular conception—lawlessness, disorder, chaos. Nor is it the bomb-throwing anarchy of the nineteenth-century “black” anarchists, usually associated with Russia and labor movements. Nor is it the black flag anarcho-syndicalism of leftist writers such as Proudhon and Goldstein. Rather, the anarchy being spoken of here is the anarchy of “absence of government” (literally, “an arch,” without a chief or head). It’s the same anarchy of “anarcho-capitalism,” the libertarian free market ideology that promotes voluntary, uncoerced economic transactions.29

This statement is no passing remark because, for May, western society is at a crossroads, which will force us to choose between “a surveillance state” and “a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist state,” and “The fundamental battle is already underway between the forces of big government and the forces of liberty and crypto anarchy.”30

A reluctant libertarian indeed.

Notwithstanding the evidence, Beltramini’s argument about May’s supposedly “reluctant” libertarianism is ostensibly justified by the notion that May was influenced Michael Foucault.31 But again, his argument does not stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. Pointing to the famous Chomsky-Foucault debate, Beltramini asserts a simple syllogism: Chomsky is a libertarian; Foucault disagrees with Chomsky about human nature; therefore, Foucault is not a libertarian.32 Thus, if May is influenced by the non-libertarian Foucault, then May is not merely libertarian.

There are at least two unmistakable problems with this argument. First, there are many different varieties of libertarianism. May was primarily influenced by right-wing libertarians like Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and David Friedman, hardly the type to be equated with the left libertarianism of Chomsky.33 Using Chomsky as a heuristic to understand May’s political ideology is completely unwarranted without some exegesis of primary sources, and Beltramini utterly fails to do this. It is also highly doubtful that any attempt to place May and Chomsky in the same political category could succeed, given that—as the passage above demonstrates, May openly rejected the kind of anarcho-syndicalism Chomsky supports.34 Second, while many left-liberals in the academy have been drawn to Foucault’s philosophy, this should not occlude the fact that Foucault’s thought is quite consistent with some forms of libertarianism.35 Libertarians often celebrate the fact that Friedrich Nietzsche exerted major influence over Foucault’s thinking, especially in his later years. Praising Foucault’s opposition to Marxism, one online libertarian encyclopedia states: “Nietzsche was his most important intellectual ancestor. [Foucault’s] mature works show a critical, antinomian libertarianism, rather than a rigid, class-based analysis of social phenomena.” Foucault’s Nietzscheanism must be one reason that May was drawn to his work. Why else would May name his cat Nietzsche?36

In contrast to Beltramini’s failed investigation into to May’s political worldview, studies ought to perform close textual analysis of primary sources in political theory to gain a better understanding of how May’s philosophy of crypto anarchy fits into the various traditions of anarchism and libertarianism. May is credited with coining the term “crypto anarchism,” and he defines “anarchism” as a political system “without a head or chief.” For May, “this is the same sense of anarchy used in anarchocapitalism, the libertarian free-market ideology that promotes voluntary, uncoerced economic transactions.”37 May was one of the most prolific writers in the cypherpunk movement, and many of his short essays have been reproduced in anthologies.38 While more research is required—I am unaware of any extended critical analysis of May’s philosophy of crypto anarchy, and his un-anthologized writings have rarely been considered in analyses of the cypherpunk movement—there can be no question that May was a thoroughgoing libertarian.39

Rather than relying upon false dichotomies and dubious equivocations, as Beltramini does, historians, political theorists, and philosophers ought to undertake rigorous examinations of cypherpunk primary sources and place them into the larger historical and theoretical contexts to which they belong. We need a deeper engagement with the cypherpunk primary texts in order to trace out the various strands of political theory that manifest within the movement. Scholars looking to highlight the non-libertarian strands of the cypherpunk movement ought to take two approaches. First, they ought to peruse the cypherpunk mailing list—archives of which are widely available online—to actually draw out the various lines of political ideology that the movement attracted and inspired.40 Second, they ought to study the works of second and third generation cypherpunks, especially the works of Julian Assange. The next section pursues the second of these strategies.


The Devil in the Details: How Hating Julian Assange Obscures Studies of the Cypherpunks

Julian Assange was an original contributor to the cypherpunk mailing list, joining approximately two years after the list began, and he remains one of the most prominent advocates of cypherpunk philosophy today. Assange founded WikiLeaks in late 2006, and he built the WikiLeaks system using ideas incubated in the cypherpunk movement. In the United States, WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010 when Assange and his colleagues published “Collateral Murder,” a 2007 video of two United States AH-64 Apache helicopters gunning-down unarmed Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists. WikiLeaks enjoyed sustained support within some liberal, left, and libertarian sectors of American politics, but during the 2016 election, when WikiLeaks published two sets of emails that seemed to damage the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party nominee, WikiLeaks was perceived as supporting her rival, Republican Party nominee Donald Trump, and many abandoned their support for the whistleblower platform and its Australian founder. Beltramini only mentions Assange and WikiLeaks four times in his essay, but these passing references reveal the ways in which Beltramini’s apparent political commitments undermine his historical analysis of the cypherpunks. Beltramini’s attempt to demonize Assange is not only self-contradicting but also impedes his ability to substantiate—with evidence—the claim that the cypherpunk movement was not merely libertarian, for Assange is one of the most prolific non-libertarian spokesperson of the contemporary cypherpunk movement.

Beltramini seems to argue that all three of the movements he discusses—the 60s radicals, the punks, and the cypherpunks—were all organized around the idea of resistance, and that when Assange put cypherpunk ideas into practice by building WikiLeaks, he moved the cypherpunks beyond resistance and made the movement subversive. In his discussion of Mario Savio, Beltramini says that the 60s radicals had concluded that the system of technocracy resulted in a situation in which individuals “can only accept or resist what others try to make of them” (9). They chose resistance. Likewise, Beltramini explains, “Punks were radical because their primary purpose was to resist,” and “their anarchism was motivated by resistance” (10-11). Finally, following in the footsteps of their supposed predecessors, the cypherpunks were also motivated by resistance, or as Beltramini put it, “he/she is a resistant” (13). When Assange is placed in this genealogy, however, he apparently adds the element of subversion. Arguing that “WikiLeaks has focused on spreading government secrets,” Beltramini describes Assange as “the activist who attempted to subvert the democratic operations of the United States” (15, 2, emphasis added). Whereas the other cypherpunks were dedicated to resisting, Beltramini asserts that “Assange would change the image of the cypherpunk into that of a subversive” (13, emphasis added).

Importantly—and tellingly—Beltramini fails to substantiate these assertions about Assange and WikiLeaks with any citations. There are no examples or reasons given. The point is simply asserted without any evidence or explanation. What’s more, the distinction between resistance and subversion is unclear because the terms are never defined. Most problematically, they are even used interchangeably. When describing the cyberpunk literary movement, for instance, Beltramini says that “the cyberpunk resists technologies used to access the human mind” (12, emphasis added). Yet a mere three sentences later, he writes,

The cyberpunk is an outsider, outcast, criminal, and dissenter: his/her illegal behavior represents a reaction against the invasive operation of so-called legal powers; his/her subversive attitude is a positive attack against a corrupted controlling power. To be punk is to question controlling powers, and to be cyberpunk is to actively subvert technology-driven controlling powers (12, emphasis added).

This same equivocation appears in Beltramini’s discussion of the cypherpunks, who he says “would protect themselves from invasive institutions through the subversive tools digital computing also promised” (14). Thus, because Beltramini provides no support for his claims about Assange and WikiLeaks, he depends upon the word subversive to do most of the work; yet, it does not do that work because it is not even clear what that word means in the context of Beltramini’s argument.

While it may be tempting to understand these issues as semantic or definitional problems, there is a distinct political valence to Beltramini’s commentary on Assange. Early in the paper, Beltramini argues:

the cypherpunk movement reacted to the perceived emergence of a surveillance order in a post-industrial era and the way in which it has subtly eroded the democratic fabric of American society and ultimately human freedom. The final stage of this process is a perceived Orwellian phenomenon, that is, a totalitarian, surveillance society, where control and behavior modification mutually sustain each other (3).

I note the term perceived here because it does two things: first, it accurately describes what the cypherpunks believed was happening in the 1990s and beyond; and second, it allows Beltramini to distance himself from having to either affirm or reject the cypherpunk position on surveillance. To be sure, such critical distance is important in scholarship because it opens the way for greater, though still imperfect, levels of objectivity.

In Beltramini’s case, however, the word perceived is not only doing this scholarly work, it is also doing political work. When Beltramini describes Assange as “the activist who attempted to subvert the democratic operations of the United States,” he means it in a factual manner. This description of Assange comes after descriptions of three other cypherpunks, all of which have a factual nature. Beltramini describes Ryan Lackey as “the engineer who left the movement to go work for Google,” Tim May as “the recluse who lived in a state of permanent anticipation of being picked up by the Feds,” and John Gilmore as “the rich entrepreneur who sued (several times) the U.S. Federal government” (2). So, when Beltramini says that Assange as “attempted to subvert the democratic operations of the United States,” he discloses the fact that he rejects the cypherpunk conclusion about the United States government transforming into an Orwellian surveillance state. To describe the government of the United States as democratic is to make certain assumptions about the nature of the country’s political system, as even Beltramini himself argues in one passage.41

Scholars are obviously not only permitted but encouraged to approach their subjects of study with a critical edge, but in this case, Beltramini’s post-2016 understanding of WikiLeaks actually impedes his ability to successfully make his first argument, namely, that the cypherpunk movement is not merely a libertarian movement. Assange is arguably the most prolific non-libertarian cypherpunk. While the cypherpunks have been criticized for overemphasizing the threat of oppression by government and thus ignoring the threat of oppression by corporations, Assange’s views do not succumb to that criticism.42 In his Unauthorized Autobiography, Assange explains that many participants saw the cypherpunk movement as “essentially about privacy as capitalist freedom, the right to be free of big government, to have your data kept back.” But for Assange:

The cypherpunk ethos allowed me to think about how to best oppose the efforts of oppressive bodies—governments, corporations, surveillance agencies…Regimes often rely on having control of the data, and they can hurt people or oppress them or silence them by means of such control. My sense of the cypherpunk ethos was that it could protect people against this: it could turn their knowledge into an unreachable possession of theirs, protecting them in the classic Tom Paine way of securing liberty as a bulwark against harm or aggression.43

Many cypherpunks view the state as the primary threat. Tim May, for example, argues that corporations are victims of government coercion just like average individuals.44 Assange disagrees: “I don’t see a difference between government and big corporations and small corporations. This is all one continuum; these are all systems that are trying to get as much power as possible.”45

Assange’s departure from the libertarian standard that dominated the first generation of the movement stems in part from his intellectual eclecticism, as I have demonstrated eslewhere. The two movements most influential to Assange’s thought are the Enlightenment and the antiwar movement of the 60s and 70s. While Tim May was reading Rand and Nietzsche, Assange took inspiration from many early modern figures like John Milton, the Levellers, John Wilkes, and others. As a teenage hacker, Assange derived his handle—Mendax—from the writings of Horace, a Roman lyric poet from the first century BCE whose writings were extremely popular in eighteenth-century Europe. Moreover, Assange’s parents were part of the Vietnam War protests in Australia, and he internalized anti-imperialist values of the antiwar movement. Over the course of his life and writings, Assange has also sporadically referred to various authors whose work left an impression on him. Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Black Panther member George Jackson, influential scholar Harold Innis, and famous sociologist Jacques Ellul all make appearances in Assange’s writings.46 And, unlike other cypherpunks who seem to have no direct connection to the punk scene, Assange’s favorite band as a teenager was the progressive Australian New Wave group Midnight Oil. Assange identified with this band so closely that when he designed the second ever computer worm—which he called the WANK worm, an acronym for Worms Against Nuclear Killers—he attached lyrics from the Midnight Oil song “Blossom & Blood”: “You talk of times of peace for all / And then prepare for war.”47

Another important feature of Assange’s distinctive contribution to the cypherpunk political thought is his unmistakable cosmopolitanism.48 Because most other first-generation cypherpunks were from the United States, they tended to do what many American radicals do, namely, situate their radicalism within a larger nationalistic identification with America.49 May, for instance, in true libertarian fashion, could always come up with the names of oppressive regimes—“the former Soviet Union, Iraq, China, and so forth”—and murderous dictators—“Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot”—always finding them over there, outside the United States.50 In contrast, Assange’s not only rejects American Exceptionalism, he also rejects what he calls the “Western eye,” which describes a view that sees the West as basically free while the East or the Global South are the places where tyranny happens. When once asked about Iran and North Korea, Assange replied: “These societies are much more political than the West. People like to talk about politics over dinner every night. So I am not sure it is right to take a Western eye and think that these people don’t understand the lot that they are in.”51 In Assange’s view, non-Western societies are far more political because they have not been “fiscalized” under neoliberal capitalism. As Assange explains:

You can have a lot of political “change” in the United States, but will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone’s bank account? Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts, and contracts on contracts on contracts? Not really. So I say that free speech in many Western places is free not as a result of liberal circumstances but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn’t matter what you say. The dominant elite doesn’t have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not; it is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not.52

Assange therefore rejects the kind of Western chauvinism implied by May’s orientalist comments, and he argues that so-called Western capitalist freedom may actually be a ruse. Thus, when we juxtapose Assange’s suspicion of market solutions and market fundamentalism with May’s steadfast commitment to anarcho-capitalism, we immediately see that Assange dramatically departs from the libertarianism to which the majority of first-generation cypherpunks are committed.53

We see, therefore, that two problems—studying the political views of the cypherpunks and unsubstantiated claims about Julian Assange—are intimately connected. On the one hand, Beltramini (correctly) argues that the cypherpunks were not all libertarians, but then he (incorrectly) pursues this argument in the most unreasonable way possible, namely, claiming that Tim May was not a libertarian. On the other hand, Beltramini makes serious claims about Assange with no citations, no evidence, and—somehow—with no definitions. Not only did these unsubstantiated claims apparently pass peer review, they also foreclosed one of the most fruitful lines of inquiry regarding the claim that some cypherpunks are not libertarian. May and Assange are both cypherpunks, they are both interesting social and political theorists, and scholarship on their respective theories is needed. But only one is demonstrably non-libertarian. In the end, Beltramini’s political dispositions cloud his analysis, and his reviewers let his claims go unchallenged. To overcome these problems, scholarship on the cypherpunks ought to rigorously pursue comparative analyses of the cypherpunks’ political and theoretical writings, grounding such analyses in extensive primary source research—a project that has yet to begin.


Conclusion

This essay has responded to Enrico Beltramini’s “Against Technocratic Authoritarianism: A Short Intellectual History of the Cypherpunk Movement,” seemingly the first academic history of the cypherpunks. Through three parallel lines of argument, I have argued that Beltramini’s account of the cypherpunks is riddled with shortcomings and errors indicating a lack of scholarly rigor. First, he fails to engage with the relevant literature—including the standard text on cypherpunk history—even though his other publications reveal that he is aware of said literature. Second, he commits the egregious equivocations in his dubious commentary on politically theory, not just failing to account for the important differences between Rand’s objectivism, Friedman’s anarcho-capitalism, Chomsky’s anarcho-syndicalism, and other schools of thought but actively ignoring them. Third, ill-defined and unsubstantiated remarks about Julian Assange reveal the ways in which the political dimensions of Beltramini’s argument impede his ability to demonstrate the validity of his central thesis. Taken together, these glaring issues with Beltramini’s supposed history of the cypherpunks indicate that it would be unacceptable to let his analysis stand as the basis for future scholarship on the cypherpunk movement.

Alternatively, I have advanced alternative theses and directions for future research that are grounded in the relevant primary and secondary literature. First, I argue that any history of the cypherpunks must deal with more complex phenomena that some monolithic, seemingly transhistorical “technocracy,” and instead investigate the connections and divergences between the cypherpunks and other relevant twentieth-century movements and traditions: cybernetics, the New Left, the counterculture and the New Communalists, the cryptographers, and the like. The work of Levy, Greenberg, and Turner offer promising starting points for such research.

Second, I argue that any claims about the political ideologies of the cypherpunks ought to be grounded in both the primary writings of members of the movement and the major texts of the history of political theory. On the one hand, Tim May’s ideological convergences and divergences with anarcho-capitalism should be explored through a comparative textual analysis, juxtaposing his writings with those of David Freidman and other established anarcho-capitalist thinkers. On the other hand, Julian Assange’s theories ought to be situated at the intersection of cypherpunk philosophy and the other traditions that inspired him, such as Enlightenment philosophy, antiwar activism, and communication theory.

Finally, the fact that Beltramini’s confused, uncited, and unargued claims about Assange indicate two problems. That these claims were seemingly able to pass peer review suggests that greater scholarly rigor is needed when it comes to the study of WikiLeaks. Likewise, that such facile political motivations prevent Beltramini from seeing an easier way of substantiating his central thesis—namely, that the cypherpunks are not all merely libertarian—reminds us that our politics shape our scholarship and that we must therefore be vigilant (or at least transparent) about the influences of values on our work as scholars. In the end, Beltramini’s error-riddled “history” of the cypherpunks cannot become the definitive or even a definitive history of the movement, for—to quote a cypherpunk—allowing such problematic narratives to stand unchallenged is “how bullshit ends up being history.”

Epilogue

I contacted Taylor & Francis, the publisher of Internet Histories, to report the improprieties in Beltramini’s article. The publisher was willing to issue a correction and add a few additional citations, correcting the apparent plagiarism in the work, but they were not willing to retract the article as such. As a result, I wrote the essay that follows, highlighting all the issues with Beltramini’s article. Interestingly, while Internet Histories was willing to publish Beltramini’s “research,” the journal editor informed me that the journal was not interested in my response to Beltramini. In fact, I spent all of 2020 and part of 2021 sending the essay to several academic journals—including Technology and Culture, Left History, and History and Technology—and each time I was either ignored or told that the paper needed an “original thesis” beyond providing a counterargument to Beltramini.

This is how bullshit becomes History: academic journals publish complete nonsense and then refuse to properly correct it. Beltramini’s work has now been cited as authoritative on the cypherpunks, and some scholars have even directly quoted the originally-plagiarized passages in Beltramini’s essays and attributed the passage to Beltramini himself. The academic publication cycle is extremely slow, but we can expect to see Beltramini’s work reverberate throughout the scholarship on cypherpunks for years to come. It will take at least a decade to correct the inaccuracies that have now entered the academic record.

Notes

  1. The cypherpunks perceived the United States government as having become a surveillance state long before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance in 2013. See Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Picador, 2014); Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019).
  2. See Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (New York: OR Books, 2012).
  3. Enrico Beltramini, “Against Technocratic Authoritarianism: A Short Intellectual History of the Cypherpunk Movement,” 1. This claim is actually a plagiarized reference to a statement by Lucky Green, a cypherpunk who commented on the passing of cypherpunk cofounder Timothy C. May on Facebook, writing that the cypherpunks were “perhaps the single most effective pro-cryptography grassroots organization in history.” The post is archived here. Green’s comment was widely quoted across online media. For a representative example, see Yogita Khatri, “Cypherpunk Legend Timothy May Has Passed Away,” CoinDesk, 17 December 2018: https://archive.fo/VyM2t.
  4. Lincoln Dahlberg, “Cyberlibertarianism,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 26 October 2017.
  5. Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn, and Zimmermann, Cypherpunks, 7.
  6. Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeaks, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information (New York: Dutton, 2012), 4.
  7. Enrico Beltramini, “True Names, True Nyms: The Power of Technology and the Future of Identity,” Messages, Sages and Ages 17.1 (2019): 12-23.
  8. One more recent work that should be taken into account in any history of the cypherpunks is Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (New York: Public Affairs, 2018). As a journalist, Levine questions the excitement of the cypherpunks and other crypto advocates over the Tor browser. Tor is an encrypted network, which the cypherpunks would like, but it was developed by the U.S. Navy to promote U.S. interests abroad, something the cypherpunks’ own principles, Levine suggests, should lead them to at least be cautious.
  9. Quoted in John H. Summers, “New Man of Power,” in C. Wright Mills, The Politics of Truth, ed. John H. Summers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9.
  10. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Robert Cohen, ed., The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings that Changed America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and Michael Stewart Foley’s Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). Interestingly enough, Beltramini incorrectly cites Foley’s work, confusing it with Alex Ogg, Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years (Oakland: PM Press, 2014).
  11. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 31. Turner acknowledges that the relationship between the New Left and the counterculture is a matter of contentious debate and offers relevant sources, 266n.68.
  12. Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948).
  13. Beltramini, “True Names, True Nyms.” Interestingly, at the time of writing, Fred Turner is on the editorial board of Internet Histories, the journal in which Beltramini’s so-called “history” of the cypherpunks appears.
  14. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, 2010). This is the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, the original having been published in 1984.
  15. For an account of James Ellis, a GCHQ agent who conceived of public-key encryption before Diffie and Hellman, see Steven Levy, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (New York: Viking, 2001), 313-330.
  16. On Diffie, see Levy, Crypto, 3-36; on the NSA, see James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America’s Most Secret Agency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
  17. Levy, Crypto, 17-18. Claude E. Shannon, “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 28, no. 4 (1949): 656-715.
  18. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 22-23; Levy, Crypto, 32-33, 45-47.
  19. Levy, Crypto, 103-105. Martin Gardner, “Mathematical Games: A New Kind of Cipher that Would Take Millions of Years to Break,” Scientific American, vol. 237, no. 2 (1977): 120–124.
  20. Levy, Crypto, 189; Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 62-64.
  21. This juxtaposition is extrapolated from Levy, Crypto and Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
  22. For a brief review of literature on systems theory, see Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 264n.28.
  23. See Levy, Crypto, 26, 206, 209; Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, xii, 57-59, 65, 70, 76, 78, 82, 91, 109, 119-121, 255.
  24. When Beltramini’s article first appeared, there was no reference to Manne anywhere in the text. Based on a complaint filed with the publisher, the publisher has announced their intention to add a citation for Manne at some time. The complaint was filed because Beltramini’s failure to cite Manne is conspicuous given the glaring similarity of their arguments. In defining cypherpunk philosophy, Manne writes,

    “At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand.”

    Beltramini describes the cypherpunks as such:

    “They all believed that the great political and technological issue of the day was whether governments and corporations in America would use the Internet to increase their control upon the individuals, then monitor and control their freedom and privacy through digital surveillance, or whether autonomous individuals would protect themselves from invasive institutions through the subversive tools digital computing also promised.”

    This may be a second instance of plagiarism in Beltramini’s essay. See Manne, “Cypherpunk Revolutionary”; Beltramini, “Against Technocratic Authoritarianism,” 14.
  25. Quoted in Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 58.
  26. Alon Ganon, “Tim May, The Father of Crypto Anarchy, Has Passed Away,” Being Libertarian, 20 December 2011: http://archive.fo/5NTCF.
  27. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 58.
  28. David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism (New York: David D. Friedman, 2015).
  29. Timothy C. May, “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy,” in Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, ed. James Frenkel (New York: Tor, 2001), 70.
  30. May, “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy,” 85-86.
  31. While May’s debt to thinkers like Ayn Rand and David Freidman is well documented, the only reference to May’s debt to Foucault comes from Beltramini himself, who claims to have interviewed May before his death in December 2018. Though I have not uncovered any public evidence regarding May’s debt to Foucault, I do not doubt that May was, at least partly, influenced by the French poststructuralist. Given that May was a voracious reader and worried about surveillance, it would make sense that he come across Foucault’s work at some point. But being influenced by Foucault does not mean one is not libertarian. On May’s death, see Nathaniel Popper, “Timothy C. May, Early Advocate of Internet Privacy, Dies at 66,” The New York Times, 21 December 2018: http://archive.fo/78jdH.
  32. Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (New York: The New Press, 2006); Peter Wilkin, “Chomsky and Foucault on Human Nature and Politics: A Essential Difference?” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 25, no. 2 (1999): 177-210.
  33. For May’s connection to these right-wing libertarians, see Levy, Crypto, 206; Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 57; and Timothy C. May, “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities,” in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 69, 78. I have not come across any instances in which May refers to Chomsky by name.
  34. Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Anarchism, ed. Berry Pateman (Oakland: AK Press, 2005).
  35. See for example Ronald Beiner, “Foucault’s Hyper‐Liberalism,” Critical Review, vol. 9, no. 3 (1995 ): 349-370; and Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Polity, 2016).
  36. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 58.
  37. May, “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities,” 69.
  38. See Peter Ludlow (ed.), High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Peter Ludlow (ed.), Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); and Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, ed. James Frenkel (New York: Tor, 2001).
  39. May’s work has been discussed in some detail, but these takes are largely isolated form political theory. See Manne, “Cypherpunk Revolutionary”; Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).
  40. One cypherpunk essay that deserves more scholarly analysis from a political theory perspective is Jim Bell, “Assassination Politics”: https://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm.
  41. In a passage where he contests Jamie Bartlett’s interpretation of Tim May’s writings, Beltramini says, “if democratic government is no longer the liberal government of modernity, rather the illiberal government of late modernity, the expression ‘democratic governments’ takes on an entirely different meaning.” Beltramini, “Against Technocratic Authoritarianism,” 15. See Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2015).
  42. One of the earliest critics of the cypherpunks, David Brin, accused the movement of hypocrisy and of a childish opposition to government. Brin may or may not correct in his criticisms of cypherpunks like Tim May, but Assange’s borader analysis seems to escape such facile criticisms. See David Brin, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? (New York: Basic Books, 1998).
  43. Julian Assange, Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Autobiography (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2011), 79.
  44. May, “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy.”
  45. Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2016), 132-133.
  46. For Assange’s reference to George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), see Assange, Unauthorized Autobiography; for his reference to Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), see Julian Assange, “Introduction: WikiLeaks and Empire,” in The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire (New York: Verso, 2015), 1-19; and for his implied reference to Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1964), see Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn, and Zimmermann, Cypherpunks.
  47. Suelette Dreyfus and Julian Assange, Underground (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2012), 6.
  48. Renata Avila, Sarah Harrison, and Angela Richter, Women, Whistleblowing, WikiLeaks: A Conversation (New York: OR Books, 2017); Geoffery de Lagasnerie, “Julian Assange for the Future,” in In Defense of Julian Assange, ed. Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler (New York: OR Books, 2019), 244-250.
  49. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993).
  50. May, “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities,” 68, 77.
  51. Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks, 144.
  52. Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks, 124.
  53. For more on Assange’s opposition to markets, see Manne, “Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”