True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier by Vernor Vinge Page A

strong, encrypted, black channels are available, it will essentially be too late to crack down and stop them. The horse will be out the barn door—arguably this has already happened. Add to the mix steganographic channels, lots of bandwidth over several types of channels, and it’s too late to go back; the tipping point will have been passed.
    A phase change is coming, a kind of “crypto singularity” (to morph a use coined by Vernor Vinge). Virtual communities are in their ascendancy, displacing conventional notions of nationhood. Voluntary economic and social relationships, with true freedom of association. Virtual communities, connected with black pipes opaque to outsiders, bound by their own rules and their own standards of behavior.
    The fundamental battle is already under way between the forces of big government and the forces of liberty and crypto anarchy. Pandora’s box has been opened and we might as well make the most of it.
    Acknowledgments
    My thanks for the many discussions over the years with the dozens of core contributors to the Cypherpunks list, including both the physical and the virtual discussions. Thanks especially to Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, Lucky Green, Hugh Daniel, Nick Szabo, Robin Hanson, Duncan Frissell, Black Unicorn, Sandy Sandfort, Jim Bell, Bill Stewart, Jim Bennett, Doug Barnes, Keith Henson, Peter Hendrickson, Michael Froomkin, the late Phil Salin, Bob Fleming, Cherie Kushner, Chip Morningstar, Mark Miller, David Friedman, and the many others who critiqued or contributed ideas.

Eventful History: Version 1.x
    John M. Ford
    Science fiction and science have always been close cousins. Most historians of science fiction will agree that science fiction is a byproduct of the development of science and technology. The complexities of the relationship between the two fields is a large subject that we don’t have room for right here.
    Science fiction writers have always been fascinated with the process of human development to which science is so connected; within the past sixty years or so, writers of science fiction have begun to realize that human development may not indeed be the only kind to involve the exercise of intelligence.
    John M. Ford has written science fiction and fantasy for more than twenty years, including the World Fantasy Award–winning novel The Dragon Waiting and the recent noir urban fantasy The Last Hot Time. His works include hard science-based fiction of the near and far future, games based on SF and fantasy, and historical fiction which may sometimes rove into the realm of alternate worlds much like, but not quite the same as, our own. The essay that follows, which could only have been written by the man known to thousands as the inimitable “Dr. Mike,” contains much food for thought. This piece was written in 1995.
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    I wonder what the machines will think, down the line, of what was said about them now. This is a difference between them and us: neither Julius Caesar nor Gaius Caligula, Thomas Jefferson nor Joe Stalin, cares now what people choose to publish or dramatize about him. The machines will not be so fortunate. (Some of them, anyway. If you took your Pentium laptop to the Smithsonian, and showed it the 8086 silent on its pedestal, would it understand? Feel the sense of time gone by? Overwrite your screen with “… look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”?)
    The machines to come may not have the curiosity to look; but if we do not give them that curiosity, or at least point them in the way of evolving it, we ought to quit moonshining right now about creating mechanical “intelligence” or “awareness.” If they have no desire to extend their understanding, however great that understanding may become … they might as well be people.
    True, looking at the imperfect model, only some of them will be able (or, looking again at the model, willing) to think past where the next watt is