Since the Charlie Hebdo attack in january 2015, free speech has become subject to a constant entropy, and this at the western scale. Because this entropy was impossible to translate into metrics or even to complexe tensors, this degradation has been silent for the majority of the population and inintelligible for the minority that was noticing it. But when you compare covers from Charlie Hebdo or even The New Yorker during the early 2000 and after 2015, you notice than some kind of terror win over the humorists of the western block.
A vast array of false solutions
The first false solution, which unfortunately, is the most obvious because the most advertised in the media, due to our western oligarchic-democratic-system that runs on simulated rebellion, is to rant about the state of free speech. This solution should be made illegal and anyone using it should be sent to a re-education camp on three generations. We had an endemic production of literature, debates, and experts these last 7 years, and absolutely none of these instances has produced a solution to stop this attack on free speech. Worst of all, they come up with a thing : it’s called moderation. And when you’re online, you know what moderation is : an opaque entity, controlled by some kind of cyber state that can ban you without any justification. Surprisingly this is the kind of shadow tribunals that are now being enforced by law in our western states.
The second false solution is also obvious, but its falsehood is (for most people) quite immediate : Voting. I would not go deep into the subject, but voting is quite hopeless for minor topics. It’s obvious when you see Topics like retirement age being constantly mistreated by absolutely every government. Also Democracy is the exact opposite of individual freedom. It’s a gateway to absolutely anyone coming to your home, telling you what you should do, and in a country where people don’t have legal access to weapons of war (like France) this state of things quickly becomes a situation. Democracy is gay, prefer human sacrifice!
Sade, jailed but Free
Despite all the horrors of the last decade, two fortunate events happened. The very first was the bicentenary of the death of Sade, the French (and also western) most subversive author. His commitment to freedom of speech was absolute : He spent half of his life in prison for his writing and his book printer was even guillotined. His most famous manuscript, The 120 days of Sodom was written on toilet paper when he was imprisoned in La Bastille, and hidden between two stones, few days before the destruction of the prison, the 14th july 1789. The Marquis de Sade, believing his masterpiece gone forever, “cried tears of blood”. Despite this, he kept writing from his jail, and even directed several theatre plays in the asylum of Charenton where he died in 1814. But the crazy story does not end here! For the 140 following years, most of his writing were considered illegal, till a 20 year french guy named Jean-Jacques Pauvert decided to publish it under his real name, putting himself into a 10 years fight against the French state that would eventually result the unleashing of all the writings of “the divine Marquis”. The thirst for freedom of the marquis didn’t stop with his death, but impregnated his work to the point where his writings became an endemic meme in the XXth century French intelligentia.
Cody Wilson and the irreversibility of Action
The second fortunate event was Cody Wilson’s quest to release the 3D printed gun’s files. Inspired by Julian Assange and wikileaks, he decided to drop out his Law School to become a gunsmith/cyber-dissident, becoming one of the 10 most dangerous people on the Internet according to Wired magazine. Mostly known for his 3D gun project, his contribution to crypto-anarchy are numerous : Hatreon, Dark Wallet, a mysterious Deep Fake project (introduced during a podcast). At some point, there was even a rumor on 8chan than he was Sanjuro’s real identity, the founder of the unfamous Assassination Market running on TOR. All his projects come with some refreshing over-the-top gesture. I think the best example was when he publicly talked about engaging a militia to release the 3D printed gun files on the Internet, in a pure Mishimaesque move (announcing a process that he will articulate 7 years later under the name Deathletic). He is literally the anarchist version of Mark Zuckerberg. But the most important point is: He is quiet about most of the projects he is working on. Why? Because it’s about action, and not any sort of action : Irreversible actions that change the face of the world.
Putting some skin in the Writing Game
Sade-pilled and Cody-pilled, I jumped on both trains, with freedom as my ultimate destination. My very first action was to stop being moderated in my writings, get 10% more psycho like Justin Murphy says. I should write and fuck as what I am : A crazy sovereign individual that starts to feel his vitality escaping.
But here comes the main course, “le plat de resistance”. If you want your fight for freedom of speech to be successful, you need to empower your audience. This is why Charlie Hebdo failed : they were, in the french fashion, too much centralised, they never genuinely empowered their audience. For this, I am becoming a text publisher. I want at first to distribute texts from the people following me, and in the long run, help them to monetize their creation, but also to make their writings uncensorable, via blockchain and peer to peer technology. For this, I am launching Freemarket Sade.club, an ambitious project to generate beautiful pdf files from raw text and sell them using crypto-money. This week I finished the first prototype. Here are my findings.
GOOD : the pdf layout is free and absolutely gorgeous, saving you hours of page makeup, and providing your audience the feeling of reading a classical French subversive thinker with the complicity of the (underrated) Nicolas Jenson’s font.
BAD : the payment/shopping part is buggy and complexifies the user flow far beyond what I can handle. I think I will split this project in two parts, a platform to build and distribute pdf as peer to peer files and another to monetize files with crypto payments.
In conclusion
Freedom of speech is not about having a conversation about freedom, it’s about ending this conversation. What we can learn from the Marquis de Sade and Cody Wilson is that their lack of moderation made their creation powerful and lindy. The 3D printed gun and The 120 days of Sodom have embodied the power their authors put into, became hyper-objects, and eventually killed this endless conversation nightmare. And being inspired by these two personalities, I’ve decided to end the conversation too, writing outrageous BDSM things and providing support to the people that want to join the fight.
I’ll be comfortable when people will stop coming into my office and acting like it’s a debate. There is no debate anymore. The guns are downloadable, the files in the public domain, you can’t stop them anymore.
Cody Wilson, on 3D weapons
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