#5 - Rachel Rose O’Leary - “Lunarpunk, Encryption as Infrastructure for Liberation”

Bitcoin was essentially a political ideology that was expressing itself through software in a very immediate way. I think a fun way of describing Luna Punk is as a weaponized solar punk. Freedom of the individual is not possible until the society is free. Hello everyone and welcome back on Solar Punk Manifesto. Today we are receiving Rachel Rose O'Leary to continue our reflection on decentralized forms of social organizations, but this time from the philosophical and technical perspectives of Luna Punk. Rachel Rose is a founding figure in the Dark Fire movement and the Luna Punk aesthetic. She is what we can call a revolutionary programmer originally from Ireland with a deep passion for the philosophy of technology. Rose belongs to those who want to reignite the disruptive potential of tech. She believes that we are at a turning point in the history of humanity in which technologists are faced with a choice. To either passively advance the interest of a system faded for destruction or undertake a psychic reveal. Welcome to the podcast Rose. Thanks so much for having me. Rose, you started studying arts. Your background is in arts. Could you maybe tell us about this initial part of your life and what drew you away from the art world towards crypto and tech? Definitely. I did start in the art world and I spent like six years studying arts. I did a four year bachelor's and followed by a two year master's and then I very briefly did a one year as a professional artist. But to write this process I was basically realizing that there was something terribly wrong with the art world and in a way art in general. So I think to kind of give it an artist's historical kind of context throughout the 20th century art as a phenomena that had existed prior to the 20th century basically died. Like at the hands of artists so like the artists destroyed art and you know what happened next was basically a kind of imposter or charade of what art had been a kind of shadow and performance of ours that wasn't like a true art in the way I saw it. You guys might know that in 1918 the artist do shop put a urinal in a gallery. And this is a moment that you know we study an art college because it's a pivotal moment for the art world and for the question like what is ours and it's kind of a moment where art died because I became everything and it kind of made art a mockery of itself. But it also expanded the potential of art into a kind of infinite directions which meant that our practice became like increasingly weird and kind of devolved progressively over the 20th century to the point where the whole notion of making art inside of a gallery no longer made at a sense since art had basically escaped conceptually those gallery walls. Also I should probably mention that as an artist I was very influenced by basically conceptual art so I was like conceptual art sculpture was like my area and I think for other artists like people who are painters they would have a different kind of critique to me but going from a conceptual background I was very informed by these conceptual artists of the 70s like people like Saul the wit who would say stuff like the idea is the machine that makes the art. So with this in mind it brings to mind a kind of awareness of forum and of medium of expression that kind of withered away the art world itself like the kind of optimizes out the art world because the art world is a very restricted sphere. Like if you want to communicate some kind of a idea like whether that's an artistic idea or otherwise there are much better more effective more networked and global ways of doing that that don't involve the art world and actually side stepping the art world entirely you know putting stuff online and it seemed to be a much more effective way of communication. Similarly then when it comes to art objects I became increasingly kind of frustrated with the weird kind of observed charade this like mimicry of like an older form of ours which was like involved in making paintings and making sculptures when you know stuff like software is very exciting as a medium because there's this incredible immediacy of idea and effect where you can actually you can actually instantiate your you know the idea that in in solo its words becomes a machine that makes the art there's this like instant kind of effect where you can make software that directly instantiate those ideas in material reality. So that's a kind of really powerful form and medium and when I came across Bitcoin for the first time it was around 2014 2015 I was very taken by the fact that Bitcoin seemed to be like a more optimal form of art than these other kinds of artworks that were still inhabiting this kind of mimicry or like shadow of like the art world that had existed. It was a essentially a political ideology that was expressing itself true software in a very immediate way so you know that's where you know thinking about Bitcoin in that way and this effort to kind of use networks to express ideas like in an incredibly kind of sophisticated global way but also using software to kind of like embed those ideas of the code and enact them in the world. That's basically what made me decide to like move away from the inefficiencies of the art world and all of the kind of inconsistencies that it represents as well which is like a whole other rant but I really think the art world is some kind of fallen like imposter like charade. But do you see that do you see crypto art I don't know what you would call this art movement but would you see it as an antidote to postmodernism then because it appears from your critique or kind of the discussion that you just held is that you have some sort of a negative outlook on postmodernism but at the same time to me seems that the freedom of the media that postmodernism gave is also the reason that you can now. So freely say that you are out of the form of a canvas or the dance floor or something like that and you're on to the code and you're on to the blockchain and that is also art. So actually you're reaping the fruit of postmodernism to the most extreme sense of it. Yeah definitely I'm not necessarily critical postmodernism but I do see it as the death of art in a way but also the beginning of something else. You could say it's the completion of postmodernism like brought to you it's most kind of extreme point but yet we have to bring things to their completion in a way to push them to their most logical extremes. Yeah actually I wanted to share my experience reading you as someone who was very far and not familiar at all with the world of crypto and I'm not a very technical person either. And when I read your chapter on the dark forest I found it really intriguing and quite accessible actually for someone like me because of the fact that you really bring your artistic background, your sensitivity but also your Irish heritage to the way you describe this technological world of crypto. So basically you can really feel that there is something very human that you bring back into the reflection of crypto. So that was quite enjoyable. Maybe you could tell us about your initial attraction to the crypto movement and also what aspects of it eventually led to your disillusion. Definitely so thanks so much also for your comments on the text. I think you're referring to the text which is from the second issue of agarism in the 21st century. It's called explain the dark forest or I'll fucking kill you. That's the one. That's the one. You know you said the chapter but it's fine. To kind of specify but yeah in answer to your question I had this kind of persistent kind of feeling that you know everything that was happening in art was a kind of like a weird echo of like some older institution but no longer had any relevance or practical power in the present. I kind of came into crypto at the same time as these ideas were getting you know very dominant in my head and around that time I read a book called cipherpunk and the freedom of the internet which was an interviews interviews done by. Julian Assange with several different people. The intro to the book is a text written by Assange, which is kind of like his manifesto. And it's very beautiful and very kind of scary on reading this text. It was the first time I had thought about technology as a dialectic of surveillance and encryption. And where surveillance is aligned to totalitarianism and control and encryption is like a very simple technique that we can render in service of freedom. So I read this book, which I'm just to give a little shout out to my friend to lend me that book. It's another philosopher called Paul Dylan Annas. I just like to mention that because this is a really fundamental book that I read at the time that in changing my perspective. So it really kind of woke me up to the reality of the stylactic of technology, but also the essays in that book. They talk about Bitcoin, they talk about PGP encryption, the cypherpunk movement. So it's really like this whole world. I kind of opened up. And having read that book, I decided then that I really wanted to dedicate my life essentially to this movement. And I started working at that point for coin desk because at the time I had some writing experience I've always had a writing practice. So it was easy for me to get a job as a writer. I didn't have programming skills at that time. So I started working for coin desk, which is a kind of giant in the cryptocurrency media space. So one of the, I think it's still is, but at the time it was definitely the biggest media outlets in crypto. And you know, that was an amazing experience because I worked there for two years, I think. And I traveled like all over the world to different conferences. I met many, many people from crypto, spoke with many people interviews. And it was a extremely educative experience, but it also kind of revealed to me that while cryptocurrency kind of had this origin in the cypherpunk movement, it had also become basically even at that time, there were signs of a lot of kind of scaminess. Just also to contextualize this, I started working at coin desk in I think 20, 2016, 2017. So like having come into crypto in 2015, it was really this transitional movement in crypto, where in 2015, crypto is still a place that you enter and you automatically start hearing about cypherpunk. But by 2017, it had grown to the point where you could be in crypto and not know about the history. And now it's kind of completely evolved away from cypherpunk. So that the newcomers really, they don't know. It's only like people here in it from a longer time, you know about cypherpunk, or it's people who have a particular interest or like historical interest in cryptocurrency that know about it. But in general, you could be completely in crypto and not have any awareness that there's this kind of deeper political ideology that's at work. So it was 2017 when I was working for coin desk, it was the ICO boom. So that was a time where Ethereum was in a period of like rapid growth. There was a lot of new people, there was a lot of scams. There was a sense that a lot of this political ideology was really just being used to basically sell crypto as a product. But there was a disconnect between the kind of political vision and the practical reality of what kind of world this technology was working in service of. And really it was just enriching people. And also in 2018, I remember this one conference in 2018 in coin desk and in the kind of US centric blockchain space, the narrative was very much about institutional Bitcoin, institutional blockchain. It still kind of is, but that was like the roots of that narrative. And so they had these events where it was just like all these suits and talking about blockchain for banks. And I just found it very boring and also like very, very far from what I thought Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was supposed to be. Were there any efforts done by like the OG members of the community to tend up and be outrage? What is this? Who are these people in Seos? Get out of here. Type of thing. Was there, did you feel like? Definitely. In the two years that you were there, you were one of the few ones because there was just such a big stream of new people coming in who were not interested whatsoever in the philosophy, but just in making money. Because essentially it's just a new technology. That is just a buzzword, like AI or whatever. You just go and you open a company or whatever and you just get some money. And that's it. And you exit because I see you're not even liable for anything because it's just somewhere in the cloud. That's it. Yeah, I didn't know this at the time. I know this now because I have more of a stark perspective on Bitcoin and crypto. But the most important efforts to reclaim the narrative around Bitcoin crypto happened in 2013, 2014. And that was when basically also the origins of Darkfai began. 2013 was, it was around the time where Bitcoin was starting to grow. And there was prominent voices in the Bitcoin community that wanted to essentially gentrify the technology and the narrative so that it would appeal to bankers and companies and et cetera. At the same time, there was a kind of a radical center that wanted to push back. And like one of those people was Amir Taki, who I'm now co-founded Darkfai with, a project called Dark Wallace, which is the first version of Darkfai. Actually, it was an anonymous Bitcoin Wallace. So that first came about in 2013. And the way that that project was kind of communicated was as like to draw a line in the sun saying like, Bitcoin is not for banks or for all this like institutional corporate takeover. It's fundamentally about like unstoppable freedom to transact. And for that, you need anonymity. But so in 2013, 2014, there was kind of a political struggle between these two groups. But you know, like one of the things that happened was Amir and left cryptocurrency and went to Syria. And so that when that happened, then this conflict that had begun in 2013, 2014 basically migrated into what's known as the Bitcoin Scaling debate. So kind of evolved into this other debate, which was a, which was a technical one, but the kind of coordinators were still there. And over time, even those voices in Bitcoin, who were more cypherpunk, in a weird way, many of them started to just kind of agree that Bitcoin, you can't make it anonymous, you know, you can make changes to Bitcoin. And I think maybe they got kind of like brainwashed by their own bags. You know, there's a very conservative attitude towards Bitcoin development. So they were like, Oh, no, no, we can't touch the code. We can't make it anonymous. We have to. And so that happened. And then in Ethereum, I think in 2017, 2018, because Ethereum was quite early, there was still a lot of optimism that everything was going to be fine. And it's only now in 2023, 2024 that Ethereum seems to be going through a similar kind of moment where, you know, there's a conflict between the different kind of ideologies of Ethereum and, you know, an effort to a desire to return back to the roots. Right. But can I just ask a more technical question? Because for me, this emergence of the desire to absorb the blockchain technologies by the banks is sometimes really unclear because why do you even need blockchain technologies for banking? Because it already works like everything. Okay, you have legacy code, but okay, go get like a software as a service provider for your for your back end. And that's it. Like why do you need blockchain? Because to me, that trap seemed so evident that the bankers would come and say, Hey, guys, can you please make it for us? Even though there is no use, but because they saw into the fact that, okay, this is going to hijack our business, we're just going to try and absorb, but absorb it the entire sector to prevent it from hijacking. But because I don't see a technical application in financial technology for blockchain that is actually desired by the bank world. Like ledgers, I don't know, smart contracts for all these things. If everything is transparent, you can still do it with regular software, right? Yeah, exactly. They don't have a need for decentralization, which is the most interesting use case of cryptocurrency. But as you said, it's just basically they're like they're trying to co-opt it because they don't want to be over what you call it replaced by that technology. Yeah, to go further into this question about you being very much aware of this. And evidently, there were other people people who were aware of it like I'm here. So then you already explained why you wanted to return to the Cypher Punk ideals, but at the same time, you founded something new, like the neo-cypher punk movement, AKA with your face in front of it as darkfigh. But why did you decide to shift from the personal liberty that was the focus of the traditional Cypher Punk towards the collective liberty? What inspired you to emphasize on that? - Great question. A large part would have been the kind of reading, the philosophy that we have read as a movement and also the time that I spent in Rojava. So to kind of continue with the timeline and then circle back to your question. 2018, I met Amar for the first time and he basically encouraged me to learn programming, which I'd wanted to do for a while, but I hadn't gotten around to it 'cause I was working full time. But he said, no, just don't worry about journalism, just like study programming and philosophy. And so I said, yes, but around that time was when the war was kind of kicking off in Syria. Erdogan, the president of Turkey was like threatening to invade. So basically, we went there to like assist and through that experience, but also through the writings of Otschalan, we kind of came to this critique of the original Scytherpunk vision. And basically, the critique is that Scytherpunk has inherited a lot of the American libertarianism. And you know, some of that is really kind of valuable, but there are some elements of that ideology which are actually holding Scytherpunk as a movement back. And in particular, we've had a failure to coordinate around these issues such as, you know, this desire to push back against the co-option of crypto. You know, the Scytherpunk answer to that has been very disappointing. And it kind of points to the drawbacks of individualism as an ideology. And so this kind of critique, it's not my own critique, but it's basically lifted from Otschalan who makes the exact same critique of anarchism in his books, where Scytherpunk suffers from the same problems of anarchism. But to be honest, like in an even more like advanced way. So what Otschalan critique of anarchism is basically, anarchism, it has the right philosophy, like in the sense that it has a correct understanding of history and the critique of the state is correct. So, you know, it's kind of theoretically correct, but as a practice, it has consistently failed. And anarchists have failed in a revolutionary context against other groups like communists and like others that are more well organized fascists. He basically tries to explain why is that happened? Why do they have this excellent theoretical basis, but very weak, practical orientation? A big part of that is this emphasis on personal liberty, which is kind of like, oh, I'm free. That means I can do whatever I want, you know, and so that means in a practical sense, if you're trying to work together, sometimes people need to actually put aside their own personal liberties in favor of the collective liberty, which, you know, in Rojava was something that is like very much a practice that people aspire to and I was very impressed by some revolutionary women that I spoke to over there who had a critique of Western feminism on the same basis where they basically said women in the West, they think that freedom is freedom to do whatever I want, like freedom to work, freedom to go drinking, freedom to wear whatever. But actually that's not a correct interpretation of freedom because freedom is not possible. So really the effort of like what freedom, what the pursuit of freedom is, should be more of a collective pursuit than an individual one, although they're also kind of harmonious and complementary. It's that critique and that perspective that I basically we borrowed and also made the same observation about cypherpunk. - Okay, so let's lean back a bit into privacy 'cause I was just curious to ask you about the interpretation of cypherpunk, right? So in dark fire. Why, because we keep on mingling between the two topics of both democracy and anarchy and social organization, but also privacy and blockchain. I think to an unprepared listener, this might seem a little bit far-fished. So can you maybe talk a little bit about why the concept of privacy is essential for democratic societies and building those? - Definitely. So in like a true democracy, there are basically two types of voice. The first and always the primary form of voice is like the ballot box, right, like voting. But the second and equally fundamental kind of voice is the gun. So for truly democratic society, the people need to be able to essentially hold the government at ransom if that first fundamental type of voice, which is the voting, is being infringed on in a certain way. So basically what underpins or what enables a democratic society is the ability of the people to use violence to protect themselves against the government or to change the government through revolution if necessary. And so the problem now with a lot of the Western, quote unquote, democracies is that they are these basically disarmed democracies. So you have some appearance of democracy through votes. And but you lack this other fundamental form of voice, which is these weapons and the ability to use violence to hold the government to ransom. So like what where I see privacy is like a kind of weapon. So it's all about restoring those abilities. So we live in a society where all of our weapons have been taken away. And also we're heavily surveilled like farm animals or something like where we cannot have private lives or like do organize in a way that would be subversive to whatever regime. So I do see privacy as kind of necessary to uphold this like basic tenet of democracy, which is like actually the ability to organize to overthrow a government that has become totalitarian. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, I think to me it makes sense. And this is a standard thing that people don't think about, right? People usually prefer stability and they see stability as the end of history because most people just are not interested really in thinking beyond the possibilities of the contemporary status quo, which is interesting inherently due to the complexity of the topic. And I suppose that organization through decentralized and decentralized technologies is something that could offer us a way out of here. But at the same time, I want to speak a little bit about the concept of fear of privacy that has also been installed by the current governments mostly, similarly to taking away our weapons and normalizing transparency, right? Because all of these are tools basically that allow them to hold as much power as possible for as long as possible, because we have no way of subversing them. So could you maybe, if you know, talk us through the history of how that all came about, maybe the myth of transparency and dewebinizing society and non-violent protest, and et cetera, et cetera? So a really excellent book, which talks about the normalization of surveillance is surveillance capitalism by Zuboff. That's a really excellent book. It's in two parts. The first part is a kind of journalistic, like historical analysis of where technologically speaking did surveillance emerge. And it's looking at not the kind of deeper-- I think it starts in maybe the '80s or '90s, but it doesn't go deeper than that. But it looks at stuff like Google, Big Tech, and how it is that ad money became the dominant kind of economy of the internet. So that's a really good book to understand that kind of practical trajectory as it relates to economy. But then the second part of the book is also really good, because it talks about the ideological underpinnings of this surveillance mindset. And basically, tracks the emergence of this ideology that is very dominant in Big Tech, a particular MIT professor whose name I forget, and a book called Walden 2, which you guys probably know Walden 1, or it's just called Walden, by Henry Thoreau. It's a book, like 19th century, early 20th century book, by-- This guy, Henry David Thoreau, and it's like quite romantic, but it's about a man, and it's a real account of a man who like leaves his life in a city to go and live in the woods and to pursue this kind of like more mindful way of living that is like more integrated with nature. Like, you know, catches his own food, cooking like little house. And so he kind of rejects civilization. That was the first world and the second world in we scored world in two came out sometime in the 60s or 70s. And it's about a utopia where everyone is completely surveilled. And like, everyone's needs are perfectly met because everything is perfectly monitored through these kind of smart devices. And it was and it's a world where yeah, it was a world where there is no concept of free will. Everything is kind of always already provided to you and you just live in this world without any needs. And when it came out, it was originally seen like people were disturbed. They're like, whoa, this is a really creepy vision. And we don't want to live in this boring like society, like rats in a cage. We want uncertainty and free will and agency over our lives. We don't want to be hooked up to the system. That's monitoring us. But anyway, so that book was like a rid initially rejected. But then it ended up becoming really influential. This is the book by the MIT professor that you're talking about. It was at least from which field did that person come because to me, it's a wild thought to have in the 60s that this could be an attainable future. I mean, they did some, I was wrong. It was actually published in 1948. 48. And yes. And it was written by a guy called Skinner, B.F. Skinner, psychologist. Oh, it's the same Skinner that did the pigeons, right? The reinforcement learning of the pigeons. Okay. Yeah. That's the guy. Well, okay. That says a lot actually about contemporary, yeah, behavioral dark patterns that are used in marketing. Exactly. So again, this is Zuboff's research and insights. And I highly recommend that book. So she talks about how this guy was originally kind of seen as something very weird and creepy like this vision. But then later it was highly influential on the big tech and people started to think, Oh, actually, that sounds really cool. And like, how can we build that using the internet of things and stuff and like surveilling everything? So I referred to her book from a history on how that came about. But I think she calls it the dispossession cycle, which is how people became progressively kind of robbed of their privacy. And then how is increasingly normalized to the point where there's no even outrage sense of outrage left. It's just been all worn away. So she doesn't really go to analysis of that. But also I think in terms of like why people are scared of privacy, there is some kind of latent anti tech tendency in society where I think people in general and not just governments, but governments also are always a bit scared and a bit cautious of new technologies. I heard a really good anecdote, which was and I'd not sure this is true historically, but it's a good story, which was about the Roman Emperor Tiberius. And so apparently Tiberius, you know, was sitting in his court and the man comes in and says, I've got this amazing material I want to share with you. And he picks up like what looks like a glass and he drops it on the floor and the glass bounces and he says, look, I've got glass that can't break, you know, it's like shutter proof. And Tiberius says, wow, like how many people know about this? And he says, well, you're the first person that I've told. And then he goes, clicks his fingers and he says, all right, I had this guy. And then that was the end of that technology. And people say it was like it was plastic. They could have had the Romans could have had plastic. But there's kind of historical questions about that. Other people say it was rubber. But the point is that, you know, that emperor Tiberius, he didn't want to deal with the disruption that such an invention would bring. So I think the same is true for most technology and especially privacy. So I think that's why some of the fear exists. Yeah. So he was like, Permitius already brought enough. We don't need more. We don't need more musicalities. Exactly. Okay. And then I'll also mention that it has to be said that there has also been a side up campaign like against privacy where, you know, privacy has basically been associated with criminality. And it leads people to this reaction where they say, why do I need privacy if I'm not doing anything wrong? Because privacy is seen as something scary and evil. But I think it's not just true for privacy. Like it's kind of interesting when you watch a lot of, you know, mainstream like movies, a lot of the times the villains are villainized. Like Batman, for example, is like a souped up fascist cop where his bane is actually pretty cool. He's, yeah, you know, he's kind of occupied or something. He's like swarms the stock market and he's like, yeah, send it to zero or whatever. So he's kind of represents something about the psychology of people. And also I will mention that oftentimes people, they're afraid of things even when those things are like very good for society. Just to give another historical example in Ireland prior to the revolution, the first effort, like the first, there was many, many attempted revolutions. But the last attempt before the successful attempt, which was 1916, there was a small group of people who'd banded together and created like a micro revolution and declared Ireland an independent nation. And at the time, most people thought they were ridiculous. And they not only thought they were ridiculous and kind of laughable, but also they didn't want autonomy. Like many, many people did not want the autonomy from Britain at that time because they were like, we have everything we need that will like we're trying to build something here. We don't want to mess up the relation. We don't want to war. It wasn't until that those people who attempted the revolution were assassinated that the popular sentiment shifted in favor of the rebels. And that's when the genuine revolution happened was when they realized actually we are oppressed and we do want this. So just sometimes the people can kind of sly out some cells as well as being sly out. But in contemporary society, don't you feel like what has to happen that people realize that we need things to work different because the degree to which the Assange case is just like everyone talks about it, right? And it's so overwhelmingly clear what is happening. It's very difficult to be in the grey zone there in the Julian Assange case, right? And still people are like, I mean, that's just how it functions. Are you exposed to state? You get imprisoned for however 100 years. That's normal. How does that not outrage people enough to be like, no, you know, privacy, free and wealth speech? What has to happen? Who has to die? Who has to be imprisoned? Disassistinated for these kind of things to resonate enough in our society to induce some sort of a change. I think the recognition that like traditional forms of politics or traditional forms of democracy had basically broken. For me was like after the just before the Iraq war, where literally like millions of people took to the streets and across like the Western world protesting the war and didn't want it to happen. And everyone was like, please, we really don't want this word to happen. And the war still happened. Like that was kind of like the point where it was like, okay, actually, this is not a democracy. This is some kind of fake democracy. And we don't have like autonomy or decision making power over like fundamental things like whether our currency or whether our country should go to war. So I do think we're in a very kind of strange era where we have this immense kind of sense of disempowerment, where even though this is kind of like diffuse outrage, like stuff like a sange case, everyone feels basically powerless to do anything. So I think the best thing is, well, I don't have like the full answer, but a few different things like one is definitely education, propaganda, kind of efforts, education and propaganda. And the other is these kind of zero to one technologies that basically you just need a small number of people to work on software that can like genuinely disappear in a way that has like never before happened or at least has happened before. And it's something similar to something like the printing press where you just see these like sudden reconfigurations of power that that happened as a result of these new technologies. Okay, yeah, I think now let's talk about stepping into the dark as a society and your effort, your personal efforts to contribute to empowering people to take such a step into the dark. So could you start by briefly describing Lunar Punk. And this podcast is not going to be focused on defining what Lunar Punk is and the technicalities of it for that I refer you to other podcasts that can be found online or conference talks that Rose has given. But for the sake of context, can you please introduce Lunar Punk a little bit? Definitely. So I think a fun way of describing Lunar Punk is as a weaponized solar punk or maybe an extremist solar punk. But really it's a kind of new synthesis that combines elements of both cypherpunk and solar punk to basically complete the meme. So specifically, it takes a different components from each. So from solar punk, it takes this sense of like we need to think optimistically and open mindedly about the future. And we need to actually try to practically imagine and kind of build those worlds or initiate those worlds that we want to bring into being and not be in this kind of mindset of oh, you know, everything is terrible and just kind of glorifying the aesthetics of the negative in the way that so like cyberpunk and also so much sense cypherpunk do. So it adopts that aspect of solar punk that kind of like sunshine aspect. But then it takes from the cypherpunk this kind of emphasis on like technology and defensive technologies such as encryption. And then there is also like the whole kind of symbolic angle of using the moon as opposed to the sun. And which you know, I think also brings in like a more feminine element. And also, you know, I recommend there's a really good book by a writer called Mercier, a lady called patterns in comparative religion where he talks a lot about different symbols and their history. And he says basically, and he's examining religious cults like pagan and early monotism from like the earliest evidence of religious society. So it's and it's very broad kind of analysis. So he looks at various different areas where humans have evolved with these symbols. And you know, I think his analysis of what the lunar symbolism is is very compelling. More compelling to me than the solar imagery that sort of punk evokes. So specifically like he talks about so he's about the sun as and its history as a as basically death cults in ancient Egypt. And the fact that the sun is worshiped like much less frequently in human society than the moon. The moon has this like much more much wider reach and much more kind of complex and intricate symbolism associated with it. Specifically, I think relative to lunar punk is this idea of the moon as symbolizing becoming and and like the kind of endless that is integral to nature. So the moon is something which is you know, constantly cycling and and also dying and being born again renewed. So you know, I see I see lunar punk as this kind of trying to maintain the same kind of mythological angle of the death and rebirth which is inherent to the moon as a symbol. All right. And why did you I think well, first of all, yeah, I think it's beautiful imagery. We'll get back to that in a second. But just one thing that I want to clarify is why the punk, you know, people who are listening, they're probably so sick of hearing, you know, the solar punk desert parks cyberpunk, cyberpunk, cyberpunk. Why all these punks? So you we as as let's say we're here, compressing as the solar punk representatives. We me and Lola, but the solar punk, you know, Jackson poses itself to I guess capitalism really like in its darkest forums. But what does what do you oppose yourself to as lunar punk? So I agree with those people here are like sick of the punk. In a way, I'm also like sick of the punk. And I think it draws in it does draw in the issues like we discussed in relation to anarchism like punk has a lot of those issues as well. However, the reason why I think we're all using this this moniker punk comes back to punk itself originally, which was kind of very interestingly a fashion movement before it was a political one. It was like a fashion movement or an aesthetic that basically created a politics around it. Which, you know, I think that all of the punks like solar, cyber, even, you know, steampunk, etc. Try to do right like they tried to create an aesthetic and and essentially in a science fiction kind of way depict these other worlds that have this particular aesthetic and then kind of use that to use those images as, you know, what do you call what's the name for a image, which is what is it? Yeah, like you an icon are like a hieroglyph. So like you use these images, these images of the future as like hieroglyphs, which basically attract futures towards them. So I see this as basically hyperstition in the in the kind of philosophical sense of fictions which which create realities around them. And so I think that's why we're we're we're say we're using this punk like later punk and every other punk is using this punk. It's it's the same praxis basically, but but you know, it also drags in and in a way like I've heard people say before like solar punk is not that punk like it's in terms of its relation to the original punk. It's like we are trying to look at the punk. I don't know about that. If if punk juxtapose itself to disco, you know, for initially as an aesthetic and they were trying to to be everything that disco was not and then it like flowed into, you know, like, energy in the UK and stuff like that. For us it's really that we're trying to subvert the overwhelming notions of capitalism really. For us, solar punk is punk and we're trying to get away actually as much as possible from the green washy aesthetics of it because for us that is the main problem. And I guess that is one of the things that I want to talk to like that's why I'm bringing it up because even though it is the power of punk and let's say the roots of the punk movements to come from the aesthetics, we think that the solar punk aesthetic initially kind of toned itself down by choosing a particular aesthetic because it immediately was very reminiscent of the green washy shell green future hydrogen renewable electricity type of ads that you can see and you know on on our first episode we talked with Andrew Dana Hudson about Chobani being like these solar punk aesthetic which is just a yogurt brand in the United States so it was just an ad literally. So the encapsulation by capitalism is something that we want to prevent as much as possible in in our take on solar punk and that is also why we wanted to see what your what your first step into the punk meanplex is and how you develop it further from that. Nice. Who's that a question? I mean, yeah, I mean, if you if you feel like you've answered the question of I mean, you didn't really answer what you just opposed yourself to really right. You just explain why you're punk of the why you're part of the punk meanplex but I feel okay. If your take is that you're you're just creating a meanplex by putting a punk name like punk suffix to it that's fine. If you if you say for example, your lunar punk because you think that transparency is not addressed enough or sorry privacy is not addressed enough and you're juxtaposing yourself to the prevalent ideas of transparency in the crypto movement that would be like that's like the answer or is that the case or is there more to it? Your framing just now kind of helped me reorientate in terms of also our critique of punk. There is a tendency in anarchism and also in cypher punk which is like this kind of inversion. So it's like a reactive attitude which says we're not this we're anti this and in punk especially this comes through in like a lot of punk songs and they give like the sub-humans they have a song called no and the song is literally just no. He's like streaming like oh no no and he's saying basically like rejecting he's like going through all these kind of things that are expected of him in like the you know in this life that he's been born into and he's just saying no no no obviously there's a power there definitely but you know there's also a limitation which is you don't want to get trapped in this negative space which is just like purely reactive especially if it means that in a way you become this kind of inverted mirror of the thing. that you're trying to overcome in a way you've like bound yourself to that thing. This is a problem in general with like the kind of anti-capitalist or any kind of anti-something is this deeply couples kind of connection that you have to that thing that you're trying to critique. And so what Luna from tries to do and again we basically take this from Archalan and I experience the Rojava is it definitely orientates itself in response to its critique which is of the state, so like the nation state, the surveillance state, but rather than seeing itself as like anti-state, the goal is to promote more like non-states. So trying to like really think and I do think solopong tries to do is when it comes to capitalism as well but like trying to circumvent like the very framework that has been like forced onto this discussion and like come out from a very kind of alien like external kind of angle which I think the moon is also a really nice symbol of that kind of alien kind of external kind of otherness. We're basically trying to imagine the these alien forms of society that are completely disentangled from the state-based civilization that we're coming from essentially. Yeah that's right and I think what unites us really is the fact that we're both just disheartened about the incapacity of the state to do anything about the problems that each of us address that say solopong addresses a different set of problems than lunar punk but nonetheless there are problems that in no way can be fixed by the state however much they pretend as if they're passing their their GDPR laws and stuff like that and trying to send foreign aid, nothing changes, nothing changes, nothing changes, nothing changes, nothing changes. So yeah. Before we go into lunar punk as praxis, let's stay a bit longer in the symbolism of lunar punk. You already touched upon the moon and the importance of lunar mythology for human societies in general. But another interesting part of this lunar punk vision is this idea of the dark forest. In your writings you often repeat this phrase, let there be dark. So what's the dark forest and what's the philosophy behind it? So there's two things. There's the philosophical background and then there's also a kind of more historical background to those symbols as well. I'll briefly touch on the history before answering your question on philosophy. So I often when talking about the forests draw on the example of Ireland because this is something that's like very formative on me as a person where you know Ireland is a place where it used to have the greatest number of forests in the whole of Europe was like extremely forested and everything about our society has remnants of this older kind of landscape. So the place names often contain the word for forest or tree, the surnames, the language, the ancient alphabet was like named after trees. Even the word for gaelic gael means the forest people. So there's this kind of this echo or remnant of this old form of society and place, place. This old environment that Ireland used to have. But then it basically went from being the place with the most forest coverage to the place with the least forest coverage, which is where it is now. And this process also corresponds roughly to the loss of the language and the loss of the kind of cultural richness and diversity. Although we still have like remnants of both, there is basically these extinction processes that happened alongside the loss of the forest. So like for me, when I think about forests, I tend to think about the practically in terms of like actual trees, but also kind of metaphorically in terms of the forests of language, of the forests of culture. And so like more broadly like the neuter punk objective is to expand the forests like of all different kinds. And so dark fight, for example, is try and make this encryption like forest on the internet, which is like a different kind of forest. So there's that. And what's really interesting about the Irish example as well is that as well as this kind of relationship between the loss of the forest and the loss of the language of the culture, there's also a relationship between forests and resistance where forests historically actually provided a safe cover for guerrilla units to basically organize and train and launch attacks and out from the forest cover. So there is these like really interesting parallels. So that's kind of one side of the forest kind of metaphor, but then there's also the fact that not just in Ireland, but more broadly in the world, there is a kind of relationship between these decentralized ecosystems like forests, but also like jungles or mountains anywhere where the landscape is like basically broken up by these natural features such as trees or mountains or other kinds of like tundras. There's a relationship between those kinds of geographies and like decentralized ways of organizing society. It seems to be for like a practical reason where it's like some of these places that they're more decentralized because so you can look at like Switzerland as a really good example. It's more decentralized because historically there was like just less ability to move between the different places. So they just ended up evolving in such a way that there was like quite a rich kind of like societal ecosystem. It's like forests are generative in many directions. The societal one and the kind of ecosystem level as well. There's also the angle of like so in Syria, Rojava, they have these two giant rivers, the Tigres and the Euphrates. And in between these two rivers is like very important in terms of the origin of human civilization. So basically on the banks of these rivers there were many many early human civilizations emerging in like ancient Mesopotamia. So I think it's 8000 years to 5000 years ago. There was this huge diversity of like different kinds of early forms of civilization that were growing around the banks of these two rivers. So there's an amazing kind of historical connection between these rivers and the flourishing of civilization. But then basically fast forward present day. So you have this state nation state type societal forum that became prevalent and dominated over all those other kinds of civilizational forums. And it's kind of a desert in that it's a monopoly and it's monopolizing and it's also you know, antithetical to the diversity that was present like prior to that. So it's kind of a monoculture in societal terms. So you have this monoculture of the nation state that has installed itself across the world and recently was installed on top of the Middle East. And in the Middle East and in Syria specifically, you know, you have these many different ethnicities that are kind of like a patchwork. And then post World War One, the European Paris basically divided up these territories in a very rough way. And they said, okay, you know, this is Syria around Turkey, Iraq. And the Kurdish people were left out of these land muscles. So they were basically even though they lived to the center where the mountain ranges, various dark people have been there since the origin of civilization. But they were basically like ignored due to diplomacy with Turkey. So they ended up split between these four nation states. And Achalan who we spoke about before comes from Turkish Kurdistan. So the part of Turkey that is in Kurdistan, he organized a revolutionary process basically in the 70s that spread to Syria. And he was arrested put in prison in the 90s, but that later became a verjava. But to kind of start wrapping up this, I'm still the first half of my answer. So to wrap this up, these two rivers, Tigre as you freighters that are running through the Middle East are extremely significant geopolitically. And Turkey has built over the past like a few decades, has built dams basically redirecting the flow of water away from Syria and into Turkey. And as results, deserts have spread all over Syria. So you have this desertification process, not just Syria, but it's all over the Middle East. Water is the biggest kind of thing of most geopolitical significance in the Middle East. So the place that Achalan was born, an ancient Kurdish town in Turkish Kurdistan, is now flooded under water like permanently because of the redirection of these rivers by the Turkish dams. At the same time, Syria deserts have like expanded and it's lost most of its forest as a result. However, and where this kind of informed our metaphor as well, you know, in the war between Syria and Turkey, the biggest kind of challenge was the Turkish drones which see everything and they have like absolute domination over the air and in a war type conflict it's a really bad situation if your enemy dominates the air because they also control the ground basically if they have like full surveillance so that was a situation in the attempt to resist the Turkish invasion like Rajava had to build tunnels they basically have to dig underground and what's really interesting is that forests like actual natural forests are today if you don't have like good anti-drone tech they are the next best thing and because they provide this kind of like natural encryption that protects people and obscures the movements of people and their heat signals on the ground that's also something really important to mention in religion of forests but to finally answer your question which is the philosophy behind us there's a few different thinkers but one book in particular which informed this is a book called on being a pagan by a French philosopher called Alan de Benoit and he basically draws a comparison between paganism and forests and between monotheism and deserts and he talks about the coincidence of the emergence of monotheism in the desert and so he says like monotheism is this perfect kind of hierarchy of man god and like desert whereas the forest as a place which is like much more complex and diverse is more easily pinned onto this religious attitude where there are multiple gods and so so he draws a distinction between monotheism which has a strict sense of inside and outside and polytheism which allows for the presence of kind of like multiple conflicting gods at any given time so it's more inherently diverse but also kind of accepting of contradiction and diversity so that's where basically you know that kind of forest desert dialectic so there's that Alan de Benoit but Alan de Benoit himself gets that dialectic of deserts and forests from Nietzsche who talks about it in terms of like homogeneity and differentiation which is you know basically the same way that lunar punk uses it so it has its roots in Nietzsche but then there's also this kind of I do highly recommend reading the book by mercia elady which is called patterns in the part of religions where it's basically the kind of the key notion of forests it's it's multiplicities and differentiation as opposed to the the uniformity and homogeneity of the desert but it's also the sense of like the endless kind of self-generating diversity of nature that is always creating things in new configurations so that's kind of I hope that answers your questions plaintfully I think in a very lovely way all right so if we are to talk about the multiplicity and the different ideals that you're trying to convey with lunar punk and if we see that you know darkfire is kind of like the project that is supposed to put a face to the name kind of would you describe darkfire as a prefigurative project and prefigurative by prefigurative here I want to say that it tries to imagine other ways of being other ways of functioning for societies and not necessarily in a way that is trying to just engulf actual societies actual people and convert them to become lunar punk but actually try and build a community which would serve then as a blueprint for redesigning rethinking our society because it can be both and I think you balance very very finely on that between those two concepts but I wanted to know what your own opinion was of where you are on this spectrum yeah you can talk about this project actually and maybe in general so how you view education in that field as being important for revolutionary change yeah and perhaps also drawing on your experiences of being with the Rojava's right because I think you mentioned that you help them kind of develop educational ways of being more involved in the technological aspect of the warfare right yeah exactly so like a large part of the kind of educational context that we're coming from again comes from Rojava where they have basically each sector of society whether that be technology or agriculture or defense etc have their own academies where they're kind of continually training people like young people that come in and the idea is you can move between academies so you can it's like a different kind of education where you can go and focus in a particular area but there's just you know ability to specialize in different directions but also this kind of continuity between the learning and then the actual working where you know you would be like actively working on projects while you're in an academy and there's a critique of the parent student relation but it's not total kind of chaos where it's just like students like well you do you have these these mentors which are guiding the process and so on so you know I have to in Rojava on some academies for technology because during the Syrian civil war basically the schools were forced to close so a lot of people children missed out on any kind of education but even the education that they did have prior to the Syrian civil war was like extremely kind of like authoritarian so like they would beat the kids on stuff and they wouldn't be allowed to speak Kurdish and it was just like hardcore factory school system but in like in an abusive to an abusive degree and so they were trying to reform this in Rojava and I think they were doing really really great work so you know when we started out 20 I think 2018 we and earlier Amir's been was trying this for a couple of years like he basically realized that you he's not just going to be able to find developers that are going to be like able to work on this project you need to kind of create them and they need to be like not simply devs in the way that like computer science departments create devs but you know they would be like philosopher programmers which are you know like kind of like they have an analysis and you know they have a they have a motive and a mission as well as having those skills required to put that mission into practice so you know that that was the goal and in a way I am a product of thus because I met Amir in 2018 when he was trying to put this economy together and he mentored me to become a programmer and he's since you know and myself as well and others in our in Darkfi have also tried to mentor people if if you go to our docs dark dot fi and then you click docs on the webpage we put a big emphasis on basically learning education but you know over time because of the resource constraints this became increasingly kind of remote where people are just like self learning self taught and self initiative and we have like skilled mentors you're able to guide that process obviously we are resource constrained in terms of our time as well so basically the we just really emphasize that people are self directed but anyone can learn like all you need is like the the the desire to and I think a lot of people lack thus and and personally you know I studied ours I I didn't learn programming until like later in life like I was an adult when when I learned programming which is very different to like most of the people I work with who started programming when they were like 10 years old so it definitely puts me at a disadvantage but I truly believe that if you have a strong enough motive you can overcome these kind of intellectual challenges at any age but unfortunately what we see is a lot of people just don't just lack the ambition or the the fire in the belly that is necessary to you know make those leaps of education later in life right but it's also I think also has to do with the fact that if you have already gone so far as to learn how to program smart contracts and you know blockchain technologies then you might as well go and get a job for that pays like 200 thousand dollars a year and live a happy life so I think Amir is really right in saying that you have to really find the crowds that would benefit from these technologies the most because it directly affects their life And I guess the result of people are really an excellent case study for this, but it's a really cool take for me on the philosopher King's kind of concept from ancient Greece that you have to raise people who are these super like multidisciplinary thinkers that can, you know, decide for society, but in this case it's not by means of this imaginary democracy that works, but really like a full decentralized democracy. So it's a very organic continuation that is fed by the advancements in technology. But it begs the question for me, can true social revolution take place by means of this like group of people, these hackers or lunar ponds or, you know, is it going to be enough or are they just going to be providing the infrastructure for other people to organize more and more? Because what I'm struggling with a bit is the marginalization of decentralized technologies, like sometimes the things, you know, it's also this whole dark aesthetic. It sometimes plays down the capacity of it because perhaps, you know, you could be at the forefront and you do like we see leadership as something where you stand in the front, you face the evil, etc., etc. But in lunar punk that vision is really, really different because you operate in the like guerrilla warfare. So can it be enough to be a group of hackers to overthrow these to ensure a big societal change or is it more up to developing the infrastructure for that to happen? Well, I think the whole kind of history of revolution has been a story of a small group of people working independently and at times against the kind of desires of like the main society, I definitely think that it's not a problem of scale because it's definitely possible that small groups of people with focus and momentum can achieve like great societal change. To kind of come back to kind of step back and to define first what do we mean by revolution? Because I think Achilan again is like a really good resource for really influential because he says that revolution is not anyone just like installing the society that's like the one that they like the most, just anyone just like making that expression of their ideal society. Rather like what he sees revolution is enabling moral and political society. And what he means by that is basically he says that society is fundamentally both moral and political. Moral in terms of it creates values. So the fact of there being like law or like the fact that there is law is kind of an example of the fact that the humans have values and they tend to society is like always trying to create this kind of like shared value system that others can enter into and kind of navigate. The law is kind of the crystallization of a much older kind of moral compass that society has been like slowly accumulating over time. And then so that's one side. And then there's the political side which is kind of the what he calls like the art or the practice of freedom. So it's the ways in which we put these moral frameworks into practice. So morality is kind of what he sees as the code of freedom or the yeah the software and politics is the implementation or the expression of that code in society. And so he says that society is these two things. But what happens is with the state civilization, which is like the form of society that emerged 5,000 years ago, which is basically structured like a pyramid where you have these God kings that are like enslaving this kind of like feudal society at the base and they kind of extract all of the value from society. So they're they're this kind of malignant like vampiric kind of hierarchy dies installed itself on top of society that's extracting its value. So he says that this state which is like malignant is basically separating society from its mar- morality in politics. And when society is separated from its morality in politics, it becomes this kind of slavish kind of a cattle like mass. And so the goal of revolutionary is according to archalan is to basically restore morality in politics. And there's various ways to do this like one is true education and the other is providing the people with weapons, but not just giving them weapons, but also giving them the mindset for which you defend themselves. So this kind of like concept of self-defense is very important to archalan, not just like having the weapons to defend yourself, but also having the strong enough culture and the strong enough moral grinding that you have the ability to use those defenses in a profound and kind of a beautiful way. So something that I really like in Rojava is whenever they do weapons training with people before anyone gets a weapon, they're actually given more like an ideological training and they're taught to like heal first before you can have given the parrot like injure someone, you must learn how to provide medical care for that person so that you know both things, you know how to heal and injure as well. And they do this kind of ideological training to give this depth and this kind of emphasis on what does it mean to actually hurt or to kill someone like in a war context. So that's an example of like the distribution of weapons, which is the distribution of power is really important, but it must come with the simultaneous effort of education on transforming the moral basis of society, the transformation of values. So Darkfai is like now, especially because we're focused on trying to ship the first version of the product is like very much in the kind of weapons category. So it's not so much in the education category, although we do some stuff like for example, Luturpunk is like a meme. So it's not like we're just like purely technical. We do have these like strong narratives, but I would say currently the emphasis is more towards technology. And then when that's further along, we will start to shift more again towards the informational educational kind of angle to basically support that technical aspect. It's that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense to me, but when you bring up Ocelán and it's evident how Paramount, his influences on the philosophy behind Darkfai and Luturpunk, I haven't read his works, but does he direct himself more towards the people of Rojava? Or can we imagine other types of groups that would be able to benefit from it? And let's say we if we are to think about the more solar punk mindset and think about the groups that are experiencing social or ecological injustice, can the technologies like yours like Anondown, Darkfai be empowering to these kind of communities to take their efforts further than they are doing right now as they are being well usually dismissed or ridiculed even. Yeah, great question. So there's kind of two parts of that question. First, I'll just say that definitely Ocelán has a global perspective and one of his core teachings when it comes to what we just discussed, morality and politics. So he has a narrative which begins in ancient Mesopotamia, which is also the ancestral homeland of the Kurdish people, but he also encourages that each people, each kind of nation, what he calls a nation is like any group that has that kind of that like shared sense of identity. It's not just Kurdistan, which is a nation or Ireland, which is a nation, but there's also a nation of women, a nation of Muslims, like any kind of identity group is some kind of nation according to Ocelán. Each of these nations can have their own kind of versions of these like origin myths and it's part of their role to develop their own moral and politics in accordance to those foundational myths. So again, to give an example is like Big and Rojava is the genealogy, which is Kurdish for basically like womenology or like the science of women. Okay. And so that's the kind of effort to reinforce this notion of like a nation of women by looking at what is the kind of like can we develop like a science and like a sociology of women that has its own kind of myths and you know its own historical analysis and its own kind of vision also of a future that it wants to reject. So Ocelán is encouraging not just Kurdish people to do this, but for all sorts of people it's kind of this effort to know thyself, which is know the myths that form you and you know create a create a vision of technology, a vision of economy that integrates these histories in different directions. So it's very like pluralist in that sense. Do you see the punk movements trying to do that, trying to create that kind of a universe which people would be able to relate to and then organize around that? Do you think that that's kind of what we're trying to do with all these punk movements? Yeah, I think so definitely one thing which is a challenge, but maybe an interesting one is like there's a geographical like unruitedness to some of these movements where they're like fundamentally International and they have people from all sorts of places So it's not the case that you can kind of as easily form a shared kind of historical basis for those people I still think yes, it's definitely possible that they can achieve this kind of nationhood and that kind of Circles back to your the second half of your first question, which was about a non-deck So I'll just briefly introduce the concept so like many of your listeners are probably aware of like Dau's as they exist on Ethereum So a Dau decentralized autonomous organization is a kind of loose term that normally describes like when a group of people have some kind of Treasury on Ethereum or another blockchain, which you know, they have a shared ownership of So typically it describes this kind of like collective ownership of some kind of on-chain Treasury Darkfight has implemented a version of this in which the Treasury is anonymous The participants are anonymous and everything that happens on-chain like in terms of all the transactions and behaviors of the Dau are also anonymous So it is the first fully anonymous Dau and it's very interesting because it's not just that like the three of us could have a shared Treasury and We can design it in such a way that we can set the rules according to what kind of a governance we want So there's that but there's also the fact that other apps like smart contracts can actually use this Treasury as like a plug-in so you can have stuff like liquidity pools attached to like other apps that are owned by those apps It's kind of protocol owned liquidity. So it's really interesting powerful Primitive that we have on dark fight, but in terms of a U.S. like how might this relate to sort of punk's on I have one more question about Anondow and the government. Yes, Sure Governance tokens and the Treasury for people who don't know anything about Ethereum because the bold presumption that people do know about The House is a bit bold But would you be able to describe it as anything similar to direct democracy where people really just go to the square and then they put their hands up, but then everyone has a mask on you know, and then you just don't know What people are voting you can just count the number of yes or no's and then you just have a pot of coins and you're trying to figure out what that what to invest that on Well thing is the way that they've been implemented thus far also on dark fight Is that it's something called token weighted voting So basically what that means is like the tree of us we have a dayo we randomly distribute tokens Whoever gets the most amount of tokens has the biggest vote So if you have 50 of the tokens and me and load out of 25 That means that you can be so we dominate the vote sure and what's the function of that? That's a practical thing so the issue is you could try to make it so like you only want each one Person to have a single vote and not have it like token weighted But the difficulty is thought basically this requires identity So if you look at something like get coin which is a self-professed Soda punk project on Ethereum They allow you to do this voting, but you have to log in with your GitHub account And from there they're able to do more interesting Forms of basically things that are more similar to direct democracy or one person one vote Using these kind of logians and they have other kinds of cool voting tricks But like basically we don't have that Implemented right now because our emphasis is on anonymity and to do that simply we just talk what is now the standard on it Which is token weighted voting? But it means that your distribution of governance tokens is very important How do people get the tokens and how many do they each get is like a difficult question is like a governance engineering question Okay, yeah, because for me that's kind of the problem that I see it's because How do you ensure social equality? How do you ensure equal representation for let's say you have minorities in a society then how do you address this? Problems do you give them more weight or what is because ethically there's a lot of questions there unless you really do one person one vote and Equal weight told tokens So the cool thing which get coin does which dark fight doesn't do because it requires identity is this thing called quadratic voting Which is basically they have a pool Which matches so if you have a huge group of people and you see there are many many small voters Voting on something say it's a I don't know do we want to invade Iraq? Yes or no and you see that there are like a thousand people that voted with very small amounts of tokens So you assume that these are like not wealthy people and then you have one or two people who are like got loads of votes like loads of tokens and they vote with these huge votes that you basically say we're gonna use this treasury to match the small people and Amplify their vote of this kind of like giving waste to the signal that is that many many many small people want this thing and So balancing out that risk in token weighted systems where like those those basically an oligarchic Tendency where those with the most votes have the most power in the governance But in terms of dark fight what we've built now is the most basic kind of reduced Like primitive version of what we could have you know dark fight is on testnet. It's not on main net yet So this is a prototype of a fully anonymous now, but it does have this issue which means that The distribution of governance tokens is important. So like it is a governance engineering question And so to kind of make this a bit more practical what are the groups that could use this? I think there's a kind of common misconception when it comes to anonymous days That because of the fact that your Activity is hidden that the people in the DAOs are necessarily anonymous Or that they don't know each other So that's not necessarily true. We could create a DAO. We know each other We set the voting rights for everyone and you know that's violent anonymous death It basically just means that the public In terms of whoever has the blockchain copy the blockchain doesn't know who we are But we know ourselves there's a kind of distinction made between that which is Anonymous at the kind of blockchain level and that which is anonymous at the personal or you know like practical kind of political level So that's important back to like making concrete examples for me like what was really exciting about Anonymous DAOs is again kind of circles back to this idea of nations And what Audsana talks about and you imagine you hadn't read him So I will recommend his third book which is called manifesto for a democratic the five books he has They're called manifesto for a democratic civilization. They like to find main books only the first three are translated into English The third one is called sociology of freedom And I recommend that as a starting point because it's kind of a summary of the first two books So I would recommend to start there and then to read one and two But one of two are really good the first ones on civilization the history of civilization the second is on the history of capitalism So they're really good, but the third one is summarizing and also gives like more concretely his proposal But basically he talks about the challenges of like non-states Such as Rojava to basically couple from the system of nation states If you want to be a nation state today You have to enter into this like implicit society of nation states And if you don't enter into that if you're a seed is like a threat to the the current order Then they will do anything in their means to basically like oppress you and to stop you from growing as a nation It's an excellent kind of part of the book and I recommend the whole book But what excites me most about technologies like darkfire and like a non-dare Is that you could hypothetically be a nation like a neo-nation And like secede From the system of nation states Using these technologies. That's like that's like the end goal. I mean, that's a really cool end goal and it's it's because privacy Has meaning when it's considered in relation to others It has almost like a G. geopolitical meaning. So it's privacy enables you to act in a way that others can't, you know, can't infringe on that activity simply by the fact of their observing us. So it could allow for nations to basically split off from the system of nation states and like create new kinds of civilization. And also like when we say nations, we're not just talking about countries or, you know, like traditional, like nationalities, but you know, thinking about nations in a more evolved way. So also including the nation of sonar punks, for example. Sure. And for me, I think this question, I mean, I believe that this parallel city, you know, concept parallel society can really be instilled. But for me, there's quite often a problem of accessibility as it's currently quite a big issue in the blockchain world because you either put on the pink glasses, do a theorem kind of dancing around the fire and everything becomes really nice and accessible in terms of your user experience. And your grandma is supposedly also able to use it, even, you know, if she lives in Kurdistan. But otherwise you are stuck behind your terminal desperately trying to install it like when I was trying to contact you, I was, you know, struggling with the IRC for two hours. That I was like, okay, I'll just stalk you on telegram. And that was my way out of the problem of accessibility. How do you see this being resolved to empower these communities and organizations to find agency through decentralized technologies? Yeah. So great question. I think that the way that technology has gone, like mainstream kind of technology stuff like WhatsApp, TikTok, etc, is these kind of interfaces that basically the people that are using them in a way unconscious to the fact that they're using them. So I think what the challenge for us is how to make technologies that are usable, accessible, and kind of comfy to use without also making that like hiding, I think there's a real problem. There's a real like danger in trying to basically enter into the unconscious mind of people. I would much rather that these technologies were like conscious and like people were like activating the users that engage with them rather than kind of sedating them or tranquilizing them. So I agree that privacy is tense, we're very inaccessible and we need to make more usable products. But at the same time, we want to envision a new kind of technology which isn't like turning people into these passive consumers and is actually rather inspiring them to reclaim their privacy and to assert their privacy as an active kind of transformative process. So right now, Darkfy, again, I imagine it's early stage, we haven't launched the main product, but we are planning to work on a app which will be something like Telegram. Telegram, it's bad for privacy obviously, but as a UX, it's pretty good. It's better than most of the chat apps. So we would like to make something more like Telegram. That's like an app that you install on your phone or on your desktop where you can like run a DAO, send money, engage in like other kinds of smart contracts, swap money, like you do on ETH, inside of this desktop or mobile application. We think that mobile is really important. Like there are many, many multiples of people, multiples more people that have mobile phones than have computers. So like you notice it's in Mojava, everyone has a smartphone, but sometimes there's just like one computer per family if that's something that just don't have computers. We definitely want to build for mobile, but again, our approach is that we need to focus first on underlying infrastructure level and then build up from there because there's a tendency in technology today that people rush toward the shiny interface because they just want to capture users and make VCs happy, but their underlying technology is badly written and so people end up losing money or they end up getting hacked. And a lot of the web apps are like this, they're just like badly built because people are rushing to get to that end product. So we're rather going in a step by step where it's like, you know, like a playing bricks, we're putting together a strong foundation and then we also want to make like a comfy interface as well. So maybe if we take that vision of a more comfy, thoughtful design and taking it a step further and we now try to imagine how such future might look like. So a future in which decentralized technologies have become widely adopted, how do we ensure that the outcomes we reach are better than the current one in terms of addressing social or economic inequalities, for example. That is a good question given that so far, cryptocurrency is, I don't think it's reduced inequality. I think it has enriched like a new kind of class that didn't exist before, but I don't think it has done the social inequality reduction. There's an interesting book which is called The Sovereign Individual, which is very influential in cryptocurrency. For a lot of people, it's like they're gospel and it was written in the 90s, but it's the kind of prophecy which predicts the rise of cryptocurrencies and other things. And in that book, the guys are saying, this is not going to lead to decreased injustice or better equality. This is just going to lead to the rise of these kind of technologically impaired ubermench. And so unlike the humans, there will be actually an increase in inequality. That's the vision that a lot of people in crypto are building toward. When they're like actively inspired by that vision, it's probably going to kind of manifest in some ways through the code, through the software, through the efforts that are put in. But there is one way that I can see that there is a possibility that social inequality could be addressed. So in particular, a big cause of economic kind of irrationality today is the fact that governments are, so basically you have these big banks and central banks, which are the central banks are the ones which are creating money, right? They're actually like printing money. And then they have this kind of neoliberal capitalist ideology, which says that if you just give that freshly minted credit to speculators, you know, people that you were like trading property, unlike people who were trading the stock markets, you just inject the capital into there that it will trickle down the call out like the trickle down effect to the rest of the economy. But what we've seen is actually know when you inject money into the financial sector and speculators, you just create giant property bubbles and you actually amplify inequality. And that's why we've seen in the last couple of decades, they have some scale, I don't know what it's called, but they have a way of measuring the distribution of wealth and the distribution of wealth has gotten much, much less equal over time. I think a large part of that is to do with this economic, the direction of where the money is flowing in the economy, which is towards speculators. So one thing that like cryptocurrency decentralized technologies could do is basically democratize credit creation. So you could have groups, whether that's nations or you know like other groups, darkfies like one such group, many of the projects who are creating their own money. And basically they can decide where that capital flows. So a much better kind of model of like if you were trying to do like a decentralized banking network is like basically the banks rather than borrowing from the central bank, they would create their own credits and then they would distribute that credit to the productive sectors of society that they want to stimulate. So that could be agriculture, you know, that could be science or there are areas, but it's managed in such a way that it's not being directed into the banks and into speculation, but rather into these area society that are actually creating value for people. So that might be a way with self-managed economies and these micro banks that can create tokens and essentially issue credit. That might be such a way that the social inequality could be reduced. But what about the more objective value of money in the sense that if you have a central bank, if you have a government, right, you can say, okay, we're taxing you 60% of everything you have, basically. In a really radical society, you would be taxing people on whatever they earned or whatever they have in their bank and crypto and equity etc. and then you're just distributing it kind of forcefully to prevent accumulation of wealth. But in crypto, you cannot do that, right? Especially if you have like maybe on a theory and where you attach people identity to their wallets, you can, but on the such technology as Dark Fire, you don't know who owns the tokens, right? And you don't know how many and et cetera, et cetera. You could do policies like that if you wanted to. For example, many crypto projects or some of them do this, like ZCaches, an example where they basically, in their, in their, in the coins that are minted to miners, you know, where basically the credit is created on the blockchain. They have some amount of credit that is created that goes directly to the ZCache company and another one that goes to the ZCache foundation. So they're basically funding, it's a kind of tax. So you're basically funneling wealth into these like different sectors. So you can totally program that even in an anonymous blockchain, just saying, okay, so we have these block rewards, but rather than just giving 100% to the miner, we give 80% to the miner, 20% to whatever happens to be like, say it's the defense arm of our blockchain nation. So it is possible to do these kinds of taxation. But could you do accumulated wealth and progressive taxes as well? Because if you don't know how much the person has, because this is what you're proposing right now, just sounds like a flat tax and flat tax, you know, is usually in super libertarian, like, radical free market. Because it's not a flat tax in the sense that it's not like all of us are getting taxed the same amount. It's just because it's not a proportional to our wealth at all. It's like something else is like coming from the source. So if the Fed is paying taxes instead of us, kind of thing. The Fed. No, but what I mean is that let's say you have a mining farm already because you've been mining Bitcoin since 2014 and then you get on ZCache and then you can continue mining there to whatever extent mining exists in a particular coin. But then you are mining and you have more computing power. You already invested in video, in video stocks went up. Everything is great in the capitalist world and you are being taxed. Like you are contributing to some extent to the distribution of wealth, but you are mining more than other users on the net, right, on the distributed network. So that means that you are still getting the most and you are getting richer and richer and richer. Other people are also getting a little bit better. I mean, that's how tax kind of works. But at the same time, it will not essentially mean that we have equal communities in terms of finance, stability, et cetera, et cetera, because there is still such a high leverage point for these big players on the network to mine a lot and get a lot of money and for others not too. The cool thing about all of crypto is that it's programmable. So you can create micro economies with different rules. And if you wanted to create like a hyper, everyone has the same money kind of economy, you can probably conceptualize ways to enforce that. But like you said, it may be difficult to do that with anonymity because anonymity, if everyone's volunteer anonymous, it would require that tax to be voluntary. Yeah. Which I prefer in principle. So like, you know, there are like different, different trade. If you want to force people to pay tax, then you could either implement that in the software. The tax is taken at the source kind of thing before the money is distributed or you could do a public blockchain where everyone's balances are known and then you could course people to pay tax the same way you do nowadays where basically everyone is courteous to pay tax and if they don't, they'll go to jail or you could have it be like voluntary paradigm where people are asked to pay tax, but it's not enforced. But obviously then you don't have the same strictness of guarantee that those tax will be paid. Yeah. Exactly. Well, that brings me, I think, to the last question in terms of organizing you using this decentralized technology because for us, I guess one of the points of this interview was to kind of figure out whether we can use the decentralized technologies to promote their use by communities and organizations that align themselves with solar punk values. But nowadays we see in that as one of the biggest critiques, of course, of anonymous technologies that it's quite often extremist groups. So like parrard that are engaging themselves on these platforms because they're being pushed away from like de-anonymized platforms because they're just seen as threat to society. And the leftist groups are less often so and the more mild groups, less often so, which in some sense just means that they get washed out in the sea of allowed personal freedom and no one really pays attention to them. But do you see how we can attract different crowds onto the decentralized network? And can you do like an elevator bitch for why in your organization that aligns itself with solar punk values, for example, can get on your Anondow or on Darkfy and be better often sent in a sense in their local community or in going about solving problems locally. I would basically say that any political group that is relying on centralized social media as the primary form of communication is basically compromised. And the second that they try to do something that's genuinely interesting, they will be censored or incriminated by virtue of their use of those technologies. So like I do see privacy technologies as essential, especially for people like politically minded organizations that could potentially challenge the status quo. In fact, challenging the status quo should almost be an objective. If you're not like doing that, then maybe you should question like why is it that Facebook or you know name your big tech is facilitating your conversation? Maybe there are bigger like geopolitical or like agendas at work here that you really don't want to be complicit in. That's the kind of challenges that I would post to the political groups, but also that there's a challenge there, but also like a warning in a sense that I don't think that is safe to be relying on that. If you're genuinely a political organization, you might actually endanger your members and you could be acting. Again, this is old critique of Sotapun, like you may be acting in a naive way, like naive optimism where like you're so kind of optimistic of your Sotapun utopia that you just expect that it will happen without any conflict or power struggle. And it's actually better to think in a way like protectively of your communities and try to give them the ability to organize anonymously, especially in decentralized ways. And also because again, it relates back to what you said before about like prefigrative politics. There's like an immense contradiction about like political groups that are like in favor of decentralization to be using like centralized technologies to communicate when there are better alternatives. I would challenge people to reflect on that. It just says it like an example. For one year I went to the CCC conference in Germany, it's a chaos computer club, which is a kind of anarchist hacker like festival that happens every year. And it was the first year they actually allowed cryptocurrency. Because before that year 2018, they were very anti-crypto because they saw it as something capitalist. But I remember speaking with someone at this event, again, it was the first time they allowed the crypto in. And I think it's changed a bit now, but at the time I was speaking with someone they were buying a beer. And they were saying like, oh, cryptocurrency, it's just capitalism. And they're sounding there with the heroes buying a beer. And I'm like, what is this? Like you have the ability to opt in to a parallel economy that is peer to peer like autonomous to the capitalist system. But you're you're just saying, no, I'd rather kind of just like unconsciously engage in the systems of capitalism while being apparently critical of them. So it's the same contradiction when I see like solar-point groups relying on centralized or surveillance based technology. Okay. How are you guys? Are you getting tired? Yeah, I think we're going to go on to the last question. It's okay. It's alright. But I wanted to say that to all our solar-point listeners, get off the discord and on to the dark fi IRC. That's right. All right guys. So I think we can go to the last question now. So Rose, would you tell us what gives you hope for the future? And also what inspires you to continue to work in this field? After all these really optimistic conversations we've had, I mean you definitely should have a vision on this. Do you guys know Richard Stahlman? Rings a bell, but not necessarily. So I really highly recommend everyone looks up his work because he's been like, profitized. He saw in advance, like in the 80s, like where technology was going. He was like, this is going to end up in a very dangerous, like surveillance way, like centralized way. And if we don't like take control of technology and create a new path for technology, which is based on freedom, things are going to get really bad. So, you know, he created free software, which is what open source is based on, but open source is kind of the gentrified version of free software. But I really like Richard Stomman because when people ask him questions, like the one you just asked, the dude is like quite autistic. He just says, I can't speculate on what will happen. Like, I can just do whatever I can now in the present to protect freedom as much as possible, even though I don't know how this is going to go. But he's not willing to make guesses us to the future, but he is willing to invest all of his energy into making the future the best he can possibly imagine. And he does that tirelessly. The dude is like a warrior for freedom. I love that guy. So, just your question reminded me of actually a question I asked him. Like last, when I met him last year, I asked the same question to Stomman, and that's the response he gave. So, I thought that was kind of cool. But, you know, in answer to your question, I think we're at a really interesting moment in history now. And actually, it's not just now, it's been happening for at least 200 years, where society is reaching this kind of maximum. We have this incredible output in many different areas, like scientific research, technological advancement. There's really been this massively accelerated curve. But at the same time, the complexities are constantly building. And so, it feels, while we're kind of more advanced, we're like closer to this future, you know, we're very close to becoming like a space-faring civilization. At the same time, we're like always dancing at the precipice or the cliff-sege of society, where it could collapse at any moment. So, I really like the kind of the intensity of this time that we're in. And the fact that it's almost like a seasonal transition. It's kind of like either spring or autumn. I can't decide which one. But there is this kind of similar spring autumn kind of mix of like death and rebirth. So, this society that we have is kind of decomposing. And there is something new that is emerging out of that. And, you know, it's just like very generative, very exciting moment. So, that's basically what gives me hope. I think more practically, we're at a time where power has never been more entrenched. At the same time, people have never been more like disenfranchised with their governments. And surveillance is like at a maximum. But encryption is also like at a maximum. So, everything's turned up to like the highest maximums. And something's going to give. And when it does, you know, these kinds of lines of questioning, stuff like solar punk, lunar punk, which are like trying to imagine a future basically beyond this precipice will come through. And will provide the basis of a new kind of future. And, you know, hopefully with all of our research and knowledge and tools, it will be like a better future than what's come before. [Music]