Laser Cut Crypto Art

The Cypherpunk Series

I’d rather live in a dangerous world than unwittingly die in a prison

My passion for a fair and open society drives me to promote crypto and decentralisation technology…

I create laser cut crypto art and gifts for the global community of cypherpunks, hodlrs, truth seekers, bitcoin art lovers and cyberpunk freaks…

Everything on this site is be paid for with crypto… if you would like to be the first notified of my new work please join my substack ;o)

In this series I wish to promote with the topics and themes that got fired up and led me down the path of a truth seeker years before I discovered bitcoin… it will cover privacy, anonymity, transparency, injustice, free speech, whistleblowers, and mass surveillance… I’m looking for an evolution not a revolution

I have 4 pieces to start with, a 5th on its way, and I will continue to add work as time goes by

1. Truth Will Out

(5 pieces in total just 1 remaining)

“In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

anon

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”

CIA Director William Casey

In the west it is a common misbelief that we have free speech and we do not have political prisoners. This piece is a record of 3 three courageous people who have categorically exposed the truth and have, as a result, been punished by their Governments and paid with their freedom.

In a healthy society that upholds genuine freedom of speech, freedom of the press and ultimately the truth, such injustice would not happen.

The broken bar you see just to the right of Julian Assange is to show some hope in what is otherwise quite a depressing state of affairs. It also represents the cracks that are beginning to appear in the Corporatocracy… as our establishments infrastructure continues to eat away at itself through systematic corruption, it can only continue to exposed itself for those willing to open their eyes… it will all be surpassed and made redundant by the use of blockchain technologies, open source software, and open data.

In Support of our heroes…

I will be making a much larger version of this work which will be auctioned… the proceeds for which will be going towards supporting these 3 courageous individuals and humanitarians… this piece will be at least 82cm X 60cm high

I hope this piece speaks for itself but for those who are not familiar with the faces depicted, here is a brief summary…

From left to right;

Edward Snowden

In 2013, when working as a CIA subcontractor, Edward discovered that the American, British and other western governments in cooperation with telecommunication companies had been conducting massive global surveillance of the most intrusive nature of billions of their citizens for over a decade despite the governments continually denying publicly that this was true.

This infringement of the most fundamental of human rights, the right to privacy, led Edward bravely following his moral code and make the categoric evidence publicly available. He escaped to Hong Kong he recruited the help of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskilland. The documents were finally published through The Guardian Newspaper.

Edward Snowden is now the president of the Freedom of Press Foundation:

Julian Assange

Before the hunt for Julian Assange, every newspaper in the western world confidently used the information published on Wikileaks as the most trusted source for exposing corruption within political parties, banks and our very own governments.

After 10 years and more than 10 million documents published, Wikileaks never once needed to retract or correct any information. Why? because the documents always came from the very sources they exposed thanks to courageous whistleblowers. The evidence could be used in courts of law as hard evidence.

However, unsurprisingly, these organisations do not like the public to know how they truly operate behind closed doors and will go to great lengths to destroy anyone brave enough to expose them.

To learn more about Julian Assange and Take Action please visit this link:

Chelsea Manning

As Bradley Manning in US Army, she was convicted for espionage after releasing 750,000 documents to Wikileaks. She served 7 years in prison (2010-2017) and was then released after her sentence was commuted (for a lesser crime). She is now back in prison however after her refusal to testify against Julian Assange.

Some of Chelsea’s disclosures include the famous “Collateral Murder” video and the “Afghan War Diaries” that expose the cover up of hundreds of civilian casualties amongst others.

2. Whistleblower

(5 pieces in total just 1 remaining)

“Honesty. The best of all the lost arts.”

Mark Twain

“Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it’ll always get you the right ones”

John Lennon

“the truth will set you free”

John (8:32)
(Some holy dude… I’m more spiritual)

I hope this piece speaks for itself… it’s to promote and support any and all whistle blowers the world over.

Whistle blowing is not a crime… the ironic truth is, if you blow the whistle on the wrong people it is.

Whistle blowers are the strongest and most brave of all humanitarians… and yet through our apathy we have let our

3. Beigeme – The Beige Regime

(SOLD OUT – only the artist proof remaining)

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Benjamin Franklin

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

Edward Snowden

This piece is an attempt to show what we are doing when we install “permanently-on” devices into our homes… mass surveillance is literally draining the colour from life.

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”

Noam Chomsky

The more people allow their private lives to be monitored by the big corporations, the more they feed their second-by-second personal data into the advertising networks, the easier we are making it for corporations and the deep state to mould and manipulate society into buying certain products or believing certain narratives of propaganda.

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” ― “

C.S. Lewis

Individuality is being lost. Conformity is the fashion of the day.

When you try to explain this to people you are met with apathy.

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

Elie Wiesel

My thoughts were echoed recently in this tweet by fellow crypto artist Marguerite deCourcelle aka @coin_artist:

We have permitted total surveillance and it is creating sheeple people… ask your average hipster why they style themselves the way they do, and they will say “to be different”, whilst being surrounded by fellow hair bung, bearded, full sleeve tattooed “individuals”.

It’s a uniform not a statement… being a hipster doesn’t mean you stand for anything in particular other than conformity.

The beige regime is in full swing.

Colour is being drained from society.

Cryptography brings privacy and this surveillance camera is dieing.

NOTE: I have the deepest sympathy for those individuals, who 20 years ago, grew beards, got full sleeve tattoos or grew their hair into a top bung… you were individuals and none of you were trying to look like anyone else because an advert told you… your look caught the attention of a fashion house and it was productised.

This piece is not a statement against hipsters… it can be applied to every level and uniform in society… no one that hands over their privacy and solely consumes mainstream media is free.

4. Sousveillance

(5 pieces only – 2 remaining)

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”

Ayn Rand

“If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion.”

William J. Brennan

Sousveillance is about the technical ability that we can have in a healthy society to allow the individual the right to privacy whilst removing the Governments practice of secrecy and making them transparent and accountable.

We can do this through the use of open source, privacy focussed and decentralised technologies… it’s early days but the basic infrastructure is there and a multitude of solutions, startups, and grass community initiatives are pioneering the way

I designed Sousveillance to look like a giant eye… the layering around the outside is representative of the organic nature of society and how blockchain technology will eventually be seamlessly blended into it… the pupil is made up of a hexagonal structure representing the technical nature of a decentralised technology

In the centre of the piece above you will notice the “All seeing eye”

This eye can be seen all over the world from the Freemasons to the American $1 bill to the logo of the British Security Service MI5 (logo circa 50’s-70’s)

The eye that I depict on my piece has a tear drop… the tear drop has two meanings…

1) the tear drop tattoo, which has numerous meanings, in this case it means the killing or murder of a fellow human being

2) the tear represent sadness, the game is over, the reign of oversight is coming to an end

The two circles of beings around the outside are us… humans, individuals, decentralised and working in cooperation… the technology allows us to keep an eye on the establishment, ensuring that governments are there to serve us… the tables have now been turned, we are now looking in on those who once surveilled us

The piece is finished off by an oak ply border

My original character looked more like the Guy Fawkes anonymous character

But in a moment of random 80’s’ness I stumbled upon and played Jean Michel Jarres Equinox album… it’s still a classic today… on it’s cover there were these beings known only as “The Watchers”… they eerily gaze upon you… I am hoping that my recreation of them also conveys that eeriness to those that surveil us now

Sousveillance is a term first coined by Steve Mann an engineer with numerous inventions to his name in the fields of Augmented Reality, wearable computing, and computational dynamic imaging… Sousveillance is contrasting the French words sur, meaning “above”, and sous, meaning “below”… so sousveillance is observing from below

The name Sousveillance is a word I first heard from an Andreas Antonopoulos talk and then later just as I was finishing this piece I read it in his book The Internet of Money… buy the book, but also watch the video “Bitcoin: Privacy, Identity, Surveillance and Money – Barcelona Fablab Meetup March 2016” I dropped it at 21 minutes 04 seconds where he explains Sousveillance… thank you Andreas

“It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.”

Noam Chomsky

“I value my privacy and my personal life – and I certainly don’t exploit my personal life.”

Scarlett Johansson

5. Cryptoanarchy 1.0

(30 pieces – only a few left)

To see the video more pics and a full description please click here:

Cryptoanarchy 1.0