In this text I'm talking about philosophies and ideas that I know are more sophisticated than I describe them here. I'm not aiming for this to be a universal manifesto, just my personal take.
Backstory
No Good Kid back in the day not giving a damn about stuff
I read Neuromancer 20 years ago and loved it. My favorite computer game of all time is Deus Ex. You might think I'd have some relationship with cypherpunk, but I don't.
I was a 90s lower-middle-class street kid. I never really fit in anywhere, so like a lot of lost souls before me, I found my place in music. As a musician I spent my childhood at music festivals and my teenage years in music clubs. I was too busy living a rocknroll life to give a damn about economics or technology.
Fun side story: around 2006 I accidentally became part of a highschool crew called AC KIDS, short for anarcho-capitalism. Those guys were 3-5 years older than me, and I used to hang out with them, drinking beer and smoking joints while they talked about Urza and anarchism for hours - debates I didn't care about at all at the time. But besides that they were alright, and we organized a bunch of public readings, concerts and visual art exhibitions, back when you could still fill a venue with just posters around town.
Many years later, when I met bitcoin people, I got my first hits from the cypherpunk pipe. I felt somehow connected to it, but there was always this mystery around it, especially the "cypherpunks write code" line, which instantly made me feel excluded. I don't code, at least not the way cypherpunks do. I don't really understand the complex cryptography stuff, and I don't even like glitch or pixel art. But I do love the ideas. And most of the cypherpunk guys I've met are very nice, cool people who inspire me.
After spending some time with them I kind of understood it's not all about the tech. There are cultural elements in it that, once I thought about them more, I could relate to. But I still feel like an outsider - just a visitor among cool coding fellas with crazy lives and crazy tech setups.
Lunarpunk
punk_ňaz preaching at Lunarpunk festival, SK
Then the term lunarpunk came along. I first heard it from , who talked about it in the context of peer-to-peer interactions. It sounded less like an implementation of cypherpunk tools and more like a whole culture, a model for society.
He described communities in the mountains that didn't use any special technology at all, and later, in his book Tamers of Entropy, the transformation of identity. Pretty heavy stuff for what's supposedly just a community of computer nerds.
So what's lunarpunk, in general?
Using technology to achieve freedom - private communication tools, independent money like Bitcoin, the ability to interact with other people without asking permission from a central authority - that's cypherpunk.
Lunarpunk follows right after that. Once cypherpunk tools are put into practice, the mind starts breaking free from the hierarchical society we know, and gains the ability to move beyond the role that society assigned to it.
Out of technological tools and a specific community ethos, a bigger culture is born - one built as much on voluntarism and the golden rule as on freedom tech.
That's something I can relate to a lot more easily than to cypherpunk alone.
Culture
Lunarpunk zine Dark Forest, Peter Horváth feat. bitpunk.fm, designed by No Good Kid
The real-life application of cypherpunk tools - and now I mean Bitcoin and Nostr - has created a space that basically anyone can join. I follow people with incredible craft skills, people who make or sew beautiful , and I can reach them, interact with them, do business with them directly, through open protocols, using freedom money.
Friendships and real personal connections form naturally here, partly because there's no single algorithm deciding what everyone sees. It's no surprise that most people I first knew through Nostr and later met in person gave me a hug - and some of them are people I know for a fact work on some of the most sophisticated security tools out there. You think those guys just give away hugs like that?
This culture does something to people. It shows them a side of humanity they thought was gone for good. Turns out people, and their creativity, are not what the media - especially social media - tells us they are.
In this culture you don't have to run a fake urgency countdown on a course nobody needs or shout into a five-second instagram video to sell shit. You do what you're good at, and the uniqueness and honesty of it speaks for itself.
Spreading the word
Tamers of Entropy by juraj & lisa, art directed by No Good Kid
After I realized this might be a way to heal society from the sickness of social structures people can't meaningfully refuse or exit, I started thinking about how to spread those ideas among my friends.
I got lucky when my personal hero invited me to handle the creative side of some of his projects. They were written without much technical lingo, and he did a great job explaining deep cypherpunk ideas in a way a normal homie could understand.
I then designed them in a way that would feel familiar to cypherpunks, while still being attractive to the homie. That's how I see myself contributing to lunarpunk culture - breaking down the boundary between the techy way of presenting things and more or less normal people's taste, making it appealing to both sides.
In the end it's the same as with Bitcoin. Hopefully one day voluntarism won't be anything special. It'll just be the normal way of doing things.
Till then, let's keep practicing it in the dark forest.