Agorism in the 21st Century — Volume 2 (2023)

Authors: ed. Paul Dylan-Ennis, Rachel-Rose O'Leary + anonymous | Essays: 10 | Publisher: Agorism XXI, Sept 2023 | Generated: 2026-09-05

How to Use This Skill

• Without arguments — load core frameworks below for reference
• With a topic — ask about dark forest, squad wealth, sousveillance, etc.; the relevant chapter file gets read
• With an essay — ask for Wilson, O'Leary, Hermes, ch07; that chapter loads
• Browse — ask "what chapters do you have?" for the full index

Core Frameworks & Mental Models

Death Athletic (Wilson) — freedom-tech as acrobatic discipline staking one's social/physical life. The core technique is the super-ordination of the voluntary over the compulsory: when authority strikes, answer "of course — according to plan" (Christ's Consummatum est, Socrates' Crito, Yes Chad). Secessionary gestures (severed arm of Goliad, "Live free or die") make the act legible beyond the actor. Girard's mediation audit guards the practitioner: name your models (external mediation) or they become demons (internal mediation → ressentiment, purity spirals, stolen valor). Absurd contests are worth attempting for their shadow cone — they scramble the coordinates of the possible.

Dark Forest (O'Leary) — anonymity as the seed vault of culture. Ireland's history as template: colonization = deforestation (Senchas Már's censored law → Cromwell's scorched earth → famine); resistance = the forest's return (Cethern Coille guerillas using the wood as natural encryption; Gaelic Revivals as cultural re-forestation). Strauss's vertical (esoteric) vs horizontal (exoteric) encryption; Öcalan's prison manifestos as exoteric comhrún (shared secret + common purpose). Rojava's democratic modernity: xwebûn (self-becoming units) confederated, restoring moral and political society. Lunar symbolism (Eliade): the moon dies and returns — "becoming is the lunar order of things"; the dark age (Kali Yuga) ends in seed-burst. Eternal return as selection filter (Nietzsche/Deleuze): affirmation compounds, reaction self-cancels — "bite off the head of the snake."

Necroprimitivism (Alsindi) — the Bitcoin-maxi pathology named: thermo-Austrian scarcity logic + petro-masculine identity + code-as-law immutability = tolerating ecological collapse rather than consensus change. Bitcoin is an indifference engine: PoW cannot discriminate energy sources (sensorship-resistance); "timechains don't pivot, they fork." The timechain is fundamentally a timestamping server (chronaissance). "More prophetable to imagine an end to the world than a change to Bitcoin's consensus."

Minor Calendars (Valens) — calendars are political instruments. Solar timekeeping serves extraction; lunar/vernacular time (lunar mansions, gossip, art) serves conspiracy and resists harnessing. Transparent blockchains = solar (linear, unforgiving, "never forget"); shielded chains = minor calendars (after Deleuze & Guattari) — time about revelation, private by default, revealed with discretion. Double-spend = forgery of time. Counterpowers need their own timekeeping.

Lunar Epistemology (Hermes) — the solar trinity (sun–knowledge–vision) made illumination an ethical imperative; its terminal form is the surveillance panopticon ("optic fiber ganglia, satellite-meshwork retina"). All computation is disembodied vision. Counter-tactics: crypto-epistemology (there is no uncovering without prior cover-up; minds endarken as well as illuminate), sousveillance ("transparency for the powerful, privacy for the weak"), penumbral semi-permeable boundaries (full openness/closure both kill), endarkenment (the right to forget; "read the books and burn them" — deletion against generative entrenchment), post-ocular plurimodality (oral tradition's antifragile anonymity).

Punkplex Dialectic (Dunkel) — lunarpunk is the synthesis of cypherpunk (combative but bitter, intoxicated by the abyss) and solarpunk (hopeful but escapist, VC-captured), not the antithesis of either. It asserts rather than negates — exits the prison of inevitability. The true enemy is the 5,000-year system of domination (ziggurats → state/capital as its faces). Defense is constructive: "farms and factories, libraries and laboratories" under the cryptographic canopy. Moonlight: visibility calibrated — enough to see the path, not enough to be seen.

Non-Coercive Collectivism (Owocki) — the individualist/collectivist war is a funding-method dispute; both want public goods. Web3's parallel society: DAOs + tokens + ZK proofs = voluntary, trackable, privacy-respecting public goods funding. Opt-in to open source and parks, opt out of wars. Snowball, not revolution.

Modern Tribes (Lupták) — "Space Age technology under Bronze Age rulership": information abundance destroyed the monopoly preconditions of homogeneous governance; enforcement violence is now prohibitively expensive. Virtual communities replace geographic ones; political form should follow affinity. Tribes = natural grouping: loyalty, conflict resolution, lower transaction costs, autonomous zones and rule-sets.

Squad Wealth (Lakshmi/LunarDAO) — wealth = the social fabric (knowledge, resources, infrastructure); movements refusing wealth stay reactive ("comfortable state of discomfort"). Squad test: belief + methodology + strategy + goal (Bitcoin maxis fail it). Capitalism is anti-economy — oikonomos (produce + fairly redistribute for communal well-being) is the original. Semantic drift is a corruption vector: the movement's words were hollowed one by one. Squad wealth = philosophy + ideology + technology + economic power, held collectively — first line of defense in the dark forest.

Foreword frame — crypto as Dante's Purgatory: redemption requires recognition of the sin; the Moon (Dante's first Heaven) holds the inconstant-but-well-intentioned. "We are in the mix."

Chapter Index

Topic Index

• anonymity → ch03, ch04, ch05, ch09
• anti-economy / oikonomos → ch09
• Bitcoin critique (energy/ossification) → ch02
• censorship-resistance / sensorship-resistance → ch02
• Dante / Purgatory → ch00
• dark forest → ch03, ch05, ch06, ch09
• death performance / euthanasia → ch01
• deletion / right to forget → ch05
• dialectic / synthesis → ch06
• encryption (vertical/horizontal) → ch03
• eternal return / Nietzsche → ch03
• Girard / mediation / ressentiment → ch01
• Ireland / Senchas Már / Pearse → ch03
• lunar symbolism / moon → ch03, ch04, ch05, ch06
• lunarpunk (definition/politics) → ch05, ch06, ch09
• Öcalan / Rojava / democratic modernity → ch03
• opt-in public goods / DAOs → ch07, ch09
• privacy chains / shielded transactions → ch04, ch05
• public goods / commons → ch05, ch07
• secession / exit → ch01, ch08
• solarpunk → ch05, ch06
• sousveillance → ch05
• squad wealth / tribes → ch08, ch09
• surveillance critique → ch02, ch04, ch05
• timechain / time → ch02, ch04
• Yes Chad / authority response → ch01
• ZK proofs → ch07

Supporting Files

• glossary.md — all key terms with definitions and chapter refs
• patterns.md — 10 actionable techniques (when/how/trade-offs)
• cheatsheet.md — decision tables and tells for quick reference

Scope & Limits

Covers Vol. 2 (2023) only — not Vols. 1 or 3. The essays interlock (deliberately) but disagree in places (Alsindi vs Wilson on Bitcoin's death-drive; Dunkel's synthesis vs Owocki's liberal-ish optimism) — preserve the tensions, don't flatten them. For C's operational agorism (real-world parallel-institutions practice), combine with project context; the volume is philosophy, not a runbook.