A Voice for Open Source: An Interview With Hacker Amir Taaki
Art by Tanzanian Wojak
Everyone knows the internet has gone rotten. Social media is a self-imposed surveillance apparatus, Google results are bought and paid for, and what remains of quality content is locked behind paywalls. Once upon a time, there were fun sites, like Newgrounds (free animation and games) and TOTSE (highly banned information, from bomb instructions to erotica). Altruist programmers promoted free, open-source software like Linux (operating system) and Firefox (internet browser). Now, the average internet session is spent doomscrolling Twitter or Reddit until one’s eyes ache. Instagram has some good meme accounts and that’s about it. Even crypto, once propelled by revolutionary energy, has been absorbed into the financial mainstream, its believers replaced by scammers looking to pump and dump.
How do we restore the feeling? Can we live in harmony with technology? And how do we prevent the state from swallowing up crypto? These are all questions best answered by Amir Taaki, a well-known British-Iranian programmer, “hacktivist,” and anarchist. Taaki has somehow been involved in nearly every digital revolution since the late 90s—after cutting his teeth in the free, open-source software community, Taaki played a pivotal role in Bitcoin, including creating the UK’s first Bitcoin exchange and Bitcoin conference. He then put skin in the game by joining the Rojava Revolution in Syria in 2015, serving in the military of the incipient, anarchist, egalitarian state also known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. The 36-year-old veteran now wages war in the crypto realm through the DarkFi project, whose aim is to allow people to raise money and form organizations in total anonymity—which they believe will be a graver threat to governments than any other internet advance of the last 20 years.
Taaki starred in The New Radical, a 2017 documentary which also featured crypto-anarchist Cody Wilson, who is notable for creating the first widely-available 3D-printed pistol. At the time, the pair were working on Dark Wallet, a crypto wallet that anonymized financial transactions. (Fun fact: The New Radical was edited by one of Countere’s favorite directors, Alex Lee Moyer.) One of our regular contributors, Zach Emmanuel, spoke to Taaki about the internet, Linux, outer space, crypto, and how to live free in the digital dystopia.
The interview was conducted over jitsi, a free, open-source alternative to Zoom.
What inspires your commitment to free, open-source software?
Technology. It runs modern society. If we don't have access to that technology, then we're enslaved by it.
Is all the software that you use free and open-source?
Yeah, for the most part. I have this other laptop where I do calls and stuff—I might use Zoom or Google Meet. But in general, I use free software. I'm not doing much video editing or music-making, I’m a developer. So in terms of writing code or doing math or any of that stuff, the open-source toolkit is excellent. It's the best.
Was free, open-source software a foundational principle for you as soon as you started using the internet?
Yeah. When I was very young, I was very much into politics and questions around economics and society in general. I was also doing programming when I was a teenager. One day, a friend said to me, “‘Amir, have you heard about Linux?’
And I said, ‘No, what is that?’ And he said, ‘Oh, well, you know, it's an operating system. You’ve got Windows and you've got Mac. Well, you can change that. You can put other things on there.’
I was like, ‘Whoa, really? It didn't even occur to me that I could change the operating system in my computer.’ And he said, ‘It’s Linux and there's no company that owns it. It's made by people all across the world.’”
And then I read about it. I was like, that’s incredible. There’s another way to make technology. There doesn’t have to be a company that owns it. For me, that was the example of a radical economics which was in cyberspace.
Then I was all in on Linux. The same way people who discover Bitcoin or crypto today and they're like, whoa, we can have a non-state economy in cyberspace. It was a similar moment with Bitcoin for me as well. Mind-blowing for a lot of people.
Is there any software that has sentimental value to you?
I got really into Blender when I was 18, 19 years old. Blender is still around, and it's one of the most successful open-source software that exists. It is spectacular software in so many ways. If you open any commercial 3D software like 3D Studio Max or Maya, there's this splash screen while it's loading [that] takes a couple of minutes. Blender instantly loads; it’s snappy and it's fast and efficient. Unlike other 3D software, you can customize your workspace however you want.
Blender’s community is unmatched, and now it’s a competitor with the big commercial software. And there's interest from commercial industry in keeping Blender on top because loads of people depend on it. So it’s a huge success story in terms of free software.
What do you think of paywalls for information? You see them everywhere in The New York Times, Washington Post…I mean, all the news basically is paywalled.
I use the Bypass Paywalls Firefox script. So I don't have to deal with the paywall on a lot of those websites. It seems that [legacy media] doesn’t have a business model, so they're trying all these random things like paywalls, advertising…I mean, Blender is a really good [success story]. They’re not selling Blender, so how do they fund it? It just has such a great community where they release books or merchandise every every six months, they do these film projects where they gather a team of people to produce a film using the software, and there's a donation drive. And the community helps fund it. And those experiences are really good because the devs gather with the artists and and fix their problems real-time.
So Blender is an example where you have a great community that is invested in keeping this software solvent, and it seems to work. Partly I put it down to the good leadership of [Blender founder] Ton Roosendaal. But yeah, I do think [legacy] media, it's probably just going to have to die. Nobody trusts it anymore. Everybody thinks it's full of lies.
Yeah. I mean, on all sides, for sure. It's been dismaying to see that early, free, open-source internet idealism turn into what the internet is today, where people feel like there's only a few sites they can visit. What are your thoughts on the direction of the internet and where it will go?
That's interesting because I was very much part of that wave post-2000 where everybody was like, oh, the internet, it's a global consciousness. If only we can just bring this magical tour of all information and knowledge to anybody's fingertips, we could radically improve society for the better. Obviously, that internet idealism that you talk about hasn't turned out to be quite so simple. Big Tech has made use of the internet as this kind of surveillance apparatus, which is a danger to human freedom. Even now in crypto, we're at this juncture point where all the crypto projects are [focused on] raising money, appeasing certain groups of people, in order to have their valuations pump.
Everybody's searching [in crypto] and going like, “We can feel that our strength is evaporating, and how do we recover? Even though back in 2010, 2011, we were small, we were unheard of, there was still power there, there was vibrancy…”
I’ll give the analogy here, which is that in the early 90s when Linux was born and the free software movement was creating stuff that was innovative. People were going, wow, this software doesn't exist anywhere else. It's truly unique. As the movement gained momentum, people started to go, okay, I want to work on this full-time. I'd like to have a team, resources, and we need to think about business models. And the idealists pushed back against that and rejected it.
So those [idealists], that side of the free software movement, started to branch off and formed the open-source movement. And there was this divergence where the open-source movement movement started to go, okay, it’s not about [being free]. It's not about the values or the core principles. It's about purely utilitarian arguments that [open-source software] is objectively better.
Post-2000, we saw a boom come, and there was this promise that we would bring Linux to the mainstream. And then it wouldn't happen. And then the next year [we would say] this is the year that Linux reaches mainstream. And then it wouldn't happen. And then Mac came out of nowhere and we were like, shit, we just got blindsided. The mobile phone came and just passed us by. So what happened was we stopped innovating, we started to play catch up with Windows. Linux, instead of being it’s own thing, became just a shitty alternative where it was like, what is the goal? We’re always just following behind Windows, not charting our own path.
And the [ultimate] realization was that Linux is not Windows and it's not Mac. Linux is its own thing. The business model of Windows and Mac is about entrapping many users so they can tax each one of them. Linux is a different type of economic model. Linux is about building self-sovereign infrastructure that allows us our communities to be economically powerful. This is the [same] value proposition of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is not about getting mass adoption from normies, it's about building a new financial system. And in particular, there is fragile crypto and there is anti-fragile crypto. We are seeing this divergence play out now.
The end result will be that there is a RegFi (regulated finance) and a DarkFi. And the RegFi will be the side of crypto that is zero. It'll be meaningless. And the DarkFi side of crypto will be subterranean, it’ll be innovative, it’ll be exciting. It'll be where all the interesting software is developed.
That's what crypto has to do. You talked about this fight for freedom and technology and the internet—we have to look back within ourselves, rediscover our core principles, form a strategy, and struggle for that instead of just getting trapped into the same Silicon Valley bullshit narratives…look at the mobile phone. The phone is full of crappy applications. They're buggy and obnoxious. And it's like, why are we trying to copy that failed business model? It's obviously a failed paradigm of computing. We should be creating a different paradigm of computers that's powerful. So I see the opportunity there, but [crypto] needs people to wake up and start to mobilize as a movement.
“Cryptocurrency is not about getting mass adoption from normies, it’s about building a new financial system.”
On that note, can you tell us about your newest project, DarkFi?
DarkFi is anonymous, generalizable, smart contracts. In this sector, we basically have zero competitors…the ones that are [also] trying to do privacy, they don't offer generalizable smart contracts. We even have advanced features like anonymous protocol owned liquidity, which enables us to create applications such as anonymous DAO. We've made the world's first fully on-chain, anonymous-style, token-weighted treasury governance. Not only that, we have fully anonymous staking, which protects the validators.
What are some of the other exciting current technologies to you out there, from crypto to AI?
I'm very interested in all the new cryptography that's being developed. Outside of that, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening with space research: planet exoplanet detection, which a few years ago used to be very difficult—you had to detect the wobble of a star, etc…but now they're actually able to photograph planets, or at least the dimming of the stars as they cross in front of the star. And they're making new kinds of telescopes, which block out the rays of the sun, so that they can see the planets more accurately.
I am curious where that ends up. In 50 years, we'll be able to see the surface of another planet. I saw a proposal the other day where a scientist was saying, if we made a very tiny probe that was one gram, we could actually accelerate it to the neighboring star systems using lasers to power them flying at some percentage of the speed of light. They could reach there within 15 years. And then we could directly observe the planets in another solar system.
Imagine if we [could do that] and see the color of the surface of another planet. Maybe we could see that as the seasons of the planet change, the color changes and [we’ll know] there's vegetation on the planet. Or if we had even higher resolution, we could see evidence of civilization or stuff like that. So yeah, I’m very interested to know what's out there. There's this saying where people say, “Too old to explore the world, but too young to explore outer space.”
Yeah, I guess that’s the time we're living in. What are your thoughts on the acceleration of AI right now?
I really am not able to comment because it's not my specialty. I know that GPT is making a lot of low-tier work, like filler articles, obsolete. I saw some of the automated coding programming [it does], but I wasn't too impressed—it is quite junior work that is being automated. That's maybe a good thing. It forces people to [be more creative]…I really think we're in the age of moving away from low-skilled, industrial-era labor to high-skilled, information-age, more generalized and creative work. I see that as a natural or even healthy process.
People say we’re not far off [from developing] artificial general intelligence. Maybe we reach it, maybe we don't. Quantum computing is one of those things that they've been talking about for a very long time; not much seems to have been actually delivered. On the other hand, [last year] the UK government announced 3 billion in quantum computing research. So maybe it's happening.
What was the most important lesson you learned during your military service in Rojava?
Taaki in Rojava.
The most important lesson by far was my maturation of politics. Before, I had these anarchist ideas about revolution: that somehow the revolution will materialize and we will all work [smoothly together]. But in Rojava, I understood that actual change comes about because of people united by a vision and strategy.
In particular, [Rojava’s] critique of anarchism is something that I completely have taken to heart—which is that when the Syrian government collapsed, it wasn't just that suddenly people took up arms and bam, made a revolution. It was that there was a revolutionary organization with a cadre that had been in the mountains for decades studying political philosophy. And then in that power vacuum [that formed], they came into the cities and started to organize people.
Because in a society, you need to have military strategy [to protect yourselves]. People need to be armed and trained and organized into units. You have many other areas: legal system, economy, education. So if we're talking about fundamentally changing society, of overthrowing the nation-state, these are really important questions that we need to discuss: what will education, healthcare, law, and self-defense look like in this new society? And the problem is that anarchists, with their complete rejection of all forms of authority, even legitimate authority, meant [historically] that they were unable to effectively organize to implement change.
“In Rojava, I understood that actual change comes about because of people united by a vision and strategy. ”
[I’ll give] the example of NASA, which for 50 years has not been able to go to the moon, because inside of NASA it’s very political. They are all bureaucrats with their own little groups which are each investigating something in low-Earth orbit, their own little science experiments. But to get to the Moon or outer space, you need political willpower. You need a direction, you need a strategy to get there. And they lack that strategy.
It’s like when you make a software project. What's the roadmap? What's our architecture? What do we want to create? Now let's conceptualize what will the components be. That's the vision. That's the ideal aspect. We want a free, empowered, democratic society. There should be no nation-state; the nation-state is anti-human, anti-nature. Okay. So what will our governance look like? What will our economics look like? What are the steps that we need to achieve along the way?
Each step should be incremental and achievable. And the goal itself should also be very practical, so that whenever people start going off on tangents, you can refocus that energy. I've seen it happen so many times with political movements: people get excited, start to mobilize, the ball starts rolling, and everybody starts throwing all their energy, immersing themselves completely. There’s flow, there's creation, and that's power.
But then after a while, it is not clear what's the direction to take. Decisions and problems are not always black or white. There's merits to both ways. And if you lack a conceptual framework or a paradigm, you're not able to properly discern what is the correct path. And then as a movement, you start to become fragmented.
Not only that, [but there is] a hostile environment where there's nation-state actors or intelligence that are opposed to revolutionary changes that frighten the status quo, as well as peer pressure…against those kinds of forces of infiltration and subversion, it's very easy to easily get split off, to be vulnerable to divide-and-conquer tactics.
The really, really key part of having a strong organization is not laws. It’s not some system of organizing. Everybody always asks me about Rojava: what’s the system? That is western positivism; brainwashed people [say that]. The problem with anarchism as well as ideology is that it's too influenced by positivist notions where it's like, we have to create this new system and then everything's solved.
The key part is actually the belief in people. It's the spiritual aspect of society. In particular, for crypto to be strong, to really fulfill its promise of a [new, independent] economic system, we have to nurture our intellectual capabilities. We have to foster our philosophy, we have to create a strategy. And creating strategy means putting our minds together and discussing important issues, writing texts that are circulated within our community. Because creative and skilled people that are doing complex work or doing creative work—you can't direct people and say, “Go do this, go do that.”
To create something is a process. You have to put all your mental capabilities onto that thing, and slowly something begins to emerge and be born. So how do we as an organism move in a coherent way? Well, that's the role that strategy plays, and that's why we form consensus by this process.
That's something I see that is very lacking [in crypto]. Everybody builds these organizations which are like mini nation-states. There's a CEO—they’re copying even the classic corporate structure. Underneath that, they have some heads of X, Y, Z, blah, blah, and they get the VC money. And there's no role played by ideology or philosophy. There's no macro-thesis. It's like, “Oh, we are building X because this will pump and be valuable.”
And they play into that old network of people that's giving money to projects. Look, we talked with investors and VCs—and there's crypto-native VCs, they make their money using crypto, and they're smart and ideological. But then there's VCs that are kind of retarded. They're not interesting people. They're like cogs in a machine. They're completely part of the system. So you can imagine these guys, these suits, they just go and they hang out with other guys that are boring, exactly like them. And they talk about regulations or the most inane thing you can imagine.
Those guys are extremely rich. They have access to vast amounts of resources. But they don't create anything. They don't do anything original. But [that’s the] reason why they can tap into that wealth. They're like tools, essentially. The system prioritize those kinds of people, not the creative freethinking types—[those] could be a liability.
I even heard someone explain it to me, “Oh, when you make a successful corporation, you can't have too many alphas. You need to have betas, because then alphas will fight and they will get torn apart.” But when we build our organization, we want people that are like that. We want people that have energy and ambition and fight. A bit of conflict’s not bad, it’s healthy sometimes. You want to have discussion.
“The key part is actually the belief in people. It’s the spiritual aspect of society.”
The important point is having a philosophy. It’s having a reason why you make the thing. That's what makes your artwork or your software or your creation or your science have value. It has meaning because there's a belief behind it.
What does freedom mean to you?
So freedom is deeply connected with autonomy. Autonomy is the ability to freely make decisions without coercion. And freedom and nature are deeply connected as well…when I talk about nature, I don't mean the number of trees. I mean something deeper within us. There is the ascending part of nature, which has to do with growth and involves struggle and upwards movement. And the goal of our struggle is to increase or to multiply that which is good and beautiful and true, and to oppose that which is bad and ugly and false.
It feels like technology is increasingly against nature, against living an authentic life and that sort of thing. What are your thoughts on the possibility of natural life and technology existing in harmony?
Our conceptualization is that there is a state civilization and there is the democratic nation. And all of the wealth and value creation occurs within this democratic nation, and the state civilization is essentially a parasite. They extract value from society. And this goes back to the very origin of human civilization. Go to the entry for “Civilization” on Wikipedia. I'm going to pull it up now so that other people can do this alongside me.
Let's read some of this stuff: “Civilizations are organized in densely populated settlements, divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate, urban and rural populations. Civilization concentrates power extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings.” Basically, that definition of civilization is the civilization that we've come to be familiar with. [Originally] there was actually this explosion of different civilizational forms, but it was the Assyrian military dictatorship, which waged war on the other civilizations, basically enslaving everybody, that became the origin of of civilization as we know it today.
So our job essentially is to construct a new form of civilization: a democratic civilization, a free civilization. In particular, if you look at technology, there have always been two divergent legacies inside of technology: the state civilization-influenced technology and the democratic technology.
“The goal of our struggle is to increase or to multiply that which is good and beautiful and true, and to oppose that which is bad and ugly and false.”
We can see that today: for example, all the [state-influenced] technology that's associated with surveillance, automated weapons, and drone weaponry. Now they have drones that can just spend hours in the sky monitoring one area of the ground. If there's any movement, it eliminates the target immediately. They even have a highly precise type of missile called a ninja missile. It doesn’t explode on impact; it shoots ninja swords at the target in very small areas. So nation-states have invented automated AI drone weapons that fly really, really high in the sky, 15 kilometers up, and can eliminate individual human targets without any collateral damage, which I think is incredibly fucked up and dystopic.
Also, all the left-wing people get excited about UBI (universal basic income): “I can have free money for doing nothing.” That's a scam. It's a trap because it wants [people to] come into the CBDC (central bank digital currency) system, which is essentially Western states trying to copy the Chinese social credit scoring system. In China, they have this system where if you hang out with the wrong people, or are late for meetings, or don’t have correct social conduct, you get a lower social credit score, which means maybe you can't get a train ticket or rent a certain apartment anymore. Suddenly your social ranking as defined by the state becomes important. With CBDC, they’re trying to create this system of incentives where they can manage citizens using these credits. Before we had this system of decentralized banks—many small local community banks. But there's been a process of centralizing that into a few really big banks which the state can control.
It's all about power, essentially. Controlling more and more of society and limiting the space for freedom. That’s the anti-freedom, anti-nature side of technology.
But then what is the side of technology that's empowering that's good? It’s DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). DAO enable groups of people to pull their capital together because in a marketplace, your voice is only as strong as the money that you can put down. It's like when you're on a poker table and you have a big pile of chips, you can bully the weaker players. What DAOs enable you to do is to pull and direct capital as a group of people. It enables a community to form and to be powerful.
Other examples of freedom tech include TOR, which enables people to browse around censorship. Even the Kalashnikov [gun is an example of freedom tech]. When the Kalashnikov was invented, suddenly many different people had the ability to resist against occupying forces. That’s why so many nations in the Third World have the Kalashnikov as a symbol on their flags, because it was a great equalizer of power between groups of people. The printing press, that’s a major freedom technology; it gave people free access to information.
Finally, what is one book you would recommend to read?
Definitely Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization (Volumes I-III) by Abdullah Öcalan. That’s essentially where all the ideas I’m discussing originate from. On our website DarkFi, we also have a section which is books we recommend for people.
Other Free, Open-Source Software That Taaki Recommends
Pandoc - Writing tool used to convert files from one markup language to another.
Neovim - Vim-based text editor. “An extension of me basically, I’ve used it for many years.”
SageMath - Mathematics software used to prototype different algorithms.
Github - Taaki recommends checking out his Github for various scripts he has written over the years.
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