The Future

Inevitable Anonymity and the End of Non-Physical Criminality

The drive towards complete anonymity on the internet, and thus complete anonymity in the majority of ones daily activities (being at least possible if not actually used by a given person) is completely inevitable and further, is being driven by those who will most suffer from it’s implementation. The rest of us will be set free.

It is in fact large corporations, mainly media corporations and their representatives such as the RIAA and MPAA which will lead the push, and lose their business in the process. This has been much analyzed, so here I will merely summarize the most important aspects as I see them.

Centered around such aspects as file sharing, which is perfectly legal and cannot be made illegal and which has simple come too far to ever be stopped, even by the most tyrannical of governments, organizations such as the RIAA will inevitable go too far, as doing less will be inefective in protecting their “intellectual” assets. In going too far they will (and already have) trigger a backlash which will result in the advancement of technology and methods for circumventing what meager protections they can create.

By initially attacking the centralized servers, the media corporations drove users, quickly and efficiently, to develop effective, scalable, decentralized networks capable of delivering desired content without any centralized control. It is by embracing this technology, as it’s creators and supporters all knew already, that they were able to make any headway at all. By offering reasonably priced downloads they can interact with the market and offer their catalogs. However this hasn’t in the least reduced file sharing.

By attacking individuals who trade in files, these media corporations have effectively maintained the push (limited in it’s efforts only due to availability of legal downloads) towards obfuscation, encryption, proxy networks, and indirected routing (such as onion routing) making it difficult to determine what is being traded, much less who is doing the trading.

The result is a system in which there is total freedom of information. Anything that can be represented as information, that is data that can be manipulated by a computer, can be completely free of any form or censorship or regulation. Only actions in the real world will be punishable and cyberspace will be without restriction. This results in protection both for the noble goals of freedom and liberty and for criminality.

The fact that nearly anything you could want is now attainable online means that such can be acquired anonymously and only in real world interaction can anyone be traced. It is then, that only when an action requirs a real world part, such as receipt of goods, can it be traced to an actual person.

This has numerous implications. First, copyright must be abolished, as it can no longer function if it cannot be enforced. No information can be limited or hidden unless one keeps it only inside his own head. Laws relating to images, videos, movies, shows, audio and anything that can be replicated digitally will be obsolete as they will all be unenforceable.

To do business in the digital world is to make your product accessible to others. Making it accessible inevitably makes it abundant (supply exceeds demand). This makes the price of all such things essentially zero, as there is no limit on supply. It is, in fact, only through artificial manipulation that corporations are able to enforce outdated and obsolete price-system economics on a system of abundance which it is woefully unprepared to do. The result may have come later than hoped by many, but it has been clearly foreseen. The complete collapse of the economic price system and the inability to artificially support it (through laws) in the long term.

Such arrangements are often criticized in that they allow for the committing of crimes, but such arguments are moot. The fact that a crime could be committed can not stop this from happening. Information about, or depictions of crime can no longer be considered crime in such a system as they are unstoppable. Law enforcement will have to find a new way to find criminals, based on their real-world actions.

One example used is assassination markets, where people can anonymously hire anonymous assassins to carry out murder. This however only creates a cycle of increasing reliance on the system, as potential victims seek anonymity themselves to avoid being found or targeted.

In reality criminals already find ways to hide their identity and such a system is not necessary for them. At worst they currently steal an innocent persons identity and implicate them for the criminal activity, creating one more victim that would not exist in an anonymous system.

As crypto-anarchists might argue, cryptology is based on mathematics and laws of mathematics are stronger than the laws of man, therefore crypto-anarchism is inevitable. This cannot be stopped.

To ban encryption would itself be impossible as strong encryption could be concealed within weak (and presumably still legal) encryption, encapsulated or hidden within other, innocuous, files.

Further as it’s near to impossible to determine the originator of some material, attempts at prosecution are likely to incriminate innocent people, and increase the motivation for the originator to spread the material as far as possible to make censorship or elimination of the material impossible.