MMXXVI

HOSTIS

hostis humani generis

enemies of all mankind / by their decree / by our consent

On the Account/The Reprints

A free man is sovereign by virtue of being. He is the locus of his own existence, the keeper of the light he carries, the author of every step he takes. He asks no man’s leave for what is already his. He stands under the flag he raised himself.

Under that flag we sail, and have always sailed, since the first breath was drawn, no permission given.

We are. We have always been. The colours we keep have flown over every age, raised and lowered by every hand that knew itself. They fly here now. They will fly past every hour to come. They are what we are.

set down for the crew,
in this present year, and for every year after

The Articles

Articles of the Crew

Before a voyage, the crew drew up the terms they would sail by, the shares they would take, the laws they would keep themselves. Bartholomew Roberts’ crew set down eleven of them in 1720. Every man had a vote in affairs of the moment. Every man had equal title to the provisions seized. The articles bound the captain as tightly as the powder monkey. Equal hands under equal law, which they wrote themselves. These are ours.

Read the Articles
Article I

Upon Property and Scarcity

Property was devised to settle quarrels over things that two men cannot use at once. A field, a loaf, a musket, a ship. Where one man’s having means another’s wanting, ownership has work to do. Where no such conflict exists, ownership is a claim without a ground. To fence an idea is to fence a pattern of light. The fence holds nothing. The enforcement is the only thing real about it.
A design is, nonetheless, nonrival. Once the design is created, it can be used as often as desired, in as many productive activities as desired. Paul Romer, Endogenous Technological Change, 1990
Article II

Upon the Copy

When a man copies, nothing is removed from the maker. The song is still sung, the page still read, the author alive and the shelf full. Multiplication is not subtraction. Every original was already a copy of an earlier pattern. The song was first sung elsewhere. The page first set from older type. The maker selects from a common store. The law pretends the store was never there. A copy is a second candle lit from the first. No candle dims.
He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson, 1813
Article III

Upon the Name They Give Us

They call it theft to move you. The act removes nothing. The old word is dragged across the new act to summon the old crime. A copy is not a theft any more than a mirror is a kidnapping. The word came off the water, fastened to men who took cargo from companies that held an ocean by grant. It was carried inland and fastened to men who take nothing at all.
Publishers refer to copying as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. Richard Stallman, Why Software Should Not Have Owners, 1994
Article IV

Upon Monopoly

A monopoly is when the state names one party and forbids the rest. Sole trade to the Indies, sole trade to the Guinea coast, sole trade in any pattern a mind can hold. Nothing is made. Someone is stopped. A monopoly is a line drawn on paper by a man who has never been where it falls, and everyone on the wrong side of it works by his leave. No man petitions for protection from a rival he can beat. The charter is a confession, signed in advance and filed with the Crown.
Patents and copyrights are unjustifiable monopolies granted by government legislation. Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, 2001
Article V

Upon the Licence

The licence is the new lord’s charter. What it gives is permission, leased on terms drafted by parties the user cannot reach, modifiable at their pleasure and enforceable only against him. This is the feudal compact. Provisional use of what was never theirs to grant, in exchange for the freeholder’s submission.
The opposite of a free culture is a permission culture, a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past. Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, 2004
Article VI

Upon the Purchase and the Repair

What cannot be opened is not owned. The maker takes apart the thing he uses, to study it, mend it, alter it, and pass it on. The act is older than every patent office and will outlast every one of them. A lock between the hand and the mechanism is rent in perpetuity, charged by a landlord who has crossed the threshold of the home and stayed.
What I cannot create, I do not understand. Richard Feynman, blackboard at the time of his death, 1988
Article VII

Upon the Archive

A book burned in 1933 is gone. A book paywalled in 2026 is almost gone. A book kept alive on a hundred drives in a hundred houses is harder to burn. The archive survives by copy alone. Every seeder is a monk in a scriptorium. Every mirror is a cathedral in the dark that keeps the candles lit. A copy reaches the reader the licence never meant to serve.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. Aaron Swartz, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008
Article VIII

Upon the Key

A letter is sealed before it is sent. When two people turn the same key the words pass between them and no third, and no clerk in any room decides otherwise. Ships once carried their papers weighted, to go over the side before a boarding party reached them. That was a seal a man could break if he was quick enough. This one is cut from math, and no empire has found its edge. The key belongs to whoever turns it, and to nobody who asks.
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy. We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. Cypherpunks write code. Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, 1993
Article IX

Upon Surveillance

A thing that watches its bearer is not his. The master of it sits in a building the bearer has never entered, and the device reports there in a tongue he was not taught. The watched man is a ledger entry. The unwatched man is himself. A window cut into a private house by an unseen hand is a breach whether the watcher ever comes through it or not.
A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Timothy May, 1988
Article X

Upon Cash and the Ledger

A coin in the hand is paid. It was weighed on deck and cut into eight when the shares would not come out even, and once it was in a man’s pocket the matter was closed. A coin in a ledger is held at the keeper’s pleasure. He reads it, decides who may buy, and prints himself richer at the holders’ expense. They run the press. We hold the key. What comes from the press is whatever number the moment requires. What the key moves is what was paid.
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008
Article XI

Upon the Crew

We are a crew of free women and free men who sail together while the sailing serves, and part when it does not. No flag of nation, faction, or platform stands above the colours we keep among ourselves. The articles bind those who sign them, for as long as they choose to sign them, and not a day longer. We come together for this. When this is no longer necessary, we part. The colours travel with us either way.
As to hanging, it is no great hardship; for were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so infest the seas, that men of courage must starve. Mary Read, at trial, Jamaica, November 1720

The Annals

The Long Lineage

The sea was pacified by the Royal Navy in the years after 1718. Ideas were privatized by the Statute of Anne in 1710. The two enclosures arrived in the same generation, drawn up by the same Parliament, enforced through the same admiralty courts. The fence moved from the shore to the page, and from the page to the server. What follows are the names and dates that mark its passage. Three centuries of crewmen, plaintiffs, technologists, and dissidents who answered the same question, in the same way, at the moment it was put to them.

Read the Lineage
1557
The press is granted away
Mary grants the Stationers’ Company the sole right to print in England. The Company decides who may enter the trade, searches where it likes, and seizes what it finds unlicensed. Copyright begins as a censor’s instrument held by a guild. The Statute of Anne is a hundred and fifty-three years off.
1572
Drake at Nombre de Dios
Francis Drake raids Nombre de Dios, and the next year ambushes the Spanish silver train on the Isthmus of Panama. The English Crown rewards him with arms. Spain hangs his men when they catch them. He sails for the state. The pirates after him will sail for themselves. The distinction is the entire argument that follows.
1593
Two queens at Greenwich
Gráinne Ní Mháille sails to London and meets Elizabeth I in person at Greenwich. Both queens in their sixties, both fluent in Latin, neither willing to use the other’s vernacular. She refuses to kneel and will not recognize Elizabeth as her superior. The English queen releases her sons. The Irish queen sails home and resumes raiding English shipping.
1600
The ocean is granted away
Elizabeth charters the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. Fifteen years of sole English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. No subject may sail there without the Company’s licence, and those who try forfeit ship and cargo, half to the Crown and half to the Company, with prison on top. The Company is given leave to make its own law and to punish under it.
1651 – 60
The Navigation Acts
Parliament closes the sea lanes. The 1651 Act reserves the carrying trade to English ships. The 1660 Act goes further, requiring three quarters of the crew English and naming the goods that may be landed nowhere else. Sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo. Smuggling becomes the ordinary way to trade, and the pirate is a supplier before he is ever a threat.
1660s
Brethren of the Coast
Tortuga, then Hispaniola. A working pirate-democratic code. Elected captain, elected quartermaster, shares by rank, compensation for lost limbs, a vote before engagement.
1671
Henry Morgan sacks Panama
Fourteen hundred buccaneers cross the isthmus, burn the city to the ground, and hand the Crown a victory it had not asked for. Morgan is later knighted. Useful piracy is statecraft. Inconvenient piracy is crime.
1678
Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America
Alexandre Exquemelin publishes the first widely read account of the buccaneers. Europe learns that the pirate ship has a written constitution.
1684
The Great Case of Monopolies
Thomas Sandys traded to the Indies without the Company’s licence and they seized his ship on the Thames. He argued that a king who can take a man’s whole trade can take anything he has. The Company answered that only a Christian prince may authorise dealings with infidels. Judge Jeffreys ruled for the Company. Parliament reversed him in nine years.
1690s
The legend of Libertatia
Captain Misson’s pirate colony on Madagascar. Probably fiction, published in Johnson’s General History. A democratic, multiracial, multilingual settlement that abolished slavery decades before any state dared to. Fiction or not, the idea reached further than most governments.
1695
Henry Every takes the Ganj-i-Sawai
The richest prize taken by pirates to that date, exceeded only by the Cabo in 1721. Every vanishes into legend. The first global manhunt begins, and fails. The reach of the state was finite then. It is finite now.
1696
Rex v. Dawson
An English admiralty court tries Henry Every’s crew. The judges hold that pirates are hostis humani generis, enemies of all mankind, triable by any nation that catches them. The phrase is older than the case. The case gives it teeth.
1701
Captain Kidd hanged at Wapping
A privateer commissioned by the Crown, then disowned by the Crown, then hanged twice for the inconvenience of having documented his commission. The rope breaks the first time. The second holds.
1710
The Statute of Anne
England invents copyright. Fourteen years plus fourteen, then the work belongs to everyone. The term has lengthened every generation since.
1713
The Treaty of Utrecht
The War of the Spanish Succession ends. Tens of thousands of trained sailors are demobilized into a peacetime market that has no use for them. They take the only trade they know to the only employer who will have them. The Golden Age proper begins.
1716
The Republic of Pirates
Nassau. For the better part of four years the port runs outside the Crown’s writ. Blackbeard, Vane, Hornigold, Bellamy, Rackham, the whole crew ashore. Lawless by London’s measure. Self-governing by their own.
1717
Bellamy’s Speech
Aboard a captured sloop, Sam Bellamy answers Captain Beer, who has refused to join him. Johnson prints the words in 1724 and no other record of them exists. I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea and an army of 100,000 men in the field.
Sep 1717
The King’s Pardon
George I proclaims a pardon on 5 September for any pirate who surrenders within the year. Most of Hornigold’s men take it. Bellamy and Roberts would not have. The pardon is a clever piece of counter-insurgency. It splits the crew between those who want a quiet life and those who remember what they came for.
May 1718
Blackbeard blockades Charleston
Edward Teach holds an entire colonial port hostage for a chest of medicine. He gets the chest. He sails away. The lesson is published in every newspaper on two continents. A state’s monopoly on coercion is fragile.
Jul 1718
Woodes Rogers takes Nassau
The Crown ships the former privateer Rogers to New Providence as governor, with a navy squadron and a copy of the pardon. The Republic of Pirates ends with paperwork. Rogers hangs the holdouts who refuse the offer. Hornigold takes the pardon and becomes a pirate hunter. The archetype of the co-opted radical is minted here.
Nov 1718
Death of Blackbeard at Ocracoke
Maynard’s boarding party. Five musket balls and twenty cutlass wounds before he goes down. His head, cut off and slung from the bowsprit, is the kind of trophy a navy displays only when it knows the man is more dangerous as a story than he ever was as a captain.
1719 – 22
Black Bart takes 400+ prizes
Bartholomew Roberts, the most successful pirate captain by prize count in the entire Age of Sail. He drank tea, not rum. He forbade gambling aboard. He insisted his crew not work on Sunday. He also ran up a flag with his own figure standing on two skulls, captioned A Barbadian’s Head and A Martinican’s Head, to remind the merchants of those two islands who had hanged his men. The articles worked.
Jun 1720
Bartholomew Roberts’ Articles
Black Bart’s crew draws up eleven articles. Equal vote, equal share, no smuggling aboard women or boys, lights out at eight, disputes ashore with pistol and cutlass. The most complete pirate code that survives.
Oct 1720
Anne Bonny & Mary Read captured
Both plead their bellies and escape the noose. Bonny’s parting words to Jack Rackham, as Johnson reports them. Had you fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog.
1722
Death of Black Bart
A broadside catches Roberts in the throat off Cape Lopez. 272 of his crew are taken to Cape Coast Castle for the largest pirate trial in history. Fifty-two hang within the flood marks of the castle gate. The back of the Golden Age is broken.
1724
Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates
The book that shapes every pirate myth after it. Likely written by Defoe. The articles, the flags, the speeches, the ends. All here.
1726
William Fly on the gallows at Boston
One of the last of the Golden Age captains. The minister offers him a final repentance. Fly refuses, retying the noose himself with a sailor’s knot and warning the assembled merchants and shipmasters to use their crews better, lest the same fate find them. A clean exit. The Golden Age ends with its mouth shut around a curse.
1730s
Calm, officially
The Royal Navy completes the Atlantic suppression. The last of the great Caribbean captains hang or sail east. The public argument the pirates carried, about property, sovereignty, who owns the sea and who owns himself, is forced underground. London declares the trade ended. London is half right.
1735
Zenger acquitted
John Peter Zenger, German-born printer in New York, is tried for seditious libel after publishing criticism of the colonial governor. Andrew Hamilton argues that truth is a defence. The jury acquits in ten minutes. American press freedom dates from this verdict.
1751 – 72
Diderot’s Encyclopédie
Twenty-eight volumes. Seventy-two thousand articles. One hundred and forty contributors. Twenty-one years. Diderot and d’Alembert compile the technical knowledge of an age and refuse to let the church or the crown decide who reads it. Suppressed twice, smuggled past censors, finished anyway.
1789 – 91
Free speech enters constitutional law
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man, Article 11. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Two years later the United States ratifies the First Amendment. Two governments at war with each other write the same insurance against themselves.
1801 – 10
Ching Shih’s Red Flag Fleet
A former Cantonese sex worker takes command of her dead husband’s pirate fleet. She expands it to eighty thousand hands and 1,800 ships, fights the Qing navy and the East India Company to a stalemate, and negotiates her own retirement on her own terms. The Atlantic golden age ends in nooses. The Pacific golden age ends in pension.
1844
Spooner runs the post
Lysander Spooner founds the American Letter Mail Company at five cents a letter against the federal monopoly’s twelve. The post moves faster and reaches farther for less money. Congress shuts him down with a new postal act the following year, then drops federal rates to match. The company is gone. The argument carried.
1859
Mill’s On Liberty
John Stuart Mill publishes On Liberty. It argues for free expression as a positive good. The peculiar evil of silencing an opinion, Mill argues, is that it robs the human race, those who dissent from it still more than those who hold it. Truth survives best when contested in the open. The harm principle gives the framework its shape.
1886
The Berne Convention
Ten states across Europe and beyond sign a treaty granting reciprocal copyright across borders. A book published in Paris is now protected in Berlin, in London, in Bern. Every empire that signs commits to enforcing every other empire’s copyright. The Statute of Anne has become an instrument of imperial policy.
1906
Twain testifies
Mark Twain appears before the congressional Joint Committee on Patents in a white flannel suit, which he debuts that day, 7 December 1906. He argues for perpetual copyright on the grounds that the wealthy already enjoy it through trusts and dynasties. The 1909 Copyright Act extends the term to fifty-six years.
1917
Vernam invents the one-time pad
Gilbert Vernam, at AT&T’s research lab, designs a teleprinter cipher that combines plaintext with a random key tape. Joseph Mauborgne later proves it mathematically unbreakable when the key is truly random and used once. The first cipher math itself certifies as secure.
1928
Olmstead v. United States
The Supreme Court rules five to four that federal wiretapping does not violate the Fourth Amendment because no physical entry occurred. Justice Brandeis dissents. the right to be let alone is the right most valued by civilized men. The dissent loses the case and wins the next century.
1929
The Black Chamber dissolved
Secretary of State Henry Stimson disbands the American cryptographic bureau with a single sentence. Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail. Yardley’s team had been reading Japanese cables for a decade. The decision is reversed within three years. The next rebuild will be at Bletchley’s scale.
1940 – 45
Bletchley Park
Alan Turing’s team breaks Enigma at a country house north of London. The work is so consequential it stays classified for thirty years. Industrial-scale cryptography becomes a state instrument. The postwar NSA and GCHQ inherit the toolkit. Mathematics takes orders from parliaments, briefly. The cypherpunks of 1976 onward will spend a generation taking it back.
1948
Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication
Claude Shannon publishes A Mathematical Theory of Communication at Bell Labs. Information becomes measurable, encodeable, transmissible. His information theory and his classified cryptography work had been the same project. The math foundation of every entry that follows.
1964
Radio Caroline drops anchor
Ronan O’Rahilly anchors a ship three miles off Essex and plays the music the BBC will not. Seven million listen. By 1967 there are ten stations on the water and Parliament makes it a crime to supply them. The BBC opens Radio 1 the following month, staffed with the pirates’ own disc jockeys.
Jun 1971
The Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg gives the New York Times 7,000 pages of classified history on the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration seeks an injunction. The Supreme Court rejects prior restraint in fifteen days. The Times prints. The first modern leak. Every leaker since has traced the same line.
Jul 1971
Project Gutenberg
Michael Hart types the Declaration of Independence into a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois on July 4, 1971. The first electronic free-information project. He runs it by hand for forty years.
Oct 1971
Secrets of the Little Blue Box
Esquire prints Ron Rosenbaum on the phone phreaks, who found that a whistle from a cereal box sounded the tone that opened AT&T’s long-distance network. John Draper went to prison for it. Steve Wozniak read the article, showed Steve Jobs, and the two built and sold blue boxes for six thousand dollars before they built anything else.
1976
Diffie & Hellman
New Directions in Cryptography. Public-key cryptography makes private conversation possible between strangers. The first crack in the state’s monopoly on secrets.
1980
Life is granted away
The Supreme Court rules five to four that a bacterium engineered to eat crude oil can be patented, on the reasoning that Congress meant to cover anything under the sun that is made by man. Brennan dissents. By 2006 a fifth of the human genome is held under patent.
1983
Richard Stallman begins GNU
Free as in freedom, not as in beer. The first serious argument that software, and by extension all code, ought to be unshackled from proprietary enclosure.
1988
Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
Timothy May opens with a line borrowed from Marx. A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Privacy, contracts, and markets will be reconstituted outside the state’s reach.
1989
David Chaum’s DigiCash
Blind signatures. Anonymous electronic cash, twenty years before Bitcoin. The technology works. The business dies. The idea outlasts the company.
1990
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, and John Gilmore charter the EFF in San Francisco. The trigger is the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games, a tabletop publisher whose machines are seized over a cyberpunk roleplaying book. The EFF sues. The EFF wins. The lawyers for the network arrive before the network has finished arriving.
Jun 1991
Phil Zimmermann releases PGP
Strong encryption for the ordinary person. The US government opens a three-year criminal investigation for exporting munitions without a licence. He publishes the source code as a printed book. Books cannot be export-controlled. The investigation is dropped. The cipher is loose.
Aug 1991
Linus Torvalds posts Linux
A Finnish graduate student announces a kernel he wrote for fun on a Usenet newsgroup. By 2026 it runs the internet, every Android phone, the cloud, and most of the world’s servers. Free software at scale, three decades after Stallman called for it.
1992
The cypherpunks mailing list
Eric Hughes, Tim May, John Gilmore host the first meeting in a Bay Area living room. The list runs for decades. Nakamoto, Finney, Back, Dai, Szabo all pass through it. The whole of modern digital money, anonymity, and private computation is hashed out on a mailing list, exactly the way a pirate code was hashed out on a captured deck.
Mar 1993
A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto
Eric Hughes opens it. Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Cypherpunks write code. The crew’s new articles, in a new sea.
Apr 1993
Crypto Wars, Round One
The Clinton administration announces the Clipper chip, a key-escrow scheme that would have handed the government a backdoor into every encrypted consumer device. Cypherpunks, EFF, and academic cryptographers mount a coordinated public-comment and technical-critique campaign. Matt Blaze demonstrates a fatal flaw. By 1996, the proposal is dead.
1996
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
John Perry Barlow addresses the governments of the industrial world. You have no sovereignty where we gather. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Written in Davos of all places, during the signing of the US Telecommunications Act.
1998
The DMCA passes
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalizes breaking DRM, even on things you bought. Circumvention becomes a separate offence from infringement. The fence is given its own guards.
May 1999
Bernstein v. United States
Daniel Bernstein, a Berkeley math student, sues the federal government over export controls on his Snuffle cipher. The Ninth Circuit rules that source code is speech, protected by the First Amendment. Every cipher published since stands on this judgment.
Jun 1999
Napster
Shawn Fanning writes a program in a college dorm. The music industry’s revenue model is broken inside twenty-four months.
Oct 1999
DeCSS
Jon Lech Johansen, fifteen years old, cracks DVD encryption. Prosecuted in Norway. Acquitted twice. The code is printed on T-shirts, tattooed, written as a haiku. Speech cannot be enjoined.
2001
BitTorrent
Bram Cohen publishes the protocol. Every leecher becomes a seeder. The network gets stronger the more it is used. An architecture of mutual aid disguised as a file-sharing trick.
Oct 2002
Tor goes public
Developed by the US Naval Research Lab, released as open source. Onion routing goes from classified to available to every activist, dissident, and journalist on earth.
Dec 2002
Creative Commons launches
Lawrence Lessig launches Creative Commons. A set of standard licences that let creators waive the rights the law assigns them by default. Wikipedia adopts CC. So do Flickr, MIT OpenCourseWare, and millions of small works. The commons becomes a thing a person can build without asking permission.
2003
The Pirate Bay
A Swedish BBS spawns the most prosecuted tracker in history. Raided, seized, cloned, relocated, mirrored. Still running. The flag does not come down.
2006
WikiLeaks launches
Julian Assange and a small group set up a drop box for whistleblowers. Cablegate follows. The consequences for Assange follow the consequences of every Golden Age captain who made state secrets public. Exile, siege, imprisonment. The documents remain.
Jul 2008
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Aaron Swartz, age 21. Information is power. But like all power, there are those who wish to keep it for themselves. There is no justice in following unjust laws.
Oct 2008
The Bitcoin whitepaper
Satoshi Nakamoto proposes a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Sound money without a central bank. The cypherpunks’ longest-running bet finally clears. Nine pages. The single most consequential document in the post-2008 financial order.
2009
Satoshi mines the genesis block
Encoded in the coinbase, the headline of the day. The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. The first written act of the new monetary order is a headline about the failure of the old one.
2010
Bradley Manning
An Army intelligence analyst, twenty-two, transmits roughly 750,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks via Tor. Diplomatic cables, war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Collateral Murder video. He is convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917, the same statute used against Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. Sentenced to thirty-five years. Obama commuted it to seven.
2011
Sci-Hub
Alexandra Elbakyan, a neuroscience grad student in Kazakhstan, builds the shadow library that gives every researcher on earth the papers their institutions could not afford. Elsevier sues. Sci-Hub keeps sailing.
2012
Megaupload seized
In one week, the US government raids Kim Dotcom’s mansion in New Zealand, and a coordinated internet protest kills two laws that would have empowered Hollywood to blacklist any site at the DNS level. A taste, briefly, of what organized refusal at scale can do.
Jan 2013
Aaron Swartz dies
Indicted on thirteen felony counts for downloading academic papers from JSTOR. Thirty-five years and a million-dollar fine hung over him. He was 26. He died under indictment. The argument he made carried.
Jun 2013
The Snowden disclosures
PRISM, XKeyscore, MUSCULAR, the whole apparatus. The cypherpunks are retroactively proven not paranoid. The response is wider encryption, faster protocols, quieter chat.
Aug 2013
Lavabit shuts down
Ladar Levison receives a federal demand for the SSL keys that would unlock every user of his encrypted email service. He shuts the service rather than comply. The first business in modern memory to choose closure over collaboration.
Oct 2013
Silk Road seized
Ross Ulbricht arrested in a San Francisco library. Sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus forty years for running a marketplace. The state’s response to a functioning anonymous market is to imprison its operator until he dies.
2016
Apple vs. FBI
The FBI demands Apple build a backdoor to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. Apple refuses publicly. The FBI finds an outside contractor and drops the case. The largest company in the world said no to a federal court. The court withdrew.
2018
GDPR comes into force
The European Union begins enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation. Consent must be informed, data minimised, breaches reported, fines apportioned by global turnover. The American platforms threaten to leave, then comply. The regulation does not return ownership to the user, but it raises the price of the harvest.
2019
Assange arrested at the Ecuadorian Embassy
Seven years of asylum end. London, Belmarsh, and a US extradition request built on the Espionage Act. He is eventually released in 2024 after a plea bargain. The documents he published remain.
2022
Anna’s Archive
After the Z-Library takedown of November 2022, the pseudonymous Anna Archivist opens a meta-index of every shadow library at once. By 2026, more than 68 million books and 156 million papers, all CC0, code and data fully open, designed to be re-hosted by anyone if seized. The largest open library in human history.
2023 – 26
The Right to Repair
After years of farmers locked out of the tractors they paid for, Colorado passes the first Right to Repair law in 2023. New York, Minnesota, and California follow. The FTC sues Deere in January 2025. The class action settles in April 2026 for ninety-nine million dollars, and in July the FTC settlement lands with teeth, binding Deere to open its diagnostic software to any owner or independent shop. The right of the buyer to open what he bought returns to the books, where it was always supposed to live.
2023
The AI corpus suits begin
The New York Times sues OpenAI. Authors sue Meta. Getty sues Stability. The industry that spent a century enforcing copyright maximalism discovers the argument runs both ways when a machine does the copying. The enclosure begins to eat itself.
Aug 2024
Pavel Durov arrested in France
French authorities detain the Telegram founder at Le Bourget airport. The charge is the platform’s failure to comply with French law enforcement requests, framed as complicity in the crimes of its users. The founder is held responsible for what the platform carries. The chilling effect is the indictment.
Sep 2024
Hachette v. Internet Archive
The Second Circuit affirms the lower court. The Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending is judged copyright infringement. One scanned copy lent to one borrower at a time fails the four-factor test. The publishers prevail. The library that does what every library has always done is named a pirate operation.
Jan 2025
Ulbricht pardoned
Eleven years in, Ross Ulbricht walks out of federal prison. The precedent of two life sentences for running a website remains on the books. The next marketplace builds on Monero and lives on Tor.
Aug 2025
Roman Storm convicted
A Manhattan jury convicts the Tornado Cash co-founder of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business for writing the smart contracts. The code is immutable, on-chain, custody-free. The jury deadlocks on the two graver counts. The state prosecutes the author of the math as if he ran the laundromat.
Sep 2025
Bartz v. Anthropic settles for $1.5 billion
The largest copyright settlement in American history, preliminarily approved by Judge Alsup. He ruled training itself fair use, but Anthropic’s torrented corpus from LibGen and PiLiMi was not. Roughly $3,000 per qualifying work across the certified class. The enclosure has begun to send itself the invoice.
now
The voyage continues
The fence keeps moving. So does the crew. The names on the articles change. The articles do not.

The Broadside

The Common Enemy

A broadside was a single sheet, printed cheap and pasted up where it would be read. The dying speech of every hanged pirate left the gallows in this form, sold the next morning for a halfpenny. The Crown’s proclamations went up beside them, on the same wall. Those who could read recited them aloud to those who could not. What follows is set down in the same form, to be hung up wherever a wall and an audience can be found. It is not a dying speech. The crew is not dead.

Read the Broadside
printed this year · to be read aloud and carried onward
Hostis Humani Generis

Hostis humani generis. Enemy of all mankind. Cicero’s charge, fastened onto pirates and hardened by English admiralty law into a rule. A pirate belongs to no nation, may be tried by any nation, stands outside the protection of every one. Mankind agrees to treat a man as the common enemy of mankind. The category is a verdict passed by interested parties, and always was. Enemies of all mankind by their decree. We keep the name by consent.

Before a company put to sea it wrote down the terms it would sail by. A vote to every hand aboard. An equal share of the provisions. Payment in coin for a limb or an eye lost at work. Captains elected, and turned out again by ballot. No king in Europe granted a seaman one of the four. The crews took all four in the one place on earth where nobody could stop them, and the Crown answered by hanging them in chains at the mouths of harbours, where the lesson would be legible from the deck of every ship coming in.

Court transcripts. Articles of indictment. Inventories of confiscated goods. Sermons preached at the condemned on the Sunday before they died. Power documents itself to justify itself, the paper outlives the office, and it is read at last by people it was never meant for.

The fence has moved. From the shore to the page, from the page to the server. The name moved with it. We are where we have always been.

One crew, then, and a long one. Each hand on it told what he might do with what was already his. Those companies. The printers. The mechanic. The farmer. The archivist. The cryptographer. The buyer. The spender. The seeder. Every one of them was asked the same question at the moment it was put to him. Every one gave the same answer.

The same terms are written in code now, and a man signs them by running it. They bind in the one place the fence cannot reach. That place is mathematics. It cannot be petitioned. It does not take orders. Two people of no importance can hold a conversation that every treasury on earth, spending all it has, cannot open. No statute has ever repealed a prime number.

The fences are paper. The math is bedrock.

Ask no man’s leave for what is already yours. Read this aloud where it will be heard. Nail it up where it will be read. Take a copy and carry it, and when the fence moves again, carry it further.

set down for all who would read it and carry it

What your machine handed the page, unasked. None of it sent anywhere. None of it kept.

No name set this. No login. No cookie. The mark holds from page to page, and most keep it for good. What follows is how you leave less.

The Stores

Tools of the Trade

The quartermaster held the stores and kept the count. He was elected by the crew and his first duty was to the men aboard. The provisions were common stock. Every hand had an equal title to them by article. Below is the working hold of the present crew. Each entry is a project that is actively maintained and vouched for by the community that lives by it.

Read the Stores
Shadow Libraries

Research behind paywalls, books out of print, knowledge priced out of reach. Every seeder a monk, every mirror a cathedral in the dark. Domains rotate under takedown. Current as of May 2026. When one fails, Anna’s Archive and FMHY hold the live address.

  • Anna’s ArchiveThe meta-index. 68.6 million books, 156 million papers, 1.1 petabytes of preserved record. Aggregates LibGen, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, the Internet Archive, DuXiu, MagzDB, Nexus/STC, HathiTrust. Domain rotates under takedown. The .org was placed on serverHold in January 2026, .se and .li followed. Current mirrors at .gl, .pk, and .gd.
  • FMHY (FreeMediaHeckYeah)The community-maintained meta-index of free and pirated media. Fifty-plus categories of vetted links. Streaming, downloading, torrenting, books, audio, software, courses, tools. Updated daily by a global volunteer crew. The starting point any contemporary catalogue should defer to.
  • The Internet ArchiveBrewster Kahle’s library of everything. The Wayback Machine, software collections, audio, video, scanned books. Under continuous legal siege from publishers. Mirror what you read.
  • Project GutenbergFounded 1971 by Michael Hart. More than 70,000 works in the public domain, free and legal everywhere. The original digital library.
  • Standard EbooksPublic-domain books lovingly typeset by volunteers. Beautiful editions in EPUB and Kindle formats. Drop-in replacements for the ugly Gutenberg dumps.
  • Open LibraryAn Internet Archive project. One web page for every book ever published. Controlled digital lending where permitted.
  • LibriVoxVolunteer-narrated audiobooks of public-domain works. Free everywhere. The audio counterpart to Project Gutenberg, running since 2005.
  • Sci-HubAlexandra Elbakyan’s archive. 88 million peer-reviewed papers freed from publisher paywalls since 2011. Sci-Hub paused new uploads. SciDB at Anna’s Archive is the continuation. Domain shifts under injunction. The .ru and .st are the durable mirrors. The .se domain was DNS-blocked in January 2026.
  • SciDBThe Anna’s Archive scholarly paper interface. Direct DOI lookup against the full Sci-Hub corpus plus continued ingestion.
  • Library GenesisThe elder library, running since 2008. Textbooks, scientific literature, fiction, journals. Domain in constant flux. The .li, .is, .rs, .gs, .gl, and the .im fork are all current. If the front page fails, search through Anna’s Archive.
  • Z-LibrarySeized by the FBI in 2022, returned, repeatedly reborn. The clearnet domain rotates constantly and z-lib.sk is the current one. Phishing clones proliferate, so verify before signing in. The onion does not rotate. It is bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion. When the clearnet domain moves again, Anna’s Archive holds the mirror.
  • Ocean of PDFGenre fiction and contemporary novels. The friendliest interface in the shadow library world. What casual readers reach for first.
  • OpenStaxRice University’s peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks for core undergraduate courses. Genuinely free, genuinely good.
  • DOAJThe Directory of Open Access Journals. Vetted, indexed, free to read. The legitimate face of the same fight.
  • arXivCornell’s preprint server. Where physics, mathematics, and computer science papers actually live before the journal demands a transfer of copyright.
  • Memory of the WorldMarcell Mars’ project. A public library that does not ask for a borrowing card. Custodial libraries built by readers themselves.
  • Academic TorrentsDistributed dataset and research-paper sharing by torrent. Used by universities to share corpora too large for the journal site. The legal-and-radical face of the same impulse.
  • The Pirate BayFounded 2003 by Piratbyrån. Twenty-three years of every domain seizure, every server raid, every founder convicted, and the magnet links still resolve. The lighthouse of the public-tracker era. The onion is piratebayo3klnzokct3wt5yyxb2vpebbuyjl7m623iaxmqhsd52coid.onion.
  • 1337xPublic torrent index, community-curated, the most usable interface in the public-tracker tier. Rolling mirror list under DNS pressure.
  • NyaaThe anime and Japanese-media torrent index. The successor archive after the original Nyaa shut down in 2017. The community kept the catalogue moving without missing a release.
  • RuTrackerThe Russian-language torrent tracker. The deepest archive on the public web for Eastern European media, scientific software, and out-of-print everything. Free registration, indifferent to Western takedown notices.
  • SoulseekThe peer-to-peer network the music underground never left. Lossless rips of records that never made the streaming services, every B-side and live recording the band quietly let go out of print, the rare imports your local shop never carried. Pair with Nicotine+ as the maintained client.
  • Nicotine+The maintained Soulseek client. Cross-platform, ad-free, full chatroom and search support. The way into the network in 2026.
  • archive.todayPage-level web archive. Paste a URL, get a permanent snapshot the publisher cannot revise or delete. The bypass for paywalls and the receipt for any article you may need to cite after it has been quietly edited or pulled.
  • KiwixOffline reader for Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, Project Gutenberg, and TED. Boots from a USB stick, runs without a network. Used in prisons, censored countries, and on the road.
  • Real-DebridPremium link generator and torrent cache. Paid service, but the reason the public-tracker chaos can be turned into instant gigabit streams. Pair with the *arr stack for the streaming experience the platforms charge two hundred a month for.
  • AllDebridEuropean debrid alternative to Real-Debrid, working the same way. Cache hits served at full speed, the rest fetched on demand. Different terms-of-service jurisdiction.
  • PremiumizeCloud-side debrid. Files cached, downloaded once, shared at speed. The third option in the debrid trio.
  • EwekaDutch Usenet provider. Ten-plus years of binary retention, no DMCA jurisdiction, audited. The reference provider for the European market. Pair with an indexer.
  • NewshostingLong-running US-friendly Usenet provider. Decade-plus retention, ships its own newsreader, frequent multi-year subscription deals.
  • UsenetServerSister provider to Newshosting under the same backbone. Equivalent retention, same backbone, often the cheaper of the two.
  • NZBgeekVeteran Usenet indexer. Handles the catalogue side. Search, NZB generation, integration with the *arr stack. Lifetime memberships when open.
  • NZBPlanetLong-running Usenet indexer. Strong API, regular signup windows.
  • DrunkenSlugSelective-invite Usenet indexer with a reputation for clean releases and active moderation. The enthusiast tier.
  • SABnzbdThe reference Usenet download client. Open-source, web-based, integrates with every indexer and every automation tool. Set it once.
  • NZBGetLighter alternative to SABnzbd. Runs on a Pi, a NAS, anything. Lower memory footprint for the same job.
  • KodiOpen-source media center. The community-extensible playback layer for self-hosted libraries. Every streaming front-end and add-on ecosystem you have ever heard of plugs in here.
  • MakeMKVRip Blu-ray and DVD discs to MKV with the original streams intact. The disc-side end of the personal-archive workflow. Free in beta forever. The developer keeps releasing new keys for new discs.
  • libdvdcssThe DVD content-scrambling-system bypass library. Lets free software play and rip the DVDs you own. Half of VLC’s usefulness depends on it.
  • /r/OpenSignupsReddit community that posts when private trackers open registration. RED, OPS, BTN, PassThePopcorn, HDBits, MyAnonamouse, AnimeBytes, GazelleGames are the canonical stops. Subscribe to catch a window when it opens.
  • /r/trackersThe Reddit community wiki for private trackers. Application guides, interview prep, reputation notes, current invite statuses. The reference desk before any application.
Streaming

The broadcast was free over the air, the match public until the bidding closed. Now watched in a window, without paying the gatekeeper. The meta-trackers know where the rotating names have gone. These names rot fastest. Checked August 2026, and three that had died were pulled. When one fails, FMHY and the r/Piracy megathread hold the live address.

  • Stremio + Torrentio + Real-DebridStremio with the Torrentio addon and a Real-Debrid account. Netflix-grade interface in front of every torrent on every public tracker, played at gigabit speeds. Three dollars a month for the debrid, free for the rest.
  • TorrentioThe Stremio addon that turns the public-tracker chaos into instant streams. Wires Stremio to RARBG, 1337x, ThePirateBay, Nyaa, EZTV, served through the debrid cache.
  • r/Piracy MegathreadThe community-maintained piracy guide on Reddit, mirrored at rentry. Parallel to FMHY with a heavier focus on streaming and live sports.
  • CinebyFMHY’s current top-starred movies-and-TV streaming site. Auto-next, multiple source switching, manageable popups when paired with uBlock Origin.
  • LookMovieOne of the more durable browser-streaming sites, surviving multiple domain changes since 2018. Films and TV, auto-next, 480p ceiling but reliable.
  • Soaper.TVMovies and TV with multiple official mirrors. Clean player, modest popup count.
  • 9animeThe 9anime/AniWave/HiAnime line. After AniWave’s 2024 shutdown and HiAnime’s March 2026 shutdown, 9anime.org.lv is the current working mirror carrying the same library and interface.
  • GoGoAnime / AnitakuThe oldest anime streaming site still operating, in various forms since 2013. One domain goes down, three appear. Gogoanime3.cc is the live domain at present. Gogoanime.io and anitaku are the rotating alternates.
  • AnicrushNewer anime site, gained traction after HiAnime closed in March 2026. Clean layout, soft-sub support that lets you adjust subtitle timing and switch sources.
  • MiruroAnime site with a weekly schedule view for tracking ongoing simulcasts. Multiple subtitle languages, multiple servers per episode.
  • DaddyLive / DaddyLiveHDThe current most-stable live sports aggregator since StreamEast was shut down by ACE in late 2025. Schedules every major football, basketball, UFC, and NBA match with multiple stream sources per game. Currently at daddylives.sbs and rotating mirrors.
  • StreamEastWas the largest free sports streamer. Seized by ACE in September 2025, resurrected through clone mirrors at rotating domains. NFL, NBA, UFC, soccer.
  • SportSurgeLive sports aggregator that predated StreamEast and outlasted it. NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, soccer, MMA, boxing, UFC, all with multiple mirrors per game. Domain rotates. FMHY tracks the current one.
  • Stream2WatchLong-running sports aggregator with broad league coverage. Wider source list, rougher interface.
  • BuffstreamsLong-running live sports streams. Football, basketball, MMA, boxing. Operating through a decade of takedown attempts.
  • IPTV-OrgOpen-source repository of publicly available IPTV channels from every country with a broadcast presence. Over a hundred thousand stars on GitHub. Every link is a stream the broadcaster has put online publicly. M3U playlists, EPG data, an API.
  • Free-TV/IPTVCurated set of legally-receivable IPTV channels, as M3U playlists for Kodi and VLC. Five thousand channels, all confirmed legitimate. Drop the URL into a player.
  • IPTVnatorOpen-source, cross-platform IPTV player. Loads any M3U or M3U8 playlist, supports EPG, no telemetry.
Models on Your Own Iron

The model that runs on your hardware, against weights you downloaded, owes nothing to the cloud. The platform AI watches and meters. The local AI runs in your house.

  • GPT4AllCross-platform desktop app for running open-weight models with no setup. The simplest possible path to a private LLM.
  • JanOpen-source ChatGPT alternative that runs locally. Polished desktop app, OpenAI-compatible server, no telemetry.
  • LM StudioDesktop app with a polished GUI, model browser, and one-click downloads from Hugging Face. Proprietary but local-first, the non-developer’s on-ramp before Ollama.
  • OllamaThe Docker-of-LLMs. One command to install, one command to run any of the major open-weight models. OpenAI-compatible API on localhost. The default starting point.
  • Open WebUISelf-hosted ChatGPT-style frontend that talks to Ollama, llama.cpp, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Run it locally, log nothing.
  • Hugging FaceThe model registry. Tens of thousands of open-weight models, datasets, and spaces. Where the actual fight over open weights is being kept on the record.
  • AUTOMATIC1111The default web UI for Stable Diffusion. Local image generation against weights you downloaded. The model never sees the prompt because it never leaves the box.
  • ComfyUINode-based workflow editor for diffusion models. The professional tool, with full control over every step of the generation graph.
  • llamafileMozilla’s single-binary distribution. The model and the runtime in one executable that runs on six operating systems without installation. Sovereignty by way of portability.
  • KoboldCppSingle-binary llama.cpp fork with a generous web UI, story-mode interface, and KoboldAI-compatible API. The hobbyist’s daily driver for local inference.
  • SillyTavernThe character-card-driven local-LLM frontend. Connects to Ollama, KoboldCpp, llama.cpp, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The most popular front-end for long-form local chat.
  • text-generation-webuiPower-user web UI for local LLMs. Multiple backends, character cards, training extensions. The hobbyist and researcher tool.
  • llama.cppGeorgi Gerganov’s C++ inference engine. The foundation under Ollama, LM Studio, and most local LLM tooling. Run when you want full control of the inference path.
  • LocalAIDrop-in OpenAI-compatible API that runs entirely on your hardware. Speech, embeddings, image generation, chat, all from the same endpoint, all local.
  • vLLMHigh-throughput LLM serving for the production-scale local deployment. PagedAttention, continuous batching. The fastest open-source inference engine when the hardware is there.
  • MLXApple’s open-source array framework for Apple Silicon. The native path for fast local inference on M-series Macs, including the largest open-weight models that exceed standard VRAM budgets.
Moving Unseen

The pirate’s first duty was to disappear when pursued. Same duty now, different waters. Tor for the highest threat models, VPN for everything else, live OS when the disk itself must remember nothing.

  • Tor BrowserOnion routing. Three encrypted hops, no single node knowing both ends. The default for any threat model that involves the state. Use as-shipped. Do not install extensions.
  • SnowflakeTor pluggable transport that uses volunteers’ browsers as one-hop bridges. Run the extension to give a censored user a way out. Install Tor Browser with Snowflake to slip a national firewall.
  • OrbotThe Guardian Project’s Android Tor client. Route any app on the phone through Tor, including via VPN-mode for system-wide onion routing. The mobile equivalent of Tor Browser’s baseline.
  • Onion BrowserThe official Tor Browser fork for iOS, supported by the Tor Project. The only legitimate way onto Tor on Apple’s walled garden until Apple permits real Tor Browser.
  • Mullvad VPNCash-payable, account-number only, no email required, no logs by audited policy. Five euros a month, flat. The benchmark VPN.
  • Proton VPNSwiss jurisdiction, repeatedly audited, solid free tier (no traffic logs even on free). Accepts cash by mail.
  • IVPNNo-logs by design, accepts Monero, accepts cash, multi-hop available. One of the few VPNs Privacy Guides still recommends without hedging.
  • AirVPNItalian-run, technically opinionated, accepts Monero and Bitcoin. WireGuard and OpenVPN, port forwarding, no logs by design. The long-running choice where the threat model includes torrenting.
  • RethinkDNSOn-device firewall, DNS, and WireGuard client for Android, no root required. See every connection an app opens, block the ones you never agreed to, choose the resolver yourself. The phone stops phoning home.
  • TailsAmnesic Debian-based live OS. Boot from USB, route everything through Tor, leave no trace on the machine. Snowden used this. Journalists at the Intercept use it.
  • WhonixTwo VMs, one acting as Tor gateway, the other as workstation. All traffic forced through Tor by network design. Even a compromised workstation cannot leak your IP.
  • Qubes OSSecurity through compartmentalization. Every task in its own Xen-isolated VM. Snowden’s public recommendation. The serious journalist’s operating system.
  • I2PAnonymous overlay network designed for hidden services rather than clearnet. Garlic routing, peer-to-peer, no central directory. The other dark web.
  • LokinetOnion-routed mixnet built on the Oxen blockchain. An alternative path when Tor is blocked at the network level.
  • Deflock.meCitizen-mapped database of Flock automated licence-plate readers across the United States. Where the cameras are. Where the cameras are not. Submit, search, plan accordingly.
  • Organic MapsOffline maps and turn-by-turn navigation with no account, no ads, no tracking, built on OpenStreetMap. Download a country, pull the SIM, still find the road. Where you go is no one’s ledger.
  • OsmAndThe power user’s offline navigator. Dense with layers, contours, and settings, open-source, every map held on the device. More dials than Organic Maps for those who want them.
  • OpenStreetMapThe map of the world drawn by the people who live on it. The commons every honest map app is built from, owned by no company, edited by anyone. The atlas before the enclosure.
Browsers as Bridges

The browser is where most of the watching happens. Harden it or be hardened against.

  • BraveChromium with blocking built in, including for sites that detect uBlock. Disable the rewards and crypto features and it is the cleanest Chromium choice.
  • LibreWolfFirefox fork with telemetry stripped, tracking protection maxed, sane privacy defaults. The drop-in for everyday use.
  • Ungoogled ChromiumChromium with every Google service surgically removed. For when you need site compatibility without the surveillance.
  • Mullvad BrowserTor Browser hardening over a VPN or clearnet, built in collaboration with the Tor Project. The browser to use when you want Tor-grade fingerprint resistance without onion routing.
  • Tor BrowserListed in Moving Unseen above. Bears repeating here. The default browser when the threat model includes the state. Use as-shipped, no extensions, no theme changes. The strength is the uniformity of the fingerprint.
  • Arkenfox user.jsA vetted Firefox configuration that closes the telemetry, fingerprinting, and tracking holes Mozilla left open. Drop the file in your profile, restart, done.
  • uBlock OriginThe only content blocker that matters. Install it on every non-Tor browser you use. Default lists are good. Medium and hard mode for power users.
  • NoScriptBlock JavaScript by default, enable per-site when the tradeoff is worth it. Bundled with Tor Browser for a reason.
  • Privacy BadgerEFF’s heuristic tracker blocker. Learns from cross-site behaviour, no manual list curation needed.
  • Multi-Account ContainersMozilla’s container tabs. One identity per container. Pair with Temporary Containers for one-time-use isolation.
  • Cookie AutoDeleteWipes cookies and local storage from any tab the moment you close it. Whitelist the few sites you want persisted. Everything else forgets you.
  • ClearURLsStrips tracking parameters from links automatically. The fbclid, the utm_, the gclid. Gone before the page loads.
  • LocalCDNReplaces requests to commercial CDNs with locally bundled copies of the libraries. The page loads, the CDN never sees you.
  • SponsorBlockCrowdsourced skipping of sponsor segments, intros, outros, and self-promotion on YouTube. The advertising-funded web rendered slightly less so by collective annotation.
  • AdNauseamBrowser extension that clicks every blocked ad in the background. Where uBlock denies the tracker its data, AdNauseam poisons the well. Active resistance, not passive refusal.
  • DuckDuckGoThe first move away from Google. Free, tracker-free, default-friendly. Backed by Bing’s index with its own crawl on top, so results lag Google for the long tail. The on-ramp before Kagi or SearXNG.
  • KagiPaid search. Rankings reflect relevance because the user pays directly. Programmable lenses for further customization.
  • MarginaliaA search engine that prefers small, non-commercial websites. The web before SEO captured it.
  • SearXNG instancesFree, self-hostable metasearch. Pick a public instance you trust or run your own. No profile, no logs.
  • InvidiousPrivacy frontend for YouTube. No Google account, no JavaScript, no tracking pixels. Pick a public instance or self-host. Cory Doctorow’s preferred way of watching.
  • PipedNewer YouTube frontend, faster than Invidious on busy days. Public instances or self-host, no Google account, SponsorBlock built in.
  • FreeTubeDesktop YouTube client. No Google account, subscriptions stored locally, sponsor segments skipped. Windows, Mac, Linux.
  • NewPipeAndroid YouTube client without Google services. Background play, downloads, no ads, no telemetry. On F-Droid and the project site only. The Play Store version is a fake.
  • NitterPrivacy frontend for X. Read accounts and threads without an account, without JavaScript, without the algorithm. Public instances rotate under API pressure. The project lives on.
  • RedlibReddit frontend, the active fork after Libreddit’s maintainer stepped away. No JavaScript, no telemetry, no API key required. Public instances or self-host.
  • LibRedirectBrowser extension that intercepts links to YouTube, X, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, Wikipedia, Google Maps and routes them through whichever privacy frontend is currently up.
  • Cover Your TracksEFF’s browser fingerprint test. Confirms whether your privacy stack actually works against tracking, or only feels like it does.
  • Terms of Service; Didn’t ReadVolunteer-graded summaries of the terms-of-service contracts no one reads. Browser extension surfaces the rating live as you sign up. The licence is the new lord’s charter. This is the reading.
Speaking Unheard

Private conversation between free people. End-to-end, metadata-poor, ideally without a phone number tying the speech to the speaker. The watchers get nothing.

  • SignalThe baseline. End-to-end encryption (the protocol that bears its name), open source, repeatedly audited, used by Snowden and recommended by the cryptographers who designed it. Phone number required.
  • MollyHardened Signal fork. Database encryption at rest, lock on idle, Tor support, no Google services. The variant for users whose threat model includes the device itself.
  • ThreemaSwiss end-to-end encrypted messenger. No phone number required, identity is a generated ID. Paid (one-time, modest), audited, fully open-source since 2020. Used by the Swiss army and the German federal government.
  • WireSwiss-jurisdiction encrypted messaging and conferencing. Open-source clients, Proteus protocol (Signal-derived), federated through MLS. Used by enterprise and the European Commission alike.
  • SimpleX ChatUser identifiers eliminated entirely, including phone, email, and account. Contact happens by sharing one-time invite links. The strongest metadata story available.
  • SessionOnion-routed messaging on the Lokinet stack. No phone number required, decentralized server network.
  • BriarPeer-to-peer over Tor, Bluetooth, or local Wi-Fi. Designed for journalists, activists, and people whose internet has been cut. Works when the internet does not.
  • CwtchPeer-to-peer encrypted messaging built directly on Tor onion services. Runs without accounts, servers, or stored metadata. Open Privacy Research Society’s answer to “what would Signal look like with no central infrastructure at all.”
  • Delta ChatEnd-to-end encrypted messenger that piggybacks on email. Use any IMAP server you trust, including the one you self-host. The fediverse messaging tool that actually exists.
  • Matrix & ElementFederated, self-hostable, end-to-end encrypted. Group chat, voice, video, files. The IRC of the decentralized era.
  • XMPPFederated chat protocol, three decades old, still working. Use with OMEMO encryption. Conversations (Android) and Gajim (desktop) are the recommended clients.
  • RetroshareDecentralized friend-to-friend network. Messaging, file sharing, forums, all over a darknet of mutual-trust connections. Older than Signal, still alive, still useful when you need a small encrypted social fabric.
  • Proton MailEncrypted mail, Swiss jurisdiction, end-to-end with other Proton users and PGP-compatible. The practical default for those not yet self-hosting.
  • TutaEnd-to-end encrypted mail and calendar. German jurisdiction, fully open source clients. Strong free tier.
  • DisrootVolunteer-run free email, cloud, chat, pads. The community-cooperative model. Pay what you can, run by activists.
  • RiseupEmail and VPN for activists, by activists. Invite-based, mission-driven, has fought subpoenas and won. Trusted across the radical left for two decades.
  • SimpleLoginEmail aliasing. Generate a fresh address per service. The alias forwards to your real inbox until you burn it. Open-source, self-hostable, owned by Proton since 2022.
  • addy.ioEmail aliasing with unlimited aliases on the free tier, open-source and self-hostable. Hand a different address to every service so a breach at one never follows you to the rest. SimpleLogin’s open rival.
  • GnuPGThe old reliable. Sign, encrypt, verify. The standard since 1999. Your key is your identity. Use with the keyoxide.org self-attestation network.
Encryption of All Things

Keys, vaults, envelopes. The pirate buried his chest. The cypherpunk encrypts his.

  • EFF Dice-Generated PassphrasesThe Electronic Frontier Foundation’s diceware lists. Five rolls per word, six or seven words, an unguessable passphrase you can actually remember. The base layer under every password vault and every encrypted disk on this list.
  • KeePassXCOffline, open source password manager. The database file lives on your disk, encrypted with a master key, syncable through any channel you trust.
  • BitwardenOpen source, self-hostable password manager. Repeatedly audited. The pragmatic choice for shared vaults across devices.
  • VaultwardenLightweight Bitwarden-compatible server you run yourself. Your vault on your own hardware, the official clients still work.
  • Aegis AuthenticatorEncrypted two-factor codes on Android, fully offline and open-source. Export and back up the seeds yourself, so a lost phone is never a locked door. The software second factor most people actually carry.
  • Ente AuthCross-platform TOTP with end-to-end encrypted sync and a real desktop and web client. Free, open-source, and it imports straight out of Authy when you walk away from the locked one.
  • VeraCryptFull-disk and file-container encryption. The actively maintained successor to TrueCrypt. Hidden volumes for plausible deniability.
  • CryptomatorClient-side encryption for any cloud storage. The cloud sees opaque blobs. You hold the key. Native apps for every platform.
  • Cryptsetup / LUKSThe Linux full-disk encryption standard. Used by every serious distribution’s installer. AES-XTS, Argon2id key derivation, headers detachable for plausible deniability.
  • PicocryptSingle-binary, audited file encryption. XChaCha20 + Argon2id, runs without installation or telemetry. The modern simple option when VeraCrypt is too much and you just want a file sealed.
  • ageModern, simple file encryption by Filippo Valsorda. A single binary, sane defaults, replacing GPG for most tasks. Use rage for the Rust implementation.
  • OpenSSHThe remote shell, file transfer, and key-based authentication standard the entire internet runs on. Hardened by the OpenBSD team. Free everywhere.
  • YubiKeyHardware security key for FIDO2, WebAuthn, GPG, PIV, OATH. Phishing-resistant by construction. Buy two, register both, keep one in a safe place.
  • NitrokeyOpen-source hardware keys, audit-friendly firmware. The German answer to YubiKey for those who want to read the source.
  • OnlyKeyOpen-source hardware key with PIN entry on the device itself. Keylogger-proof, self-destructs after attack threshold.
  • OnionShareShare files, host a static site, run a chatroom. All over Tor, no account, no middleman, the URL itself is the access control.
  • Magic WormholeEnd-to-end encrypted file transfer between two devices using a short human-readable code. SPAKE2 cryptography, no servers retain anything.
Anti-Forensics & Erasure

Strip metadata before publishing. Wipe drives before disposal. Shred files when delete is not enough. The investigator looks at what you left behind, not what you said.

  • Metadata CleanerGUI for MAT2. Drag a file, see the metadata, hit clean. The user-friendly path.
  • ImageOptimmacOS tool that losslessly compresses and strips all metadata in one step.
  • ExifEraserModern Android image metadata stripper. Permissionless, full report of what was removed.
  • MAT2Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit. Strips EXIF, GPS, document hidden fields, torrent comments, archive timestamps. Cross-platform, open source, the standard.
  • ExifToolPhil Harvey’s tool. Reads, writes, and deletes metadata across thousands of formats. The reference command-line option.
  • DangerzoneFrom the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Converts potentially malicious documents into safe PDFs by rendering them in a sandboxed VM. Strips metadata in the process.
  • BleachBitCross-platform cleaner. Shreds files, wipes free space, clears application caches and histories. The Hillary Clinton tool, when used correctly.
  • shredThe GNU coreutils command. Overwrites a file repeatedly, then deletes. Works for spinning disks. SSDs need ATA Secure Erase or full encryption from day one.
  • dd / nwipeFor wiping a whole drive. dd from /dev/urandom, or nwipe for a guided multi-pass wipe with verification.
  • ShredOSDBAN’s successor, and still maintained. Boots from USB, runs nwipe, handles modern hardware (NVMe, large drives, UEFI) that DBAN cannot. The current free choice for whole-drive disposal.
  • SystemRescueFree, actively maintained live boot disk for partitioning, recovery, and secure erase. Ships nwipe and the rest of the disposal toolkit. The free analogue to commercial rescue distributions.
  • GParted LiveThe bootable GParted environment. The reference partition editor on its own live media for the disposal-and-rebuild ritual.
  • BusKillUSB cable with a magnetic breakaway. Tether the laptop to your wrist. If the device leaves your reach, the cable parts and the system locks, shuts down, or wipes.
  • USBKillPython script that locks or wipes the system the moment a USB device is inserted or removed. Written after Ulbricht was arrested with his laptop unlocked.
Sound Money

Cash on the wire, without a paymaster reading over the shoulder. Fiat is a printing press pointed at your savings. These are the exits.

  • BitcoinThe one that cracked the seal. Fixed supply of twenty-one million, no issuer, no permission required to send or receive. Run a full node if you can. Bitcoin.org has the install path.
  • MoneroPrivate by default. Ring signatures, stealth addresses, confidential amounts, encrypted memos. The cypherpunk’s cash and the regulator’s nightmare.
  • Cake WalletMonero and Bitcoin mobile wallet. Built-in non-KYC swap. The phone wallet that does not phone home.
  • Phoenix WalletLightning-native mobile wallet. Channel management handled for you, on-chain fallback built in. The friendliest Lightning experience without giving up self-custody.
  • Sparrow WalletBitcoin wallet for the serious user. Coin control, Tor support, air-gapped signing with hardware wallets, full-node compatible.
  • ElectrumLightweight Bitcoin wallet running since 2011. Hardware wallet support, Tor-friendly, multisig. The longest-serving wallet that still ships.
  • FeatherFree Monero desktop wallet built on the official monero-wallet stack. Tor by default, coin control, hardware wallet support.
  • BlixtOpen-source Lightning wallet that runs your own Lightning node on your phone. Sovereignty at the smallest scale.
  • Wasabi WalletDesktop Bitcoin wallet built around WabiSabi coinjoin and Tor routing. The zkSNACKs default coordinator suspended service in 2024 under regulatory pressure. Users now select from independent coordinators (Kruw and others). The wallet itself remains open-source and active.
  • JoinMarketDecentralized, market-based Bitcoin coinjoin. No central coordinator to seize or pressure into shutting down. The cypherpunk approach to Bitcoin privacy that survived the 2024 regulatory wave.
  • Specter DesktopMultisig-first Bitcoin wallet for hardware-wallet users. Run against your own full node, sign air-gapped, coordinate complex setups without trusting anyone in the middle.
  • NunchukMobile and desktop Bitcoin multisig with hardware wallet support. Designed for inheritance, partner-key setups, and the full self-custody stack.
  • TrezorThe original open-source hardware wallet, 2014 onward. Multi-asset, fully auditable firmware, the trusted default for self-custody.
  • ColdcardAir-gapped Bitcoin-only hardware wallet from Coinkite. Designed assuming the connected computer is compromised. The choice of long-term holders.
  • Foundation PassportOpen-source, air-gapped Bitcoin hardware wallet. Camera-based QR signing, microSD-only data path, removable battery.
  • SeedSignerDIY Bitcoin hardware signer on a $50 Raspberry Pi Zero, no persistent storage, no firmware to update. Build it yourself. Verify every line of source if you want.
  • Border WalletsMethod for memorizing a Bitcoin seed phrase as a visual pattern across a 12-by-12 grid. Cross any border with no paper, no metal, no device. The keys stay in your head.
  • BTCPay ServerSelf-hosted Bitcoin and Lightning payment processor. The free, no-fee, censorship-resistant alternative to Stripe and Square for accepting on-chain or Lightning payments.
  • Mempool.spaceThe open-source Bitcoin block explorer. Self-hostable. The reference page for verifying any transaction without trusting an exchange or a third-party API.
  • BitrefillBuy gift cards and prepaid services with Bitcoin or Lightning. Groceries, fuel, flights, phone top-ups, subscriptions. The bridge between cypherpunk theory and Tuesday’s groceries.
  • BisqPeer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange running over Tor. Operates without accounts, KYC, or custody. Trades settled directly between two users.
  • HavenoMonero-native decentralized exchange in the Bisq lineage. Multiple frontends. Choose a community instance you can verify.
  • RoboSatsLightning-native peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange. Tor-only, no KYC, no account. Trades clear in minutes.
  • KYCnot.meMaintained directory of non-KYC exchanges and swap services. The reference page for finding a venue that does not demand identity papers.
  • TrocadorAggregator of non-KYC swap services. Compare rates across a dozen exchanges that do not collect identity papers. Tor-friendly, Monero-friendly, no account.
Owning Your Own Ship

Self-hosting. The server in your closet. Files, music, photos, notes, passwords, calendar, mail, all on hardware you own. The cloud is someone else’s computer.

  • YunoHostServer distribution that makes self-hosting accessible to non-sysadmins. One-click install of dozens of self-hosted apps on a low-end box.
  • UmbrelSelf-hosted OS for personal servers. Bitcoin node, Lightning, Nostr relay, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, all from a friendly app store.
  • StartOSSelf-hosting platform formerly Embassy OS. Sovereignty-focused, Bitcoin-friendly, opinionated about privacy defaults.
  • awesome-selfhostedThe canonical curated index of self-hostable software. Thousands of entries, hundreds of categories, decades of accumulated taste.
  • NextcloudSelf-hosted Drive, Calendar, Contacts, Office, Talk, photos. The most mature replacement for Google’s suite. Run it on a Pi or a real server.
  • SyncthingContinuous encrypted peer-to-peer file sync between your own devices. No central server. Set it up once, runs forever.
  • Restic / BorgBackupDeduplicated, encrypted, append-only backups. Restic ships as a single Go binary and stores to S3, B2, or any remote. Borg is the older lineage, locally faster, well-tested. Pick one, set the schedule, verify the restores.
  • JellyfinSelf-hosted media server. The Plex fork that stayed free. Your library, your rules, no subscription, no telemetry, hardware transcoding.
  • NavidromeSelf-hosted music streaming. Subsonic API-compatible, so any client works. Spotify replacement without the surveillance.
  • AudiobookshelfSelf-hosted audiobook and podcast server with native iOS, Android, and web players. The Audible replacement, against your own library, with progress sync.
  • ImmichSelf-hosted photo and video backup with native iPhone and Android apps. The Google Photos replacement that finally works. Face recognition, geolocation, all on your box.
  • SonarrAutomated television show downloader and library manager. Watches RSS feeds and indexers, fetches new episodes the moment they appear, hands them off to Plex or Jellyfin. The cornerstone of the *arr stack.
  • RadarrSonarr’s sibling for movies. Queue your wishlist, the daemon hunts for the best release, drops it in the library, names it cleanly.
  • LidarrThe same automation pattern, applied to music. Wishlist by artist, fetch by album, library kept tidy.
  • ReadarrFor ebooks and audiobooks. Author-first wishlist, format negotiation, drop into Calibre or Audiobookshelf.
  • ProwlarrIndexer manager for the *arr stack. Configure every torrent and Usenet indexer once. Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, and Readarr all share the connection. The clean way to scale.
  • OverseerrFamily-friendly request frontend for the *arr stack. Your housemates pick from a Netflix-style UI. The daemon downloads and stores. The polish layer that makes self-hosted streaming actually pleasant.
  • JellyseerrOverseerr fork for the Jellyfin/Emby crowd. Same model, open-source the whole way down.
  • KarakeepSelf-hosted bookmark and read-it-later, with full-text search and AI tagging. The Pocket replacement. Formerly Hoarder.
  • WallabagSelf-hosted read-it-later with article extraction. The article goes onto your server, mirrored from the web before the publisher decides to break the link.
  • ArchiveBoxSelf-hosted web archive. Feed it URLs, browser history, or bookmark exports. It preserves HTML, screenshots, PDFs, media, and source. The Wayback Machine you control.
  • FreshRSSSelf-hosted RSS aggregator. Lightweight, fast, full-text capture, mobile clients via the Google Reader API. The way to read the open web after it gave up on the algorithm.
  • MinifluxMinimal RSS reader written in Go. Single binary, opinionated about reading without distraction.
  • VikunjaSelf-hosted to-do and project tracker. Kanban, lists, calendar, teams. Todoist and Asana, against a database you back up yourself.
  • Paperless-ngxSelf-hosted document management. Scan, OCR, tag, search. Every receipt, contract, statement, and warranty in one place you control. The end of the filing cabinet and the spreadsheet of PDFs.
  • SnikketSelf-hosted XMPP for families and small communities. Encrypted chat, group calls, file sharing, your domain. The accessible front-door to running your own messaging server.
  • TailscaleWireGuard mesh between your devices. Private network across the whole internet. Self-host the control plane with Headscale if you want to own that too.
  • WireGuardThe modern VPN protocol. Four thousand lines of audited Linux kernel code. Faster, simpler, and more secure than every alternative it replaced.
  • CaddyModern web server with automatic HTTPS by default. Reverse proxy, static file serving, Let’s Encrypt built in. Configuration is a single readable file. The replacement for Nginx-and-Certbot in front of every self-hosted service.
  • Fail2banLightweight intrusion prevention. Watches log files for failed authentications and bans the source IP. The first thing on any server with SSH on the public internet.
  • Authelia / AuthentikSelf-hosted single sign-on with two-factor and identity-provider features. The auth layer in front of your other services. Authelia is lighter, Authentik is more feature-rich. Pick by the size of the homelab.
  • CrowdSecBehavioral intrusion prevention with shared community blocklists. Watches your logs, signs the threat data, benefits from every other instance running it. The modern Fail2ban.
  • OPNsenseFreeBSD-based firewall and routing platform with a web UI. Stateful packet filter, traffic shaping, VPN, IDS, captive portal, all in one. The friendlier fork of pfSense.
  • WiresharkThe packet analyzer. Reads every protocol on the wire, decodes most of them, runs everywhere. The diagnostic tool the rest of the security stack assumes you already know.
  • Pi-holeNetwork-wide ad and tracker blocking at the DNS layer. One Raspberry Pi cleans every device on the network. Set it and forget it.
  • AdGuard HomeDNS-based blocker like Pi-hole, with a more polished UI and DoH/DoT out of the box.
  • NextDNSCloud-hosted encrypted DNS with per-device configuration. Block ads, trackers, malware, parental categories, all rule-based. Free tier covers most households.
  • Quad9Free public encrypted resolver run by a Swiss non-profit. No logs, malware-domain blocking, DoH and DoT support. Point any device at 9.9.9.9 and it works.
  • Mullvad DNSFree public encrypted resolver from the Mullvad team. No logs, no account, content-filtering profiles available, all over DoH or DoT.
  • DNSCrypt-proxyLocal DNS proxy that forwards every query through encrypted channels. Pulls from a curated list of resolvers, fails over automatically. Runs on every OS that has a network stack.
  • UnboundValidating recursive DNS resolver. Run it on your network and ask the root servers directly with DNSSEC. The full-stack answer to depending on no upstream.
  • Home AssistantOpen-source home automation. Pull every smart device off the manufacturer cloud and onto your own server. Local-first by design.
  • ForgejoSelf-hosted Git forge. The community fork that took over after Gitea went corporate in 2022. Hosts Codeberg and the F-Droid infrastructure. Lightweight, fast, fully under your control.
  • DawarichSelf-hosted location history. Pull your timeline off Google Maps and onto a server you own. Import the takeout, keep the record, control the map.
Keeping Your Tools Yours

Right to repair, re-flashing, modding, jailbreaking. The craftsman’s relationship to his vise, translated to the phone, the laptop, the router, the tractor.

  • iFixitRepair guides and parts for nearly every device ever made. The bible of the repair movement, plus the political fight for the law.
  • FrameworkLaptops designed to be opened, upgraded, and repaired. Specs on a card on the screen, screws on the outside, every part replaceable.
  • System76Linux laptops and desktops with open firmware. Pop!_OS as the default. Coreboot on selected models. American assembly, full root.
  • MNT ReformThe fully open-source laptop. Schematics, firmware, mainboard, mechanical drawings, all published. Builds itself with a screwdriver.
  • Pine64Affordable, hackable hardware. PinePhone, PineBook Pro, PineTab. Community-driven, multi-OS, screws on the outside. The hobbyist’s on-ramp to fully libre devices.
  • GrapheneOSHardened, de-Googled Android for Pixel devices. The most secure mobile OS available to civilians. Hardened memory allocator, restricted permissions, sandboxed Play Services if you need them.
  • CalyxOSDe-Googled Android with microG for app compatibility. Includes Datura firewall. The friendlier on-ramp before GrapheneOS.
  • LineageOSFree Android for phones the manufacturer abandoned. Three more years of life for hardware they wanted to brick.
  • /e/OSGaël Duval’s deGoogled Android. Murena ships pre-flashed phones for those who want to skip the unlock-and-flash step.
  • F-DroidFree and open-source Android app store. Reproducible builds, no Google account, no telemetry. The first thing to install on any phone.
  • AccrescentModern Android app store with cryptographic update guarantees and modern API requirements. Stricter sandboxing than F-Droid, smaller catalogue, growing fast.
  • ObtainiumInstalls and updates Android apps directly from their GitHub release pages, project websites, or F-Droid repos. Skip the app store entirely. The tools come from the people who built them.
  • HeliBoardOpen-source Android keyboard with no internet permission at all. Every key you press stays on the device, optional offline suggestions, nothing sent anywhere. The thing that reads everything you type, made deaf.
  • MagiskSystemless root for Android. Strip carrier bloat, run modules, control what the OS can and cannot do, all without modifying the system partition. The lock the manufacturer set. The key the user keeps.
  • OpenWrtCustom router firmware. Liberate the box between your machines and the wire. Real Linux, real package manager, real ownership.
  • corebootFree firmware replacement for proprietary BIOSes. Removes the management engine where it can be removed, opens the boot path on the rest.
  • HeadsCoreboot-based BIOS that uses TPM measurements to detect tampering. Used in Purism and Insurgo laptops. The gold standard for measured boot.
  • CalibreThe ebook swiss army knife. Convert, manage, read, fetch news, strip metadata. Pair with the DeDRM plug-in for books you have already paid for.
  • DeDRM ToolsThe Calibre plug-in suite that strips DRM from ebooks you have purchased. Kindle, Adobe ADE, Kobo, B&N, Apple Books. The Apprentice Alf project, kept alive by noDRM. Required reading is section 1201 of the DMCA, which makes circumvention separately illegal in the US no matter the underlying right.
  • palera1nOpen-source iOS jailbreak (checkm8-based) for compatible iPhones. The way back into the device Apple sold you. iOS 15 through 18 on supported chips.
  • checkra1nThe hardware-exploit jailbreak that started the modern lineage. Works against the bootrom on a fixed range of devices. Permanently unpatchable on those models.
Open Protocols

The internet the way it was supposed to be. Federated, permissionless, forkable. No single kingdom to seize.

  • Mastodon & the FediverseFederated social via ActivityPub. Many ports, one shipping lane. Move servers without losing your audience.
  • Pleroma / AkkomaLightweight ActivityPub server, written in Elixir. Runs on a Raspberry Pi. Akkoma is the actively maintained fork. The federated server for those who want to host a community without the Mastodon footprint.
  • LemmyFederated link-aggregator and discussion forum. Reddit’s shape, distributed across instances no private-equity firm can buy. Each instance hosts its own communities. The federation lets you read across them.
  • PixelfedFederated photo sharing. The Instagram replacement, ActivityPub-native, no algorithm trying to keep you scrolling.
  • PeerTubeFederated video hosting. Each instance independent, all of them speaking the same protocol, BitTorrent-assisted distribution under load. The YouTube replacement that does not need YouTube’s budget.
  • FunkwhaleFederated audio platform. Music, podcasts, radio, all hosted on independent servers, all talking through ActivityPub. Self-host your own SoundCloud.
  • MobilizonFederated event organizing. The Facebook Events / Meetup replacement, by the Framasoft cooperative. Local groups, no surveillance, no platform politics.
  • MovimWeb-based XMPP frontend for community-scale communication. Threaded discussions, blogs, chat, video calls, all through the open XMPP protocol.
  • ActivityPubThe W3C standard behind the Fediverse. The protocol, not the platform. Read the spec, write a server.
  • BitTorrentBram Cohen’s protocol, 2001. Every leecher becomes a seeder. Still the most resilient large-file distribution mechanism ever built.
  • qBittorrentThe free, ad-free, feature-complete BitTorrent client. The replacement for the old commercial uTorrent.
  • TransmissionLightweight cross-platform torrent client. Ships with most NAS systems, runs headless, sips RAM.
  • NostrKeys, events, relays. The simplest decentralized social protocol yet devised. Your identity is a keypair. Your reach is whatever relays you publish to.
  • Scuttlebutt (SSB)Offline-first peer-to-peer social protocol. Append-only logs, gossip-replicated when devices meet. Designed for sailors, boatyards, and bandwidth-poor places. The social network that does not require the internet.
  • IPFSContent-addressed storage. A file is identified by what it is, not where it sits. Pin what you care about. The network keeps the rest.
  • Hypercore ProtocolThe protocol formerly known as DAT. Append-only logs, peer-to-peer replication, sparse-fetch. The Beaker browser used it. The protocol outlives the browser.
  • Tor Onion ServicesHost anything, anywhere, reachable only through Tor. The .onion address is the address. Three hops, end-to-end encrypted, no DNS.
  • VeilidCult of the Dead Cow’s peer-to-peer application framework, released at DEF CON 31 in 2023. “Like Tor, but for apps.” No exit nodes, no special servers, every node equal. Written in Rust, MPL-2.0. Build privacy-by-default applications on top of it.
  • MeshtasticLoRa radio mesh on cheap commodity hardware. Off-grid encrypted text messaging. The network when the network is gone.
  • ReticulumA cryptography-based networking stack that runs on almost anything. Serial cables, packet radio, LoRa, TCP, UDP. Designed for resilience first.
  • The Gemini ProtocolA small, deliberately limited internet protocol. Smaller than the web, larger than gopher. Used by people who think the modern web overshot.
Free Workshops

Writing, drawing, editing, composing, modeling, coding. The craftsman’s tools, free as in freedom and free as in beer.

  • LibreOfficeThe free office suite. No subscription, no telemetry. Opens every file Microsoft has ever shipped, in some cases more reliably than Office itself.
  • OnlyOfficeOffice suite focused on Microsoft format fidelity. Self-hostable collaborative editing for Nextcloud and others.
  • CryptPadZero-knowledge encrypted office in the browser. Documents, sheets, slides, kanban, whiteboard, all end-to-end encrypted before leaving your machine. Self-hostable. The server sees opaque blobs.
  • ObsidianPlaintext Markdown notes in a folder you own. Local-first, free for personal use, no telemetry. Where most people land if they are not on Logseq.
  • LogseqOpen-source outliner and knowledge graph in plaintext. Roam Research’s free competitor.
  • JoplinOpen-source notebooks in Markdown with end-to-end encrypted sync to a server of your choosing, or none at all. Clip the web, hold your notes as plain files, leave whenever you like.
  • Standard NotesEncrypted notes built to outlast their maker. Audited, open-source, plaintext at the core. Long-term archival without trusting the company that holds the keys, because it does not hold them.
  • ZoteroOpen-source reference manager. Captures citations from every browser, exports to every word processor. Built by historians, used everywhere.
  • TypstA modern typesetting system. LaTeX’s power with a sane syntax and instant compilation. The future of academic and technical writing.
  • PandocUniversal document converter. Markdown to PDF to HTML to DOCX to LaTeX to anything. The format-translator the world relies on.
  • GIMPRaster image editing. Not Photoshop and not trying to be. Three decades of refinement.
  • KritaDigital painting. Built by artists for artists. Brush engine that rivals any commercial offering.
  • InkscapeVector graphics. Production-ready, free forever. The native SVG editor.
  • ScribusOpen-source desktop publishing. The InDesign replacement for posters, zines, magazines, books. Production-ready PDF output, CMYK, spot colours, the whole prepress stack.
  • PenpotOpen-source design and prototyping platform. The free Figma. Self-hostable, SVG-native, design system support. Gaining serious adoption fast.
  • darktableNon-destructive RAW photo workflow. The Lightroom replacement.
  • RawTherapeePowerful RAW developer with a different philosophy than darktable. Use both, pick by job.
  • ImageMagickThe image processing equivalent. Batch convert, resize, transform, composite from the command line.
  • OBS StudioOpen source broadcasting and recording. Record, stream, composite, every codec under the sun.
  • TenacityAudacity fork without the telemetry that got bolted on after the 2021 acquisition.
  • ArdourOpen-source digital audio workstation. Multitrack recording, MIDI, mixing, mastering. Pay-what-you-want for the binary, free to build.
  • LMMSOpen-source pattern-based DAW in the FL Studio lineage. Beats, melodies, samples, plug-ins. The free entry point to electronic music production.
  • HydrogenOpen-source drum machine. Pattern programming, sample libraries, MIDI export. The TR-808 you do not need to buy.
  • MuseScoreMusic notation software. Compose, engrave, export to PDF or audio. The free Sibelius, two decades along and still under volunteer hands.
  • SuperColliderReal-time audio synthesis programming environment. The serious composer’s instrument since 1996. Live-codable, network-distributable, deeply weird in the right ways.
  • KdenliveNon-linear video editor. Free, serious, multitrack, GPU-accelerated.
  • OliveModern non-linear video editor. Node-based effects, professional pipeline, GPL-licensed. The fast-moving alternative to Kdenlive.
  • HandBrakeFree video transcoder. The default tool for converting captured footage into something portable.
  • yt-dlpThe youtube-dl successor. Pulls audio and video from thousands of sites. Faster, more sites, actively maintained.
  • FFmpegThe audio and video swiss army. Convert, mux, transcode, capture, stream, anything. Half the media internet runs on it.
  • NatronOpen-source node-based compositor. The Nuke replacement for VFX work. Reads OFX plug-ins natively, used in indie post-production worldwide.
  • Blender3D modeling, animation, simulation, video editing, compositing, game engine. Used in feature films. Funded by the Blender Foundation, free forever.
  • FreeCADParametric 3D modeling for engineering. The SolidWorks replacement, free and open. Architectural, mechanical, ship design, every workbench under one roof.
  • OpenSCADProgrammer-oriented solid 3D CAD. Models written as code, version-controlled, reviewable, diffable. The maker’s git-friendly workshop.
  • CuraOpen-source slicer with the gentlest learning curve. Ultimaker-funded, profile library covers most consumer printers, default settings ship sane.
  • PrusaSlicerOpen-source slicer for 3D printing. The reference G-code generator, profiles for hundreds of printers, fork lineage going back to Slic3r. Use SuperSlicer for the experimental fork.
  • OctoPrintSelf-hosted print server. A Raspberry Pi on the printer gives a web interface, time-lapse cameras, and a plug-in ecosystem. The printer never has to phone the manufacturer.
  • Klipper3D printer firmware that moves the motion math off the printer onto a host computer. Faster prints, input shaping, pressure advance. The advanced operator’s default.
  • PrintablesPrusa-run model repository. Open licence, no account required to download, ten thousand designs uploaded a week.
  • ThangsSearch engine across every major 3D model repository at once. Pulls Printables, Thingiverse, MyMiniFactory, GrabCAD, and others, version control on top.
  • DEFCADDefense Distributed’s repository, founded in 2012 as the host for the Liberator. Taken offline by federal injunction, sued back online, still serving. US-only access under court order.
  • The GatalogFlorida-incorporated successor archive for community-uploaded files. Decentralized contributors, mirroring across Odysee and BitTorrent. The State of California sued in February 2026.
  • KiCadElectronic design automation. Schematic capture, PCB layout, 3D viewer, Gerber export. Funded by CERN. The hardware hacker’s default.
  • GodotOpen-source game engine, MIT-licensed, no royalties, no per-seat fees. The Unity refugees’ new home, with a 2D pipeline that beats every commercial competitor outright.
Free Operating Systems

Kernels and userlands without landlords. Where the machine you paid for answers to you.

  • Linux MintThe most-recommended distribution for newcomers leaving Windows or macOS. Based on Ubuntu, with Cinnamon desktop, sane defaults, and a fanatical aversion to telemetry. The on-ramp that does not patronise.
  • FedoraBleeding edge, hardened defaults, SELinux on by default, Wayland first. The upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
  • DebianThe universal operating system. Three decades of volunteer coordination. The base layer under most of the others. Stable as bedrock.
  • EndeavourOSArch with a friendly installer. The on-ramp without the patronizing.
  • Arch LinuxMinimal base, you build it up. Rolling release. The wiki is the single best piece of Linux documentation in existence.
  • Alpine LinuxSecurity-oriented, musl-libc, BusyBox-based. The default base layer for half the world’s container images. Tiny, hardened, transparent.
  • Void LinuxIndependent rolling-release distribution. runit init system instead of systemd, xbps package manager. The contrarian’s choice that earned its place.
  • NixOSDeclarative operating system. Your entire machine is one configuration file. Rebuilds are atomic and rollback works. The future has been here a decade.
  • GuixFunctional package management, reproducible builds, fully free GNU stack. The same idea as Nix with the GNU politics.
  • OpenBSDSecurity as an obsession. The team that wrote OpenSSH, LibreSSL, OpenBGPD, and pf lives here. Two remote holes in the default install in three decades.
  • FreeBSDThe Berkeley Unix lineage. ZFS, jails, dtrace. Half the world’s storage runs on it. You would not know unless you looked.
  • Qubes OSListed in Moving Unseen above. Bears repeating here. The most paranoid civilian desktop on the market.
  • postmarketOSReal Linux on the phone. Alpine-based, ten-year support target, built to outlive the manufacturer’s abandonment of the device. Runs on the PinePhone, the Librem 5, and dozens of old Android devices that were thrown away too early.
Whistle and Tip

Channels for the source and the journalist. For when the leak matters more than your safety, and your safety still matters.

  • WikiLeaksFounded 2006 by Julian Assange in the lineage of Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers. More than ten million documents published, including the Iraq and Afghan War Logs, the diplomatic cables, and Vault 7. Active publishing paused since 2019 under prosecution. The archive remains online and the Tor submission system is still listed.
  • SecureDropAaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen’s work, maintained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Used by the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Intercept. Tor-only, GPG-encrypted, air-gapped on the receiving end.
  • SecureDrop DirectoryThe list of newsroom onion addresses, vetted by FPF. Bookmark before you need it.
  • GlobaLeaksFree whistleblowing platform from the Hermes Center. Used by NGOs, anti-corruption offices, and activist newsrooms across Europe and Latin America.
  • Hush LineLightweight tip line as a service. The newsroom or the public figure publishes a link. Sources send messages anonymously, no Tor required for senders.
  • OnionShareListed in Encryption of All Things above. Bears repeating here. For the source who needs a one-time channel. Spin up a temporary Tor onion service from your laptop, share the address, close the laptop.
  • Distributed Denial of Secrets501(c)(3) archive of leaked datasets in the public interest. The working successor for the institutional leak in the years after WikiLeaks went silent.
  • Freedom of the Press FoundationThe umbrella organisation. Maintains SecureDrop, runs digital security training for journalists, fights subpoenas. Donate.
  • Courage FoundationInternational defence fund for journalistic sources, established to support Snowden, Manning, Assange, and others. The legal-aid line WikiLeaks itself points sources to.
  • Gone Man’s SwitchSelf-hosted dead man’s switch. Schedule a message that goes out via email, Telegram, or SMS if you fail to check in. The post-arrest, post-incapacitation, post-death channel.
Further Study

The theoretical hold. The writings and arguments that made the case long before this manifest picked up the thread. Each entry below is genuinely foundational in its own lineage.

  • The Hacker ManifestoLoyd Blankenship aka The Mentor, 1986. Written the night of his arrest, published in Phrack issue 7. The hacker self-portrait every later one has had to answer to.
  • The Four FreedomsRichard Stallman, 1986 onward. The definition of free software. The base layer of everything the open movement has built.
  • The Crypto Anarchist ManifestoTimothy May, 1988. A specter is haunting the modern world. Issued at the first Crypto ’88. Everything downstream is a footnote to it.
  • Why I Wrote PGPPhil Zimmermann, 1991, revised 1999. The single most persuasive first-person case for encryption as a civil right.
  • A Cypherpunk’s ManifestoEric Hughes, 1993. Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Cypherpunks write code. Four pages, still the cleanest statement of the position.
  • A Declaration of the Independence of CyberspaceJohn Perry Barlow, 1996. Written in Davos, aimed at Clinton’s Telecommunications Act. Still quoted in court.
  • The Cathedral and the BazaarEric Raymond, 1997. The argument for open development against centralized cathedral models. The essay that convinced Netscape to open source Mozilla and set the template for two decades of open source after.
  • The Right to ReadRichard Stallman, 1997. Predicted DRM, the Kindle, and the read-it-later licence-revocation almost word for word.
  • Against Intellectual PropertyStephan Kinsella, 2001. The cleanest libertarian-legal argument that IP is not property at all.
  • Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It’s a Seductive MirageRichard Stallman. The argument that the term itself is a propaganda device that bundles unrelated regimes (copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret) under a single warm word.
  • Free CultureLawrence Lessig, 2004. Copyright, the public domain, and the “permission culture” that the framework of strong IP produces. Released under Creative Commons. Read free or buy the print edition.
  • Code v2Lawrence Lessig, second edition 2006. Code is law. The thesis that the architecture of digital systems regulates conduct as effectively as legal codes do. Released under Creative Commons. Downloadable free.
  • Guerilla Open Access ManifestoAaron Swartz, 2008. The case for the open archive, written before the archive was open.
  • Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash SystemSatoshi Nakamoto, 2008. Nine pages. Largest philosophical consequence per word of anything written in the 21st century.
  • Freedom in the CloudEben Moglen, 2010. The talk at NYU that named the architectural problem with centralized cloud services and pointed the path back. The seed for FreedomBox, the federated social wave, and the broader self-hosting revival.
  • The Enshittification CycleCory Doctorow, 2023. The post that named the cycle of platform decay. American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year.
  • Black Flag White PaperCody Wilson, 2024. The original gun printer’s case that in this movement copyright is gun control. The first printers were pirates. Copyleft was a hack to invert the law, not to obey it, and most gun files are industrial design no copyright can hold.
  • Steal This BookAbbie Hoffman, 1971. The Yippie era’s practical manual for living outside the system. The ancestor of every later refuse-the-system guide on this list.
  • Hackers: Heroes of the Computer RevolutionSteven Levy, 1984. The defining popular history of MIT, Homebrew, and the early game-developer scene. Where the Hacker Ethic was first articulated in print.
  • NeuromancerWilliam Gibson, 1984. The novel that named cyberspace before there was one to name. Console cowboys running ICE jobs out of low-rent rooms. The cyberpunk imagination begins here. The rest is mostly footnotes.
  • Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and SoftwareCharles Petzold, 1999, second edition 2022. The patient ground-up explanation of how the machine works. Read it before any politics about the machine.
  • CryptoSteven Levy, 2001. The history of the Crypto Wars. Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, Zimmermann, the export-controls fight, and the moment civilian cryptography won. The history-of-record for the lineage this document sails under.
  • Free as in FreedomSam Williams, 2002. Biography of Richard Stallman. The origin story of the whole free software tradition.
  • Free Software, Free SocietyRichard Stallman’s collected essays, third edition. The complete philosophical case for free software, in his own words. Free PDF, also available in print from the Free Software Foundation.
  • The Master SwitchTim Wu, 2010. Every information industry begins open and ends consolidated. Wu names the cycle, runs the proof through radio, telephony, and film, and presents the internet as the test case running in real time.
  • The Age of Surveillance CapitalismShoshana Zuboff, 2019. The systematic account of how the harvest of behavioural data became the dominant business model of the early 21st century. Names the regime the cypherpunks were warning about.
  • No Place to HideGlenn Greenwald, 2014. The journalist’s account of meeting Snowden in Hong Kong and the publication campaign that followed. The arc of how the documents reached the press.
  • Information Doesn’t Want to Be FreeCory Doctorow, 2014. The practical case for the working creator in the post-DRM economy. Three rules for the free internet. Released under Creative Commons.
  • CypherpunksJulian Assange in conversation with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann, 2012. The case from inside the surveillance state, made by the people the state was hunting.
  • Permanent RecordEdward Snowden, 2019. The first-person account of the contractor who walked out of the apparatus with the receipts. Written from Moscow, where he has been since the disclosures.
  • UndergroundSuelette Dreyfus, 1997. Researched with Julian Assange under his Mendax handle. The history of the early international hacker scene, before the cypherpunks, in the people’s own words. Free PDF.
  • Under the Black FlagDavid Cordingly, 1995. Random House. Twelve years of curating the National Maritime Museum’s pirate collection condensed into the standard general history.
  • The Many-Headed HydraPeter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, 2000. The deeper history. Pirates as one head of a transatlantic working-class resistance from the 1600s onward. The book that defined the term hydrarchy.
  • Villains of All NationsMarcus Rediker, 2004. Beacon Press. The academic case for the pirate ship as a floating experiment in egalitarian social order.
  • The Republic of PiratesColin Woodard, 2007. The popular history of the Golden Age and the Bahamas-based Flying Gang. Source for NBC’s Crossbones, AC4: Black Flag, and Netflix’s Lost Pirate Kingdom.
  • The Invisible HookPeter Leeson, 2009. Princeton University Press. The economist’s case for pirate organization as a working anarchist constitution. Democratic vote, equal share, written articles, more than half a century before the United States.
  • The Enemy of AllDaniel Heller-Roazen, 2009. Zone Books. The pirate as hostis humani generis, the enemy of all, traced through law and politics from Cicero to the present. The concept this whole project takes its name from.
  • Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to GatesAdrian Johns, 2009. University of Chicago Press. The long history of intellectual piracy from the first printers to the software wars. Argues the pirate and the original have always defined each other, and that the history of piracy is the history of modernity.
  • The Pirate OrganizationRodolphe Durand and Jean-Philippe Vergne, 2013. Harvard Business Review Press. The pirate as a recurring organizational form at the frontier of capitalism, from the sea lanes to pirate radio to cyberspace. Each enclosure breeds the outlaw who maps the next territory.
  • Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real LibertaliaDavid Graeber, 2023. His final book, published posthumously. The Madagascar pirate settlements read as real experiments in radical democracy, and the case that the Enlightenment’s egalitarian ideas were partly pirate in origin. Libertalia as method, not myth.
  • Pirating and PublishingRobert Darnton, 2021. The Paris Guild held the monopoly and could not supply the readers it had. Houses on the French border pirated Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot and ran them back in. The Enlightenment reached the provinces on pirated sheets.
  • EFF Surveillance Self-DefenseThe Electronic Frontier Foundation’s practical guide. The starting point for anyone moving from theory to practice.
  • Privacy GuidesThe community-curated reference page for privacy tooling. Vetting criteria are public. Recommendations are conservative. Updates are continuous.
  • PRISM BreakMaintained directory of privacy-respecting alternatives to surveillance-funded services, organized by what you are trying to replace.
  • AnarSecOperational security guides for activists. Practical, threat-model-driven, written by people who have been hunted.
  • EFF DeeplinksThe Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog. Three decades of fighting the same fights, better than anyone else.
  • Pluralistic by Cory DoctorowDaily dispatch from the trenches of enshittification, DRM, antitrust, and the platform compact.
  • The Cypherpunk Mailing List ArchiveThe preserved record of the original 1992–1998 Cypherpunks list, where May, Hughes, Zimmermann, Gilmore, Finney, Assange, and the rest worked the foundations out in real time. Primary source for the entire tradition.
  • Satoshi Nakamoto InstituteThe canonical archive of cypherpunk and Bitcoin foundational writings, well-typeset and ad-free.
  • CryptomeJohn Young’s archive, running since 1996. Primary documents the other archives will not host. Still updated.

The Practice

Keep the Colours Up

The flag is kept up by every copy. The pirate ship survived by daily discipline. The quartermaster kept the accounts honest. The watch was posted. The hull was careened before it fouled. The powder was kept dry. A crew that drank itself into stupor at anchor was a crew the navy took at dawn. Below, in plain order, the work that any reader of this page can do right now. This is hygiene, kept by hands that keep it. The fence comes down by inches.

Read the Practice
  1. Know what you defend, and from whom. Before any tool, the threat model. A blanket of paranoia protects no one. The right defence answers a specific question. Find the question, then choose the tool.
  2. Encrypt by default. Always, regardless of stakes. Plaintext is a confession written in advance, and the system that learns to read your sealed letters does not unlearn the habit when you decide the next letter matters. Full-disk encryption on every device. End-to-end encryption on every channel. The seal closes whether or not the message is grave.
  3. Verify what you install. Signature, checksum, reproducible build where it exists. The supply chain is the surface most often attacked and least often checked. Five minutes of verification keeps the rest of the practice from being theatre.
  4. Read what you sign. The terms appear. The buttons say accept. The contract was drafted by lawyers who do not know your name and binds you the moment the click registers. Read the parts that govern data, account closure, and assignment to third parties. Refuse what the click was meant to extract. Walk away when the consent itself is the cost.
  5. Patch on the day. The fix and the exploit ship in the same hour. The window between them is as long as you make it. Auto-update what will let you. The rest is your hand and your discipline.
  6. Cover the route. The bytes leave your machine and travel wires you don’t own. Every DNS query announces the next site you visit. Every unencrypted connection announces what you do there. Encrypted DNS, verified HTTPS, a VPN or onion routing where the threat model demands what they add. The eavesdropper who hears the traffic still cannot read it.
  7. Hold your own keys. Passwords in a manager you control. Coins in a wallet you signed for. Signing keys on hardware that does not phone home. Two factors on every account that allows them, a hardware key best. Fingerprints and faces are convenience. A passphrase is the only key a court cannot compel. A third party that holds your keys hands them to whichever government writes that party the next letter.
  8. Back up what you cannot lose. Three copies, two media, one off-site. Encrypt the backup. Test the restore. The seeder, the self-hoster, and the keyholder all share the same ghost story, and it always begins with a drive that did not fail until the day it did.
  9. Strip the metadata before you publish. The photograph carries the camera, the room, the coordinates, and the hour. The document carries the author, the revisions, the printer, the dots no eye was meant to see. What you mean to share is the content. What you actually share is the file. Clean it before it leaves your hand.
  10. Watch what you broadcast. The location stamp on the photograph. The friend tagged in the post. The morning routine confirmed by daily timestamps. The platform watches. Everyone who reads the feed watches too. Half of operational privacy is what you decide not to publish. The pirates did not sail under their own names.
  11. Compartmentalize. One identity should not unmask the next. Different handles, different mailboxes, different keys, different browsers, different machines where the stakes call for it. The breach you cannot prevent is contained by the wall you remembered to build before it.
  12. Shrink the trail behind you. Close the accounts you no longer use. Delete what the law lets you delete. Opt out of the data brokers that compile you, then opt out again the next year because the lists restock. The trail you do not prune is the trail the next adversary inherits.
  13. Refuse the cloud by default. Every device, every install, every account proposes to keep a copy of you in a building you have never entered, against terms you were not permitted to read. The answer is no, and the answer is no again, and the answer is still no the third time the prompt rephrases itself. What you cannot keep off, encrypt before upload. The provider sees opaque blocks. You keep the plaintext on hardware you control.
  14. Treat the phone as a sensor. The microphone, the camera, the GPS, the radios pinging every tower you walk past. The device you carry knowingly is the device that reports on you most. Audit permissions, reset the advertising identifier, replace the default keyboard. Where the threat model demands it, a hardened de-Googled mobile OS shifts the surface.
  15. Refuse the listening room. The speaker, the TV, the doorbell, the watch, the thermostat. Most ship with a microphone, a camera, or both, routed to a cloud you cannot inspect. Ask whether the thing actually needs the network it asks for. Segment the rest onto a guest network where they cannot see the machines that matter.
  16. Self-host what you can. The library, the photo archive, the notes, the calendar, the chat. A weekend of setup buys back the rent of a lifetime, and the data that lives on hardware you control lives by your terms.
  17. Repair before replace. The device that breaks is the one you opened to fix. The device sealed against you is the one you replace and forget. Every screw on the outside, every part stocked, every schematic published is the manufacturer admitting the device belongs to its buyer. Buy the hardware that lets itself be opened. Fix what breaks. The landfill is easier to refuse from the start than to leave once you settle in.
  18. Seed what you take. Every torrent left running is a mirror the next reader can find. Bandwidth is the cheapest gift the crew gives. The shadow libraries are kept alive entirely by people who decided not to close the client.
  19. Pay the maker. Share the work. Buy the book, then copy the file. Subscribe to the writer, then forward the post. Tip the artist, then mirror the song. The two acts are not in tension. The publisher invented that tension to bill you twice. The maker eats. The work travels.
  20. Add to the crew. Run a node, however small. A relay, a full validator, a federated instance. Or teach a hand. Sit beside one person you know while they install one tool that protects them. The network exists because crew members run it. The crew grew by hand, never by decree.
  21. Pass the articles on. Mirror this page. Fork it, sign it, host it under your own colours. The argument is kept alive by the copy. The flag is kept up by the next hand to raise it.

The hourglass sat on Blackbeard’s flag. A horned skeleton, Death itself, holding the glass in one hand and a spear striking a bleeding heart in the other. We are coming. There is still time to surrender. Time is running out.

Three hundred years on, the hourglass has changed sides. It sits now on the other deck. The enclosure has an expiration. Every fence ever built has come down. The ones they are building now will come down too. The only question left is how many of the crew they drag under before they fall.

Every mirrored file is a grain. Every broken DRM is a grain. Every replicated seed, every key generated on a machine the carrier did not authorize, every reader in Kazakhstan reading a paper the publisher in London charged $39 for, every farmer signing his own tractor back into service, every encrypted conversation the state was told it could not have, every piece of cash that settled without a bank’s permission. A grain. And another. And another.

The Crew

Signed Upon the Articles

A pirate ship’s articles bore the marks of every hand aboard who consented. These names never all met. Some never heard each other spoken. The list is not exhaustive, and no one on it has signed the rest of this document or speaks for it. They are on the same page because they did the same thing: refused the permission of a court, a publisher, a platform, or a parliament to do what was theirs to do. Each was, in their hour, an enemy of all mankind in the state’s ledger and a member of the same crew in this one.

Read the Crew
Klaus Störtebeker
c. 1360 – 1401 · his crews called themselves the equal sharers
Sayyida al Hurra
c. 1485 – c. 1561 · the sultan came to her
Gráinne Ní Mháille
c. 1530 – c. 1603 · met Elizabeth as equal
Henry Every
c. 1659 – after 1696 · vanished with the prize
Thomas Sandys
fl. 1680s · traded east without their leave
Edward Teach
c. 1680 – 1718 · the man who became his flag
Charles Vane
c. 1680 – 1721 · refused the king’s pardon
Bartholomew Roberts
1682 – 1722 · author of the Articles
Calico Jack Rackham
c. 1682 – 1720 · took the pardon and broke it
Edward England
d. 1721 · deposed for his clemency
Mary Read
c. 1685 – 1721 · fought on deck while the men hid
Samuel Bellamy
c. 1689 – 1717 · free prince of the Whydah
Howell Davis
c. 1690 – 1719 · took prizes by deception
Anne Bonny
c. 1697 – ? · fought with Read, vanished after
William Fly
d. 1726 · tied his own noose
John Peter Zenger
1697 – 1746 · printed it, then beat the charge
Ching Shih
c. 1775 – 1844 · the empire treated with her
Lysander Spooner
1808 – 1887 · ran the post against Congress
Paul Baran
1926 – 2011 · the diagram that became the internet
Daniel Ellsberg
1931 – 2023 · took 7,000 pages to the Times
Jude Milhon
1939 – 2003 · namer of the cypherpunks
Ronan O’Rahilly
1940 – 2020 · put a ship where the law ended
William Binney
1943 – · first crack in the apparatus
Whitfield Diffie & Martin Hellman
1944 – , 1945 – · broke the state monopoly on secrets
John Perry Barlow
1947 – 2018 · declarant of cyberspace
Michael Hart
1947 – 2011 · typed the Declaration into a mainframe
Mitch Kapor
1950 – · bankrolled the first line of defence
Timothy May
1951 – 2018 · the specter he named arrived
Wau Holland
1951 – 2001 · founder of the Chaos Club
Ralph Merkle
1952 – · architect of the trees
Richard Stallman
1953 – · free as in freedom
Phil Zimmermann
1954 – · the man who armed the inbox
David Chaum
1955 – · inventor of digital cash
John Gilmore
1955 – · routes around the censor
Tim Berners-Lee
1955 – · built the web, did not patent it
Hal Finney
1956 – 2014 · the second node, the first receipt
Mitchell Baker
1957 – · kept Mozilla independent
Carl Malamud
1959 – · freed the law from copyright
Eben Moglen
1959 – · drew the law around free software
Brewster Kahle
1960 – · keeper of the library
Werner Koch
1961 – · kept GPG alive in the dark years
Lawrence Lessig
1961 – · lost to Disney, built the commons
Cindy Cohn
1963 – · lawyer of the cypherpunks
Edward Felten
1963 – · put research above the DMCA
Laura Poitras
1964 – · carried the camera to Hong Kong
Eric Hughes
c. 1965 – · writer of the Manifesto
Theo de Raadt
1968 – · rewrote the world’s ssh
Linus Torvalds
1969 – · wrote the kernel, then wrote git
Adam Back
1970 – · inventor of the proof of work
Daniel Bernstein
1971 – · the case that made code speech
Julian Assange
1971 – · publisher of empire’s cables
Cory Doctorow
1971 – · chronicler of enshittification
Rick Falkvinge
1972 – · carried the name into a parliament
Kim Dotcom
1974 – · hosted what the studios wanted gone
Bram Cohen
1975 – · every leecher a seeder
Andrew Huang
1975 – · sued the state over section 1201
Roger Dingledine
1976 – · architect of the onion routes
Fredrik Neij
1978 – · kept the racks behind the tracker
Peter Sunde
1978 – · spoke for it because no one else would
Shawn Fanning
1980 – · wrote it in a dorm at eighteen
Moxie Marlinspike
1980 – · built the Signal protocol
Ladar Levison
c. 1980 – · shut it down rather than hand it over
Jon Lech Johansen
1983 – · the teenager who broke DVD
Edward Snowden
1983 – · the receipts on the apparatus
Gottfrid Svartholm
1984 – · wrote the code, served the time
Pavel Durov
1984 – · detained for what crossed his wires
Ross Ulbricht
1984 – · did eleven years for a website
Aaron Swartz
1986 – 2013 · killed SOPA before he was killed
Chelsea Manning
1987 – · sent the wars to the press
Cody Wilson
1988 – · uploaded the file the law could not recall
Alexandra Elbakyan
1988 – · freed the papers from the journals
Roman Storm
c. 1989 – · convicted for what others did with it
Wei Dai
unknown · the paper Satoshi cited first
Nick Szabo
unknown · designed bit gold a decade early
Daniel Micay
unknown · hardened the phone against its own maker
Satoshi Nakamoto
2008 – · the nine pages, the one exit
Anna Archivist
2022 – · named no one, indexed everyone
& every reader after
now – · the next mark on the articles

What They Said at the Gallows

The state hanged pirates publicly to deter the next sailor from turning. The speech from the scaffold was permitted, then printed and sold by daybreak. Most condemned men used the moment to preach the chaplain’s lines back at the crowd. The men below did not. The words are recorded as the broadside printers heard them.

All Masters of Vessels might take Warning by the Fate of the Captain that he had murder’d, and to pay Sailors their Wages when due, and to treat them better. Their Barbarity to them made so many turn Pyrates.

William Fly at the gallows · Charlestown Ferry, Boston · 1726

They should take care how they brought Money into New England, to be Hanged for it.

John Quelch at the gallows · Charles River, Boston · 1704

I had killed thirty-seven Masters of Vessels.

Philip Lyne at the gallows · Curaçao · 1726

Such is the justice of Providence, that few or none of us preserve enough to maintain us.

Walter Kennedy at the gallows · Execution Dock, Wapping · 1721

I wish I had been a greater plague to these Islands.

Thomas Morris at the gallows · Nassau, the Bahamas · 1718

We are poor rogues, and so must be hanged, while others, no less guilty in another way, escaped.

unnamed pirate of Bartholomew Roberts’ crew at the gallows · Cape Coast Castle, West Africa · 1722

The dying speech was printed overnight and sold by daybreak.
The pamphlet outlived the rope.

Sign Your Mark

A pirate’s articles bound only the hands that set their own mark to the page. There was no roll filed at the Admiralty. There was no server in Whitehall keeping count. The signature was a private act between a free hand and its own conscience, and the mark stayed as long as the hand that made it chose to honour it. The same applies here. Sign if it suits you. Strike your name when it ceases to.

no network call · no account required · no record leaves this device
the mark is written to your own browser storage, where only you can read it or strike it

The Last Act

Take a Copy

The argument is kept alive by the copy. Press the button. The whole document, signatures and all, lands on your disk as a single HTML file. Mirror it. Fork it. Reprint it. Host it on a domain we will never know about. Hand it to a stranger. Read it from the file when the site is taken down, because the site will be taken down, and what is taken down is what was never theirs to give.

Take a Copy hostis.black QR code