The Anarchist's Guide to Escaping the Matrix

Every week there's some guy on my Instagram feed telling me that he's escaped the matrix.

He rents a Lamborghini, and that's how you know he is free.

He wants to sell me a course, I think. He's figured out the secret to escaping the matrix. And for just 99 dollars a month, he'll teach me how to do it.

But before you pull out your credit cards, you should know that none of this stuff is new.

Escaping the matrix is not some new thing the finance gurus just began to figure out on Instagram. It's a game as old as civilization itself.

Millions of people have been doing it for thousands of years, before Instagram, before smartphones, before the word 'matrix' even existed.

When our ancestors were still trying to figure out how to sacrifice a goat, people were already escaping the matrix.

So this is the story of the OGs. One of the first in history to escape at scale. And their playbook is still running today.

I suppose some things never change. Or do they?

In today's video let us explore the old art of not being governed.

That, by the way, is the name of this book: "The Art of Not Being Governed", by the Yale anthropologist James C. Scott.

In the book Scott writes about a place called Zomia.

Zomia is a region roughly the size of Western Europe. Located in the mountain ranges of upland Southeast Asia, it sprawls across the borders of several countries including China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, and reaching all the way into the far northeast of India.

But who cares? This place sounds like the middle of nowhere. Why are we talking about it? Why does it even have a name?

Well, Zomia being in the middle of nowhere is kind of the point. It's precisely because it's in the middle of nowhere that many people have chosen to live here throughout history.

And those who lived here did so in an unusual way.

In the book, Scott calls Zomia "the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states".

Today we would call these people 'anarchists', in that they lived without the control of central governments. And they'd done this for centuries.

One might even say that Zomia is the last truly 'free' place on earth, or, at least it was, until modern governments started systematically cracking down on it.

As you know, modern governments don't seem to like it when there are people in their borders doing whatever they want and not paying taxes.

Despite the governments' best efforts, however, pieces of the Zomian communities survived. Like an ancient ghost it refuses to die only to linger on to haunt us and our modern institutions.

But how did they pull this off?

On the surface, Zomian communities look like nothing more than primitive mountain tribes: backward and uncivilized.

Their communities produced little surplus and lived mostly at subsistence.

Historically almost all Zomians were illiterate. Their civilization left behind no written history, or notable monuments of any kind.

In fact the only written records of Zomian societies are from the history books of the surrounding states, which mostly portrayed the Zomians as barbarians living in the mountains.

Some historians hence theorized that Zomians must be our living ancestors.

They are what we were like back when we were still living in the mountains. We lived off nature in small subsistence tribes because we hadn't figured out how to produce food at scale and organize ourselves through sophisticated political institutions.

But as our civilization progressed, we came down from the mountains into the valley. We invented writing, large scale farming, and organized ourselves into kingdoms where we raised armies, built monuments, and made history.

Historians then concluded that Zomians must be the remnants of our ancestors, those who never made it down the mountains. Some kind of living fossil of pre-civilized societies.

The truth however is the exact opposite. The valley civilizations came first, and the hill tribes came after. Zomians are not our ancestors. We are theirs.

It's therefore more accurate to call Zomian societies "post-civilization" rather than "pre-civilization"

But how did this happen? Why would anyone voluntarily leave the comfort of civilization to live in the mountains?

And why did so many of them do it, for so long?

Well technically they didn't leave civilization. What they left was the governance of the nation state.

And the reason they left the state was more straightforward: because it sucked to live there.

Historically, states didn't care about the well-being of their people. What states cared about was taking from them, so much so that the entire state apparatus was designed for that purpose.

If you were a subject living in one of the states surrounding the Zomia region, you would have probably been forced to work on rice farms. The states liked rice in particular because it was easy to tax and transport.

Likely more than half of your harvest would have been taken, leaving you just enough to feed yourself and your family if you were lucky.

Periodically you'd also be forced to perform unpaid physical work. This is called corvée labour, where you would build temples or palaces or whatever else the king fancied.

If the king wanted to fight a war, you and/or your kids would be conscripted, where you would be forced to kill people you didn't know for reasons you didn't understand.

And if you somehow survived all of that there'd still be many more ways to die.

If the weather was a bit dry one year the crops could fail causing famine. And since you lived in close proximity with other people and livestock, epidemics were also not infrequent.

And all of this good stuff was assuming that you were not a slave. You could very well be one statistically speaking given how widely slavery was practiced back then.

So the real question isn't why anyone left the states. It's why anyone stayed.

Now let's say you've had enough. You've decided to leave. Congratulations. But you now have three problems.

First, the state will hunt you down. You're not their customer, you're property. If you run, the state and their bounty hunters will come after you.

Second, where would you go? Any good lands out there are probably already taken by the states. What's left are the scraps that no one bothered with.

And lastly, what are you going to eat? Now that you've left your rice field behind, how are you going to get food?

So compared to the modern version of escaping the matrix, which mostly consists of moving to Dubai and selling courses on TikTok, the historical version seems a bit harder.

But it wasn't impossible.

First, let's talk about where you would go.

Of course you want to get as far away from the states as possible, but not all distance is created equal.

For example, flat lands with good road networks are much easier to traverse. If the distance between you and the state is made up of these flat lands, that's not very helpful.

So what you want is not mere distance, but effortful distance, or distance that's hard to traverse.

Mountains are perfect for this. Have you ever hiked on a mountain before? Pretty annoying, isn't it? It's almost like mother nature designed mountains to be as annoying for human travel as possible.

Before modern infrastructure mountain travel was prohibitive. Anything with wheels basically doesn't work on mountains. You can try horses but that's sketchy.

Realistically mountain travel would have had to be either on foot or with pack mules, or occasionally small elephants.

So if you can manage to travel light, and get your ass deep into a mountain somewhere, you'll suddenly become quite safe from the state.

At that point the state can't send armies after you anymore. Cavalry on horseback don't fare well in the mountains and it would be a nightmare to supply troops in the mountains.

To get you, the state would need to hire a specialized team with mules or elephants. They'd need to venture into the mountains and somehow track you down without getting lost or dying. And once they find you they'd still need to physically fight you to capture you, and then go through the treacherous mountainous journey again to bring you back home.

It's not impossible to do, it's just too much work. So unless the states have a very good reason to come after you, most of the time, they wouldn't bother.

It's in this way that the mountains have historically become the canonical destination for those escaping the states. The Chinese saying 'the mountain is high and the emperor is far away' is one such folk wisdom representing the concept.

It just so happens that Zomia is the biggest pile of mountains in the neighborhood. And it sits in the middle of many surrounding states.

And as the people from these states ran, they all ran uphill towards Zomia.

For two thousand years the surrounding states drained people into the same pile of mountains.

And as such, Zomia became a collection of human leakage from all over the place. A zone of refuge, for those escaping the matrix.

This is why Zomia is so culturally diverse. In the book Scott describes it as "one hundred million minority peoples of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety" such that "traveling even a short distance in the hills would expose one to a crazy-quilt of languages, rituals, and identities."

Anyways now that we've established where to go, let's talk about what to eat.

Humans are creatures that eat. And a creature that eats must keep eating, elsewise it dies.

So what are you going to eat?

Will you continue cultivating wet rice even in the mountains? Well, that's not impossible. You can try a terrace farm, which makes for a stunning tourist attraction but a pain in the ass to construct and maintain.

It takes about 20 times more effort to carve a terrace farm into a mountainside compared to the comparable endeavor on flat ground. And once you build the terrace you are stuck with it, meaning you can no longer leave and take it with you.

A terrace farm also stands out thoroughly in the middle of the mountain, making it much easier to track you down. And the state now has a good reason to come after you just as soon as they realize that you are about to harvest all this rice.

So wet rice farming is out of the picture but what can you do?

Well for a while your options were limited.

There were some okay candidates. For example, barley, millet and buckwheat are tough little grains that tolerate bad soil and high altitude, but they stand out above ground and are easily taxable like wet rice.

Taro can be left in the ground so it's less obvious, but it demands wet, fertile soil. Yams are hardier than taro, but require more work. The sago palm is less work, but it does not survive high altitude.

So farming in the mountains only kind of worked. There was no ideal crop, and for centuries, agriculture outside the matrix ran on compromises.

The compromises ended however in the 15th century, when an Italian dude decided to look for India by sailing west, and landed on a whole new continent instead.

That stunt changed a few things in human history, one of which was that a slew of novel crops native to America made their way into Eurasia. Many of those crops happened to be extremely optimized for those escaping the matrix. Think about a potato.

What's so special about a potato? Nothing really. So much so that you can't really tell that they are there.

This is a picture of a potato plant.

This is a picture of some grass I found on the sidewalk outside my house.

If you were to tell me it was the other way around I wouldn't know. They all look the same to me.

This is advantageous because the state can't take what they can't see. If you are growing potatoes in the mountains, no one knows you are growing potatoes in the mountains. Above ground, your potatoes look like any random grass.

Below ground your potatoes look like any random mud.

It follows then that people can't take your stuff if they don't know you have stuff.

What's more, potatoes can grow just about anywhere. They don't need a special irrigation system like wet rice.

Shove a potato into the ground, and the fucker grows.

It grows at sea level. It grows in the mountains. It grows near the equator. It grows in the Arctic. My friend Matt even managed to grow it on Mars in his own shit.

And potatoes aren't even the best crops that came out of the new world.

My personal favorite has gotta be the cassava. I don't know if you've heard of cassava before, it's a kind of large root crop. And its specs are so OP that it's honestly kind of broken.

"So hardy and self-sufficient is this large root plant that preventing it from growing seems almost more difficult than cultivating it"

"it is drought resistant; it will tolerate soils in which virtually nothing else can be grown;"

And it's even kind of fireproof. A forest fire would only destroy the aboveground part of the plant, while your lunch survives in the dirt, ready to emerge from the ashes like some sort of a phoenix.

To grow cassava, you just need to stick the stem in the ground and then you are free to take off.

It will grow on its own, and you can return virtually at any point in the next two to three years to dig up dinner. In the meantime you can also eat its leaves, which are probably even more nutritious than the roots. About 20 to 30 percent of the leaves are protein by dry weight, which is more than many other green vegetables.

When you do get around to harvesting the roots, you can either eat the roots, or turn them into a kind of flour called tapioca for longer storage. Both the roots and the flour can also be traded for cash.

By the way bubble tea pearls are made from tapioca, so if you think you've never had cassava before, you probably have. And if you've never had bubble tea before, that's a bigger problem than I can solve right now.

In any case, cassava deservedly acquired the "undisputed status as the crop requiring the least labor for the greatest return."

One plantation owner in Central America once said that "with cassava, all a peasant needed was a shotgun and a fishhook and he would cease to work regularly for wages."

Now cassava are not invincible. They don't grow well in cold climate, or beyond an elevation of 2000 meters above sea level. But where it can grow, it really is unbeatable. The thing functions more like a free food machine than a farm crop, especially in the tropical monsoon climate found in much of Zomia.

Now one common technique Zomians used to farm these crops is called swiddening, also known as shifting cultivation.

The farmer would clear a patch of forest, burn it, plant in the ashes, and harvest for a year or two. They would then move on to another patch, somewhere else in the forest to do it all over again, while the old plot grows back and disappears and the soil underneath recovers its natural fertility and structure.

The word 'burning' might sound scary for the environment, but the practice was surprisingly sustainable. At the scale Zomians practiced, the carbon released into the air would have been pulled out of it when the plot grew back. So, historically it would have been carbon neutral if not better.

By the way, the farming techniques that do harm the environment are mostly the modern variants, such as crop residue burning done on permanent fields at industrial scale.

In any case, as a farming practice swiddening is almost the exact opposite of an irrigated rice farm.

To farm rice you need to take more or less a month to build the paddy itself, then weeks at the start of each season to prep the field before you can plant a single seedling.

You then grow the crop in neat rows into a more or less symmetrical field.

Tax collectors love this, because they now have a permanent spot on the map that generates reliable output on schedule.

They can predict at a glance when and how much rice you are expected to harvest.

They can then schedule the tax collection on the calendar and plan out the logistics and transportation accordingly such as how many carts and horses they need to bring to take your stuff and how much supply they need for the trip.

You have helped to optimize the administrative process for the state to take your stuff.

Swiddening, on the other hand, is the tax collector's nightmare.

First of all since you are temporarily clearing a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, it's unclear the tax men would even know that you are there. And by the time they find out, you're probably long gone.

There is also no road system that goes to your middle of nowhere plot so even if they knew you are there they wouldn't know how to get there or how to transport your stuff back after taking it.

They also wouldn't know when to show up. Since you plant a variety of crops, they don't all ripen at the same time. This is called staggered maturity. In practice you dig your lunch out of the ground as they ripen but for the tax men it means there is no one time of year that is the harvest season for them to show up to collect.

And even if they did show up, they wouldn't know what to do with your plot anyway.

You are not planting one crop in neat rows like a rice farmer. What you do have is more like some potatoes over here, some cassava over there, some yam next to some taro, maybe even a Sago Palm in the corner. From the outside, your plot looks like a clusterfuck of random grass. The average tax man simply doesn't have the botanical training to know what they are looking at.

And in the worst case, let's say you've got some really motivated tax collectors, they charter an expedition through the mountain to get to your plot, they don't care that there's no harvest season, they even bring my friend Matt with them to figure out what you are growing, by the time they get to your plot, you can just leave.

They will then be confronted by the fact that your potatoes are in the ground. And if they want your potatoes, they are going to have to dig them up themselves.

In other words they've come all the way here just to do farm work. The whole project simply makes no sense financially, or calorically for that matter. Meaning it takes more calories to come take your potatoes than the amount of calories in those potatoes.

So if you are swiddening in the Zomian mountains it will probably be tax exempt.

Swiddening also opens up a much wider range of lifestyle possibilities unavailable to those in the matrix.

For example rice farming is so effort intensive that it's inherently a team effort. You need to work with your neighbors from transplanting to harvesting. And you need a village chief to coordinate the whole thing. So for the most part, to be a rice farmer is to be locked into a village life.

The reward for all this collaborative effort is a large yield at harvest. And again the states love this because they get to come and take it.

Swiddening on the other hand does not produce as much yield. But it does not require nearly as much work either, so much so that it can be done solo. A guy with a machete can clear a field and shove potatoes in the ground all by himself.

So swiddeners get to choose how they'd like to live.

Do you like neighbours? Well then, by all means live in a village. But the moment the HOA gets a bit too much you can just bounce. Clear another plot somewhere else, shove some new potatoes in there, and you are good to go.

And even when you do live with other people, leadership is not a necessity, since there's nothing that needs a chief to coordinate.

Historically, this has resulted in stunningly diverse social structures in the Zomia region.

There were permanent villages with chiefs, temporary hamlets that moved, single families out in the forest that answered to no one at all, and everything in between.

Some communities deliberately adopted an egalitarian social structure with no vertical hierarchies and no single point of leadership.

Not because they were hippies but as a hedge against state invasion.

A society with no leader is a society you can't easily take over, because the invading state would have no central command to attack. To properly take over a leaderless community, the invader would need to go from hut to hut to secure one household at a time. And that is so annoying to do that the invaders would hopefully never try.

The European colonizers actually ran into this exact problem when they tried to administer over part of Zomia in the 19th century, and weren't able to do much as a result.

Many Zomians also adopted fluid ethnic identities to further optimize state evasion. Some of them changed their ethnicity as often as they changed their clothes. Sometimes literally by changing their clothes.

So one group of people might be Shan on Monday. But on Thursday when the Shan kingdom began conscripting for war, they changed their dress, put on a hat, walked back up hill and were suddenly the Kachin and were no longer legible for conscription. Many Zomians also spoke multiple languages which aided in this endeavor.

In this way, Zomians could adopt whichever ethnic identity that was most advantageous at any given time, thusly slipping in and out of the state's grasp as they saw fit.

Scott argues that even Zomians' lack of literacy is a state-evading technique.

Once something is written down it is fixed into the physical world and hard to change. By keeping no written record of the past and adopting an oral-only tradition, Zomian storytellers could change their tribe's history at will, morphing their collective identity into whatever shape best suited for survival.

Like that Bruce Lee quote, Zomians are formless and shapeless, like water.

You put them into a cup, they become the cup. Put them into a teapot, they become the teapot.

And a state that reaches out for the Zomians will only find them slipping through its fingers.

At this point you are probably realizing how annoying it is to deal with the Zomians from the states' perspective.

In medicine, when a disease is incurable, doctors opt for prevention instead. That seemed to be the attitude of many states when it came to Zomia, as a disease they couldn't cure, therefore could only hopefully prevent.

One preventative method consisted of literally building walls. One wall in particular was so great that it is now called the Great Wall. Although the Great Wall you've likely heard of faces north against the pastoral nomads of the great Mongolian steppe, not Zomia. The Zomian-facing wall is a separate wall called the Southern Great Wall.

Both walls were officially constructed to keep people out but in fact also to keep people in. It was to stop the ungovernable barbarians from coming in as much as it was to stop the state subjects from leaving to the other side and becoming ungovernable.

Other preventative efforts were psychological; psyops, if you will.

As the saying goes, if you can't beat them, insult them.

Indeed the states have said many mean things about Zomia behind its back over the centuries.

They've called Zomians barbarians, savages, uncivilized, lazy, wild, raw, or some other variations of undesirable losers.

By painting the Zomians as low status, the states hoped to convince their subjects not to join them, and instead stay in the matrix to farm rice and pay taxes obediently.

Surprisingly, even these reputational attacks were used as a state-evasion technique by the Zomians.

In some sense the Zomians wanted to be painted as undesirable losers. When people think you are broke, they are less likely to take your stuff. Thanks to the low-status reputation Zomians could more easily fly under the radar, live a free life outside the matrix without garnering unwanted attention.

But importantly, Zomian communities were not completely isolated from the valley states.

In this case, when one escapes the matrix, one does not simply cease all contact. One instead maintains intricate and frequent interactions with it.

Trading, for instance, occurred frequently between the valley kingdoms and the hills of Zomia.

The hill sold to the valley medicines, spices, tea, and precious metals, among other things. The valley sold to the hill salt, fish, ironware, ceramics and steel weapons, among other things.

This trade relationship was important for both sides. Scott noted that "[the valley states] were at least as dependent on products from the hills as hill peoples were dependent on valley products".

In fact many of the things being traded were either comparatively advantaged, or downright exclusive to each side.

For example, you can't find rubies and sapphires in the valley. Spices and tea are also better grown in hill climate. In the same way you can't find seafood in the mountains. And steelwork is more advanced in the valley. So if people wanted these things, they'd have to trade for it.

Now unfortunately, peaceful trade was not the only kind of interaction that occurred.

Zomia is not some kind of Utopia. You can outrun the states, but you cannot outrun human nature. Just because someone leaves the states does not automatically mean that they are good people.

In fact the mountains simply don't care about the content of your character. As a result, all kinds of people congregated there, including real criminals who only came to the mountain to run away from the law.

They could then use the mountainous terrain to evade justice while continuing their criminal endeavor. For instance they might have become mountain bandits that robbed travelers for a living.

Obviously there were peaceful hill tribes who wanted nothing more than to be left alone to shove their potatoes into the ground, but not all hill tribes were like that.

When you put enough humans together for long enough, they behave predictably.

Some hill tribes in the mountains grew large enough that they became small statelets of their own. They collected taxes, raised armies, kept slaves, raided nearby communities, and made war with the states outside the hill.

Sometimes there could even be several of these statelets in one area. They then formed alliances with and waged wars against each other, and played the same sort of court politics found in the valley.

This might seem a bit ironic. These people left the matrix only to recreate it all over again. The escapees rebuilt the exact thing they escaped from.

But this isn't exactly unexpected. In fact it fits well with a known pattern of history.

The Chinese classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms opens like this: "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide."

This is accurate as a literal observation of Chinese history. China has been cycling through division and unity for two and a half thousand years. The same patch of land would break down into warring states, then unite into one empire, only to break down again, over and over, like clockwork.

This pattern isn't just a random chance of history. It is driven by something inherent to the human heart: the tug of war, between order and chaos.

We humans need order in our lives, but we don't like it when there's too much order. So we seek out chaos, but we also don't like it when there's too much chaos.

Too much order is like a helicopter parent who controls every aspect of your life. Every minute of your day is scheduled; every decision already made. You are to do exactly as you are told, and live your life precisely as planned.

That is an orderly life but it's no way to live. There's no adventure. No creativity. No fun. Soon you will crave a bit of the unexpected; a bit of chaos.

But too much chaos is also intolerable, like a parent who is never there. Think about the Home Alone movie, except it is not just the holiday season but all year round. It's fun for a few days; then it becomes way too stressful when literally everything is unexpected all the time.

So presumably we like to be somewhere in the middle between order and chaos. Enough order so that we feel safe but also enough chaos so that we are not bored.

The problem of course is that we have no idea where that exact sweet spot is. It differs between people because it's a matter of value. Some people prefer more order. They like routines and plans. Others are more adventurous and would feel stifled with too much structure.

That seems fine as long as we are all individuals and free to make our own choices and live our lives as we see fit, except that we also have to live together.

Scale that up to whole civilizations and we see why it oscillates between unity and division throughout history.

So the story goes, a state would unite the realm and enforce order. But then it concentrates too much power and becomes tyrannical. And now there's too much order.

So some guy starts a rebellion and the realm divides. Wars break out. People die. And now there's too much chaos.

Until a strong leader unites the realm and we do it all over again.

The pendulum swings back and forth as the tug of war wages on.

The Zomia mountains and their surrounding valley states are but an externalization of this exact pattern. What is unique about Zomia is that it offers individuals a choice, one with less violence and bloodshed.

When the valley kingdoms become tyrannical, people can run to the hill. They can exit the excess order and seek out chaos on their own terms, and presumably no one has to die.

When the king is wise and the valley kingdom is peaceful and prosperous, some Zomians can then choose to come down the mountains and find employment and stability in the valley states. They get to exit chaos and seek out order peacefully and productively.

In theory, people get to choose, based on their own values.

Want more order? Then stay in the valley. Crave some chaos? Then have your adventure in the mountains.

But all good things come to an end. The Zomian party had been going strong for 2000 years but its days were numbered.

Its downfall began with the advent of modern infrastructure.

You see the mountains worked because they were annoying to traverse. Modern infrastructure changed that.

Around the 1950s, the states began building roads and bridges with steel and concrete. Then railway.

What used to be a treacherous journey that took days now costs a scenic afternoon on the train.

And so the states came for Zomia. Along with the roads and the wifi connection, the states brought census, registration and IDs, school and courts, and apparent rule of law, credit cards, private ownership of lands, the forced cessation of cultural practices like swiddening, and, of course, taxes.

Now this did not happen all at once, and there are still a few hold out communities in the mountains even today. But they are a remnant compared to what they once were.

The mountains are still high but the emperor is no longer so far away.

The long divided Zomia is finally united by steel and concrete.

On paper, it would seem that Zomia is over. Yet its spirit lives on.

Infrastructure can close the frontiers of the mountains, but it cannot close the yearning for freedom in the human heart.

The appetite for chaos does not go away just because we now have trains. Long united must divide. And the pressure now needed a new Zomia.

So where is this new Zomia now?

Well we have quite a few options, and I don't have time to talk about all of them in this video.

So I will talk about just a few for a taste, starting with the internet.

So it's the 1990s. The physical frontiers closed with roads and railway, but the virtual frontiers were just opening up with the fiber-optic cables.

There was this new virtual space in which you could have the freedom you wanted and the state couldn't reach you.

It's a bit ironic to escape the matrix by plugging into a virtual space. It's supposed to be the other way around in the movie. But for a while it worked.

Civil-liberty activist John Perry Barlow made this explicit in 1996 when he wrote to the governments of the world: "You have no sovereignty where we gather."

As internet matured it also became easier to escape the matrix through it. It became a virtual Wild West, or a virtual Zomia of sorts.

The archetypal escapee would have looked something like a digital nomad.

With a laptop and a wifi connection their physical presence was completely divorced from their virtual counterpart. This separation added friction to state control the same way the mountains used to do.

It was harder for the states to control them because the state didn't know where they were physically. It might look like they were making US dollars online but the income could nonetheless be untaxable because they were physically in Dubai or something with a different tax code, or the absence of one.

The empire long united by infrastructure, was then divided, by the internet.

For a while this kind of worked. It arguably peaked around the 2020s during COVID, when everyone and their mother started working from home.

But long divided must unite. The states never tolerate an unregulated frontier for long, and had been incrementally increasing their grasp on the virtual frontier.

At some point people woke up and found their online freedom to be a mere shadow of what it once was.

A handful of American companies now control the majority of online activities. Together the data they track can identify exactly who you are, where you are, and what you do. Your supposed online freedom is ultimately a facade.

The people running these companies can be summoned by the states and compelled to do their bidding.

And as more of our lives move online, we become less free, and more subject to state control than even before the internet frontier existed.

And so the empire long divided by the internet was united by hyperscalers, shareholders, and their servers.

But that won't last forever. As you may have guessed: Long united must divide.

The seed of division was planted all the way back in 2008, when some guy by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto released an obscure white paper talking about something called Bitcoin.

Few people took it seriously back then, but about 2 decades later the thing now has a market cap of over a trillion dollars, with the broader crypto market it inspired worth about twice as much.

Finances aside, the kind of technology and technological principles of bitcoin inspired a different philosophy of networking, known as Web 3.

To parse the jargon here:

Web 1 was the initial internet, with anarchic freedom if only because it was so new.

Web 2 is the hyperscaler-server enabled online control. It looks free in so far as anyone gets to upload their latte photo on instagram. But underneath the facade a handful of companies know exactly where you bought the latte and how much you tipped the barista before you even uploaded the photo.

Web 3 then is encryption and protocol enabled online freedom.

The implication of web 3 is profound, and again I don't have the time to be exhaustive here in this video.

But just to scratch the surface:

From a finance perspective, what the crypto industry has created are new kinds of money that run on decentralized servers that are hard for the states to seize. Individuals can transact online, at times with complete anonymity, outside the state's reach.

More importantly, beyond money, the broader web3 network protocol allows people to communicate and work in the same way.

At the moment, there are around 20 thousand developers working on web3 in any given month. They write code, run project treasuries, and make and sell stuff, among other things. No one knows their real name, where they live, or what they look like, and yet some of them are making quite a comfortable living.

Now much of web3 is still in its infancy. Its infrastructure is less mature compared to web2, and to participate one typically needs some degree of technical proficiency.

As a result the majority of online activities still occur in the state-controlled web2.

You for example are watching this video on YouTube, not because you want Google to track all your data, but because it's convenient: the app works, and the creators you like all seem to upload on this platform.

And I posted this video on YouTube, not because I want to give one American company the power to unilaterally destroy my entire life's work with a click of a button, but because it's convenient. The app works and the people who enjoy watching long form deep dives all seem to congregate on this platform.

So web 2 is not optimal but it provides the most convenient experience at the moment and people generally choose convenience over optimality.

But as web3 matures and adoption grows, it is my hope that web 3 will one day become the default for most people.

In the meantime I have made some crude attempts to hedge against web 2's tyranny.

Here's my email newsletter which is my humble attempt at decentralized content delivery.

In the event that YouTube deletes my channel because I utter the wrong word, which seems bound to happen one of these days, I would hopefully still be able to reach some of you through this newsletter. So check it out in the description.

In any case, it is in this way that the empire long united by tech monopolies is starting to be divided again by protocols, encryption, and code, one email newsletter at a time.

By the way there's a tangent here where web 3, like Zomia, is not a utopia.

Just as a historical criminal can run to the Zomian mountains to continue criminal activities, a present-day criminal can leverage web 3 for the same thing. Lots of money laundering occurs through crypto currencies for example.

So we should not be so quick to assign morality here.

In any case Web 3 isn't the end of the road.

You know the game at this point, the tug of war must go on. Long divided must unite, but what will unite web 3?

It's hard to say. Web 3 is still quite new in many ways, so anything that I can say right now should fall into the category of conjectures.

Maybe the states will crack down on web 3.

Or maybe the states will join it.

Maybe a bit of both, depending on which state and which policy we are talking about.

There are other interesting ideas here that go beyond traditional statehood. Balaji for instance explores the possibility of starting new countries using web 3 as a base layer. He talks about this in his book The Network State, which he presents as a way to unite the long divided crypto anarchy.

But I think I will stop now. This video is long enough as it is and what I'd like to do most of all right now is to try shoving some Cassava in my backyard and see what happens.

In the meantime you can check out more of my work in my community, and my email newsletter, both linked in the description. Thank you for watching, I'll see you next time.