The Purple Pill
Russell Brand, the Censorship Industrial Complex & Crypto-Anarchism.
It is incredibly easy today, owing to the passion and hard work of crypto-anarchists, for the average person to evade censorship. Whether that censorship be intellectually, economically, or otherwise, the tools to make oneself essentially bulletproof, at least in cyberspace, already exist.
The primary tools I am referring to of course are Satoshi Nakamoto’s decentralised and permissionless peer-to-peer monetary system, Bitcoin, and more recently — and very much following in the footsteps of Bitcoin but in the realm of communications — Fiatjaf’s open protocol and decentralised social network, Nostr (interestingly, both authors opted to maintain their anonymity and for the same reason: personal safety).
The inspiration one has taken from the other is evident, with Nostr not only being architected in the spirit of Bitcoin’s network of nodes (enforcing the rules of the network and maintaining Bitcoin’s public ledger) and miners (constructing Bitcoin’s public ledger), of which anyone can become, instead relying on relays (otherwise known as servers, which anyone can run) and clients (otherwise known as Nostr apps, which anyone can create) to spontaneously, which is to say without a central authority, distribute, maintain, and organically grow the network; what’s more, Nostr incorporates Bitcoin into the protocol itself through its second layer Lightning Network, making it possible by default for user’s to make payments (referred to as “zaps” in Nostr) between one another using the peer-to-peer monetary system.
In the wake of these incredible achievements — without which, I believe, true private property rights and, by extension, self-ownership would be impossible in the midst of technology created expressly for the purpose of achieving the opposite (e.g. central bank digital currencies) — anybody, including a well-known and, as of late, intellectually and economically downtrodden public figure like Russell Brand, can achieve immunity to censorship.
In fact, in case it was not already apparent, this was explicitly what these technologies were established to achieve in the first place: Bitcoin to inoculate one against economic sanctions (e.g. demonetisation by big tech platforms, such as those in Brand’s case presently) and theft from central banks, directly (e.g. the 2008 Financial Crisis, out of which Bitcoin was conceived) or otherwise (e.g. inflation); Nostr to inoculate one against intellectual sanctions (e.g. the UK government lobbying Rumble and TikTok to remove Brand’s content from their platforms) and, because of its incorporation of the Lightning Network, economic sanctions to boot.
In this way, Nostr actually improves on Bitcoin’s censorship-resistance, creating a safe haven for everyone, regardless of stature, to permissionlessly create a public-private key pair, continue to speak, and continue to receive payment.
The only vulnerability in this arrangement is the relays upon which a creator’s posts (otherwise known as “notes” in Nostr) are stored and broadcasted for other’s to read; but even if a relay were to block the storage and distribution of a particular user’s communications, whether coerced into doing so or done independently, this only affects their ability to publish to that particular relay, and they can continue to publish to any other that will have them or, if necessary, establish and maintain their own (similar to how anyone can operate a Bitcoin node to verify their own transactions or become a miner to help publish said transactions to the public ledger, there is no permission required to do so and therefore nothing to prevent one from participating in the network).
Through this pipeline of resistance to speech sanctions to resistance to economic sanctions, one becomes exposed to not only the value of maintaining one’s ability to communicate freely, but also one’s ability to transact freely. This is what is meant by “the purple pill”. As the creator of “zaps” and popular Nostr client Damus Will Casarin put it, “Nostr is the purple pill that makes the orange pill go down easier.”
Hence not only do cases like that of Brand’s present an enormous opportunity for Nostr to be promoted far wider and with much greater intensity than it otherwise would be, that is, when promoted by those already convinced by or having worked on the protocol themselves; it also presents a much more significant opportunity to expose and educate those under the boot to the virtues of holding and transacting in Bitcoin by proxy; and not only this, they also migrate their audience of potentially millions along with them, they too becoming aware of the utility of such technologies as a cascading effect from the character assassination of one of their idols.
And the perks of such a migration to Nostr, and Bitcoin by association, and all the publicity that will surely follow, is also beneficial to the migrating party. As a figure with the following and influence of someone like Brand moves from a centralised platform to a decentralised protocol, they not only spread awareness of the existence of such a technology and with far greater effect than a relative unknown (such as myself) could do (even merely by declaring their intention to do so and for the reasons I have highlighted); they set themselves up to become essentially impervious to such intellectual and economic turmoil in the future, with the only method by which to penetrate this immunity to tyranny in cyberspace being to terrorise them in the physical world, which is to say by means of deploying agents of the State to accost the offending individual in real life (such heavy-handedness only serving to amplify the need for such technologies even more).
Despite its unjust and totalitarian nature, in the absence of such modern Stalinist show trials to remove dissident voices from what we shall call “fiat society,” otherwise known as the status quo, such traction and subsequent mass migration would not be possible. What this means is people who would have otherwise never understood the utility of the likes of Nostr and Bitcoin, as an unintended side-effect of their own persecution or that of a public figure, now do.
Nostr, like Bitcoin, needs “elites,” such as former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, in order to succeed, owing to the problem of simply making the average person aware that such an avenue to evade censorship is actually available to them. The issue then becomes one of self-promotion and planting awareness in the minds of those who would trigger such a mass awakening to the possibilities of and consequently an onboarding onto the protocol. Brand qualifies as such an elite, one who, unlike the technically-minded Dorsey, is perhaps a more effective candidate to market Nostr precisely because he represents the overwhelming majority of people who are not technically-minded, and hence would not immediately grasp the importance or necessity of such a technology.
Once such dissident elites have become sufficiently educated, it is entirely up to them to abandon the means of their own enslavement and adopt the means of their own liberation. And I believe as opposition to such self-liberating technologies intensifies, with examples of it becoming more common and more explicit (e.g. the Online Safety Bill, blacklisting crypto exchanges), the case for mass exodus will become easier and easier to make in parallel, until eventually challenging the powers that be and yet neglecting to equip oneself with such tools will be perceived to be as oxymoronic as championing one’s right to property and yet neglecting to lock the front door.