Crypto-anarchism

Abstract

This article takes a look on the political philosophy of crypto-anarchism, regarding connected historical and more general ideologies as well as implementations in the information society and associated utopic and dystopic aspects.

Historical Background

The shaping of this new political ideology is often regarded to have started with the publication of Timothy C. May's "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" in 1988. It warns the public that new times with unseen challenges are coming and captures the utopia of truly private communication. The author predicts that technology will develop sufficiently in the following ten years to enable these dreams. May also presents counterarguments against encryption such as the usage by drug dealers and national security in general but simply states that these won't stop crypto-anarchy from becoming reality. This crypto-anarchy is described as "a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures", clearly establishing the connection to anarcho-capitalism.

Anarchism

Although often associated with chaos and violence, anarchism is a fundamentally peaceful ideology based on the abolition of any form of oppression, private or state. Anarchism seeks to protect individual freedom and sees hierarchy in any form as harmful. It can alternatively be described as libertarian socialism since both capitalism and the state are regarded as coercive forces harming the natural order. Anarchism has a series of subcategories defining different philosophies, but their common ground is in the liberation of the individual. Anarchists perceive the state as a weapon of oppression and consider it illegitimate, regardless of its political leanings. Major decisions are made by a small elite, rather than people having power over their own lives. Authority is ultimately based on power, regardless of how open or transparent that authority is, because it still has the ability to coerce others. Another anarchist argument against states is that people who make up a government, even the most selfless of officials, would always crave more power, which will lead to corruption. Because the ruling class is separate from the rest of society, anarchists believe that the idea that the state is the collective will of the people is an unattainable fantasy.

Anarcho-Capitalism

The term "Anarcho-Capitalism" was shaped by Murray Rothbard in the 1940s, synthesizing elements of classic liberalism, minarchism and individual anarchism. It is characterized by liberty as the core value and the rejection of any authoritarian power. Despite the similarity in name to anarchism, anarcho-capitalists have a very different relation to property and wealth than anarchists. They argue that any limitation on or redistribution of personal property would require a public, state-like force that they reject as anti-libertarian and a violation of personal rights. A key element of anarcho-capitalist theory is the non-aggression-principle, protecting the right of every person to its own body and its property. Violence, assault, murder, and slavery are viewed as attacks on persons and therefore crimes as well as fraud, burglary, theft, and taxation which are viewed as attacks on property. The rejection of taxes concludes to a stateless society, where - in contrast to minarchism - even police, military and courts are privatized in the form of insurance companies and private mercenary armies. This way, law can continuously be enforced but the former public sectors are integrated in the free market, the central instrument maximizing efficiency that anarcho-capitalists regard natural and constantly seek to achieve. Courts would compete against each other as well as security firms and private prisons. According to Murray Rothbard, Anarcho-Capitalism even includes a free market for children where adopting parents compensate the biological parents appropriately.

Cypherpunks shaping Crypto-Anarchism

Timothy C. May, author of "The Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto" (1988), was a founding member of the Cypherpunks, a loose group of cryptography-enthusiastic libertarians connected by a mailing list since 1992. The term is a linguistic synthesis of cipher and cyberpunk, describing a person pushing for widespread adoption of strong encryption and privacy-enhancing technology as a means of achieving social and political change. The mailing list was used as a forum to discuss aspects of their common ideology: crypto-anarchism. Among other things, they discussed limitations and necessities of digital cash and the politics and philosophy of concepts such as anonymity, pseudonyms, reputation, and privacy. Eric Hughes, another founding member, argues in "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (1993) that privacy is an absolute necessity for an open society in the information society, yet governments, companies or similar big organizations are unfit to design the needed encryption software. The Cyberpunk's quest is therefore more than theoretical: They write the software to realize their utopia, a system where every little piece of data is solely accessible with consent of the creator or owner. Members of the list were for example Julian Assange and John Young. Some Cypherpunks have filed lawsuits against governmental limitation of cryptography export controls. Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin, published a white paper on the reasoning behind bitcoin on the Cypherpunk mailing list in 2008.

What is Crypto-Anarchism?

Crypto-Anarchism is a political ideology focusing on civil rights and privacy regarding the growing surveillance in the modern world. It seeks to weaken the state's power by strengthening the citizens as individuals. This goal should be achieved by advanced encryption technology, prohibiting government agencies from collecting any data on its citizens. Additional goals are the circumvention of censorship as well as the forming of a new free and decentralized economic and political system.

classification in the political spectrum

Despite the relationship by name, crypto-anarchism would likely not lead to an anarchist society in the traditional, Marxist way. Due to the resulting anonymity, such a system would likely impede the collection of taxes as well as the enforcement of regulations and bans or the redistribution of wealth, therefore creating an anarcho-capitalist environment. Timothy C. May himself states: "What emerges from this is unclear, but I think it will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call crypto-anarchy." Therefore, crypto-anarchy is in the libertarian right, focusing on negative freedom (the absence of coercions) rather than the often-left-wing adjunct positive freedom (actively enabling self-realization).

The crypto-anarchist scene

The crypto-anarchist ideology is still largely developed and supported by computer-affine libertarian activists like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden. The scene has occasional meetings like the Hackers Congress at the "Institute of Crypto-Anarchy" in Prague where participants discuss recent developments relevant to crypto-anarchist goals like the growing spread of bitcoin, compare the latest anonymous and secure messaging apps like Signal and Telegram, and the decentralizing force of the growing sharing economy in various industries, namely borrowing cars, daily tasks, lending bikes, lending money, home Wi-Fi and even clothes.

Possibilities of implementation

This ideology is strongly dependent of reliable encryption, a technology just a few informaticians understand today. It would therefore require either great educational efforts to enable the general public to use encryption independently or a lot of simplified software that would have to be open source and approved by neutral experts. It isn't realistically actionable on a national scale, but specialized communities can already live it today as shown in the examples below. However, many this this independence and anonymity requires a lot of work and most people prefer to exchange their data for more convenience in their everyday life. Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and many others collect our data on every usage, yet their revenue is still increasing and with the expanse to emerging markets don't seem to stop anytime soon.

Examples in the information society

Blockchain

The first association most people have when they hear a term including "crypto" nowadays is likely to be crypto currencies, with Bitcoin as the most prominent example. Their name comes from the technology behind it, the so-called blockchain, which enables reliable peer-to-peer contracts or payments without the need of a neutral third party by using a public transaction history distributed many times. The revolutionary aspect of this technology is the possible abolition of many traditional powerful controlling systems that anarchists have been protesting for centuries, for example notaries and banks. Bitcoins are transferred via blockchain using special Bitcoin addresses assigned to a user’s wallet. By switching his address for every new payment, users can avoid being tracked in the blockchain lists. Combined with the blocking of IP address logging by using a tool like TOR, payments with a high degree of anonymity become possible.

Wikileaks

Created by Cypherpunk Julian Assange in 2006, WikiLeaks is a non-profit-organization running an openly accessible platform where confidential documents, mostly of governments or other authoritarian institutions like the catholic church, are published ("leaked"). Its focus lies not on the protection of private communication from the state but rather on revealing information the state wants to keep from its own citizens. Ultimately, both tactics seek to bring back into balance what crypto-anarchists see as a crooked relationship between individuals and the state. They want the state to serve its citizen and not the other way round. This radical publication of domination knowledge has as goal neither the destructive nihilism which he was accused of in the past, nor being a journalistic corrective to the current system. Instead, as Sueddeutsche Zeitung has analyzed in 2010, Assange wants to weaken what he calls "conspiracies": all authoritarian governments including several western democracies, especially the USA. By leaking important secrets, he wants to stimulate fear and paranoia between the "conspirators", making internal communication more cognitively laborious and less effective. This system-wide cognitive decline in turn leads to a decrease in their ability to hold on to power as the outside world forces them to adapt.

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden, at the time NSA consultant, revealed dozens of global mass surveillance programs in June 2013, many of which were run by the National Security Agency and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the help of telecom companies and European states, and sparked a cultural debate about national security and personal privacy. Snowden states that he got disillusioned with the operations with that he was part over time, and that he attempted to voice his ethical questions through internal channels but was disregarded. US officials have accused him of bringing great harm onto the national security of his country, but he argues that he felt he had to inform the public as to what extent the surveillance of the citizens in their own name has taken on. Though he is not an actively proclaimed crypto-anarchists, stickers on his laptop while leaking the documents in 2013 showed his support for the Tor Project and John Gilmore's Electronic Frontier Foundation. A 2015 study found that only 36 % of US Americans supported his actions, while citizens in the also spied on allied countries of central Europe gave him approval ratings of over 84 %. On September 2, 2020, a US federal court ruled that the bulk telephone data collection by the National Security Agency was illegal and possibly even unconstitutional.

TOR Browser

TOR is short for The Onion Router, a privacy-focused open-source browser that directs internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer overlay network consisting of more than six thousand relays. It impedes tracking connections, messages, and the location of the user. The Browser is a gladly used tool for whistleblowers contacting media anonymously and people circumventing censorship in authoritarian countries like China or Russia. On the other hand, escaping governmental surveillance by NSA and other authorities is not only interesting for law-abiding citizens seeking privacy but also for criminals using the web to commit bank fraud , upload child pornography or even arrange contract murders. Silk Road was, according to the FBI, the web's biggest anonymous drug market until the site got seized in 2013. For two and a half years, had been an Eldorado for buyers and sellers of hard drugs. Using TOR, they could easily access the site, fill a shopping cart and checkout with payment via Bitcoin. The drugs were then sent to a given address, just like with any other online shop.

Defense Distributed

Cody Wilson, self-proclaimed crypto-anarchist and free-market-anarchist, founded Defense Distributed in 2012 as a non-profit organisation with the goal of endorsing private gun ownership by developing and providing online digital schematics of firearms in CAD files. These can be downloaded to build a firearm using a 3D printer or a milling machine. In 2013, Defense Distributed released their first printable firearm design, the Liberator. It is a single-shot handgun lasting 8 to 10 shots when printed under the right conditions. Despite the governmentally forced retract of the files from the organizations ‘’Defcad’’ website, they are still available throughout the internet on filesharing sites like The Pirate Bay.
Cody Wilson says that the right to own a gun should be treated like any other right and not be limited by artificial obstacles, arguing that the second amendment of the US constitution protects the right to bear arms alongside the first amendment protecting freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This fundamental approach leads to the conclusion that even mass shootings like they are increasingly happening in the USA must be tolerated as a consequence of this constitutional right and cannot lead to a restriction of it.

Utopic Aspects

Crypto-Anarchism can be largely described as Anarcho-Capitalism transferred into the information society, but with an increased focus on individual rights and powers, reducing the danger for persons to be abused by large companies since the encryption technology could also protect someone from commercial data collection common among big tech firms nowadays. However, this only fully applies if the technology is open source and not provided by another company, since that corporation could easily create loopholes to collect data anyway.
Besides this specific advantage, Anarcho-Capitalism ensures maximum (negative) liberty and economic prosperity. By lifting restrictions in the business (and in the currently public) world, competition would grow, causing a wider range of offered goods, fair prices and better access to products and services. With kings, presidents, and generals out of power, there would be no wars for power over others like today. Private arbitration would work fast and efficient, bounty hunters and private investigators paid in bonuses might be more motivated than public police and infrastructure would have regular maintenance not delayed by parliamentary budget meetings and tedious committee discussions. Individual freedom would be a lot better than in most societies today, with everyone being able to buy, consume and produce what he wants without moral guidelines dictated by the state.

Dystopic Aspects

Governmental and corporate secrets exposed by Wikileaks or Cryptome are today already a quality source for terrorists and hostile countries, so these organizations could be made responsible for the death of people, for example spies whose identity is revealed or victims of terror attacks, sadly a consistent reality in our society.
Despite the aforementioned advantages of an anarcho-capitalist society, such a political system would also cause a series of drawbacks, especially from the view of workers. Although the central control of currency currently exercised by the central banks would have been abolished, each person’s fate would continue to be determined by his wealth and the gap between poor and rich would probably get much bigger due to the lack of a welfare state. Additionally, syndicate work would be impeded since anti-discrimination rights and limited employment hours couldn’t be controlled anymore. Unemployed and disabled persons would be fully dependent of relatives, friends, or voluntary charities. Rent would be organized privately which means old people who miscalculated or lost their assets would be forced to continue working until their end of life. From an anarchist or socialist perspective, Anarcho-Capitalism and therefore also Crypto-Anarchism fail to free the individual from the capitalist coercion of dependency and hierarchy.
The weakness of Anarcho-Capitalism is that its thinkers often assume virtues in the human nature that aren’t reliable in the real world. Without regulation, most companies wouldn't limit pollution and greenhouse gas emissions at all and some issues like water pipes, train tracks and streets are actually more efficient being built publicly since they would have to be built multiple times. Education would be very expensive, much like US College today, and individuals of low income without private security would have no one to turn to if they're in danger. Since the state authorities could no longer identify and pursue criminal activities, people would have much easier access to drugs and weapons. Although many Libertarians dream of such a society, the opioid epidemic and increasingly frequent mass shootings in the USA let it seem very undesirable and call for a stronger regulation. Even generally condemned crimes like digital theft or pedophile uploads couldn't be tracked anymore, making the internet a seemingly lawless place.