Tag: Agora! Anarchy! Action!

Know Your Revolutionaries

People often make the mistake of assuming anarchists and sovereign citizens are the same. As an anarchists I’m tired of this. For those of you wanting to know the difference between the two let me summarize.

Anarchists: Believe nobody should rule anybody else.

Sovereign Citizen: If you say the right magical incantations, file the correct paperwork in triplicate, and sign government documents with your name in all capital letters followed by “under duress” the United States government will be forced to allow you to live free by its own rules.

I hope that clears things up.

Make Dispute Resolution Part Of Your Agreements

Because of my gift for taking a great deal of bullshit and condensing it into a reasonable size (I also have a gift for the reverse) I’m often asked to help people develop agreements. More often than, if I’m not involved in the initial drafting of the agreement, I find myself looking at pages and pages of very specific points.

These days it seems very common for people to try to spell out every possible way a party involved in an agreement could violate it. This tendency results in pages of text pointing out specific actions that are in violation of the agreement. Everything from how close one individual can be to another (sometimes exact measurements in inches are even listed) to what language they can use often appear as points amongst the seemingly billions of other points.

When I’m asked to review one of these agreements I start with the Bill and Ted principle, which is “Be excellent to each other. Party on, dudes.” Such a basic principle seems to leave an almost infinite amount of wiggle room for people to be assholes. The real trick is to also include dispute resolution as a point in the agreement.

Every business contract you’ll read has a dispute resolution point but a lot of agreements for non-business groups lack them. A dispute resolution point is one that explains how a dispute amongst members will be resolved when they arises (and one will arise). Usually this take the form of a few individuals, either from within or outside of the group, respected by members of the agreement being appointed official dispute resolvers.

The old agreement may have said, “Personal space includes any and all space within one foot of an individual.” Through the magic of a dispute resolution point any disagreement over what constitutes personal space can be brought before the dispute resolvers. Instead of having to imagine every possible way members of an agreement could come into conflict (which is impossible anyways) an agreement can now fit on a notecard.

This method is effective because it’s simple enough for anybody to understand and flexible enough to handle changing dynamics within a group. Considering our society’s love for a practically uncountable number of laws and lawsuits regarding those laws it’s easy to see what even basic non-business agreements have blown up into 10 page documents. But sanity can be restored. All that’s needed is appointed a few trusted individuals to resolve disputes amongst members.

Brew Up Some Agorism

One of the hardest questions for a new agorist to answer is, “What kind of agorist business can I start?” Coming from a society that has very little entrepreneurial spirit left, which isn’t surprising when children are told their highest aspiration in life is to get a college education so they can work for somebody else, it’s not surprising that this question is so commonly asked. Hell, I still ask it (although I’ve finally got some solid ideas). In my experience the first step in answering that question is identifying a market with relatively high demand, a low entry fee, and an abundance of regulatory burden.

Beer is a good example. Drinking is a common pastime for people, getting into home brewing is affordable for people of even modest means, and there’s a massive amount of regulatory burden:

In a video posted in September by the group Learn Liberty, two college professors break down the cost of a brew to reveal who and what is responsible for that price tag.

According to Peter Jaworski of Georgetown University and Christopher Koopman of George Mason University School of Law, the answer is simple: taxes.

Koopman says that up to 44% of the cost of a beer can be attributed to federal, state, and local taxes. Furthermore, Koopman says that beer is “one the most highly regulated industries across the country,” which causes additional problems for craft breweries.

Any market where 44 percent of the cost comes from taxes is a good place to start when you’re not interested in collecting taxes. The real barrier to entry in the beer market is learning how to brew a halfway decent beer. Fortunately we’re living in a renaissance period for home brew. Information on getting start is not only widely available but the people who already know how to do it are usually happy to teach newcomers (especially if they’re selling brewing equipment or otherwise profiting from teaching).

Some may be concerned that the home brew market is saturated at this point. If everybody who brewed beer sold their creation under the table for profit that might be the case. In my experience most of the people who brew beer, like most people in general, are overly concerned with being a good law-abiding citizen and therefore do not sell their beer or sell so little that it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Because of this beer is still, in my opinion, a good market for a budding agorist to dip their toes into.

Micro Hosting

I’ve been talking about the need to decentralize the Internet. Unfortunately handing so much power to a handful of domestic companies has proven to be a boon for the surveillance state. This is one of the reasons why I self-host most of my online services. I don’t like the current centralized environment and am therefore trying to walk the walk in decoupling myself from large service providers. Admittedly the current environment makes things like self-hosted e-mail questionably useful in most cases, mostly because almost everybody uses Gmail and therefore most email ends up on Google’s servers anyways, it does demonstrates the feasibility of a strategy (and as I wrote elsewhere every revolution has a humble beginning).

For the purposes of this post I’m going to create a phrase that’s probably already being used unknown to me: micro hosting. Micro hosting is an idea that came to me at AgoraFest after hearing a speaker urging agorists to develop a million one dollar ideas instead of one million dollar idea. A micro host is some schmuck like me with a server, a business Internet connection, and knowledge in system administration providing services to a handful of people. The key to this model is that you have a million small hosts providing services instead of one large host. Decentralization not only makes it more difficult for the State’s surveillance apparatus but also makes it difficult for the state to enforce it’s massive number of regulations.

Another advantage to this model is that it could finally weaken the grip advertising has on Internet services. Each host is obviously free to develop whatever business model they choose. For people like me that business model would involve getting paid by users instead of advertisers. Under such a business model privacy becomes a feature instead of a liability since convincing customers to pay for your service over, say, Google’s would likely require assurances that you’re not snooping through their communications for advertising purposes.

Recently I’ve put out feelers to people I know who are concerned about privacy to see if there’s an interest amongst them to have me host their e-mail for a small charge. Surprisingly there has been quite a bit of interest in not just e-mail but other services as well. Since I’m already running the services the overhead of hosting more people is pretty minimal. In other words this makes for a great agorist business idea since the risks are fairly minor and the prospect of turning a profit exists.

As I move forward with this this plan I’ll post updates. My reason for this is to inspire other agorists, specifically to start a small business such as a micro host. An additional reason, of course, is to inspire other people who may not be agorists to start a micro host to help decentralize the Internet.

The Illusion Of Choice

Like Christmas, presidential elections seem to assault our world earlier every cycle. The 2016 presidential election is still more than a year away but is already clogging our news feeds with coverage. At the rate things are going the 2020 presidential election will begin ramping up before the 2016 election has even concluded!

What’s especially frustrating is how irrelevant elections are. I know, people will tell you this election is the most important election in our nation’s history. Republicans will argue that any of their candidates, no matter how sickening they may be, are a better alternative to Hillary or Bernie. Democrats will claim the country is doomed if any of the Republican candidates wins. The Green and Libertarian parties are apparently suing in the hopes of getting their candidates the same national coverage the Republican and Democratic candidates enjoy. And throughout all of this you will have to suffer friends, family members, and pretty much everybody else telling you how you need to vote.

Herein lies the problem, there is no choice. There are multiple candidates but that’s different than a choice. A choice would be a ballot box for abolishing offices or the entire government. But no ballot in the United States, as far as I know, has an option for abolishing an office. Your “choices” are to either be ruled or be ruled.

This is why I can’t bring myself to give a damn about any election. I have no interest in being ruled. The only interest I have is to advance individual freedom, which cannot be realized through elections.

AgoraFest’s Mesh Network

AgoraFest happens at Villa Maria, which is a retreat in Frontenac, Minnesota. There’s a lot of things to like about the location but Internet connectivity isn’t one of them. For the most part the only Internet accessibility is in the castle. None of the cabins have Internet connectivity and you’re out of luck getting it via your phone unless you have Verizon.

Because we’re modern day agorists we want Internet connectivity. After all, how else can we use Bitcoin or quickly look up the spot price of silver and gold? To solve this I was charged with creating a mesh network.

Mesh networks, for those of you who don’t know, are networks where each node is capable of connecting directly to every other node. The advantages of this kind of setup the lack of central failure points. It also allows you to expand a wireless network as far as you have nodes.

Commotion Wireless is a firmware built on OpenWRT that aims to make setting up mesh networks simple. I loaded this firmware onto a series of Ubiquiti NanoStations and PicoStations. The NanoStations are directional and have an advertised maximum range of five kilometers and the PicoStations are omnidirectional and have an advertised maximum range of 500 meters. Both are outdoor rated so weather conditions such as rain don’t require us to shutdown the network.

In all we used four NanoStations and five PicoStations for the setup. With this setup we were able to extend the Internet connectivity at the castle to all three cabins and a tent we setup for flying drones and launching model rockets. Speeds weren’t great because the Internet service at the Villa isn’t fast but we managed to get a reliable connection spread across a pretty wide area.

Setting up a mesh network wasn’t only a good idea technically, it helped demonstrate the feasibility of mesh networks to attendees. I gave a talk about mesh networks at AgoraFest, which included my overarching plan to get networks to establish mesh networks and eventually interconnect them to bypass centralized Internet service providers. In other words I want what Guifi has accomplished in Catalonia. Obviously that will take a great deal of convincing, resources, and effort but there’s no better place to find a group of willing people than AgoraFest.

I’m Off To AgoraFest

You’ve probably noticed this week has already been slow. That’s because I’ve been busy finalizing things for AgoraFest. In addition to the talk I’m giving on cryptography as it relates to agorism, I’m also the head of the mesh networking team so I’ve been flashing a lot of access points with Commotion Wireless firmware.

Anyways, I’m out for the rest of the week. New content will return next week.

Child Terrorized For Being Intelligent And Having Drive

What happens when a child with a Middle Eastern name and appearance builds an electronic clock and brings it to school? If you said, “He’s awarded for his efforts and drive to learn,” you’d be incorrect. The correct answer is he’s terrorized by the State:

Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.

He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for.

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”

He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”

[…]

Police led Ahmed out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., his hands cuffed behind him and an officer on each arm. A few students gaped in the halls. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor — the one “who knows I’m a good boy.”

Ahmed was spared the inside of a cell. The police sent him out of the juvenile detention center to meet his parents shortly after taking his fingerprints.

After interrogating, cuffing, and parading him around like some kind of captured beast the police magnanimously decided that they had terrorized the poor child enough and announced they would not pursue charges. Of course they never went so far as to apologize for their absurd overreaction:

Irving’s police chief announced Wednesday that charges won’t be filed against Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School freshman arrested Monday after he brought what school officials and police described as a “hoax bomb” on campus.

[…]

Asked if the teen’s religious beliefs factored into his arrest, Boyd said the reaction “would have been the same” under any circumstances.

“We live in an age where you can’t take things like that to school,” he said. “Of course we’ve seen across our country horrific things happen, so we have to err on the side of caution.”

Every officer involved with this travesty should be arrested and charged with kidnapping. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of bullshit. Circuit boards along do not make a bomb. Unless there was some clay or other such material that at least kind of resembled an explosive attached to one of those boards there were no grounds whatsoever for anything more than a cursory glance.

The levels of idiocy that has to take place for these events to spiral so far out of control is almost awe inspiring. You need a teacher to not bother with looking at the clock and using a bit of critical thinking to contact the police. Then you need the police to against not bother taking a look at the clock and applying a bit of critical thinking. On top of all of that you have to have a society full of people who are so fucking compliant with anybody holding a badge to not storm the jail, arrest the police, and hold a trail to determine their possible guilt and punishment.

That school doesn’t deserve a student like Ahmed. Hell, this society doesn’t deserve a student like Ahmed. Students that demonstrate intelligence and drive should be somewhere where their knowledge and skills will be appreciated and advanced. My only hope is that this fiasco doesn’t stomp down his drive and he’s eventually able to start an underground company and make billions of dollars without paying one cent in taxes.