A generation ago, multi user timesharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection. Then, strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. It's time we had the same thing for the fast spread of open knowledge, personal ownership, and use of generative AI through commerce based coordination. Pause for a quick minute.

Recognize the reference? Now, jump in a way back machine, whatever a generation ago means where you are, and the late night mailing list daisy chains you find in the more cypherpunk edges of the map. Hit different. Fast forward again. We're now face to face with the transformative power of open knowledge, personal ownership, and generative AI.

Yet, a lot of conversations around these concepts, sub just as echo chambers for techno optimism and misplaced despair. Let's challenge that complacency of both kinds. Encryption today already extends well beyond just securing text or financial transactions. Sophisticated techniques now allow for granular, contextual controls over different forms of data, be it smart contracts or decentralized and autonomous assets. This form of conditional encryption changes both personal autonomy and economic leverage directly, allowing people to set the terms for how and when our data and assets are accessed and transferred.

While the term trustless is used a lot, it's more accurate to say trust is being extended and diffused across the network. You have the power, along with everyone at the edges of the network, to create more trust with each signed, check pointed, and token gated social interaction and each bit of collaborative work. And pure, peer to peer commerce is moving away from centralized platform dependency, with public goods dev funding getting in on the action too. Instead of one abusive relationship with VCs as the only path to market, selling NFTs, prints, apparel, and other goods directly to collectors who want the added bonus of backing open source infrastructure and open research you align with is a healthier and increasingly competitive alternative. But while we're looking at the future present, we have to ask.

Where have all the cypherpunks gone? I read recently a medium piece on the history of Lance Sassaman, questioning if he was in fact Satoshi himself. I don't know if we can ever know, but I lean a bit more towards the Bourbaki theory myself. No matter your take on who Nakamoto was or is, the piece is worth a read for its foundational look at how we got here. It's called Len Sassaman and Satoshi, a Cypherpunk History.

Plain and to the point enough. In it, it gets stuck quick, drawing attention to the profound cost of losing so many classical hackers to suicide. It echoes Drew Len's story, a luminary in cryptography and by extension, the cryptocurrencies and decentralized networks. It contrasts the fateful life of Len, etched into the Bitcoin blockchain as a tribute with the disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto. Around the same time, Glenn, a self taught technologist and dedicated cypherpunk, was deeply into cryptography, public key infrastructure, and peer to peer networks, Walking under blockchain inventor David Chaum and collaborating on PGP encryption, Len was also staunchly committed to personal liberties.

Yet despite, or maybe because of, his brilliance and contributions to open source privacy technology, Glenn's struggle with depression and functional neurological disorders led him to take his own life at just 31. This dark interlude fits hand in glove with Satoshi Nakamoto's Vanishing Act. After a flurry of code commits and forum posts that ignited a new financial paradigm, Futoshi stepped away, leaving an unspoken legacy and a fortune untouched. The undervalue of this story is the inescapable tragedy of other prodigist minds, Aaron Swartz, Ilya Zhitomirskiy and James Dolan lost to the sane inner demons. Aran is another story dedicated to the complete open sourcing of publicly funded research and knowledge.

Sometime in 2008, maybe before Satoshi released the Bitcoin white paper, maybe after, Swartz said it best like this, Information is power. But, like all power, there are those that want to keep it for themselves. We need to take information wherever it is stored, make copies and share them with the world. But we can't. Really.

Because the leverage is regulated to charity, activism and hope for a better day on a platform owner's terms. Open access to information and the decentralization of power. It sounds nice in theory, but where does it meet the practical needs and wants of most people who we know aren't listening to a monologue with a nice musical backdrop, on the finer points and mysteries of the cypherpunk ethos, and how open knowledge sparked and fueled the onslaught of growth, new technologies, and much higher standards of living in a few short hundred years. As much as I love another throwback to Ziegler, bringing up Virginia Postrel's words about him again, well, let's let it sink in first. When Mark Ziegler did his weaving manual in the seventeenth century, it's not that no weaver had ever written down weaving patterns before.

They had. He says they must have because you couldn't keep all these things in your head. But other people couldn't see them. His idea, which was an idea that was in the air at the time, was that knowledge will advance faster if it is shared. And now, let's get entirely extend the earlier question with me.

Where are all the cypherpunks working on fully decentralized and open source large language models and the conditionally encrypted coordination of access to the machines these Clubhouse goods needed to run any model worth its tokens. It might be hard to see the thread winding its way through from the roots of what encryption has done for us and at what cost to brilliant lives gone too young. And from there, to fine grain toggles of event listening yeses and nos, switching on and off conditionally programmed access to everything. The decentralization question too of whether it's enough, It's not to decentralize only the most traditional and static of the tech stack. Or if we really need, we do, to decentralize power and the ability to build economic leverage across the board.

It might be counterintuitive, but with as much raw engineering skills and ideological fervor as Swartz, Ziegler, and the cypherpunks who got us here, we need now to decentralize the machines that are used to generate every new bit of text, audio, image, video, architecture, and everything else we can imagine. Before the concentration of the only capital that matters, the machines that create and amplify value are closed off to most of humanity as we bifurcate into a quickly and shitified arms race. More on that in the next go round. This script ends here for today, but not what you do now. Don't wait for the next episode to guide you.

Write it yourself and make it a story worth clicking.