At the heart of the U.S. government were an ascendant set of ideas that saw the internet as the ultimate neoliberal project: a borderless marketplace where free-flowing information would lead to optimal prices, ideas, and solutions. Full of messianic cultural confidence following the fall of the Soviet Union, they believed that if information were allowed to flow, the values of American capitalism would triumph on their own merits.
Anonymity loves company — so Tor needed to be sold to the general public. That necessity led to an unlikely alliance between cypherpunks and the U.S. Navy.
Observing these two worlds — the military academics and the cypherpunks — interacting, through sharing test results, theoretical discussions, phone calls, emails, and eating the occasional roasted onion, we see the beginnings of a distinctive idea of what privacy means. Somewhere between the cypherpunk’s everyday, radical, decentralized vision of privacy and the high-security traffic protection desired by the military, a shared idea was forming. This saw privacy as being strongly shaped by the clusters of power and control built into digital infrastructure. This understanding of privacy as a structure would unite an odd coalition around Tor over the next three decades: activists, journalists, drug buyers, hackers, and the military itself.
This strange story of a group of libertarian hackers teaming up with the U.S. military amid the aftershocks of the Cold War presents a more nuanced picture of privacy than the familiar lone-user-versus-state narrative. It shows different groups coming together to change how — through laws, technologies, practices, and cultural values — we police the boundaries between different material systems of power. Understood in this way, we can see privacy as setting out where the domain of the community, of the family, of the state, of a corporation, of an institution or an individual begins and ends.
The workflow is simple: I publish a blog post, share it on Bluesky, edit the post to add the AT URI, and the replies to that Bluesky post become the comments on my blog.
This approach scales with the platform because it uses the platform.
In my opinion, the web is better when independent sites can connect to broader conversations without sacrificing their independence.