Re-Published with Edits from October 4, 2020. What follows was an article meant to explore the unique nature and duality of cyberpunks and cypherpunks. With the meteoric rise of bitcoin recently, we wanted to revisit this article for our community and give credit to those who help create the Bitcoin and crypto movements in the first place. We will return to Robotics in Wisdom next week.
Who are cyberpunks and cypherpunks?
What separates them? What unites them? Better yet, what drives them?
In exploring a digitally dystopic world, amalgamating our individualism through personal design requires food for the cyber-soul. Within the tech-noir culture of the late 1980s and early-1990s that would produce Cyberpunks and Cypherpunks, we can find our beating heart. Exploring the elements of what makes these two groups unique and discovering what makes them unique can aid us in our own personal endeavor to technologically self-define.
A Tech-Culture Personified
In our pursuit to define ourselves as individuals in today’s world, we come face to face with the electronic representations of our own identity in cyberspace. This is because the world around us has taken on heavy electronic overtones. The digital explosion of the late 20th century gave rise to the cyber-world of the 21st. A world that that people are now enmeshed in, thrive upon and are forced to confront daily.
Within the beginning of this cyber-world arose two cultural phenomena: CYBERPUNKS and CYPHERPUNKS. Cyberpunks, many of us are now familiar with.
We have grown up with them: Deckard and Neo to Alita and Beyond; we are them: fighting to understand our tech-fueled world and define ourselves within it. For a quick return and/or introduction to what Cyberpunk is, we’ve made the following video:
For those unfamiliar with the term cypherpunk, the movement is kin and kith with cyberpunk.
Search Security’s TechTarget helps to most cleanly develop the central thesis which we BCB Cyberize here: the deep spirit of a cyber-spaced individualism (Cyberpunk) blended with the combo spice of encryption and privacy helps give birth to the Cypherpunk! Kin and Kith indeed, more next-gen phenotypic expression of the same genetic programming if you ask us.
Personal testament to personal testament, the two are forever linked. Where Cyberpunk blends individual exploration and reaction to the outside world, Cypherpunk looks to maintain individual ethos and self-integrity through digital privacy. For the latter, it is, unfortunately, the case that their concerns over a loss of anonymity are now our reality.
Null State Cyberpunk; Activation Cypherpunk
Fed from the Same Seed:
Accepting the Yin and Yang of digital existence, where bad actors balance the good, is the price to be paid for an individual’s right to privacy in a digital world for the Cypherpunk. This is merely an extension of Cyberpunk’s central worldview where knowledge is the main thesis and the vehicle used to communicate that message is tech.
With this degree of openness, however, there will always exist a tension that comes with the potential for non-self-defined exposure in cyberspace. To what extent does the Cyberpunk then yield the autonomy of their own individuality to systems used to spread their message?
For the American mathematician, computer programmer, and Cypherpunk Eric Hughes., the concern was and is the forced revelation of one’s individuality: one’s self. For engaging in digital media means expressing yourself in various communication forms.
A BCB Cyberized summary of the analogy Hughes’s uses in his argument in the link above goes like this: when transmitting or sending information to another person, the transportation system itself needs not to know all the contents of the letter, they only need to know a few basics: who it is from, where it is going, and how much it will cost to perform the service! With digital media not only does the information have value, but so too does the individuality and privacy of an electronic sender/receiver.
Maintaining the integrity of a person’s being in digital space then is the paramount concern and privacy is the core problem to be over come. Privacy then is the ability of the individual to self-reveal themselves to the world upon their own terms and share of themselves as they see fit.
If the individual is to find themselves in a world of forced openness, one where the very means of exchange has the right and whim to take this information and do with it what they please without our consent, privacy does not exist. For Cypherpunks then two things are necessary: an autonomous transaction system, a system for privacy to thrive on, and cryptography, a means of ensuring the non-disclosed nature of the data itself.
An Encrypted Creed
The pith of the solution then is sharing of information in the form of code, code that can be protected, and predicting that the code itself will proliferate and become a central means of exchange in society (i.e. become the system for privacy to thrive on). In short, Cypherpunks long to and do create strong encryption algorithms for private transactions in order to offer the individual a means of protected being in cyberspace. This protection is then what allows the proliferation of knowledge as the Cyberpunk defines itself. They go hand in hand.
Both Cyberpunks and Cypherpunks then are forever linked with digital individuality and more specifically, the elements necessary to be able to self-define in Cyberspace.
In doing so, Cypherpunks predicted the coming of open, anonymous systems of communication and exchange (blockchains) and the instruments of value to exchange on them without permission. For if individuals are to self-define and reveal themselves as they see fit there must be an exchange for those transactions to occur that maintain those abilities.
If encryption and blockchains are the shields protecting a digital self, the Cyberpunks are the individuals acting on those exchanges. Under this defense, they are enabled to further expand their mission of infusing their lives with tech-culture and prizing exchange of information. They are enabled by the “preaching, practicing, and hacking a program of internet anonymity, privacy, and anti-censorship” provided by the Cypherpunk.
Coming Together
Where Cyberpunk and Cypherpunk walk hand in digital hand, so too does the eventuality of the tools used by both: knowledge, encryption, and blockchains. For there is no doubt that Cyberpunk is the initial actor on the blockchain and the first users of encrypted assets like cryptocurrencies. Both forever fascinated by the coin and the potential it represents.
A Place for All
As we all follow our own paths into an electronic world of dark and sordid electronic alleyways, Cyberpunks and Cypherpunks alike provide the light-emitting diodes we need to brighten our way and ensure our individuality. They are the forebears a thus it is to them that we owe a great debt of thanks. Thanks, in the form of continuing to develop our own identities; learning, growing, and building individuals knowledgeably in cyberspace, adopting blockchains and crypto-assets, acting on the rights and responsibilities inherent in an open and free information society.
Like this article? Check out our BCB Cyber Wisdom page to see what other topics we seek to explore in the future.