Cryptocurrency: Declaration of Currency Independence, a Team McAfee Project, Crypto Art for Sale

[grarpamp]

https://cryptoslate.com/what-is-currency-independence-and-why-is-it-important/
https://themoneymanifesto.com/2018/05/28/john-mcafee-says-there-is-a-war-on-cryptocurrencies/
https://bitcoinist.com/john-mcafee-says-war-cryptocurrencies/
https://ethereumworldnews.com/mcafee-warns-about-crypto-war-calls-for-currency-independence/
https://toshitimes.com/john-mcafee-war-on-cryptocurrencies-declaration-of-currency-independence-and-the-blockchain-revolution/
https://zycrypto.com/john-mcafee-invites-millions-to-join-his-currency-independence-movement/
https://freeworldeconomicreport.com/john-mcafee-declares-currency-independence-from-unaccountable-individuals/
https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/john-mcafee-declares-currency-independence-on-his-new-website/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9P3sA4Eqtk Declaration of Currency Independence
https://luchopoletti.com/products/declaration-of-currency-independence-canvas
https://steemkr.com/bitcoin/@curncndpendnce/why-i-signed-the-declaration-of-currency-independence-essay-series-006-common-goals-edition
https://medium.com/@currencyindependence/declaration-of-currency-independence-b404296bf03b



http://www.currencyindependence.com/sign.html
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/1000913287154937857  The
Crypto War and DoCI by John McAfee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1LCNzCxE7I  The Crypto War, We're In
It Together by John McAfee

Declaration of Currency Independence

"
History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.
When in the Course of human events it becomes apparent that the bands
of control and power stem from a universally common source, the
necessity of separation from these powers become a matter of survival.

For as long as the printing press has existed, the whole of
civilization has quietly fallen under the influence of sovereign
entities with the ability to control the value of expended work
through the manipulation and control of currency. The ‘sweat off the
brow’ ceased to be represented by any discernible value, but rather
through an unseen, uncontrollable force of entities outside control of
the masses exchanging their representative currencies.

The expenditure of energy by man, machine, and Nature is the sole
source of Value. These sources and their result have been devalued
through the intentional inflation of printed currencies. Money and
currency as understood by the global population are no longer an
expression of the collective output of exertion, but rather an
arbitrary calculation of unaccountable individuals and organizations
that hold them in their influence. Humanity has fallen under the
domination of control through Fiat, but this domination has only
increased the pressure of humanity seeking a viable escape.

When entities acquire the power to artificially create Value with the
stroke of a pen, bribery and collusion become a trivial matter for
those with that power. Those with access to this power naturally
develop a bubble of judicial protection, accelerating disparity of
wealth. As a result, the Value of Work has been wholly degraded by
arbitrary calculations of political expediency. The integrity of Value
within all societies has been literally and figuratively forced to the
brink of irreconcilability.

This viable escape has come in the form of provable and irrefutable
math through the expenditure of energy — Bitcoin and its derivative
cryptoassets.

Prior to the proliferation of cryptoassets, the option of the State
abdicating control over the supply of currency was never a viable
possibility due to threat of forgery, and the costs to secure the
integrity of the currencies. The State, and only the State, could
secure the integrity of a printed currency through the threat and
employment of Force. The maintenance of this integrity is a noble
cause and necessary to the stability of a state, because it ensured
the exchange of value could be trusted. However, the maintenance of
that integrity can, has, and is fundamentally manipulated.

Whilst the State still maintains a justifiable monopoly on the lawful
application of violent force, its monopoly on the control of currency
has been demonstrably displaced by the implementation of Bitcoin and
its cryptoasset derivatives.

Where value was once proven by the strength of the State “at the end
of a barrel”, humans have developed, demonstrated, and proliferated a
technology capable of proving value through the expenditure of
electricity via the irrevocable proof of math. Such a concept has
never been accomplished prior to the initiation of the Bitcoin
blockchain.

As use of cryptocurrencies has spread and adoption rates have grown
throughout the world over the past decade, the paradigm of ‘value’ has
shifted in the minds of those who truly grasp the capabilities of this
new technology of ‘value transfer’. Whereas the Internet changed how
humans viewed the transfer of information, cryptoassets are doing the
same with the transfer of value.

We are not declaring Independence from State Controlled Currency — We
are declaring Controlled Currencies through fiat have been rendered
Obsolete.

Our reasons for declaring obsolescence are plentiful. Many deaths and
crimes of the previous Century can be traced to unaccountable entities
with control of currencies who have gained control of the many levers
of power in order to direct the course of Humanity.

Those who create our currencies have conspired to assume Total Control
of the global money supplies, while obfuscating through suppression of
media and education the fact that they are capable of conspiracy.

They embody the systemic risk with the hypocrisy of providing loans to
public banks that must provide transparent audits, while avoiding any
such audits themselves.

Their behavior has consistently tipped the scales of potentially Open
Markets in favor of providing newly printed currencies to those they
trust, as opposed to those the Free Markets trust.

They have ingratiated themselves through the selective support of
lawmakers and regulators whom enact policies that ensure their actions
are exposed to minimal risk and maximal gains by diverting
consequences on the populations which use their currencies.

They have degraded the public trust in elected representatives and the
equal application of justice by collectively avoiding any
accountability for creating systemic risks.

They have become Cause and Solution to financial crises, to which
there is no means of recourse for the rest of Humanity, which bears
this burden as a result of Their behaviors.

This Declaration of Currency Independence is a direct response to the
continued manipulation and destruction that stems from the deliberate
degradation of Value across the whole of humanity.

We, the undersigned, will dedicate our lives building networks and
systems that restore the Integrity of Value and directly challenge the
authority of those who seek to destroy Value.
"





https://cryptocurrencynews.com/declaration-of-currency-independence-mcafee/
The Declaration of Currency Independence: A Team McAfee Project
May 25, 2018 Dr. Josh Cotton

On Friday, May 25th, 2018 Team McAfee published the Declaration of
Currency Independence which is a pledge of solidarity to what many
would say are the core principles of the cryptocurrency movement.
Although I do not speak for the authors, I was given an advanced copy
prior to the mass distribution and have direct contact with some of
those inside Team McAfee and can speak to the document’s authenticity
and altruistic intentions. Under the leadership of the famous
cryptocurrency evangelist John McAfee, Team McAfee is requesting
readership of and signatories to this declaration. The promise of
cryptocurrency is essentially the freedom to transact online without
government intervention. Most governments form not to oppress, but
simply to organize, to manage and to do good for others through unity.
But when an organization forms it has a purpose, a problem or many
problems that it tries to solve. Eventually, those problems are solved
or at least under control and then the organization’s purpose tends to
shift. At that point, most organizations change from trying to solve a
problem, to simply trying to remain relevant, to survive, and often to
grow. When governments start to grow political debates arise over the
parallel “expansion of powers” that ensue. One side will argue the
government needs more authority in order to solve more problems while
the other side will argue the government needs less authority and more
power is just the byproduct of its search for relevance, sustainment,
and growth. The Declaration of Currency Independence makes the bold
point that when governments of the world shifted from commodity backed
currency which sets natural limits on currency powers to fiat based
currency which is limited only by decisions, these governments moved
from solving real problems to seeking relevance, survival, and growth.
Specifically, the Declaration states, “Money and currency as
understood by the global population are no longer an expression of the
collective output of exertion, but rather an arbitrary calculation of
unaccountable individuals and organizations that hold them in their
influence.”

Similar Declarations

The parallels between the Declaration of Currency Independence and the
United States Declaration of Independence
are clear. Both documents start the same way “When in the Course of
human events…” Both documents seek the support of the people. But
perhaps most importantly, the principles of self-determination are
espoused in both. The United States Declaration of Independence says,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.” In the United States, the government is constructed of the
people, for people, and by the people, and it is the people who run
their own government. While all the world does not operate under those
same freedoms, this principle of a government that serves the people
likely led the authors of this document to publish it in the hopes to
remind us all that everyone deserves to be free. Blockchain and
cryptocurrency are spreading freedom throughout the world and for the
most part, reasonable governments have supported that expansion. While
almost all governments have reacted with some fear and taken some
actions to slow the growth, reasonable people recognize that in the
modern world, an Internet-based peer to peer network is an
uncontrollable force. Some try to control it, most tend to ignore it,
but as with all apps, when an app is useful enough to gain a lot of
users, that app can eventually take its place in human history as a
new pillar of society. Will Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stellar, MilitaryToken,
and other cryptocurrencies take their place as pillars of society…they
already have. The only question that remains is for how long, and what
comes next?







http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2020/05/31/cryptocurrencies-anarchist-turn-or-strengthening-of-surveillance-capitalism-from-bitcoin-to-libra/
Cryptocurrencies: Anarchist Turn or Strengthening of Surveillance
Capitalism? From Bitcoin to Libra
By Catherine Malabou

In an article published in the United States on 21 May 2018, John
McAfee, an internet expert, argues that we are witnessing today a
veritable war against cryptocurrencies. The list of ‘enemy combatants’
fighting these currencies includes governments, banks, and credit card
companies, as well as the SEC (Security Exchange Commission). These
institutions have allied in order to thwart the development of the
‘crypto-renaissance’. A number of banks and lenders have allegedly
interrupted payments in electronic currencies. McAfee exhorts ‘crypto
believers’ to take a stand: ‘What can we do? Take action. Write to
your Congressman; it sounds silly but while they are still in power,
make them work. Go into your bank and demand that they allow crypto
transactions. If they say no, ask them to recommend a bank that will.
Demand the credit card companies allow crypto payments’(Avan-Nomayo).

Cryptocurrencies must be defended. Speaking on behalf of his fellow
‘crypto believers’, McAfee writes: ‘We are not a security; we are
coins, we are currency. They are frightened of us’. McAfee invites
internet users to sign an extraordinary text that was recently
published online in a number of different languages: the Declaration
of Currency Independence (‘Declaration’). This document is strikingly
similar to the United States’ Declaration of Independence. Both begin
with the same formulation: When in the course of human events…. ‘When
in the course of human events it becomes apparent that the bands of
control and power stem from a universally common source, the necessity
of separation from these powers becomes a matter of survival’. The
time has come to challenge the State’s monopoly on the fabrication of
money and the control of currency flows; to deconstruct the link
between geography and money (that is, to deconstruct money’s
national—or, in the case of the Euro, international—assignation); and
to put an end to the privilege enjoyed by central banks and all the
organisms that depend on them.

‘The expenditure of energy by man, machine, and Nature is the sole
source of Value’, the text of the Declaration continues. ‘These
sources and their results have been devalued through the international
inflation of printed currencies. Money and currency as understood by
the global population are no longer an expression of the collective
output of exertion, but rather an arbitrary calculation of
unaccountable individuals and organizations that hold them in their
influence. Humanity has fallen under [their] domination. […] The value
of work has been wholly degraded by arbitrary calculations of
political expediency. […] This declaration of Currency Independence is
a direct response to the continued manipulation and destruction that
stems from the deliberate degradation of Value across the whole of
humanity. We, the undersigned, will dedicate our lives to building
networks and systems that restore the Integrity of Value…’
(‘Declaration’).

By ‘cryptocurrencies’, the authors are referring not only to the most
famous cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, but also to the multiple other
cryptocurrencies that exist (to date, 1500 have been recorded). By the
terms ‘networks and systems’, the Declaration’s authors also have in
mind the technology that serves as a platform for these currencies:
the blockchain. Recall that the blockchain, which emerged as a
response to the financial crisis of 2008-9, is a distributed ledger
technology, a kind of record in which anyone can write, carry out, and
verify transactions, albeit without the possibility of modifying or
erasing previous transactions. These transactions are recorded and
stocked in the form of blocks, or numerical containers, which are
assembled in chains and distributed across multiple computers and
protected from fraud thanks to an electronic consensus between
participants, or ‘nodes’. The blockchain is the foundation of
cryptocurrencies. Cryptography is the procedure by which a sender
transmits an encrypted product to a receiver, who then deciphers the
product with the help of a key. Transactions occur ‘peer to peer’,
without the mediation of a third party. The register belongs to
everyone and no-one, while its functioning is decentralised, anonymous
and secure.

There remains little public awareness of what is at stake in this
monetary and cybernetic phenomenon. The reason for this no doubt has
to do with the high degree of technical sophistication that
cryptocurrencies imply. The functioning of the blockchain, as of the
mechanisms for the creation, circulation and use of cryptocurrencies,
is not easy to understand and requires a process of initiation. It is
reasonable to think, however, that this difficulty will be overcome in
time, as was the case with the internet. For now, it is crucial to see
that far from being a purely technical question of interest only to
economists or finance buffs, the development of cryptocurrencies is in
fact a major political and social issue.

When the authors of the Declaration of Currency Independence associate
bitcoin and the blockchain with the re-creation of value, it is
obviously not in the name of a return to some sort of gold standard.
Cryptocurrencies are wholly dematerialised and have no tangible form.
With cryptocurrencies, value, which is limited neither to price nor to
the exchange rate, arises from a phenomenon that is simultaneously
effective and symbolic: the reliability of the algorithm, which
thereby takes the place of human confidence. Indeed, in his founding
text, Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s enigmatic creator, speaks of the
disappearance of the notion of confidence: the ‘electronic payment
system [is] based on cryptographic proof instead of trust’. In another
passage, he writes: ‘We have proposed a system for electronic
transactions without relying on trust’ (Nakamoto). The reliability of
the algorithm allows value to return in the form of transparency.

However, contrary to what the Declaration of Currency Independence
might have us think, the war of states and banks against
cryptocurrencies does not pit evil against good, nor the unjust
against the just. It is, rather, an internal war. The enemies are
brothers. In fact, what we are witnessing today is a conflict internal
to capitalism, which is entering a new phase. Today, capitalism is
beginning its anarchist turn. How else are we to describe such
phenomena as decentralised currencies, the end of the state’s
monopoly, the obsolescence of the mediating role played by banks, and
the decentralisation of exchanges and transactions?

It is important to note that the large majority of traditional
currency systems are supported by central banks who create and control
liquidity. In addition to this, in order to lend money to their
clients, commercial banks also create, without actually possessing it,
a second layer of money. The banks then credit the current accounts of
borrowers. By way of a simple game of writing, banks thereby produce
money. Thanks to this process, the stock of money grows in proportion
to the needs of the economic system in general. Let us add, finally,
that central banks can now also use the digital currencies they
control and store in their accounts. In all cases, these monetary
sources are inaccessible to their clients.

With the phenomenon of cryptocurrencies, there has also appeared
so-called ‘money agitators’, who, in the wake of the 2008 financial
crisis, challenged the banks’ monopoly. We can distinguish five major
movements in this ‘agitation’ (Scott). The first goes by the name of
‘modern monetary theory’. Its representatives affirm that it is
contradictory for governments to say that they have to take money in
the form of taxation while banks can in fact indefinitely create
money. ‘The idea that a federal government can run out of money like
an ordinary household or a business is an illusion […]. A government
can only run out of money if it either does not issue its own
sovereign currency (like the European nations, which have opted for
the Euro) or if an artificial political limit has been placed on how
much money it can issue’ (Scott).

The second tendency is that of the ‘reformers’. According to them, the
excessive power possessed by banks creates constant instability. It
was the banks who effectively plunged the world into financial crisis
in 2008. American reformers include the ‘American Monetary Institute’,
the group ‘Positive Money’, and the ‘International Movement for
Monetary Reform’. There are just as many libertarian reformers as
there are liberal reformers, in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term.
They include both the right-wing economist Murray Rothbard and
progressive organisations such as the United Kingdom’s Green Party.
The reformers’ demands vary but converge on the following point: the
necessity of a form of currency creation that is independent,
transparent, and governed by democratic institutions.

Next, we have the ‘cryptocurrency crusaders’, a very heterogeneous
group who nevertheless share a single idea: the rejection of national
banking systems, credit included. The system, they argue, should be
replaced by the circulation of a currency that is produced just liked
any other commodity. This is the function of ‘mining’. Money would
then no longer be the business of the State. I referred above to state
uses of cryptocurrencies. In Venezuela, for example, the government
introduced the ‘petro’ in an attempt to control the currency crisis
that had sent the country hurtling towards the abyss. But this points
precisely to the difference between the use of cryptocurrencies by the
state and by circuits linking particular individuals: the latter are
obviously constituted outside of the centralisation of state reserves.

The defenders of local forms of currency (the ‘localists’) also
express scepticism towards government and banking systems. According
to them, small communities, rather than algorithms, should control the
flow of money in a closed circuit. Such an apparatus would also
encourage the economy of the region of origin.

A final group is made up of members of the Crypto-Credit Alliance, who
bring together cryptocurrencies and mutual credit by way of the
blockchain. This is the least well-known of all the movements, but
without doubt the most interesting. Recent initiatives such as
Trustlines, Holochain, Sikoba, Waba, and Defterhane seek to hybridize
old inventions like mutual credit and the use of the most recent
distributed technologies—including, of course, the blockchain.

In light of these phenomena, it is not surprising to see the semantics
of anarchism emerge in the management literature. A number of
introductory books have appeared lauding the coming of ‘capitalist
anarchy’ with the development of blockchain and bitcoin. Patrick
Shwerdtfeger’s work, AI, Anarchy Inc., Profiting in a Decentralized
World with Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain, is an interesting
example (Schwerdtfeger). This ‘Uberisation’ of the economy ‘without
the company Uber’—this ‘Uberisation of Uber’—allows him to affirm that
‘anarchy is within sight’ (45).

In the United States, a plethora of articles pose the question of
Trump’s ‘anarchism’. ‘Is Trump an Anarchist in Chief?’ asks one
journalist in reference to an interview with Michael Moore titled
‘Donald Trump, an Anarchist at Heart’, in which Moore comments on his
film Trumpland (Stoddard).

The paradox is striking, even shocking: how can we speak of anarchy in
a period marked by the growing and unprecedented concentration of
power? And yet, when political journalists (and experts) ask if Trump
is an anarchist, they are not playing with words. They are attempting
to circumscribe, more or less successfully, what the whole world is
experiencing as a new crisis of capitalism: the combination—at once
senseless, monstrous, and unprecedented—of savage verticality and
uncontrollable horizontality.

Savage verticality, which is at once a cause and consequence of such a
transition, also takes the form of the fascistic evolution of so many
of today’s governments policies, with the excessive security and
military build-up that goes along with it. Such phenomena do not
contradict a drive towards anarchism. Rather, they indicate precisely
the disappearance of the state, which, once its social function has
been removed, expresses the obsolescence of its force through the use
of violence. Ultra-nationalism thus signals the death agony of
national authority. Once again what is striking and paradoxical in
such a situation is the fact that the semantics of anarchy that are
animating it motivate a discourse apparently invested in confidence
and transparency. ‘We are putting an end to the pyramid model of
decision-making’, Emmanuel Faber, the CEO of Danone, recently declared
(Girard and Gallois). This is the paradox of a discourse of
transparency that simultaneously authorises the large-scale but opaque
use of data, the dark web, and the fabrication of information.

It will be said that this is a ‘right-wing’ or libertarian form of
anarchism. Thus, for their part, the authors of the article ‘Trust,
Anarcho-Capitalism, Blockchain and Initial Coin Offerings’ highlight
the direct link between bitcoin and blockchain and the Austrian
school: ‘We argue that blockchain can trace its philosophical roots to
the anarchy-capitalist strain of the Austrian school. […] Hayek, for
example, abandoned his former belief that it was necessary to control
the abuses of the State as regards the monetary system […]. He ended
up calling for what he terms the “denationalization of money”’ (Flood
and Robb).

It is thus not only the State but the nation that is being disturbed
by ‘cyberanarchy’. The authors also ask the following questions: ‘What
will happen to national borders if money is the same everywhere? How
will governments raise taxes if revenue is anonymized by cryptography?
How will the economy function without a central authority?’

Of course, the semantics of anarchism that give ultra-capitalism its
new tonality changes nothing as regards the logic of profit, which
ultra-capitalism only expresses in a different form. Those banks that
should logically be afraid for their survival have already seen the
provisional advantages that they can draw from blockchain: the
reduction in the number of agents and advisers they have to hire. An
article in the Financial Times, ‘Five Ways Banks Are Using
Blockchain’, insists on the fact that the new technology is indeed
revolutionising the sector (Arnold).

On this new stage, conflict is once again raging. This conflict pits
the cyber-anarchist tendency, which marks the new turn in capitalism,
against the ultra-sovereigntist counter-tendency, which accompanies
it. And the banks have seen perfectly clearly the at least provisional
advantages they can draw from the situation: financial technologies,
crowd funding, and staff cuts. Incontestably, the horizontality of
blockchain will prevent neither its privatization by some sectors
(there already exist multiple private blockchains), nor its
confiscation in the name of particular interests. However, this does
not mean that traditional forms of currency exchange are not
threatened. This is what explains the surrealist character of polemics
such as those around the question of exiting the Eurozone. With
electronic currencies, we have already ‘exited’. The discourse of
centralized control is undermined from within. Whence the war, the
prohibitions, and the predictions that claim that cryptocurrencies
will eventually vanish.

Why not leave these enemies to finish each other off? Why sign the
declaration? Why did I, a philosopher who is not a libertarian, sign
it? Signing the Declaration of Currency Independence is obviously a
wager: once again, we encounter the question of confidence. What if
the end of confidence were to revivify confidence? By guaranteeing
transparency and protection, is it not true that the algorithms
accomplish what institutions have prohibited, namely the possibility
that both exchanges and money are our own, in all senses of the term?
That money, even demataterialized money, is in our hands? With neither
intermediaries nor middle men? The economist Jean Tirole recently
declared that while the blockchain was a useful invention,
‘cryptocurrencies did not contribute to the common good’. Despite
this, if the association between cryptocurrencies and blockchain
allows us to at least repose the question of what the common good is
today, then bitcoin already, incontestably, has value. ‘We, the
undersigned, will dedicate our lives building networks and systems
that restore the Integrity of Value and directly challenge the
authority of those who seek to destroy Value’, states the Declaration
of Monetary Independence.

We could extend this analysis by mentioning the relation between new
trajectories and the new forms of money and value and what has been
called the third industrial revolution, that of the ‘internet of
things’.

An object, connected to the internet, has the ability to receive data
and to send it over the internet to an integrated control panel.
Blockchain technology has considerable potential in this new domain.
Objects, connected to the internet and linked to the blockchain by a
cryptocurrency protocol, are able to contract a service or validate a
transaction all by themselves. A washing machine capable of
calculating its own consumption, an electric heater that can enter
into an appropriate contract, a rental car that can sign a contract
directly with a driver—all of these are examples that give another
twist to the new law of exchanges, with objects now contracting with
and between one another. Not only are currencies becoming delinked
from nations or territories, not only are they escaping the hands of
the state, the human actors of exchange are themselves in some sense
disappearing behind the horizontal autonomy of objects contracting
with other objects with the help of currencies that are themselves
objects connected to one another and to other commodities.

Many will conclude that the third industrial revolution is but one
more turn of the screw in the logic of capital. Others, like me, will
persist in seeing in capitalism’s conflict with itself the paradoxical
possibility of the emergence of a new type of resistance, of an
anti-capitalism that will wrench a liberatory anarchism from the grip
of its counter-model, libertarian anarchism.

In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin affirms that the new
technological platforms are ‘Collaborative Commons’. Without going so
far as to use the word ‘anarchism’, he insists on the change of
paradigm that capitalism is currently going through: ‘A new economic
paradigm—the Collaborative Commons—is rising […] that will transform
our way of life. We are already witnessing the emergence of a hybrid
economy, part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons. […]
Between these two rival paradigms, the struggle will be long and
implacable’ (Rifkin).

To distinguish a liberatory from a libertarian anarchism, the
representatives of the first movement propose to name liberatory
anarchy acracy, signifying the absence of power in the sense of an
absence of domination, and the second anomie, in the sense of an
absence of law. According to the famous definition first given by
Durkheim, anomie signifies the social disorganization that results
from the absence of common norms. It is incontestable that libertarian
anarchism goes in this direction. However—and this is what makes the
current situation so striking—the absence of a social bond is being at
once exacerbated and repaired, in an almost unthinking coincidence, by
a technological supplement. Automated confidence is in the process of
becoming the substitute for a social bond. How can we not think, even
if it is in a utopian mode, that this prosthetic bond will not
generate new forms of communal organisation that will simultaneously
resist the anomie from which they arise?

Responding in 2017 to the question ‘Do you see blockchain technology
as a means to anarchy?’, Noam Chomsky declared that a technology was
certainly not sufficient to allow the advent of a new political
regime. ‘There is no such “silver bullet” tool that will bring about
anarchy. The only way is via implementing anarchist practice in what
we as humans do and the way we come together in our societies, how we
organise and make freedom a paradigm. Anything else is not
sustainable. It may be a tool that could be used, I’m not sure how,
but the reality is to bring about anarchism we have to organise via
anarchist praxis’ (Error). It is obvious that a fetishization of the
blockchain is not the path that we should follow. But Chomsky is wrong
to conceive of technology in an exclusively instrumental sense. In any
case, how can we separate technology and praxis today? How can we
affirm that the technological situation of a given epoch does not have
a determining value for collective praxis and its ‘organisation’?

Recently, the ‘anti-capitalist’ philosophers Erin Manning and Brian
Massumi responded to the questions of Uriah Marc Todoroff for The New
Inquiry. Based in Montreal, the two philosophers use blockchain
technology to develop a network of social and economic exchanges.
Influenced by the work of Félix Guattari, Manning and Massumi plan to
create a network that is ‘parasitical’ upon the liberal economy.
‘Massumi: Going back to the question of value, we want to create an
economy around the platform that does not follow any of the usual
economic principles. There will be no individual ownership or shares.
There will be no units of account, no currency or tokens used
internally. The model of activity will not be transactional.
Individual interest will not be used as an incentiviser. What there
will be is a complex space of relation for people to create
intensities of experience together, in emergent excess over what they
could have created working separately, or in traditional teams. It’s
meant to be self-organizing, with no separate administrative structure
or hierarchy, and even no formal decision-making rules. It’s
anarchistic in that sense, but through mobilizing a surplus of
organizing potential, rather than lacking organization. You could also
call it communistic, in the sense that there is no individual value
holding. Everything is common’ (Todoroff).

So, where do we stand today? The current monetary outlook is changing
so quickly that it is becoming more and more difficult to understand
the meaning of its evolution. Thus, when I set out to develop these
reflections, Facebook had not yet announced the birth of its
cryptocurrency Libra, nor that of its subsidiary company Calibra,
which was tasked with managing ‘Libra’. This took place in June 2019.
Do these new phenomena render my conclusions null and void? The
immediate answer is no. ‘Calibra’s main mission is to develop an
electronic wallet that can be used on the messaging services WhatsApp
and Messenger and through a dedicated mobile application’ (Delaye),
explains Kevin Well, the vice-president of the project based in
Geneva, the city where Libra’s reserves are managed. The first
objective of this new global digital currency ‘is to serve the 1.7
billion people in the world who have no access to banking
institutions, and the equivalent number who have poor access’,
declared David Marcus, the project’s director. Libra, whose commercial
launch is set for 2020, will make payments almost free and as simple
as sending a text message. To shore up confidence, each one of the
partner companies (there are 28 in total, including eBay and Spotify)
has invested 10 million dollars to buy control of one of the nodes of
the blockchain that Libra is built on. The other element for
engendering confidence—and perhaps the one that is most
determining—concerns the choice of the way that Libra’s value will be
fixed. ‘It is built on the foundation of stable currencies’, explains
David Marcus. Which currencies has not yet been decided, but the Swiss
franc, the Pound sterling, the euro and the dollar are being evoked.
Finally, Kevin Weil promises that there will be no link between the
personal data that appears on Facebook and the financial data stored
by Calibra. For example, there will be no ‘retargeting of advertising
between Facebook and Calibra’ (Delaye). Apparently, then, Calibra will
function in substantially the same way as cryptocurrencies.

However, many today think that far from being decentralized, the use
of Libra will be hyper-controlled by Facebook, whatever the company’s
claims to the contrary. Are we not dealing here with a new model of
money, one that resembles neither the ‘sovereigntist’ model of the
classical state nor cryptocurrencies’ anarcho-libertarian model, but
which is much closer to the model of ‘surveillance capitalism’? Libra
is indeed a currency that lies outside of states’ powers, but it is
accompanied by a surveillance apparatus that allows Facebook to track
the behaviour of its users. As Primavera de Filippi says in an
interview given to Philosophie Magazine on July 2, 2019, ‘The problem
is that the injunction to create profit always leads to abuses. We
could perhaps pay for an Uber directly via Facebook and send tips in
the form of Libras. All of this is very practical. But couldn’t our
reputation on an application like Uber, where we are evaluated by each
driver, not constitute a piece of data for the social network that can
then be used to evaluate our capacity to pay back a loan to a bank? If
an application has identified us as a bad payer, Facebook could easily
monetise that information and sell it to a bank! We thus find all of
the same risks we associate with ‘social credit’, which already exists
in China, with the large social network WeChat’ (De Filippi).

Have we thus left anarchism behind? In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg and
David Marcus, three members of the United States Congress demanded the
suspension of Libra. According to them, Facebook’s future
crypto-currency represents serious competition for the dollar. ‘It
appears that these products may lend themselves to an entirely new
global financial system that is based out of Switzerland and intended
to rival U.S. monetary policy and the dollar. This raises serious
privacy, trading, national security, and monetary policy concerns for
not only Facebook’s over 2 billion users, but also for investors,
consumers, and the broader global economy’, they write in the letter
(Hern). We might think, then, that rather than representing
capitalism’s war with itself, Libra is generating a simple war between
states, which today have become, on a global scale, companies.

Yet, in reading an article from the magazine L’Echo, titled precisely
‘When Facebook Becomes a State’ [Quand Facebook devient un État], we
learn that things are not so simple. The article characterises
Facebook, with its new capacity to create currencies, as the most
powerful global company at the same time as it is ‘a state above
states’, and thus as an even more centralized version of a state. In
the following paragraph, however, the author contradicts himself by
speaking of the ‘old libertarian dream’ that, according to him,
Zuckerberg is adhering to with Libra. He continues: ‘the former hippy
communes of the 1960s, having failed to realise their utopian visions,
will progressively […] be reincarnated through the constitution of
alternative communities based in cybernetics. An extraordinary
encounter has thus taken place between notorious visionaries, artists,
hackers, scientists and left-wing activists’ (Brunfaut. See also
Klein). We thus come full circle, back to liberatory anarchism. But
not for long, as it is now a matter of anarcho-capitalism: ‘But this
libertarian ideology, which is fundamentally left-wing, will
progressively enter into alliance with right-wing libertarianism, that
is, hyper-liberalism’.

Our thesis thus seems to have been confirmed. If it is indeed very
difficult to know where the deconstruction of the idea of a national
currency will lead, we can clearly perceive that this is a political
problem just as much as it is an economic one, which demands that we
renew our analysis of capitalism, which is also to say our resistance
to capitalism. That this renewal demands thought travel down anarchist
paths—both left-wing and right-wing—is without doubt one of the most
troubling philosophical challenges of our time. If only for this
reason, crypto-currencies must be defended.

Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at the Centre for
Research in Modern European Philosophy, at Kingston University, UK ,
and at UC Irvine where she regularly teaches in the Spring. Her last
books include Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity
Press, 2016, trans. Carolyn Shread) and Morphing Intelligence: From IQ
Measurement to Artificial Brains (Columbia University Press, 2018,
trans. Carolyn Shread). She is currently working on a new book project
around anarchism and philosophy.


Works Cited

Arnold, Martin. ‘Five Ways Banks Are Using Blockchain.’ Financial
Times 16 October 2017.
<https://www.ft.com/content/615b3bd8-97a9-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b>.

Avan-Nomayo, Osato. ‘John McAfee Says There is a War on
Cryptocurrencies.’ Bitcoinist, 28 May 2018.
<https://bitcoinist.com/john-mcafee-says-war-cryptocurrencies/>.

Brunfaut, Simon. ‘Quand Facebook deviant un Etat.’ L’Echo 24 June
2019. <https://www.lecho.be/entreprises/technologie/quand-facebook-devient-un-etat/10139091.html>.

‘Declaration of Currency Independence.’ 28 June 2018.
<https://medium.com/@currencyindependence/declaration-of-currency-independence-b404296bf03b>.

De Filippi, Primavera: ‘Le libra est aussie une nouvelle façon de
collecter des données.’ Interview with Charles Perragin. Philosophie
Magazine, 2 July 2019.
<https://www.philomag.com/lactu/resonances/primavera-de-filippi-le-libra-est-aussi-une-nouvelle-facon-de-collecter-des-donnees>.

Delaye, Fabrice. ‘La crypto-monnaie de Facebook relance la Genève
financière et internationale.’ Bilan, digital editino, 8 June 2019.
<https://www.bilan.ch/techno/la-crypto-monnaie-de-facebook-relance-la-geneve-financiere-et-internationale>.

Error, Dave. ‘Noam Chomsky: Do You See Blockchain Technology as a
Means to Anarchy?’ Interview with Noam Chomsky. Quora, 22 September
2017. <https://www.quora.com/Noam-Chomsky-Do-you-see-blockchain-technology-as-a-means-to-anarchy>.

Flood, John and Lachlan Robb. ‘Trust, Anarcho-Capitalism, Blockchain
and Initial Coin Offerings.’ 20 November 2017. Griffith University Law
School Research Paper No. 17-23.

Girard, Laurence and Dominique Gallois. ‘Emmanuel Faber, PDG de
Danone: ‘Nous mettons fin au mode de décision pyramidal.’ Interview
with Emmanuel Faber, CEO of Danone. Le Monde 26 April 2018.
<https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2018/04/26/emmanuel-faber-en-rendant-tous-les-salaries-de-danone-coactionnaires-nous-mettons-fin-au-mode-de-decision-pyramidal_5291107_3234.html#kBDBSBHCLtkE2yLb.99>.

Hern, Alex. ‘Libra: US Congress Asks Facebook to Pause Development.’
The Guardian 3 July 2019. <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/
jul/03/libra-us-congress-asks-facebook-pause-development-cryptocurrency>.

Klein, Olivier. ‘Les cryptomonnaies, une utopie anarcho-capitaliste.’
Les Echos 7 October 2018.
<https://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/cercle/les-cryptomonnaies-une-utopie-anarcho-capitaliste-141086>.

Nakamoto, Satoshi. ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.’
<https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>.

Rifkin, Jeremy. The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of
Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. St.
Martin’s Press, 2014.

Schwerdtfeger, Patrick. AI, Anarchy Inc.: Profiting in a Decentralized
World with Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain. Authority
Publishing, 2008.

Scott, Brett. ‘These 5 Rebel Movements Want to Change How Money
Works.’ Huffington Post, 17 September 2018.
<https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/five-monetary-rebellions-change-money-system_n_5b9a819ae4b0b64a336ca248?ri18n=true>.

Stoddard, A. B. ‘Donald Trump, Anarchist-in-Chief’?’
RealClearPolitics, 14 October 2016.
<https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/10/14/donald_trump_anarchist-in-chief_132066.html>.

Todoroff, Uriah Marc. ‘A Cryptoeconomy of Affect.’ The New Inquiry, 14
May 2018. <https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/>.







Why I Signed the Declaration of Currency Independence - Essay Series
#006 - Common Goals Edition
2018-06-04

The Declaration and its signing campaign is a vehement attempt to not
only gather people around the idea of cryptocurrency as an alternative
to centralized currency, but moreover to disclose the existing problem
of the entire humanity.

Throughout human civilization no one has ever seriously questioned the
existing governments’ monopoly for centralized money. In the second
half of the twentieth century, a number of libertarian economists (For
example: Friedrich Hayek – Austrian and British economist and Nobel
Prize for Economics Laureate) began to challenge the government’s
monopoly for money. Currently, each and every national fiat currency
is completely centralized (is regulated by a centralized power), and
the citizens of the respective countries are forced to accept it as a
tool of payment for their goods and services (as a means of exchange).

The negative impact on the entire of humanity as a result of existing
centralized monetary system is sufficiently clarified in the
Declaration.

The mantra “only the governments are entitled to emit and regulate
used by the society means of exchange” is still highly prevalent in
modern life as current economic statistics demonstrate.

So, what solution does the Declaration propose?

The Declaration offers an opportunity to gather like-minded people who
support the concept of an alternative method of currency transfer; and
realize the idea, that not only governments are entitled to emit and
regulate the societal means of exchange. Theoretical underpinning of
this idea existed decades before, as indicated by prominent
libertarian economists. Only the technology was missing...

With the implementation of Bitcoin’s blockchain, the lack of
technology has been successfully solved. Not only is the algorithm
there, but the respective open-source software has been also
developed. Bitcoin became recognized by millions of its users.
Alternative coins (altcoins) started to pop up, like mushrooms after a
warm rain in August.

Hopefully, the Declaration will be signed by a lot of people. Among
the signatories there will surely be a large number of highly skilled
software developers, with the capability to write sophisticated,
secure and innovative applications.

But what is the most likely scenario of further development? Will each
of these talented developers consider themselves to be the next genius
capable of offering the next algorithm capable of saving humanity?

Freedom and liberty should not mean ignorance towards others and their
ideas! A natural component of personal freedom is the capability to
listen and hear others; to consider their way of understanding; their
proposals and ideas. This will only serve to increase the potential of
a collective brain; of collective thinking in order to find the most
suitable solution to the problem which is influencing the lives of
each of us.

We have to learn how to identify common goals and to join our efforts,
each – according to his best knowledge and skills, in order to achieve
our mutual objectives. For this we (the cryptocommunity) have to learn
how to work, to think, and to create, together.
-Author: Alex Alcazar