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form of intrusive 'digital wire-tapping'. The EFF was, and remains
vigilant to the threats to free speech and the rights of privacy such
proposals represent, and have been instrumental in keeping debate
going on such topics. Taking a more proactive stance are the
so-called 'cypherPunks' or 'crypto-anarchists', who are engaged in
actively using encryption technology to undermine or subvert offi-
cial channels of communication. Whether through the activities of
the EFF or of such cypherPunks, the Web becomes a kind of virtual
disputed territory, over which governmental forces of repression and
the supporters of liberty fight for control. (Interestingly, given this
aversion to government, Brand, along with Kelly and Negroponte, is
also a founder of the Global Business Network, a California-based
brains trust that advises multinational companies and governments,
including that of the United States, about information technology
and economic strategy in the post-Cold War global economy.)
By the time neo-liberal policies were being put into practice, Cyber-
netics and systems theories had given rise to new ways of thinking
about order, organization and self-regulation. The developments in
Cybernetics leading to theories about autopoiesis, work in automata,
and in complex phenomena such as the weather, had given rise
to new areas of scientific research, such as chaos and complexity.
These had developed partly out of the work of Lorenz, Mandelbrot,
Conway and others described above. Shared by these different
thinkers was the idea that order could be generated out of chaos, and
complexity out of simplicity. These ideas were further developed by
others, including the biologist Stuart Kauffman, who had already
experimented with shuffling computer-punched cards in the '
s to
show, as he had expected, that the apparently random sequence set-
tled into a 'state cycle' very quickly. Out of this he developed his
theories of complexity, in which order emerges out of apparent
chaos. Meanwhile Chris Langton has furthered this work by suggest-
ing that the 'phase transitions' found in physics, in which a system
moves from one state to another, from a solid to a gas for example,
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