Thread by @jurbed

So you want to be free(er). There are a few stages of what people do when they realize this. It starts by being this in forefront of your consciousness. First stage is despair - I live in a non-free world. This law and that law limits my freedom. And often not only laws.

Then you start looking for ways out. Second stage is usually looking for loopholes. Yes, I have to pay custom duty if I import coffee, but if I roast it inside, the duty is lower. If I move my business somewhere else, the taxes are lower and so on.

Then you realize that these loopholes take a lot of time and they are constantly changing. Navigating them becomes as difficult as sailing from Europe to North America in a stormy night without stars. You are blind to the future.

Then you realize everything is easier with community and you start looking for like minded people. And they have strategies. Contrary to what you thought, there are people who have lived decades longer with this libertarian affliction and have found strategies to increase freedom

Friends point you to several well developed strategies that just work. You start to look for ways to increase your optionality. I made a podcast about relationship between optionality and liberty. hackyourself.io/2020/08/24/opt…

Then there are questions - could these strategies work even in my country? Do I have to join or vote for a local libertarian party in order to increase freedom first and then I can enjoy it? Nope. Look what people in totalitarian regimes have done. Here: taz0.org/bitstream/0x0b…

If these strategies work in communist authocracy, they might work in liberal democracy as well. But, we have something else - contrary to dissent in 1970s and 1980s that copied texts on typewriters, we have technology.

Technology has been used against us - big data, financial surveillance, other kinds of surveillance, automatic enforcement, "e-government". We are becoming a cog in a machine. And the engine is not human. It's a stochastic program, written in a weird language of "legalese".

But there are ways to use technology for liberation. Here, #cryptoanarchy and #secondrealm can help. These are modern strategies adapted for the world of today and tomorrow. anarplex.net/files/secondre…

Don't like them? There are many other options. #agorism is for the more hard-core ones. web.archive.org/web/2008110406…

If you would just like to live your life, without smashing the state, minimize your "mean time to harrassment", you can opt for #vonu. Making you invulnerable to coercion since 1970s. vonupodcast.com/free-vonu-book/

Like to protect your wealth against inflation? #gold and #bitcoin. Would you like not to brainwash your children? #unschooling with a lot of theory and many practiotioners.

What I am getting at - if you want to be free, there are strategies out there. By the very definition of how they work, the practitioners of these strategies won't talk about it on social media. It's not enough to "follow" a few Twitter accounts.

Social media are showing you an illusion in this space. Because part of these strategies is that liberty-minded people want to look conventional and ordinary. But that does not mean you are alone (you are not) and it does not mean you have to discover everything yourself.

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