Jim Bell's 'Assassination Politics'

Assassination politics is the name of an essay by a guy called Jim Bell. In it, Bell plausibly describes what he takes to be an inevitable technological event that will make it impossible for the state to exist, at least in the forms we're familiar with right now. I believe that Bell himself is in prison for having been found to have bomb-making ingredients or something similar.

I'm predicting that this fact will strengthen an already very strong temptation for some of those hearing about this idea for the first time to interpret any description of it as an advocate of violence. So to avoid any ambiguity about that, my intention is not to advocate violence. Instead, I believe that it's important that people know about this essay because it's extremely relevant to the question of whether the formation of states is inevitable, whether it's something we're stuck with.

If Bell is right in his prediction that the emergence of the systems he describes is inevitable, and I believe he is, then this dramatically changes what we ought to expect our near future to look like. It will be an environment incompatible with the existence of anything that we'd recognize as a state. Bell's idea is that through a combination of the internet, public key cryptography, and decentralized digital currency, we'll see the emergence of anonymous crowdfunded assassination markets, which are entirely legal, at least according to current law.

In the scenario Bell describes, an organizer publishes to a website a list of names of people known to have aggressed against others, for instance, people who start wars, who bomb children, who torture whistleblowers, etc. Next, users, taking care to do so anonymously, donate funds using a decentralized digital currency to the pool associated with an aggressor. This is the crowdfunding parallel. Potentially, many thousands of users from all over the world will be making micro donations towards what is essentially an assassination pool.

I'll quote from Bell's essay to explain the rest: "In order to prevent such a system from becoming simply a random unpaid lottery in which people can randomly guess a name and dates hoping that lightning would strike as it occasionally does, it would be necessary to deter such random guessing by requiring the guesses to include, with their guess, encrypted and untraceable digital cache in an amount sufficiently high to make random guessing impractical. The digital cache will be placed inside the outer encryption envelope and could be decrypted using the organization's public key."

"The prediction itself, including name and dates, would be itself in another encryption envelope inside the first one, but it would be encrypted using a key that is only known to the predictor himself. In that way, the organization could decrypt the outer envelope and find the digital cache, but they would have no idea what is being predicted in the innermost envelope, either the name or the date. If later the prediction came true, the predictor would presumably send yet another encrypted envelope to the organization containing the decryption key for the previous prediction envelope plus a public key to be used for encryption of digital cash used as payment for the award."

"The organization would apply the decryption key to the prediction envelope, discover that it works, then notice that the prediction included was fulfilled on the date stated. The predictor would therefore be entitled to the award; nevertheless, even then, nobody would actually know who he is. It doesn't even know if the predictor had anything to do with the outcome of the prediction. If it received these files in the mail in physical envelopes which had no return address, it would have burned the envelopes before it studied their contents. The result is that even the active cooperation of the organization could not possibly help anyone, including the police, to locate the predictor."

"Also included within this prediction fulfilled encryption envelope will be unsigned, not yet valid digital cache, which would then be blindly signed by the organization's bank and subsequently encrypted using the public key included. The resulting encrypted file could be published openly on the internet, and it could then be decrypted by only one entity: the person who had made the original accurate prediction. The result is that the receiver will be absolutely untraceable."

The system has some interesting implications. I think it represents a point of no return. As soon as the first such working market emerges, whether it's legal or not, there's no going back because any official attempting to shut it down will be quickly targeted and assassinated.

Another thing to notice is that it makes being a politician anywhere in the world an extremely dangerous occupation. It makes it so dangerous, in fact, that no one would do it; at least that's what I believe. To the extent that wars are engendered by publicly visible leaders—can you really be a general that no one's ever heard of? This system ends war too.

Anyway, read the essay if this sounds like an important idea to you, and I think it should sound like an important idea, especially read the essay if you have complaints about the plausibility of the scenario Bell describes because he addresses a lot of problems that people thought they'd spotted.