Shapphirepunk

Hey everybody, is the mic on? Can you hear me? Am I amplified? Yes I am. Wonderful, okay.

So maybe a bit different than some of the things we've heard in the last moments. So we're here thinking about privacy and the presence or absence of it in a practical sense but I want to also open it up to a bit more of an open circuit of inquiry. So I gave a talk at the Cypherpunk Congress in Thailand in early November and that was titled Cypherpunk. So this is a linguistic slip exploring a break or a possible new way forwards for the concept of Cypherpunk. And today's talk further explores this idea of an epistemic break but now it is our, let's say, underformed but more coherent alternative proposal or at least a direction than I had six months ago.

And first of all, because we're in a place, we're on some land, it's very fashionable these days to do a land acknowledgement. So in Berlin, we are standing on the grounds of former Crusader territory. In the 13th century, Schöneberg and Kreuzberg were both Knights Templar lands. So I want us to honour and remember the Christo-Fascists from a thousand years ago that gave rise to the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany. And that's a joke that I'm making, possibly make a case, that's based on some land acknowledgements that are actually happening here in Germany in the middle of this insane genocide and the German response to that.

So, okay, violence. That's why I didn't read the room. So I want to recap what I spoke about in Bangkok on Cypherpunk. So I couched the talk back then in a disclaimer which I'm going to repeat to you again. This is a provocation exploring an extremely specific purist opinion that I don't only share but I think it's at least an interesting area to explore.

Many of you might find these ideas objectionable and that's kind of the point. I don't hold these opinions strongly and I would not die on these hills. No. Okay, can I get a GM? I know it's not morning anymore, but, GM.

GM, good morning, GM, GM, mornings are good. This is a reference to a briefing among Bitcoin and blockchain enthusiasts and followers of social media. The joke, such as it is, refers to the value of getting involved in a given crypto finance proposition early and the expectation of a bright future and that's why we're all here, right? But maybe it was different in the past. Okay, so I want to give you like a historical slip and a story of where the word Cypherpunk came from.

So, Cypherpunk initially was a twist on Cyberpunk. You all know this, it's credited with that particular wordplay and the idea of the cypher itself comes like, you know, let's say very, like a few steps from the east. And so we can trace cypher most clearly back to the Arabic word Cypher which is zero in the Arabic language and indeed the Arabs borrowed the concept of numericals which you can compute on from their misadventures and adventures in southern Asia, particularly what we call India today. And then this travelled eastwards and indeed Fibonacci or Fibonacci's sequence golden ratio kind of thing is credited with bringing cypher via Zephyrus into Latin and Western language. But I want us to think about the root of this word, that both zero and cypher come from this Arabic word for the void, for nothing, for concealment, for maybe even censorship.

Okay, and here's a paper I dug out on the eve of the conference in Thailand in November around the census burdens, kind of like some of the epistemic grapplings we have when we talk about information, particularly in a frame of just censor, shall we say, and the state argues it's basically impossible because of the limits to knowledge, what can be known at a particular time. Okay, meme break, here's a meme. Financial growth, exponential financial growth, exponential financial growth on a planet with finite resources, and hands up who knows universal paperclips, I feel like there must be at least a few in the audience. Okay, just quick recap if you haven't played it yet, and in advance I'm sorry if you haven't. You will learn a lot or like you will reiterate a lot about the way the world is today, so this is how I see our modern market-based necrotic capitalist present.

So universal paperclips is a simple web game where you control, you're a humble paperclip merchant, you click a button, you turn strips of metal into paperclips, and after a while you start getting tools, and you're there clicking away linearly, you start getting tools. The scales, this gives you scale, it gives you automation, and you end up, before too long, controlling the squadron of hyper dimensional intelligences stripping the universe for all available material, and that's market-based capitalism, that's what we live in, but we have to live in that universe as well, right? I often route the conversations through some of Baudrillard's earlier work. Many of us are familiar with the idea of the simulacrum and the simulation, the idea that the abstracted kind of fake can outsurpass the real, but in his prior work, especially in the book Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard lays out a schema for mimetic economies, economies that play on cool codes of capital that don't have any real underlying them. I'll give you a quote because I think it's worth remembering.

We now live in a world dominated by the free play of the monetary sign that is beyond reference to any real of production, or even a monetary referent in the form of a gold standard. In this world, the idea of real value, of equities, of commodities, of houses, of anything, is meaningless as what matters instead is not value per se, but infinite speculation. This new world is marked by the emergence of a brothel of capital, not for prostitution, but for substitution and commutation. Does that remind you of anything? And Baudrillard has this kind of three-stage genealogy, I guess almost kind of like in a Marxist frame, where we start from raw commodities, lumps of coal, sacks of wheat, whatever, we refine those using social value into steel or bread or whatever, but really the third and final form of value is this cold semiotic forms, symbolic codes, and I look around at, first it was coins, tokens, then coins, DeFi, DAOs, whatever, we even had things on the TradFi side like GameStop, we've now got crypto things which are starting to eat the stock market, like strategy and all these companies building Bitcoin and Ethereum and treasuries.

So I think Baudrillard's word warrants a reappraisal in the present day. Okay, I'm not going to talk about Raymond and his cathedrals and bazaars or the price vanity today. It was me gatekeeping the Ethereum infinite garden in Bangkok, I found that across the road from the venue, and then like, okay, so last time what I said was, Ethereum can't be cypherpunk actually because of that terrible thing that you did at the start of it that we never talk about again, and that is the DAO exploit in 2016. I'm not going to litigate it in depth again here, but I will just like show you some of the promises and warnings that came up at the time, some of the criticisms that especially the Bitcoiners have made. The Bitcoiners don't take this Web3 movement seriously because they think you can just delete shit at will, and what's the fucking point, if you don't mind my French.

There's been some movements and attempts, including this one, to rehabilitate the image of Ethereum in terms of cypherpunk, make Ethereum cypherpunk again. And I will just note that in this article which Vitalik wrote and which somebody over there fact-checked, I can see to the acknowledgments, there's an awful lot of valor being stolen from Bitcoin if I'm being unkind. It almost seems like all of the virtuous examples of cypherpunk are being borrowed from Bitcoin, and we're kind of like not talking too much about the other stuff like irregular state transitions and deleting attackers balances and whatever. Can you guys stop trading? All of that stuff.

Anyway, there's this thing called Cody's Law. Maybe some of you will still remember this. I think it's in the graveyard now. We put it to death after the Dow hack. But there was a group of people in the 90s onwards, Bill Mitchell and Lawrence Lessig most notably in those early days, hypothesizing that we could inscribe and embed our values into technologies and they would kind of outlast those moments.

In the 90s, that sounded very cute. The internet was barely a thing. But now we have persistent programmatic cryptographic substrates like blockchains where we can embed these values and they could potentially last for very long periods of time. I won't say forever because a lot of things got marketed as being forever, and they already started to decommission them. So like, I don't know, for a while, let's say.

Okay. And then the Dow hack happened and there was a chain split in Ethereum. Ethereum forked off, broke the rules, forked off. And there was a group of people in that community that said, no, we're not going to fork off. We believe in Cody's Law.

We believe in like, if rules are broken, we're going to keep doing this. And that became the Ethereum classic community. And they derived their identity from this concept of Cody's Law. Here's one of the logos at the time, which was a phoenix rising from the flames of the whatever thing, the bad thing that happened, the catastrophe. By the way, I was writing about forks.

That was where I started doing my first field specific research in 2017 and 18. And I ended up speaking at the Ethereum classic summit in Korea in 2018 because they read my work and it was more charitable about them than most other peoples at the time. But what was interesting was at that point, I made a series of predictions about what was going to happen to their network, the longer that Ethereum would delay the move to proof of work. And indeed, one by one, very sadly, they all came through, ending with an enormous 51% attack on the network. Six weeks worth of transactions got reorg'd, as I remember, and the exchanges got cleaned out.

And so paying attention and being inside this little movement, trying to understand it as a community or something like, you know, the conscientious objectors to the situation in 2016 was very interesting, but there wasn't much of a community there, if I'm honest. All right, so I would say code's law is a good example of what you might call algorithmic formalism. Like we set the rules and then we can't change the thing in the future. And we see these kinds of ideas all over the place and they're responsible for a lot of in the world, let's say. Just by the way, if I can go back, yes, code is law.

What about the law bit of code is law? Does the law change? Yes, the law changes because the world changes, technologies change, jurisdictions change, facts change, realities change. So what is the law part of code is law, if we're not referring to the law? Natural laws, maybe?

Well, you should read my epistemology work about how the natural laws aren't laws. Okay, and then one of the things I did very briefly in Bangkok, I talked about cyberpunk, which is Bitcoin, proof of work. Like we give the machine all the power and all the agency. So here's a little bit of poetry. The church and the network, zeal and time, death and money, all sides of the same coin.

All right, so Bitcoin, it looks like it's pretty cyberpunk. It looks like it's pretty decentralized, looks like it's pretty permissionless. There's no gods, no masters to a first approximation, but this comes at possibly the ultimate cost. So we built a system which has no sensory capabilities beyond its environs. All it knows is it needs energy.

And every two weeks, the probability of a hash finding a block gets recomputed, this lottery ticket kind of mechanism, so that the block clock, the real innovation of Bitcoin, the decentralized temporal regime that is Bitcoin, can keep ticking regularly at the possible expense of boiling the oceans. And obviously, much ink and hot air has already been spilled on that. Okay, so he said this, it's indifferent to us, maybe even insufferable. Okay, well, that's all well and good. People always say, yes, we see.

Thank you very much for the criticism. Do you have any constructive ideas about how we might actually fix this garbage heap of a situation? Well, here's something called Sapphirepunk, that I've been working on with a few other people, and I'll say it's a work in progress, provisionally articulated proposal on a wave beyond some of the dead ends of this kind of like technolibertarian dream, which became associated with the word Cypherpunk. So first of all, I will just note that there was this very famous document, which most of you are probably aware of, from 1993, Eric Hughes' A Cypherpunk's Manifesto. What I really want to point out here, like, you know, we'll get to the rest of it in a minute.

What I really want to point out here is, like, in the title, the way it's laid out, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto. A is an individual, Cypherpunk is a possessive. So we've already, in the title, prefigured the worldview from which this is being espoused, and through which you will receive it. Okay, Sapphirepunk is an on-chain technology, EM, on-chain. And here are the co-authors of this document.

Some of them ain't on, some of them are. Oh, and that QR code, you'll be able to read a preview of this document. It's about three and a half thousand words long. I'll also show it at the end, so don't worry if you don't catch it right now. Okay, and then I'm going to start reading you stuff.

This is a conference where I, the person on stage, gets to advertise to you, right? I don't have anything to sell, but I've got some concepts, so I'm going to ram them down your throat for the next eight minutes. The world cannot be protected by cryptography alone. We are the Sapphirepunks. We inherit the tools of cryptographic resistance and invoke them, not for escape, but for togetherness.

Privacy is not a bunker, it's a commons. Sovereignty is never in isolation, it's always in relation. Sapphirepunk is a call for a reformation, not a rejection of the original Cypherpunk ideals, but a reckoning for today's We summon forth a new poetic and political imaginaries that expand beyond the sovereign individual into the plural and the planetary. We demand the crafting of technologies that nurture meaning, resilience and communal flourishing. We will not passively receive the futures we deserve.

We must collectively bring them into being. We reimagine cryptographic tools as instruments of communion, not alienation. To act as a Sapphirepunk is to believe that privacy is a necessary starting condition for imagination, resistance and community, not the end point. We envision technologies that uplift the collective, not merely cloak the self. We wish to create tools that serve not only the technologically fluent or the economically privileged, but also those most at risk from state violence, political oppression, corporate surveillance and techno-fascism.

Okay, you can read these offline another time, I will get to the good bits because we only have a few minutes left together. The collective promise of cryptography. Today we are all cyborgs, not just interfacing with cryptographic systems, but co-poetically bringing their meanings and consequences into being. The tools we build reflect the worlds we wish to inhabit. The self, like a networked node, only experiences meaning through its edges.

There is no cryptographic truth without a handshake, no key without an other to unlock, no privacy without shared trust. Worse still, the more secure the enclave, the lonelier the architect. The myth of the ungoverned self forgets that to exist at all is to be born into a web of care, memory and responsibility. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, freedom is born not in isolation, but in the spaces in between. In the web of human relations where action, speech and remembrance take shape, a politics of privacy.

Oh, I can't read the rest. Okay, I'm going to skip that. This is important. We can have our eyes glazed over as we sit in these post-launch talks, but I think this is the most important part of this document. I want to read it carefully with you.

Feel free to front run me and take a look at it while I take a sip of water. Recuperating the humiliated technological subject, the emotional substrate of cypherpunk, despite its technological rationalism, is affectively shaped by shame, paranoia and fear. Shame in particular plays a central yet disavowed role. The shame of being seen, the shame of being the shame of exposure. It is a fantasy of purity and control, a dream of a self-sovereign subject who never has to depend, reveal or negotiate.

Shame is fundamentally an individualizing and narcissistic emotion. It centers the self as a failed or contaminated object and in doing so isolates rather than connects. The cypherpunk reacts to vulnerability by retreating into technical mastery, encrypting everything, trusting no one. But this dream leaves little space for cooperation, solidarity or repair. When privacy is grounded in shame, the ideal becomes to disappear, not to relate.

Trust is seen as a bug, not a feature. Dependence is weakness. Vulnerability is flaw. What emerges is a social... I can't read that, whatever.

Okay, there is no security through That's the punchline. Okay. And I want to wrap this little kind of whistle-stop tour of this new document with the final thoughts in it. Endings and beginnings. The old cypherpunk dream is dead.

Cryptographic armors wielded in isolation have now been co-opted as the weaponry of the very hegemony the cypherpunks sought to resist. Privacy auctioned, freedom commodified, solidarity fractured by market logics. This is the cost of mistaking encryption for emancipation. We refuse this hollow future, living in the ruins of techno-capital exploitation. Technology alone cannot heal broken trust, nourish our commons, nor honour the web of life.

Now that the master's house is also a casino, exploiting both their tools and ours, we must regroup and build new architectures rooted not in fear, but in radical care and community. Okay, that's it. Thank you. If you want to download it, just scan that code. More questions?

We can have one, two, three. Go ahead. Come at me. There wasn't really much crusader material. I was kind of disappointed.

How did the crusades fit into the new cypherpunk? Well, if you look at the crusades from the eastern perspective, which is something that I know you're not that keen on doing, you will notice that jewellery as well as other kinds of material riches is often given by the eastern victims of the crusades as the real motivation for the westerners coming over to fuck their shit up. Not so much just like God, whatever, holy stuff. More to take our land and jewels and stuff. So that's how it's like with cypherpunk.

More questions? I'll give one, because when you were saying cypherpunk, I was thinking, oh, it's a plurality of punks here and there, like Diffie Punk, Kerr Punk, Cypherpunk. Are you accepting personally the notion that there will be plurality of different playgrounds and people trying to go their own subculture of punk? I mean, these are memes. These are like little ideas that might gestate and germinate into ideologies of movements.

So they're going to bloom, or at least they're going to be planted and people will discuss them and see if they resonate with them and see if they germinate and turn into movements. Ultimately, I think you can be your own punk. Yeah, we don't, there's no monopoly on the memes of ideation, let's say. And also I saw that there's a poet on your cap, and I was thinking there's a poetry in there, and there's the Julio from Poetic Technologies. What sort of poetry have you seen with this industry and the potential?

Well, I'll just say for the full disclosure, there is a subunit of the 0x Salon platform, which I helped to run, called the Cryptographic Poetics Researchers Union. So I would argue that the poet, especially in the business of cryptography, the poet is themselves encrypting and decrypting, or let's say transforming and mutating meanings. The poets have the sharpest knives, much like the satirists. So they can go to places with the creative license that others can't. And the other thing is that poets aren't working in Web3 and they aren't funded by Web3 treasuries, so they can say what the fuck they like, and they're not going to get hacked by their super bosses.