One of the disappointments of being in my late 50s is watching young people having to learn the hard lessons of life all over again, instead of learning from history only a generation or two old.
Especially now, where events before the Internet seemingly never happened, and events after the Internet get endlessly memed or propagandized into whatever currently fashionable ideology benefits the status quo.
There has been a thin thread of rebellion against this that has survived in the form of cypherpunk activism of the 80s and 90s through the invention and proliferation of Bitcoin in the 2010s and now the advent of distributed, uncensorable communication networks such as Nostr.
And yet, it's not clear to me whether this nascent drive towards individual freedom will survive. Too much of the public discourse is consumed by "strategic reserve" this, "legal tender" that, and in general the tying of Bitcoin to its relation to the State. Politicians seek political favor by making noises allying themselves to the Bitcoin community, and to great benefit. The vast majority of Bitcoin movement is between exchanges, not individuals. I won't even go into the absurdities on display at conferences ostensibly about Bitcoin but have turned into promotional grounds for grifters and influencers.
We are at a unique point in history where we have both the technology and the motivation to establish direct, peer-to-peer, mutually beneficial, and most importantly, voluntary, non-coercive relationships among each other that bypass existing systems of surveillance and control.
Let's do this.
