Another day, another political drama. A new regulation has passed, new tax is introduced, this politician yelled at that politician, the bad guy is winning, another war has started.
While these things sometimes have real consequences (especially war), in most cases they are but a distraction. For people who take it seriously, it creates fear and there is always a political solution. Vote for us! Give us more money! We need more power! You are powerless to fix this on your own.
Peter Diamandis says that the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. That's what we are being distracted from. That we - either ourselves or some entrepreneur from our community - can solve this problem. Instead we are told we should give away our power to the political and bureaucrat class.
The politicians can't reach the dark forest though. But we are already there. So the distraction makes even less sense for us. Yes, we might fear whatever spooky words come out of the Constant Crisis Networks' talking heads, but we know the politicians can never solve these problems in the dark forest.
The proper approach was described by Paul Rosenberg - the politicians and the old ways should be in our rear-view mirror. Understand enough so it does not affect us, but look forward from the Bronze Age style rulership.
So let's look up to entrepreneurs, and be entrepreneurial ourselves, avoid distractions and build a better future. Ourselves and for ourselves.
Imagine traveling to another continent 500 years ago… or even a hundred years ago, what you experienced traveling from Europe to Indonesia, from North America to Africa, or from Australia to South America was a completely different cultural experience than what you were used to. People acted differently, thought differently. There were different, almost alien customs.
With globalization, the world turned to a homogeneous cultural soup. We have kids in Laos listening to Taylor Swift and eating burgers. Every hipster in Amsterdam eats sushi three times a day. A startup CEO connects with Pachamama with their Harvard-educated Ayahuasca shaman. Because of global trade and easy travel, we become more alike.
That is not good or bad. It is good to take the best from the world and consciously adopt it as our own. Being different is not a problem either though. It makes us unique and with uniqueness comes specialisation and market edge.
Each part of the dark forest is different. There is no single recipe for a good life, a good society, a magic structure that will solve all our problems. There is no template to copy. There is only our skill to discover what works for us, in our particular situations.
Entering a forest, most people don't dare to mentally comprehend the dark part of the forest. Its inhabitants are always friendly, exchange ideas and trade, but not every visitor is allowed inside the dark part of the forest.
When people are infected with the statist virus, they might not understand or know how to interact with the booming life of the dark forest. The old ways have to be left outside. People who are free will always find a way.
They are welcome and we gladly interact with them. Together we grow, create and enjoy what liberated life has to offer.
In the dark forest, we are together, free of the old ways.
To communicate, we need to connect. Mouth to ear, face to face, but also over longer distances.
For our parallel monetary system in the dark forest, we need some form of connectivity as well. That does not necessarily mean internet connection though. Local Cashu mints, or local lightning channels. The peer to peer nature of lightning is underappreciated. We do not need internet connectivity or uninterrupted connection to the whole bitcoin p2p network to be able to make local transactions.
Peer to peer messaging, using encryption and signatures is one of the better researched areas of cryptoanarchy, that's what cypherpunks started with.
Basic infrastructure can be built on email, with even simple apps and encrypted groups. DeltaChat is a good example. For high latency and resilience, mesh networks are even better. Reticulum is media independent (LoRA, tcp/ip, paper qr codes), encrypted by default and dynamic mesh routed protocol suite. For longer distances, take messages few times a day using a long range drone. Old school fidonet style mashed up with high tech UAV.
Btcpayserver, bluewallet or Zeus with local nodes, Cashu and others add payment infrastructure on top of mesh networks. For lightning, you can receive bitcoin state using Blockstream satellite receiver. Determine current prices using on chain data with UTXO.live.
Starlink or other ISPs are nice, but what if internet connection is down? Let's be conscious, play with the tech and know what we'll do. Direct experience is even better. We can do this.
Energy consciousness
Let's be conscious about energy. After we move away from centralized finance, energy is the next lever of control of the central planners. While it's good to participate in division of labor, we are quite dependent on state monopolized and hierarchical energy grids. We might find ourselves in a situation, when energy is only for companies that pass some ESG certification and it can become part of the emerging social credit scores.
Traveling too much without an approval? Maybe your CBDC wallet won't work at the gas station anymore. Sorry, no plane ticket to Bali. And turn up the temperature on your AC. Energy (for transportation and powering electrical devices) can be controlled centrally both through the financial system and through the distribution grid that is often monopolized, centrally controlled and sometimes government owned.
It's not too hard to upgrade our thinking. Be conscious of your energy usage. If it heats up, it probably uses a lot. If it moves or spins, it's medium. Understand your usage. Connect cheap power meters to outlets to understand what is going on. Optimize when it makes sense.
Solar power is widely accessible, although also quite visible. It won't heat up your home during winter in mild climates, but it will probably cool your home during summers. Learn about batteries. LifePo4 are good for solar. You can put it also on a car. There's also wind and hydro energy.
It does not mean you need to switch. Energy is abundant and cheap and makes many things - including climate change - more bearable. Energy and money allow us to adapt to change.
The dark forest, if it's secluded physically from the mainstream society needs an energy source. Don't count on the grid to work.
Something’s in the air.
Speaking to common self-employed folk, the kindergarten owner/guide, the plumber, the wall painter… they can feel it. If you talk to them, they realize something is not right. They have their hand on the pulse of the economy. They get it.
They also live in the dark forest. They do peer to peer, cash to pocket transactions. They have it in their power to protect themselves.
Most of them have heard about Bitcoin. Most of them either have it already or want to get paid in it. Some of them prefer gold, which is OK.
If you live in the dark forest, you get it, you want to escape the declining world and be part of the ascending world. You naturally gravitate towards Bitcoin, towards unschooling, towards liberty, towards creativity and peer to peer relationships. You go where you are treated best, but it often does not mean changing a country or moving - you can change your jurisdiction by opting out of some economic interactions - and opting into the dark forest interactions.
No need to talk to common employee in the coffee shop to try to convince their boss to accept Bitcoin. Talk to the producers and owners directly, interact with people who are not part of a corporation. They know something’s in the air already. They don’t have to go all-in, but they want to have their plan ₿⚡️
Lunarpunk and the dark side of the cycle.
Good intro to Lunarpunk
Hey fellow Lunarpunks.
Please know that I exist and would like to publish content that might interest you. See above ^^^
@npub1mgaaanz7xx3m60573m84fvmqgzsk3falxhdamawj2c6vldk3lycqnr7mch @npub1unar0900g30s4x20m2lm6kphxez4k9ek83t8vfmes6hvnd7jp84sqmdqda nostr:npub15xkpvjux5fw2q0kgl8m9c6pv0wu5urgctq9tthftmu559lf4wxqqknkrnh nostr:npub1pamu3dhq5glm35ylf5e8wh3df73vv40n643ksukp26tnshx6vqlqq85dmc nostr:npub1m2mvvpjugwdehtaskrcl7ksvdqnnhnjur9v6g9v266nss504q7mqvlr8p9 @npub1250ftehxrwsv7586j65ekfmywxhd6kpsktynzx5z3eeg9k3lm3kq0e5pur @npub1y2se87uxc7fa0aenfqfx5hl9t2u2fjt4sp0tctlcr0efpauqtalqxfvr89
There is a particular annoying scent that you can't forget, it is a scent of regulatory capture. You can of course smell it out if politicians and bureaucrats, but when you recognize it, you can smell it also from "business people" (people who think they are doing business, but actually use the power of government coercion to capture whole industries with their frienemies - their big corporate competition).
Whenever there are conferences on "AI safety", "addictive apps", "disinformation", "energy crisis" and many other topics, you can feel the scent from the airport hotel ballroom where the conference takes place all the way out. The smell comes from the money trying to create regulations to limit competition and make the sponsors' products mandatory in one way or another (one very common way is "certification"), but you can smell it from the people. Everyone comes with well paid homework from these events. Bureaucrats write regulations that increase the power of the stamps in their hands. Politicians have new fears to talk about and new promises to make to make them go away. Corporations are buying small competition for bargain or let them go bust.
If you want to avoid the scent, avoid airport hotel ballrooms, all the conferences where industry experts talk about "we should self regulate and I'll tell you how".
Or even better yet, take a walk in the dark forest. It smells of connections, creativity and it is the home of mycelial networks that connect peer to peer parallel economies.
Cypherpunk evolved into Lunarpunk and lunarpunks manifest the dark forest.
Hello Nostr!
I will share some Lunarpunk bites for thought and take you to the journeys of Dark Forest Shinrin-yoku - forest bathing. We will step into the dark forest to get energy, be creative, see what’s new and noteworthy and escape the noise and smell of the mainstream statist society.
I hope to be the library for cryptoanarchists, cypherpunks and lunarpunks in the dark forest.