The dangers of the state monopoly on identity
All well and good comrades, but why stop there? There exists a grave danger from powers, sought or unsought, from the crypto anarchy, techno industrial complex. Identity matters! Whether we like it or not, the words anarchy and crypto anarchy can be a boogeyman to the general public, and Tim May went along with the term because he liked it but the “cyber liberty” one might be more fitting by his own admission. What happens is with the spread of technology — cheap smartphones as in the case with Africa — more and more people are joining the world economy and getting the means to cross the local boundaries. What would people in Zimbabwe use for money, when their national currency completely collapsed, were it not for the access to technology, and cheap access too? This is cyber liberty. The advance and spread of the blockchain technology gives even more opportunities for people to go translocal and transborder. All that people need is a device, an Internet connection, and a willingness to learn. This is not to say that all three of these are easy to accomplish, but they are a possibility and they are opportunities. While mobile money is just that — a currency, even though a currency that’s convenient and even life-saving to some that also gives a taste of joining the world economy, the blockchain is the next step and the opportunities that come with it are truly fitting for the term “cyber liberty”. The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… So we are the New " Net State" and we shall continue to be in that capitalist state until we have created the institutions that form some other community. That community identity may be crypto anarchist. Crypto agorist or Cyber Libertarian, or something else again. Holocratic. A Futarchy. In the virtual marketplace for ideas let's "Let a thousand flowers bloom!" Quadratic democracy for the win! Armed with zero knowledge proofs check summing each new ideology becomes trivial. Like checking in on your favourite antistate token. Let a thousand new schools of thought contend! Or run away and hide if that's what they decide. Treat all state-like forms as damage and route around them. Brave Eric Hughes he bravely ran. And in cyber Heaven, I am told, Vitalik stands up to his old man.
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