Code as a Weapon: Amir Taaki Wants You to Join the Real Crypto Revolution

There are many words that could be used to describe Amir Taaki - but today, ambitious is best.

In a series of diagrams, Taaki described the evolution of biological cells, the structure of societies and the impact that technology can have on such systems, sparking runaway trends to monopolization, or its opposite - atomization.

While Taaki insisted the details on the whiteboard not be published for fear they be co-opted - "There's a lack of ideas in this space," he told CoinDesk - it's clear the tooling he's got in mind would be a revolution, which is exactly what he wants.

Having left bitcoin development to fight alongside a Kurdish militia in Rojava, an autonomous region in northern Syria, Taaki is hoping to spread that region's practices of democratic confederalism, a political theory that advocates for small, self-governing communities.

While there's room for ideological diversity within the organization - for example, Taaki wants to set up multiple tiers of participation and a system of allied academies globally - core attendees will need to follow careful timetables, give up other engagements and dedicate themselves fully to the project.

Whereas the former creates global, top-down, single-purpose technologies, polytechnics conceives technology for users across different socio-political contexts - and it's the latter that Taaki believes can bring about change.

"Technology is the means, or the instrument of power that we use for shaping the society, but we are fundamentally the drivers of that technology," Taaki asserted.

At the time of writing, Taaki and the earliest enlisted members of the revolution are squatting at the historic home of the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, a cooperative that spawned a cryptocurrency of its own, FairCoin.

Taaki has even designed a special flag for the academy, in the colors of the organization, green and black, with a blazing sun, as a symbol of technology, in the center.

"Right now to get established we're trying to get donations which is kind of difficult because despite rhetoric a lot of people in this crypto space are very stingy," Taaki said.