Anarchy Today - Part 4 - Anarchy in the Blockchain I
"Anarchy in non-obedience."- charlie 777pt
Introduction
Whenever there is a dead-end in a political era because it does not have any solutions for its cancer and decay, always generates a crisis of values that demand new ideas to fix society and humanity.
“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” - Eric Schmidt
Anarchy is in a hype of revival with a myriad of new "anarchisms" from extreme individualism to leftist collectivism, and a lot of new "mixes" trying to integrate religions, nationalism, transcendence, and some anecdotical connections for all kinds of problems generated by these philosophies of "integrators", dispersing people from the real objectives of anarchy.
Anarchy is connected to self-conscious free individuals in real life, where there is no place for collective beliefs imposing rules and constraints on the "non-believers".
We can't be liberated individuals, while there are others around that are not, or when there is any kind of collective power or authority dictating human will and destiny.
Anarchy is always the voice of new ideas and ways of living, as an answer for the change and increasing complexity of social organisms, where the actual society based vertical communication systems (top-bottom) have no solutions because they can't even see the problem that was created.
The new horizontal forms of communication, brought about by p2p communication in the anarchic kingdom of Cyberspace on the Internet, helped by the source code that wanted to be free, have changed all conceptions of social life centered on state, laws and territory.
The Blockchain empowers a unique technology that can be used as a social tool to empower individuals to participate in the construction of a new crypto-economic society, with a free market based in decentralization.
"A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years". - Lysander Spooner
Anarchy is the last political philosophy that can change the laws of society as the alternative for the actual capitalist or collectivist centralized Structures (structure organization and connections) and its Functioning (reproduction of existing System), by bringing new Developments (transformation in new innovating systems) to change the socio-economic formation of society.
1 - Undermine the concentration of power with cyber-anarchy in the blockchain
Crypto-anarchism is the first example of a technological tool, to replace the old centralized systems of control, that can deal with the actual complexity of social organization, opening doors for total decentralization of power, allowing individual participation as the pillar for human liberation and constant innovation.
Some integrations like crypto-economy and crypto-anarchism are very important for the revival of the political philosophy of anarchy but this time supported by a technology, born in the anarchic and unregulated cyberspace, that allows its main creation goal that was to be decentralized and self-regulated and the only escape today is privacy and anonymity.
"While most people assume the commune is impossible, the neighborhood dead, and the alienating existence of mass society here to stay, anarchists reasonably suggest as a long-range goal an "organized anarchy"-a decentralized society of federated autonomous communities that would be better able to deal simultaneously with both global and individual problems at their source.
Refusing to consider anarchist perspectives and failing to question our own basic assumptions may ultimately lead to tragedies that could otherwise be avoided. " (2) - Dennis R. Fox, American psychologist in "Psychology, Ideology, Utopia, and the Commons" (1985)
At the same time, we need to create a global collective consciousness more focused on human valorization than on the value of money or material possessions, because there is no happiness and prosperity for each one when freedom is not a possibility for all.
The Internet and the Blockchain are designed to be anarchic, without centralized authority, allowing systems of governance by consensus, and it's not a way to overthrow the state but to show the decay and obsolescence of the hierarchic intermediaries sucking value between the people2people financial and goods transactions.
Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications ecosystems, allow virtual communities as networks of autonomous individuals, in total transparency to outsiders, and even governments.
On the other at the individual level, it is resistant to censorship from the states, providing anonymity with encrypted messaging, political and economic liberation, and freedom of speech and trade using native crypto-currencies.
Timothy C. May in 1988 had already theorized it all, until Nakamoto releases the practical tool to enable it.
" Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re-routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation." - Timothy C. May - The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto in 1988.
People of all countries are now living in a global country outside territorial and physical conception of national sovereignty, where the platforms can be collectivist but under the individualist principle of freedom of access and participation, uniting One to All.
"Man's freedom, morality, and dignity consist precisely in the fact that he does good, not because he is ordained, but because he conceives them, wants them, and loves them." - Bakunin.
The technology of the blockchain materialized the crypto-anarchism ideas with a technological cradle, that supports a social revolution, based in the decentralization and consensus, where anarchist ideology totally fits as the only solution because the result of the other existing political paradigms, have evidently lost the capacity to resolve the problems it has created.
We are living in a complex society, and the idea that decentralization and community self-management is the best way to substitute “The Establishment” using features on the blockchain like electronic voting for a change of code, or crowdfunding open to all.
For government politics, decentralization in the actual centralized systems is a kind of con or prank because there are no decentralized systems that have limited autonomy, but politicians like the word and they are cheating people with a false concept of "centralized decentralization".
Privacy and anonymity is the basic foundation of freedom of expression, information, education, and communication, building the pillars of our freedom of choice.
" Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property". Timothy C. May - The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto in 1988.
The Blockchain is a technological utopia that expands the limits of the possibilities of combining People, Objects, and Links (influences), improving the scalability of traditional communication, but at the same is a living evidence of the limitations of each human being to interact with infinite peers and objects, and it is naturally limited by the capacities of men like a species (150 maximum by community).
Anarchy for all is not a realizable utopia, but anarchist communities are creating self and collective educated people by mutualism and consensus, that is helping to spread colonies of realizable non-paternalistic social utopias happening now on the blockchain.
Steemit is a good example of a blockchain platform that is decentralized and collectively owned and accessible, but it is open to centralized and corporative interests of developers like Steemit Inc (best and biggest) and other smaller players and developers but at the same time it allows to own property and unequal possessions creating a gap on the individual power to participate.
As this article is getting too long, so the second part will be published in the next post.
The Dialectics of Liberation: Anarchism, Existentialism and Decentralism.
Published Posts:
Introduction to the Dialectics of Liberation: Anarchism, Existentialism and Decentralism
I - Anarchism
- What is Anarchism?
- The History of Anarchism
- Part 1 - Pre-Anarchy - Social Revolution
- Anarchy: Revolution Against The State
- Anarchy Today
- Part 1 - The Era of Extremisms
- Part 2 - Crypto-Anarchism
- Part 3 - Anarchist Tools
- Part 4 - Anarchy in the Blockchain I - This post
Next posts on the Series:
I - Anarchism (cont.)
- Anarchy Today (cont.)
- Part 4 - Anarchy in the Blockchain II
- Part 5 - Today's Anarchism
II - Existentialism
- What is Existentialism ?
- The "Existentialims"
- Humanism and Existentialism
- Existentialism and Anarchism
III - Decentralism
- What is Decentralism?
- The Philosophy of decentralism
- Blockchain and Decentralization
- Anarchism, Existentialism ,and Decentralism
IV - Dialectic for Self-Liberation
- The Dialectics of Liberation Congress
- Psychoanalysis and Existentialism
- The Anti-psychiatry movement