20 Interviews is an interesting read, and the author is smart to link Snowden to this indirectly.
I agree with the author’s assessment that a/the counterculture to the early 2000’s global tech MAGA FAANG thunderdome will come out of that… space in the way described: some mix of Snowden, crypto, compass meme, e-deologies.
If you read Snowden’s bio, he was fully schooled in the internet being a new space of free thought and open information.
If you read 20 Interviews, Nick Land comes up… a lot… in interviews with edgy teenagers.
One of the worst Intel leaks recently, the discord/Ukraine leaks, came from a what looks like a perma-online discord resident. You can guesstimate that he was in the direction of the political compass culture.
Crypto (cryptography and cryptocurrency) itself comes out of the original internet-establishment/surveillance state haters.
Jack Dorsey is firmly an old school cypherpunk.
I don’t think there’s a cohesive label for all this outside “cypherpunks” although that feels dated. but it is a cohesive group and this article was interesting to read as it seems rarely Linked in public.
I see it, there’s a group that is extending the cypherpunk ideologies of the 90’s combined with the nihilism of watching climate change/COVID failures combined with internet edge-lord roots. I think it’s a potent force. It has so far:
- brought consumer encryption into the world
- caused two of the largest intelligence leaks in recent memory
- love it or hate it, invented cryptocurrency and permanently changed conversations about what money is and how it’s accessed to include a new $5bil global market
I agree with the author’s assessment that a/the counterculture to the early 2000’s global tech MAGA FAANG thunderdome will come out of that… space in the way described: some mix of Snowden, crypto, compass meme, e-deologies.
If you read Snowden’s bio, he was fully schooled in the internet being a new space of free thought and open information.
If you read 20 Interviews, Nick Land comes up… a lot… in interviews with edgy teenagers.
One of the worst Intel leaks recently, the discord/Ukraine leaks, came from a what looks like a perma-online discord resident. You can guesstimate that he was in the direction of the political compass culture.
Crypto (cryptography and cryptocurrency) itself comes out of the original internet-establishment/surveillance state haters.
Jack Dorsey is firmly an old school cypherpunk.
I don’t think there’s a cohesive label for all this outside “cypherpunks” although that feels dated. but it is a cohesive group and this article was interesting to read as it seems rarely Linked in public.
I see it, there’s a group that is extending the cypherpunk ideologies of the 90’s combined with the nihilism of watching climate change/COVID failures combined with internet edge-lord roots. I think it’s a potent force. It has so far:
- brought consumer encryption into the world
- caused two of the largest intelligence leaks in recent memory
- love it or hate it, invented cryptocurrency and permanently changed conversations about what money is and how it’s accessed to include a new $5bil global market
- brought tor and vpns onto the scene
- brought you the Arab spring