In Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic 1993 sci-fi novel Red Mars, a pioneering group of scientists establish a colony on Mars. Some imagine it as a chance for a new life, run on entirely different principles from the chaotic Earth. Over time, though, the illusion is shattered as multinational corporations operating under the banner of governments move in, viewing Mars as nothing but an extension to business-as-usual.

It is a story that undoubtedly resonates with some members of the Bitcoin community. The vision of a free-floating digital cryptocurrency economy, divorced from the politics of colossal banks and aggressive governments, is under threat. Take, for example, the purists at Dark Wallet, accusing the Bitcoin Foundation of selling out to the regulators and the likes of the Winklevoss Twins.

Bitcoin sometimes appears akin to an illegal immigrant, trying to decide whether to seek out a rebellious existence in the black-market economy, or whether to don the slick clothes of the Silicon Valley establishment. The latter position – involving publicly accepting regulation and tax whilst privately lobbying against it – is obviously more acceptable and familiar to authorities.

Of course, any new scene is prone to developing internal echo chambers that amplify both commonalities and differences. While questions regarding Bitcoin’s regulatory status lead hyped-up cryptocurrency evangelists to engage in intense sectarian debates, to many onlookers Bitcoin is just a passing curiosity, a damp squib that will eventually suffer an ignoble death by media boredom. It is a mistake to believe that, though. The core innovation of Bitcoin is not going away, and it is deeper than currency.

What has been introduced to the world is a method to create decentralised peer-validated time-stamped ledgers. That is a fancy way of saying it is a method for bypassing the use of centralised officials in recording stuff. Such officials are pervasive in society, from a bank that records electronic transactions between me and my landlord, to patent officers that record the date of new innovations, to parliamentary registers noting the passing of new legislative acts.

The most visible use of this technical accomplishment is in the realm of currency, though, so it is worth briefly explaining the basics of Bitcoin in order to understand the political visions being unleashed as a result of it.

The technical vision 1.0

Banks are information intermediaries. Gone are the days of the merchant dumping a hoard of physical gold into the vaults for safekeeping. Nowadays, if you have ‘£350 in the bank’, it merely means the bank has recorded that for you in their data centre, on a database that has your account number and a corresponding entry saying ‘350’ next to it. If you want to pay someone electronically, you essentially send a message to your bank, identifying yourself via a pin or card number, asking them to change that entry in their database and to inform the recipient’s bank to do the same with the recipient’s account.

Thus, commercial banks collectively act as a cartel controlling the recording of transaction data, and it is via this process that they keep score of ‘how much money’ we have. To create a secure electronic currency system that does not rely on these banks thus requires three interacting elements. Firstly, one needs to replace the private databases that are controlled by them. Secondly, one needs to provide a way for people to change the information on that database (‘move money around’). Thirdly, one needs to convince people that the units being moved around are worth something.

To solve the first element, Bitcoin provides a public database, or ledger, that is referred to reverently as the blockchain. There is a way for people to submit information for recording in the ledger, but once it gets recorded, it cannot be edited in hindsight. If you’ve heard about bitcoin ‘mining’ (using ‘hashing algorithms’), that is what that is all about. A scattered collective of mercenary clerks essentially hire their computers out to collectively maintain the ledger, baking (or weaving) transaction records into it.

Secondly, Bitcoin has a process for individuals to identify themselves in order to submit transactions to those clerks to be recorded on that ledger. That is where public-key cryptography comes in. I have a public Bitcoin address (somewhat akin to my account number at a bank) and I then control that public address with a private key (a bit like I use my private pin number to associate myself with my bank account). This is what provides anonymity.

The result of these two elements, when put together, is the ability for anonymous individuals to record transactions between their bitcoin accounts on a database that is held and secured by a decentralised network of techno-clerks (‘miners’). As for the third element – convincing people that the units being transacted are worth something – that is a more subtle question entirely that I will not address here.

The political vision 1.0

Note the immediate political implications. Within the Bitcoin system, a set of powerful central intermediaries (the cartel of commercial banks, connected together via the central bank, underwritten by government), gets replaced with a more diffuse network intermediary, apparently controlled by no-one in particular.

This generally appeals to people who wish to devolve power away from banks by introducing more diversity into the monetary system. Those with a left-wing anarchist bent, who perceive the state and banking sector as representing the same elite interests, may recognise in it the potential for collective direct democratic governance of currency. It has really appealed, though, to conservative libertarians who perceive it as a commodity-like currency, free from the evils of the central bank and regulation.

The corresponding political reaction from policy-makers and establishment types takes three immediate forms. Firstly, there are concerns about it being used for money laundering and crime (‘Bitcoin is the dark side’). Secondly, there are concerns about consumer protection (‘Bitcoin is full of cowboy operators’). Thirdly, there are concerns about tax (‘this allows people to evade tax’).

The general status quo bias of regulators, who fixate on the negative potentials of Bitcoin whilst remaining blind to negatives in the current system, sets the stage for a political battle. Bitcoin enthusiasts, passionate about protecting the niche they have carved out, become prone to imagining conspiratorial scenes of threatened banks fretfully lobbying the government to ban Bitcoin, or of paranoid politicians panicking about the integrity of the national currency.

The technical vision 2.0

Outside the media hype around these Bitcoin dramas, though, a deeper movement is developing. It focuses not only on Bitcoin’s potential to disrupt commercial banks, but also on the more general potential for decentralised blockchains to disrupt other types of centralised information intermediaries.

Copyright authorities, for example, record people’s claims to having produced a unique work at a unique date and authoritatively stamp it for them. Such centralised ‘timestamping’ more generally is called ‘notarisation’. One non-monetary function for a Bitcoin-style blockchain could thus be to replace the privately controlled ledger of the notary with a public ledger that people can record claims on. This is precisely what Proof of Existence and Originstamp are working on.

And what about domain name system (DNS) registries that record web addresses? When you type in a URL like www.e-ir.info, the browser first steers you to a DNS registry like Afilias, which maintains a private database of URLs alongside information on which IP address to send you to. One can, however, use a blockchain to create a decentralised registry of domain name ownership, which is what Namecoin is doing. Theoretically, this process could be used to record share ownership, land ownership, or ownership in general (see, for example, Mastercoin’s projects).

The biggest information intermediaries, though, are often hidden in plain sight. What is Facebook? Isn’t it just a company that you send information to, which is then stored in their database and subsequently displayed to you and your friends? You log in with your password (proving your identity), and then can alter that database by sending them further messages (‘I’d like to delete that photo’). Likewise with Twitter, Dropbox, and countless other web services.

Unlike the original internet, which was largely used for transmission of static content, we experience sites like Facebook as interactive playgrounds where we can use programmes installed in some far away computer. In the process of such interactivity, we give groups like Facebook huge amounts of information. Indeed, they set themselves up as information honeytraps in order to create a profit-making platform where advertisers can sell you things based on the information. This simultaneously creates a large information repository for authorities like the NSA to browse. This interaction of corporate power and state power is inextricably tied to the profitable nature of centrally held data.

But what if you could create interactive web services that did not revolve around single information intermediaries like Facebook? That is precisely what groups like Ethereum are working towards. Where Bitcoin is a way to record simple transaction information on a decentralised ledger, Ethereum wants to create a ‘decentralised computational engine’. This is a system for running programmes, or executing contracts, on a blockchain held in play via a distributed network of computers rather than Mark Zuckerberg’s data centres.

It all starts to sounds quite sci-fi, but organisations like Ethereum are leading the charge on building ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’, hardcoded entities that people can interact with, but that nobody in particular controls. I send information to this entity, triggering the code and setting in motion further actions. As Bitshares describes it, such an organisation “has a business plan encoded in open source software that executes automatically in an entirely transparent and trustworthy manner.”

The political vision 2.0

By removing a central point of control, decentralised systems based on code – whether they exist to move Bitcoin tokens around, store files, or build contracts – resemble self-contained robots. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase are human faces behind the digital interface of the services they run. They can overtly manipulate, or bow in to pressure to censor. A decentralised currency or a decentralised version of Twitter seems immune from such manipulation.

It is this that gives rise to a narrative of empowerment and, indeed, at first sight this offers an exhilarating vision of self-contained outposts of freedom within a world otherwise dominated by large corruptible institutions. At many cryptocurrency meet-ups, there is an excitable mix of techno-babble infused with social claims. The blockchain can record contracts between free individuals, and if enforcement mechanisms can be coded in to create self-enforcing ‘smart contracts’, we have a system for building encoded law that bypasses states.

Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies, though, are empowering right now precisely because they are underdogs. They introduce diversity into the existing system and thereby expand our range of tools. In the minds of hardcore proponents, though, blockchain technologies are more than this. They are a replacement system, superior to existing institutions in every possible way. When amplified to this extreme, though, the apparently utopian project can begin to take on a dystopian, conservative hue.

Binary politics

When asked about why Bitcoin is superior to other currencies, proponents often point to its ‘trustless‘ nature. No trust needs be placed in fallible ‘governments and corporations’. Rather, a self-sustaining system can be created by individuals following a set of rules that are set apart from human frailties or intervention. Such a system is assumed to be fairer by allowing people to win out against those powers who can abuse rules.

The vision thus is not one of bands of people getting together into mutualistic self-help groups. Rather, it is one of individuals acting as autonomous agents, operating via the hardcoded rules with other autonomous agents, thereby avoiding those who seek to harm their interests.

Note the underlying dim view of human nature. While anarchist philosophers often imagine alternative governance systems based on mutualistic community foundations, the ‘empowerment’ here does not stem from building community ties. Rather it is imagined to come from retreating from trust and taking refuge in a defensive individualism mediated via mathematical contractual law.

It carries a certain disdain for human imperfection, particularly the imperfection of those in power, but by implication the imperfection of everyone in society. We need to be protected from ourselves by vesting power in lines of code that execute automatically. If only we can lift currency away from manipulation from the Federal Reserve. If only we can lift Wikipedia away from the corruptible Wikimedia Foundation.

Activists traditionally revel in hot-blooded asymmetric battles of interest (such as that between StrikeDebt! and the banks), implicitly holding an underlying faith in the redeemability of human-run institutions. The Bitcoin community, on the other hand, often seems attracted to a detached anti-politics, one in which action is reduced to the binary options of Buy In or Buy Out of the coded alternative. It echoes consumer notions of the world, where one ‘expresses’ oneself not via debate or negotiation, but by choosing one product over another. We’re leaving Earth for Mars. Join if you want.

It all forms an odd, tense amalgam between visions of exuberant risk-taking freedom and visions of risk-averse anti-social paranoia. This ambiguity is not unique to cryptocurrency (see, for example, this excellent parody of the trustless society), but in the case of Bitcoin, it is perhaps best exemplified by the narrative offered by Cody Wilson in Dark Wallet’s crowdfunding video. “Bitcoin is what they fear it is, a way to leave… to make a choice. There’s a system approaching perfection, just in time for our disappearance, so, let there be dark”.

The myth of political ‘exit’

But where exactly is this perfect system Wilson is disappearing to?

Back in the days of roving bands of nomadic people, the political option of ‘exit’ was a reality. If a ruler was oppressive, you could actually pack up and take to the desert in a caravan. The bizarre thing about the concept of ‘exit to the internet’ is that the internet is a technology premised on massive state and corporate investment in physical infrastructure, fibre optic cables laid under seabeds, mass production of computers from low-wage workers in the East, and mass affluence in Western nations. If you are in the position to be having dreams of technological escape, you are probably not in a position to be exiting mainstream society. You are mainstream society.

Don’t get me wrong. Wilson is a subtle and interesting thinker, and it is undoubtedly unfair to suggest that he really believes that one can escape the power dynamics of the messy real world by finding salvation in a kind of internet Matrix. What he is really trying to do is to invoke one side of the crypto-anarchist mantra of ‘privacy for the weak, but transparency for the powerful’.

That is a healthy radical impulse, but the conservative element kicks in when the assumption is made that somehow privacy alone is what enables social empowerment. That is when it turns into an individualistic ‘just leave me alone’ impulse fixated with negative liberty. Despite the rugged frontier appeal of the concept, the presumption that empowerment simply means being left alone to pursue your individual interests is essentially an ideology of the already-empowered, not the vulnerable.

This is the same tension you find in the closely related cypherpunk movement. It is often pitched as a radical empowerment movement, but as Richard Boase notes, it is “a world full of acronyms and codes, impenetrable to all but the most cynical, distrustful, and political of minds.” Indeed, crypto-geekery offers nothing like an escape from power dynamics. One merely escapes to a different set of rules, not one controlled by ‘politicians’, but one in the hands of programmers and those in control of computing power.

It is only when we think in these terms that we start to see Bitcoin not as a realm ‘lacking the rules imposed by the state’, but as a realm imposing its own rules. It offers a form of protection, but guarantees nothing like ‘empowerment’ or ‘escape’.

Techno-Leviathan

Technology often seems silent and inert, a world of ‘apolitical’ objects. We are thus prone to being blind to the power dynamics built into our use of it. For example, isn’t email just a useful tool? Actually, it is highly questionable whether one can ‘choose’ whether to use email or not. Sure, I can choose between Gmail or Hotmail, but email’s widespread uptake creates network effects that mean opting out becomes less of an option over time. This is where the concept of becoming ‘enslaved to technology’ emerges from. If you do not buy into it, you will be marginalised, and that is political.

This is important. While individual instances of blockchain technology can clearly be useful, as a class of technologies designed to mediate human affairs, they contain a latent potential for encouraging technocracy. When disassociated from the programmers who design them, trustless blockchains floating above human affairs contains the specter of rule by algorithms. It is a vision (probably accidently) captured by Ethereum’s Joseph Lubin when he says “There will be ways to manipulate people to make bad decisions, but there won’t be ways to manipulate the system itself”.

Interestingly, it is a similar abstraction to that made by Hobbes. In his Leviathan, self-regarding people realise that it is in their interests to exchange part of their freedom for security of self and property, and thereby enter into a contract with a Sovereign, a deified personage that sets out societal rules of engagement. The definition of this Sovereign has been softened over time – along with the fiction that you actually contract to it – but it underpins modern expectations that the government should guarantee property rights.

Conservative libertarians hold tight to the belief that, if only hard property rights and clear contracting rules are put in place, optimal systems spontaneously emerge. They are not actually that far from Hobbes in this regard, but their irritation with Hobbes’ vision is that it relies on politicians who, being actual people, do not act like a detached contractual Sovereign should, but rather attempt to meddle, make things better, or steal. Don’t decentralised blockchains offer the ultimate prospect of protected property rights with clear rules, but without the political interference?

This is essentially the vision of the internet techno-leviathan, a deified crypto-sovereign whose rules we can contract to. The rules being contracted to are a series of algorithms, step by step procedures for calculations which can only be overridden with great difficulty. Perhaps, at the outset, this represents, à la Rousseau, the general will of those who take part in the contractual network, but the key point is that if you get locked into a contract on that system, there is no breaking out of it.

This, of course, appeals to those who believe that powerful institutions operate primarily by breaching property rights and contracts. Who really believes that though? For much of modern history, the key issue with powerful institutions has not been their willingness to break contracts. It has been their willingness to use seemingly unbreakable contracts to exert power. Contracts, in essence, resemble algorithms, coded expressions of what outcomes should happen under different circumstances. On average, they are written by technocrats and, on average, they reflect the interests of elite classes.

That is why liberation movements always seek to break contracts set in place by old regimes, whether it be peasant movements refusing to honour debt contracts to landlords, or the DRC challenging legacy mining concessions held by multinational companies, or SMEs contesting the terms of swap contracts written by Barclays lawyers. Political liberation is as much about contesting contracts as it is about enforcing them.

Building the techno-political vision 3.0

The point I am trying to make is that you do not escape the world of big corporates and big government by wishing for a trustless set of technologies that collectively resemble a technocratic crypto-sovereign. Rather, you use technology as a tool within ongoing political battles, and you maintain an ongoing critical outlook towards it. The concept of the decentralised blockchain is powerful. The cold, distrustful edge of cypherpunk, though, is only empowering when it is firmly in the service of creative warm-blooded human communities situated in the physical world of dirt and grime.

Perhaps this means de-emphasising the focus on how blockchains can be used to store digital assets or property, and focusing rather on those without assets. For example, think of the potential of blockchain voting systems that groups like Restart Democracy are experimenting with. Centralised vote-counting authorities are notorious sources of political anxiety in fragile countries. What if the ledger recording the votes cast was held by a decentralised network of citizens, with voters having a means to anonymously transmit votes to be stored on a publicly viewable database?

We do not want a future society free from people we have to trust, or one in which the most we can hope for is privacy. Rather, we want a world in which technology is used to dilute the power of those systems that cause us to doubt trust relationships. Screw escaping to Mars.

Podcasting represents a radical decentralization of the airwaves that can’t actually take place on the airwaves, for a few reasons.

Most people conceive of FM radio as being one giant mass of differently-formatted radio stations and content providers. In actuality, there are three tiers:

1. FM Commercial Radio Broadcast Stations
2. FM Noncommercial Educational Radio Broadcast Stations
3. Low Power FM (LPFM) Noncommercial Educational Radio Broadcast Stations

The first tier, commercial radio, is your average music, talk and sports programming; the FCC allows commercial radio to potentially take up every slot from 92.1 MHz to 107.9 MHz. The second tier is where “public radio” can be found, and the FCC generally allots 88.1 MHz to 91.9 MHz to public radio stations. This is the realm of NPR and its competitor-partners. The third tier, LPFM stations, are generally smaller community outfits that can cover neighborhoods with their broadcasting power, but little else. They have a smaller budget and don’t operate through NPR; they also tend to hire more amateur and independent producers on a volunteer basis. Due to the low transmission power, it’s rare that these producers can get their work heard by more than a few hundred people at any given moment.

Podcasting does for these producers what national syndication does for Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition and All Things Considered: it gets their work out there to potentially anyone. Of course, the latter shows aren’t exactly done by independent producers, which brings me to the second barrier to entry for radio decentralization: just about every production company operates in the realm of old media.

With one notable exception, the companies that operate and compete in public radio hire much in the same way that a newspaper or television station does; only producers that are credentialed (usually in the form of a college degree followed by so many years interning or working at low-power FM stations) can get even entry-level jobs at National Public Radio, Public Radio International, or American Public Media. This is not a good or bad thing – this is just something that they do. Unfortunately, there’s a side-effect: not everyone currently producing audio has a college degree, and not everyone who wants to be in radio can actually afford to go to college for it; therefore, the demographic of people who are actually working at one of the major content providers tends to be very… monochromatic.

That notable exception? The Public Radio Exchange, or PRX. Its slogan is “Making Public Radio More Public,” and its entire infrastructure is set up for exactly that task. Anyone can sign up as a producer for free, and the entry cost to actually make money with PRX is only $50 a year. Unfortunately, the free producer account has a data upload limit of two hours – not exactly conducive to doing a long-run podcast. Also, there are some technical barriers to using PRX as your main distribution tool – barriers that, if you’re not familiar with the inner workings of public radio, might be very difficult to overcome. Studioless podcasting comes with very few of those barriers; plus, it’s all-online.

This is really the crux of what makes podcasting special: its ability to open up new spaces for more voices in almost infinite capacity. You can podcast for fun or for a living; your success isn’t tied to which market you’re doing the best in and you don’t have to worry about broadcast clocks. You don’t have to worry about your show being canceled because the station lost money or didn’t raise enough in the periodic fundraiser to keep it going. Podcasting is made for everyone.

Quasi mai il coraggio fisico è la virtù suprema. Non è neanche particolarmente legato ad un qualunque altro valore morale. Ma è ugualmente una virtù, e una virtù che purtroppo oggi scarseggia tra gli individui dei dipartimenti di polizia, che si nascondono dietro una buffa schiera di macchine da guerra e fanno fuori chiunque, di qualunque specie o età, provochi il più flebile fremito di paura nei loro deboli cuori. Animali domestici, malati di mente, vecchi: apparentemente, tutto quello che si muove è in grado di terrorizzare l’ardito poliziotto; lo colma di abietta paura, presumibilmente se la fa addosso, è spaventato al punto che tira fuori la sua arma e fa fuoco, volente o nolente, su tutto quello che batte i denti per il terrore.

A luglio a Hawthorne, in California, un agente di polizia alla vista di un cagnolino meno di un quarto le sue dimensioni è stato sopraffatto dalla paura al punto che non gli è rimasta altra scelta che sparargli cinque colpi davanti al suo padrone. Ovviamente, nessuno può biasimare il poliziotto in questione. Con lui c’erano soltanto tre suoi colleghi. Non avrebbero mai potuto nulla contro quella bestia feroce, che sulle zampe posteriori arrivava quasi all’altezza della sua cintola. Lasciare che il padrone lo calmasse era chiaramente fuori discussione, visto che quest’ultimo era un pericoloso malfattore colpevole di un crimine orrendo: offesa alla polizia in stato di negrezza.

A gennaio in Maryland un ragazzo di ventisei anni con la sindrome di Down e un quoziente intellettivo pari a 40 è stato assassinato non da uno, non da due, ma da tre poliziotti fuori servizio perché osava cercare di vedere un film due volte senza pagare un secondo biglietto. La possibilità che una tale trasgressione non valesse la vita di un uomo non è passata per la testa dei nostri impavidi agenti. Quando gli hanno chiesto di andarsene, la sua reazione irata fu tale che gli agenti si presero una paura tremenda per la propria vita, e furono costretti a immobilizzarlo e “tenerlo sotto controllo” finché non morì asfissiato. L’aspetto tipico di una persona affetta da sindrome di Down è così facile da riconoscere che anche un profano riesce a diagnosticarla sui neonati. Ma apparentemente i nostri eroici agenti non hanno mai visto “Johnny Stecchino”. Chi può biasimarli per aver avuto paura? La loro vittima era alta un metro e sessantatré e pesava 130 chili. Di muscoli, immagino.

Di nuovo in California, a giugno, alcuni agenti del dipartimento di polizia di Los Angeles, credendo di sentire l’odore inconfondibile di qualcuno che si fa un prodotto chimico illegale, hanno sfondato la porta di casa di un ottantenne che, spaventato dall’intrusione notturna di sconosciuti, ha tirato fuori un fucile ed è stato immediatamente ucciso da una scarica di piombo dei nostri eroici agenti, che coraggiosamente hanno giustiziato un vecchio sul suo letto. Si ignorano le ragioni per cui i nostri agenti non siano riusciti a farsi identificare. Non si sa neanche come abbiano fatto a schivare il fuoco del vecchio. Ma una cosa è certa: ora che un ottantenne non può più brandire la pistola contro sconosciuti che irrompono nella sua camera da letto nel bel mezzo della notte siamo tutti più sicuri.

Quando si parla di abusi della polizia, si finisce solitamente per discutere di politiche e procedure da cambiare e della necessità di una maggiore responsabilità. Cose importanti, ma è importante anche discutere dell’incredibile livello di codardia che tolleriamo negli agenti di polizia. Se il pericolo ti spaventa al punto che sei un pericolo per gli altri, non ci fai nulla in un lavoro pericoloso. Dovresti prendere in considerazione un altro lavoro da qualche altra parte in un bell’ufficio confortevole. Il coraggio fisico non è la più grande virtù, ma è pur sempre una virtù.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Physical courage is hardly the highest virtue, nor one linked particularly closely with any other measure of moral worth. But physical courage is a virtue all the same, and one sadly lacking today in our cowardly police departments, who hide behind a comical array of war machines and gun down anyone of any age or species who inspires the slightest tremor of fear in their faint hearts. Family pets, the mentally disabled, the elderly — seemingly anything that can move can terrify our brave police officers, so overwhelming them with abject, presumably pants-wetting fear that they draw their weapons and open fire willy-nilly on whatever has their teeth chattering in terror.

In July in Hawthorne, California, a police officer was so overcome by fear at the sight of a little doggy less than a quarter his size that he had no choice but to fire five shots into the animal in front of its owner. Of course one can hardly blame the officer in question, as he only had three of his colleagues there with him and could not possibly have prevailed against the ferocious animal, which reached nearly to the officer’s waist when on its back legs. Letting the owner calm the animal down was also plainly not an option, as the owner was a dangerous villain guilty of a heinous crime — annoying the police while black.

In January in Maryland, a 26-year-old with Down’s syndrome and a reported IQ of 40 was murdered by not one, not two, but three off-duty police officers because he dared try to see a movie twice without buying a second ticket. The possibility that such an offense might not be worth taking a man’s life over never occurred to our fearless officers, who were put in mortal fear of their lives by his anger at being asked to leave that they were forced to tackle him and “subdue” him until he asphyxiated. Down’s syndrome has such a classic, easy-to-spot presentation that even lay people can readily diagnose it in newborns, but it seems these heroic officers had never watched “Life Goes On.” And who can blame them for their fear? Their victim stood all of 5’6” and weighed nearly 300 pounds, presumably all muscle.

In June, back in California, police officers with the Los Angeles Police Department thought they smelled the trademark smell of someone enjoying an illegal chemical and burst into the home of an eighty-year-old man who, startled in the night by strangers in his home, drew a gun and was immediately killed by a fusillade fired by the heroic officers in question, who boldly executed an old man in his bed. Why these officers could not explain who they were or back out of the room to avoid the old man’s fire is unknown, but one thing is certain — we are all safer now that this eighty-year-old man cannot brandish a pistol at strangers who burst into his bedroom in the middle of the night.

Discussions of police abuses usually turn back to policies and procedures that should be changed and the need for increased accountability. These things are important, but also important is addressing the unbelievable degree of cowardice we tolerate in our police officers today. If you’re so afraid of danger that you’re a danger to those around you, you have no business in any kind of dangerous job and should consider going to work in some nice comfy office somewhere. Physical courage isn’t the greatest virtue, but it is a virtue all the same.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, I Migliori in Città: Armati, Brutali e Codardi.

With all of the nationalist rhetoric, we seem to forget that even the founders created a strong, centralized government that protected the economic ruling class. In the founders day, only white male property owners were deemed worthy enough by law to engage in politics. Males with no property did not make the equal cut, women did not have the rights of men, and the slave trade treated human beings as commodities while the rights of indigenous people were systematically violated. Those who made it out of feudalism then had to deal with their socio-economic status in a new class society. Today, in the era of too big to fail, it is corporate monopolies and financial institutions that benefit from the public. As George W. Bush said: “We must abandon free market principles to save the free market.” What he meant was: “We again need to exploit the middle and working classes to serve our economic ruling class.”

We should make no mistake, state institutions are hurdles to democracy. Today, our civil liberties are being sacrificed at the national level. The civil rights that the public enjoys today are being curtailed in the name of our “national interest.” This loss of liberty at the hand of the state, however, should not be surprising. Challenges to our power structure and the advancement of libertarianism has never been championed by the corporate/state apparatus. These movements, rather, have been accomplished by organized people, from a diverse history of social movements, from free association among individuals, with co-operation and consensus building. Indeed, groups such as Moutain Justice are a heroes for environmentalists, not the EPA, and organizations such as SNCC accomplished great strides for civil rights, not the Department of Justice. The state is not democratic, it is centralized and hierarchical. Democracy and justice has come from we the people.

State institutions are full of conflicts of interest. Can the interests of citizens really be represented in the halls of power? At every turn we see invested corporate interests, “oversight” of economic liberty, bail outs, a revolving door between government officials and the business/banking community, austerity measures and more. The Department of Interior, charged with protecting and managing our National Parks is the same bureaucracy that issues mountaintop removal permits and leases public lands to oil and gas companies. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are often used as jobs programs (especially now, with the natural gas boom) rather than institutions dedicated to protecting our environment and serving the public interest. Even as 40,000 strong marched on DC for “Forward on Climate,” our nations largest climate protest in history, Obama and top administration officials were golfing with oil and gas tycoons. Even still, with all the corporate welfare, even in the age of too big to fail, state capitalism is somehow still the American way and challenging the status quo is unpatriotic. It is red ruin on wheels to elevate working people.

With all of this in mind, I wish to make the case for state decentralization. I wish to make the case for what I like to call “Freedom out of Bounds.” I am not speaking of the freedom of businessmen and politicians to write laws that centralize our economy to state monopolies. I am instead arguing that we need the freedom of concerned and engaged citizens to fully take part in the democratic process. The freedom to have our institutions truly represent our democratic consensus, NOT the whims of different administrations and special interests. Decentralization of the state, and the relinquishing of state power would truly be liberation. The top down approach of the rule of law would be gone, and grass roots consensus building would be empowered. Decentralization would put checks on the power structure, unlike our three branches of government today. This “radical” idea, liberty, cedes power to the powerless, not state officials. The spontaneous order of democratic movements have done much better than state bureaucracies and “innovation” from the state capitalist system in enhancing and bettering our everyday lives. If our institutions were decentralized, freed from the “public” and private sectors, and worked within the market form then our institutions would be a democratic check to the halls of power.

When I mention the market form, I am referencing how people engage in exchanging their labor for goods and/or services. I am not talking about big economies that are almost autonomous to human interaction because of the current state capitalist system. The current system places emphasis on mass consumption of goods, not the products of human labor. I do not advocate the economic rhetoric of today which champions spending instead of savings and growth at no cost. This system encourages debt and is incredibly harmful to the environment. I speak of markets and labor, rather, based on human terms. The left libertarian market form will not allow special interests and big business to reign tyranny over the public (as modern “movement” libertarians and anarcho-capitalists defend corporatism). I find beauty in the thought of people regulating markets, labor, business and the state (for as long as it exists), as opposed to the other way around. This free market form allows for more economic, social and environmental justice.

There is far too much power concentrated in the hands of our institutions right now. Our economic elite (mostly – not all) choose to ignore science, ignore democratic movements and place barriers in front of those seeking social, economic and environmental justice because these movements do not support special interests or the status-quo. Instead we should vision and champion a society that allows the free flow of information, science and progress. Let our democratic values and the fruits of our labor spread without restriction. Let us allow democratic action, as opposed to despotism, determine how great we can be.

Too be radical is to work within the given system and change its institutions. When engaged movements address the power structure, said movements can then change the government. In moving forward, we must remember that states are not voluntary, mutual or peaceful. The state is not democratic. States rather are monopoly organizations, bureaucratic in nature. The state seeks to systemize democratic movements. Decentralizing power and growing alternative, civic institutions will return power to where it belongs – to the people.

I do not personally think a perfect society will ever exist. In a way though, that is the beauty of our species. We will constantly be solving problems and advancing civilization (if we can make it past the ominous clouds of climate change and nuclear weapons – and I believe we can). Our achievements as a species will be even greater without the burden of centralized power. In its absence we will be more efficient in solving the complex wicked problems of today and we will see progress beyond any time in our human history. Decentralizing authority will fuel the social power revolution and let liberty spread her wings.