# "Seizing the Means of Seduction" by Wassim Alsindi // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025

- Speakers: [Wassim Alsindi](https://streameth.org/speakers/wassim-alsindi)
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2026-01-09
- Duration: 25:07
- Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, congress, ethereum cypherpunk, buenos aires, argentina, vitalik buterin, privacidad
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-UunCXjdl6kc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UunCXjdl6kc

## Description

Wassim Alsindi from 0xSalon brought theoretical piece about "seizing means of seduction" and going through playwords with cypherpunk, sapphirepunk, memes and culture and politics.

Explore more

https://wassim.pubpub.org 
https://0xsalon.pubpub.org 

Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress by Web3Privacy Now is the world's largest cypherpunk and human rights event. 4500 people gathering in Buenos Aires to celebrate privacy with internet freedom leaders like Richard Stallman, Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, and Eva Galperin. 

Join us in building a free internet for all.

Website: https://web3privacy.info  
Congress site: https://congress.web3privacy.info

## Transcript

[applause] All right, great. So, I haven't got that long. I might have to run relatively quickly through uh quite a broad swave of research. So, I'm promising you uh a proposal which is that we must seize the means of seduction. And hopefully we'll get to the point where uh that will become clear what I mean. Is this the All right. Great. Okay. First small print. This is a provocation exploring an extremely specific purist position that I don't wholly share, but I at least think it's an interesting one to explore. Many might find these ideas objectionable, and that's kind of the point. I don't hold the stronghold I don't strongly hold these opinions myself and I would not die on these hills. Lol. Okay, I know it's late in the day, but can I get a GM? Good morning, GM. GM, mornings are good. This is a reference to a greeting among Bitcoin and blockchain users and followers on social media. This 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. Unkind, possibly. Let's see. So, we're here at the Cipher Punk Congress. So, am I going to talk about cyberpunk or am I going to talk about its negative? I'm going to first introduce to you a concept that I cooked up for the first cipher cyher punk congress in November last year in Bangkok, which I call cifher punk. And cifhpher is the Arabic word for zero. And that's actually where cipher and zero in western languages come from. And my proposal is that Ethereum isn't actually cipher punk. Never was. But it can be cypher punk. Okay. So let's look at the ethmology, the history of this phrase. Cipher punk itself. This playful fusion of cipher and punk and cyber punk came from Jude Milona aka St. Jude uh who was a prominent early figure in hacker culture. of the late 20th century. So, as you know, the cipher punks advocated for the use of strong cryptography to achieve privacy and security in our increasingly digital world. And so, like this phrase originally came that the concept of cifur as zero came from Arabic. The Arabs borrowed it from India and Sanskrit contains the concept of shunya. And you could even trace this concept of the nothing, the void and the zero as a computational number uh back to Babylon and back to Mayan civilizations. Uh okay, let's move on. So I want to talk to you about utopia. And this is something that Dyra mentioned earlier about the warning to not take the technutotopians at their word. Utopia begins with a promise. It constitutes a promise. It comes from the 16th century uh uh work of Thomas Moore and it was about an island, fictional island and the idiosyncratic ways of the monastic traditions of the people that lived on it. And this concept was meant to represent no place as in this is an impossible place. This is a fiction. This is something you cannot have. But because u the letter u and au uh eu uh uh sound the same in English there's a linguistic slip between the no place and the true place. AU is the prefix for true in Greek. And I believe that it's this linguistic ambiguity that's given some space for the so-called technoutopians to insert some very damaging and dangerous uh promises uh that still persist in the world today. All right, we said that. So, here's a classic picture. Many of you probably recognize it. It's the MIT wearable computing group from the 90s, I suppose. And funnily enough, uh the uh group that I'm involved in at MIT is kind of a descendant of this. So, these are sort of my colleagues. Um and I want to read you a couple of quotes from the early days of the uh cypher punk movement. Some of them are documented in the uh printouts that you can find upstairs. Uh so, this is Timothy C. A crypto anarchist manifesto 1988. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. Well, that sounds nice. Uh, Hughes, the classic. I won't go too far into this, but I just picked out a little nugget for you. We, the cipher punks, are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money. And then from Timothy Cay again in 94, we will be the colonizers of cyerspace. And then my last stop on this historical tour is John Perry Barlow 96. The declaration of independence of cyerspace. Governments of the industrial world. You weary giants of flesh and steel. I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. hands. I'll leave it for you to decide as to whether those lofty, if a little pompous, proclamations and declarations have borne their fruit in the last three decades. So, this is what we were promised and this is what we got. And I'm going to argue that we have fallen far short of the cyber punk dream. So many of you know about the um the history and the trajectories of software and sovereignty. The one thing I wanted to pick out is this book that is often quoted by cipher punks, bitcoiners and now the network statists the sovereign individual by James Dell Davidson and William Reese Moog. And this in many ways preaged the technological turn of libertarianism for better or for worse. Many of you are familiar with um oh gosh what's his name Raymond the Raymondian concept of the cathedral and the bizaar I also won't go into it here because it's some very welltrodden history for the people in this particular room the concept of the price of anarchy and the concept of the tyranny of structurlessness are two of the uh corolleries and counterpoints to the uh the uh the sovereign individual and the cathedral and the bazaar. I will leave those as placeholders for you to look into more in the interest of time. So it's a picture I took in Bangkok last year. The gated community of Ethereum, one might say. And I want to talk today. It's my turn to give you the bad news. That's why it's so late in the day. But the reason why I think Ethereum has never been and can never be cipher punk is because of that really bad thing that happened a long time ago that we never talk about. It was called the DAO. Some of you in this room were in that room as well. I was in that room too. And there was a promise, the technoutopian promise of the DAO. We can actually do stuff with Ethereum. We can build these decentralized institutions. But and there were warnings from researchers some of whom are in the room and particularly Dynamo Mark, Vlad Zanfir and Emmen Gonay not to hurry the implementation of the DAO. hands. Well, we all know what the rest of history was. I wanted to show you this very unkind image. This is what the Bitcoiners think of web 3 and Ethereum. They think that if you can delete people's balances at will, what's even the [ __ ] point? What are we doing here? So, again, this is not what I think. I'm just don't shoot this messenger. Okay? And there's been, as you know, we're in this room together. there's been a somewhat of a renaissance of trying to bring back the idea of cipher punk uh in the context of contemporary technology. You have articles by people like Vitalic saying things like make Ethereum cipher punk again. But if you look at this article closely, you will actually see that most of the all of the examples and all of the the virtues that Vitalik is borrowing from are those of Bitcoin. So if I was being unkind, I would say that this neocypher punk movement is stealing the valor of what came before it. Okay, some of you might remember code is law. It's a very uh old-fashioned concept. I suppose now that there's that movie, people might be revisiting this idea, but a lot of people actually believed this was real 10 years ago. uh the idea that you know well Leig and Mitchell uh conceived it in the 90s in the early days of the internet and it kind of became um more of a concrete proposition with blockchains. So here's from this is from Leic in the '90s. Cod's law a form of regulation where private actors may embed their values onto technological artifacts. So meme break I don't know if some of you will recognize the image on the screen. If you don't know what it is, I'm happy for you. Practicals don't care about your feelings. Systems disregard their externalities and formalisms cannot reason about the real. Okay, so code is law. What does that even mean? Because we know that the law changes if we're going to talk about legal systems. And so realities change, technologies change, jurisdictions change, and the law changes. So if the code doesn't change, what kind of law are we even talking about here? Natural laws. Well, I would argue that even natural laws aren't laws in the ironclad sense that this uh expression uh seeks to uh borrow from. Okay. I would say there's more than a hint of algorithmic formalism in the idea of code is law and more generally in the blockchain world. I won't go into it too much, but I will just say that it borrows a an an it's an analogical leap from legal formalism. And there's a great paper from 2020, the FAT conference by Salom Villin and Ben Green called algorithmic realism, which I think you should all read. So, um, meme break, a computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision. And that's a slide from a 1979 IBM presentation. And that's Joey Tribani from Friends on the other side. Some of you might be old enough to remember who that is. Uh but in the corner in 2025, it seems that a computer can be management. And I believe that Joey Tribani is right to be concerned. Okay. So that was cifer punk and now I want to talk to you very briefly about cuff punk. And for me, cuff punk is a very specific thing which we'll get to in a minute. Another poetic refrain with a clue in it. The church and the network, zeal and time, death and [snorts] money, all sides of the same coin. And which coin? The coin that started it all, Bitcoin. I see Bitcoin as an inhuman monetary system. And I'll give you a very brief description uh about what I mean. You can read a much grander elaboration in the second issue of the philosophical journal of algorithm on an article called necro primitivism rising. Aside from a single course difficulty adjustment feedback mechanism, Bitcoin's proof of work is insensate. It cannot care about what happens outside of its borders, only that the piper is paid. Proof of work pits capital and ecology against each other in a prisoner's dilemma style paradox that could tip the balance in favor of a hot house earth. All right, you're all doubtless familiar with the way that Bitcoin works. Burning all this energy to achieve this leadless consensus and the amount of energy that Bitcoin requires only increases every time I update this slide. I have to squash the y- axis. So I call Bitcoin an indifference engine. Uh riffing on Babage's concept. As a consequence of keeping proof of work stochastic block clock regular, Bitcoin is insatiable. Furthermore, you could say it's insensate. It cannot care about what happens outside of its perimeters. So I want to then take this lack of care and like reterritorialize it from the metaphysics of Bitcoin onto our planet which is what the Bellaragian concept of network states is all about. And I'm writing a book about this which uh you know by the time the next one comes around hopefully I'll have copies in my hands. Um, Bellaraji is an extremist and he is advocating for a form of tech Zionism. And like, you don't even have to believe me. I've just screenshotted an interview with him. There's the um transcript. He says it he wants to be a tech Zionist. So this is just like you know the entirety of years of research into the Bellagian concept of network state in one meme that they think they found a gap gap in the global polace but really what they've done is ignored the global polace. So I want to give you just a brief uh uh teaser of a couple of texts one book and one article that are coming going into print very soon. So the work I'm doing at the moment is a historical analysis comparing the Bellagian form of a network state to the medieval crusader states, the crusader kingdoms that the uh Latin genociders made uh in the eastern shores of the Levant at the end of the 11th century. What if the medieval crusades never truly ended? Instead, what if they became the template upon which modernity was modeled? a blueprint that reveals its true horror in our current age of technofascism. Enough of that. Okay. With their dreams of new network state empires, resource extraction, and supremacist domination, today's tech overlords are the descendants of Europe's crusaders. Though the methods have evolved, the western will to power and conquest, the chain mail gaze itself, remains the same a thousand years later. The cultural logic of the crusade, a righteous civilization defining ideological war has left its indelible mark on the world's past, present, and possible futures. And well, if you don't dis if you don't agree with me, you'll have to read my book to find out what I really think. And this text is about to drop very soon on the Slovenian press axiom on software as fascist operating system, not unrelated concept. Okay. So what can we do about this? What can we do about this creeping onset of techno authoritarianism? Well, I would contend that we need to arbitrage against the machine. And I have some proposals on how we do that. Sorry. Okay. So I don't have that much time to elaborate these things. So I just want to give you a flavor. In ancient Greece, first in the Ionian region of the Aian and then in Athens itself, there was this concept of isomeia, equality before the law. And one of the ways that they try to make the law equal and make it resistant to coercion and capture was to use the method of sort random number sampling which has now found itself into the blockchain space. now that we have developed and if if nothing else what we've done in with blockchain is develop and uh uh improve the ways that we can use cryptography to and apply it in different contexts. So we've had cryptographic sort uh as long as um you know Sylvia Maui developed this and it got implemented in a certain blockchain which I'm not going to mention uh but we have ways of using cryptography and to harness randomness and we can apply that to make time limited citizen assemblies like juries uh to govern policies and that mitigates the problem of charismatic formation. When we have these uh charismatic strong people, authoritarians that get elected through populist manipulation of the media and of the of the of the populace at large. And then once they're in charge, they dismantle the systems of governance from the inside. I mean, we are in Argentina. I don't need to elaborate so much further. Take a look at the world around you. And the other one, oops, excuse me, is paratical governance. So, um, think about the pirate ship, think about the captain, and think about the mutiny. You're all familiar with the concept of the mutiny. What is the mutiny? Like, if the captain loses the confidence of the shipmates, they are dropped off at the nearest rank uh rock or made to walk the proverbial plank. And so, what the mutiny, the cultural logic of the mutiny really is, is a continual renegotiation of the power structures of the polity under the formalized and persistent threat of revolution. And so I think we need to bring back the mutiny. Okay. And the last thing I want to leave you with is something a bit more positive. I appreciate I've largely been the bearer of not great news. Uh so let's try and uh fabricate at least a semi-sincere happy ending at the end of all of this. And so uh earlier this year a group of uh researchers including myself with humanitarian and uh humanities and anthropological backgrounds got together to write a counter proposal to this the cipher punk manifesto. uh we thought of this as a postcipher punk movement and this uh uh bore the fruit of a document that we call the sapphire punk manifesto and I'm going to take the rest of my time until they throw me off stage to elaborate some of that. So just to call back first to Eric Hughes's 93 manifesto and I don't want to go into the details just look at the title a individual cipher punk's possessive manifesto and I believe that the title alone betrays the worldview that these documents came out of of possessive of market supremacy and of individuality and like those things aren't terrible in themselves in the theoretical domain but when we look at what has been born of the 10 years of web 3 and the almost uh uh 20 years of Bitcoin. Uh well, I see a lot of individualism and I see a lot of possessiveness. And somebody said earlier that they didn't want to say that the problem is cap capitalism. Well, I will say that the problem is capitalism. Okay, you can read this at sapphireunk.com and I'll try to uh give you the rest of my time to explain and elaborate some of that. So the old cipher punk dream is dead. Privacy isn't a bunker. It's a commons. Sovereignty is never in isolation. It's always in relation. We refuse acceleration without direction, optimization without ethics and autonomy without care. We do not merely seek privacy. We seek solidarity. We reimagine cryptographic tools as instruments of communi communion not alienation. There is no security through insecurity. The world cannot be protected by cryptography alone. We are the sapphire punks. 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. Sapphire Punk is a call for a reformation, not a rejection of the original cipher punk ideals, but a reckoning for today's world. We summon forth 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 refu receive the futures we deserve. We must collectively bring them into being. Be your own punk. And I'm quoting here from my colleague and coowwriter Sasha Shelina. Punk was rebellion stripped to its bones. Three chords, a sneer, a molotov. It collapsed under its own intensity. Burned bright and fast. What came next was postpunk, angular, anxious, experimental. The ruins of punk were rebuilt, rebuilt into cathedrals of sound, jagged, intellectual, haunted. That's a quote from Simon Reynolds, who actually spoke on this stage yesterday at a different event. Cipher Punk similarly began as a rebellion against surveillance, centralization, and censorship. It built tools to disappear, to resist the state, to exit. But now we see its children, Dows, DIDs, Zikke coordination, decentralized science, etc., not as weapons, but as instruments in a symphony of governance, play art and new forms of collective life. That's a Buterine quote from 2019. Against maximalist totality, where the cipher punks whispered, cipher punks write code. The postcipher punks ask what else can be composed from these primitives. They treat blockchains not just as infrastructure but as medium like the synthesizer was to postpunk. And just like the post punks were suspicious of utopias, the post cipher punks are suspicious of maximalism. There is no silver bullet, no pure ledger, no one chain to rule them all. There are just fragments, partialities, and interlinking protocols giving us a dissonant harmony. Enter Sapphire Punk. Born from this tension between defense and design, privacy and plurality, Sapphire Punk proposes a new frame for thinking about digital autonomy, care, and cryptographic infrastructure, where the cipher punk imagined privacy as an individual right to disappear. where the cipher punk sorry sapphire punk sees it as the foundation of relation trust and commons encryption without ethics of care is merely a harder shell around the same old oppression and then how how can we be safer how can we uh resemble and exhibit the qualities of a sapphire punk well I'm going to tell you if the cipher punk era gave us the bunker and the postcipher Punk imagination gave us the garden. Then Sapphire Punk offers the third image, the gem, the structure. Sapphire is a crystal of clarity forged under pressure impossible to fake across cultures. It has symbolized sincerity, wisdom, and protection. In medieval law, it shielded the we the wearer from poison and envy. In its metaphysics, it channels truth. To build sapphire punk architecture and infrastructure is to build durable transparency, refined insight and relational clarity. It is to believe that code can carry not just power but care. Not maximalism but multiplicity. Not extraction but craft. Sapphire refracts. It does not blind. It sharpens. It glows. And I will just finish here by giving you the call to reimagine. Come and reimagine with us new possible futures beyond the sovereign individual and the dead ends of individualism uh selfishness. Like let's see new ways through this maze. We don't have to be rats in the labyrinth of capitalism. There are other futures that we must but we must collectively bring them to bear. Thank you very much. >> [applause]