Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

The book’s ending is all wrong. It’s really where the story is just about to get going, but when you’ve already subjected your readers to 1100 pages, you’re options are limited. In this case, our heroes are about to launch a new cryptography-based digital money sans government support.

“Electronic cash from the Crypt. Anonymous. Untraceable. And untaxable.”

Doug’s regained his composure now, and is back to belly laughs. “What will that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?”

“Soon enough, it’ll buy you anything that money can buy,” Tom says.

This is the story I wanted in Cryptonomicon, instead we get a whole lot about code-breaking and WWII and the lives of Gen X-ers. Gripping and enjoyable in that many of the heroes are Walter Whites in their own domains, but ultimately, not the cyberpunk epic I was hoping for.

Cryptonomicon was published in 1999 and you get glimmers of the crypto wars, the promise that, armed with heavy-duty math and personal computers, the common man could stand up to Big Brother. Plus, even at that early stage of the internet, Stephenson clearly gets it:

One has to assume this is an attempt to launch some sort of philosophical debate. Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be – or to be indistinguishable from – self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

Yet, if you are gonna write a book about a book called the Cryptonomicon, I expect a little more math magic (there’s plenty of math in *Cryptonomicon*, just all of it is rather mechanical). I want to see the sly roundabout power of cryptography at work defending the little guy, but most of what Stephenson is concerned with here is breaking codes, not making them. There is a cool little bit of code with a deck of cards by Bruce Schneier, but otherwise it’s all cracking keys.

I did dig the way Stephenson juxtaposed the people who use cryptography with the people who create cryptography: the big moral there is that codes are only so strong as the people who send them. He makes the hacker approach to cryptography very attractive. But that’s the problem: we don’t to see the hackers really launch their project.

Basically, the assayer’s scale was the exchange point – the place where the mineral, this dirt from the ground, became money that would be recognized as such in any bank or marketplace in the world, from San Francisco to London to Beijing. Because of the nerd’s special knowledge, he could put his imprimatur on dirt and make it money. Just like we have the power to turn bits into money.

The nerds and their special knowledge – first of gold, later of math, and networking – can turn bits into money. But we never get to see them actually do it, and the story ends, rather depressingly if you ask me, with a kind of ho-hum reveal about just how their are going to do it. *Cryptonomicon* could have been Icarus, but instead it’s just another story about a bank.