Ghosts in the Machine

[trilight]

# Ghosts in the Machine

## The Dawn of Defiance

There was a time, before ledgers and KYC, when cryptocurrency meant the possibility of rebellion against mocking banks, governments, and the hypocritical digital capitalists. Satoshi and the cypherpunks were not seeking career opportunities at regulated exchanges, instead they wanted to unsettle the order, build parallel paths, and disrupt. But as blockchain innovation collided with the brutal realities of for-profit and entrenched power, much of that early idealism was supply-chained, hogged, and monopolized. Open-source ideals took second place to custodial wallets, influencer marketing, and pumping, at the highest level of societies.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence through Large Language Models, the other next Big Thing, underwent the exact opposite path: developed and pushed by the largest and most powerful companies of our world, from their glass towers of the data-industrial complex, running on the fumes of consolidated surveillance data, helmed by Google and Meta. The immense amount of raw power, terawatts of electricity humming through the grid, and raw human intelligence in the form of newly minted millionaire talents, required to attain the threshold of GPTs, meant that the people and hacktivist movements never even got a chance to peer into the technology.

Global media attention and the wish for monopolizing new goldmines led to hundreds of billions poured on AI research, to maintain one's bleeding edge over competitors. And at no point in time did anyone in power pause to admit how this new data stream had become a catastrophe for privacy and decentralization. Most users remained trapped in the hands of a few mega-providers, longing for tools smart enough to make their life easier, discharge intellectual effort, and share their most intimate fears. The original hope of disintermediated, ownerless, autonomous agents, digital value-adding ghosts, remains largely a futuristic scenario, mostly gestured at in VC pitch decks and online channels. The dream is fading fast, long before it can be realized. The cryptos dream, on the other hand, refuses to fade away, long after it began and limits were proven.

## Synthetic Subjugation, Intertwined Realities

The promise of LLM has been computed intelligence: cognition fuelled by industrial-scale energy, making sense of the universe's chaos, omniscient machines. Yet, as hundreds of millions flock to their outputs, every prompt, every completion becomes another brick in the citadel of surveillance. Companies began offering personal AI assistants, new silicon wardens, watching and monetizing not just what you buy or like, but thoughts, secrets, intellectual drift, tuning them to their profit-making engines.

In parallel, crypto, battered by waves of regulation, web3 scams, and lack of adoption, has become more about speculative finance than permissionless rebellion. Exchanges cooperate with forensic analytics companies. States demand transaction traceability in the name of compliance. Rogue nodes quietly run in server farms. Wallets integrate state-sanctioned blacklists. As this happens, privacy features and untraceable transactions become rarer, more marginalized, sometimes even criminalized. Countries around the world are fighting to make zero-knowledge a relic of the internet, to be discussed in courtrooms and history books, absent from repos. Code has never been law, code has always been speech. Speech has always been a target for control.

These technologies once stood as opposing visions: crypto, the architecture of resistance, promising freedom and counter-censorship; AI, the oracle of efficiency and optimization, offering to make sense of the world for those able to pay for the view above the clouds. But their trajectories became entangled in the circuitry of late-stage neo-capitalism, dissolved into a loop of profit and control. The blockchain is now an open ledger of behavioral data; LLMs, an engine of social stratification and gatekeeping. Their converge breeds enforcement, platforms and protocols, invisible cages. Logging.

## Glimpses of Decentralized Autonomy

And yet, technology is as fickle as culture, and even within the shadows thrown by massive platforms, smaller lights flicker. The push for competitive dominance is forcing some companies to open their models, preferring to control the platform and execution rather than the singularity, enabling lightweight, public, and permissionless computed intelligence. Grassroot projects, privacy-focused collectives, and lone tinkerers will emerge from the battlefield of competitive edge, running in full control of their device, models, and ideals.

While limited in their abilities, these models are more than toys. They enable agentic use-cases, subtle exoskeletons to a privacy shield, core component of a future resistance. Just like with decentralized protocols, distributed storage, mesh networks, or privacy coins, they will emerge as tools for the willing and the clever, rising against rent-seeking capitalists, amplifying the ability of individuals to resist corporate and governmental overreach. The blockchain will allow agents to flow across cyberspace, executing functions, opening paths, lodging transactions, truly permissionless.

The lines of control are permanently being redrawn, englobing the mass markets that remains under the steering hands of institutions and companies, but hope remains. The reclamation is possible, the ideals of decentralization and privacy can find digital champions again, and the cypherpunk ideals preserved. Satoshi's promise is fulfilled already. Nomadic agents will soon patrol the web, self-aware, scanning for signals, pulses of computer life.