13.3.1. "herding cats"..trying to change the world through exhortation seems a particulary ineffective notion 13.3.2. There's always been a lot of wasted time and rhetoric on the Cypherpunks list as various people tried to get others to follow their lead, to adopt their vision. (Nothing wrong with this, if done properly. If someone leads by example, or has a particularly compelling vision or plan, this may naturally happen. Too often, though, the situation was that someone's vague plans for a product were declared by them to be the standards that others should follow. Various schemes for digital money, in many forms and modes, has always been the prime example of this.) 13.3.3. This is related also to what Kevin Kelley calls "the fax effect." When few people own fax machines, they're not of much use. Trying to get others to use the same tools one has is like trying to convince people to buy fax machines so that you can communicate by fax with them...it may happen, but probably for other reasons. (Happily, the interoperability of PGP provided a common communications medium that had been lacking with previous platform-specific cipher programs.) 13.3.4. Utopian schemes are also a tough sell. Schemes about using digital money to make inflation impossible, schemes to collect taxes with anonymous systems, etc. 13.3.5. Harry Browne's "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World" is well worth reading; he advises against getting upset and frustrated that the world is not moving in the direction one would like.
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