Cypherpunks
I can remember back in the day the cypherpunk movement - it sprang from cyberpunk but was a thing all it’s own. I was pretty interested in it for awhile following along in the mid to late 90’s, but my interest tapered off. It was a group focused on privacy in an increasingly connected world - now that I think about it, it was people who very early on were concerned, among other things, about the ephemerality of conversation as the usage of email was growing so quickly. Those were heady days when your .sig had your pgp finger prints and key server urls and key signing parties were all the rage. Even since then I periodically will get involved in this and sign up for something like a hushmail account, I think I’ve gone through 3 or 4 of those in my years. Sadly those days seem long past.
You never hear of cypherpunks any more. But here’s the thing - early on in that movement as a gesture towards anonymity there came to be a convention that at any site that required free registration someone would sign up an account who’s login name and password were both “cypherpunks”. Through all this time, this is still in place - I was reminded of this simply because I wanted to check something out on washingtonpost.com today and needed a login. Handily cypherpunks/cypherpunks came to the rescue. A last vestige of what I think of as a great movement. There’s probably some commentary in those last two sentences, but I guess I’ll just wax nostalgic and leave it at that.
