My Introduction to Steemit, Open Source Terraforming & How I became a Voluntaryist

I'm an artist, musician, live music photographer, researcher, traveler, bodyworker and chef. I also write sometimes on the subjects of Voluntaryism, Agorism, Intellectual Property, Natural Law, Spirituality, Genderism vs. Individualism, Economics, Health, Food, Gardening, Music and whatnot. I’m all over the place and I like it that way. Specialization is for insects.

I’ve never really told the story of how I became an Anarchist, and thought it might be a good introduction on Steemit (which I am really excited about).

Enter Ubuntu

Some time in early 2006 I bought an old used laptop, which was shipped with windows 2000.  My roommate recommended that I install the Ubuntu OS on it. He received the CDROM in the mail a few days before and had yet to install it on his own computer. I’m not really a techie, but why not? Not knowing what I was doing, not knowing the first thing about open source operating systems - didn’t deter me. I’m always down for a change or for learning something new. So I installed it in an afternoon, not knowing that it would not only change my relationship with software, but that it would seriously alter my worldview.

Over time, as I learned the ins and outs of repositories and the multiverse, it amazed me that all the cool programs I was now using (GIMP, NVU / Kompozer, Open Office, Firefox, Audacity, etc.) were made by people who were working together on their own time simply because they believed in something really cool: co-creating a valuable resource for themselves - and then sharing it with others, free of IP constraints. This alone was an amazing concept to me back then, but philosophically, switching to Ubuntu led to a significant shift for me when I considered the wider implications of turning value creation & distribution hierarchies upside down. Because now, here was the way it was most certainly going to happen. And it was beginning to happen. And I was literally blown away by the larger implications. I was old enough to have well-established criticisms of having culture dictated to me, and young enough to embrace creating my own.

I began writing my crazy thoughts down because imaginally, I was taking that model and transposing it to everything: The individual, now networked and provided with a distribution platform was a holistic political actor. Ideas, literature, history, services - culture in general - that would never have seen the light of day through the usual channels - was now broadcast to billions. It occurred to me that P2P culture is to the 21st century what the printing press was to the Age of Enlightenment - but to an almost unfathomably greater degree. The virtual sum of human knowledge was now available to dissect, critique, compare, dismiss, reject, embrace, build upon or capitalize on - and this enormous sea change would irrevocably transform consciousness, and therefore could logically replace or eliminate the need for political systems within a decade or two. 

Although at the time when I shared this insight with friends, most thought I had lost my freaking mind - and that’s fine. Maybe it sounded sort of crazy and even scary to imagine no one being 'in charge'.

Pretty soon though, I was glad to discover that other people were thinking similarly. I started a blog in order to catalog and organize these ideas - using history as a comparison and looking at periods when cultures had been previously transformed due to information-liberation, new technologies and less restrictive regimes. I also read a lot about P2P culture (the sausage-making of open source software creation) and intellectual property - and came across a few great thinkers in this sphere, such as Eben Moglen.

Enter Ron Paul, Austrian Economics and Bitcoin

Around that time and in the 6 months leading up to the 2008 election, I went from Libertarian to full-on Anarchist-Voluntaryist, thanks to Ron Paul. I read (devoured) books by many of the classical libertarian and anarchist authors: Bastiat, Spooner, Rothbard, La Boetie, Hayek - and began my study of Austrian Economics, even though I was actually sick a lot in 2008-9. I was diagnosed with a rare ocular melanoma, and had another serious illness in my immediate family. Later I found out that I had Lyme disease, so a lot of my time was spent reading and researching how to get well from that. But I remember the day I found out about Bitcoin. My first thought was that it was of course inevitable (and seriously reassuring) to watch the trend of decentralization extend into the sphere of money - as the means of bringing actual progress through free market interaction, unrestricted by a central banking cartel. I knew, even then that change wasn’t going to happen through traditional political means, but as a natural outcome of decentralizing technologies and culture in general. 

A few years on and many interesting physical, intellectual and spiritual excursions later, I’m more reassured than ever that the specific technologies and positive cultural changes which voluntaryist and free market philosophies seems to be driving - and which are designed to offer greater freedom for individuals (and now greater prosperity). These implications, while technological and social, are indeed spiritual.

And despite the political theatre around us, Voluntaryism and the technologically-enabled free market are literally changing the world for the better before our eyes. 

It’s really an exciting time, don’t you think?