web3/concepts/ideologies/cryptoanarchism.md

Cryptoanarchism

Cryptoanarchism or cyberanarchism is a political ideology whose aim is to achieve the protection of privacy, political freedom and economic freedom through the use the use of cryptography and crypto assets. Cryptoanarchism sees itself as reaction to the overreach of governments and the state into the private and financial lives of citizens and asserts the need for so-called total freedom.

• Total anonymity of individuals in the digital spaces.
• Total freedom of speech without censorship or moderation
• Total freedom to trade without regulation or protections

The idea revolves around the politics that individuals are self-sovereign and that the internet or cyberspace as a whole is an independent territory outside the remit and regulation of governments. This is outlined in the seminal writing by cryptoanarchist leader John Barlow in his writing A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

The ideas behind bitcoin can be traced to another seminal work The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.

See also anarchocapitalism, libertarianism and post-state technocracy.

References

• May, Tim. 1994. ‘Cyphernomicon’.
• May, Timothy. 1992. ‘The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto’. High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace.
• Barlow, John Perry. 2019. ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. Duke Law & Technology Review 18 (1): 5–7.
• Greenberg, Andy. 2012. This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers. Penguin Randon House. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/309904/this-machine-kills-secrets-by-andy-greenberg/.
• Jarvis, Craig. 2021. ‘Cypherpunk Ideology: Objectives, Profiles, and Influences (1992–1998)’. Internet Histories, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1935547.
• Moore, Daniel, and Thomas Rid. 2016. ‘Cryptopolitik and the Darknet’. Survival 58 (1): 7–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2016.1142085.
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• Golumbia, David. 2013. ‘Cyberlibertarianism: The Extremist Foundations of “Digital Freedom.”’ Clemson University Department of English.
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• Wolf, Martin. 2019. ‘The Libertarian Fantasies of Cryptocurrencies’. Financial Times, February. https://www.ft.com/content/eeeacd7c-2e0e-11e9-ba00-0251022932c8.
• Anderson, Patrick D. 2021. ‘Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful: The Cypherpunk Ethics of Julian Assange’. Ethics and Information Technology 23 (3): 295–308. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09571-x.
• Beltramini, Enrico. 2020. ‘Trust, Finance and Cryptocurrencies’. In Anarchism, Organization and Management, 184–95. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315172606-19.
• *———. 2021. ‘Against Technocratic Authoritarianism. A Short Intellectual History of the Cypherpunk Movement’. Internet Histories 5 (2): 101–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2020.1731249.
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• Curran, Giorel, and Morgan Gibson. 2013. ‘WikiLeaks, Anarchism and Technologies of Dissent’. Antipode 45 (2): 294–314. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01009.x.
• DuPont, Isaac Quinn. 2017. ‘An Archeology of Cryptography: Rewriting Plaintext, Encryption, and Ciphertext’. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. PhD Thesis, University of Toronto (Canada). https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/78958.
• DuPont, Quinn. 2016. ‘The Politics of Cryptography: Bitcoin and the Ordering Machines’. Journal of Peer Production 1 (4): 1–23. http://peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/DuPont_draft_submission.pdf.
• Gehl, Robert W. 2016. ‘Power/Freedom on the Dark Web: A Digital Ethnography of the Dark Web Social Network’. New Media and Society 18 (7): 1219–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814554900.
• Gürses, Seda, Arun Kundnani, and Joris Van Hoboken. 2016. ‘Crypto and Empire: The Contradictions of Counter-Surveillance Advocacy’. Media, Culture and Society 38 (4): 576–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643006.
• Hellegren, Isadora. 2020. ‘Crypto-Discourse, Internet Freedom, and the State’. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. https://oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-887.
• Hellegren, Z. Isadora. 2017. ‘A History of Crypto-Discourse: Encryption as a Site of Struggles to Define Internet Freedom’. Internet Histories 1 (4): 285–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1387466.
• Jarvis, Craig. 2021. ‘Cypherpunk Ideology: Objectives, Profiles, and Influences (1992–1998)’. Internet Histories, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1935547.
• Phillips, David J. 1998. Digital Cash and the Surveillance Society: Negotiating Identification in New Consumer Payment Systems. University of Pennsylvania. https://search.proquest.com/openview/7ca922683fe4b5a94427e0ba59af4def/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.
• West, Sarah Myers. 2018. ‘Cryptographic Imaginaries and the Networked Public’. Internet Policy Review 7 (2): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.14763/2018.2.792.
• *———. 2020. ‘Survival of the Cryptic: Tracing Technological Imaginaries across Ideologies, Infrastructures, and Community Practices’. New Media and Society, 1461444820983017. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983017.