Goodbye Cypherpunk values? Adapting to the new world order

Hello, thank you. Thank you so much for being here for this talk. So the title was already introduced, so we will just introduce ourselves. So my name is Anne Brody. I have a PhD in communication studies and my background is in anthropology.

I studied decentralized governance and DAOs. And my name is Costanza. I have a master's degree in law, anthropology, and society. And I've been working in crypto since forever, advising more than 10 projects. So thank you so much for being here and for working with us with what anthropologists do in cryptos.

OK, so this presentation essentially is about rethinking cyberpunk values because, you know, the world has changed and so must we. But before we actually delve into what that means, let's first begin by setting some context on who were the cyberpunks. Now I recognize that maybe many of you here are already seasoned cyberpunks and you've seen shit. So, you know, this explanation might be redundant, but for the newcomers, I just want to take a chance and explain. So the cyberpunks were activists who believed that privacy was a fundamental right where in an increasingly digital world, privacy was essential for political freedom and personal autonomy, which could be achieved through the means of cryptography as a form of direct action.

So activism through technology, instead of relying solely on legal or political systems, cyberpunks thought to build technological solutions that would secure privacy by design. And one of the earliest cyberpunk people from the States was Eric Hughes. And he wrote an important document called A Cyberpunk's Manifesto, which was basically a concise declaration of principles where individuals must use cryptography to secure their privacy because essentially no one else will. So there were these ideas, and I directly quote, it was stated, privacy is necessary for an open society in an electronic age and that people cannot depend on governments for their protection of privacy. And also ideas like cyberpunks write code and, you know, quote, we know that someone has to write software to defend privacy and we are going to write it.

So in these sort of ideas, code becomes a moral act. It's a mode of resistance and a medium of autonomy. So it becomes both the shield and sword in this digital terrain. That's sort of like how the imaginary works. But in today's world, this ethic of protection and agency has evolved.

So while code remains crucial, what I'm personally seeing with my anthropological eyes is cyberpunk culture and the idea of cyberpunk is now expanding beyond just coders and programmers and devs now we have community builders, writers, poets, artists, archivists, and educators, all those who craft the cultural, symbolic, and infrastructural commons of our digital future are sort of coming together, up and rising. So there's an expansion of sorts going on and we must remember that as we forge a new path we work not only through the means of code like before, but also narratives, norms, and social networks. So this being said, it is important to note that the cyberpunk manifesto comes from 1993, didn't happen in a vacuum. Like any cultural movement, it happened in the context of a broader shift, of a broader political shift of what was happening in the world. So what was happening in the world?

On the wider political scene, many things were changing back then, and especially in the years that led to 1993. With the excuse of Cold War, for example, the government was tightening their surveillance. During Cold War, it gets so insane up to the point that cryptographic technologies were primarily developed and controlled by government agencies like the NSA, and cryptography was actually classified as ammunition, like a nuclear bomb. Then, for example, even the private sector was developing. So Oracle, the big database company, was founded and its first customer was the CIA.

So on the one hand, internet was expanding and more people were going online and were exchanging information. On the other hand, Western government started building back doors. So, of course, there was this growing concern over surveillance, control of cryptographic technologies. But then, on the side of that, there was also thirst for freedom, anger for freedom. So while the cyberpunk were writing code to defend our privacy and to defend our freedom of information, building digital tools and writing code, there were activists that were claiming physical spaces as temporary zones of freedom, like the Berlin Technoclubs in the post-war era.

So both forms of resistance emerged when the state was overreaching, and the objective was the same. The more governments were tightening their control, the more individuals were seeking to expand their freedom with experimentations and autonomy. Now, it is important to note that while the cyberpunk movement specifically emerged within the Western context, within the U.S., as a direct response to increasing digital surveillance, the desire for freedom and the desire for autonomy is not restricted to cyberpunk only.

It's not restricted to Western societies only. So while the authors of the cyberpunk manifestos are from the U.S., the bottom-up, the grassroots demand for freedom is not restricted to a singular culture or technological tradition. So, for example, the Arab Spring in 2010, it was a broader global demand for freedom and resistance against oppressive surveillance and censorship.

It is not framed as cyberpunks, but it shares similar ideas, challenging centralized control, empowering individual voices through digital tools like social media, creating spaces of freedom and, indeed, the bell of censorship fell. Internet service providers shut down. Mass surveillance over communication brought so many people in jail. The Arab Spring was fundamentally driven by local histories, contexts, and grassroots aspirations, reflecting the universal yet distinctly local nature of those principles. And history shows that governments everywhere, in Egypt, in Syria, in the U.

S., in Germany, in Russia, they all employ the same tools to shut down criticism. So why is it important? It is important because the world has changed a lot since 1993, and so we should. How?

So, we should accept that technology, the technology we're building here, is political. It was political in 1993. It was political in 2009, when Fatah she launched Bitcoin. Technology is political as fuck. Surveillance technology gives power to centralized governments.

Cyberpunk-like technology empowers people, giving tools to people to organize a protest, to coordinate and rise against centralized powers. It's political. Web3 is political. We've been seeing with the tools before, and we need to admit that, because whether we admit that or not, if we don't own that, political parties will own it. And we've been seeing it in the past 12 months, where political parties all over the world have been running on a crypto platform, and they have been appropriating this, because we didn't.

So, in 1993, very few people were online. In 1990, only 1% of the world's population was online. Today, more than 70% of the world's population is online. For most people, like for me, there is no distinction between online and offline. And also, while the manifesto was deeply rooted in U.

S. culture, Internet is borderless, and information should be free to flow. So, when we talk about Cyberpunk in the New World Order, it has to be grounded online and offline. And statements like, Cryptography will ineluctably spread all over the globe, have a deeper and broader meaning today. So, we must start from the assumption that freedom and privacy cannot be selectively applied to some and denied to others.

Cyberpunk tech must be available for everyone, or otherwise, it is not Cyberpunk. And the first step is to ground Cyberpunk in goodness, is to make it available to everyone. So, it should be a technology that is available to everyone. And to do so, we need to put the humanity back at the center. So, in practical terms, because this is very philosophical, it means that when we say that it is borderless, it should actually be borderless.

It should not be censoring people based on their IP addresses. So, no matter whether you're in Toronto, you're in Berlin, you're in Milan, in Ramallah, in Arabia, Bangkok, a censorship-resistant network must ignore firewalls. It must ignore IP bans and borders. Either we all have freedom, or none of us do. And this is, of course, extremely scary to centralized governments.

They act on fear. Fear is universal for every government all around the globe. So, they regulate based on fear, imposing restrictions on who can use a code, making artificial borders, saying that some IP addresses cannot use it, or if you interacted with some IP address, then you're prevented from using it. And this is what they do. They prevent people from using software based on IP addresses.

The platform, the infrastructure that we use to build our code, if we give it to everyone indiscriminately, think about GitHub, they can cut access to internet service providers if they want to silence us when everything else fails. They can refuse to give us access to the hardware that we need to build the technology. And when everything else fails, they just go around and harass people. So, resistance now means infrastructure defense, internet service providers, decentralized Git hosting, decentralized supply chain. Because the pressure is no longer abstract.

It is bi-operational, and it is bi-grounded in offline. Then there is another point. Because the most dangerous enemy is the one that pretends to be your friend. And cyberpunk in the new world order means most of all looking in the mirror and seeing ourselves and asking if the technology that we're building is truly a technology for everyone. And I don't mean like, oh, if a DeFi protocol is so complex that it requires a PhD, no, it's fine.

It means asking, can the technology we are building today be used by a new corporation like Palantir to actually implement surveillance? Can it be used by governments to restrict our freedoms? That happens because sometimes the road to hell is paved by good intentions. Sometimes it happens because there is a trade-off that we don't see. And sometimes because people are playing into the wannabe cyberpunk tech that seems to be cyberpunk at first but is actually a tool for control.

So here, I would like to call for decolonizing cyberpunk and grounding it into goodness. So by asking the question, is what we're building actually humane? Is what we're building inviting to people? Is it good? Because being good is about care.

And care, it is political. Okay, so now I'm gonna take a more philosophical, sort of psychoanalytical approach here. So what is the way forward? So we believe that we must go from fear to care. The older cyberpunk generation was characterized by fear, shame, and vulnerability.

In this respect, we must rethink the relationship of cyberpunk values from this stance. The emotional substrate of cyberpunk, despite its technical rationalism, is affectively shaped by shame, paranoia, and fear. Shame, in particular, plays a central yet disavowal role. The shame of being seen, the shame of being known, the shame of exposure. Shame is fundamentally an individualizing and narcissistic emotion.

It centers the self as a failed or contaminated object, and in doing so, isolates rather than connects. The cyberpunk reacts to shame by retreating into technical mastery, encrypting everything, trusting no one. It is a fantasy of purity and control, a dream of self-sovereign subjects who never have to depend, reveal, or negotiate. But this dream leaves little space for cooperation, solidarity, or repair. When privacy is grounded in shame, the ideal becomes to disappear, not to relate.

Trust is seen as a bug, not a feature. Dependency becomes weakness. Vulnerability becomes a flaw. What emerges is a social ethic of isolation masked as liberation. So what can we do?

It starts with you. We must move from shame-driven privacy to affect-aware infrastructures where protection is not merely about defense, but about sustaining the messy, collective, and ongoing work of being together. One way we can approach this shift is through framing cryptographic instruments not as a means of control, but as mediums of care, means through which we cultivate, protect, and co-create more just and durable forms of collective life. I emphasize the word care here quite deliberately because it signals a return to the deeper currents of the hacker ethic, not merely its libertarian defiance, but more of its artisanal devotion to the craft of making, its joy in tinkering, in refining, in building with care for the future. To care in this context is to resist the extractive logics that have come to dominate much of Web3 discourse.

It is to affirm that the value of a system lies not solely in its scalability or market fit, but in its capacity to support lived, situated forms of freedom. The aesthetic and affective dimensions of making pleasure, beauty, even play must be reinstated as political acts. And in this respect, we can draw from the hacker tradition not solely as a practice of subversion, but as a philosophy of world-making, one in which craft is a form of ethical inquiry. Hacking, in the sense, is not merely the disruption of systems, but their imaginative reconfiguration, a mode of engaging with complexity through both precision and playfulness. We're not done yet.

There's more. There is more. The last slide. But thank you. But thank you.

And so this is where I see the role of science fiction really coming into play. So I'm a huge book nerd, and there is a really great book by a media scholar named Finn Brunton who talks about the earliest subcultural visions around digital cash and the earliest experiments that preceded Bitcoin. Basically, the experiments and projects that aim to recreate features of fiat in digital form which helped make Bitcoin successful, essentially. And so Brunton reveals how technological utopians and political radicals created experimental money to bring about their visions of the future and how these experiments were deeply rooted in science fiction literature, essentially, which is a genre, as you know, that speculates about the future in ways that are both visionary and cautionary. And so these stories didn't just entertain.

They shaped a political and technological imagination They envisioned worlds where cryptography, anonymity, and decentralized technologies could resist authoritarian control and safeguard individual freedom. But again, today we stand at a very different crossroads. The world that birthed the early cyberpunk ideals has shifted dramatically. Our political and technological landscape has transformed. Surveillance capitalism has become more pervasive.

AI-driven predictive control grows, and our digital environments are increasingly dominated by a few massive players. The old fights over privacy and cryptography are now tangled with also climate crisis, digital authoritarianism, new forms of economic inequality and struggles over identity and so on. So why do I bring up science fiction? Because the future demands new stories to shape it. Privacy and freedom must be understood as relational.

Not something one simply possesses but something that emerges within a web of social, and institutional relationships. It is about creating the conditions in which entire communities can thrive. So when privacy is violated, it's not just an individual harm. It is a disruption to the networks of trust, mutuality that allow for resistance, and collective survival in the first place. At a fundamental level, one might say, as Constanza said earlier, either we all have privacy or no one truly does.

Without a shared commitment to collective liberation, any notion of freedom remains partial and precarious. In this sense, liberation is not merely a personal condition but a relational and mutual one. So in this case, there is no liberation for me unless there is liberation for us. And what I'm really trying to say is we need to make space for new grammars of freedom which is rooted in care, kinship, and interconnection. So instead of envisioning a single definitive manifesto such as the Eric Hughes foundational text from 1993, we might embrace a more pluralistic approach.

Let the original manifesto serve as a point of inspiration not prescription. Go forth and craft your own punk ethos. Remix it, it's not a time for orthodoxy but for many visions which is to say let's not just be consumers let's be creators. Thank you. Thank you so much.

If you'd like to continue this conversation we'll be around. Otherwise, you can find us on X. Thank you so much. That was really great. Truth bombs in there.

We have time for some questions not much but some. First one is how to make the tech available to everyone when we do not even own the infrastructure to run the internet? Can I take this one? Yeah, go. That's the question.

That's the question. I mean, that's the most important question because owning the internet infrastructure is actually I guess everything from the connection to the hardware to the means of production for the hardware. And when a government wants to transfer you and everything else is failing what they do is they cut off the ISP. So, on one hand I would like to say that actually there is a very good example I want to say I want to use. And it's an example where the community came up and rose to activating and give made internet available and it happened in Gaza.

As you know with the current war what happens is that Israel shut off the internet service providers to prevent people from communicating. So, I've seen a lot of movements buying the E-SIM cards from Egypt that had enough coverage to also cover Gaza. And so donating them to people that were on the ground. So, when we don't own the technology and we don't own the internet infrastructure is a very big problem and it's something that I really would like to change. In the meantime the community and the character community of helping one another is something that in that instance helped a little bit.

Thank you. Next question Can you elaborate on the cyberpunk? Yes. I'll take this one as well. What I've been seeing very often is that many technologies that are claiming to be cyberpunk are actually enforcing IP addresses to get access are actually enforcing borders that should not be there on the claim that we know better.

When actually the whole idea is that I don't remember the quote exactly but the quote is going to be available and you cannot stop it. That's very simple. It's not claiming or this is cyberpunk and then just claiming it just because it's cool to say today it's good marketing it's good branding it's actually making code and making it available without yeah, without using it as a branding. Thanks. That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for dropping all these truth bombs and live by what this young lady is about saying. Give her a big round of