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Showing posts from August, 2020

Weathering With You: An Agorist Perspective

If someone asked you what your favorite emotion was, how do you think you’d answer? For many people, I suspect they would answer “Happiness”, “Joy'', or some variant of exclusively positive emotion. Someone may think more meticulously and answer with “Contentment”, which while a positive emotion has a lot of nuance attached to it. However my answer to that question is what I feel others would consider more orthodox: Bittersweet. Pleasure accompanied by suffering, not exactly most people’s first pick but from my perspective pain is necessary in order to enjoy the pleasure that life gives you. Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing but there’s something to desire from looking back fondly at times where you were hurting and seeing yourself in a better place in the present. Perhaps you finally have moved on from “The one who got away” and can look back on those times with fondness. Perhaps you are sharing stories of a friend or family member at their funeral and though they may never w

Operational Security: A Counter-Economic Guide

*Note: For legal reasons, this article is for educational purposes only* Operational security is a key aspect of counter-economics. In fact, its the only element common to all counter-economic operations. As such, it's a shame opsec isn't discussed more often. The reluctance to lay the issue out bare may be due to either a naivety surrounding the topic, or an unwillingness of agorists to embrace their black market roots. But remember Laertes, to thine own self be true ! As agorists, it's incumbent upon us to lay out a guide for operational security that newcomers can use to engage with the counter-economy in a simple, safe & secure manner. This is a first attempt at such a guide. The New Libertarian will be updating this piece from time to time as technology continues to progress. Feel free to jump to any section that suits your needs. I. KYC II. Coin Mixers & Privacy Coins III. E2EE IV. Password Protection V. Tor VI. VPN I. K

The Case for Data Mining

7/31/2020 Derrell McIver  With even more hilarious Congressional hearings, Big Tech has been in the news a lot recently. Popular former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has been discussing the alleged evils of this industry in two of his recent podcasts. In May, he interviewed Jaron Lanier. Lanier is a computer philosopher who argues that the government should prohibit social media companies from selling user’s data to third parties, effectively forcing companies like Facebook and Twitter to charge a service fee. Yang expressed support for this idea. He also, in another episode a month later, said that, “the economics stink for consumers.” He bemoaned how Facebook is currently worth $650 billion, and how “the vast majority of that is on the backs of selling access to us and monetizing our data.” However, he makes an exception for himself by claiming that when he used people's data for targeted ads during his campaign, it was of course "in a very above board way."