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Short abstract:

In an oral history of NYC cryptoparties, the ecology of activist spaces and information institutions that supported these events are revealed. Cryptoparty activists evangelized public-key cryptography—a tool for communal trust in programmer communities—which limited the reach of the events.

Long abstract:

Hackers, activists, and journalists have been throwing cryptoparties—crowdsourced skillshares for anti-surveillance and digital privacy tools—for over a decade. But the dream of cryptoparties creating “encryption for the masses” has passed, as behavioral surveillance has become more entrenched in capitalism. Through an oral history of the cryptoparty movement in New York City, cryptoparties are revealed to have been sustained through an ecology of activist spaces, open source culture, and information institutions like libraries. Cryptoparty organizers struggled to use technical expertise and vocational skill to turn narrow tools of encryption and obfuscation, created by free and open source software developers, in service of broader community need. For the free and open source software programmers and cypherpunks in the movement, encryption technology like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is the key into a world of community and participation through code. But when they evangelized the use of public-key cryptography tools, all they could offer most members of the public was the key to an empty room. The role of PGP as a source of communal trust in hacker and infosec communities is examined, to show how its use in the social reproduction of those communities created alienating requirements for activists and privacy-conscious library patrons alike and ultimately limited the reach of cryptoparties.