"Creating the Cypherpunk Future we'd want to live in" by Kurt Opsahl // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025

Hello everybody. Uh wonderful to be here. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for waiting in the line outside and coming here on a morning after a Saturday night uh in uh Buenosari is a lovely place to to be. Um so let me tell you a little bit about my myself.

Uh so I I've been an internet lawyer for oh golly it's now looking like close to 30 years. Uh I represented a lot of internet companies in the early years the first com boom uh and then uh went to work for the electronic frontier foundation EFF uh to help uh defend your rights online to privacy speech anonymity innovation. Uh part of that work was working on the uh crypto wars. That's the uh the cryptography wars uh from establishing code as speech. Uh a very important principle that code is part of your expression and is protected by your freedom of expression.

So that when you put your ideas and desires into the form of code, it would have the protection similar to if you did it in a book or in a uh a presentation. uh and this this principle is one of the things that helps defend your ability to have privacy and free enhancing software. Uh you know there are many challenges to that over the years. It is still a challenge. Uh as we I think just saw from tornado cache uh making a privacy enhancing software can be still cause some liability.

But uh we at least in that case uh uh one of the things I was able to help out with there while still at EFF is after Tornado Cache was removed from GitHub after being placed uh the software placed on the specially designated nationals list uh we put it back up uh um uh representing Matt Green uh to put it back up there and basically dared the government to take it down again uh uh and challenge it uh challenge that on free speech ground. They did not take up our dare. Uh but that also meant the code was available. Uh and so now I am a policy council, the associate general counsel for policy with the Filecoin Foundation. Uh and Filecoin Foundation is a decentralized storage for the decentralized web for web 3.

So let's get into my room. We're trying to create the future that we would want to live in to like imagine a future that is coming where it is your rights come with you that it is one that where technology is helping you is protecting you. Let's try and find that future. I'm starting here with a classic poem from Robert Fost speaking of two roads diverging in a wood. uh and he chose one road and that made all the difference.

So he chose the less traveled path. The welltraveled path is the path of complacency that leads to centralized services, surveillance, capitalism, large companies eventually dominating uh the space and with a loss of autonomy and privacy. These were some of the mistakes of web 2 in the 90s uh and like maybe web web one or even before the web. Uh this is when the cippher punk movement was born. And there was a lot of thought that technology is going to bring freedom.

It is going to bring uh a a better world by the nature of having the powers of of encryption by having powers of computing in the hands of people. But web web 2 came along. The next generation of it saw the consolidation of power. These were some of the mistakes and I hope that with a web 3 we can have a bit of a doover and try to not repeat those mistakes taking perhaps the harder path. It's not easy but it is necessary.

So go over a bit uh this is some of what I I talked about uh last time I was presenting at this conference. Uh so I will keep it briefer this time but I want to like lay the the groundwork. Uh what are some of these core principles of the the cipher punk movement? Uh one was privacy. Uh privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.

These quotes here are from some of the manifestos and think pieces that were helping define what the cyberpunk movement was. Uh anonymity or pseudonymity. The idea was that if you could operate anonymously based on a a particular pseudonym or where you would be judged based on what you did on your reputation that it wouldn't necessarily be tied to you are you could protect your you could have multiple identities depending on what communities you could code switch by changing those identities and be judged on those merits. uh decentralization. They wanted user-to-user tools peer-to-peer uh avoiding that having single point surveillance, avoiding the honeypotss where if you have a point where say all communications go through where it can be used to cut off communications, it can be used to surveil communications.

And if you have single points of failure, they are very tempting targets for those who do not want to have an empowered future for the users. and using code to guarantee with physics and mathematics, not with laws, these principles to so you could have code that you can look at, open source code that would allow you to uh audit or assess, but also that it would be more certain than some of the vagaries of policies. So why does it matter? Well, it is building a world that in bodies and principle is about protecting our fundamental rights that probably you don't we have on the sign I can see there in the background uh without uh freedom you cannot have freedom without privacy and I think this is absolutely correct right privacy is a core right that protects the other fundamental rights and because it allows you to do things about your freedom of expression your uh freedom of association are enabled by having privacy. And so that enables you to have and share your political thoughts and views uh where in the communities you want to but with with less concern that you will be singled out by uh you know an authoritarian who opposes having those points of view out there by an intolerant society.

you can gather information about a controversial topic. One that uh you know you don't want too many think I might get in trouble if I try to learn about this thing. If I see a digital trail that I search for information about this with privacy you can do that more freely. You can gather the information and try to understand things better. make your develop your political and social ideas and also to control your own information to uh be able to choose whether you will share uh information with someone uh or not share that with it.

control whether if if uh the information uh you know disappears after a period of time try and get a little bit more choice and control and ultimately as I see privacy there are many ways of looking at privacy and there's valuable ways to a lot of these but one of the ones that really is the right to be left alone the right to just have it's none of someone's business they shouldn't get into your business and it's a little bit more than uh you know something to hide one of the more uh pervasive uh and you know sort of nihilistic thoughts is well I I've got nothing to hide so why do I care about privacy by framing it and looking at it as the right to be left alone that even some people who might feel like they have nothing to hide still don't want someone's nose in their in their business and might not think of that in the same way as as privacy. So saying we're trying to build this better uh future. What does that future look like? Well, having encryption and privacy have encryption uh in with information in motion at rest. Uh and this means making things secure and private by design as they are built.

Uh open source uh not allows it to be built by a community with code available to all. They can fork it and take it different directions, build upon it, make it interoperable with other things. Uh and you can take a look at it. Transparency helps build some trust so you can see what it is. And then with decentralization so you can avoid that uh to empower the people who are making it but not have these single points which can all too often fail.

So an example of just trying I was think trying to think of a way of like what would be a dream. We talk a lot about AI uh these days. It's it's new hotness. Uh, and so I was trying to imagine what a good AI would like, one that I would like to see in a future we could live in. And so imagine an AI that's that's your ally.

It doesn't belong to it's not designed to for the purposes of its creators uh for their interest, but one that looks out for you. Could be your agent could negotiate with other AIs. Uh something I would find very uh convenient uh would be if uh the AI could figure out which way to turn the sliders when there's a cookie uh popup uh on a website. Uh so you can empower and like with the you can do things for you can settle payments. Uh you can have verifiable training in so you know what it is.

Uh your data will remain private with endtoend encryption. You hold the key. uh decentralized infrastructure so it's not easy for it to fail if any one part uh goes down and trust based on open code auditable code auditable training training sets now if we try to build that just note the centralized players will fight back and I was looking at two recent examples uh one I would call the hard way uh Amazon filed a computer fraud and abuse act that's the US federal hacking law uh lawsuit against perplexity because perplexity city had made a browser uh right along AI that would uh help people find good deals on Amazon or find what they were looking for and Amazon really much preferred if people used I think it's Rufus their AI that will do things that Amazon would like you to see and the sponsored links and so on. Uh and so they they sued to try to stop that. Uh and there's also the software.

Uh Google and Apple are now offering what they call a private AI compute. Uh which you know it is nice to see some privacy. I am glad that that is out there. Many people will use those those services but you still have to trust big tech and it still preserves the status quo. I call this a soft way because it's better to entice people in with some better things and have some competition there but it still maintains the status quo.

So, this is going to be hard. Long is the struggle and hard the fight. I use a quote here from John Kennedy about uh uh going to the moon. We do this not because it's easy, because it is hard. It's hard, but it is worthwhile.

And I added another quote here. This is actually something I uh from Argentina, uh a comic strip from Argentina, Mafala. Mfelda has uh been overheard by uh some middle-aged gentleman who about her dreams of changing the world and like, "Oh, I used to I used to have those dreams, but now now that I'm older, I know better." And her response I really love is let's make some noise, kids. It turns out if you don't hurry to change the world, it's the world that changes you.

I like that inspiration. Don't give into that nihilism. So how can we do better? Build the tech that we need. If you don't like what's in develop, build something better.

Many of you here are builders are developers. This is your chance. Build those things. Development is not the end. Uh it's it's a lot easier to start something than it is to to continue it.

And we have to be maintained, sustain, and improve them. And use them. Use them both for dog fooding so you know what the problems are because you're experiencing them. Use other people's projects and tell them what the problem so they can make it better and evangelize the values. Tell people about why these matters.

Tell your friends and communities. So let's go through there a bit more. So building the values into tech. With great power comes great responsibility. If you are a builder, build things in by design.

Have it part of your thought from the get-go, part of your road map. Keep it secret. Keep it safe. This is about getting encryption, having privacy and security by design from the get-go. And remember always to fight for the users.

Make sure that they have autonomy, control, choice, and very critically usability. Make it so that people can use it, that they know what they're doing, they know the choices that they're making, and it's easy for them to make those choices. So building on the decentralized cloud they a lot of people use centralized systems uh and they are still very fragile and we saw an illustration of that in the last uh month or so where there are a number of very big outages uh exposed a lot of this dependent as critical infrastructure for centralized and web 3 was the there were a number of decentralized projects they may have decentralized governance they have a lot of decentralized parts but one aspect of was still leaning upon AWS. And so when AWS went down, these decentralized projects went down. And there's a saying that was around for a long time.

No one gets fired for buying IBM. That was when IBM was the dominant player. Uh it's no longer true about IBM. It is who that is true about has switched over time as there is whatever is the dominant player. But even if it does go down, even if it's fragile, no one gets fired for choosing AWS because that is the default choice.

So let's make it so no one gets fired for choosing to use open software. Uh one of the things at Filecoin Foundation, I came there because I wanted to try and make things better for the decentralized web. One of the things that Filecoin is doing is the Filecoin onchain cloud. It's launching in a couple of days, November 18th, Tuesday. Uh so it's part of uh the centralized stack storage retrieval payments.

I encourage you to to come to the deep end day and check that out or you can go to filecoin.cloud. It is in beta but there's some interesting projects that are trying to bring some of these privacy encryption values to it. Uh I'll name check estoxyz and keypoint.io who are trying to put privacy and encryption into the storage layer.

Once you've built it, you have to maintain it. They say, you know, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and that's a great way to get people going, but there's still another couple million steps. So, uh, you need to maintain projects. You need to have the enthusiasm for people to keep working on them. Uh, and that requires resources.

So, you need a sustainability model for the long term. Public goods funding. A lot of people come to this conference uh, come to this conference at large. Think about that trying to fund the commons. Uh but it also just need to have a plan for keeping things sustained and to improve as technology involves uh either as security flaws come up need to be fixed as new technologies come out that can make it better need to be have a plan to keep improving and then use the tech that reflects your value by using the software that you would like to see that makes it better.

Uh there are network effects. Uh if a lot of people use signal then more it becomes more enticing for other people to use signal. This community uses telegram quite a bit. A lot of people also use signal. If more and more people are starting their group chats on signal instead of telegram you would switch them over to signal or make signal more viable in the community.

Crowds also help protect uh the more people who use tour the less sus it is. If someone is using tour, more people use it for uh also for fun things for or use any of these technologies for ordinary things. Uh I'm going to shout out to the cute cat theory uh which is that if a technology is being used to share cute cat pictures, it is less likely to be taken down by an authority because the people like that, they may not be people who are caring about the underlying principles, but they like they know when they can no longer see cute cats. So having a technology build it not just for the hardcore uh most uh uh secure and private person but also available to usable by everyone so they can share their cat pictures and so the public knows of its value even if they are not all the way into the issues. Uh for some of this at stacks.

web3privacy.info a number of the people who have speak spoken at this event uh have given some of their favorite software to use. You can check that out for some some ideas that you might like. But some it's not easy. Uh there there are very few purists out there and only a couple people who pretty much live a fully uh open-source freedom enhancing technology lifestyle.

Uh and that's okay. Let's work towards a better future where it is not a hard path for someone to use that all the time. But it's okay if if uh if you're not there. um briefly go through uh an example uh at EFF a lot of people use Libra Office great good piece of you know software if you wanted to use it amongst yourself but it was a big problem for collaboration because many of the NOS's we would work with use Google Docs getting things back and forth was not so easy for the and law firms that we worked with they all use Microsoft Word and so sometimes you have to work with where people are on the other hand I just saw that the international criminal report has uh said no to Microsoft Word and moved to uh Openesk as as a solution. That's a prominent institution.

So there is a path to get there. Uh but also say that optimism is what I want to preach here. Like do all the good that you can do it by all the means that you can in all the ways that you can. So, this is about just you do your best and if you if it's not, you know, it's it's not everything in your life, that's okay, but you keep on trying to do it. Uh, I'm going to have to hurry this up because apparently we are late for some.

Uh, so look, there's still going to be the the danger of creeping dystopia. Like, we have to keep that in mind and that is what we are fighting against, but just help people not give up. And to channel back to Mafala, let's make some noise about it. So promoting evangelizing it. Spread the word with joy and positivity about how this is a better thing.

Not the world is doomed. Maybe this will help but it is a better world and tell them why it is a give them the hope that will give them the desire to move forward. The hope that will help them move on their their projects to work on them uh and take advantage of new technologies of communication. So we had, you know, the cippher punk started with a mailing list that had, you know, hundreds of people on it. That was one of the, you know, better technologies for spreading the news and having discussions at the time, but we have now a hyperconnected world with many, many tools for spreading words, spreading memes, spreading ideas.

Take advantage of them and talk about what what you like about uh what we're talking about today, the values, the technologies, and let people know about it. And to to close it out, uh just say it's also about community. Uh we are stronger as a community by working together. The people all of you who came came here today self- selected to come here uh you know on a on a Sunday after on a weekend before this conference. Take your time because you care about these values because it matters to you.

So the people in this room we can all collaborate and it'll be fun. I've had so many great conversations talking to people at this conversation. I'm sure that you will too. And that will help us work together and together we can choose that road, maybe the less traveled one, but that does make all the difference. And then we can come live in a cyberpunk future empowered by systems that are open, strong, resilient, usable, private, secure, decentralized, and transparent.

So I hope you will join us in that future. Thank you.