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Hey friends 👋
You know how sometimes a song pops into your head and you can't get rid of it until you can finally listen to it? I recently went looking for an album I had been quite fond of in college to free one particular melody from this kind of infinite loop. But I came across an issue…
The album wasn't on Spotify. And it wasn't on Apple Music. It wasn't on Tidal or Bandcamp or just about anywhere else I checked. In fact the only place I could find it was a relatively low quality stream on YouTube with a description that effectively begged that it be excluded from any form of takedown.
Fortunately for me it hadn't been taken down yet so I was able to scratch my itch. But I knew that I might go looking for it again one day and it might not be on YouTube then, so I needed my own backup. As I made one last ditch effort to find a CD or record, I discovered that not even physical copies could be found, so I decided to turn to a source I'd long neglected to consider when searching for media.
Back when I was young, long before Spotify was even a glimmer in its founders eyes, many an adolescent culture-sponge such as myself were experiencing a minor renaissance ushered in through a combination of broadband internet and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, beginning with the now-infamous Napster.
Napster was an innovative piece of computer software that allowed users to connect with each other to share files over the internet. The way that Napster facilitated this (which would ultimately be the source of its demise) was via a centralized server that facilitated the connections between the so-called seeder (uploader) and leecher (downloader) of a given file.
By providing a platform on which copyrighted media could be distributed, Napster was an easy target for lawsuits, eventually being forced to shutdown. Fortunately, the people of the internet, having tasted unrestricted access to culture, decided to use Napster's failure as a lesson and charge ahead.
The biggest lesson... well I'll give Dan the honour:
In the wake of Napster's shutdown, everyone was clamouring to fill the void it left, including Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. The scandinavian duo (one Swedish, one Danish), hired a team of Estonian developers called BlueMoon to develop a protocol for a file-sharing network called FastTrack which would serve as the means for their Kazaa file-sharing app to connect users in a decentralized way.
Fun Fact: BlueMoon, Zennstrom, and Friis would later go on to create Skype.
P2P file-sharing grew to enormous popularity, and FastTrack became the de facto protocol for the most popular file-sharing softwares from Kazaa to Morpheus. And while some bands like Radiohead acknowledge that they owe their success to P2P file-sharing, the record industry as a whole loathed it and resorted to everything from lawsuits to spamming the network with corrupt files.
Fortunately for those of us who believed that protecting record-company profits was not a good enough reason to gate-keep access to music and other media, P2P file-sharing showed no signs of slowing down, and soon an even more elegant protocol was developed: BitTorrent.
As with each of the technologies that preceded it, the BitTorrent protocol's strength was to further decentralize the file-sharing stack. While FastTrack had relied heavily on users with high speed connections to function as so-called supernodes that both seeded files and created the connections between users, BitTorrent's innovation was two-fold:
Searching for files takes place on the worldwide web rather than on the file-sharing network itself. This cut down on bandwidth substantially. Once users find a file, they can either download the .torrent file which a client can read to connect them to other seeders and leechers, or can use a magnet link to do the same thing in an even more direct, P2P manner.
Files being shared by multiple seeders are broken up into pieces with different seeders providing different pieces simultaneously. This is faster and more efficient and is actually quite an impressive design.
These improvements led to torrenting becoming the dominant method of file-sharing and in the mid-2000s, before services like Netflix and Spotify made streaming ubiquitous, BitTorrent received, by some estimates, 35% of all internet traffic. And while consumer use has declined due in large part to the simplicity of many streaming services, the technology has been adopted more widely because of it's clear superiority to more centralized methods of file transfer.
For example, Blizzard Entertainment, best known for the Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft gaming franchises, used torrents to distribute game files and patches. Canonical uses torrents to distribute their Ubuntu Linux distribution. And the Internet Archive provides over 1.5 million archive items for download via torrent.
Speaking of the Internet Archive, let's take a quick detour and talk about another evolution of file-sharing.
The Internet Archive is a big believer in decentralization and peer-to-peer distribution. Since 2016 they've held annual events where people can come together to learn, connect, and build the decentralized web, or as they call it the DWeb. The first events, held in 2016 and 2018 respectively were known as the Decentralized Web Summit. In 2019, the DWeb brand was officially born, and Dweb Camps began to be held yearly.
Juan Benet, the creator of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) spoke at several of the Internet Archive (and DWeb) events, and the IA even experimented with archiving content via IPFS, alongside other technologies like WebTorrent.
Fun Fact: WebTorrent and IPFS are both supported out of the box by Brave browser.
IPFS uses similar technology to BitTorrent like content addressing and distributed hash tables (DHT) but instead of the user locating content seeders via the torrent file or mirror, one instead queries IPFS with the content hashes of the files being requested and is served them from any relevant nodes. There are other features like file directories and versioning history that make IPFS well suited to longer term file storage in a way that further distinguishes it from BitTorrent.
We're really only beginning to see what a tool like IPFS is capable of. If public repositories of data like Wikipedia and Internet Archive use IPFS they will become uncensorable. And that could in-turn have major effects on global access to knowledge, journalism, and free speech.
Anyway, enough about file storage, I want to talk a bit more about file-sharing.
In "Whose Left Is It Anyway?" we took a look at a couple different flavours of anarchism that make use of money in one way or another. The approaches in question are mutualism and agorism.
In "Tales from the Mushroom Commune" we dove deeper into the various mutualist approaches to funding (worker-run) enterprises and we looked at some mutualist projects that are actively experimenting or otherwise being proposed.
One such example is Breadchain which is built on the principal of dual power.
Dual power is a two-part strategy that consists of public resistance to oppression (counter-power) and the building of alternative democratic, participatory institutions (counter-institutions). In other words, one part fights the existing systems by mobilizing against them while the other builds resilient, people-led institutions to take their place.
Ok but what does this have to do with Agorism?
Agorism, which is not so much an political or economic system as it is a tactic to help subvert institutional power to help decentralize power. It aims to achieve this through it's own kind of dual power instigated via counter-economics.
If you're unfamiliar with the term, and don't feel like clicking the included link, I'll break it down in simple terms. Counter-economics is any economic actions which are either forbidden by the state (commonly known as black market activities) or economic actions which are discouraged or even outright prohibited but go unenforced/under-enforced (sometimes referred to as grey market activities).
If you are using cryptocurrency to transact, to lend or to borrow, to provide financial support to others, to send money internationally, to flee from the US dollar, or transact privately, you are engaging in counter-economics; subverting the US financial system and undermining its hegemony.
If you stream TV shows for free on third-party websites, download torrents of copyrighted content, or even share a Netflix password, you are subverting monopolistic corporate power, which, since the state serves capital above all else, is forbidden.
Building better systems that help musicians, writers, and filmmakers earn a livable income is a meaningful goal. But Spotify, Netflix, and Audible aren't that. These corporations and the systems they entrench perpetuate inequality, funnel excess money to the top, and cast aside creatives left and right to maximize profits.
Support artists directly. Go to their shows, buy their merch, get their venmo, paypal, or, preferably wallet address, and send them money directly. There is nothing preventing you from combining mutualism and agorism in this way. And, in fact, it is probably the best thing you can do if you seek real change.
For, to shake things up, a strategy of dual power is needed. Fortunately we have decades of punk hackers building the tools for exactly this kind of subversion: peer-to-peer filesharing, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and smart-contracts. They're there, ready for you when you need them... or when you just can't get a song out of your head.
I'll leave you with a thought I shared almost one year ago in response to a tweet from Jacob Horne, co-founder of Zora. Hopefully it inspires some debate, or better yet, some builders!
When I began planning this article, I had no idea the rabbit hole I about to go down. It turns out that this is an incredibly interesting subject with a rich history. I hope that I managed to capture just how important P2P file-sharing is to the history of the internet. If you'd like to learn more, one article I recommend, which served as the starting point for me, was this episode of Curious Minds podcast (and accompanying transcription) ⬇️
Written By: Ran Levi Napster, a revolutionary Peer-to-Peer file sharing software, was launched in 1999 - and forever changed the media world. In this episode, we'll tell the story of Sean Fanning and Sean Parker, its creators, and talk about the legal battle it fought with the record company - and Metallica.
Next up, since this issue is all about counter-culture, here's 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺 with a very counter-cultural piece on the importance of bias.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to give the government a nudge, you'd probably take your protest signs and make some noise on the streets. Back in those days, the government's bag of tricks for shaping what you thought-or sprinkling a little curated misinformation here and there-was pretty straightforward.
And lastly, because I don't want you getting scammed, here's a blog post, or rather a public service announcement, from The Blockchain Socialist about a particular scam going around on Discord.
I've been pretty lucky in my time in crypto, I'm proud to say that I've never had any crypto stolen from any of my wallets \*knocks on wood\*. I think part of the reason is that I came to this world in a time where one of the dominating narratives was "not your keys, not your wallet" and it was imperative that you stay extra vigilant.
And that's as good a place as any to leave you.
Until next time,
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Now on @paragraph, Thumbs’ Update: Peer-to-Peer Review In this issue of my monthly newsletter, I go down the historical rabbit hole of P2P file-sharing and wonder aloud whether this might be a tool for agorist action. And if not, what should we do? https://paragraph.xyz/@thumbsup/peer-to-peer
Featuring: @dwr.eth @jacob @ipfs @punk @bias @tbsocialist and @fabric
oh and the cover image is of course @davidgreenstein