Assassination Market. It sounds like
a punk song. But for the past four months, it’s existed—serving as a sort of Kickstarter
for the murder of politicians and other government figures. As someone who took
the ending of Fight Club as political inspiration (more like
revenge fantasy), as crazy as this is, it excites me. You know who's on
the list? NSA director Keith Alexander, President Obama, Ben Bernanke.
Funny
enough, the man with the largest bounty on his corrupt-ass head is Bernanke,
for $75,000. Personally, I hate that guy. Would I kill him? I dunno. Probably
not. Ask me offline. But the fact that people want to says something, and that
something is exciting.
Just as exciting is the intention of
the website. "Kuwabatake Sanjuro," (the name of the samurai
protagonist of a Kurosawa film) creator of the site, hopes to enable enough
assassinations that politicians won't have the guts to hold office. He wants to
"destroy all governments, everywhere." He ultimately aims for
“…a world without wars, dragnet
panopitcon-style surveillance, nuclear weapons, armies, repression, money
manipulation and limits to trade is firmly within our grasp for but a few
bitcoins per person. I also believe that as soon as a few politicians get offed
and they realize they’ve lost the war on privacy, the killings can stop and we
can transition to a phase of peace, privacy and laissez-faire.”
It’s bold. Unrealistic, but bold. Some
might feel that political assassination attacks democracy, and I disagree. For
one, we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a republic with petty attempts at
maintaining the illusion of caring about the people. But regardless, this stuff
doesn’t attack “democracy.” Politicians attack democracy. The joke that is the
presidential elections attacks democracy. And I’m pretty sure we did not vote
for Ben Bernanke. So pipe down, yall. And as much as I admire the initiative
behind this project, the potential impact of it all seems rather dubious. Being
driven to this point says a lot about the current state of affairs, and you
never really know what could happen—but a Second Coming of cypherpunk and
cryptoanarchy is more than ok with me.
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