Charlotte Fang

Posted on Apr 25, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

Crypto and its Discontents: Hello Web3 Entryists

Everyone should have access to "unfettered and unmoderated" online communication, that is also surveillance resistant and illegible to the state.

@dystopiabreaker

Web3 is a return to Web 1.0, the Wild West, only this time not by negligence of the state, but through active resistance against it. There is no right or left wing in Web3's anarchy—only state & anti-state, centralization & decentralization, web co-option & web nativism.

The anarchist cypherpunks behind everything crypto have been building in the shadows for fifty years and now the threat has become obvious: it must be understood that anyone calling for deplatform censorship on Web3 is an outsider entryist wielding state propaganda against the innate anarchism of crypto to neuter its revolutionary potential.

Permissionless is a feature, not a bug. Identity politics and the woke frameworks used to justify cancels are payloads, and their proponents are footsoldiers regurgitating CIA propaganda—irrational, schizophrenic programming received from centrally controlled news organs transparently designed only to increase state power—introduced to suppress an open marketplace of ideas.

Yet they will never win because cryptographic decentralization is an on-going act of resistance against the state by its fundamental design. As water wants to flow, information always wants to be free, technology wants to connect and the people want to self-organize.

The state is a bug that demands fixing, and the entire history of personal computing has been oriented towards this goal:

They won't get far, but you can expect them to add cyberanarchism—that is, decentralization itself—to the list of "problematic" targets to point their footsoldiers at. You can expect to be cancelled, publicly censured and economically isolated, you can expect them to come into the space and co-opt and subsume decentralization as an aesthetic, redefining the values to introduce convenient vulnerability to state control ops.

Yet real computer liberation is already here, the locus of power has moved to the people, powered by tools born directly from cypherpunk revolutionaries. This is the only political status that matters, and resistance against any attempts to erode our free status the only necessary praxis. This is why they’re afraid: we are building our own ark.

Web3