# "Not Yet Named Conference": A Manifesto
We build with quantum computers but coordinate with centuries-old models. Our technologies evolve exponentially while our social structures remain locked in the past. Representative democracy, nation-states, corporate hierarchies—these aren't natural laws but historical solutions to obsolete problems, now creating crises we struggle to comprehend.
The threat to freedom technology isn't only external regulation—it's self-capture. The internet wasn't crushed by governments; it gradually captured itself through governance bodies, platform monopolies, and standards organizations. FLOSS communities, cryptocurrency projects, hackerspaces—all face the same gravitational pull. The pattern repeats: liberation technology achieves adoption, institutions form around it, gatekeepers emerge, the original promise erodes. Our enemy isn't just the state or capital—it's our trained reflex to recreate hierarchy, our comfort with insider circles, our unconscious reproduction of the very patterns we sought to escape.
The problem runs deeper than overt control. Modern institutions don't just coerce—they disable. Educational systems produce dependence on credentialing. Professionalized services eliminate community knowledge and mutual aid. Industrial systems destroy vernacular competence—the informal capabilities that once enabled people to provide for themselves and each other. We become users, clients, consumers, dependent on complex systems we cannot inspect, repair, or truly control. You can be formally free yet structurally disabled. Liberation without capability is incomplete.
We have powerful tools but lack coherent alternatives. Free software advocates built remarkable technology, then struggled as projects corporatized or stagnated in governance debates. Cryptocurrency promised liberation from financial control but risks reproducing the same extractive dynamics. Privacy tools exist but adoption remains limited. We need frameworks that connect technical solutions to social transformation—linking FLOSS, crypto-anarchism, and mutual aid to questions that matter: How do we coordinate without reproducing hierarchy? How do we build systems that enhance collective capability? How do we create convivial tools—technologies that remain under community control, that don't establish monopolies by crowding out alternatives, that enable rather than disable? How do we sustain ourselves through cooperation rather than competition or institutional dependency?
This conference gathers those who recognize these challenges across political traditions. We explore sovereign infrastructure through mesh networks, self-hosting, and censorship-resistant systems. We examine economic alternatives from cryptocurrency and mutual credit to gift economies and commons-based production. We develop autonomous communication through decentralized protocols and federated systems. We preserve knowledge commons through shadow libraries and open access. We connect technology to practice—cypherpunk tools, anarchist organizing, institutional critique, cooperative economics, convivial design. We build parallel structures providing what states and corporations monopolize, but through solidarity, shared knowledge, and community control. We share methods for security and privacy against both surveillance and capture. We experiment with consensus, do-ocracy, and fluid organization—coordination models that resist permanent authority. We recover the capacity for collective self-determination.
This conference offers no manifesto demanding signatures. We gather people asking difficult questions. The event itself demonstrates what's possible—coordination without corporate sponsors, without hierarchy, without gatekeepers, without becoming an institution ourselves. If we can't organize a conference this way, how will we reorganize society? Every choice tests whether our principles work in practice or reveals where we unconsciously reproduce what we oppose. We organize through do-ocracy where authority comes from contribution, never permanent. We protect radical privacy. We make everything forkable and replicable. We resist creating insider circles or permanent leadership. Each iteration dissolves completely. The goal isn't reforming existing structures but building convivial alternatives—human-scale, horizontal, capable, commons-based.
This isn't just a hacker conference or just an anarchist gathering. It's a space where different traditions—FLOSS culture, crypto-anarchism, left-libertarian thought, autonomist movements, appropriate technology advocates—can find common ground in shared practice. Where we stop debating theory and start building alternatives. Where we recognize that whether you arrived through reading Bakunin or Rothbard, through using Tor or organizing a housing co-op, through writing free software or running a community kitchen—we face the same challenge: building systems of genuine self-determination that resist capture.
The future isn't something that happens to us—it's what we build together. This invites everyone who understands that our biggest obstacle is our own tendency toward institutionalization. Who sees that technical freedom without social transformation is insufficient. Who's ready to experiment with coordination models that don't recreate what we oppose. Fork this. Improve it. Make it unrecognizable. Build the world it describes.
