Crypto-Tribalism:
Folk & Faith in the Digital Age

^[1]1,014 words

Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay has taken a clear stand in opposition to technical solutions to government oppression in a recent Wired interview, “You can’t beat politics with technology ^[2].” He’s in the eye of a seemingly technical and esoteric debate, but there’s more than meets the eye. Its resolution will dictate the boundaries of politics for future generations.

I disagree with him. You absolutely can beat politics with technology, and we have succeeded at doing so time and time again. Technology, not political lobbying, broke the music industry’s monopolistic cartel. Technology is what allowed Arktos, Counter-Currents, and others to break Radical Traditionalism out of the samizdat ghetto to which Western politics had relegated it. Technology is what empowered nearly everybody reading this to break out of the Matrix of Modern system politics in the first place.

We can engage in politics to discourage system politicians from persecuting us, but that always will be and can only be of secondary importance, a rear-guard action while the primary energy is invested in developing systems which are integrally immune to state oppression. Contrary to what Sunde would have one believe, public key encryption technology truly does empower us to communicate and conspire without government interference. There’s still important work to be done in realizing its full potential beyond the geek and hacker communities, but there are no impediments to that development.

Just as few realized the explosive potential of the humble “hyperlink,” few currently realize just how consequential it is that we’re rapidly approaching an age when communication, conspiracy, and currency are all beyond the reach of the System. The Crypto-Anarchist community ^[3] gets it, but their limited understanding of politics and human nature naturally compels them to see “anarchy” following the victory over this reigning authority. Completely ignorant of the Authority which preceded the power structures at the service of global finance capitalism, they can be forgiven for this error.

There will be no abyss of anarchy in a world where the state is no longer capable of controlling its minions in the way it currently does. Human behavior will be regulated by the bonds of family and community, by religious authority, and by the fixed constraints on humanity which nature and instinct put in place. Humans are intrinsically tribal and traditional, a fact which will be made manifest as this anti-tribal and anti-traditional regime is weakened. The welfare state and its socioeconomic framework allows and encourages men and women to think of themselves as atomized individual atheist islands, an illusion which cannot survive outside this Matrix.

When the Internet first emerged, there was an assumption that since the protocol was intrinsically global and anti-hierarchical, that it would necessarily have a globalist and anti-hierarchical political impact. The very Leftists who at first championed the Information Revolution and the spread of ideas are increasingly subject to a bunker mentality regarding the Internet, carefully monitoring any and all feedback and pining for the good old days before the Internet empowered all those pesky regressive bloggers and commenters to promote ideas they had successfully purged from public discourse.

I’ve been a Bitcoin evangelist ^[5] for years. Regretfully, few in our movement grasp just how pivotal the capacity to convert political power and influence into a regime-resistant form will prove to be in the grand scheme of things. While the capacity to transmit ideas is a critical first step, the capacity to invest in those ideas is the necessary next step in translating them into temporal threats to the prevailing political order. As our enemies know all too well, currency is power in liquid form. With Bitcoin and related technologies, we now have the capacity to exercise power beyond their reach.

As pivotal as Sunde’s Pirate Bay was in bringing about the first wave of resistance to the political order, his decisions and actions are relegating it along with Napster and Silk Road to a first generation of threats to this regime which failed for one reason or another (never due to a failure of the algorithms) to actualize their revolutionary potential. This is to be expected, as the men and women stumbling into the Crypto-Tribal Age can’t be expected to realize how their work fits into an overarching meta-political mega-trend.

We don’t need a constitutional First Amendment, because encrypted communication guarantees that for us. We don’t need a constitutional Second Amendment, because the successor to Silk Road will guarantee that for us. We don’t need to End the Fed, because massively distributed crypto-currencies will subvert the Federal Reserve by providing superior alternatives for storing and transmitting wealth. I’m not opposed, per se, to fighting for our liberties within this System, but the real struggle is for liberation from this System.

Sunde fails to grasp this, failing to grasp just how revolutionary his Pirate Bay project was. He regrets failing to shut down Pirate Bay on its tenth anniversary, and is working on some stupid centralized communication project which will require us to trust him and his servers with our private communication. The fatal problem with the Pirate Bay is exactly that, its entrusting Sunde to stewardship of the System. Data encryption and the advent of massively distributed algorithms empower us all to have systems which aren’t dependent on Peter Sunde, Ben Bernanke, Mark Zuckerberg, or Larry Summers. Humanity will no longer be hostage to these “experts” and their whims.

Our global technocratic elites will soon be relieved of the whip hand. It’s difficult to state how important this development is. It’s the foundation of an entirely new global political order superseding the Marxism, Fascism, and Liberalism Alexander Dugin and other New Right intellectuals have identified. It’s too early to predict precisely how it will play out, but the most likely mega-trend is that those political forces which are capable of exerting influence and control without military technology or financial manipulation will be ascendant. Those include the more hierarchical churches, the aristocracies, the traditional fraternities, and, most importantly, the local paragons and familial matriarchs and patriarchs.

Source: http://www.tradyouth.org/2013/11/crypto-tribalism-folk-and-faith-in-the-digital-age/ ^[6]