Writings
Writings
Manifestos, essays and foundational texts.
Josiah Warren· 2026· 970W
Building Freedom Without Gatekeepers
Third in the Spirit of Freedom trilogy ([part one](writings:spirit-of-freedom), [part two](writings:fall-of-democracy)). Shifts from diagnosis to construction: parallel institutions, peaceful exit, and the Logos stack as infrastructure for plural opt-in societies with consent by default, portability, and competition between communities — not secession, but lawful coexistence and self-sovereignty coordination without gatekeepers.
Josiah Warren· 2025· 2.1kW
The Fall of Democracy (and What Comes After)
Second in the Spirit of Freedom trilogy ([part one](writings:spirit-of-freedom)). Diagnoses democratic institutions as functionally hollow — captured elections, the Conflict Machine, and design failures that cannot self-correct. Distinguishes voting from genuine consent, surveys global democratic backsliding, and points toward voluntary, code-auditable governance infrastructure as what comes after.
Josiah Warren· 2025· 1.2kW
What Happened to the Spirit of Freedom?
First in a Logos Press Engine trilogy. Argues that what people mourn is not democracy's death but the fading of the Spirit of Freedom — self-governance through voluntary association and consent, not ritual elections alone. Contrasts colonial pamphleteering and printing presses with today's algorithmic consolidation of voice, and calls for new experiments in decentralized legitimacy without waiting for permission.
pcaversaccio· 2024· 906W
The Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto
An Ethereum-specific return to cypherpunk first principles. Written in 2024, the manifesto argues that the ecosystem's legitimacy depends on defending privacy, security, and censorship resistance as core commitments rather than optional features.
Rachel-Rose O’Leary· 2022· 1.4kW · 9:26
Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle
A lunarpunk manifesto disguised as market analysis. The essay argues that solarpunk's optimism and transparency are structural fragilities — when regulatory pressure mounts, transparent systems expose their users and collapse. Anonymity and encryption are not optional extras but the precondition for crypto's antifragility.
Satoshi Nakamoto· 2008· 3.2kW
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
The nine-page paper that launched Bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency era. Published in October 2008 under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto to the cryptography mailing list, it proposed a purely peer-to-peer electronic cash system eliminating the need for trusted third parties by combining a proof-of-work chain with cryptographic signatures.
Julian Assange· 2006· 1.9kW
Conspiracy as Governance
Assange's December 2006 essay, published on iq.org while he was developing the ideas that became WikiLeaks, models authoritarian governance as a conspiracy — a connected graph of communication links among elites whose collaborative secrecy defines their power. Using graph theory metaphors (nails, twine, link weights, total conspiratorial power), it asks how to reduce a conspiracy's cognitive ability to plan and adapt.
Nick Szabo· 2001· 4.3kW
Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes
Szabo's 2001 essay argues that every "trusted third party" (TTP) invoked in a security protocol is itself a security hole — a vulnerability that must be plugged at great cost. Certificate authorities, DNS registries, and similar institutions became the most expensive and failure-prone parts of PKI and the web not despite cryptography but because protocol designers assumed TTPs away instead of minimizing them.
Wei Dai· 1998· 1.4kW
b-money
Wei Dai's 1998 proposal for anonymous digital cash and contract enforcement on an untraceable network — a direct precursor to Bitcoin. Written in response to [Timothy C. May](people:timothy-c-may)'s crypto-anarchy, it describes money creation through proof-of-work, pseudonymous transfers, and smart-contract-like arbitration, all without trusted institutions.
John Perry Barlow· 1996· 861W
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
John Perry Barlow's 1996 manifesto for digital freedom and an autonomous Cyberspace. Written in Davos the day after the United States passed the Communications Decency Act, it addresses "Governments of the Industrial World" as obsolete authorities attempting to impose territorial law on a borderless networked society.
Eric Hughes· 1993· 874W · 5:10
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Foundational text of the cypherpunk movement. Hughes argues that privacy in the electronic age cannot be granted by institutions — it must be seized through cryptography. "Cypherpunks write code."
Timothy C. May· 1988· 506W · 3:19
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
A short, incendiary prediction: cryptography will make it possible for individuals to communicate, trade, and contract in total anonymity — beyond the reach of any state. Written by Timothy C. May in 1988 and distributed at the founding meeting of the Cypherpunks in 1992.
David Chaum· 1985· 11.3kW
Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete
Chaum's landmark *Communications of the ACM* paper (October 1985) argues that large-scale automated transaction systems need not build a dossier society. Instead of universal identifiers linking every purchase, message, and credential, individuals could use separate digital pseudonyms with each organization — unlinkable even if all institutions collude.
Václav Benda· 1978· 659W
Paralelní polis
Benda's 1978 essay coins the concept of the parallel-society: a network of independent institutions — schools, courts, media, cultural spaces — built alongside the totalitarian state rather than in direct opposition to it. The goal is not to overthrow the system but to make it irrelevant.
Václav Havel· 1978· 30.7kW
The Power of the Powerless
Havel's October 1978 essay, written for a planned Czechoslovak–Polish dissident volume and circulated in samizdat, became a manifesto for Charter 77, Solidarity, and anti-communist opposition across Central Europe. Paul Wilson's English translation introduced the greengrocer parable: ritual display of regime slogans without belief, sustaining "living within the lie."
Friedrich Hayek· 1945· 5.5kW
The Use of Knowledge in Society
Hayek's 1945 *American Economic Review* article is among the most cited papers in economics. It reframes the problem of economic organization: even if marginal conditions for optimum allocation can be stated mathematically, society's real problem is that knowledge of circumstances is never given to a single mind in consolidated form — it exists only as dispersed, local, and often tacit bits held by separate individuals.
16 texts