Foreword

In recent years, the crypto ecosystem has expanded into unforeseen territories. Memecoins have proliferated, bringing with them a new, energetic class of crypto traders. NFTs, DeFi and DAOs rose to power as essential primitives for emboldening crypto communities. Rumors of regulatory unrest are met with significant advances in zero-knowledge cryptography, which promise to make anonymity practical for crypto users.

Yet as an ecosystem, crypto's growth is propelled not by its flowers — the various technical phenomena that constitute crypto — but by its roots: the philosophy from which crypto originates. It is the contention of this journal that the roots of crypto are firmly agorist. Agorism is crypto's mythical substructure, its source of nourishment and its anchor.

Agorism is an applied, practical philosophy. Its primary tactic is called counter-economics: the sum of all black-market activity. Agorism is counter-economics wielded consciously. In the words of its founder, Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3):

As more people consciously convert their work and leisure to the counter-economy, the State loses both control and sustenance, like a vampire losing blood and victims. The self-conscious counter economy is called The Agora (and the libertarian/counter-economists are called agorists).

All manner of parallel societies, privacy extremism, and even Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) track back to agorism. Most famously, agorism inspired Silk Road, a Bitcoin-enabled darknet marketplace that in 2011 was among the earliest projects to forecast crypto's insurrectionary potential. Its founder Ross Ulbricht proclaimed “we are all agorists", stating “I'm out to turn unconscious agorists into conscious active ones".

Echoes of agorism are everywhere in contemporary crypto. Web3 is the extension of agorist principles into all sectors of society — governance, culture, finance. Still, crypto is mostly composed of “unconscious agorists". The motivation of this journal is to change that.

This journal has been edited with the following agorist principles in mind.

1 ▪ Reject political divisions.

Konkin situated agorism on the extreme left of the political spectrum. This was a strategic choice to widen the possible recruitment base to radical voices from across the partisan divide, with revolutionary tendencies emphasized above any particular political allegiance. This journal adopts the same approach and refuses to discriminate between thinkers. Any anti-state revolutionary is a potential ally.

2 ▪ Welcome dissonance.

Discourse necessitates conflict. In the several journals he curated, Konkin deliberately included voices that did not resonate with each other, proclaiming: “Everyone appearing in this publication disagrees!". This was critical to his frequent usage of the term “alliance", defined as a “handling together of sovereign units for a goal and then disbanding". Agorism teaches cooperation while nurturing difference.

3 ▪ No compromises.

Agorism was born from conflict: Konkin rejected the formation of the Libertarian Party and all party politics — what he called “partyarchy" — and maintained a strictly revolutionary ideology. Following a brief attempt to destroy the Libertarian Party from the inside, in 1973 Konkin left party politics forever, taking his followers with him.

Crypto today finds itself at a similar juncture. In response to unjust regulations, people within crypto are calling for the creation of crypto-focused political bodies to engage in party politics. This journal gives voice to the alternative:

Agora! Anarchy! Action!