13.3.1. "herding cats"..trying to change the world through
exhortation seems a particulary ineffective notion
13.3.2. There's always been a lot of wasted time and rhetoric on the
Cypherpunks list as various people tried to get others to
follow their lead, to adopt their vision. (Nothing wrong with
this, if done properly. If someone leads by example, or has a
particularly compelling vision or plan, this may naturally
happen. Too often, though, the situation was that someone's
vague plans for a product were declared by them to be the
standards that others should follow. Various schemes for
digital money, in many forms and modes, has always been the
prime example of this.)
13.3.3. This is related also to what Kevin Kelley calls "the fax
effect." When few people own fax machines, they're not of
much use. Trying to get others to use the same tools one has
is like trying to convince people to buy fax machines so that
you can communicate by fax with them...it may happen, but
probably for other reasons. (Happily, the interoperability of
PGP provided a common communications medium that had been
lacking with previous platform-specific cipher programs.)
13.3.4. Utopian schemes are also a tough sell. Schemes about using
digital money to make inflation impossible, schemes to
collect taxes with anonymous systems, etc.
13.3.5. Harry Browne's "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World" is
well worth reading; he advises against getting upset and
frustrated that the world is not moving in the direction one
would like.
By Tim May, see README
HTML by Jonathan Rochkind