Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias

In Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, Peter Ludlow extends the approachhe used so successfully in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, offering a collection of writingsthat reflects the eclectic nature of the online world, as well as its tremendous energy andcreativity. This time the subject is the emergence of governance structures within onlinecommunities and the visions of political sovereignty shaping some of those communities. Ludlow viewsvirtual communities as laboratories for conducting experiments in the construction of new societiesand governance structures. While many online experiments will fail, Ludlow argues that given thesynergy of the online world, new and superior governance structures may emerge. Indeed, utopianvisions are not out of place, provided that we understand the new utopias to be fleeting localized"islands in the Net" and not permanent institutions.The book is organized in five sections. Thefirst section considers the sovereignty of the Internet. The second section asks how widespreadaccess to resources such as Pretty Good Privacy and anonymous remailers allows the possibility of"Crypto Anarchy"--essentially carving out space for activities that lie outside the purview ofnation states and other traditional powers. The third section shows how the growth of e-commerce israising questions of legal jurisdiction and taxation for which the geographic boundaries ofnation-states are obsolete. The fourth section looks at specific experimental governance structuresevolved by online communities. The fifth section considers utopian and anti-utopian visions forcyberspace.Contributors Richard Barbrook, John Perry Barlow, William E. Baugh Jr., David S.Bennahum, Hakim Bey, David Brin, Andy Cameron, Dorothy E. Denning, Mark Dery, Kevin Doyle, DuncanFrissell, Eric Hughes, Karrie Jacobs, David Johnson, Peter Ludlow, Timothy C. May, Jennifer L.Mnookin, Nathan Newman, David G. Post, Jedediah S. Purdy, Charles J. Stivale.

Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, is the author of Semantics, Tense, and Time: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Natural Language (MIT Press, 1999), among other books, and the editor of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (MIT Press, 2001) and High Noon on the Electronic Frontier (MIT Press, 1996).