At first glance, this seems wrong. As Gizmodo reports, all of Pirate Bay’s creators languish in jail and now their site is down. State authorities have taken down sites like Silk Roads 1 and 2, targeting other torrent sites besides. How could this make the state look bad?

Although individually these cases may seem to cast doubt on the ineffectiveness of the state they must be viewed within a larger context: The state is just playing whack-a-mole with the internet.

And here’s the kicker: It’s losing.

For every site the government tries to take down, another five spring up. And no one in government is going to admit that what they’re doing is futile. They simply don’t have incentives to act rationally. They’re getting paid to take down sites. It doesn’t matter if five more spring up for each one they hit — they get paid either way. So why stop now?

The state won’t and can’t stop, “cede” the ground to the people of the Internet and admit defeat. But here’s the thing: The whacking process itself is a much bigger sign of defeat than actually surrender. The state is engaged in a Sisyphean task and by gum it’s going win or run out of funds trying!

In Labor Struggle in a Free Market, Kevin Carson writes of another instance of this whack-a-mole process from a decade ago. Sinclair Media energetically fought a boycott using “SLAPP” litigation), but   “… found the movement impossible to suppress, as the original campaign websites were mirrored faster than they could be shut down, and the value of their stock imploded.”

Another case Carson mentions is Diebold, “… resort[ing] to … shut[ing] down sites which published internal company documents about their voting machines. The memos were quickly distributed, by bittorrent, to more hard drives than anybody could count, and Diebold found itself playing whack-a-mole as the mirror sites displaying the information proliferated exponentially.”

The final nail in the coffin for the state is that we can all reasonably expect a new incarnation of, or equivalent replacement for, The Pirate Bay to emerge in a matter of days.

If the state wants to play its game of high-stakes whack-a-mole, that’s fine. We’ve known the stakes and have been prepared to fire back for a while. When the state can’t fight by its own rules and instead finds itself forced to play like ours, it’s like a bad game of Battleship. And the state won’t be sinking ours anytime soon.

We all know, or should know, the problem with indefinite extrapolations from present trends. They ignore negative feedback effects making those trends unsustainable. Remember those “America’s Energy Future” PSAs by the fossil fuels industries, where Brooke Alexander said growing demand would lead to 60 million new cars on the road in America by mid-century? Ain’t gonna happen. Industry numbers crunchers came up with that statistic by extrapolating from current trends, without considering that total output of petroleum has peaked and will steeply decline in the future (along with steeply rising in price). Those trends in auto use can’t continue. Instead, people will modify their behavior.

Another problem with OECD’s analysis is that it equates an increase in quality of life with “economic growth,” when in fact what the economic output statistics measure is the consumption of inputs and monetized activity. But the new technologies that show the most promise of increasing our quality of life — garage-scale micro-manufacturing with open-source CNC machinery, free and open-source informational goods, Permaculture, high-tech vernacular housing technology — will also result in the implosion of the monetized GDP, since they require less in the way of capital and labor inputs. The natural tendency of such technology is toward a world in which the capital required to meet our consumption needs can be raised by small cooperative groups of producers, those needs can be met with fifteen or twenty hours of labor a week, and the official GDP figures collapse because everything is so cheap.

The only way to prevent this collapse of official economic output metrics and maintain present levels of economic inequality is for the economic ruling class, the propertied elites, to act through their state to enclose technological progress as a source of rents. But the legal framework these enclosures depend on is untenable. We’ve already seen what Wikipedia has done to dead-tree encyclopedias and file-sharing to music and movie industry profits. The shift to micro-manufacturing of most goods in neighborhood shops, using pirated digital design files to produce knockoffs of patented goods or just producing better designs without built-in obsolescence, will do the same to the industrial corporations.

We’re headed for a world where the transaction costs of networking together are near zero, where ordinary people can associate to produce most consumption goods with capital outlays equivalent to a few months’ factory wages, and there’s nothing all the regulations, patents and copyrights on paper can do to stop us.

As the subtitle of the Guardian article cited above says, “Populations with access to technology and a sense of their human rights will not accept inequality.” The people of the world will simply not allow economic elites, with the help of the state, to maintain toll-gates between us and the technologies of abundance, skimming off most of the benefits in return for letting some of them trickle down.

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.

The phenomenon of capital cheapening relative to labor should raise an obvious question, but of course it does not because we have been conditioned to think of work as something we are given by the owning and employing classes in the form of “jobs” rather than something we do.

About eighty years ago Albert Nock remarked on how odd it was, considering all the vacant land held out of use and all the unemployed labor available to work it, that work was viewed as something given by the employer. Today, likewise, when we hear that workers are unemployed because employers use radically cheapening production tools as a substitute for labor, the question that should — but doesn’t — automatically come to mind is “If the tools are so cheap, why don’t we just use them to work for ourselves and let the employers eat their money?” After all the reason for the factory and wage systems in the first place was a technological shift from cheap, general-purpose craft tools that individual workers could afford to extremely expensive large-scale machinery that only the rich could afford to buy, and then hire others to work.

Now six months factory wages will buy a shop full of open-source tabletop CNC machine tools that can produce goods that once required a million-dollar factory. Since we’re experiencing a shift back to a high-tech version of cheap, general-purpose craft tools, why do we need the wage system at all? Why not work cooperatively and organize our own horizontal mechanisms for pooling risk, providing mutual aid and insuring against sickness and poverty?

The answer is that a whole host of institutional and legal mechanisms exist precisely to keep us from doing so.

The term “technological unemployment” is a wrongheaded way of framing the issue. When technological improvement results in less work to produce the same standard of living, that’s a good thing. That’s why we have a standard work week of forty hours in the U.S. today, as opposed to 70 or 80 as in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

The problem is not that it takes fewer hours of work to produce what we consume, but that there’s not a proportional drop in the number of hours we have to work to pay for what we consume. And the ultimate source of that problem is not the technology, but who owns it; it’s the wrong people substituting labor for technology. Rather than workers substituting technology for our own labor in order to live better, what we have is those who own the technology and hire labor to work it substituting technology for the labor of those they pay wages.

An observation by Tyler Cowen in Porter’s article inadvertently gives this away.

…[H]e looks around the world to find the relatively scarce factors of production and finds two: natural resources, which are dwindling, and good ideas, which can reach larger markets than ever before.

If you possess one of those, then you will reap most of the rewards of growth. If you don’t, you will not.

Exactly. When we own all the benefits of increasing our efficiency, we celebrate anything that results in less work. A farmer who finds a way to grow just as much corn with half the labor, she doesn’t lament being “put out of work,” because all the benefits accrue to her.

On the other hand our maldistribution of wealth results from who currently owns both the natural resources and the ideas. But neoliberal economics treats that pattern of ownership as a fact of nature, and the laws of economics as a neutral means by which market-clearing prices are established under any circumstances regardless of the pattern of ownership. So to address the problem we have to look at the structure of the economy, not as something that just happened, but something with causes — and motives! — behind it.

Capitalism is not some universal phenomenon of nature governed by neutral rules. It had a beginning in history. And that beginning was far from spontaneous or inevitable. For example, the concentrated ownership of natural resources and arable land that Cowen talks about results from a process of violent robbery in late medieval and early modern times in Europe, and more recently in the colonial world. Before the Industrial Revolution most arable land of Britain had been enclosed by landed elites, and the peasantry transformed into a propertyless proletariat with no alternative but to sell their labor on whatever terms were offered by the owning classes. In settler societies like North America and Australia, states preempted ownership of land and then granted it to land barons who fenced it off and charged rents to those who would work it. The Enclosures were reenacted in the Third World in colonial and post-colonial times, with tens and hundreds of millions of peasants evicted from land that is now owned by local landed elites and used to grow cash crops for export.

The oil and mineral wealth of the world, likewise, was enclosed by colonial authorities and then doled it out to Western-owned extractive industries. The mineral wealth of southern Africa, for example, and the oil fields of Nigeria and Indonesia that are protected from the local population by death squads hired by Shell. Or the federal lands that passed directly into the government domain from France and Mexico, to which extractive industries like oil, mining, lumber and ranching now have preferential access.

Cowen’s other category, the “ownership” of ideas, is especially key to the corporate enclosure of technological progress as a source of rents. “Intellectual property” is the reason that a Windows or Office CD costs $200, as opposed to Open Office or Ubuntu for $5, and a pill that costs Pfizer a dime to produce costs you five bucks. It’s the reason most of the price of your consumer electronics and appliances comes from embedded rents on patents, rather than labor and material. Patents and trademarks play the same protectionist role for global corporations today that tariffs did for national corporations a century ago, only they operate at the boundaries between corporations and the rest of the world rather than the boundaries between nations. But just like patents, they restrict who has the right to sell what in a given market. It’s only because of “intellectual property” that Nike can outsource all its actual production to independently owned sweatshops for $5 a pair and charge a $200 Swoosh markup in Western retail chains: Nike has a legal monopoly on the right to decide who produces a certain kind of sneakers, and a legal monopoly on disposal of the product.

Both the absentee ownership of land and resources that were not acquired through direct labor, and the ownership of ideas, are examples of the same phenomenon: Artificial property rights. Franz Oppenheimer argued, in The State, that economic exploitation was possible only when all independent access to productive opportunities had been enclosed, so that employers no longer had to compete for labor with the possibility of self-employment. Having erected these toll gates, the propertied classes are able to charge tribute for access to the basic means of production and subsistence, and charge a monopoly markup on the necessities of life.

The natural outcome of a free and competitive market, when it comes to the fruits of technological progress, is communism. Competition causes the productivity and efficiency benefits of new technology to be socialized in the form of imploding consumer prices and shortened work weeks. Artificial property rights in ideas, on the other hand, enable corporations and plutocrats to enclose these benefits as a private source of rents. And artificial property rights in land and natural resources — like, for example, the Enclosures in Britain 250 years ago — close off competing opportunities for self-employment and comfortable subsistence and leave people with no alternative but to compete for the dwindling supply of jobs that is left.

So the question is not whether technological progress is beneficial, but who owns the benefit: A state-allied class of parasitic rentiers, or us?

Despite its aspirations and mythological treatment, the internet has never been some perfectly connected “net” capable of regenerating like Wolverine. While that goal was an underlying assumption of a variety of protocols that became popular and helped shape the development of the internet, the internet in practice is not an organic mesh of individuals, but a few thousand organizations that are loosely tied together in clusters. In theory each organization controls the connections that comprise its internal network and, again in theory, they build physical links and negotiate contracts with one another to pass packets between networks. This peering takes many forms, passing traffic at different speeds and costs, but the traffic itself has largely been treated homogeneously.

Well, okay, this isn’t entirely true. Governments around the world have installed routers and machines capable of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) wherein a packet is routed based on its content. This is one way the People’s Republic of China, for example, has blocked connections to the Tor network.

But there are good reasons for an organization to peek inside packets and adjust their prioritization accordingly. DDOS attacks or merely bandwidth intensive but not pressing traffic can flood the network slowing down transmission rates for other content. The problem isn’t a lack of neutrality; neutrality is usually artificial, only possible where there are universally shared preferences or no pressure to optimize.

If the internet survives the next twenty years it will undoubtedly look quite different. Radicals working on overlay networks to the existing infrastructure, like Tor, I2P, GnuNet, Tahoe-LAFS, and FreeNet, are fighting the more immediate battle, but so long as only a few hundred or thousand organizations control the material connections that everything travels on we will always be in danger of the state. Even a hundred thousand networks could still be beaten into collaboration with a censorship regime. Right now the future sits on a knife edge, poised to fall into new enclosures, with state access cards and comprehensive whitelisting. And even if we win, the day still might come where the state wakes up and considers technological society itself too high a risk, sabotaging and tearing apart our centralized infrastructure.

To head off such retreats, to keep the statists on the playing field, we must build a world of proactive, individual-scale connections. In the more trivial ad hoc limit this can look like peer-to-peer connections between the phones of passing strangers, but when it comes to building lasting resilient bonds there’s no replacing on the ground community organizing. The sort of projects anarchists have long taken the lead in, building one-on-one relationships of trust and strengthening the human roots upon which all other relations are built.

There are many community mesh wifi projects with radical sensibilities, some like those of Athens, Catalonia and across Germany are already quite established and supported. Hundreds of others are still just attempted sprouts. Focusing on those in the midrange we’ve chosen to invest over six hundred dollars in People’s Open Network in Oakland, California, Kansas City Freedom Network, and AlterMundi in Argentina to provide an extra push as well as highlight their radical sensibilities and work at building community.

We at the Center for a Stateless Society believe strongly in the potency and importance of persuasion in building a freed world, but we also know that world won’t be built without hands-on grappling, activist organizing and building commons. That’s why we started the Entrepreneurial Anti-capitalism project, to pay forward the good fortune we’ve received and provide a helping hand to those doing amazing, necessary, frequently thankless work with very little.

It is our hope that others will follow our lead in donating to these great projects. Each one accepts bitcoin at the following addresses:

• People’s Open Network: 12RxU4DpLpdWcmEBn7Tj325CCXBwt5i9Hc
• AlterMundi: 12mVSq3NBKTs3tCpWXyJqwdHq8p92ka6fq
• KC Freedom: 1Jmjmf2hDWsrSfnxiM27GZtNWmWGbPNEQM

Apparently these “homemade guns” weren’t very dangerous. I don’t remember hearing of any serious injuries in the “bottle rocket wars,” though I don’t doubt there were some, somewhere. But other “homemade guns” certainly existed. Harlan Ellison describes “zip guns” made from car antennas or coffee percolator tubing in his non-fiction New York City gang life memoir, Memos from Purgatory (I wonder if Ellison ever gets the credit he deserves for foreshadowing Hunter S. Thompson’s breakout book, Hell’s Angels?). I once saw a demonstration of a “one-shot field-expedient shotgun” made from an old Sears catalog, a rubber band, a nail and a shotgun shell.

All of this is just to establish that there’s nothing new about non-traditional manufacture of firearms by individuals. Ever since we’ve had guns, we’ve had homemade guns.

3D printing just makes it easier. A LOT easier. Easier all the time.

It’s only been about a year since Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed debuted the “Liberator,” a single-shot, .380-caliber, 3D-printed pistol, releasing the plans for it “into the Internet wild.”

Within weeks, as Andy Greenberg of Wired reports, enthusiasts were designing and producing multi-shot .38 pistols. Recently Japanese freedom fighter Yoshitomo Imura was arrested with (allegedly) a 3D-printed six-shot revolver. It appears that fully automatic weapons (or conversion parts for existing guns) are out there for the printing.

It’s time to repeat, with emphasis, what Cody Wilson told the world a year ago when he rolled the Liberator out:

“Gun control” is over.

It’s done.

It’s as dead as music copyright, and for the same reason: Advancing technology has taken the matter out of the hands of government regulators and their privileged industry monopolists.

Nobody has to like it.

That’s how it is whether anyone likes it or not.

Personally, I like it. If there are going to be guns — and there ARE going to be guns — I’d rather they were easily available to regular people than only to state military and law enforcement agents, violent criminals (but I repeat myself) and those who curry state privilege. In America, the statistics seem to indicate that violent crime goes down, not up, in environments of easier gun availability and fewer legal restrictions.

“An armed society is a polite society,” wrote science fiction master Robert A. Heinlein in 1942. That makes sense to me, but even if he was wrong, I’d rather go armed than unarmed in an impolite society. Everyone with access to modern technology — not just in the United States but everywhere — now has that choice.

A new, free society is building itself in the shell of the dying authoritarian society. Technologies of abundance, with all those technologies imply, are an inescapable feature of that new, free society. The sooner you begin availing yourself of your continuously expanding options, the faster and less violent the transition will be.

Le leggi sulla proprietà intellettuale comprendono i brevetti, i diritti d’autore e i marchi commerciali. Da qualche decennio ad oggi le imprese americane, soprattutto quelle ad alto contenuto tecnologico, hanno preso a dipendere sempre di più da queste leggi per proteggere i “loro profitti”: l’impresa prende il capitale mentre il lavoro individuale raramente riceve una ricompensa. Nota la Reuters, inoltre, che questo aumento delle cause legali è il prodotto di differenze tra le sentenze dei giudici costituzionali e le sentenze di una corte d’appello specializzata con sede a Washington che si occupa dei casi di brevetto a livello nazionale; su alcuni punti chiave le due parti non hanno raggiunto un accordo. Tenete conto del fatto che una sentenza sulla proprietà intellettuale può avere vaste conseguenze sulla società: il genoma umano e i vaccini dovrebbero essere brevettati o possono rimanere risorsa comune? Io propendo per quest’ultima. Ma l’industria farmaceutica investe molti soldi e molte energie politiche a favore di una forte protezione dei brevetti, così da poter proteggere il suo “diritto” multimilionario ad incassare una rendita su un monopolio inventato.

Se poi le cause legali che riguardano la PI sono aumentate è anche perché questa restringe l’ambito dell’attività umana e l’innovazione.

Le cause aumentano perché la libertà è la nuova etica: creative commons è qui per restare. La rivoluzione tecnologica generata dall’open source sta emergendo davanti ai nostri occhi con il suo tema della decentralizzazione, costringendo lo status quo a cambiare, e questo agli interessi particolari non piace. Per nostra fortuna il mondo è anarchico. La rivoluzione stigmergica lavora per vie traverse attorno alle gerarchie tradizionali e il loro potere di coercizione: il vecchio ordine (per quanto ci provi) non riesce a stare dietro.

Quello che vediamo è forza sociale in azione. In questa nuova pubblica piazza le corti, il potere legislativo e gli interessi particolari sono impotenti. Il mercato così liberato non è interessato alla proprietà delle idee, ma al progresso, all’innovazione e alla collaborazione nel lavoro. Il colonialismo corporativo ha i giorni contati.

Se si vuole liberare la società le idee non devono avere padroni. Una volta che queste finiscono nel mercato, chiunque dovrebbe essere libero di aggiungervi le proprie conoscenze e mandarne avanti la realizzazione pratica. Questo significa semplicemente massimizzare le capacità innovative dell’attività umana. Le migliori realizzazioni pratiche dovrebbero essere lasciate libere di svilupparsi. La PI, con le leggi che riconoscono la “proprietà” dell’informazione, restringe il potenziale creativo e innovativo della popolazione in senso ampio. Le leggi sulla PI servono a proteggere il capitale a spese dei lavoratori dotati di talento. Le idee sono uno strumento potente, fondamentale, in una società libera; e non dovrebbero essere ingabbiate dall’attivismo legalistico.

Grazie alle nuove tecnologie, oggi informazione e idee si diffondono senza restrizioni. L’attività umana ha un nuovo management: l’individuo. L’uso dei tribunali per privatizzare le idee e proibire il libero flusso delle informazioni è un credo che appartiene al passato; ecco perché è emerso creative commons. Il mercato va sempre alla ricerca della libertà, perché l’attività umana opera per l’avanzamento reciproco di tutte le parti della società.

L’attività umana dotata di talento, libera, è il motore che fa andare una società libera. L’ordine anarchico sta emergendo. Mentre seppelliamo la proprietà intellettuale reclamiamo il nostro potere sul bene comune.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

“The only entities and organizations with anything to fear from Bitcoin and its offspring are governments (which rely on the ability to tax) and the political class (including pseudo-”private” parasites who make their livings sucking off the tax teat). And they SHOULD be afraid. Their day is coming to an end.”

“What we are seeing is social power at work. The courts, legislature and special interests are powerless in the new public arena. The liberated market is not interested in the ownership of ideas, but rather progress, innovation and co-operative labor. The days of corporate colonialism are numbered.”

“Ehi! Il mercato dei cambi più importante di Bitcoin è scomparso nel nulla… e invece di collassare, i Bitcoin ancora si vendono a 500 dollari! Una moneta robusta, con grandi capacità di ripresa! Un successo! Grande! Grande!”

Sincerità nelle notizie? Mica tanto. Al contrario, vediamo i soliti sospetti che mulinano sempre la stessa solfa da quando hanno visto Bitcoin: “Il futuro di Bitcoin è in dubbio”.

Io ho i miei dubbi.

In realtà, se anche Bitcoin oggi o domani dovesse scendere ad un valore percepito pari a zero, sarebbe comunque un grande successo: La prova dell’idea che una moneta non-governativa, che funziona da pari a pari, che si auto-organizza senza l’aiuto delle autorità centrali è una possibilità.

Sì, qualche speculatore (“compra basso, vendi alto”) si è fatto male con tutti questi su e giù di Bitcoin inteso come “investimento”. D’altro canto, però, qualcuno è diventato molto ricco. E Bitcoin non è pensato per ESSERE un “investimento”. È pensato per essere un mezzo di scambio.

E poi sì, anche chi ha usato Bitcoin come quel mezzo di scambio che dovrebbe essere si è fatto male. Per due ragioni. Perché lo stato ha rubato quantità significative di Bitcoin, ad esempio dai clienti di Silk Road, e perché anche gli hacker hanno rubato un bel po’. Ma per qualche ragione non vedo servizi della CNN che dicono che è “in dubbio” il futuro dei dollari (emessi dallo stato americano, che poi li ruba a carriolate con le tasse e l’inflazione) e delle carte di credito (il furto di Bitcoin è una bravata rispetto alle frodi sulle carte).

E ancora sì, Bitcoin in sé potrebbe calare di importanza fino a diventare irrilevante quando altre criptomonete più forti, più sane, più facili da rendere anonime prenderanno il suo posto. Litecoin. Dogecoin. L’imminente Zerocoin. Non so neanche immaginare quale criptomoneta diventerà “lo standard” o uno tra i pochi mezzi di scambio “più fidati”.

Ma POSSO dire con certezza che le criptomonete sono qui per restarci.

Perché? Perché funzionano. Servono funzioni vitali: Non solo proteggono chi le usa dal furto, pubblico o privato che sia, ma anche perché permettono di fare “micropagamenti” – spina dorsale del commercio economico su internet – rendendo i confini economicamente superflui.

Curiosamente, gli stessi media tradizionali farebbero meglio a prendere in considerazione Bitcoin e altre criptomonete invece di insistere con la loro pusillanimità approvata dallo stato. Da anni i giornali si lamentano perché internet colpisce duramente i loro bilanci. Hanno già adottato uno schema di “micropagamenti aggregati” (vendita di spazi pubblicitari a bassissimo prezzo per ogni inserzione o click) come rimedio parziale. Ricorrere ai micropagamenti in criptomonete, invece di erigere alte “barriere” in dollari che pochi sono disposti a saltare, sarebbe stato il primo passo logico verso la loro ripresa economica.

Le uniche entità e organizzazioni economiche che hanno qualcosa da temere da Bitcoin e simili sono lo stato e la classe politica (che include i parassiti pseudo-“privati” che cavano rendita dalle mammelle delle tasse). E hanno RAGIONE a temere. I loro giorni sono contati.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.