Encryption Without Ethics Is Just a Harder Shell
“Privacy is not a bunker. It’s a commons.”— A Sapphirepunk Manifesto
There was a time when cryptography meant resistance. A time when publishing PGP was an act of civil disobedience (Levy, 2001), when anonymity was armor, and when “cypherpunk” conjured images of shadowy figures tunneling through the digital underground. They had a creed: privacy is necessary for an open society (Hughes, 1993). They coded, not talked. Their tools were elegant, their politics fierce, their dream clear: liberation through mathematics.
But we are no longer there.
Like post-punk after the raw howl of punk rock, we are now living in a post-cypherpunk era—not in the sense that its values are gone, but in the sense that its boundaries have exploded. What came after the bunker? Not surrender—but surrealism. Not purity—but complexity.
We offer a name for this shift: Sapphirepunk.
Alongside an incredible group of thinkers, we’ve authored and released:
>The Sapphirepunk Manifesto
A signal. A refraction of everything we’ve lived and learned in crypto, in culture, and beyond.
What follows is a companion essay, a brief exploration of how we got here, what we’re leaving behind, and what a post-cypherpunk future might feel like when cut like a gem.
[These reflections are entirely my own and do not speak on behalf of the other contributors to the Manifesto]
I. From Punk to Post-Punk/From Cypherpunk to Post-Cypherpunk
Punk was rebellion stripped to its bones: three chords, a sneer, a Molotov. It collapsed under its own intensity, burned bright and fast. What came next was post-punk: angular, anxious, experimental. Bands like Joy Division, Wire, and Gang of Four took the ruins of punk and rebuilt them into cathedrals of sound: jagged, intellectual, haunted (Reynolds, 2005).
Cypherpunk, similarly, began as a rebellion: against surveillance, centralization, and censorship. It built tools to disappear, to resist the state, to exit. But now, we see its children (DAOs, DIDs, zk-coordination, decentralized science, quadratic voting, cryptobiometrics, retroactive funding) not as weapons, but as instruments in a symphony of governance, play, art, and new forms of collective life (Buterin et al., 2019).
Where the cypherpunks whispered “Cypherpunks write code” (May, 1994), the post-cypherpunks ask: what else can be composed from these primitives? They treat blockchains not just as infrastructure, but as a medium, like the synthesizer was to post-punk. And just like the post-punks were suspicious of utopias (Eshun, 1998), the post-cypherpunks are suspicious of maximalism. There is no silver bullet, no pure ledger, no one chain to rule them all. There are just fragments, partialities, and interlinking protocols —> a dissonant harmony.
II. The Bunker and the Garden
If the cypherpunk ethos built a bunker, the post-cypherpunk mood tends toward the garden.
A garden encrypted, yes, but open to experimentation, to hybridization, to weird growth. Donna Haraway’s notion of cyborg subjectivity is instructive here: a hybrid of machine and organism, coded and emotional, anonymous and relational (Haraway, 1985). Post-cypherpunks, too, are hybrid beings, not only protectors of privacy but also composers of networks, protocols, and rituals of interaction.
The bunker was necessary. It taught us that privacy isn’t a luxury, but a foundation. That freedom depends on opacity (Brunton & Nissenbaum, 2015). But now, cryptography isn’t just a shield, it’s a brush. ZKPs can protect, but also coordinate, verify, and compose. Where the early cypherpunks saw escape, we now see the possibility of cryptographic expression, not just self-defense, but world-building.
III. The Sapphirepunk Ethos
This is where Sapphirepunk enters.
Born from this tension — between defense and design, privacy and plurality — Sapphirepunk proposes a new frame for thinking about digital autonomy, care, and cryptographic infrastructure. Where the cypherpunk imagined privacy as an individual right to disappear, Sapphirepunk sees it as the foundation of relation, trust, and commons.
“Encryption without an ethics of care is merely a harder shell around the same old oppression.”— Sapphirepunk Manifesto (sapphirepunk.com)
It draws from feminist ethics, radical infrastructure, abolitionist tech, and design critique, but speaks in its own mood: critical, poetic.
Sapphirepunk does not abandon cryptography. It expands it. It reframes privacy not as hiding, but as refining. Protocols not as exits, but as ecologies. Code not just as control, but as craft.
IV. The Aesthetics of Post-Cypherpunk
Just as post-punk had its own sound and look (black overcoats, empty warehouses, drum machines echoing in concrete), post-cypherpunk has its own aesthetic too. It is the vibe of the encrypted rave, the generative oracle, the DAO art collective, the sci-fi governance salon. It lives in liminal Telegram chats, X threads, at privacy summits and cypherpunk congresses, in the design of dark-mode dashboards, in the poetry of ENS names (Bratton, 2016; Voshmgir, 2020).
It is:
• dark but playful;
• rigorous but surreal;
• political but post-ideological;
• technical but mythopoeic.
It is where mechanism design meets mysticism. It’s what Harney and Moten (2013) might call a fugitive planning, encrypted in code and carried in spirit.
V. The Sapphire Core
If the cypherpunk era gave us the bunker, and the post-cypherpunk imagination gave us the garden, then Sapphirepunk offers a third image: the gem, a structure.
Sapphire is a crystal of clarity, forged under pressure, impossible to fake. Across cultures, it has symbolized sincerity, wisdom, and protection. In medieval lore, it shielded the wearer from poison and envy. In metaphysics, it channels truth.
To build sapphirepunk infrastructure is to build durable transparency, refined insight, and relational clarity. It is to believe that code can carry not just power, but care. Not maximalism, but multiplicity. Not extraction, but craft.
The sapphire refracts. It does not blind. It sharpens. It glows.
VI. Manifesto (or Anti-Manifesto)
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.
Read the full text here: The Sapphirepunk Manifesto
VII. What Comes After the After?
This is not to say we’ve arrived. The post- is never the end; it is the opening. Just as post-punk eventually became new wave, no wave, goth, synthpop, so too will post-cypherpunk mutate. Maybe toward solarpunk federations and network states. Maybe toward hyper-automated science (Shilina, 2025). Maybe toward rituals of computation and new techno-theologies.
But it begins here: with a shift in tone. From exile to experiment. From encryption as escape, to encryption as an instrument. From radical autonomy to radical interdependence.
References
Bratton, B. H. (2016). The Stack: On software and sovereignty. MIT Press.
Brunton, F., & Nissenbaum, H. (2015). Obfuscation: A user’s guide for privacy and protest. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262029735.001.0001
Buterin, V., Hitzig, Z. & Weyl, G.. (2019). A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods. Management Science. 65. 10.1287/mnsc.2019.3337
Eshun, K. (1998). More brilliant than the sun: Adventures in sonic fiction. Quartet Books.
Haraway, D. (1985). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 80, 65–108.
Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. Minor Compositions.
Hughes, E. (1993). A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
Levy, S. (2001). Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. Penguin Books.
May, T. (1994). The Cyphernomicon. https://hackmd.io/@jmsjsph/TheCyphernomicon
Reynolds, S. (2005). Rip it up and start again: Postpunk 1978–1984. Faber & Faber.
Shilina, S. (2025). DeScAI: the convergence of decentralized science and artificial intelligence. Front. Blockchain, Sec. Blockchain for Science. Vol. 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2025.1657050
Voshmgir, S. (2020). Token economy: How the Web3 reinvents the internet. Token Kitchen.
Originally published here.