#5 - Rachel Rose O’Leary - “Lunarpunk, Encryption as Infrastructure for Liberation”

Rachel Rose O’Leary is a revolutionary programmer, poet, and co-founder of DarkFi,  a decentralized anonymous infrastructure for building sovereign digital communities. She is one of the leading voices behind the Lunarpunk movement 🌚:  a darker, more militant sister of Solarpunk that defends the right to resist, hide, and build worlds away from the surveillance gaze. 🔮

Originally trained as a conceptual artist, Rachel left the art world to explore the political potential of software. Her path took her from early Bitcoin spaces, inspired by the writings of the Cypherpunks and Abdullah Öcalan in Rojava, to developing privacy tools for organizing in the shadows of the surveillance state. 🐦‍⬛✨⛓️

With Rachel, we discussed the failures of mainstream crypto 🪙, her subversive Irish heritage 🍀and why privacy is not a luxury but a condition for democracy 🔐

We hope you enjoy this unexpected synthesis of revolutionary strategy, symbolism and technical insight. 🧝🏻‍♀️

Let there be dark. 

Instagram - solarpunk.manifesto / Music - @simocellmusic / Editing - Xenia Kuznetsova / Visuals - @louise_mscr @tengtenho_ @via_minhu / Studio - Edouard Picard from @lpiparis 

(00:00:25) Personal journey from art to Lunarpunk

(00:06:48) Possibitily to criticize art is the result of postmodernism?

(00:07:58) Can you describe your initial attraction to the crypto movement and what aspects eventually led to your disillusionment?

(00:14:47) Institutional Bitcoin or free (Cyberpunk) Bitcoin? (Blockchain for banks)

(00:19:52) Why did you decide to shift from the personal liberty towards the collective liberty?

(00:25:59) Why the concept of privacy is essential for a democratic society?

(00:28:56) How does normalization of transparency and surveillance come to life?

(00:38:46) What should happen for people to feel the urge to privacy?

(00:41:27) Core Concepts of Lunarpunk and DarkFi

(00:41:59) What's the dark forest?

(01:03:26) Is DarkFi a prefigurative project?

(01:09:30) Can meaningful societal change be achieved through decentralised methods?

(01:16:51) What groups of people would be able to benefit from Decentralised Technologies?

(01:22:26) Are governance tokens similar to Direct democracy?

(01:34:50) How decentralized technologies can influence on social or economic inequalities?

(01:44:17) How we can do that not only extremist groups would benefit from decentralized technologies?

(01:49:25) What gives you hope for the future?

PS: this session was recorded in April 2024.