Eric Hughes

Eric Hughes is a mathematician and cypherpunk — the author of A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993) and, with Timothy C. May and John Gilmore, a co-founder of the cypherpunks mailing list that gave the movement its name. His manifesto is the movement’s compact statement of purpose.

A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

Written in March 1993, the manifesto opens with the claim the whole cypherpunk project rests on: “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” Hughes is careful to distinguish the term from its usual confusion with concealment — privacy is not secrecy, he writes, but something more precise and more social:

“Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

— Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto”

From that definition follows the manifesto’s central move, and the movement’s break with mere advocacy: privacy in the electronic age will not be handed down by governments or granted by corporations, so those who want it must build it themselves. “We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy”, Hughes writes — and the remedy is not persuasion but construction. He states it in the line that became the movement’s motto: “Cypherpunks write code.” The cypherpunks, he declares, “are dedicated to building anonymous systems”, defending privacy with cryptography, anonymous mail forwarding, digital signatures, and electronic money.

Co-Founder of the Cypherpunks

Hughes co-founded the cypherpunks mailing list in 1992 together with Timothy C. May and John Gilmore, hosting it initially from his own machine; the group’s name was coined by Jude Milhon at one of its early meetings. Where May’s The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto supplied the movement’s political vision, Hughes supplied its ethic of action — the insistence that the argument is won by writing and releasing working tools, not by winning a debate. (Hughes’s biographical details here are widely documented common knowledge, not drawn from the manifesto this page cites.)

Place in This Wiki

Hughes sits at the founding of the cypherpunk thread alongside May. His “write code” ethic is the practical hinge of the whole privacy-and-cryptography tradition the wiki traces from PGP through Signal to Bitcoin: the conviction that crypto anarchy is not a policy to be lobbied for but a set of systems to be deployed. His definition of privacy as selective revelation also underlies the wiki’s treatment of censorship resistance and pseudonymity.

See Also

• Timothy C. May - co-founder of the cypherpunks list and author of its crypto-anarchist vision
• Cypherpunk - the movement Hughes helped found and name
• Crypto Anarchy - the political program the “write code” ethic serves
• Privacy and Cryptography - the tradition his manifesto launches
• Censorship Resistance - a property his selective-revelation definition underwrites
• John Perry Barlow

Sources

• A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto - Hughes’s 1993 statement: privacy as selective revelation, the refusal to expect privacy as a gift, and the “Cypherpunks write code” ethic of building anonymous systems