About 2 years ago, I began my journey into the cypherpunk lifestyle. A view of the world where data, information and privacy are not just about keeping secrets but about power. The cypherpunks understood that in the Information Age, information and data is power and control. — — — — — — —

A very brief history of power:

Several thousand years ago, something called the Agricultural Revolution happened, when our hunter gather ancestors learned to grow food and domesticate livestock. No more need to move around searching for food, they could stay in one place and grow food on the land. So, this not only enabled them to stay in one place, but also build towns and then cities. Power came from the land. Who controlled the land had the power. This led to feudalism and the age of kings and queens, lords and serfs.

A couple hundred years ago steam power allowed people to create new machines to do work, this concept spread and became what is now called the Industrial Revolution. Machines and factories became the sources of power and control. The men who controlled the machines were now at center of power. The rise of Carnegie, Rockefeller Ford, etc..

Now, we are in the Information Age, and who are the richest and most power people? The ones who control the information or the data. You know who they are, Facebook, Google, Amazon etc…. — — — — — — — -

So what was my cypherpunk lifestyle like-First by getting off of social media. This may be the first post I have written anywhere in almost two years. (more about that later)-Second, only using open-source software. no more windows or mac only Linux OS- Third, I stopped using Google and starting using non-tracking search engines like DuckDuckGo-much much more but too lengthy to go into here.

But why you may ask? At first in was an art project exploring identity and privacy, but as I learned just how much we were being tracked and spied upon and by whom and why, I had to make a change and try to break free.

Privacy comes at a cost. As artist I got quite a few sales, commissions and shows from Facebook. Google is a monstrous behemoth whose AI wants to know everything about you, but man, it’s really good search engine.One of the hardest things has been making a website that is true to the philosophy. It has been hard to try to make a site look good and functional using only open-source software and no tracking cookies or javascript, no google analytics, etc…

After two years of the extreme, I am going to keep many if not most of my new privacy practices in place, but I will start sharing more, with knowledge of how and why to do so in way I am in more control of my information.

Privacy is not just about the past but it’s about the future

,Johnny Dollar

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Thanks to Eric Hughes and all of the other trailblazers

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reference

A cypherpunk’s manifesto