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Nexus X HumectressThis quote from Leopold Kohr summarizes perfectly why I am an anarchist. The only remaining problems would be the prevention of power from reconcentrating or recentralizing (like the Macedonian conquest of Greece or the trajectory of US history), the possibility of localized conflicts (like Athens vs Sparta or the Bloods vs the Crips), and localized systems of abusive authoritarianism (like Jonestown).
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Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
Isn’t it about time you discussed the implications of my “Assassination Politics” idea and essay? https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
In 1995, without being aware of his existence or that of his book, I fixed David Friedman’s “Hard Problem” from his 1973/1989/2014 book, “The Machinery of Freedom”:
Friedman correctly identified that there was a problem: How does an anarchic region defend itself against other nations that are still being operated by conventional, “tax and fund a large military” systems? Why can’t such a nation simply march in, take over, and re-generate the government? Friedman took a stab at a solution, without much satisfaction.
All anarchists should admit that without a solution to that problem, ‘anarchy’ was inherently unstable and undefendable. Without being aware of Friedman’s existence or his book until about 1996, I understood that there was a problem, a “show-stopper”. I too couldn’t figure out how to solve the problem, until I realized the solution in January 1995.
Nobody else figured it out. I did. Friedman gets credit for describing that problem, which he deserves, but I actually describes the solution.
Shouldn’t I get some credit for that?
Your contributions in that area are extremely important. What you have done is essentially update the old anarchist idea of propaganda by the deed and as well as the traditional concept of tyrannicide and apply it within the context of digital technology and fourth-generation warfare.
Mr. Bell, I’m very familiar with your work. I first read your essay back in 2006 or so and was worried that just accessing it would get me an FBI file!
I assume that by now, many tens of thousands of people will already have read it. I doubt that the authorities, by now, are concerned that “one more person” has read it,
I pay close attention to comments about it by regularly (monthly) doing a Google-search for ‘ “assassination politics” “bell” ‘ . If anyone had noticed a significant flaw in it, it would have been publicized.
My position is that anybody who calls himself an “anarchist” (as I do, and have since 1995, when I wrote AP) should have been aware that David Friedman wrote of the “Hard Problem” of having a stable, peaceful, and protected anarchy, in his 19973/1989/20014 book, “The Machinery of Freedom”.
Put simply, it was obvious that anarchism simply wouldn’t work without an actual solution to that “hard problem”. Yet, I strongly suspect that the vast majority of “anarchists” were either entirely aware of this fact, or at least chose to pretend to not realize this.
I solved David Friedman’s “hard problem” in 1995. I await this solution being fully implemented.
I’ve seen some questionable attempts at implementing your solution on TOR’s Dark Web. But I assume they are either scams or simply half-hearted attempts.
There was a claim of an attempt to implement it in late 2013 by a person calling himself “Sanjuro”, but apparently nothing ever came of that.
More recently, the combination of Ethereum and Augur allows the operation of ‘death prediction markets’, but there may be technical differences with AP as I described it, which won’t induce people to use it for assassination. I’m not sure of this, because I have chosen to not look at it in any detail. (And, I’ve avoided talking to the operators: We might have great conversations, but I don’t think that would be…wise now.)
But that could change just as soon as the operators want, I suspect.
The great breakthough of Ethereum is that it is a distributed computer system: Instead of a program running at a specific location, on a specific computer, it spreads the work so that a program runs on at least thousands of different computers, perhaps millions of them. That is a technique that my AP essay did not anticipate. It ensures that the program will continue to run, even if a large number of computers get shut down. There is no centralized ‘off switch’ at all.