GPG seems to be gaining mindshare. It is an open-source set of libraries and command line tools that inherits a lot of the interface from PGP (which is proprietary).

I have used the Cryptophane interface on windows and it makes it pretty easy to generate keys and manage them in your local keystore as well as to sign, encrpyt and decrypt arbitrary text. This would get tedious if you did a lot of email though but based on what you described I think it would work well for you.

Here is a link to other front-end tools for GPG: http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html

And you are certain this is a good thing?

They might approve of the elite not being driven by boredom to constantly murder each other in useless duels.

Apologies, historical pedantry follows...

"Useless" duels started out as a way for nobles to legally murder each other (a mark of class distinction from the commoners who would actually be committing a crime when killing each other -- useless only in the sense that status signalling is useless), but the elites weren't stupid. Dueling evolved from sword-fights to the death to sword-fights to first blood,* and then to gun fights with rules that tended to minimize fatal outcomes.**

*A legacy of this is the difference between fencing rules in foil/sabre and epee. IIRC, the former have highly structured rules about advancing and retreating (because being ignoring such things in early duels would get you killed); the latter is much less structured because it is based on duelling after the change from to-the-death to first-blood.

**Though this varied by time and geography. The Russians, for example, had a nasty tendency to toss the "civilizing" rules out the window. The Wild West variant as well.

They might approve of the elite not being driven by boredom to constantly murder each other in useless duels.

You mean an elite that dosen't care about their honour?

They might approve of the wealthy elite sharing the power rather than consolidating it with a king or emperor.

The wealthy elite is sharing power?

They'd probably approve of Cinemax After Dark.

Maybe.

If my goal was to maximize the diversity of my lived experience, I suspect I would not sign up for a several-thousand-year linear lifetime (that is, a lifetime where I remembered all of my past experiences as one sequence of events) at all.

I would far prefer, in that case, to "reset" periodically and live new lives, as well as to experience the recorded lives of others in the first person, depending on what was technologically feasible.

I have noticed lately that we are living in what might be considered a technological utopia by the majority of our ancestors. However, people tend to nearly instantly take new enabling technologies for granted. People are generally just as stressed about their jobs despite the fact that they need relatively little money to achieve to obtain a relatively high level of material wealth by historical standards. Everybody remains just as unhappy and un-actualized. It's a relatively common trope in science fiction to depict a highly technological future where everybody is just as stressed and unhappy as they are now.

This TED talk in particular was illuminating to me:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

I think this was the last straw in eradicating my belief that merely improving people's standard of living will make them happier.

I don't know - imagine a time traveler going back 500 years, and trying to convince an average European nobleman about the benefits that would come from improvements in science and technology, by describing today's Western Europe - warm water, light, and quality clothes for everybody! Even a peasant can afford to travel to the other side of the world in a few hours! People live to eighty years old, with much less diseases and crippling injuries! Death by violence is rare and scandalous, and there haven't been any wars in Western Europe for over sixty years! Nearly everybody can read, and watch amazing shows from the comfort of his home!

Can you name a change in culture or norms that he would approve of? I'm pretty sure this isn't just a case of eutopia being scary but more a case of "well those paper clip maximizers are warm, healthy and can travel the world, but my value system is practically extinct, so I'm not too pleased with this future".

Also for some strange reason some LessWrongers think that his values extrapolated to encompass a better understanding of the natural world would converge with our own. Oh sure he'd probably say slide more forager on say the farmer vs. forager continuum of Robin Hanson than he did in his time, but moral change in the past few centuries can not be separated from peculiar historical forces.

What is the point of this?

I updated the original post. Maybe we could agree on those questions. Be back tomorrow.

Thanks for writing this, it is a very good analysis of what I sometimes find to be a pretty creepy trend. It helps me understand some of my reservations about this story link that was posted recently.

History is full of new things coming to pass, but they have never yet led to utopia.

This is not convincing because 10,000 years is a pretty small sample size.