Sick sad world code#

Later, Bell devoted his time to finding and publishing the home addresses of IRS employees. Remember, this is a guy who said things like, 'Tax collection constitutes aggression, and anyone assisting in the effort or benefiting from the proceeds thereof is a criminal.' It's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but with sniper rifles.Īnd this wasn't satire! He really thought this was a good idea, a thing that should be built, and that only the 'bad' people would suffer from an epidemic of 9mm tumors. So basically, Silk Road meets Kickstarter but for freelance hit-men. Even the organization itself would have no information that could help the authorities find the person responsible for the prediction, let alone the one who caused the death.

I also speculated that using modern methods of public-key encryption and anonymous 'digital cash,' it would be possible to make such awards in such a way so that nobody knows who is getting awarded the money, only that the award is being given. It could ask for anonymous contributions from the public, and individuals would be able send those contributions using digital cash. I speculated on the question of whether an organization could be set up to legally announce that it would be awarding a cash prize to somebody who correctly 'predicted' the death of one of a list of violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees. It is long and rambling, but the gist of it is this: That latter particularly sociopathic part of hacker culture now calls itself 'black hat', but the Libertarian end of it, that metastasized out of hacker culture and took over the tech industry in toto.Īnd in 1995, he published an essay on the 'cypherpunks' mailing list called 'Assassination Politics'.

Sick sad world code#

These nerdy, young, sheltered, wealthy white men believed that you could code your way to freedom and good governance, and they could thereby avoid the yoke of whatever oppression they were suffering.įor many of these people, the oppression they felt seemed mainly to be paying taxes, or being told that they couldn't hoard guns, or that they simply couldn't get to do whatever they wanted to do whenever they wanted to do it. In the 80s and 90s, hacker culture was flush with tech utopians who thought that computer networks in general, and cryptography in particular, would allow them to route around the world's problems.