Agora! Anarchy! Action! – Page 11

Starving the Beast

There’s a lot of hoopla about large companies storing their cash outside of the United States. According to Bloomberg New a handful of large technology companies currently have $2.1 trillion sitting in offshore banks:

Eight of the biggest U.S. technology companies added a combined $69 billion to their stockpiled offshore profits over the past year, even as some corporations in other industries felt pressure to bring cash back home.

Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Google Inc. and five other tech firms now account for more than a fifth of the $2.10 trillion in profits that U.S. companies are holding overseas, according to a Bloomberg News review of the securities filings of 304 corporations. The total amount held outside the U.S. by the companies was up 8 percent from the previous year, though 58 companies reported smaller stockpiles.

Ironically it’s the progressives that are making the biggest stink about this. They are bitching that the tech companies are being irresponsible by not bringing the money back into the country where it can be taxed. I say this is ironic because progressives like to claim they oppose war, militarized police, and violations of human rights. All of those things are made possible because of tax dollars.

By keeping that money outside of the United States these tech companies are preventing the state from extract tax revenue. That means it has fewer resources to build bombs; outfit local police departments with armored personnel carriers and cell phone interceptors; and hire more law enforcers to harass minorities, the homeless, and other people powerless to defend themselves.

Every company should strive to keep as much money as it can outside of the United States. Only by depriving the state of resources can we force it to either collapse or cancel rights violating programs that it can no longer afford to fund. I would even go so far as to say this practice furthers agorist goals even if it isn’t necessarily anti-state in its entirety (since other states are usually collecting some kind of tax revenue).

Instead of condemning these companies for keeping their cash overseas we should be cheering them on. We’re not going to vote our way out of this imperialistic police state but we may be able to force our oppressors’ hand into pulling back many of its more egregious practices.

My Nomination for the New Face of the $20 Bill

Since 1928 Andrew Jackson’s face has adorned the $20 bill. A group of individuals believes it’s time for a change up and they want to see a woman’s face replace Jackson’s. I’m all for this. There’s a good reason people were lining up to kill Jackson and those reasons really should have disqualified him from appearing on our money. But the people behind this movement, sadly, have created a list of approved women. Approved lists don’t sit well with me but of the women listed I would say Harriet Tubman deserves the honor. She holds a special place in my heart for breaking the law by helping runaway slaves get to the safety of the North.

With that said, I’d like to present another nomination: Anne Bonny. The reason I want to nominate her is because she embodies the American dream. Like so many her family fled their home country of Ireland in the hopes of finding a better life in the new world. She suffered setbacks before her father made it big but was then later disowned by him. Not one to let the dream of success fall to the wayside she and her husband pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and set course for Nassau. For those of you familiar with Nassau during the 1700s it had another name: the Pirates Republic. Anne made a life for herself by joining the elite ranks of pirates. In so doing she declared herself outside the rule of the state and took up a far more honorable source of work than any politician.

For far too long our money has immortalized despots and tyrants. I think it’s we adorn our money with more respectable faces.

Cody Wilson Puts Out Bounty for Carbon Fiber 3D Printer

Cody Wilson has done a great job demonstrating the futility of gun control though his efforts of creating functional firearms with 3D printers. But 3D printing a firearm with plastic has major limitations. Fortunately a company has released a 3D printer that uses carbon fiber. Unfortunately they won’t sell to Cody because they know he wants to use it to print a firearm and the company apparently isn’t cool with that. But once you release your technology to the public it cannot be control and Cody is determined to get his mitts on one of these 3D prints. So determined in fact that he’s offering a sizable bounty for one:

Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson says he pre-ordered the Mark One about a year ago for $8,000, but was told last Friday in a phone call with a MarkForged salesman that the company refuses to sell him one, citing terms of service that disallow private citizens from using the machine to make firearms. So instead, Wilson is offering what he describes as a “bounty” to anyone who can get him MarkForged’s new carbon fiber printer.

“Anyone who’s got access to one, any reseller, any individual or business or entity that can deliver it to me, I will give them fifteen grand,” says Wilson, who has also released a YouTube video advertising his offer. “I’m going to get this printer. I’m going to make a gun with it. And I’m going to make sure everyone knows it was made with a MarkForged printer.”

Herein lies the problem for those who want to control technology. Once you sell your technology to somebody they can easily turn around and sell it. If they stand to make a nice profit they will likely be willing to sell. $7,000 is a tidy profit and I’m guessing Cody isn’t going to have any problem acquiring the printer.

Konkin: First Significant Thinker to Get Libertarianism Totally Right

Stephan Kinsella, an excellent libertarian thinker to whom I cannot even hold a candle to, made a quick post where he declared Hans-Herman Hoppe the first significant thinker to get libertarianism totally right. In the post Samuel Edward Konkin III received an honorable mention:

One of the people I’m learning a bit more about is Sam Konkin III. From everything I know about him he was pretty solid on everything—the state, IP, everything. He was in fact one of the pioneers of the modern anti-IP movement. However, he was more of a minor figure and did not have a fully fleshed out political theory that I am aware of. He is known for “agorism” and his fairly brief (but profound and correct and perspicacious) comments on IP, but ….

But he didn’t quite top Hoppe in Kinsella’s opinion. Personally I rank Konkin at the top of my list of libertarian thinkers. There are several reasons for this. He was decidedly anti-state. If I remember correctly he lived in the United States illegally and avoided having any legal source of income so he didn’t have to pay income taxes. That’s the type of consistency that is rare to come by. More importantly though Konkin managed something that few well-known libertarians have managed: he described an entire philosophy in a few short essays.

Many people mistakenly believe that Konkin didn’t have a fully fleshed out political theory but I believe he did a better job of fleshing out a libertarian philosophy than almost anybody else. Libertarianism, when you really boil it down, tends to advocate the principle of non-aggression. Where people go from there differs wildly but the foundation is simple. Konkin, by not writing lengthy books explaining a view of the One True Libertarian Theory, demonstrated he understood something about libertarianism that few others did: libertarianism shouldn’t try to describe the single proper society.

Liberty implies individuals having the freedom to form whatever group they desire with the understanding that members are allowed to come and go as they please. Non-aggression ultimately means one person cannot coerce another person into participation. If a group of individuals want to form a collective where all goods are commonly owned they should be free to do so. Any individual in that group should be free to leave if they so desire as well. While collective ownership is almost always scoffed at by libertarians it isn’t incompatible with non-aggression so long as the people participating in the collective are doing so voluntarily.

Konkin identified the opponent of libertarianism and, through his advocacy of agorism, proposed a means of destroying it using a libertarian strategy: voluntary association. By participating in “black” markets individuals can associate with one another on their terms and keep resources out of the hands of the state. It’s a simple strategy that doesn’t need volumes of material to explain. Furthermore Konkin didn’t waste time telling everybody how to do agorism in minute detail because that really is up to the individuals participating in the “black” market.

Mises wasn’t an anarchist and Rothbard and Hoppe both invested a lot of time telling people what the One Truth Libertarian Theory was. Konkin briefly described libertarianism and left people to explore the potential societies that can arise when people are allowed to associate voluntarily. In other words Konkin basically took market anarchism to its logical extent by letting markets determine what kind of associations will succeed and what kinds will fail.

Anarchists in Space

Or the Middle East. But as far as some American are concerned that might as well be in space. With the expanding threat of the Islamic State (IS) much of the Middle East is more chaotic than usual (which is saying something). Old states are crumbling, a new state is rising, and within the chaos a little bit of anarchy is cropping up:

The Democratic Union Party (PYD) and Kurdish National Council (KNC) established in the region of Rojava a society that mixes fierce libertarianism (guns are everywhere and there are no taxes – none) and Occupy-friendly anarchist thought with a healthy dose of feminism. While most Kurdish groups, especially those the US is friendly with, would some day like to establish a Kurdish state, in Rojava they have leap-frogged over the idea of the nation state into a more advanced system that they call Democratic Confederalism.

Heavily armed anti-state feminists? Sounds like my kind of crowd! If you know your Middle Eastern history then you’re aware that the Kurds have always had their own thing going. Other Middle Eastern nations have tried conquering them time and again but have never really succeeded. The IS is no different. While other Middle Eastern cities have fallen to its onslaught the Kurds have managed to keep it at bay.

According to statists anarchy should devolve into survival of the fittest. The people in Rojava should be slaughtering one another. But they’re not and that isn’t surprising. If you know the history of anarchism you know that it likes to creep up in areas of turmoil and act as an oasis to the burtchery surrounding it. Not only are the people in Rojava enjoying a far freer existence than the people around them but they’re also doing so with classic anarchist tools of organization and justice:

In the cantons of Rojava, there is a small central government with an absolute minimum of 40% female delegates, but most of the day-to-day work of running society happens at a local level, street by street and village by village. Democratic Confederalism’s chief architect, Abdullah Ocalan, says that “Ecology and feminism are central pillars” of the system he has spearheaded, something that you would have to go very far to the margins to hear from Western politicians. In Rojava, men who beat their wives face total ostracism from the community, making their lives in a highly social, connected society virtually impossible. Instead of a police force and jails, ‘peace committees’ in each municipality work to defuse the cycles of inter-family revenge killings by consensual agreements between both sides – and it works.

Like the Catholic concept of subsidiarity, anarchist societies strive to make decisions on the most local level possible starting with the individual. Rojava is doing that by leaving the day-to-day decisions at the local level and only involving more people in the decision making process when it’s absolutely necessary.

In addition to decentralized decision making the people of Rojava are opting for social ostracism instead of vengeful violence (imprisonment, lashings, and other forms of institutionalized violence) as a form of punishment. Statists often claim that anarchism can’t work because vengeful violence against bad actors in society is necessary to prevent societal collapse. But history shows that social ostracism and outlawry, that is taking away the protection of the law from those who refuse to live within it, is very effective at protecting a society from bad actors. There are few threats more frightening to most human beings than being completely cutoff from other human beings. Such is the burden of being a social species.

Obviously this won’t get much play in the media because the narrative of statism must be upheld at all costs. But for those of us who advocate anarchy it’s just another example of it working in the real world.

You Can’t Stop the Signal

If you research the development of communication technology you’ll notice two trends. First, when the technology first begins to gain popularity there are always government busybodies arguing that it must be controlled. Second, any attempt to control the technology utterly fails in the long wrong. When the printing press started gaining prominence the Inquisition wanted to control it to prevent the printing of heresy. While they achieved some limited success in controlling what was printed in certain languages, namely the languages the Inquisition officials that works in censorship knew such as Italian, the result was that people printed censored works in languages, such as German, that Inquisition officials were less familiar with. Today the same game is being played with modern communication technologies. Every government seems hellbent on censoring modern communication technologies and some states have been especially tyrannical in their efforts. Cuba is one of those states. But the watchful censors of the Cuban government have been continuously outsmarted by a bunch of kids:

HAVANA (AP) — Cut off from the Internet, young Cubans have quietly linked thousands of computers into a hidden network that stretches miles across Havana, letting them chat with friends, play games and download hit movies in a mini-replica of the online world that most can’t access.

Home Internet connections are banned for all but a handful of Cubans, and the government charges nearly a quarter of a month’s salary for an hour online in government-run hotels and Internet centers. As a result, most people on the island live offline, complaining about their lack of access to information and contact with friends and family abroad.

A small minority have covertly engineered a partial solution by pooling funds to create a private network of more than 9,000 computers with small, inexpensive but powerful hidden Wi-Fi antennas and Ethernet cables strung over streets and rooftops spanning the entire city. Disconnected from the real Internet, the network is limited, local and built with equipment commercially available around the world, with no help from any outside government, organizers say.

Never underestimate the power of kids wanting to communicate with one another. Unlike many adults, kids haven’t have the fear of the state beaten into them and therefore are more willing to flip it the bird and do as it wants. Combine this willingness to disobey with an amazing capacity to learn new technologies quickly and you have a recipe for rendering state censorship efforts impotent.

As long as we have states we will likely have attempts to censor communications. But you can’t stop the signal. Humans have an innate desire to communicate with one another and will smash through any barrier that lies between them and their friends.

Anarcho-Robots Care Not For Your Laws

I was out late helping plan a local CryptoParty so this will be all the content you will get today. But I’m giving you some gold. Science fiction often explores the ideas of artificial entities breaking laws. Usually these entities take the form of artificial intelligences that are capable of thinking and acting on their own. Under such circumstances it’s easy to see how human law can be applied to artificial intelligences. But what happens when the artificial law breaker isn’t intelligent? That’s exactly what this story is making use address:

The Random Darknet Shopper, an automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin, is programmed to do a very specific task: go to one particular marketplace on the Deep Web and make one random purchase a week with the provided allowance. The purchases have all been compiled for an art show in Zurich, Switzerland titled The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland, which runs through January 11.

The concept would be all gravy if not for one thing: the programmers came home one day to find a shipment of 10 ecstasy pills, followed by an apparently very legit falsified Hungarian passport– developments which have left some observers of the bot’s blog a little uneasy.

If this bot was shipping to the U.S., asks Forbes contributor and University of Washington law professor contributor Ryan Calo, who would be legally responsible for purchasing the goodies? The coders? Or the bot itself?

This case is another example of the legal system being unable to keep up with the advancement of technology. The article goes on to explain that the laws apply to people knowingly purchasing illicit merchandise. Because of the bot’s random nature the author could not know that they would receive illegal merchandise. But the bot also didn’t know what it was doing since its actions were random and it is incapable of thinking (as far as we know, those AIs can be pretty sly).

In all probability politicians will scramble to debate this issue, write a law, and pass it. By the time they’re done the next technological advancement will be created that acts outside of the boundaries imagined by the politicians who passed the law that was supposed to deal with the last situation. Eventually we will have to address more severe crimes such as assault or murder. At some point when machines are intelligent enough to create new machines we’ll have to deal with the idea of whether or not an artificial author is responsible for the actions of its creation’s crime. Property crimes will also be interesting once the offenses are committed by machines instead of humans.

The legal system is incredibly slow moving while technological advancements happen at a rapid pace. There will likely come a day when intelligent machines become responsible for most technological advancements. What will happen then? Will we have to put the legal system into the hands of machines as well? Will people accept that? It’s an interesting thought exercise.

Minors and Agency

As an anarchist I am greatly interested in the concept of individual agency; that is the “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” according to Merriam-Webster. Most often this interest is in relation to the state and its subjects. Subjects, or citizens as they are often euphemistically referred to as, do not have full agency because their capacity to act and exert power is limited. But the concept of agency can be analyzed in other parts of society as well. Employer-employee, husband-wife, and user-administrator relationships are all interesting areas to analyze the concept of agency.

A touchy subject amongst anarchists is agency of minors. The reason this subject is touchy is because children obviously lack the knowledge, experiences, and common sense to survive without guidance. To further complicate the issue different individuals become capable of surviving without guidance at different ages. Most societies, for reasons of simplifying legal systems, have set age ranges for when they consider an individual an adult. In the United States, for example, an individual, with the except of certain extenuating circumstances, has no legal agency until they turn 18. Setting an arbitrary age works when the goal is to create a simplified legal system but relying on arbitrary cutoffs is also extremely rigid.

What happens in situations where the well-being of a minor and the beliefs of their guardians are at odds? That’s what happened in the case of Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen who ended her life after her parents’ religious views conflicted with her needs. In her suicide note, reprinted here (the original source appears to have been taken down), she made her situation clear. Her parents, who were devout Christians (I will use the label with the understanding that I am speaking exclusively of her parents’ specific Christian beliefs, not Christianity as a whole), were only willing to accept the fact that Leelah was transgender within the scope of their beliefs. That is to say they didn’t acknowledge Leelah as transgender but instead saw her as a teenager going through a phase, a sinner, or both and felt that the only solution was to have her see therapists that also saw things within the scope of their religious beliefs. Eventually when the results they desired were not attained they isolated her by removing her from public school and confiscating her means of communicating with her friends.

Leelah’s parents took actions that most mental health professionals would oppose. She obviously had reached a point in her life where she possessed knowledge of her situation. Her words coupled with her parents’ actions lead me believe she was the expert in this matter between the three. But the legal system under which she lived wouldn’t acknowledge that and thus she had no agency in the matter. Instead of being free to pursue options based on her research she was restricted to options permitted by her parents, who seemed entirely ignorant of the matter.

Leelah’s situation isn’t unique. A very close friend (whose permission I sought and was granted to write this) of mine went through a similar situation in her youth and the result was almost the same. She too attempted suicide but survived and made it to the age of 18, or the finish line as she calls it, and was able to pursue options previously closed to her. Those options, which she wanted to pursue years earlier, changed her life for the better. Receiving the help she needed allowed to to move forward and live a fulfilling life. And it is situations such as these that make me believe that we must rethink how minors and agency are treated. Minors should be granted agency when it is clear that they’re the experts on a matter effecting their lives. Admittedly that makes for a far more complicated legal system but I also believe that justice should be the primary goal of a legal system, not simplicity.

Using Gun Buybacks for Agorism

Gun buybacks are one of the dumbest ideas that have ever popped into the heads of gun control advocates. These buybacks works off of the idea that state can steal money from the people then use a portion of that stolen money to buy some of the people’s guns. But they’re an easily exploitable. While the idea is to further increase the disparity of force between the state and its subjects, smart individuals can use these programs to recover some of the money stolen from them. Much to the chagrin of gun control advocates, gun owners are actively working to recover some of their wealth:

The self-described “gun rights activist,” who we are not naming, brought in a duffel bag full of home made, “slam-fire” shotguns (all of legal length). He was paid $50 for each of these improvised guns. This low ball price shows just how unrealistic it is for anyone but criminals to turn guns in to the police when they have these buy back programs.

While this was a low buy back, sometimes programs go as high as several hundred dollars. Activists have turned in a few dollars worth of pipes for what added up to thousands out of the police department’s pockets.

Agorists should take note of this. With a few dollars in parts from the hardware store you can net $50 or more from any police station holding a buyback. Not only does this extract wealth from the state but it specifically extracts it from one of the worst parts of the state, the police.

Encryption as Agorism

Encryption as agorism is something I’ve been thinking about recently.

Agorism, at least in my not so humble opinion, involved both withholding resources from the state and making the state expend the resources it currently possesses. Bleed them dry and not allow a transfusion if you will.

Widespread surveillance is relatively cheap today because a lot of data is unencrypted. This is unfortunate because encryption greatly raises the resources necessary to implement a widespread surveillance system.

Let’s assume the conspiracy theorists are correct and the government is in possession of magical supercomputers derived from lizard people technology. Even with such a magical device the cost of breaking encryption is greater than the costs of viewing plaintext data. In order to even know whether or not encrypted data may be useful you must decrypt it. Until it’s decrypted you have no idea what you’ve collected. Is it a video? Is it a phone call? Is it an e-mail? Who knows!

Now let’s look at reality. Even if the state possesses powerful computers that can break encryption in a useful amount of time those systems aren’t cheap (if they were cheap we would all have them). Any system dedicated to breaking a piece of encrypted data is unable to be used for other tasks. That means the more encrypted data that needs to be broken the more supercomputers have to be operated. And supercomputers take a ton of power to operate. On top of that you also need cryptanalysts with the knowledge necessary to break encryption and they don’t work cheap (nor are they in abundance). Because encryption is constantly improve you need to keep those cryptanalysts on hand at all times. You also need coders capable of taking the cryptanalysts’ knowledge and turning it into software that can actually do the work. And I haven’t even gotten into the costs involved in maintaining, housing, and cooling the supercomputers.

The bottom line is using encryption can certainly be seen as a form of agorism if you’re operating under a surveillance state like we are in the United States. Spying on individuals using encrypted data requires far more resources than spying on individuals using plaintext communications. Therefore I would argue that agorists should work to ensure as much data as possible is encrypted.