A Bitpat's Manifesto
When writing CRYPTO SHRUGGED, J. Lee Porter and I dealt with some social changes that we perceive among expats. There has been a lot written about video bloggers who travel and digital nomads of one sort or another but the mainstream press makes it seem that the people doing that are all young people doing it as a lark, traveling to explore. Up to a point, that's entirely true, but there are also those who turn to the nomadic life as a political statement, as a way of ensuring they have the maximum in personal freedom. These individualists are important people in our novel, and we decided to make some of them into a distinct group that we've termed bitpats.
To understand them, why they think and act the way they do, you need some insight into their philosophy, so we added a manifesto to the book that provides a frame of reference. It's really a standalone document, however... a declaration that we think is important enough to republish here. Our character Boone is the presumptive author, but her thoughts represent the sensibilities of most of this fictional group.
Like most manifestos, it's a generalization, a basic premise, not a complete philosophy. Bitpats can be Buddhist or Existentialists, Christians or followers of Islam. None of that matters. What does matter is that they offer their allegiance to truth far more than to a nation-state. Lastly, a manifesto is an invitation for dialog, so please feel free to contribute.
A Bitpat’s Manifesto
As technology frees people from the drudgery of manual labor, it also hems them in—tying them to any specific identity defined by biometric data, by documentation that is promoted as a way to provide security and protect our freedoms. This is a deliberate deception. The “freedom” the government protects is the freedom to carefully monitor our lives. We are not free, but living at the end of a tether.
Freedom of expression, for instance, is restricted to types of expression that are considered responsible discourse. For our protection, even telling the wrong joke in an airport becomes a federal crime. Advocating an insurrection, the expression of an idea, would be a federal crime. Freedom and secrecy are incompatible, and a free society has no secret acts that can be violated. (Privacy, however, is another thing and it is rooted in individual rights.)
A world of secrecy and monitored behavior is not free. To call it freedom is an Orwellian newspeak version of the idea—the term is co-opted and redefined to describe a life that is not free at all. In the newspeak world, you are free to be a good citizen, free to behave. Although in the US, if you cross the lines set by Homeland Security, even being a good citizen doesn’t protect you from having all your rights, including that of what passes for a fair trial, from being suspended.
In the process of implementing such draconian measures, individuals become hobbled by the need for licenses, passports, visas, permits, and other documentation that assists the monitoring. Filling out the forms, collecting these (necessary) documents, moves along the path of labeling each individual without any regard for who and what they are.
The trend is intensifying. In the name of protecting the common good, governments and their agents use the newest technology, follow the digital breadcrumbs it leaves, to watch and control the populace. It’s to protect them—often from themselves. But where does it stop? Clearly, the ultimate goal, in the words of songwriter Phil Ochs, is to “put the people in concentration camps; make damn sure they’re free.”
These modern, high-tech concentration camps are often not physical or even tangible. They are created with the barbed wire of “Know Your Customer” (KYC) and anti-money laundering regulations and are driven by an intense concern to know who goes where and what they do. Some of these things evolve out of controls to prevent illegal immigration and overstaying. Some evolve out of concerns about terrorism, but they are all controls and ultimately they create physical barriers.
The move to protect freedom by diminishing it serves to erode privacy. When everything is public, nothing is personal. When all data is collected, then society begins to see that data as communal property, which can be freely used to expose, exploit, and otherwise control the people who are not interested in controlling others.
There is a group that detests and resists this trend. They are called bitpats. Bitpats are, largely, technologists, or at least people who are not opposed to technology, but they do oppose it being used as a tool of oppression. Bitpats love freedom and they are patriots, in the sense that they have an allegiance to freedom.
Expats choose, or are forced, to live outside their home country. Bitpats see the world as their country. They see their allegiance to freedom as more significant than allegiance to some nation-state.
Essentially, bitpats are a dangerous breed. They are free thinkers—interested in the free and unfettered exchange of ideas, of exploring knowledge and understanding what is possible to understand without any prospect of being persecuted for their exploration.
Government secrecy is the enemy of free thought or the free exploration of ideas. That government fears that the dissemination of knowledge is clearly evidenced by the growing numbers of classified documents unavailable to the unanointed. When “traitors” like Edward Snowden manage to release secret documents to the public, the results tend to be embarrassing to the government and anticlimactic for the rest of us. Largely, the documents prove what we suspect, that the classified, top secret information is primarily concerned with the fact that the government spies on people, including its own citizens.
The passion for secrecy is dangerous for inquisitive minds. Classifying information does not make it inaccessible, but, in an Internet age, digging for the truth leaves a trail that can be interpreted and spun as being treasonous, as if knowing things that are true could ever amount to treason in an age of reason.
Moving the search to a dark web, like fleeing the scene of a crime, is viewed as an admission of some nebulous guilt, or the desire to “hide” something. And dark places are always, eventually, brought into the light. Such efforts at concealment frighten the powers that be. This is so wrong. A desire to hide something—to keep private things private, secrets secret, does not necessarily serve some evil or nefarious scheme, unless, of course, a desire to be a free individual is considered evil or nefarious. Often, as not, attempts to secure one’s privacy are simply because it is no one else’s business—a right, unfortunately, not secured adequately by any constitution or human rights efforts.
And there is the nub of the problem, the reason that bitpats exist. They reject the notion that information about their lives and thoughts is public property. For the most part, bitpats reject the notion that public property is a good thing in the first place, given that anyone desiring freedom is at the base, a libertarian, if not an anarchist.
In joining together, bitpats can pool their resources to resist the tightening yoke of control. Working together voluntarily masks the contribution of one individual and allows the group to maximize its talents.
Despite the benign intention of bitpats to achieve liberty and freedom (and make no mistake—they are radicals, revolutionaries), they aren’t a threat to anything but secrecy and oppression. Their resistance is not violent, but neither is it passive, for bitpats are, by their nature, disruptors. They employ the disruptive nature of technology; they exploit its strengths and weakness to buttress their fortresses. And, thus, they threaten the goals of the intelligence agencies and police forces worldwide.
Bitpats are the very embodiment of the term apolitical. They will not take up arms or demonstrate against governments while making pointless political statements. Instead, they spread across the face of the planet, finding an environment that suits them, and work together using technology to protect themselves. They have no particular meetings, no dues, no secret handshake. Their contributions to any resistance are totally voluntary and welcomed.
As such, they are a threat to a world order that no longer values freedom, but they are a blessing to any world order that sees it as a natural right.
– Boone
www.bitpats.com
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Goes live April 27, 2018