Рецензия · 4. Новые концептуальные основания

4. New Conceptual Foundations

4.1 Preliminaries

In the previous two chapters, we discussed the many new (and old) forms of post-state governance that have emerged in recent decades. Many of these forms of governance are not good solutions to the failures of Westphalian governance. Rather, they are symptoms of these failures. It goes without saying that we do not think that drug cartels, paramilitary organisations and terrorist organisations are offering positive developments in human governance. All of which raises the question of what we should be looking for. What are the positive possibilities? To what should we aspire?

To see what our aspirations should be, perhaps it is best to start by thinking in terms of the failures we do not want to repeat. We have discussed these failures at some length already. We certainly do not want a system in which people of diverse values are kettled together within a geographical territory and forced to comply with a set of values that they do not share. People should not be imprisoned by their geography nor by whichever tyrant controls events within arbitrarily drawn borders. People should be free to exit hostile governmental systems. People should also be able to live free of corrupt systems in which centralised authorities take advantage of their position of power for their personal benefit.

Beyond these desiderata, we believe people should be free to politically organise themselves with whom they wish, independent of terrestrial borders. They should be self-sovereign in that they should be free to join the political system they choose and live under the values that they endorse. Another way to put this is that if they are self-sovereign, they should also be free to choose their own governing principles, which is to say that they should be free to be part of governing systems that align with their principles.

Thinking in this way is possible partly because of the revolution in communication technologies and our ability to connect (almost instantly) with people anywhere in the world. The thought is that rather than dividing governments according to boundaries established by rivers and oceans, perhaps we should divide them up in other ways. Perhaps governments can be divided according to the ways in which people network and organise with each other, whether that be with the aid of digital communications or face-to-face relations.

Having said all this, it is important to ask where these ideas are coming from, what grounds them conceptually and, perhaps just as importantly, what drives them in terms of their praxis – what makes these ideas agents of change rather than just inert academic talking points?

It is interesting that in many past revolutions in governance, people could turn to philosophers and other thinkers for new ideas about how to proceed. The philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau played important roles in the transition from monarchies to republics in the eighteenth century. Similarly, in the past, these ideas were instantiated by groups of people taking action – by protest and, in some cases, by taking up arms. But who can we turn to now for conceptual foundations, and who are the agents of change that can bring about a new order in our digitally interconnected world?

In our view, the thinkers that laid the foundations for the coming forms of governance were not individual philosophers as was historically the case, but rather groups of people working on the cutting edge of the digital revolution at the close of the twentieth century. There were several groups that saw the coming challenges of online life and called out the dangers but that also saw a path forward. More importantly, these groups also developed tools to clear the path and engaged in various forms of activism to raise awareness of the coming problems. Groups like the Cypherpunks argued for the importance of individual privacy and then developed tools to make it possible. Meanwhile, hacktivist groups emphasised the importance of governmental transparency and developed tools to pierce veils of secrecy maintained by centralised powers. In this chapter, we want to explore the history of these groups, what they accomplished and how their work can help us build alternative forms of governance for a post-Westphalian order.

4.2 The Cypherpunks and privacy

At the dawn of the early Internet, there emerged a group of activists known as the Cypherpunks.¹ Their primary concern was that the Internet could very easily become a tool of universal surveillance and oppression, and they developed tools to ensure that privacy could be maintained online. One such tool that grew out of the Cypherpunk movement was Pretty Good Privacy, a military-grade encryption protocol developed by Phillip Zimmerman that allowed individuals to communicate freely without fear of surveillance by the numerous tyrants and dictators and bad actors around the world. However, the Cypherpunks also articulated a philosophy that has helped to steer the Internet in subsequent years. This contribution was important because, although the Internet is hardly a stellar protector of individual privacy, matters could have been much worse.

One of the movement’s key documents was ‘The Cypherpunk Manifesto’, written by Eric Hughes in 1993 and anthologised in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. Hughes’ general thesis was that for an open society to function, certain things had to be kept private – for example, conversations or exchanges between individuals. Indeed, ‘Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.’²

As Hughes viewed it, an open society requires people to be able to transact and communicate with whom they want without the whole world knowing the contents of the exchange or even whom the exchange was between. Why is this critical to an open society? Because we might fear the consequences of communicating with someone who is unpopular or we might be afraid to exchange new ideas in public as those new ideas might lead to backlash and discrimination if they are unfamiliar or challenge widely accepted viewpoints. There is a reason, after all, that Leonardo da Vinci wrote a number of his manuscripts in code (mirror writing and his own shorthand). Similarly, Charles Darwin closely guarded his draft of The Origin of the Species for a decade. It was just too provocative in the moment. As Hughes points out in his manifesto, ‘Privacy is the power to selectively [emphasis added] reveal oneself to the world.’

Such historical examples were not lost on Hughes. As he noted in the manifesto:

People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

This led him to the actions that the Cypherpunks would perform to make privacy on the Internet possible. The role of the Cypherpunks would be simple:

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it.³

The Cypherpunks did not merely write code; they also established one of the earliest online communities – indeed, one of the earliest online distributed communities. In 1992, the Cypherpunks set up a mailing list to discuss topics of interest, mostly involving cryptography and its related political concerns. In 1997, they established a distributed mailing list so as to avoid reliance on a single point of potential failure.

The Cypherpunks’ mailing list was a who’s who of early Internet and web3 pioneers. List members included the core Cypherpunks like Eric Hughes, Tim May and John Gilmore but also Julian Assange (of WikiLeaks fame), multiple founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, Nick Szabo (who invented the smart contract), Satoshi Nakamoto (who created Bitcoin) and Hal Finney (who most probably – we believe – was Satoshi Nakamoto).

Of course, privacy is just one part of the equation for Cypherpunks. An open society requires people to have secure communications, but it also requires them to have access to the actions and deliberations of the government; it requires governmental transparency, and this leads us to the role of hacktivists.

4.3 The hacktivists and transparency

At the same time that the Cypherpunks were concerned about the privacy of individuals, other groups were concerned about the transparency of governments and other institutions that hold power over us (for example, private intelligence agencies). They spoke out against such cloaked government activity and, more importantly, developed tools to cast light on the methods that traditional centralised powers use to oppress others. Just as importantly, they developed tools to puncture the illusion of invincibility of these centralised powers. And finally, they showed that political action can be just as real and visceral when mediated by digital communications as it is when it takes place face to face.

First, let us explain what we mean by ‘hacktivist’. ‘Hacktivist’ is a portmanteau of the words ‘hacker’ and (political) ‘activist’, which raises the question of what a hacker is. To fully grasp what ‘hacker’ means, we should first be clear about what it does not mean. Sometimes people take hackers to be folks that engage exclusively in illicit computer activities for some sort of personal gain or perhaps just to be chaotic evil agents in the online world. However, our view of what ‘hacker’ means is more aligned with the first definition given in the New Hacker’s Dictionary:

hacker n. [. . .] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.⁴

Packed into this definition is the thought that computer technologies should not be sealed inside black boxes that no one can access, hidden from view and unchangeable, but rather should be accessible and modifiable. A hacker celebrates the idea of modifying technologies to ‘stretch their capabilities’. This hacktivist idea, of course, lies at the foundation of the free software movement as articulated by Richard Stallman (not ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’ but ‘free’ in the sense that one should be at liberty to modify the software – i.e. to hack it). Hackers, in this sense, are individuals who like to extend and repurpose existing technologies, often in ways not intended by the creators of the technology.

Coming back to our portmanteau, ‘hacktivism’ thus refers to the idea that we can repurpose and modify existing technologies to achieve a new sociopolitical end. There are many ways that hacktivism could thus unfold, and the best way to illustrate the possibilities is to offer some historical examples from the early days of hacktivism.

4.3.1 WANK Worm

According to Julian Assange, the ‘WANK Worm’ is the first instance of hacktivism. On 16 October 1989, during the Cold War, when nuclear war was an immediate possibility, hackers hit NASA computers with the ‘WANK Worm’. Two days prior to the launch of the plutonium-fueled Galileo space probe from the Kennedy Space Station, NASA employees logged on to see a humorous but, at the same time, frightening welcome screen: ‘Your computer has been officially WANKed. You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war’ and ‘Remember, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.’ The machines of the US Department of Energy and NASA worldwide had been penetrated by the anti-nuclear WANK (WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS) worm.⁵

The WANK Worm event was not just a simple protest. It was also an effort to pierce the illusion of invincibility of certain institutions. Partly, it was to remind those powers that they should avoid hubris – their technologies are not as secure and reliable as they may think. Of course, it also demonstrated that perhaps the public is not as helpless against nation states and the technologies they employ as one might assume.

This example involved deploying hacktivism to embarrass the powers that be, but other hacktivist efforts had more direct objectives. One such case was the Hong Kong Blondes.

4.3.2 The Hong Kong Blondes

The Hong Kong Blondes was an underground network of Chinese students spread across at least three continents. It was started by Blondie Wong, who had reportedly witnessed his father being stoned to death during the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution. The group initially protested censorship and the violations of human rights that occurred in China.

In their most famous action, the Hong Kong Blondes launched cyberattacks against the ‘Great Wall’ – a series of firewalls put in place to block access to Western Internet sites. With members operating inside and outside of China, the group claimed to have found significant security holes within Chinese government computer networks and claimed to have defaced government websites, torn down firewalls and even disabled Chinese communication satellites. They also worked to forewarn political dissidents of imminent arrests.⁶

4.3.3 WikiLeaks

Probably the most famous hacktivist organisation was WikiLeaks, run by Julian Assange (initially in concert with Daniel Domscheit-Berg). The basic idea behind WikiLeaks was simply to publish information concerning centralised powers sourced via internal leaks or the hacking of communications, often by finding security vulnerabilities or by ‘social engineering’ (for example, tricking someone into giving up a password).⁷

Probably the most famous group of documents published by WikiLeaks involved classified documents that had been provided by Chelsea Manning, then a private in the US Army in Afghanistan. Among those documents was a video shot from a helicopter gunship opening fire on a photographer followed by a van full of children in Afghanistan. It was an example of hacktivists providing a look behind the curtains and into the actions of the state in which they reside.⁸

The ‘Collateral Murder’ video was not even the most influential document from Manning’s leak. Even more significant were State Department documents that included a secret cable written in 2008 by Ambassador Robert F. Godec, which seemed to make it vivid that the external world saw the corruption of the Tunisian president as clearly as the Tunisians did.

Godec’s description of the Tunisian situation in the leaked cable seemed to validate all the complaints that Tunisians had been making about their government:

Beyond the stories of the First Family’s shady dealings, Tunisians report encountering low-level corruption as well in interactions with the police, customs, and a variety of government ministries. [. . .] With those at the top believed to be the worst offenders, and likely to remain in power, there are no checks in the system.

Perhaps the most powerful statement in the cable was when Godec said that the Tunisian government seemed to believe that ‘what’s yours is mine’.⁹

Just days later, after a shopkeeper set himself on fire in protest, more protests broke out, leading to the collapse of the Tunisian government, followed by revolutions across the Arab world. The series of events became known as the Arab Spring and then-new technologies were deployed to assist protesting groups to organise demonstrations and circumvent attempts by state security systems to block communications with the global community.¹⁰

It must be noted that not everyone was convinced that digitally mediated communications played a significant role in the Arab Spring. Famously, Malcolm Gladwell criticised it as ‘Facebook activism’ and argued that it lacked the ‘strong ties’ necessary to foment revolutionary fervour.¹¹ However, Gladwell was showing his disconnect from computer-mediated communication. Certainly, to the average Facebook user with little at stake in the uprisings, a few words posted in support of the cause are relatively meaningless. However, for people with skin in the game – people who were under the control of the Tunisian government, for example – it made little difference whether the communications were electronically mediated or not. The stakes were just as high, and the dangers were just as great.

For example, Slim Amamou, one of the more visible Tunisian bloggers online, was arrested and held during the Arab Spring because of his alleged connection with the international activist movement Anonymous. Azyz Amamy, who had covered the Tunisian protests from the beginning, was arrested. His Blogger and Facebook accounts were both deactivated. Hamadi Kaloutcha, a blogger and activist, was arrested at his home. During his arrest, police confiscated his computer equipment, suggesting that while Gladwell may not have been impressed by the online activism, the Tunisian police were concerned about it just the same. Around the same time as the others, the arrest of Hamada Ben Aoun, a rapper who had recently released two songs on his Facebook account criticising the Tunisian regime and its social policies, further demonstrates the authorities’ concern over online activism.¹²

Our point is that online political activism is just as visceral, just as real and just as dangerous as face-to-face activism. When there is skin in the game, it does not matter if the communication is taking place through analogue sound waves or through digital electronic communications. Just as much is at stake, and the interpersonal connections are just as real – certainly real enough for people to be risking jail time and even death.

These Cypherpunks and hacktivists and the online activists of the Arab Spring are not merely interesting because of what they accomplished; they are of interest to us here because they showed how digital technologies could be deployed by non-state groups to express and defend important values, even if the defence of those values runs counter to the interests of nation states and their agents. In particular, they showed that technologies can be employed to defend the privacy of individuals, to pierce the veils of secrecy that centralised powers deploy, and to organise fellow citizens for change and a new political order.

Most importantly, they showed us ways to organise ourselves that are indifferent to the traditional boundaries of nation states. They showed that these communications and collaborations could carry on even when nation states did not look favourably on them and even when nation states used violence to block them.

4.4 Digitally mediated, borderless governance

A final element to add is the evolution of the idea that individuals can not only organise themselves online but that these online groups can take on the roles traditionally assumed by nation states. This was the unifying idea of the collection of essays anthologised by Peter Ludlow (one of the coauthors of this book) in the book Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. As early as the year 2000, new technological tools showed us that online governance systems were a very real alternative to traditional forms of government.

At the time Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias was published, blockchain technology was still some years away. However, there were already efforts to bring about a viable digital currency, particularly by David Chaum and his DigiCash project.¹³ Online communities were already forming, encryption technologies were being deployed in those communities and a new form of government – the cyberstate – seemed possible.

Another important idea that emerged at the time was the thought that these possibilities of online worlds might provide the opportunity for people to experiment with new forms of governance, for people to freely sample different forms of governance and for there to be a kind of competition for different forms of governance, each being accessible to a broad range of individuals. John Stuart Mill talked about a marketplace of ideas;¹⁴ you could call this a marketplace of governmental systems.

First, an important essay by the legal scholars David Johnson and David Post, reprinted in the Crypto Anarchy volume, noted that the new lines of communication were orthogonal to the boundaries of traditional states:

Global computer-based communications cut across territorial borders, creating a new realm of human activity and undermining the feasibility – and legitimacy – of applying laws based on geographic boundaries. While these electronic communications play havoc with geographic boundaries, a new boundary, made up of the screens and passwords that separate the virtual world from the ‘real world’ of atoms, emerges. This new boundary defines a distinct Cyberspace that needs and can create new law and legal institutions of its own.¹⁵

In a separate essay, David Post developed the idea that there could and should be competition between these governance systems:

Although each individual network can be constrained from ‘above’ in regard to the rule-sets it can, or cannot, adopt, the aggregate range of such rule-sets in cyberspace will be far less susceptible to such control. A kind of competition between individual networks to design and implement rule-sets compatible with the preferences of individual internetwork users will thus materialize in a new and largely unregulated, because largely unregulatable, market for rules. The outcome of the individual decisions within this market – the aggregated choices of individual users seeking particular network rule-sets most to their liking – will therefore, to a significant extent, determine the contours of the ‘law of cyberspace’.¹⁶

Since these essays were written in the 1990s, newer technologies – in particular, blockchain technologies – can now be leveraged to create new forms of governance that enable the governed to retain their self-sovereignty. They can enable us to maintain our privacy and demand that governments be transparent. Most importantly, they facilitate exit from governmental systems that do not conform to their citizens’ values. The possibility of exit thus allows governing systems to compete for citizens. Rather than having citizenship determined by terrestrial boundaries, it can be determined by our sense of mutual alignment in terms of politics and values.

One version of this alternative picture is what Ludlow called a ‘cyberstate’, and US entrepreneur and former CTO of the crypto exchange Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan has called a ‘network state’ – a state that is formed by the online digital interconnections of people around the world.¹⁷ In this book, we will be looking at a more fine-grained set of solutions since we do not see that the concept of a state is all that helpful. Whether it is a network state or a nation state, it is still a state and thus carries all the baggage that states do. Our approach is to consider alternative forms of organisation as the model; we can organise around the concept of communities rather than states.

Successful communities might scale up into groups numbering in the billions or be as small as a dozen friends. Our idea is that these communities can be decentralised yet cooperative thanks to their organisation around blockchain technologies. We call them sovereign blockchain communities because they will be politically sovereign and because the blockchain will become the central nervous system of these communities and their governance. The question, of course, is how these new technologies work – a topic we take up in the next two chapters.