Comment by croissants | Hacker News Reader

Comment by croissants | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago I read a book called Maximum City. The premise is "let's look at the lives of several people [including a powerful police officer, a dancer, low-level criminals, high-level criminals, very poor people just getting by and, remarkably, a young Hrithik Roshan] in circa-2000 Mumbai". I also happened at the same time to be within hearing distance of a few discussions that touched on crypto-anarchism.

The thought I remember having is that crypto-anarchism seemed to require being embedded in a well-functioning state, but that this assumption was kind of just waved away. I had this thought because so many of the people in Maximum City are just at the mercy of the slightly more powerful people around them -- paying protection money, not getting paid for work, paying bribes -- and there's not a well-functioning government that can help them. It seemed like said people would love a lot less anonymity ("hey! look! this guy is threatening to beat me up if I don't pay him every month! that's illegal!"), and would be well-served by tech infrastructure that makes them more visible.

> The thought I remember having is that crypto-anarchism seemed to require being embedded in a well-functioning state, but that this assumption was kind of just waved away.

Not sure about anyone else, but speaking from my own philosophising, you're subtly wrong/missing the point: it requires not having any of your critical physical substrate/infrastructure embedded in poorly-functioning state. The distinction is that, in a lot of (over-)simplified models, there is no physical substrate, so what kind of state it's embedded in is a vacuous question. Compare, eg, any (over-)simplified model of computation that doesn't consider physical problems like cosmic ray bitflips or hard drives dying in fires/wearing out (ie, most of them).

More visible to whom? To the well-functioning state? I don't follow. The whole premise of anarchism is that a truly free society is one without a state. The presumed benefit of the kind of visibility you're talking about also rests on the assumption that the state is aligned with the interests of the wider population, whereas anarchism proposes that the state is fundamentally misaligned with collective and personal freedom.

Maybe your point is that because crypto-anarchism appears to rest on this state-friendly assumption, it isn't "real" anarchism. I don't know too much about crypto-anarchism and haven't formed an opinion either way, but if it's as cozy with anarcho-capitalism as the quotes at the end make it out to be, I'd probably agree with you.

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Detour: This thread has a lot of downvoted comments, but not a lot of replies. Further, a lot of the downvoted comments, like the above, are well argued. I, for one, would love to see more involved engagement.

Anyway. Anarchism is actually a broader concept than believing that state is fundamentally misaligned with the collective. That's a branch of anarchism if anything. A better definition of anarchism is the belief that every institution or authority has to be able to justify its presence and should be dismantled if it can't (quoting Noam Chomsky). Following that defintion, I'd say that crypto-anarchism is anarachism where redistribution of power is done via technological means, with an emphasis on technological solutions to privacy and trust.

You make a critical point, actually in light of the OP topic. The building of crypto-anarchist tools might lead to the insight that certain forms of state have little coercive power (because the tools restrict or redirect the actions the state can take), and so anarchists are okay with the state.

The only anarchistic definition of The State I've ever heard is some kind of body with a legal monopoly on violence. If you're going off that definition, you'd have a hard time justifying it to anyone, as it's pretty much fundamentally counter to self-determination. It's true that the state (and capitalism in general) are fundamentally technological, so successful anti-state victories (say, making it harder for the state to manufacture consent and bypassing the propaganda filter) would be significant. But that's only "certain forms," as you put it. At the end of the day, the state will at some point resort to its go-to tactic of violence. If crypto tools restrict or redirect state action, that doesn't mean the state is suddenly okay, it just means anarchists are winning.

You're right. I wasn't really trying to give a broad definition - I was making a narrower argument - and I agree that Chomsky's is a better definition. I guess my "whole premise" phrasing was a bit overly broad.

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