Introduction

Rachel-Rose O'Leary

Whatever advances rationality, likewise lends renewed strength to its antagonists — mysticism and folly of every kind.

We should recognize that every movement is:

1) Partly weariness with a previous movement (satiety with it, feeble spite towards it, illness) and

2) Partly a newly awakened, long dormant, pent up energy, joyous, exuberant, violent health.¹

We live in an era of end-times prophesies. All major religions, with few exceptions, believe we are living at the end of the world. Eighty-three percent of Muslims in Afghanistan believe the Mahdi — a figure that appears at the End of Time to cleanse the world of evil — will return within our lifetimes.² Many Jews and Evangelical Christians see the war in Israel-Palestine as the start of a sacred chain of events that ends in the total unwinding of our current timeline.³

Those who do not follow scripture instead reflect on Ancient Rome, anxiously interpreting its end days as if to chart our position on a doomsday map. Ours is an over-extended and faded civilization, once great, now tax-hungry and corrupt, serving bread and circuses to an increasingly listless people while barbarians tear at the gates. Who will be the next Caesar? Has the Republic fallen? Or are we already living in the Dark Ages, confusing Rome with its after-glow?

Rome, like our civilization today, was obsessed with end-times prophesies. An end-time prophesy was embedded in its very founding myth — Romulus was said to have seen twelve eagles flying over head, a sign sent by the gods that his city would stand for twelve centuries. When the Roman empire failed to die after the projected interval, a new myth was born. After three hundred and sixty five years Rome would be consumed in a cosmic fire to be reborn again in perpetuity.⁴

Arguably the most influential end-times prophesy in the cryptocurrency world is The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State (1997). While traditional prophesies rely on the interpretation of sacred texts or symbols, The Sovereign Individual bases its forecasts on something altogether more alien — economic incentives. The central position of The Sovereign Individual is that costs and rewards modify people's behavior. The greater the projected change in cost and rewards, the more useful forecasting can be. In the words of the authors William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson:

You can say with a high degree of confidence that if you drop a hundred-dollar bill on the street, someone will soon pick it up, whether you are in New York, Mexico City, or Moscow. This is not as trivial as it seems. It shows why the clever people who say that forecasting is impossible are wrong.⁵

Over a decade before the release of Bitcoin, The Sovereign Individual correctly anticipated cryptocurrency, the growth of peer-to-peer technology, mass immigration, rising inequality within developed nations, COVID-19, cyberwarfare, memetic warfare and the proliferation of encryption. While the central forecasting tactic deployed by its authors is economic, Rees-Mogg and Dale Davidson relied in part on a cyclical interpretation of history:

Among the cycles that permeate human life, a mysterious five-hundred-year cycle appears to mark major turning points in the history of Western civilization. As the year 2000 approaches, we are haunted by the strange fact that the final decade of each century divisible by five has marked a profound transition in Western civilization, a pattern of death and rebirth that marks new phases of social organization in much the way that death and birth delineate the cycle of human generations.⁶

Across punctuated moments — the birth of democracy, the end of Greece, the birth of Christ, the end of Rome, the birth of the Dark Ages, the end of feudalism, the birth of modernity — Western civilization rises and falls like an ocean swell. Rees-Mogg and Davidson tell us that a tidal wave formed over the past five hundred years — the accumulated logic of the nation-state paradigm and the limits of centralized power — is about to come crashing down. Unable to collect taxes or exercise control over an increasingly sovereign, technocratic elite, the nation-state will panic, thrash about vengefully and eventually die.

The central observation of The Sovereign Individual is that society rests on a delicate “logic of violence."⁷ The logic of violence is the underlying economic conditions under which violence pays. Subtle changes to this logic — the changing cost and availability of weaponry, the risk and frequency of seizure, the economic returns to force and theft — produce shifts in the boundaries of power. History can be reexamined from the perspective of a shifting logic of violence. Changing historical forces, such as technology, climate and microbes — what Rees-Mogg and Davidson call “mega-politics" — reshape the logic of violence. As violence evolves, the rules of the game change.

Five hundred years ago, the economic dimensions of violence in feudal Europe changed. The European population had just been decimated by plague. This caused labor shortages and the cost of labor rose significantly, breaking the legitimacy of serfdom and empowering the peasant class. In this new economic arena, two innovations transformed the logic of violence: the printing press and the discovery of gunpowder. The power of the Church declined as the printing press broke its monopoly on information and ability to gather taxes. At the same time, gunpowder dramatically increased the scale and returns to violence, giving groups with the greatest resources a disproportionate advantage. This lent power to an emergent institution: the nation-state.

The Sovereign Individual projects that our new, emergent era of human history will see a reversal of these processes — the undoing of the nation-state by a shifting logic of violence:

The process by which the nation-state grew over the past five centuries will be put into reverse by the new logic of the Information Age. Local centers of power will reassert themselves as the state devolves into fragmented, overlapping sovereignties.⁸

The shifting logic of violence in the Information Age hinges on the emergence of the new, unreal world of cyberspace. Cyberspace is like an alien planet that has newly entered our orbit. As if by a gravitational pull, human wealth, intelligence and economic activity is increasingly drawn into it. Wealth becomes intangible and harder to seize. Control of information supersedes the control of territories. The scale of violence changes. Cyberspace favors the light infantry — the cyber-guerilla armed with nothing more than software — over the combined industrial forces of the previous era. As small groups accumulate seizure-resistant wealth and deploy disruptive power through technology, traditional force hierarchies break down and the state's monopoly on violence weakens. Cyberspace — like an alien planet reshaping the horizon of the Real — changes the rules of the game.

In just over a quarter of a century since The Sovereign Individual was written, the logic of violence has not re-calibrated. Nation-states have largely retained the advantage. Physical war over territories has not decreased: it has complexified, intensified and become increasingly automated. One of the key variables that has retained the logic of violence in favor of nation-states is mass surveillance. The world that Rees-Mogg and Davidson envision is one where encryption is abundant. The re-calibration of violence that rips power away from nation-states depends on perfect anonymity. Thus a new front has developed that will define the logic of violence in the Information Age: the war between surveillance and anonymity. These twin goddesses of digital power — surveillance and anonymity — are the fundamental axis from which the order of violence flows. We are blessed (or cursed) to witness the apocalyptic war between these poles unfolding in our transient era — perhaps even to play a part in it.

What will the next five hundred years look like? Put differently, what lies beyond the end of the world? The essay's in this collection are a sketch toward this. Jason Reza Jorjani offers an image of a technological outlaw society that could stage its resistance from the heaving expanse of Earth's oceans. Cody Wilson reflects on the paradox of pirates — 3D printed gun designers — relying on antiquated notions of legal copyright to protect their designs on the outlaw frontier. Like a wild garden at the center of the issue, Paul Rosenbergs reflects on Life as a creative force and laments the political structures enclosing Life. Sterlin Lujan presents a hallucinogenic vision of network states bleeding backwards from the future. Aaron Dunkel offers a sober reflection on a coming war between modernity and tradition. Finally we conclude with Beth McCarthy and Joshua Dávila's transmission from the year 2140.

Certain essay's in this collection echo and reinforce each other. Others clash like oil and water. This strange mixture is by design. We compiled these essays to illuminate potential alliances and irreducible conflicts across the emerging pluralistic landscape of 21st century agorism. We share the optimism of The Sovereign Individual that the emerging Dark Age will not be the End of Time but rather the beginning of a new cycle. We sketch the outlines of the coming era as as if to prepare for a changing season.⁹

To reiterate our editorial policy:

• AXXI rejects antiquated political divisions, showcasing thinkers from across the partisan divide.
• AXXI strives to embrace dissonance. Not all of our writers agree.
• AXXI is uncompromising. We highlight revolutionary thinkers that transgress boundaries over mere defenders of the status quo.

Agora! Anarchy! Action!