Tim May left Intel at thirty-four, with stock options large enough that he never had to go to work again. A physicist famous for explaining why alpha particles from chip packaging corrupt computer memory turned out to have a lot of free time, and in 1988 he wrote a text called “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” It opened with a reworked first line of Marx: “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.” May went on to explain that encryption would soon let people communicate and trade anonymously, so that no state would know who had agreed with whom about what. The result, he wrote, would be “a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures.”