Builders, Not Talkers

Several decades have passed since cryptoanarchy and agorism entered the minds of more than a few people. In recent years, real progress has accelerated. Bitcoin works. Decentralized social protocols are gaining users. Encrypted communication is mainstream. Privacy tools that once required expertise now run on phones. The theoretical work of the cypherpunks and agorists is bearing fruit.

But it is not enough. Not nearly enough. We have built communication rails and money rails. We have not built the society that runs on them. The gap between what exists and what a parallel economy requires remains vast. Closing that gap demands something the movement has always been short on: builders.

The Situation

More people every year see that the world built on hierarchy, centralization, and endless intervention does not work. Public services are bankrupt or collapsing. The mainstream explanation is always the same: not enough regulation, not enough oversight, greedy capitalism. This is wrong. The fundamental problem is that you cannot wish reality into a different shape. The masses believed that fixing the problems caused by the last fix would eventually produce paradise. It does not. It never has. The only thing central planning creates reliably is misery for those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Humanity has achieved much. Hunger and plague have been largely overcome for hundreds of millions. But instead of embracing what made this possible, the satisfied masses of the West spit on it. Rule of law, functional markets, economic freedom. Instead of dismantling harmful corporatism, the call is for more democratic control, more government blessing, more protection from above. As if history taught nothing. As if only a productive lifestyle, not a parasitic one, can advance the human condition.

Our systems are fragile. Built on redistribution and top-down control rather than individual achievement and decision-making. Economists and complexity theorists increasingly understand this fragility. We face two options: delay the decay or accelerate the collapse. There is no third path where intervention finally works.

The task ahead remains what it was decades ago. We need a more disentangled world, more decisions made by individuals, more diversity. One rule suffices for human cooperation: do not steal.

You probably know all this already. The question that matters is: where do we go from here?

Three Steps

First, stop waiting for mass approval. Deprogram yourself from collectivist thought and hoping the masses will wake up. Do not waste time trying to fix politics, win over majorities, or receive mainstream validation. You are on your own for now. Every achiever is alone at first, possibly for a long time. Societies break down collectively, but they are rebuilt individually.

Second, realize that you must be a builder. There is no one to wait for. No blueprint to hand to future architects. If you do not act, nothing will be. If you do not implement your goals, they will never materialize. And even if someone else builds what you wanted, you would have no claim to it. You would be a free rider, and free riders cannot complain when the thing they wanted never appears.

Third, cooperate and compete. The division of labor was one of humanity's greatest discoveries. But neither cooperation nor competition works for those who produce nothing. You cannot sit around waiting for the market to fulfill your dreams. The market does not create. It only amplifies the actions of those who do comparatively well while eliminating those who produce waste. Entrepreneurs bring things into existence. People who act and face reality. Individuals who invest, think, build, then compete and cooperate. The market rewards and punishes. It creates nothing.

These three steps build on each other. They are complete only together.

Opposition

Understand that what we do is cultural entrepreneurship. We create cultural systems. And the current culture does not welcome our input. It opposes everything we represent. The dominant culture offers security through numbers, comfort in conformity. Everything we build threatens its structure.

If you doubt this, present the ideas of cryptoanarchy or radical individualism to your peer group. Watch the reaction.

This opposition has consequences. Developing the current system into something new would consume enormous energy with little probability of success. It makes more sense to build independently of what exists. We have no chance of mass approval before we have already outcompeted existing systems. And even then, approval is not a goal worth pursuing for its own sake.

The competition with dominant culture involves real risks. We are met with resistance. Those who defend the current order will take action against alternatives they perceive as threatening. Being active as a cultural entrepreneur building a competing way of life carries personal risks. Take reasonable security measures. Do not be naive. But do not lock yourself in a castle and become ineffective either. You can lose by being overpowered or by being scared into submission while your capacity for action withers. Good security defends against the first. Courage defends against the second.

Beyond the Digital

We have made progress in some areas. Decentralized communication exists. Censorship-resistant social networks are being built. Cryptocurrency provides an alternative monetary rail. These are real achievements.

But they are nowhere near sufficient.

A parallel society cannot run on social networks and payment rails alone. The cypherpunks gave us the communication layer. Bitcoin gave us the money layer. What we lack is nearly everything else: the production layer, the physical infrastructure, the human institutions that make daily life possible without dependence on hostile systems.

The future will not consist of money-movers and coders only. Coders and financiers create platforms and tools. But life comes from those who produce real goods and services: thousands of trades and products that people actually need. The farmer, the carpenter, the machinist, the small merchant. A society of app developers and traders starves in a day. If you are reading this and you are neither a coder nor a financier, you may be exactly who is most needed.

This means embracing the physical. Not everything is digital. Life does not happen on the internet. Because we are not welcome in contemporary institutions, we cannot delegate the physical to them. Mixing our activities with their banking, their justice systems, their identity infrastructure makes us vulnerable. Create physical places to meet and trade. Physical currency and barter networks. Warehouses, marketplaces, workshops. Protect your personal perimeter but do not hide entirely. There is no life and no progress in staying dug into a digital fortress.

The combination of digital and physical creates real power. Digital communication enables coordination across distances. Physical production creates the goods and services that sustain actual human life. Neither alone is sufficient. Together they enable something new: a distributed society that can grow slowly across geography while building real economic substance.

You are not alone in this, nor should you try to be. Division of labor requires others. We need peers who provide new insights, new capabilities, or simply understanding. Trade and economy are about relationships more than transactions. Business relationships become friendships, collaborations, new ventures. A new society requires social fabric. Invest in relationships. Find or build your tribe.

What Is Required

You will feel fear. This is appropriate. Fear keeps you alert, ensures you maintain security practices, protects against carelessness. But you must rule your fear rather than letting it rule you. Use it as a tool, not a cage. Your future depends on whether you can act despite fear rather than being paralyzed by it.

Many have asked where the networks are, the movements to join, the leaders to follow. There are none, at least not in the way they imagine. What exists is a distributed collection of people who have decided to build rather than wait. Entry requires becoming one of them.

What we do is risky, and we know it. What we build has value, but we know our implementations might not be optimal. We have learned that quality of associates matters enormously. Energy spent on those who only consume is energy unavailable for building.

We are not offering free passage. If you wait for others to solve your problems, implement your vision, lift you up, you will wait forever. It is not anyone's job to do work you must do yourself. Do it yourself. If you do, others who build will notice, and collaboration becomes possible.

Passivity accomplishes nothing. What matters is action: building, trading, producing, creating. Talk has its place, but talk without action is just noise. Those who act are rare and valuable. Those who only discuss are common and contribute little.

Our world is not a place of entitlements. What we build costs us dearly and continues to. Compensation matters. Honor matters. Keeping commitments matters. We are merchants, craftsmen, builders, entrepreneurs. Contrary to stereotype, this requires being civilized and trustworthy. Trade depends on reliability. We hold ourselves to this standard and expect the same from those we work with.

Be patient. Good things take time. Be quick to act, but patient in building.

You might think all this is too demanding. That there must be an easier path, a lighter burden. Perhaps there is, but we have not found it. What we have found is that the rewards of building are real, even when the work is hard. The alternative is waiting for a freedom that never arrives.

If you are ready to build, begin. The only credential that matters is action.