We live amid the most refined social engineering experiment in history.
Foreign states and domestic institutions manipulate information, shape emotion, and weaponize dependence until obedience feels natural.
Every platform and payment rail has become a feedback loop training us to consent.
We do not answer this with the same manipulation. We answer it with systems that make manipulation impossible. This manifesto concerns counter-strategy, not counter-propaganda.
The enemy of deceit is not a better lie but a structure where truth survives pressure. Nostr and Bitcoin are not slogans or investments; they are tools that invert the incentives of control.
They do not persuade the mind so much as liberate it from needing permission.
Understanding the Battlefield
Centralized power operates through narrative monopoly.
It wins not by being right but by owning distribution and punishing deviation.
Dan Farmer once noted, “People don’t want to talk about death, just like they don’t want to talk about computer security.”
That aversion keeps populations docile.
The institutions shaping perception know this intimately and exploit it with precision. Their mastery of framing, omission, and algorithmic visibility is psychological warfare disguised as normalcy.
Wietse Venema, Farmer’s collaborator, wrote that “defect-free software does not exist.”
Neither do defect free hierarchies. Every centralized system contains its own exploit, and those drawn to power learn to use it.
Our task is not to seize these systems but to build ones that make exploitation structurally irrational.
The Purple Pill
Nostr is not a social network; it is the refusal to be socially engineered. It erases the choke points that make censorship profitable.
Your voice cannot be throttled because no one owns its conduit. When institutions manipulate emotion to corral behavior, we respond with authenticity that cannot be algorithmically tuned.
Where they obscure authorship and chronology, Nostr signs every note cryptographically, creating a permanent chain of provenance.
Truth acquires memory.
Farmer and Venema wrote of their tool SATAN, “It can be used for good or for evil.” Understanding that duality is essential. We study the weapons of psychological control not to mimic them but to harden our systems against them.
Radical transparency, verifiable identity, and permanence of record make deceit expensive and short-lived.
Nostr becomes not propaganda’s mirror but its antidote. When one relay is pressured, another mirrors the message.
When one voice is silenced, others replicate it intact.
Censorship decays into futility
Every attack strengthens the network that survives it.
Farmer learned this when Silicon Graphics fired him for releasing SATAN; by exposing vulnerabilities, he fortified the entire internet.
Our defense follows the same principle: resilience through openness. We do not manipulate the undecided. We educate the curious. We do not manufacture consensus. We create conditions where truth can compete unimpeded.
Our ethics must diverge as much as our code.
The Orange Pill
Bitcoin achieves in economics what Nostr achieves in communication. It converts the will to control into thermodynamic irrelevance.
No committee can inflate, freeze, or erase your transaction. It is resistance by design, not decree.
Farmer observed, “Total security would mean no connectivity.” Bitcoin embodies that balance: open participation with rules so neutral they need no ruler.
To institutions, this neutrality is intolerable because it denies them their favorite weapon — permission.
Using Bitcoin is not financial rebellion; it is moral hygiene.
Every self custodied key withdraws power from the surveillance grid. Every Lightning payment reroutes value through voluntary exchange instead of institutional oversight.
When Canada froze protestors’ bank accounts and China throttled dissent through finance, they revealed the fragility of obedience economies.
Bitcoin turns that fragility against them. Venema remarked that most effort in software goes to maintaining code already written.
Bitcoin reverses that dependence. It maintains itself through consensus and physics, not bureaucracy.
It requires no central maintenance, no signatures of authority — only verification. Its discipline mirrors the principle Farmer followed when he made SATAN free despite global outrage: empowerment through distribution, not permission.
The Counter Strategy
Institutional social engineers exploit fear, confusion, and dependency.
We answer each tactic with its opposite:
- Where they generate fear, we build literacy.
- Where they obscure, we sign.
- Where they enforce dependency, we teach self-custody.
Their influence relies on invisibility; ours thrives in daylight.
They algorithmically manufacture emotional contagion; we cultivate voluntary coordination bound by shared truth.
They rewrite history; we timestamp it. Propagandists engineer compliance through controlled environment and hidden incentives.
We engineer freedom through transparency and open incentives.
The difference is moral, but also mechanical.
The more they centralize, the more brittle they become. The more we decentralize, the stronger we grow.
From Sovereignty to Movement
Personal adoption is the first redoubt. Generating your own keys is a psychological act of emancipation.
The first time you sign a message or hold a self-custodied balance, you cross a threshold from subject to participant.
You are no longer a node in their dataset but an operator in your own network. From there, communities form not through algorithms but through alignment.
Nostr and Bitcoin allow value, reputation, and speech to flow together without mediation.
- Journalists can publish directly to readers.
- Developers can fund work without gatekeepers.
- Artists can earn without begging platforms for visibility.
Each act of direct exchange weakens the economic logic of surveillance.
Venema once said his goal was to write “software that works as intended.” That simple ethic defines our mission. Systems should serve their users, not their owners. When they do, the need for persuasion diminishes.
People adopt what works.
Understanding Power
Our adversaries are not villains in the cartoon sense. They are prisoners of the very structures they maintain. Centralization compels control. Once power is accumulated, it must justify its existence through use.
Bureaucracy breeds censorship as naturally as gravity pulls matter. The only cure is diffusion.
Hayek warned that no planner can possess the dispersed knowledge of free individuals.
Bitcoin and Nostr operationalize that insight: decision making distributed so widely that no single failure or bias can dominate.
Truth and value find equilibrium through voluntary interaction, not command. Farmer proved that revealing flaws strengthens systems more than hiding them.
Likewise, we reveal the vulnerabilities of control — its dependence on obedience, its addiction to secrecy, its fear of open verification.
The more visible we make these weaknesses, the less intimidating they become.
The Urgency
Each year the walls close in: deeper surveillance, broader censorship, subtler psychological nudges masquerading as convenience.
The longer we wait, the more natural captivity feels.
Dan Kaminsky warned that “any system can be hacked; this is no longer a secret.” The systems controlling us can be hacked — not by subterfuge, but by exit.
Every Nostr relay spun up, every key generated, every sat stacked is an exploit in the architecture of control.
Inflation robs time; censorship robs truth. Both are thefts of human life. Using these tools is restitution.
Your participation strengthens a global counter network where freedom is not requested but executed.
The Future We Build
Imagine communication uncensorable, money incorruptible, identity self sovereign.
Imagine communities aligned by principle, not algorithmic addiction. This is not utopia; it is simply what happens when coercion becomes technically impossible.
Every major leap in liberty began as fringe defiance:
- Printing presses in cellars
- Samizdat on carbon paper
- Cryptography in academic journals
Nostr and Bitcoin are their modern lineage. You are early, which means you are essential.
The network will remember what you do now.
Mathematics is our constitution. Cryptography is our speech. Verification is our trust.
The institutions built on secrecy and control cannot compete with open systems built on truth.
As Farmer said when accused of recklessness, “I like to be thought of as a nice guy; that’s why I’m making it free.”
Freedom multiplies when given away.
Stack sats. Post notes. Educate, verify, build. The revolution will not be centralized.