of the
Civil Libertarians, though it partakes of all those other aspects, is
profoundly and thoroughly POLITICAL.

In 1990, the obscure, long-simmering struggle over the ownership and
nature of cyberspace became loudly and irretrievably public. People
from some of the oddest corners of American society suddenly found
themselves public figures. Some of these people found this situation
much more than they had ever bargained for. They backpedalled, and
tried to retreat back to the mandarin obscurity of their cozy
subcultural niches. This was generally to prove a mistake.

But the civil libertarians seized the day in 1990. They found
themselves organizing, propagandizing, podium-pounding, persuading,
touring, negotiating, posing for publicity photos, submitting to
interviews, squinting in the limelight as they tried a tentative, but
growingly sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.

It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should have this
competitive advantage.

The hackers of the digital underground are an hermetic elite. They
find it hard to make any remotely convincing case for their actions in
front of the general public. Actually, hackers roundly despise the
"ignorant" public, and have never trusted the judgement of "the
system." Hackers do propagandize, but only among themselves, mostly in
giddy, badly spelled manifestos of class warfare, youth rebellion or
naive techie utopianism. Hackers must strut and boast in order to
establish and preserve their underground reputations. But if they
speak out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile
surface-tension of the underground, and they will be harrassed or
arrested. Over the longer term, most hackers stumble, get busted, get
betrayed, or simply give up. As a political force, the digital
underground is hamstrung.

The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under protracted seige.
They have plenty of money with which to push their calculated public
image, but they waste much energy and goodwill attacking one another
with slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos have suffered
at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers, they don't trust the
public's judgement. And this distrust may be well-founded. Should the
general public of the high-tech 1990s come to understand its own best
interests in telecommunications, that might well pose a grave threat to
the specialized technical power and authority that the te