Unfortunately, this idea eventually waned or all but ceased for a couple of reasons. One is the taming of labor, the tying of its interests with the State’s and with big business. The other reason, diminishing rewards. Anarchists and revolting workers were regularly shot by police or locked in prison for years. Insisting on your freedom is great, sure, but not when it comes at the price of a decrease in your ability to act. Individual liberation is, unfortunately, hard work. And if all we face is a seemingly endless struggle, why bother?

We are here to propose a solution to this lack of incentive. In Summer 2013, a market opened up on the darknet dedicated to betting on the assassination of a public figures. In particular, these public figures need to be of the political class. A couple of months ago, this idea sparked a bit of controversy when a Forbes article featured it. And while the website is new and revolutionary, the idea has been around for quite some time. The goal? To incentivize political leaders in a new and profound way to obey what the public wants, and to diminish the amount of culpability of any particular better should an assassination takes place. The use of a crypto-currency, in order to obscure the identity of the better(s), has also been enabled with the popularization of Bitcoin, and now even further with Cody Wilson’s Dark Wallet. The original idea comes compliments of Jim Bell, one of the founders of crypto-anarchism and the author of Assassination Politics. He was subsequently hunted down by the federal government and has been in and out of prison for over a decade.

What does this market and the idea of assassination politics have to do with direct action? Incentivizing individual acts of sabotage, vandalism or expropriation. Unlike before, individuals have an added incentive outside of achieving the revolution: They have an easy method of obtaining a reward for their act of revolutionary activism. This increases the likelihood that, if someone were to organize a mass walk-out at work, co-workers would have added interest in disobeying the company’s wishes. Scabs are so often motivated by making money, rather than simply supporting the boss. So let us say to the scab, “join us instead, we’ll give you a hefty amount of bitcoin to do so.”

Of course, this does not have to only be “on the job” sabotage. We can also incentivize acts of sabotage and disobedience against the police. “5 BTCs to the man or woman who slashes all the cop car tires on Main street this Wednesday!” This adds a new and perhaps necessary motivation to commit acts which might not be already rewarding. Why not quit your day job and glue the sheriff’s office door closed? Hell, we could even bet on the boys in blue themselves to take a little bit of our money, if the price is right. We will be glad to give it, officer.

These ideas, while imbued with a crypto-anarchist attitude, are certainly not new to anarchist thought. During the height of the Abolitionist movement, Lysander Spooner encouraged individual acts of sabotage and violence against slaveholders by not only slaves and those committed to the abolitionist cause, but by those who were currently working as “freemen” for slave drivers. Spooner saw that these men cared little for their task and were much more concerned with financial reward. “So be it,” says Spooner. We want those ruthless bastards fighting for us.

From “A Plan For the Abolition of Slavery,”

“You stand ready to do all that vile and inhuman work, which must be done by somebody, but which the more decent Slaveholders themselves will not do. Yet we have heard one good report even of you. It is, that you have no such prejudices against color, nor against lib­erty, as that you would not as willingly earn money by helping a Slave to Canada, as by catching a fugitive and returning him to his master. If you are thus indifferent as to whom you serve, we advise you henceforth to serve the Slave, instead of their masters. Turn about, and help the robbed to rob their robbers. The former can afford to pay you better than the latter. Help them to get possession of the property which is rightfully their due, and they can afford to give you liberal commissions. Help them flog individual Slaveholders, and they can afford to pay you ten times as much as you ever received for flogging Slave. Help them to kidnap the Slaveholders, and they can afford to pay you more than you now get for catching fugitive Slaves. Be true to the Slaves, and we hope they will pay you well for your services. Be false to them, and we hope they will kill you.”

This is liberation for fun and profit. It does not require a moralistic banner be taken up by all against slavery, wage labor or other institutions originating with the State. The time for empty platitudes about the decency of human freedom is over. Slave drivers and the generally disinterested, your world is crumbling. The tool belt of the revolutionary is expanding. You do not have to end up penniless or in a prison cell in order to reclaim the life which is rightfully yours.  We implore you to join this cryptographic rebellion.

These online communities would function similarly to what Spooner called “vigilance committees,” where those injustices, which go unpunished by political means, are taken on directly by decentralized local forces instead. Spooner also recognized the dangers of such actions and, as stated above, such plans were hardly enforceable without great personal risk. That is no longer necessarily the case and it is time for a 21^st century implementation on this 19^th century revolutionary idea.

Of course, there are worries with this, as a previous C4SS op-ed on assassination markets has made clear. These sorts of markets are not restricted to revolutionary activity. People can use them for their own desires. There are worries that this could motivate unwarranted acts of aggression and violence against those who are not as deserving as cops, politicians or bosses. But, as is often the case with ideas like this, Pandora is out of the box. Nothing is stopping your next door neighbor from starting up an anonymous market dedicated to the lynching of any disfavored class. There is also nothing stopping that same person from simply shooting or lynching such individuals himself. So, with theoretical ideas like these, it is important to keep in mind that the necessity of education and motivating the right kind of culture is paramount.

With new tools of defense, almost always come new tools to oppress. Guns were a grand idea until we decided to give one institution with a monopolization on violence most of the weapons. So we must discourage any truly oppressive acts on these markets. We must make a society of those who despise political and economic authority, who are more than happy to set aside their day jobs and make money by tearing down the system one act of individual direct action at a time. The time to strike is now. There has never been a time more ripe than today. The libertarian community is at the forefront of this technology, pushing it forward, making evasion of law enforcement easier all the time, making it more profitable to engage in illegal and undesired activity. This is our opportunity.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Um mercado de sabotagens.

As the article details in an interview with pseudonymous founder Kuwabatake Sanjuro, the Assassination Market is a platform for crowdfunding bounties on the heads of various politicians and government officials, to be collected by anyone who can eliminate them and offer proof. On its face, the Assassination Market is the ultimate test of anonymising software, cloaking the most shameless and confrontational scheme imaginable. To most people it must seem like a clear incitement to terrorism, and by the creator’s account terrorizing politicians into extinction is his intention. And there’s a bit of libertarian macho flash to it; if private defense agencies are a hard sell to the public, get a load of this!

I won’t comment on the ethics or prudence of the site’s intended goal, but rather on its potential unintended consequences. The Assassination Market is qualitatively different from other crypto-anarchist projects to date. Tor, Bitcoin, Silk Road and Defense Distributed aim to empower individuals in ways that don’t necessarily entail such direct harm to third parties, without first gaining third party permission. These are, to paraphrase Sanjuro, a blow to the fetish of democracy. I think this is a good thing.

Wikileaks, and the expansion of bottom up surveillance by leakers, cell phone cameras, hacktivists and the like are a more complicated matter. Surveillance is commonly portrayed as  a totalitarian encroachment, but it’s really more of a people’s game. Rulers only have so many eyes and so many things to watch, while we have lots of eyes laid on comparatively fewer (and, for the familiar Hayekian reasons, slower and less responsive) institution. The advantages stack massively in favor of the little guy against the dinosaurs.

However, egalitarian surveillance and social networking enables mobs to swarm against the unpopular for illegitimate reasons, fostering a climate of chaotic and perpetual horizontal oppression by bullies for … I suppose for lulz. It’s a big relief to see Anonymous displaying ethics in its choice of targets, and recently going after rapists when other people are using the same social media platforms to threaten survivors. Ditto for the many stories of crowds rising to support abused people they don’t even know, after hearing about bullying through Facebook or Twitter. The precedent so far has been acceptably good and I’m less worried about the development of a society without privacy than I otherwise would be.

I’m not so certain regarding the crowdfunding of death, but I guess we’ll see. It could have been said about the users of Silk Road or Defcad, but I think the potential for anonymous murder might attract a dangerous kind of person. Not killers in the mold of Obama, but the kind of people who think Ben Bernanke is the most obvious proxy for Sauron and think it necessary to include his transparently Jewish middle name on the hit listing. In other words, abusive trolls from the dark recesses of the Internet, whose bark normally outstrips their bite but who in swarms, through proxy soldiers, could make their abuse flesh.

The purpose of the Assassination Market is the crowdfunded death of unpopular people. Whatever ethical constraints Sanjuro might place on his own site, there is a market for others who won’t. Today the targets are politicians and bureaucrats; tomorrow economic elites; but the model can be applied to anyone who stands out and gains public disapproval, for whatever reason. Obviously, this can lead to undesirable outcomes as far as individuality is concerned. What if the result of institutionalized assassination markets is a spontaneous order of repression more efficient than that of the current government? More Americans still want Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning imprisoned than otherwise. Salman Rushdie might not have outlived Khomeini. If you think the current crop of reddit mobs and cyber-sociopaths are bad, just wait until people put their money where their mouths are against rape survivors who speak out.

It’s unclear what will happen if this model sees broadened application. The cypherpunks of the 90s were too excited at getting here to give full consideration to where we might go from here. It will fall to us to shape the discourse, and for a new generation of technologically and politically aware to shape the trends. I’m a futurist at heart, and I’d like to think that there’s a way to force some accountability into the process of swarms, so that they become expressions of solidarity and not predation. If we can do that, then we may indeed have a bright future ahead of us.