Cyberpunks vs. Technocrats

What Hacktivists and Oligarchs Are Fighting Over

Cyberpunks vs Technocrats

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A long-standing battle exists between decentralization advocates (cyberpunks) and centralized power (technocratic oligarchs), shaping the future of privacy, democracy, and digital freedom.
From the 1960s to today, hacktivists have fought against corporate and government surveillance through encryption, free software, and open-source movements.
Apps like Signal, Mastodon, and CryptPad challenge Big Tech’s data-exploitative models proving user-funded, privacy-focused alternatives, can succeed.
Elon Musk and other tech billionaires expand their influence over AI, space, finance, and communication, posing risks of corporate-controlled governance.
Society must choose between centralized convenience and decentralized freedom, with users, developers, and policymakers playing a critical role in shaping the digital future.

You've heard of wars and revolutions fought between clouds of smoke and spilled blood. But today democracy is fighting a battle that doesn't show any of the traditional signs of distress while posing the greatest existential threat to democracy the U.S. history has ever seen.

Although this lesser-known war between technocracy and democracy doesn't give us an easy trail of screams and blood to follow it's just as urgent, because the results of that conflict will dictate society's freedoms and liberties in the years ahead. And what unsung heroes are on the front lines of this battle? Indie cyberpunks that decided technocratic centralization of political and technological power through an oligarchy that subjects us to surveillance capital wasn't good enough.

I.

A hacker ethic developed in the halls of MIT in the 60s. An era seen with greater idealism and public trust than today. Which explains why hackers had a common ethic back then. Today's hacktivists are more often like cyber pirates where the hacker ethic is more of a guideline. The first wave of cyberpunks saw computers as exclusive to mega corporations by price tag and bureaucracy, and viewed public access to personal computers as a critical ingredient to freedom and democracy.

A formal declaration of hacker and cyberpunk values was first delivered by Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984). In it, he documents the people, machines, and events that defined the first wave of hacker culture at MIT. As well as the 6 principles that cyberpunk values would be built on:

Cover of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

Hands on imperative: to remove all barriers between people and advanced technologies, and the information needed to use them.
Information wants to be free: a focal point of their entire ethic which was interpreted in various ways taken to heart. Free could mean without restrictions (freedom of movement = no censorship), without control (freedom of change/evolution = no ownership or authorship, no intellectual property), or without monetary value (no cost). Others will take this to another level that free means the information is alive. And viruses, genetic algorithms, and bots are free to act as agents of their own will.
Mistrust of authority: not believing that centralized power can be trusted with institutions that have interests to dominate the technology. An ethic that leads to promoting decentralization making it harder for a central authority figure to interfere because there's no single fail point to exploit.
No "bogus" criteria: they wanted to be judged by their abilities rather than sex, ethnicity, skin color, position, et cetera.
You can create truth and beauty on a computer: hacking was equated with artistry and creativity elevating it to applied philosophy rather than mere pragmatism.
Computers can change your life for the better: the idea that from the deep love of technology and it's creative use as a fundamental good for society makes tech inherently liberatory.

The 80s would be the decade that Richard Stallman launched the Free Software Movement. Building the first library of free open-source software that could be used as an operating system called GNU, that would later become known as Linux. Or the first personal computer guaranteeing computation wouldn't be locked out of the public by tech exclusive corporations.

Cyber pop culture of the era would get a sensational show from Lloyd Blankenship, white hat hacker and member of second generation hacker group Legion of Doom, who went by The Mentor. In 1986 he published The Hacker Manifesto also known as The Conscience of a Hacker, which would become a cornerstone of the early hacker culture capturing the defiant spirit of the first wave of coders who saw themselves as cyber outlaws fighting technocratic oligarchy. His work wreaks of hey-teacher-leave-those-kids-alone type Nirvana beat.

“You may stop me, but you can’t stop us all.”

--The Mentor

Phrack's website logo where The Hacker Manifesto was originally published

By the 90s cyberpunks were a full-fledged movement directly addressing the rising threat of private and state surveillance. A loosely organized collective of cryptographers and programmers including figures like Eric Hughes, Tim May, and Whitfield Diffie began developing encryption tools to protect public privacy in the San Francisco Bay Area.

They built political resistance into their tools like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) for email encryption, fought legal battles in the “Crypto Wars” to stop the government from restricting cryptographic software, and planted the seeds for tech like Tor and Bitcoin. Their foresight told them that the arena of the internet would become a panopticon necessitating encryption for personal freedom.

Roman Catholic theologian, and intellectual historian, Enrico Beltramini, of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Notre Dame de Namur University would describe cyberpunks as being "in opposition to an emerging technocratic authoritarian order." In 1993, Eric Hughes, of the same cryptographer collective mentioned above, would publish A Cypherpunk's Manifesto detailing the collectives values like:

"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age."

The 90s would also give us John Perry Barlow who penned A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace as a reaction to the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 with the idealistic belief that the internet should be self-governed by its users rather than by corporate or state technocrats. His work read with such conviction like:

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Cyberpunk culture was in full swing by the 2000s to the point you didn't need be an insider to know about the people and projects the movement was pushing. Linux, Firefox, and Wikipedia became household names and stood on cyberpunk business delivering privacy and free open access to information. Everyone knows Edward Snowden who exposed the reach of the NSA's surveillance in 2013. Anonymous became a viral phenomenon with their trademark Guy Fawkes mask, anonymized voice changer, and targeted cyber attacks on the infrastructure of oppressive regimes and overreaching companies.

Sometimes exchanges between cyberpunks and technocrats was adversarial through hacktivism or just creative competition with indie software seeking to peel some market share off of monopolies exploiting consumer data like the development of Firefox (which has since caved in to market demand for consumer data causing it to fall from favor among this group).

II.

Today, the pushback against Silicon Valley's surveillance principles continues in names everyone is familiar with, but may not appreciate the novel political resistance built into these apps. Let's explore a few of them:

Signal was founded in 2010 by security researcher Moxie Marlinspike and roboticist Stuart Anderson. Meredith Whittaker would become president of the most widely used secure messaging app in 2022. It's the exact opposite of the Silicon Valley monetization model for software which tells us data collection and surveillance is an inherent part of sustaining their business. Signal, on the other hand, has no ads and collects no data from its users. It strikes at the heart of the Big Tech power model by being a non-profit organization sustaining itself on donations from users that see their work as not just valuable but necessary digital commodities that facilitate personal freedom. Where Facebook would offer end-to-end encryption they would still collect and sell metadata from those private conversations for profit. Whittaker shows us that her privacy-by-design approach writes an oppositional narrative that Signal is:

“[...]evidence that surveillance capitalism…is not the only path forward for the future of technology.”

Photo of Meredith Whittaker by Dina Litovsky / Wired

German developer Eugen Rochko founded Mastodon in 2016 as a reaction to Twitter during its pre-Musk era. Although the tech pioneer liked Twitter he viewed cyber communications as "too important to be at the whim of commercial interests or CEOs." Which motivated the development of the decentralized federated platform. It runs on privately hosted servers around the world called instances. You can follow and engage with users on not just other Mastodon instances, but other social media apps on the Fediverse network all from one account. Fediverse network apps all operate on the ActivityPub protocol which makes them all compatible. Although the number of users on Mastodon started thin, Elon Musks acquisition of Twitter and subsequent changes to the app caused avid users to look for other solutions. Which created a spike in Mastodon's user base from 300,000 to over 2.5 million demonstrating that people will embrace decentralized software when centralized technocrats overreach. It's a monument to the idea that we don't need billionaire CEOs to run a social media app--we can do it ourselves.

Russian founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko / courtesy of Eugen Rochko

CryptPad is a cyberpunk reaction to Google's online office suite fundamentally replacing its functionality while keeping user data private. When you think of data collection social media apps usually come to mind, but tech monoliths like Google will hijack your data through productivity tools like Docs, Sheets, and cloud storage. Caleb James De Lisle "developed" CryptPad with realtime algorithms to encrypt the data and make the actual data unknown from the server. CryptPad can't even read them. Google is completely unreliable in the way of data security as it's built data collection into its business model. Which is why CryptPad's privacy-by-design principles implement end-to-end encryption to protect its users. It's not as popular as Signal or Mastodon, but it's used by journalists, activists, and privacy-conscious teams who work with sensitive data and need to protect their privacy.

Cryptpad creator Caleb James DeLisle's profile pic on Github

III.

Silicon broligarchs have been advancing on political influence at alarming rates making the cyberpunk movement more important than ever. Perhaps no one else in the world embodies the overlap of all these threats like Elon Musk. Which is why you'll find this blog mentioning him a lot.

Although the technocrat has brought us prolific innovations through electric cars, rockets, social media, and now artificial intelligence--he also represents anti-competitive practices in violation of antitrust laws meant to protect us from the harmful effects of monopoly, as well as an erosion of democratic oversight. Something that eerily resembles what President Biden warned us about in his farewell address before his presidency was immediately followed by Elon Musk's presence in the White House.

"I want to the warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead." --President Biden

In what ways does Musk resemble this threat?

I thought you'd never ask.

In the AI space Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 where ChatGPT was developed as a counterweight to Google's dominance in the field. He was nearly a cyberpunk in his own right. But as AI's strategic value and profitability grew Musk attempted to take power over the company to mold ChatGPT in his own image. When that didn't work out he rage-quitted OpenAI, and left to develop his own artificial intelligence (xAI). Which demonstrates what a sell out he is.

Although he had some cyberpunk tendencies long ago, he's easily corruptible with the prospect of monopolizing something. And when AI begins to define entire human cultures through consistent use across society that's an incredible power to have. Since then he's notably called ChatGPT woke, and sought to build Grok as a reaction to OpenAI's large language model. Which didn't work out for him since his AI began to accuse him of being the greatest source of misinformation on Twitter.

He also has a checkered past with space infrastructure and communications. Although SpaceX presents the benefit of reduced launch costs and exciting missions he also presents leverage that borders on monopoly given that nearly all new satellites are launched by SpaceX now, and even NASA depends on them for manned missions. But the smoking gun of overreach truly comes from what he's done with Starlink.

At first the technocrat was praised as a hero in 2022 when he delivered life-saving internet connectivity to war-torn Ukraine reenabling their military to resist Russia's invasion. That was until he directly refused a Ukrainian request to use Starlink in a drone offense on the Russian fleet in Crimea, effectively vetoing the nation's military intentions. When a tech CEO is able to decide what military actions a nation is allowed to make we can be rest assured that a massive technocratic overreach is at play.

Plus the guy openly admitted to falsely accusing Verizon of putting U.S. air safety at risk in 2023 interfering with a FAA $2.4 billion contract he wanted for himself. Can anyone spell "antitrust violation"? And has anyone wondered why plane crashes have been on the news more than ever despite their incidents hitting an all time low?

Statistical data reporting on plane crashes over time from law firm Panish | Shea | Ravipudi LLP

It's almost like the media focus on plane crashes is part of a designed narrative to build Musk's case to destabilize a public program that he can then privatize. Senator Maria thought something similar when she said:

"Elon Musk’s tweets suggest he’s trying to interfere in the Air Traffic Control system – including trying to cancel FAA's $2.4 billion competitively awarded telecommunications upgrade contract in favor of a sole source installation of his Starlink services – and sure seem to raise serious red flags."

The oligarch's malpractice spreads to finance and social manipulation. Tweeting things like "Dogecoin Rulz" or crown ing himself as "The Dogefather" on Saturday Night Live sent the meme coin on a wild ride. Musk's public attention to Dogecoin saw the meme coin's prolific rise in value to over 36,000% before crashing back down like a SpaceX rocket. It even led to investors hitting Musk with a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit, which the judge threw out because investors shouldn't rely on Twitter as financial advice.

But it still demonstrates the fragility of markets under Musk's outsized influence whether knowingly or unwittingly. Maybe no man should have that much power. Critics have expressed increased concern over the "Muskification" of public discourse after his purchase of Twitter in late 2022 where he now has the power to set speech rules for a major communication platform, control the flow of information, and even boost his own companies or investments through algorithmic tweaks.

And he's not the only silicon baron to mirror the corporate overreach of the Gilded Age that inspired legislation erecting antitrust laws. Mark Zuckerberg can tilt election news feeds and messaging encryption policies for billions of Facebook and WhatsApp users. Jeff Bezos holds Amazon and The Washington Post in his hands clutching the balls of commerce and media influence. Peter Thiel is perhaps more dangerous than the rest given that he's not only the owner of the surveillance company equipping customers like the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and the United States Department of Defense, but his vast wealth also allowed him to put his favorite picks in office seats enabling him to mold the political climate in his image. But what exactly is the contrast between the ultimate visions of these technocrats and the cyberpunks fighting back?

"Billionaire Row" at President Trump's inauguration. Photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson / NYT

IV.

The result of the war between cyberpunks and technocrats isn't some mere tech squabble--it's going to have an effect on all of us. If the technocrats have their way we could be looking at oligarchy or neo-feudalism where essential services are commanded by a cartel of a few billionaire CEOs. In a worst case scenario, world governments could become captive to their influence or emulate them using surveillance tools to exert authoritarian control.

Retired professor of psychology and information systems from Harvard University, Shoshana Zuboff, warns of a "hive" society that exchanges its privacy and freedom for convenience. In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she says unless there's some intervention we could be at risk of “a global architecture of behavior modification." A ubiquitous algorithmic nudging and coercion of our personal choices for profit. Democracy would shift to technocracy as we exchange elected leadership for unelected tech leaders.

Photo by Michael D. Wilson / The New Statesman

We'd have a handful of silicon CEOs and their AI systems in control of what we see (shaping our beliefs), how you earn a living (through gig platforms and automation services), and even whether you're labeled a "trusted" citizen (through surveillance scoring). Their vision of mega-corporations becoming de facto governments hasn't been realized yet, but mounting evidence of its potential through Chinese high-tech surveillance authoritarianism and western corporate overreach demonstrate it's possible if nothing is done about it.

On the other hand, the vision of cyberpunks presents public hope. We could get a renaissance of decentralized architecture where social media migrates to federated models, private personal data vaults become normal, and essential online services become managed by public cooperatives instead of profiteering monopolies.

Father of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, is working on a decentralized web with his project called Solid. His latest ambition aims to allow users to have full control of their own data, including access control and storage location. In this decentralized user-centric dream your social media profile, photos, and messages might live in a personal data pod that you own, and grant platform's access to as you see fit. Night and day to today’s model where your data lives in corporate silos beyond your control.

Communally owned internet would grant personal freedom and autonomy in a way that a handful of telcos or satellite operator monopolies would never allow. Blockchain might develop cryptocurrencies and smart contracts without the issues that currently exist, and finally liberate us from the influence of Wallstreet and centralized banks.

Open-source AI could seize the future of machine learning from the exclusive hands of silicon elites. We'd have not just greater privacy, but resilience against outages and bans (as there's no single fail point in a decentralized web), more competition and innovation (with lower barriers to entry), and tech would align more closely with local community values (since users can choose or host services that resonate with their preferences).

We're at a crossroads, but it starts with stopping the myth that technological progress equates with centralized control. It's time for all of us to choose between the convenience of Big Tech or the messy freedom and autonomy that comes with a decentralized web. All of us have a role to play.

V.

Whether you're a developer, legislator, or just the casual user all of our actions over the coming decade are going to see the sun set on this conversation. Obviously I encourage developers to get involved now in coding political resistance into the fabric of our architecture, and legislators to get caught up on this exponentially evolving battle.

But the rest of us casual users on the web have a role to play too. The platforms we choose to use, or don't choose to use--as well as the places we spend our money or don't spend our money will have the heaviest weight in the direction of tech's future. You can even join developer circles online like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and join the cyberpunk movement by providing user feedback that allows coders to improve their software.

And if you're interested in joining developers by building your own cyberpunk software, you don't even have to be a coding expert. Anyone can create software with the help of AI. With some convicted diligence and a fury of copy-and-pasting you can cybernetically bridge the gap between your ignorance and a fully realized app without being a tech guru. We have the technology.

by Derek Guzman

Independent journalist in tech, art, and philosophy

What Hacktivists and Oligarchs Are Fighting Over

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by Derek Guzman

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