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A Theory of Crypto-Destituent Power: Part 1

STATUS: IN PROGRESS INCOMPLETE

The long history of revolutionary movements is littered with a particular breed of problem which can be summarized simply as: How to defeat the state without reconstituting power? In a revolutionary context, how do we exert something which we can refer to as “power” without capitulating to the logic of sovereign governance by reintroducing the apparatuses of the state in alternative forms?

Baudrillard formulated this question vividly as The Agony of Power \cite{surprenant2012agony}, depicting the totalizing agony which achieving degrees of success or power presents to those who wish to dissipate all forms of hierarchical power.

Answering this and other dilemmas causes us to undergo a careful review and critique of our actions toward one another in common life together. We must ask how we can overcome the seemingly impossible paradox of wrestling control away from the state, whilst not falling prey to reproducing the same forms we freed ourselves from.

The nucleus of certain forms of insurrectionary political struggle is the idea that the law and justice of the state or god are concepts which must be negated or deactivated through the process of revolutionary actions. Leftist parties and reformists of various stripes disagree and seek to explicitly form a constituted power and a sovereign existence through their own processes.

In a post-left anarchist context, this reformism or reconstitution of power is the worst thing that can happen in a successful insurrectionary situation. This type of critique of post-insurrectionary actions and structures has been discussed millions of times with a wide and varied literary documentation.

Within the environment of contemporary anarchist discourse there is a resurgence of thought on the theoretical idea of “destituent power”. The clarity of the concept throughout this discourse is questionable but the idea is incredibly simple when stripped of pretense. The framework for destituent power was first proposed by Giorgio Agamben \cite{agamben2014destituent}.

To summarize this idea briefly, it falls roughly along the same lines as the questions that were just described above. Destituent power is an abstract conception of the idea that it should be possible to achieve some notion of power in a way that does not end with our actions reconstituting any power structure similar to the one that we dismantled.

An outpouring of fervor for the theory being produced on this topic has generated significant discussion. Most work on the topic has taken the form of several books expanding on the idea including works such as the new English translation of Marcello Tar{`\i}’s work “There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The communism of destitution.” \cite{tari2017non}. The culmination of this body of work and discussion was an entire North American conference devoted to the topic \cite{destituentcommons}.

To give extra context to the analysis in this paper, we can grab several of the excellent framing questions from the conference site itself:

This is a fantastic set of questions, and in reading these we can see the different shades of contemporary formulation of the topic. We seek through destituent power not to reformulate the same critiques of the post-left but move beyond them into new territory.

Within this new territory we desire not to discuss this concept as merely an idealistic philosophical abstraction. Instead, we wish to ask these questions in an attempt to guide how we should design material solutions and incentive structures to help with common communal problems.

Here we argue that the gestures that are described in Agamben’s works, while interesting, do not go far enough in determining actual examples of destituent power or solutions that can be designed by using it as a mental framework.

The gap between the destituent theory that people are discussing and the reality that we intend to go out and create within the world, needs to be bridged. Beyond minor poetic destituent gestures there are larger, more encompassing, manifestations of how to live life within a full encapsulation of the concepts of destituency and fugitivity.

Seeking to elucidate and extend the imaginary of the reader we choose a somewhat odd manifestation of this potential in the form of cryptographic tools. The ability to hide things, information, persons, actions, and other forms out of the reach of nation states or or comprehension by anyone (potentially forever) maps perfectly to the fundamental framework which makes up fugitivity.

Cryptography embodies this principle perfectly as an implicit function of its definition. Cryptographic tools place objects and information outside of the control of states, unless the person who hid the information chooses to give the sovereign access. This is a supremely powerful statement that we cannot take lightly. The power claimed by cryptography showcases a property that exists in almost no other known mechanisms.

The US government declared that cryptography was a “weapon of war” and attempted to legislate that cryptographic software should be categorized as a munitions device \cite{nguyen1996cryptography}. The US government went so far as to make the transmission of cryptographic tools it could not control a federal crime \cite{ludlow2001crypto}.

It is hard to argue that this was an overreaction from the states perspective, they have explicit incentives to punish independent cryptographers as harshly as possible. The act of placing something in a realm that is indisputably outside of the states control, which cannot be seized, taken, or examined, comprises one of the most all encompassing forms of power that can be used against any entity.

When we explicitly set out to dissolve the states mechanisms for gathering information we don’t desire that they have, we can create zones within the imaginary which have a distinct lack of possible governance solutions. Technological destituent processes can carve out holes in the states ability to govern, achieved via digital realms and the bridges through which they interface with the physical world \cite{ballard1991storming}.

Zones of digital opacity which exist both everywhere and nowhere simultaneously \cite{bey2003taz}. All of which can become locked by cryptographic secrets that utilize mathematical properties of universal entropy that transcend any conceivable notion of human control. Self-governing autonomous cyber-territories that cannot be silenced, cannot be censored, and cannot be stopped \cite{ludlow2001crypto}. Ad-hoc hyper-zones of lawless digital crime where justice has no possible footing that undermine all power relations known in human existence.

The direction the article is going in will be apparent and obvious to anyone that has read crypto-anarchist or cypherpunk related philosophy \cite{may1992crypto, visionofcrypto}. The description of the problem destituent power seeks to solve will probably strike anyone who is familiar with such works as being staggeringly similar to the thought of many crypto-anarchists.

It is more than a little intriguing that people are suddenly rediscovering the same cypherpunk ideas on fugitivity and the short-circuiting of law enforcement structures but through a very different context. Hopefully this article will introduce a bit of the rich history of people thinking through these same problems in alternative fields, and cause a bit of cross contamination to bridge the gap.

We are not experts in philosophy nor will we pretend to be such. Instead, in the following sections we will attempt to lay out an argument for how cryptography can be leveraged against constituted powers regardless of their form. Whether these powers are the result of the state or petty power games (eg. cancellation culture) which reproduce functions of the state within our communities, is irrelevant. We will argue that all of these forms of power can be destituted by the implicit abstract fugitivity that can be crafted using cryptographic tools.

What does destituent power mean?

Many people seem to have trouble with the concept of destituent power due to the format most works written on the topic are in, and those people might claim that this work is already falling into that rabbit hole. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there will surely be people that may claim this article is not encompassing the full richness of the term.

Rather than argue, we will be the first to admit that French continental philosophy terms tend to be as vibrant as they are slippery. The way many recent authors utilize the concept is more akin to a poetic or literary criticism technique than a serious framework for analysis of a material problem within social and insurrectionary struggles. Before continuing I want to try to add a few more quotes of authors defining the concept in their own ways in an attempt to elucidate the concept a bit more.

Hopefully these quotes can serve to help guide the discussion a little bit, if you are still confused about what the term means, try this article on Agamben’s use of the term \cite{agamben2017theory}.

If you are still confused that is fine because this article is not going to dwell on the philosophical ideas underpinning the term. Here we intend to shed as much dense philosophical language as is possible in favor of simple and pragmatic language on the material relations between individuals and concretely modelled power structures.

We say this in a feeble attempt to sidestep a more nuanced discussion of the concept that others have already sufficiently elaborated \cite{agamben2014destituent, tari2017non, invisible2018now, agamben2017theory, agamben2013elements}. By providing the most simplified and internally cohesive picture of it that is possible, we can avoid a muddy theoretical discussion and spend more time on application. In order to do this we will discuss extensively on a model of constituent power in the following section.

##Constituent Power}

To come up with an applied tactic to disrupt the cycle of constituent power we must first define a model of what a sovereign is and what they do. The sovereign constituent power, regardless of whether it is a state or any other system trying to enforce rules, must have some kind of definable apparatus of security that creates a framework for what justice and injustice is.

The destituent desire is to make alterations which can neutralize these frameworks for justice and enforcement of rules. One simplified form of thinking about the sovereign’s justice can be seen in the first figure below.

\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{crypto0.png} \label{Test} \textit{Figure 1: Sovereign Justice Loop \cite{visionofcrypto}}

This simplified diagram walks us through the different stages of a justice system invoking its power to violently enforce its rules upon its subjects. We start by defining a potentially fugitive or criminalized act which is some act that has a definable structure that can be observed by other people.

For the act in this model to function there must be a before and after of the act that can be readily apparent to the sovereign who wishes to observe the state of the world with respect to the act at two different moments. An easy example of this is breaking a window or spraying graffiti, both are crimes that have a before and after that are readily distinguishable.

After the sovereign has seen and observed a given act, they initialize their loop of justice. In most states this means creating an investigation to determine if an act violated the laws of a sovereign zone or not. After the act is observed to have happened in order to enforce the law the state must first attribute the act to a specific body or bodies.

If there is no body to attribute a criminal act to, there is no ability for the state to inflict ‘just’ violence\footnote{Though we can note that indiscriminately perpetuating random violence on a populous when no individual can be identified, is a possible action for the state to take as well.}. Finding some body to blame and potentially punish is essential to the justice loop of the state functioning.

Upon finding the body in a western context, some court process beings which then decides if the body can actually be attributed to the act that was observed. If the court decides that the body can be attributed to the act then a new determination must be made as to whether the act actually violated some social norm that the society wishes to enforce.

In a western state these are laws, but in a communal setting this might merely be shared values and norms of the community that they wish to define and force on their collective members. The norms of the given society define and codify the judgement process that a subject undergoes.

Finally, we come full circle and say, if the effect of the act which was observed, can be attributed to a specific individual, and can be judged to violate the codes of the society or sovereign, then the body will be punished. After the society

To reiterate the steps that made up this process again:

The OODA loop of constituent power

We can simplify this much further by drawing a comparison between this structure and the militaristic idea of OODA loops \cite{boyd1996essence, brehmer2005dynamic}. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, which lines up very well to the sovereign justice loop that we just described.

These loops form a common military and governance tool that is used to make dictate about how constituent forces decide how, when, and what actions should take place in general. Generally this is discussed within the context of war or battle, but it maps very well to the battles that the state perpetrates against those who fight against it.