This post by Mateo PGS was originally published on Medium.com

Framing the ideological divide within crypto-anarchism

*Link to dissertation at the end*

Trained
as we are to accept authority and the inevitability of submitting to
forces greater than us, human beings are mesmerized by rebellious
movements that struggle to overturn the established order. I guess that
the fascination is natural; everyone has heard a voice inside sighing,
or vociferating, that “the system is bullshit”. Specifically over the
past ‘post-crash’ decade, the anti-establishment sentiment has been
building momentum over the years, as people realize that the economic
system is built around the internal stability of shareholder
profitability, remaining largely oblivious to social and environmental
‘externalities’ while political elites fail to materialize alternatives.

The insurrectionary fantasies living somewhere in my head found a fictional home in Mr Robot, the TV series wherein a mentally unstable hacker named Elliot Alderson (brilliantly played by Rami Malek) decides alongside his partners-in-crime to take down ECorp, a gargantuan conglomerate that represents a seven-headed monster of monopolistic capitalism, by attacking its servers and erasing the company’s financial archives. Thus, the proof-of-debt that binded clients in their responsibility towards ECorp is erased. The global economic system is left in a coma, and all it took was a few computer geeks who make themselves known as fsociety (symbolic references to Anonymous abound). Talk about bringing down the system with limited resources… Anyhow, the fictional hacker revolt sparked my interest in the disruptive potential that lies in code and cyber attacks.

fsociety

It was
while I was doing research on the hacktivist ethos for the most engaging
and stimulating course I took throughout my undergraduate years (taught
by a living encyclopaedia on anything related to anarchist theory and
history) that I first came across ‘crypto-anarchism’.

The
more I read about the origins of crypto-anarchist thought, the
cypherpunk movement, radical techies, hacktivists, etc., the more I
realized that these ideological characteristics have not been properly
analysed yet by the academic community. I had been looking for an
exciting research topic for my final year dissertation: this was it.

Around the same time, I read a book chapter that my father had forwarded my way about this new technology that was supposed to be the ‘next big thing’; apparently, it had the transformative potential that the internet protocol had back when it first boomed. I had obviously heard about Bitcoin (although, to be honest, I was amazed at the amount of people that by 2018 still had no clue when I asked them whether they were familiar with the crypto-currency’s existence), but that was about it. I soon discovered that there was much more to blockchain than just Bitcoin. It would take me lots of reading and the visual aid of a few Youtube tutorials to grasp the technical basics of distributed ledger technology, but, in any case, I was confident that the hype was worth learning more about this cryptographic digital tool.

Thus,
the main mission guiding my research project was to provide a
much-needed framing of the crypto-anarchist ideology(ies), using
emerging blockchain initiatives to exemplify what the dissertation
points as the great ideological divide within the broad creed that is
crypto-anarchism. While it might have become increasingly popular among
political analysts to contend that the traditional ‘left-right’ spectrum
is fading, the tendencies I found when looking into this
cryptography-embracing techno-ideology suggest that the simplifying left
and right taxonomy would remain as relevant as ever in a hypothetical cypherpunk
future, where the Westphalian nation-state order would have vaporized
under the connecting and decentralizing power of networked technologies.

Thus, the main mission guiding my research project was to provide a much-needed framing of the crypto-anarchist ideology(ies), using emerging blockchain initiatives to exemplify what the dissertation points as the great ideological divide within the broad creed that is crypto-anarchism. While it might have become increasingly popular among political analysts to contend that the traditional ‘left-right’ spectrum is fading, the tendencies I found when looking into this cryptography-embracing techno-ideology suggest that the simplifying left and right taxonomy would remain as relevant as ever in a hypothetical cypherpunk future, where the Westphalian nation-state order would have vaporized under the connecting and decentralizing power of networked technologies.

The
ideological foundations of crypto-anarchism are, naturally, found close
to anti-statist political philosophies that were around centuries
before the World Wide Web was created. Not only is it obvious that both
left-wing anarchism (against the state, in favour of democratic-horizontal economic and political organization) and right-wing libertarianism
(broadly against government, for market-based structures in pretty much
every sphere that lends itself to monetary interaction) have a heavy
influence on crypto-anarchism; perhaps a more interesting observation is
the fact that the ideological divide within crypto-anarchism mirrors to
a great extent some of the academic debates between left and right
libertarians, such as the interpretation of what ‘freedom’ actually is, a debate that is obviously at the core of the dispute.

In the broadest of terms, crypto-anarchism is the belief not only in the tremedous power that cryptographic technologies offer in the creation of decentralized peer-to-peer networks, but also the conviction that these technologies should be used to bypass the state by creating alternative systems that are beyond a state’s capacity to monitor, interfere or restrict flows of information, money, etc. Any crypto-anarchist can agree to these basic premises.

The opening of John Perry Barlow’s famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

Now, beyond this point is where crypto-anarchists can fall into different strands. The key dispute revolves around the values that should guide these alternative networks and whether the agent
defining the post-state scenario should either be the invisible hand of
the free market, or a democratically organized society based on
egalitarian principles. In order to conceptualize both camps, I
categorize those who suscribe to a vision closer to the former as crypto-libertarians, and those who share the latter values as crypto-commonists.

While
over the course of my research stage I had come across a couple of
papers speaking of ‘crypto-libertarianism’ to differentiate a market
fundamentalist trend within crypto-anarchism, I was unable to find a
term that identified those with a left-leaning interpretation of
crypto-anarchism. The anarchist teacher mentioned earlier, who also
happened to be my dissertation supervisor, denounced passionately the
appropriation of the anarchist prefix by Murray Rothbard’s
right-libertarian political philosophy of ‘anarcho-capitalism’, on the
basis that anarchism is inherently a left-wing ideology.

Well, in this case, talking of crypto-anarchism as opposed to crypto-libertarianism was not a possibility, given that the latter falls under the former umbrella term. At first I decided to work with the painfully long term of ‘socialist crypto-anarchism’ , but it wasn’t too convincing, understandably. While I could have also argued for a redefinition of crypto-anarchism to refer only to the leftist interpretation (in order to preserve the academic integrity of the suffix as my teacher might have advocated), towards the late stage of the drafting process I came across an interesting wiki page at the P2P Foundation on ‘commonism’. Right off the bat, it is an eye-catching word: close enough to communism, but not quite the same.

In essence, commonism
(a term coined a decade ago by Nick Dyer-Witheford, an insightful
academic whose research intersects Marxism and the contemporary digital
era) is based on the crucial notion of the ‘commons’, building on it to
constitute an ideological form that advocates the defence of the natural
and digital commons, following the logic of collective creativity and
welfare that has grown exponentially with the internet and the ‘remix
culture’.

This
definition fit in perfectly with the main ideological tenets of the
leftist crypto-anarchists. For these, a free and open internet is a
sacred digital commons where the pool of cultural goods and knowledge
ought to be shared, whereas cryptographic tools such as encrypted
communication or blockchain technology should be used to bypass the
state and construct decentralized networks based on radical democratic
and egalitarian principles. In other words, crypto-commonism is the
crypto-anarchist strand that aims to build a commons-based peer economy alongside participatory democracy, all of this enhanced by the technical possibilities of the internet, blockchain, and digital technologies to come.

In
any case, ‘crypto-commonism’ seemed like a reasonably accurate
neologism. In order to back my thesis with real life examples showing
this divergence within crypto-anarchism, I analysed blockchain
initiatives with clearly disparate motivations and ideological
principles. The field of crypto-currencies, the most well-known
application of blockchain technology, is home to radically different
projects, with the commonist ethos embraced by FairCoin standing in sharp contrast to Bitcoin’s libertarian bias. Similarly, if we take a look at governance mechanisms developed by techno-utopian blockchain enthusiasts, it is easy to see how the post nation-state scenarios envisaged by projects such as Bitnation’s markets for citizenship packages have little to do with the global ‘liquid democracy’ that Democracy Earth advocates.

The discourse used in crypto-commonist initiatives emphasises the commons, as opposed to the embrace of free markets among crypto-libertarians, as illustrated by the following statements:

“Our
aim is to create an innovative ‘glocal’ economic system from the bottom
up in favour of an alternative and post-capitalist model, paving the
way for a collective change towards a life based on values in common”.
(FairCoin, mission statement)

“With
internet growth reaching over 3 billion lives (far surpassing major
religions and nation-states) and the development of encrypted networks
known as blockchains permitting incorruptible transactions with
permissionless audits, there’s no reason stopping mankind from building a
borderless commons that can help shape the next evolutionary leap for
democratic governance at any scale” (Democracy Earth white paper, 2018)

“Bitnation’s vision is a global free market for governance services: A post nation-state world of voluntary nations, city states and autonomous communities which compete for citizens by providing a range of opt-in governance services (Bitnation white paper, 2017)

My
bet is that crypto-anarchism will continue to grow in importance as an
ideological force, as digital technologies continue to disrupt the
established order and open new possibilities. We are currently
witnessing a retreat to nationalism that may last for years to come;
however, in the long run, the global potential of technology is likely
to prevail, enabling distributed networks to flourish and undermining
state authority. In this context, a coherent framing of the
crypto-anarchist techno-political philosophy becomes increasingly
relevant.

Crypto-commonism
and crypto-libertarianism are as different from each other as anarchism
and libertarianism; the sooner the difference between these two
contemporary ideologies is understood, the easier it will be to imagine
what a future post-statist world could look like, and work towards it.

P.S: You can access the full dissertation here.
This post summarizes the main academic contribution of the work (the
framing of the crypto-anarchist ideology and the introduction of
‘crypto-commonism’): for more detailed analysis and a chapter on the
political properties of blockchain technology, feel free to download. I
have been contacted by a few people asking whether they could cite the
research, to which the answer is naturally positive, on one condition:
please let me know about it!

Mateo Peyrouzet García-Siñeriz

Twitter: @PgsMateo

Email: mpg-s@outlook.com
The post Crypto-Commonists and Crypto-Libertarians appeared first on P2P Foundation.