Gates has a remarkable facility for casting something that already exists
and that most people take for granted -- doing business with "strangers" --
as the ripening fruit of technological progress. While our monetary
system has served us reasonably well these two hundred years, he asks us
to join him in his starry-eyed faith that digital security will, unlike
past anti-counterfeiting measures, be immune to the most sophisticated
criminal mind. Public key cryptography is indeed one of the best
solutions to the problem of authenticating digital documents. But even a
modest knowledge of history suggests that as the technology of privacy
improves, so do the skills of those who would breach it. In the world of
atoms, think of Kryptonite locks. In the world of bits: determined grad
students find chinks in Netscape security despite claims to
impenetrability. It's as if Gates were wearing binary beer goggles which
make the future look luscious and unblemished, and transform the past into
a kind fairy tale of insularity: a mythical land where cousins married
cousins, and sons and daughters worked for their fathers or aunts. The
inhabitants of this land had no legal tender since everyone claimed some
common blood and thus trusted that every promise would be kept, every debt
repaid in kind. Though neighboring towns wished to trade with the citizens
of this Lilliputian nation, these simple folks always refused, fearing
that such intimate transactions with strangers might spoil their pristine
society....

Such a nation has never existed. If anyone knows the dangers of an economy
where you cannot "do business with strangers," it's Bill Gates. After all,
his fortune was made in commerce with millions of Americans and foreigners
and, given his preference for staying indoors, I can't believe Bill enjoyed
relationships with all of them. Instead, the SEC and the Federal Reserve
have provided sufficient assurance that the transactions that filled his
coffers were valid. Moreover, the supposedly titillating possibility of
doing business with people you distrust holds only sinister promise. That
is, unless you're planning to expand operations to Russia and are
calculating payoffs as a percentage of business costs.

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