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It is very likely that the Indian government will announce significant regulations on big internet related technology companies. It is worth thinking about how the global and local contexts will interact to determine the politics of regulation. Globally, countries from Australia to America are trying to come to terms with the power of big tech. To simplify, the world was presented with two visions of the internet technology space: California Libertarianism and Chinese Authoritarianism. Chinese Authoritarianism is going strong. The California Libertarian model had astonishing success. But it is now coming under pressure because of its internal contradictions.

There are several issues. First, many of the big tech companies were not, as they claimed, mere platforms, but began to curate and generate their own content, creating possible conflicts of interest. Second, there is a suspicion that big tech companies were acquiring more monopoly power; this was not a world of free competition. There is a curious conjunction of technology and finance here. The more companies were valued, the more they needed monopoly rent extraction to be able to justify those valuations. Hence the business model and the need to drive valuations came into direct conflict with the culture they professed.

Third, the algorithms were not subject to accountability. They were, as Frank Pasquale put it, creating a black box society. There was an irony in an opaque algorithm being the instrument of a free, open and equitable society. Fourth, while the companies had immense economic impact, their distributive implications were more mixed. They empowered new players, but they also seem to destroy lots of businesses. The news business, for example, which is the subject of regulatory concern in Australia, has revolted against these companies. These companies themselves became the symbol of inequality of economic and political power.

Fifth, these companies seemed to display the ultimate hubris: Set themselves up almost as a sovereign power. This was most evident in the way they regulated speech, posing as arbiters of permissible speech without any real accountability or consistency of standards. Whatever one may think of the necessity of banning Trump from social media, the prospect of a CEO exercising almost untrammelled authority over an elected president, which was cynically exercised when that president was on the way out, only served to highlight the inordinate power and potential of hubris these companies could exercise. Facebooks reaction to Australia is also nothing but hubris. If there is anything that characterises the politics of our age, it is the demand that economic and technological forces be re-embedded in sovereign control.

And, finally, there is also greater wariness of the effects of big tech on democracy and democratisation. The social legitimacy of California Libertarianism came from the promise of a new age of democratic empowerment. But as democracies became more polarised, free speech more weaponised, and the information order more manipulated, greater suspicion was going to be cast on this model. All democracies are grappling with this dilemma. Given that Scott Morrison called Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the Facebook issue, it might seem that the Quad might need to be an alliance against both Chinese Authoritarianism and California Libertarianism!

But these global concerns will also be refracted through different national contexts. Poland, a government veering towards authoritarianism, ironically, made laws preventing media companies from censoring tweets. In India, this global context will now be used as a pretext to advance the regimes aims. Some of these aims are unexceptionable, but they will also be twisted to unsavoury ends. India will justifiably worry about its own economic interests. India will be one of the largest bases of internet and data users in the world. The argument will be that this should be leveraged to create iconic Indian companies and Indian value addition. India can create competition and be more self-reliant in this space. Pushing back against big tech is not protectionism, because this pushback is to curb the unfair advantages they use to exploit an open Indian market.

A few years ago, India would not have thought this way because of its desire to court the United States. But the context has now changed. There is a genuine ideological push to Atmanirbhar Bharat. India can also justifiably point out that in China keeping out tech companies did not make much of a difference to financial flows or investment in other areas. Will Tesla not invest because we exercise more control over Facebook or Amazon? Second, big business in India, or rather the only ones that matter in this regulatory environment, is a votary of more protectionism; it senses a business opportunity. How much we can innovate is an open question. There is a fundamental impulse in this government to potentially control the information order as much as possible. It courted foreign tech companies so long as it suited its purposes. But the minute there is a whiff that they will be a threat to this governments idea of an information order and cultural control, the government will find ways to tame them. In the long run, it would rather deal with domestic monopolies, however badly run, to create what this column called The RSS Meets Jio World (May 1, 2019).

So as new regulations affecting tech companies are announced, it will be important to distinguish between regulations that are solving some real problems in this space, and regulation that is using this larger context to exercise more control. There are complicated issues here that genuinely need addressing. How do we enhance Indias technological capabilities? What is a better institutional structure to protect democracy and freedom from both untrammelled executive power and unaccountable corporate power? Does the new regulation of technology genuinely help create a level playing field or does it create new local monopolies?

But it will be easier to address those issues if the government showed a principled commitment to liberty, a manifest commitment to root out crony capitalism, an investment in science and technology commensurate with Indias challenges, and a general regulatory independence and credibility. We should not assume that just because big tech is being made to kneel, the alternative will be any better. Just look at television news for example: An indigenous, thoroughly broken and corrupt system that is almost totally amenable to government control. We need to grapple with the internal contradictions of California Libertarianism. But we will also need to be wary that these contradictions do not become the pretext for slowly legitimising Chinese Authoritarianism.

This article first appeared in the print edition on February 20, 2021 under the title Between California and China.The writer is contributing editor, Indian Express

Link:
Big tech regulation can solve real problems, or only increase state control - The Indian Express

There is a great deal of nonsense being written and spoken about this weeks power failures in Texas, which left a number of people dead and millions without power or potable water, sometimes for days.

Among the more prominent nonsense peddlers was the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who blamed the mess on wind power and other renewable fuels, while warning that proposals like the Green New Deal which would zero out fossil fuels would more or less be the end of civilization as we know it. There was also Rick Perry, the states former governor, who seemed to suggest that using more renewables would lead to socialism, and Representative Dan Crenshaw, who blamed the whole thing on that liberal bastion otherwise known as California. Bottom line, Mr. Crenshaw wrote on Twitter, Texass biggest mistake was learning too many renewable energy lessons from California.

These statements were catnip to progressives, who mainly blamed the states libertarian energy system, which, they claimed, sought to keep prices low at the expense of safety.

None of the poppycock from Texas politicians is of any help to the scores of Texans who spent long hours and days freezing in their homes. It has also obscured the real reasons for the disaster and diverted attention from an important lesson: that the nations energy delivery system, not just in Texas but everywhere, needs a radical overhaul if it is to withstand future shocks and play the role that President Biden has assigned it in the battle against climate change.

Both sides have elided an interesting piece of Texas history. The person who put wind power on the Texas map was a Republican named George W. Bush. As governor, in 1999, Mr. Bush signed a law deregulating the states power market, at which point Texas started building loads of wind turbines. Wind now supplies about a quarter of the states energy diet natural gas is about twice that and Texas is far and away the biggest supplier of wind energy in the country and among the biggest in the world.

But wind, which supplies a smaller fraction of power in wintertime, had little to do with this weeks disaster. The simple truth is that the state was not prepared for the Arctic blast. A few wind turbines froze up, but the main culprits were uninsulated power plants run by natural gas. In northern states, such plants are built indoors; in Texas, as in other Southern states, the boilers and turbines are left exposed to the elements.

There are two lessons here to be absorbed and acted on. First, the countrys energy systems must be robust enough to withstand whatever surprises climate change is likely to bring. There is little doubt that a warming climate turned Californias forests into tinderboxes, leading to last summers frightening wildfires. The scientific connection between climate change and extreme cold is not as well established, but it would be foolish to assume that it is not there. (The dominant hypothesis is that global warming has weakened the air currents that keep the polar vortex and its freezing winds in check.) As the Princeton energy expert Jesse Jenkins observes in a recent Times Op-Ed, we know that climate change increases the frequency of extreme heat waves, droughts, wildfires, heavy rains and coastal flooding. We also know the damage these events can cause. To this list we should now add deep freezes.

If building resilience is one imperative, another is making sure that Americas power systems, the grid in particular, are reconfigured to do the ambitious job Mr. Biden has in mind for them to not just survive the effects of climate change but to lead the fight against it. Mr. Bidens lofty goal is to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury and to eliminate fossil fuel emissions from the power sector by 2035. In the simplest terms, this will mean electrifying everything in sight: a huge increase in battery-powered cars and in charging stations to serve them; a big jump in the number of homes and buildings heated by electric heat pumps instead of oil and gas; and, crucially, a grid that delivers all this electricity from clean energy sources like wind and solar.

This, in turn, will require from Congress a cleareyed look at the climate-driven calamities that have beset California, the Caribbean and, most recently, Texas. It will also require an honest accounting of their great cost, in both human and financial terms, and of the need to guard against their recurrence in the years to come.

Go here to read the rest:
Opinion | The Lessons of the Texas Power Disaster - The New York Times

To The Readers Forum:

First, let me say that l am neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

I am a registered Libertarian and l have no love for either of the major parties. Your editorial of Feb. 10 criticizing Rep. Tom Reed for his failure to try to remove another elected member of the House of Representatives seems to me to be extremely misguided. Your stated premise is that Rep. Reed should base his actions on his perceived personal interests.

What about his oath of office to protect and defend the constitution of the United States? Who decides who represents the 14th congressional district of Georgia? I contend that that choice belongs to the people of that district who elected her by a substantial majority. They deserve their representation.

Whatever her opinions, she has a right to them and a right, within legal bounds, to express them. lf the voters in her district decide that they wish to remove her they can do so in the election next year. ln the mean time she should be able to express her fringe right wing views in the same way that many Democrat representatives express comparable fringe left wing views.

Robert Peterson,

Kennedy

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

Link:
People Of Georgia's 14th Congressional Make Decision Who Will Occupy That Seat - Jamestown Post Journal

In the great game of the world economy, the final boss victory for crypto would be to rob nation-states of the ability to issue legitimate money at least, that would be the libertarian win condition.

Everyone who has been around long enough in crypto, if you scratch off the surface, is a closeted but very committed political radical, Preston Byrne, an attorney and past startup founder, told CoinDesk.

In Byrnes view, libertarianism is a close cousin of the original philosophical core of crypto: cypherpunk. Cypherpunks want control over how much anyone knows about them, but libertarians have a more profound agenda: They want to eliminate coercion of any kind. So it makes sense that libertarians would gravitate to a technology that undermines nation-states ability to mandate which money we all use with each other.

The two viewpoints have always been intertwined, as internet prophet and early Intel engineer Timothy May attested in 1994s The Cyphernomicon:

"A point of confusion is that cyberpunks are popularly thought of as, well, as 'punks,' while many Cyberpunks are frequently libertarians and anarchists of various stripes. In my view, the two are not in conflict."

The crypto industry is not just talking about a payment system, Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures told CoinDesk. For the most part, were talking about a monetary system. Those are like deeply, deeply political things, because whomever administers the monetary system has enormous leverage in the way that society looks, Carter said.

Crypto is philosophical technology or maybe technological philosophy.

Thinking about money

Aside from payments, in its generally accepted definition, money also provides the basic unit of account and a way to store value.

Money that can flow freely and whose supply wont expand just because a politician wants to build some highways, pyramids or award some no-show jobs gets right to the heart of what libertarians are all about. The 1997 book The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg foretold a future where civilians shop for a state much as they shop for electricity suppliers in deregulated markets.

The book predicted that money would play a key role in undermining state authority, largely due to nation-state preference for continually downgrading the value of their currency. Remarkably, they predicted a money native to the internet (cybermoney) would be key to this undoing. They wrote:

"This new form of money will reset the odds, reducing the capacity of the world's nation-states to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual. A crucial part of this change will come about because of the effect of information technology in liberating the holders of wealth from expropriation through inflation."

This argument that the internet would change how value gets transferred seems like a natural extension of the work of Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek, who published The Denationalisation of Money in 1976, a book that advocated for competitively issued private forms, a model that sounds much like the current explosion in stablecoins we are seeing today.

The economist-philosopher was also an advocate for decentralization long before Satoshis white paper, contending that central planning is cumbersome and daft.

We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used, Hayek wrote in his 1945 essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society.

How do people, in Hayeks conception, coordinate their activities? They do it with prices.

The Market is the sum of all voluntary human action. If one acts non-coercively, one is part of the Market.

With prices, people are able to put their knowledge about local supply and demand into the system without revealing to others exactly what they know, much as zero-knowledge proofs allow a person to answer a question without revealing any more information than is essential.

Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge, Hayek wrote 75 years ago. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.

The ability to coordinate society simply through price signals rather than politics is crucial to the libertarian worldview, and many suspect those price signals get warped by, for example, a government that has so much power to influence the economy on a macro scale.

It is far better, in this view, for such signals to circulate through an economic system (like Bitcoin) that is indifferent to particular circumstances of a historical moment.

Crypto as bricks

Libertarianism, as developed to this point, discovered the problem and defined the solution: the State vs. the Market, philosopher Samuel Konkin wrote in 1980s New Libertarian Manifesto. The Market is the sum of all voluntary human action. If one acts non-coercively, one is part of the Market. Thus did Economics become part of Libertarianism.

Like the old man in the Legend of Zelda game who handed the hero, Link, his double-powered white sword, blockchain is what enabled libertarians to start standing up a little economy all their own.

It wasnt until crypto that libertarians started to build things people actually use that reflected libertarian values. Successfully doing so caused the CEO of a publicly traded company, Overstock.com, to bow multiple times and say Im not worthy when he first encountered ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees at a gathering of bitcoiners.

Voorhees built a significant nook within that crypto-libertarian economy and Overstocks founder could see it. Voorhees company has seen setbacks on its ideal, but its moving fast to get back in line with its founders values.

Meanwhile, the architect of the software that powers EOS quit working on it because the reality didnt square with his views about the primacy of individual liberty.

Thinking a way out

Bitcoins creator decided it would have a fixed supply: 21 million coins. Similarly, theres no more DAI in the world than MakerDAO users are willing to post collateral for and borrow.

These arent just design choices. They are statements.

Carter contended the blockchains that are interesting tend to have relatively well-developed views on society, and then that is manifested in their protocol.

Theres a class of philosophers today who are native to the internet. Its not lost on some of these thinkers that cryptocurrencies arent just software but also a way to express conviction about the social world.

They are a way to incentivize people to play a new kind of game in new ways.

Bitcoin has shown the true face of the banking system. It was all about monopoly.

Ole Bjerg is a philosopher at the Copenhagen Business School who has written extensively about money, including about bitcoin. He and Byrne pointed out that libertarian skepticism extends beyond the state to the massive corporations that rely on it to persist.

In a conversation with CoinDesk, Bjerg contrasted bitcoin with the banking industry, which he said has no conviction. Banks and the financial system, they would portray themselves as: We are capitalists. Theyd say, We need competition and innovation. Innovation is good.'

But then when entrepreneurs actually try to compete with a genuinely new, disintermediating way to manage payments, Bjerg continued, then all the sudden the banks become state socialists and say: No, no, we can only have one currency. What I see is bitcoin has shown the true face of the banking system in a way. It was all about monopoly.

James Ellis is an independent philosopher and scholar who has been investing in cryptocurrencies for some time. Ellis is better known as Meta-Nomad to his followers online. He said the project of cryptocurrency was sort of philosophical from the start. Not anarchic but detached. An element of leaving something behind and finding your own space.

Ellis believes crypto fits into a larger theme he likes to pursue, that of exit. Cypherpunks started articulating ways for citizens to make their activities illegible to the state, and Bitcoins arrival presaged a future where even whole economies could be built invisible to terrestrial authorities.

If you can cordon off your own currency then arguably you can cordon off your own state, Ellis said. This is the idea that cypherpunks and libertarians share, but not all libertarians are cypherpunks and not all cypherpunks are libertarians.

The concept of a libertarian

If the libertarian is the hero of some kind of Mega Man-esque game, what does the hero do after the rug pull of the final boss? He declares: No more bosses.

Bosses in video-game legend are defined by one thing: firepower. To the libertarian mind, thats no way to be a boss.

One of my goals when Im talking about politics with people is to get them to see the gun in the room, Chainstone Labs CEO and Satoshi Roundtable co-host Bruce Fenton told CoinDesk in an interview. An OG both in bitcoin and libertarianism, Fenton invests to express his viewpoint.

A worldview needs practitioners like Fenton and theorists who can help fellow travelers envision the next steps after they are victorious. Travis Corcoran is a Kickstarter-enabled novelist who self-describes as a Catholic anarcho-capitalist.

To him, a philosophy offers at least one of two things: a way of understanding the world or a way of thinking about what is the good life, he told CoinDesk.

Previously a software developer, Corcoran was on the cypherpunk mailing list back in the day and he was sold on cryptocurrency from the jump, but he is best known as the author of the Aristillus Series, a sort of libertarian what-if story in space. Cryptocurrency hasnt popped up in his books yet, but he promised that it is coming.

Libertarianism doesnt even want to talk about understanding the world, Corcoran said. Libertarianism says: The best way to interact with each other is without force, without top-down controls.

This notion of eschewing force or coercion emerged several times in reporting this essay, and it is key. Libertarians disagree on a lot, but they have consensus around the Non-Aggression Principle, that force must not be used against people or property.

Similarly, Preston Byrne said, Libertarianism doesnt command you to do anything. It commands you to not command.

Arthur Breitman, the architect of the governance-oriented blockchain Tezos, put it another way. The thing that defines libertarianism for me is consent, he said. We are a social species. We are meant to collaborate with each other.

Specialization is for insects.

The nice thing about Tezos, Breitman contended, is that no one is forced to use it. The same, so far, can be said of all blockchains, though all bets are off once central bank digital currencies arise.

Libertarianism always has a bit of a macho, do-it-yourself and damn the torpedoes veneer that is no doubt off-putting to many. It is the kind of thinking that can lead a gang of entrepreneurs to attempt to found a utopian enclave in another nation on another continent, only to have it devolve into hopeless infighting.

Indeed, the philosophys favorite novelist might be science fictions Robert Heinlein, author of both the paean to free love, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the revolutionary vision, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein articulated the high expectations of the do-it-yourself ethos in his novel, Time Enough for Love, when he wrote:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Libertarians, in other words, can be a little extra, as the kids might say perhaps even sometimes a bit self-delusional (suburban dads cosplaying as Delta Force). Or they can at least come off that way to those who dont buy in. Fenton granted to CoinDesk that the school-of-thought has some image problems.

But realistic or not, takes such as Heinleins make it a bit surprising to hear libertarianisms proponents propound this non-aggression consensus, an idea that sounds while not exactly pacifistic more like pacifism than the typical, say, Western head-of-state would endorse.

But while libertarians have that one point in common, they differ in many ways. Byrne provided the most helpful way of breaking out the various categories without making it over-complicated. He described three varieties of libertarians:

Corcoran loosely identifies with the last category. Any time a bunch of friends get together and accomplish something without violence, thats an example of anarchy, Corcoran said.

To Fenton, whatever kind of libertarianism an adherent gravitates to, crypto complements it. Its a free and open voluntary system and thats exactly what it means. Whereas, most of our relations in the world, they are coercive, Fenton said.

In other words, the bosses of our modern economy can force everyone to use a particular currency because they have the heavy artillery; governments have the monopoly on legal violence.

It's not all about the money

As cryptocurrency has progressed, its become clearer that it offers new pathways for large groups of people to come to agreement. In crypto parlance: consensus.

Many hope that the importance of distributed consensus could extend beyond maintaining a ledger.

Consensus is very hard. Thats why the game of statecraft today is largely played by some version of majority rule. Some theorists think we now have the tools to do better.

Rachel ODwyer, now a lecturer at Dublins National College of Art and Design, wrote an essay in 2015 called The Revolution Will (Not) Be Decentralized: Blockchains, which dealt with the re-centralizing tendency of technology while noting some special hope for blockchains, the data structure that underlies most major cryptocurrencies.

"Where questions about how to reach consensus, negotiate trust and especially scale interactions beyond the local are pervasive in the commons, the blockchain looks set to be a game changer. In this context, the blockchain is presented as an algorithmic tool to foster trust in the absence of things like social capital, physical colocation or trusted third-party management."

ODwyer only wrote to point out only that cryptocurrencys underlying technology opens up a new design space for decision-making, but her point would be echoed in 2017 by the then-CEO of bitcoin infrastructure firm, Chain, Adam Ludwin, in an open letter to Jamie Dimon, the chairman of JPMorgan Chase.

Ludwin wrote, Decentralized applications are a new form of organization and a new form of software. Theyre a new model for creating, financing and operating software services in a way that is decentralized top-to-bottom.

Ludwin would go on to say that blockchains really only had one advantage over other kinds of software, but that one advantage had a distinctly libertarian tinge: a means to circumvent coercive powers ability to silence.

Censorship resistance means that access to decentralized applications is open and unfettered. Transactions on these services are unstoppable, he wrote.

Thats the new thing about crypto that distinguishes it from other assets. Its just really hard to confiscate.

That was back when the industry was more about transactions. These days, its more about individuals holding onto value themselves in a way thats also non-intermediated and resists the states or the banks ability to assert control. To that point, Carter brought in another philosopher, John Locke, who offered a theory of property in his treatises on government.

Thats quite central, I think, to the crypto doctrine, to reasserting extremely strong property rights that cant really be interfered with. Thats the new thing about crypto that distinguishes it from other assets. Its just really hard to confiscate, Carter said.

Confiscation resistance might be another feature the industrys libertarians will one day tout alongside censorship resistance; in the U.S., authorities already seem to have taken notice.

The libertarian proposal

So in our imagined libertarian video game, the hero doesnt beat the final boss in a face-off. The libertarian does it by making the states firepower irrelevant.

In other words: Today everyone only uses state-backed money. Maybe one day some people start using the internets money and maybe eventually too many people are using it for the state to stop it. Thats a rug pull.

Said another way, the libertarians dont break the princess out of the castle; they build another castle beneath the castle. Then the princess slips from one to the other when Bowser isnt looking.

That is to say, censorship and confiscation resistance are just the beginning. After that there is getting along together in a decentralized fashion, and thats just a totally different way of life. Its a game with no win condition.

Libertarians seem to believe people could live side by side more amicably by building a system around what people are capable of rather than around protecting against what might harm them a system geared more for the next opportunity than the next larceny.

For example: If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, Hayek wrote in 1945. We must solve it by some form of decentralization.

For Katelyn Sills, a libertarian-sympathetic but not allegiant software developer and blogger, the real question is whether or not people get to choose what kind of decision-making system they are subject to.

Like Breitman, consent to be governed is an important philosophical sticking point, even though she knows that any piece of land can really only have one government (for now).

But blockchains allow her to tinker with new arrangements for finding consensus in a way almost nothing else does.

What crypto is giving me is the ability to experiment with societal-level, institutional-level building blocks, with structures and designs, without having to go off and create an entirely other country. The costs are just lower tremendously. And I think that allows for a lot of innovation, Sills said. Its very consensual.

Which is another way of saying what Fenton said: pursuing ways of living among others without guns in the room.

Sills has more sympathy for left-of-center issues and causes than many others in the industrys libertarian cohort, and perhaps for that reason she liked the thought experiment laid out by another internet-native philosopher, the rationalist blogger Scott Alexander, who wrote on Slate Star Codex in 2014 about a nation where there were a bunch of closely packed islands (an archipelago). Each island had a different government but it was really easy for people to shift their citizenship and residence from one to another.

Alexanders ultimate point was that the internet made it more feasible for people to create societies they liked and to largely live within them to exit at the margins.

"I already hang out with various Finns and Brits and Aussies a lot more closely than I do my next-door neighbors, and if we start using litecoin and someone else starts using dogecoin then Ill be more economically connected to them, too."

Alexanders larger point is that this is the beginning of a much more robust societies-within-societies moment. More than subcultures, even: groups intertwined by shared tastes, ideas and currencies.

Implied in Alexanders exhortation is that if everyone can interface more with folks who want to live as they do, then they should also STFU about others who dont (but no one does).

Agorism

Obviously, the libertarian willing to metaphorically build the castle beneath the castle is more the anarchist than the legalist, in Byrnes construction. So what kind of society would be built in that castle?

One future that came up again and again in CoinDesks conversations was one described by the aforementioned Konkin. In his manifesto he described a way of thinking he called Agorism, an ideology where all problems could be solved in the market. Adherents would practice counter-economics, a black market, not because of what it sold but because its participants abjured established authorities.

Though he wrote in an era where the dominant audio format was the cassette tape, his ideas make more sense if you just add blockchain. Konkins writings square nicely with Dan Larimers vision of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which has been showing progress in 2020, in fits and starts.

As Corcoran put it, When things are lurking in the corners or on the outside long enough it really does build up momentum and it can start to do things much better than the market-dominant product can.

Win condition

But ideological purity seldom wins history.

See the original post:
Bitcoin History: Libertarianism and the Economy's 'Final Boss' - CoinDesk - Coindesk

During the pink-salt-lamp-lit evening classes she'd conduct at Yess Yoga in Minneapolis, Marnie Bounds frequently shared a mixture of metaphysical philosophies about the "subtle body," a person's energetic layers that transcend the physical, while folding in her own astrological interpretations.

After the pandemic started, Bounds' classes moved online and she added a weekly info session "What on Earth Is Happening?" that brought something new to the mix: QAnon.

QAnon is the movement that falsely believes former President Donald Trump has been working to destroy a child sex-trafficking cabal of Satanists run by prominent Democrats and celebrities. Its adherents include a handful of Minnesota politicians along with members of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, including horn-helmeted, self-declared shaman Jake Angeli.

But the QAnon movement also has found a surprising foothold in the yoga and alternative-medicine community.

Julia Szilagyi, a yoga teacher in Naples, Fla., noticed a spike in QAnon-influenced yoga teachers last spring, around the same time that people started wearing masks. She believes QAnon influencers observed the yoga community's focus on freedom and authenticity, and then lured in vulnerable yogis via social media.

"I started hearing things like, 'QAnon encourages me to think outside the box,' from people I've known and worked with for a long time," Szilagyi said.

QAnon believers are typically anti-vaccine, a view shared by some practitioners of alternative medicine.

"The anti-vax part of QAnon is deeply embedded in libertarian beliefs about the body/individual as self-property and the needle as invasion," said Jack Bratich, a professor at Rutgers University and expert on conspiracy theories. "It can connect to 'body as temple' [theories] in Western versions of yoga, where more 'natural' health beliefs also circulate.

"QAnon takes this a step further to say vaccinations are part of a deep state plan to control people through microchips."

That was precisely the view voiced by Twin Cities teacher Bounds in a YouTube video she posted in November. Bounds opined that people who got the COVID-19 vaccine might get a chip implanted under their skin. She also stated that COVID is "hugely important ... for our evolutionary process."

Since May, she has crafted regular 60- to 90-minute informational sessions for her YouTube channel, "The Time Is Now: Teachings for the Great Awakening", which has more than 170 subscribers.

Bounds and Yess Yoga did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

E. Romero, a yoga teacher in Tucson, Ariz., said she became concerned when she heard an offhand comment made by Bounds during an online yoga class, implying that protesters were somehow less enlightened than those in the know.

"That really worried me as a BIPOC person," said Romero. "There were some things she was saying that sounded almost Trumpian. I started to think, 'That's not possible I am in a yoga space.'"

How did some people in the yoga community, which uplifts care, connectedness and a holistic approach to the environment and humanity, come to embrace QAnon?

Los Angeles-based yoga teacher Seane Corn and other wellness community influencers first noticed QAnon beliefs spreading among yoga followers via social media. They called it out in a joint message posted last September. (Corn has 109,000 followers on her Instagram account.)

"Conspirituality," a podcast focused on the intersection of far-right extremism and New Age spirituality, compiled a list of nearly 50 prominent yoga and wellness community influencers who espouse QAnon theories.

The followers of QAnon claim to receive information from "Q," a self-proclaimed, mysterious "government insider" with a supposed high-level security clearance.

Since 2017, "Q" has posted cryptic messages ("Q drops") to online boards. According to QAnon, the "Great Awakening" would happen when Trump won the 2020 election. An apocalyptic showdown would ensue, destroying the aforementioned child sex-trafficking cabal and transforming America.

Neither happened, but QAnon persists.

Facebook continues to shut down QAnon pages, calling the conspiracy theory a "militarized social movement." The FBI labeled QAnon a domestic terrorist threat but Trump has said its followers "basically believe in good government."

Following President Joe Biden's inauguration, some QAnon believers have tried to rationalize the transfer of power, convincing themselves that Biden is part of Trump's plan to take down the global cabal.

Rutgers professor Bratich said QAnon's stance against masking and surveillance makes it attractive to "the influencers community around lifestyle. I think yoga becomes part of that."

He said QAnon is as much a religious movement as a political one: "QAnons are developing a sort of holy war/spiritual warfare around good and evil. Trump is good, and he's going to destroy the evil Satan-worshiping cabal. It's pretty classic Christian demonology."

QAnon's presence in the yoga community sounded an alarm for Minneapolis-based teacher Serita Colette, who was born in Kerala, India, a renowned center for the spiritual practice.

"These people sound very lost and disassociated from the tradition," she said. It's an example, Colette said, of the ways that yoga has become subject to cultural appropriation. At the same time, she said, QAnon is creating "a deeper distaste for communities of color, which, by and large, have not been met with great experiences in the white-dominant [American] yoga world."

For longtime yogis, QAnon's presence disrupts the core of yoga.

"If you are going to honor yoga's philosophy and roots in the practice, you are either one or the other either a yoga teacher or a QAnon person," said Szilagyi. "They can't exist together."

@AliciaEler 612-673-4437

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Conspiracy theories of QAnon find fertile ground in an unexpected place the yoga world - Minneapolis Star Tribune