Cypherpunks, e-money and the technologies of disconnection - encryption technology; includes related articles; excerpt from book, 'Out of Control'

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1993 by Kevin Kelly

Privacy is a type of information that has its polarity reversed; I imagine it as anti-information. The removal of a bit of information from a system can be seen as the reproduction of a corresponding bit of anti-information. In a world flooded with information ceaselessly replicating itself to the edges of the net, the absence or vaporization of a bit of information becomes very valuable, especially if that absence can be maintained. In a world where everything is connected to everything -- where connection and information and knowledge are dirt cheap -- then disconnection and anti-information and no-knowledge become expensive. When bandwidth becomes free and entire gigabytes of information are swapped around the clock, what you don't want to communicate becomes the most difficult chore. Encryption systems and their ilk are technologies of disconnection. They attempt to tame the network's innate tendency to connect and inform without discrimination.

The Next Utility Meter

We manage the disconnection of other domestic utilities, such as water or electricity, through metering. But metering is neither obvious nor easy. Thomas Edison's dazzling electrical gizmos were of little use to anyone until people had easy access to electricity in their factories and homes. So, at the peak of his career, Edison diverted his attention away from designing electrical delivery network itself. At first, very little was settled about how electricity should be created (DC or AC?), carried, or billed. For billing, Edison favored the approach that most information-providers today favor: charge a flat fee. Readers pay the same for a newspaper no matter how much of it they read. Ditto for cable TV, books and computer software. All are priced flat for all you can use.

Edison pushed a flat fee for electricity -- a fixed amount if you are connected, nothing if you aren't -- because he felt that the costs of accounting for differential usage would exceed the cost of the variances in electricity usage. But mostly Edison was stymied about how to meter electricity. For the first six months of his General Electric Lighting Company in New York City, customers paid a flat fee. To Edison's chagrin, that didn't work out economically. Edison was forced to come up with a stopgap solution. His remedy, an electrolytic meter, was erratic and impractical. It froze in winter, sometimes it ran backwards, and customers couldn't read it (nor did they trust the meter readers). It wasn't until a decade after municipal electrical networks were up and running that another inventor came up with a reliable watt-hour meter. Now we can hardly imagine buying electricity any other way.

A hundred years later, the information industry still lacks an information meter. George Gilder, hi-tech gadfly, puts the problem this way: "Rather than having to pay for the whole reservoir every time you are thirsty, what you want is to only pay for a glass of water."

Indeed, why buy an ocean of information when all you want is a drink?