Felix Atari: Cipherspace
Junio 16th, 2010
We have been talking about darknets at least since 2005. But for long, we tended to present darknets only as the less preferable alternative to open P2P-networks. If openness was associated with the famous “long tail”, we speculated that attacks on open sharing would not stop sharing but force it into smaller and darker networks of trust, person-to-person or sneakernets, which could limit access to the very mainstream of music and movie files, at least for all those people who did not have personal contacts. In a way, we saw bunkers instead of tunnels; fortified structures with limited space.
Cyphernetics
Cybernetics is the study of how to control regulatory systems of any kind; technological, social, biological and mathematical systems. Cyphernetics, on the other hand, is similar to the study of cybernetics, but does not rely on that the entire system is known or controlled from one single point. Rather, cyphernetics is the study of how to do things in states of chaos and uncertainty. In cipherspace and states of crypto anarchy, we can no longer rely on control mechanisms that emerge from a single source or agent. Instead we must be able to handle the two facts of cipherspace, that there are no identities and no authorities. This cancels out the point of departure for cybernetics; it needs to identify and authorize systems. Cyphernetics, on the other hand, can perform without these basic assumptions.
The study of cyphernetics is that of how organizations, actions and reactions can be constructed in environments where it is impossible to deduce the state of the entire macroscale system. This differs from the study of cybernetics, where the state of the entire system is supposedly known by a meta-agent. The engineering aspect of cyphernetics has its focal point in the creation of hidden functions and groups that is externally incomprehensible, but known to the actors that construct the structures. A collection of such actors, or agents, that operates towards similiar goals can be said to constitute a secret society.These are the main features of a cyphernetic system
- It is a chaotic force which operates in the world.
- It cannot be backtraced or reconstructed in detail.
- The state of a collection of subsystems can not be easily determined.
- It is generally impossible to deduce which groups of agents that constitute the entire collection (“the system”) of secret societies (“subsystems”).
- It performs without formal or central leadership. Cyphernetic subsystems are often locally focused towards singular communication mediums, but the collection of subsystems are decentralized and completely unorganized. (This very text is written by such a system.)
