The Authority. It was a hurricane of flannel and Canadian flags on the streets of Ontario when disgruntled, Brooklyn wordcels initiated their first strike assault on cartoon apes across the internet — a bizarre, crypto-populist confluence of events that has been coming, really, since America entered its very first AOL chatroom. The internet is not just a tool, it’s the digital substrate we live inside, and now, fully mature, what happens online shapes our physical world. This is a major, reality-altering paradigm shift that has already snapped our tether to collective reality, and the only thing it guarantees for sure is a fundamentally weird looking future. Concerning substance, however, what comes next will either be an increasingly-chaotic decentralization, or an increasingly-violent centralization of power. One trend will dominate — because only one can dominate — and that trend will shape the next century. Centralization, and its inevitable authoritarianism, is presently dominating (sorry).

Covid, which pulled the curtain back on everything, went something like this: governments across the free world initiated a series of authoritarian policies to combat a virus that itself almost certainly leaked from a lab in an authoritarian country. While many politicians earnestly believed their Covid policies necessary and good, it is impossible not to notice these policies also afforded our political leaders sweeping new power over the lives of ostensibly free people. Beyond the world of elected power, on questions related to the nature of the pandemic from which these new political powers draw legitimacy, media companies policed our information landscape for dissent, and social media companies erased that dissent from the internet. All of this was managed unofficially in tandem, and with ruthless efficiency. Tensions flared. Flaring tensions were further repressed. Backlash was inevitable, and in Ontario that backlash manifested on the road.

Truckers throughout Canada, demanding an end to vaccine mandates, called for a kind of strike and blocked a major trade route into the United States. Pro-establishment elements of media, in defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s rainbow-colored iron fist, falsely characterized the protest as violent (there was honking) and white nationalist. There was breathless reporting. There were saddened speeches. The word “insurrection” was repeatedly invoked. All of this in turn afforded GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform, the social permission to seize 9 million dollars raised by the protestors, a now-typical act of extra-judicial corporate punishment of state dissent. Finally, Trudeau authorized unprecedented “emergency measures,” allowing banks to freeze accounts of both truckers and their supporters.

It was an act of overpowering and disproportionate force from a proudly “free” country as inevitable as it was alarming. It was also yet another tag-team assault in a now-familiar, if unofficial and presumably uncoordinated, establishment alliance.

From the moment the average groundling could share information at the scale of our largest media companies, intelligent elitists in media correctly sensed a threat to their narrative dominance. Among many things, this shaped coverage of the technology industry (evil, in case you’re new here). It took politicians a little longer to notice the more anti-authoritarian properties of the internet, and only very recently did executives at our largest social media companies begin to closely work with policymakers and their mouthpieces in the press. In part, big tech support of the state has always seemed driven by understandable fear of federal retribution, which Congress has been threatening for years. But it can’t be ignored that most huge companies are increasingly vulnerable to decentralizing countertrends in technology. This vulnerability makes many of the largest companies in tech, including all of the speech platforms, natural allies of every other centralized, monopoly power threatened by innovation — from the media’s waning monopoly on culture to the government’s monopoly on legal violence.

An alliance among these founts of power, while uneasy, was nonetheless finally catalyzed by the election of Donald Trump, an enemy to all three, and it flourished under Covid, which ultimately precipitated the most successful grab for American power in any of our lifetimes.

The relationship between the press, big tech, and the government is complex, and tenuous, and for the most part unspoken. This all makes it difficult to address. But when it comes to the great ideological battles we wage online my sense is the conflict between this alliance and the rest of us is almost all we’re ever really talking about. On one side there is the Authority, more greatly empowered by the week, and on the other there is everyone else, a motley crew of crypto-libertarians and soccer moms and actual, frothing-at-the-mouth crazy people who refuse to submit.

Of central importance to any would-be authoritarian is control over communication, which left free at the scale of the internet has naturally destabilized all naturally-centralized powers over the last two decades. But controlling communication is an awkward challenge in a free world. This is why, until very recently, the efforts have been almost entirely unofficial, and have mostly presented as a kind of quiet war for words, in which our language itself has become a battleground.

Earlier this month, the CDC altered its definition of “vaccination” from “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease” to “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.” Clearly the purpose here was political, with no regard at all for public health. Controversy naturally followed, in response to which the Associated Press issued a “fact check” declaring the CDC’s definition had not actually been changed. Our government had merely clarified its language. Just so no one misinterpreted anything, nothing to see here!

It was bullshit, and everyone knew it was bullshit, including the people who pretend professionally that none of this is bullshit.

The problem here is neither our bad media nor our bad government. The problem is our bad media appears to be working for our bad government, which is critically exacerbated by the fact that our social media giants have all opted into the “nice guy” tyranny.

The Associated Press is an official fact checking partner of Meta, which means what the AP says is codified into Facebook’s moderation guidelines. In this way, the opinion of our “unbiased fact checkers,” working for the government, are not allowed to be disputed across most of the social internet.

All together now: for many of the most important topics of the day, the position of our sitting government is not allowed to be challenged. It’s an admittedly complicated flow chart from “free speech” to “don’t even think about it,” but then of course it has to be to get around that pesky First Amendment.

Ape hunting season. Over the years, freedom-oriented technologists have responded to encroaching authoritarianism by building ever greater tools to evade it, from encrypted, vanishing chats to digital assets that can’t (easily) be seized by the government. Anti-authoritarians have also embraced cultural technologies like anonymity and pseudonymity online. This has cartoonishly shaped our information landscape into an ideological battlezone where Real People — neck beards, substitute teacher hair, bright blue checks beside their name — go to war with communist anime fairies and based Greek statues, themselves at war with each other. Here, we grapple daily with such important questions as whether or not a series of very expensive cartoon apes is possibly an existential threat to the country.

Let’s unpack that.

A couple weeks back the tech press erupted in cheers of self-congratulation when Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos revealed the names of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s pseudonymous founders. It was fine to publicly name pseudonymous people concerned with their safety, she suggested, because these people had become wildly rich off their cartoon apes (non-fungible and blockchainy, which means you can buy one for a couple million dollars if you’re feeling opulent and crazy). As the media is generally populated by nihilist English majors who hate their rich dads and struggling 35-year-olds who made a few wrong turns and never looked back, wealth is generally, for them, a good enough reason to destroy someone. But for the rest of us Buzzfeed helpfully offered further analysis.

Were the cartoon apes a danger to the public? No. Were the men who created the cartoon apes a danger to the public? No. Was there a reasonable chance the cartoon apes could become a danger to the public? I mean of course not, no, they’re cartoon fucking apes. But Buzzfeed’s argument, parroted endlessly by the press, and in recaps throughout the press, followed as such: what these men were doing represented, potentially, in some other future form, with some hypothetical purpose not yet imagined, a theoretical threat. Also, one of the apes had a gold tooth, which in Katie’s opinion seemed kind of a racist (???). She therefore plastered the identity of several people carrying millions of dollars around in their pocket across the internet. Go get em, everyone!

The unmasking of BAYC was and remains a dangerous violation of privacy, reviled throughout most of the tech world interested in crypto, where fears of kidnapping or worse are entirely legitimate. But there is nuance here many in tech, myself included, weren’t willing to parse at the time. The Buzzfeed story wasn’t (only) evil. From the perspective of an authoritarian, it was honestly perfectly rational. There now exist digital assets worth tremendous real-world value, and they are much more difficult for the government to seize than property or jewels or dollars in a bank account. A further nightmare for the armchair despot, this value could conceivably be held by people living their lives anonymously. This means, in the world to come, the Authority might not even know who to threaten with real-world physical violence if it needed to punish their dissidence.

The implications of this hypothetical circumvention of authority were too grave. If the apes could not be destroyed, the press had to make clear that anyone involved in such a project would be hunted down, and publicly named, so they could be “held accountable” (Buzzfeed’s actual words) for the gold tooth ape. Anyone covering crypto understands the danger of such an unmasking, not only to the unmasked but to their families, which was of course the grisly point.

Shock and Awe. Let’s just break it down. Two weeks ago Biden’s Department of Homeland Security said “misinformation” on topics such as Covid — which we refer to in my corners of the internet as “dissent” — was literally terrorist in nature. The DHS further claimed broad powers to monitor American citizens so nefariously labeled. Your dumb uncle posting about the mind control drug on Facebook will henceforth be treated as a potentially violent threat to the state. About a week later Trudeau’s administration revoked banking privileges from what are unambiguously political dissidents. Then GiveSendGo, a crowdfunding platform truckers switched to after GoFundMe, was hacked, the information of Freedom Convoy supporters was leaked, and the press dutifully amplified the targeting of such clear and present dangers to the public as the owner of a small gelato café who donated 250 dollars to the cause. It is probably worth noting all of these people, from the donors to the hacker to the press, are now getting death threats.

In response to Canada’s accelerating authoritarianism, the utility of something like the non-fungible cartoon apes targeted by Buzzfeed became obvious to people who had previously not really cared.

Buzzfeed’s hypothetical bitcoin supervillainy, while interesting in the abstract, has not yet actually manifested. But there are many examples around the world where something like bitcoin could be a useful guarantee of freedom in the face of a tyrannical state. Now, we have an example on our border. Still, something tells me the anti-ape brigade isn’t really interested in the rights of angry truckers, because the angry truckers are actually the thing they’re worried about. The charitable read is simply that authoritarians fear a world of chaos, so they yank us ever closer by the day to their preferred world of domination.

But that’s the game.

The more threatened authoritarians feel, the more dramatic will become the examples they make of their enemies. Declare them terrorists, and dehumanize them. Seize their assets, bar them from our public spaces. Escalating federal no-fly lists? The ladies of the View love it. Erase them, jail them, no trials but the public trial, online, at the end of which you lose your livelihood no matter what. The examples made will have to be incredible, the encroachment on rights ever more extreme, because if you can’t actually stop people from subverting your authority, all you can do is manipulate them into believing they don’t have the tools to resist. Everything shocking will accelerate, which in turn will catalyze further reaction, which in turn will catalyze further authoritarian acceleration.

There are many possible drawbacks to anonymity and the existence of assets that can’t be seized. I’m imagining a lot of crime, for example. But drawbacks to the fusion of a country’s media, government, and largest technology companies, all adherent to a single politics and governed by a social monoculture is likewise not enticing. I’m imagining the ongoing horror that is the Chinese government, for example. The question, I think, is which do you prefer? Nothing new is simply additive. There are always tradeoffs.

Our silver lining is unhinged behavior generally comes from a place of fear, and as much as I love to make fun of authoritarians the people in charge of our country are not stupid. They are targeting, and will continue to target, actual threats to their power: anti-authoritarian technologies and technologists, new tools and startups that aide in the countering of monocultural media propaganda and the amplification of countercultural voices, all of the popular people actually using these tools, and likely, eventually, the ecosystem funding it. They will also shatter all of the most ridiculous examples of populist outrage, and frame us all as equal. But this also means many of the new technologies and companies being built are working.

The things you’re building are working.

My humble suggestion: keep building them. (And sorry, just a humble word guy here, but maybe go a little faster)

-SOLANA