A Sapphirepunk Manifesto

Sapphirepunk Manifesto 🧿

Co-auhored by Naomiii, Andr0meda, Wassim Z. Alsindi, Sasha Shilina, Wastelander

The world cannot be protected by cryptography alone.

We are the Sapphirepunks. We inherit the tools of cryptographic resistance, and invoke them not for escape, but for togetherness. Privacy is not a bunker; it’s a commons. Sovereignty is never in isolation; it’s always in relation. We refuse acceleration without direction, optimisation without ethics, and autonomy without care. Our proposal: to craft technologies that nurture meaning, resilience, and communal flourishing. We do not inherit the future; we collectively bring it into being. We do not merely seek privacy, we seek solidarity. 

We reimagine cryptographic tools as instruments of communion, not alienation. 

Sapphirepunk is a call for a reformation: not a rejection of the original Cypherpunk ideals, but a remembering-forward. A reckoning for today’s world. We summon forth new political and poetic imaginaries that expand beyond the lone sovereign individual, driven by fear and shame, into the plural and the planetary. Let’s be Sapphirine, together.

To each, according to their nodes…

Sapphires are valued for their hardness, durability, and vibrance. Indeed, lasers are made out of sapphire crystals. They have come to be associated with wisdom, virtue, sincerity, and good fortune. It might be rough around the edges, it might not be perfect on the inside, but it’s resilient. Full transparency, being sapphirine is hard work.

We do not seek efficient systems for the sake of speed, nor markets for the sake of profit.

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To act as a Sapphirepunk is to:

Believe that privacy is not the endpoint, but rather a necessary starting condition for imagination, resistance, and community.

Envision technologies that uplift the collective, not merely cloak the self. 

Create tools that serve not just the technologically fluent or economically privileged, but also those most at risk from state violence, political oppression, corporate surveillance, technofascism, and so on. 

Center the vulnerable, the excluded, the targeted, recognising that freedom that is not shared is not freedom at all.

Practice mutual aid and shared governance in how we code, organise, and distribute power.

Engineer technologies rooted in justice, and infrastructures grounded in togetherness.

Design systems that foreground social and ecological care as foundational, not optional.

Build tools that allow dissenting voices to be heard, nourish the commons, and make new solidarities possible.

Fight for privacy, not just for personal safety, but also for collective survival.

 Reject False Binaries. Reclaim Collective Futures.

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Sapphirepunks Reject…

The abstraction of the human experience into mere code or closed-form mathematical expressions. 

Market supremacism that commodifies every relation, alienating human experience into operation or transaction.

Systems that dispossess individuals from their own data, and centralise power. 

Infrastructures that extract from the many to empower the few.

False “publics”, false “commons”, false “communities”: private fiefdoms disguised as inclusion, replicating the very systems they claim to subvert.

Techno-optimism, techno-determinism, techno-solutionism, tech-neutrality. When severed from justice, felicity becomes complicity.

Hyper-individualism, cloaked as innovation, hollowing out the commons.

The automation of inequality, and the weaponisation of machinic efficiency.

Scale as objective, at the expense of intimacy.

Opaque and unfair architectures that appropriate the valour of “privacy” and “community” whilst not sharing their users’ values, or guaranteeing their best interests. 

The privatisation of privacy, wherein the right to remain unseen becomes a luxury. We refuse a vision of a world where only the elite can afford dignity and discretion.

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Dreams and Realities: A Call to Reimagine

The Cypherpunks fought for privacy, autonomy, and resistance through cryptography, against the surveillance state. They believed that code could conjure new kinds of freedom: encrypted against coercion, shielded from the violence of the state, and the extractive gaze of corporations. Code, in their hands, was not just syntax: it was a spell, a promise, a revolt inscribed in computation. 

Today, we stand at the threshold of that vision’s exhaustion. The dream that code alone could secure liberation has collapsed into a grim reality of marketised digital enclosures, surveillance and sousveillance capitalism, and the gamification of selfhood through tokens and algorithms. Privacy is auctioned to the highest bidder, and freedom is measured in asset balances and liquidity. This status quo doesn’t work for the humble user. We either all have privacy, or no one has privacy. As Fannie Lou Hamer said:

“Nobody's free until everybody's free.” 

The Cypherpunk dream taught us to build privacy-enhancing tools, obscure ourselves from surveillance, and route around control. But the conditions we now face – algorithmic violence, market supremacism, and environmental collapse – demand more than hiding. They demand visibility, solidarity, and reparation. They demand that we move beyond opacity as protection towards infrastructures of mutual care.

Encryption may guard our messages, but it cannot mend broken trust. Zero knowledge does not equal zero harm. The ledger may be “immutable” but justice is not programmable by machine logic and consensus alone. Code is not law. We had to learn this the hard way, in the early days of Ethereum. 

The world cannot be protected by cryptography alone. It is shaped by the social and political imaginaries we embed within our technologies. A tool without ethics is mere fuel for the perpetual bonfire of late capitalism; a protocol without purpose becomes its silent accomplice.

Zero knowledge does not equal zero harm.

The original Cypherpunk message conjures association with privacy, the lone coder as freedom-fighter, and the belief that encryption could serve as a form of resistance. These ideas were powerful, and in many ways, heralded the technologies we now inherit. However, being Cypherpunk is expensive and exclusive. Cypherpunk has always been a luxury belief. Not only in capital, but also in time, in access, in knowledge, and in the emotional toll of constant self-defence in a hostile digital world. The tools are complex, the stakes are high, and the promise of individual sovereignty falls short when accessible only to the technically and economically privileged.

Cypherpunk has always been a luxury belief.

The aesthetics of resistance have been co-opted, commodified, and rendered compatible with the very systems they were meant to subvert. The threats we face are systemic, not merely technical. The harms are collective, not just individual. And so our response must also be structural and relational.  

We call for a reformation: not a rejection of the original Cypherpunk ideals, but a remembering-forward. A reckoning. We summon forth a new political imagination, one that expands beyond the lone sovereign individual, driven by fear, into the plural and the planetary. 

We yearn for a collective future grounded in reciprocity, care, justice, and the healing of human and ecological relations. To resist is to reimagine the very terms of relation, not only among humans, but also with the wider web of life. In the ruins left by extractive systems, we plant the seeds of multispecies kinship, recognising that true freedom cannot exist apart from the well-being of the more-than-human world. Togetherness must reach beyond the social to embrace the ecological: a camaraderie of beings grounded not in mastery and exceptionalism, but in mutual flourishing.

Encryption without an ethics of care is merely a harder shell around the same old oppression.

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The Collective Promise of Cryptography

The Cypherpunk vision was to solve trust through mathematics and computation, however trust remains an utmost human art. It affords the promise of protection, the vow to shield our minds, our bodies, and our relationships from the invisible forces of corporate surveillance, state violence, neoliberalisation, and exploitation. 

Encryption without an ethics of care is merely a harder shell around the same old oppression. Applied cryptography must be shaped by human-centered values, by a vision of justice, equity, and autonomy, not by the forces of extraction, commodification, or techno-determinism.

In this sense, we return to Donna Haraway’s “cyborg”, a cybernetic organism, not as a myth of transcendence or liberation through machines, but as a provocation: a being who blurs the hardened lines between body and code, self and system. The cyborg resists closure. Haraway argues that the cyborg, a hybrid of human and machine, is a figure that can disrupt power structures and create new, more fluid ways of understanding ourselves and the world.

Today we are all cyborgs, not just interfacing with cryptographic systems, but co-poetically bringing their meanings and consequences into being. The tools we build reflect the worlds we wish to inhabit. Let these new worlds be plural, caring, and free.

The nodes of the many, outweigh the nodes of the few.

The self, like a networked node, only experiences meaning through its edges. There is no cryptographic truth without a handshake, no key without another to unlock, no privacy without shared trust. Worse still: the more secure the enclave, the lonelier the architect. The myth of the ungoverned self forgets that to exist at all is to be born into a web of care, memory, and responsibility.

As Hannah Arendt reminds us, freedom is born not in isolation but in the spaces in between. In the web of human relations where action, speech, and remembrance take shape, a politics of privacy must be, at root, a politics of the “in-between”, a refusal of domination that deepens connection rather than severs it. 

Intimacy, trust, and shared vulnerability are not failures of privacy but expressions of it in a deeper register. We must become tacticians of care, choosing our battles with discernment, conserving energy, refusing martyrdom on every hill. 

You are more than a glorified wallet. You are a contributor to a world yet to be made.

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Privacy, Not Privation

We Sapphirepunks seek technological tools rooted in justice, infrastructures grounded in solidarity, and innovation that does not sacrifice the many for the few. To “Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again” is not enough. That slogan echoes from a world that no longer exists. The threats have mutated. The terrain has shifted. Our tools and our approaches must evolve. Progress without purpose is drift; innovation without ethics is extraction.

The original Cypherpunks gave us a foundation: privacy, autonomy, cryptographic resistance to this we pay our homage. But too many today invoke their slogans without critically appraising the systems these tools now serve. Power has learned to wear our armor. Surveillance has found its way inside our protocols. And sovereignty without solidarity is just another form of exile and repression of shared existence and need for belonging. 

Privacy is not merely a personal preference or a neutral technical feature; it is a condition shaped by power, history, and hierarchy.  It is the precondition for resistance, the shelter for imagination, the soil for the seeds of solidarity, the dark forest foliage of cryptographic discretion. To speak of privacy is to speak of who gets to disappear and who is forcibly exposed. Cypherpunks treated privacy as an individual right, something to be protected with personal encryption. We believe privacy is not the endpoint but a necessary starting condition for imagination, resistance, and solidarity and freedom. When privacy is violated, it disrupts the networks of trust, care, and mutuality that allow for resistance, kinship, and collective survival.

Sapphirepunks stand at the threshold. We are builders, critics, users, and dissenters. We call on this new generation to do more than repeat tired and empty mantras parrotted by the same old millionaire blockchain bro talking heads. Bring the OGs to the table, yes, but also bring those never invited. Diverse builders, dreamers, and defenders who know that real freedom is collective, not merely individual. It is not too late. The tools we forge now will either liberate or enclose us. Let us wield them with conscience, complexity, and courage.

To explore the meaning of Sapphirepunk is also to pose the questions: what forms of coordination and protocol life remain unimagined and unrealised? What infrastructures of trust, resistance, or care have yet to be manifested into existence?

Sapphirepunks aspire to transcend individualism in service of a greater collective spirit; an esprit de corps.

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Natalism, not Fatalism

Hope is not a passive disposition or naïve belief in benevolent outcomes; it is a mode of radical engagement with the ‘not-yet’. As Jane Goodall insists, hope requires endurance amid ambiguity, fidelity to becoming, and the audacity to act despite not knowing. Without hope, there is no ontological ground from which transformation can emerge. In the Sapphirepunk imaginary, hope becomes praxis: a deliberate refusal of fatalism, a gesture of tending to fractured systems not as endpoints but as sites of potential reconfiguration. Our approach to hope is grounded in a reimagining of time, how we perceive it, and how we live within it. We believe time is not a resource but a relation. A relation with ourselves and all that surrounds us. 

So, how do we put this timely philosophy into practice? 

By slowing down. 

As co-author of the Xenofeminist Manifesto Amy Ireland once tweeted: “Accelerationism is a theory of time. The end.” Just slow the fuck down and honour the craft. There is no virtue in moving fast and breaking things that you do not understand. The Sapphirepunks value not only the craft we create, but the processes that sustain them. There is no liberation in speed without understanding. As Stiegler once stated, “acceleration without reflection leads to the collapse of care – a loss of attention, memory, and meaning.” 

To accelerate the progress of techno-capitalist supremacy is to make ourselves servants to artifacts we no longer comprehend and a future that is no longer ours.

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On the History We Carry

We turn to history and reclaim the Luddites; not as enemies of progress, but as workers who demanded dignity in the face of technological upheaval. These early nineteenth century English textile labourers resisted the introduction of automated machinery, not out of blind opposition to innovation, but because they foresaw the human costs: job losses, exploitation, and a diminished quality of life for workers. Too often, the Luddites have been caricatured as anti-technology reactionaries, their true concerns distorted or dismissed. Yet their legacy speaks to a deeper truth, that progress without justice is no progress at all.

We draw inspiration from the Luddites: The design, implementation, and operation of technological systems are the ground on which future struggles will be fought. 

Sapphirepunks do not romanticise cryptographic tools. Instead, they ask: who controls the infrastructure? Who benefits from financial decentralisation? Who gets to define security? From whose perspective? Whose knowledge systems are respected and whose knowledge systems are suppressed, both in the design of cryptographic tools and the social layer of networks?

We reject the myth of neutral architectures. We reject monocultures; in code, in governance, in thought. We build in plurality, and in parity, but not in purity or with impunity. We demand infrastructures that recognise that they are partial, situated, and alive.

We draw from the hacker tradition not solely as a practice of subversion, but as a philosophy of world-making, one in which “craft” is a form of ethical inquiry. Hacking, in this sense, is not merely the disruption of systems, but their imaginative reconfiguration: a mode of engaging with complexity through precision, playfulness, and intentionality. 

Against the mythos of the isolated genius, we situate our practice within webs of care, mutual responsibility, and collective discernment. Each line of code, each protocol, each design decision is understood not as neutral or inert, but as a gesture with political power, a shaping of possible worlds. To design is to take a stance; to engineer is to enact a worldview. 

We hold ourselves, and those alongside us, to an ethic of accountability, attuned to the shared consequences of the systems we bring into being. True technical practice is never separate from the question of for whom, and to what end, we build.

We build in plurality, and in parity, but not in purity or with impunity. We reimagine cryptographic tools as instruments of communion, not alienation. 

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Technology as Kinmaker, Not Kingmaker

Rather than fetishising technology as saviour or sovereign, Sapphirepunks reframe it as a companion in struggle; imperfect, but improvable, machinic otherkin allies at our disposal. We live, breathe, and walk beside cryptography, not beneath it.

We view human-centric design not as feature or desiderata; it is our foundation. Technology should not extract our data or dominate our bodies: it should extend our ability to care, resist, and rebuild. We reimagine cryptographic tools as instruments of communion, not alienation. We believe the best technology dissolves into relationship, amplifying murmurs into a resonant chorus of solidarity, not the noise of domination.

The original Cypherpunk vision traded freedom for isolation. But code does not liberate in solitude, it emancipates in solidarity. True agency is not the shedding of obligation, but the honoring of relation. It is not control over others, but a refusal to be controlled while remaining together with others. “Sovereignty” does not exist in a vacuum. The fantasy of the sovereign individual – atomised, self-contained, economically optimised – is a fiction born of supremacist logics and neoliberal dreams. It denies that all selves are situated, all autonomy is conditioned, and all independence depends upon unseen interdependence.

In a world saturated by commodification, the primordial theft is not of land or labour, but of interiority. Echoing thinkers like Erich Frommmm, Anna Greenspan, and Byung-Chul Han, we recognise how capitalist modernity disfigures freedom into performance, alienating us from the depths of being. In this terrain, the soul becomes data, and authenticity is filtered through platforms designed to extract. Sapphirepunks believe there is no meaningful ownership without autonomy. There is no sovereignty without self-stewardship. Cypherpunks might call technological optimisation freedom. Sapphirepunks call it exploitation.

Sapphirepunks do not accept the framing of tech as neutrality. We recognise that every technological choice is also a political act. Decentralisation alone does not dismantle power; it often redistributes it among new elites. As Audrey Lorde said in her now-famous essay:

“For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Sapphirepunks reject the naive belief that markets alone can safeguard freedom. We insist on radical governance models that centre relational sovereignty as resistance against the extractive tendencies ubiquitous in platform economies. 

When the master’s house is a casino, the master always wins.

We move from “code as law” to “code as organism” and “code as assemblage,”  adapting, constantly in contingency, impermanent, decentered, and ever changing. We fight not for gated freedom for the few, but freedom as infrastructure: universal basic agency that anyone can access.

What does this mean? It means creating technologies and technological frameworks aligned with relational sovereignty, privacy for the dispossessed. Our cryptographic praxis is not about hiding. It is about honoring human and non-human relationships with dignity. 

We do not run from the world, we actively shape it. 

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Recuperating the Humiliated Technological Subject

The emotional substrate of Cypherpunk, despite its technological rationalism, is affectively shaped by shame, paranoia, and fear. Shame, in particular, plays a central yet disavowed role: the shame of being seen, the shame of being known, the shame of exposure. It is a fantasy of purity and control, a dream of a self-sovereign subject who never has to depend, reveal, or negotiate.

Shame is, fundamentally, an individualising and narcissistic emotion. It centers the self as a failed or contaminated object, and in doing so, isolates rather than connects. The Cypherpunk reacts to vulnerability by retreating into technical mastery: encrypting everything, trusting no one. 

There is no security through insecurity.

But this dream leaves little space for cooperation, solidarity, or repair. When privacy is grounded in shame, the ideal becomes to disappear, not to relate. Trust is seen as a bug, not a feature. Dependency is weakness. Vulnerability is a flaw. What emerges is a social ethic of isolation masked as liberation.

Sapphirepunks reclaim vulnerability as a shared condition, not as a source of shame, but as the precondition for care, interdependence, and collective action. Rather than investing in technologies of withdrawal, Sapphirepunk politics attends to the emotional labor of being visible, accountable, and relationally entangled.

We must move from shame-driven privacy to affect-aware infrastructures, where protection is not merely about defense, but about sustaining the messy, collective, and ongoing work of being together.

Sapphirepunk politics attends to the emotional labor of being visible, accountable, and relationally entangled. Technology alone cannot heal broken trust, nourish our commons, nor honour the web of life.

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Endings and Beginnings

The old Cypherpunk dream is dead. Cryptographic armours wielded in isolation have now been co-opted as the weaponry of the very hegemony the Cyperpunks sought to resist. Privacy auctioned, freedom commodified, solidarity fractured by market logics; this is the cost of mistaking encryption for emancipation. We refuse this hollow future, living in the ruins of technocapital exploitation. Technology alone cannot heal broken trust, nourish our commons, nor honour the web of life. Now that the master’s house is also a casino – exploiting both their tools and ours – we must regroup and build new architectures rooted not in fear, but in radical care and community.

We call on the Sapphirepunk spirit within all of us to seek a new path. Forge tools that centre the vulnerable, embed relational sovereignty, and reject the tyranny of the market. Demand infrastructures where privacy is a communal affordance, not a privatised luxury. Practise slow, deliberate craft: code as assemblage, not zombie formalism. Plant seeds of multispecies kinship in the concrete jungles of blockchain-based wastelands. Reject the walled gardens of token-gated utopias, and strive for freedom as universal infrastructure: unpriced, indivisible, alive. Together, we have power, in the contingent labours of world-making. You are more than a glorified wallet. You are a weaver of worlds yet born.

Together, we have power, in the contingent labour of world-making.