I see *infopunk *as alternative information dynamics. How we access and shape information has conventionally been through institutions, and in the last decade or so through monopolised platforms, where the linear, chronological stream is the dominant structure.
Infopunk poses questions such as:
Who determines ‘knowledge’?
Who has access to knowledge?
Who has access to sharing knowledge?
How do new ideas emerge?
Where and how do fields of knowledge converge?
What are the motivations behind knowledge creation?
What are the motivations behind content, and it’s consumption?
In digital spaces, investigating these questions requires dissecting existing structures; business models, interfaces, and architectures — to analyse them, and to imagine ways of removing obstacles for critical thinking and learning. It also means finding alternative models that facilitate peer-to-peer and cross-community knowledge sharing.
Infopunk doesn’t strive to be a conceptual process for the tech community, but rather aims to create access for people from all fields and levels of tech fluency to take part in it. In practice, this means building tools and structures with accessible interfaces and transparent policies.
As all information requires attention, one of the key issues* infopunk* looks at is the balancing of limited attention capacity with the incoming input of information. *What are the conditions that enable us to direct our attention mindfully? *This question is less about an ability to focus, but rather about being able to make informed choices about *when and what to focus on *with the least interference possible.
Julian Assange
The new world of the internet, abstracted from the old world of brute atoms, longed for independence. But states and their friends moved to control our new world – by controlling its physical underpinnings. The state, like an army around an oil well, or a customs agent extracting bribes at the border, would soon learn to leverage its control of physical space to gain control over our platonic realm. It would prevent the independence we had dreamed of, and then, squatting on fiber optic lines and around satellite ground stations, it would go on to mass intercept the information flow of our new world – its very essence even as every human, economic, and political relationship embraced it. The state would leech into the veins and arteries of our new societies, gobbling up every relationship expressed or communicated, every web page read, every message sent and every thought googled, and then store this knowledge, billions of interceptions a day, undreamed of power, in vast top secret warehouses, forever. It would go on to mine and mine again this treasure, the collective private intellectual output of humanity, with ever more sophisticated search and pattern finding algorithms, enriching the treasure and maximizing the power imbalance between interceptors and the world of interceptees. And then the state would reflect what it had learned back into the physical world, to start wars, to target drones, to manipulate UN committees and trade deals, and to do favors for its vast connected network of industries, insiders and cronies.
But we discovered something. Our one hope against total domination. A hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use to resist. A strange property of the physical universe that we live in. The universe believes in encryption. It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it. We saw we could use this strange property to create the laws of a new world. To abstract away our new platonic realm from its base underpinnings of satellites, undersea cables and their controllers. To fortify our space behind a cryptographic veil. To create new lands barred to those who control physical reality, because to follow us into them would require infinite resources. And in this manner to declare independence.
The cypherpunk paradigm can be summarized as: “replacing centralized systems of interactions enforced by coercion with decentralized systems of voluntary interaction whose rules are enforced by mathematics/economics”. Desiderata for systems include: communications private from all third-parties, anonymous, provably untampered with, and provably from particular parties; social mechanisms like reputation replaced by formalized systems like feedback; and legal mechanisms like anti-fraud statutes superseded by mechanisms such as escrow or bonds (which can be fortified by cryptographic techniques as multiple-party signatures).
The ideal cypherpunk system is self-enforcing, self-regulating, and cannot be attacked directly by outsiders because they do not know where it is or how to affect it.
The decentralization is key. Centralization is unacceptable for many applications: centralization means any commercial or political interest can interfere for any purpose, be it rent-seeking or taxation, prosecuting economic warfare against another party, intended to hamper organized crime or terrorism, etc.
This fear of centralization is not idle. The ring of power offered by centralization has been grasped on many occasions: ranging from Paypal hampering its competitors to US-led crackdowns on ancient hawala financial systems & Islamic charities in the name of counter-terrorism to the US suing the Intrade prediction market (with the assistance of the Central Bank of Ireland) to credit card companies’ near-fatal boycott of WikiLeaks to Iran’s severe inflation after economic embargoes. Previous centralized digital currencies like E-gold or Liberty Reserve suffered the expected fates, and more pointedly, an earlier online drug market (the “Farmer’s Market”) was shut down and principals indicted using scores of transaction details stored by banks & Paypal & Western Union.
SilkRoad is one of the greatest examples
If we avoid the problems of centralization and resolve on a decentralized system, we face a different but equally severe set of problems: without centralization, in a distributed system in which no party has veto power (and any party can be anonymous or a mask for another party), how and who decides which of 2 conflicting transactions is the “real” transaction? Must a distributed system simply allow double-spends, and thus be useless as money?
No. The underappreciated genius of Bitcoin is that it says that the valid transaction is simply “the one which had the most computing power invested in producing it”. Why does this work? In the Bitcoin distributed system, there are many ‘good’ parties at work producing new transactions, and they will independently latch onto one of the two competing transactions produced by an attacker and incorporate it into future transactions; the amount of computing power necessary to out-invest those other parties quickly becomes too enormous for any one entity to invest. Within hours, one transaction will be universal, and the other forgotten.
Whenever classic (and illegal) cypherpunk applications are implemented using Bitcoin, you are sure to find someone complaining that you must not talk about Fight Club—how will that play in Peoria⸮ You will find quite a few, actually, as much as one would expect Bitcoin to select for hard-core libertarian types9 or techies who have internalized the Streisand effect
https://www.gwern.net/Silk-Road
https://www.gwern.net/docs/darknet-markets/silk-road/1/2013-power
The Silk Road’s payment and communication systems remain essentially impenetrable.
It is currently impossible to do a full SR post-mortem but it seems clear that the Bitcoin blockchain was useless to the FBI/DEA investigation, as was breaking Tor or PGP; theories generally revolve around Ulbricht’s currently-inexplicable decision to make a payment to a federal agent from an Australian bank account, an intercepted shipment of IDs, discovering carelessly-exposed clues to his identity, and flipping a SR employee.
It’s here on the Silk Road that the early net evangelists’ vision of a world where information flows freely, where no central hierarchy rules, and where the network takes precedence over the individual has finally been realized. Whether you celebrate or lament the fact that drugs such as cocaine, heroin and LSD are now available online with just a little effort and very little likelihood of legal consequences, it is undeniable that we are at a turning point in legal history.