"CHEESE!"1
At the zenith of your work you and your collaborators have been jailed on charges of practicing applied utopics2. The promise of peace and prosperity for so many in desperate need has been postponed another orbit. Thankfully, the gravity of this movement is greater than its mass of people and ideals. From wells to windmills, cash to communication channels, your tools are open source, permissionless, decentralized and incorruptible in a way our individual identities could never be.
You must defend your future if you expect to have any. You must grow a canopy to eclipse the coercive rays of power, money, violence, mindless consumption, a race to the bottom, a new game with which to supplant the competition whose prize is the most lavish death. You build with cryptography, distributed networks, sustainable infrastructure, open-source code, from biotechnology to synthetic intelligences. You build against corruption in the form of both deliberate attacks and accidental catastrophes.
You build defensively. A defensive system is not a hostile system. A defensive system empowers individuals and communities to maintain autonomy when desired and only when desired. Neither its ends or means are objectively criminal. Your aim is not to topple or break, but to build systems so resiliently antifragile that they inevitably supersede the status quo. Your purpose is not mere survival, nor simply to reclaim your autonomy, but regeneration, not just to protect but to accelerate the flourishing of free societies in an uncertain world. Together we write contracts, in the open so that they can deceive no one, least of all yourself, to be signed or not of your own volition.
However, you are ambassador of the very oppression you seek to obsolesce. Seeds were planted in fortified hothouses well before this tide began to rise; buried and watered by generations of instigators in the forms of social norms, by subtle and explicit jingles and slogans meant to chip away at your free will. Ignorant yeoman, you have invited them in; your own mind sells you out, carefully domesticated by your enemies to suit their cultivation. You fight isolating, illusory, entropic battles against ephemeral shadows in the war for priceless mindshare.
Lunarpunks build, but it is becoming uncomfortably clear that you don't know what you're building. The task of AI alignment has only placed a dark mirror before you; you do not recognize yourself. You are a haphazard accretion, carelessly consolidated stardust, dissolving as quickly as you coalesce. You peer dimly, through splintered lenses colored by myriad unnoticed tints; others' additive spectra clash, blinding everyone in twilight ignorance. You speak past one another, muffled shouts from vain and stilted escarpments jutting from unsteady faults. Your success extends only so far as the cooperation of your fellows in society, aims aligned like polarized light dancing on the gossamer surface of a solar sail.3 Genuflected boughs veil starlight; how can you find them when you are a stranger unto yourself? You risk laying only dimly lit dead ends paved with the rubble of naive hope for a future you don't know at all. You can seek only a toy moon.4
The future is bright but the forest is dark and dawn is further than you alone are capable of reaching. You must work with others so that your tools, your ethos, your love, your compassion, your imagination might precede you. Who are you?
Inward.
1: English-language instruction used by photographers who want their subject or subjects to smile with their lips apart and teeth showing. Also the moon is made of cheese.
2: Utopics: as in the study/practice of utopia.
3: Light waves normally vibrate in all directions perpendicular to their path. Polarized light waves vibrate in one specific direction. The moon naturally polarizes light. See here.
4: “Thou dost seek to walk where no path is, thou dost seek a toy moon…” from a Buddhist parable about desiring the impossible.