Reality Just Aint What It Used to Be

A few days ago an event happened. In July 10, 2018 The Department of Justice in the United States of America offered a settlement to a suit filed by Defence Distributed, a company founded by a [[Cody Wilson]], over what they claimed to be an infringement on their first and second amendment rights (That is the right for Free Speech, and to Bear Arms for the non US public) when they forced them to take down a file sharing website that included free downloadable plans to manufacture with 3d printers or CNC routers a workable firearm. This non-event for many seems to have evaded the public imagination of many individuals. However, there seems to be something unusual when one hears that the government of the US is now going to allow the distribution of the information on how to assemble a deadly weapon with a technology of unprecedented accessibility, yet it is hard to pinpoint exactly why. But oh well, history might prove to exert itself not with a bang, but with a whisper.

The implications of this non-event are not yet consciously evident, but they embody the current zeitgeist of a networked culture, with an alternative methodology of resistance against the totalizing tendency of what is sometimes referred to as the postmodern times we live in. What could be inaccurately called the 'digital age' or 'information age' has already proved itself to manifest a cycle of constant disruption to the traditional modes of operation of many industries. Disruption here is the behavior that, usually through networked socio-technical systems such as social networks, forums, and distributed applications, etc., subverts the logistical framework of an established industry. The operant principle usually lies with the removal of an intermediary, or the replacement of an intermediary by an algorithm, though as a first step, the algorithm has been traditionally controlled by a corporation, effectively replacing said intermediary with a more efficient one, or at least one that reduces the friction in accessing the service. You could say that Silicon Valley culture has reterriotorialized this 'disruptive meme', as evident in the conferences which just count on finding the new startup that is prone to disrupt the old industries. Whereas the potential of communication technologies was to democratise power towards the masses of consumers with access to the internet, the so called disrupters have become an institution with its respective elites serving as virtual monopolies on the new commerce, gatekeepers of data, arbiters of news distribution, and other  similar tendencies— what has been labelled the 'Digerati'.

But the face of this tech world, the public figure of the benevolent capitalist millennial – the Chuck Taylor wearing tank top using, vegan, microdosing captain of industry with their company gym, and a nerf gun at the office- is not representative of the people who are uninterested in repackaging the same capitalism in its palatable to millennials form. There is another variant of hackers and creators, cypherpunks and crypto anarchists, subjects at the forefront of the new digital frontier where a seemingly invisible, virtual if you will, battle is occurring.  And don't take it lightly, this is a real frontline which has one side that includes the entirety of the project of modernity in its unreduceable multiplicity of motivations codified into structures of power and another with a distributed, chaotic network of peers forming a meritocratic, reputation based and anonymous social structure which emerges from the interaction of agents using the mathematical language of binary code to find points of vulnerability in the apparent solidity of the former group's institutions.

What is especially interesting in this particular dynamic is that the speed of technological discovery and progress of paradigm shifting innovation, has reached a magnitude unprecedented. The relative 'immaturity' of the current status quo, creates a fundamental unbalance that has never been experienced before. Whereas the monopoly of force was the means of legitimising the institution of the state, historically, the violent act of revolution was manifested physically and had to overcome a profound assymmetry. It required winning a populace in order to gain domain of the institutions which had a historical precedence. Now the battle is much more symmetric, as communication technologies are only a generation old, the ability to supersede them through technical means, that is, create a new system which goes orthogonal to the direction of momentum of the hegemonic order is a viable option. In fact the same people that would be required to administer the monster of global digital infrastructure can and often do decide to maintain themselves outside of the sphere of institutional power. It is as though the state is forced to adapt to new technologies which it does not fully understand. Or perhaps they do understand them, and they might have been conceived as direct opposition to them, but are forced to implement them into its functioning regardless of whether it might mean relinquishing its own power. Take the original conception of Bitcoin as a specific attack towards the entire fiscal structure of the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund, and the current debate as to how to diminish its problematic features but not miss out on the innovation. The important fact is that there is now a possibility for an entire class to have the same operant knowledge as the institutions of power, a special moment indeed.

And the battle already has begun. The frontline, however is not a geographical space, but a conceptual plane. The enemy is as invisible as the structure which has been built to control him, and manifests in this way as a direct reaction to it. And though the means to structuring a new configuration of the world has historically been a thermodynamically intense process of massive effort, with the necessary sacrifice of life that accompanies challenging power, now the techno social structure is much more accessible for modification. As more power is given to algorithms, as the managerial role gets outsourced to the automating machine, more and more vectors appear to alter and crack the process. The ability to supersede the system through its own technological infrastructure without any of the parties meeting physically is unprecedented, and few have explored the revolutionary potential of such a dynamic.

Enter again Cody Wilson, who does not embody what one imagines as a revolutionary, nor a technologist, if anything one can listen to a jester like disposition akin to Heath Ledger's Joker. An accelerationist looking to cause some ripples, dangerously informed on the theoretical foundations of the alienated society which he is a part of, and if one could say that he is a master at anything, it would be at plugging himself strategically into a cultural narrative all while being able to hold his own elusiveness through his public demeanor. Much like Julian Assange of Wikileaks, and Satoshi Nakamoto of Bitcoin, and of the same loosely connected, amorphous, non-hierarchal, emergent revolutionary frontier, the new dissenters do not belong to a counter structure, nor is there a specific much less concrete goal to achieve through their aims. What binds Satoshi Nakamoto, William Assange, and Cody Wilson is their status as a set of highly skilled navigators of the social dynamics of the network culture which seems to be developing. The movement at one time called itself the Cypherpunks, now the term crypto-anarchists gets thrown around more, and they have arguably done more for a revolutionary politics than any political organization of the last decades. Their ideology blurs some of the line between the obsolete notions of left and right (though the case for Bitcoin might be said to be explicitly aligned with U.S. Libertarian right), certainly pisses off people on both sides, as well as bridges them, but might well be considered based on a maxim of personal freedom to do what one may outside of the purview of government. The most important ideological commitment is their individual willingness to accept the responsibility and the consequences of taking the freedom of the autonomous individual to its logical extreme, aware of the dangers that such a position entails when acted out, and optimistic about the potential it provides.

Another binding factor which may say to bind the crypto anarchists, and perhaps the most important factor that concerns this essay, is their revolutionary tactics. Specifically, the philosophical priority of the status of ontology rather than epistemology in their operation. What I mean to say is that instead of enacting a critique of the social function of a monetary policy not controlled by a central entity in the case of Nakamoto, free access to the information pertaining to the operation of government in the case of Assange, or the benefits on a population with free access to guns in the case of Wilson, these actors' contention is to use technological systems to create a a new conceptual plane, a reconfiguration of reality in which the argument itself is invalid and one must focus on the repercussion of a new reality where free information, uncensorable transactions, and distributed access to guns exists. They do not operate under an argumentative strategy where the ethical repercussions are discussed and speculated abstractly, followed by an institutional process that dilutes and implements the solutions. No, that is an obsolete mode of behaving in critical action in the age of instant dopamine relief at the click of a button. More than an inefficient strategy, the postmodern administrative state has evolved from that of our forefathers, and made historical revolutions obsolete. The authority of Empire is able to withstand any traditional revolutionary attempt, to wait out the dissenters in Zuccotti park, to dilute the Black Lives Matter protests and to allow J20 demonstrations to take place so long as they have the appropriate permits and no real change occurs. This is all part of what the machinery of post industrial capitalism is used to. Reformism might be at its end, but the new space of dissent might be at its beginning. What the social order has no mechanism for reteritorializing is the diffused ontological nature of the reconfiguration the crypto anarchists are in the process of enacting.

And there is a revolutionary act in each of the actions of these individuals. [[Locke ]]will have us put the act of revolution as something that will never be allowed by a state, born in the heart of an individual. A sort of sacred action, one which can never be taken away due to the unnatural status of the state apparatus and the dynamic of the social contract. This irreducible act of dissent no longer works in the way which it might have a generation ago. Perhaps May '68 marked the end of revolution as we know it, and the diffused biopolitical governance of today's society, with its totalizing surveillance, its quantification of all activities, its regulation of all aspects of life with an elegant subtlety that is difficult to point to with any exactness, and its commodification of dissent itself, cannot be escaped in any effective manner through the methods that have become synonymous with revolution.  But the new spaces of dissent are not interested in public demonstrations. It is direct (and conceptual) political action which concerns the new radicals. It begins with this acknowledgement of impotence at direct confrontation but develops into a strategy of a fundamentally different character, what I am calling a 'Distributed, Ontological Frontier'. It is distributed as it is necessarily non-localized, the networked organization of these groups is characterized lateral, open, and transparent processes. It is ontological in a relative sense, as any absolute ontology would necessarily contain all of the possibile configurations of the 'real'. Yet these actors are not challenging concepts, they are participating in the magickal act of fundamentally modifying existence through speech, actualizing new worlds, and reconfiguring the rules under which the discussion itself is taking place. Finally it is a frontier for the obvious reasons that this is where the battle is taking place.

What Defense Distributed did is subvert the argument for who and how someone should own a gun, a dialogue that used to be the based on moral and ethical questions: what relationship should the governed have to the governing? To what extent can a group of sovereign citizens defend themselves against a government that can at any moment turn treasonous? Is the good of protecting against a certain threat of tyranny overcome the good of the possibility of less mass shootings in schools?… etc. The operant ontological assumption is that a system of laws (backed by the force of a military and police) can effectively manage and regulate access to guns. The new ontology, crafted and operationalised by Defence Distributed, is that guns are information which every citizen can access and the questions we just laid out must turn inward. We must still contend with the moral and ethical question of how to prevent mass shootings in schools, but the answer can no longer be as shallow to only treat the tools by which such an activity can occur. In a sense, the answer to the former formulation to the question of how to prevent school shootings could have been to ban schools. Alas the problem of the underlying cultural pathology now needs to be addressed. Are antidepressants causing this? Are we raising violent kids? Is it a society mediated by images of violence creating violent tendencies? Is the stripping away of an object of rebellion for a disenfranchised youth causing the violent tendencies? Is our society so alienated, sold on so many unreal standards, crumbling under its inefficiency but chugging along due to its ability to predate on the insatisfaction of the shells of individuals which we now call consumers the cause? This is the power of the new revolutionary action, that the stakes for not contending with these fundamental questions are now magnified exponentially.

Let me make a point clear, this is beyond the traditional 'left' and 'right' debate which has been the way in which politics has been handled for far too long. This is neither a political position, nor am I advocating that everyone should have guns in their house. The symbolic action which was carried out was not an ethical claim, it was a political act in its purest form, with real repercussions that must now be dealt with. In a society where that seems to be taken away from us, recovering the political action is the ultimate emancipatory act. Regardless of your politics, regardless of whether you agree with their particular stance, so long as you believe in democratizing control, freedom, speech, and other such 'fundamental rights' as they are sometimes referred to, so long as you believe that power should not be under the control of what a bureaucratic machine that seems to behave out of sync with what many of the constituents want, then this can be a glimmer of hope. In a culture where a about one in eight people are on antidepressants, where there seems to be a collective identity crisis, where the standard of living might be the highest that its ever been, where the golden prison we have built for ourselves — whether intentionally/maliciously or not — makes it so we are scorned by our unsatisfaction with the world, these are the mercenaries that are opening up new conceptual ground for us to enact the closest thing to the transcendental which we know we possess, our freedom to act.

It is very clear that there will be consequences. There will be casualties. The commitment to these ideas by their implementators cannot be light. Assassination markets exist thanks to bitcoin, and necessarily so if the potential to plug in billions of unbanked citizens to a global economy is to be taken seriously. If the right to bear arms is to be enacted seriously, many of the arms will be used maliciously. Then there is Ross Ulbricbht and Julian Assange who have suffered very real consequences for their actions. In the case of Ulbricht managing The Silk Road has netted him life in prison under suspicious due process. Assange has already been forced to live for years entirely inside the Ecuadorean embassy due to the very real fear of being extradited to the US for espionage. All for providing a platform that could guarantee the anonymity of whistleblowers exposing critical information about the illegal operations of the State.  What is at stake is of course, much more than a platform for whistleblowers, but the effective ability to control one of the most valuable assets in existence today – information. By managing the flows of information, arbitrating what is secret, structures reify their control and are in a constant state of testing the limits of their power, and trying to expand it. And of course secrets of the state run the high probability of putting people that are caught up within the cogs of the machinery in real danger because of their exposure. The tradeoff is there, the same reason Benjamin Franklin said “That it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer unjustly” is what the people at the frontline are asking us to consider. How seriously do we take our freedom, what kind of safety are we willing to part with in order to live it in it's fully glorious and frightening splendor?

History will be the judge as to the role that these men will do. History will determine whether this Distributed Ontological Frontline is a fantasy for dissenters, a mere space for radicals to direct their attention while the State apparatus modifies itself accordingly and effectively nullifies the new reality, as it will surely attempt to do. Maybe it is just that, a fantasy, that these new tactics actually point towards a new revolutionary action. It might just be the case that this will be a footnote in the history of the expansion of modern Empire. But the message is there, in a system that can adapt to any form of direct confrontation, how can one effectively change anything meaningful? If you have guns, they have tanks, and the technological capacity of the state will follow the tendency to develop beyond the capabilities of any militias. However, what the Distributed Ontological Frontier points to is that reality is a much more malleable and contingent set of circumstances which can be modified, and that is the terrain in which the new political action can take place. Direct, permissionless, political action that nullifies an entire discourse is the new arena for change and it is up to us how we choose to relate to this new world. Perhaps the moral character of these actors could be called into question, the manner in which they chose to express themselves, or the cause which they might shock and disturb some. But if we are to seriously take a look at  what they are doing, the implications of their actions, what it means that they achieved the things they achieved, we might just find something much deeper than guns, markets, government secrets, and fiscal policy. Perhaps there is a glimmer of the possibility of taking back agency, and the ultimate emancipation from everything that stops us from taking life into our own hands… perhaps…