“High-Tech Hayekians”: Phil Salin’s American Information Exchange and the Cypherpunk Movement, 1984–92

In the 1970s and 80s, thousands of individuals in the Bay Area and beyond, ranging from Intel engineer Timothy May to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assangee, converged as subscribers to the “Cypherpunk” mailing list. Cypherpunks were individuals concerned with privacy, cryptography, technology, and radical politics, as computerization reshaped American life in the late twentieth century. Many within the group hoped that cryptography would “hack” the future by creating a worldwide monetary system and rendering the government a relic of the past. They thus shared a broadly libertarian style of political thinking rooted in futurism and a faith in technology. Unlike many libertarian schemes from the 1970s and 80s, however, the Cypherpunks tested their ideas within the Autodesk Corporation’s American Information Exchange (AMIX).

Futurist and Cypherpunk Phillip Salin founded AMIX in 1984. His goal was to create a digital marketplace for information, complete with seller and buyer profiles, ratings, and managers dubbed “information brokers.” Salin drew explicitly from Friedrich Hayek’s writing on the benefits of spontaneous market orders, leading economist Don Lavoie to half-jokingly describe the Cypherpunks as “high-tech Hayekians.” Ultimately, AMIX went under in 1992, after the company Autodesk acquired it and Phil Salin died. Even in death, though, Salin sought to challenge the state and economic system. On his deathbed, he invented an encryption protocol to deliver money to his descendants. Salin instructed his executors to decapitate his corpse and keep his head in chronic suspension until technological advances allowed for his “revival” or “reanimation.”

That date has yet to come, but it is high time for historians to tell Salin’s story. This paper reconstructs the failed libertarian institution that was AMIX, charts its rise and fall, and identifies aspects of Cypherpunk thought that died with Salin’s experiment — and those that live on in current libertarian politics.