I called this a "book club" because I started reading Max Hillebrand's The Praxeology of Privacy (#1489281) this week and I figured there are other people who also want to read it. It's a long book, but the first part was very interesting and I plan on reading the rest over the summer. I'll post some updates as I go and would love to hear what other Stackers have to say about this interesting combination of Austrian economics and cypherpunk action.

Part I - FoundationsPart I - Foundations

Privacy tools do not hide information. They raise the price of dominationPrivacy tools do not hide information. They raise the price of domination

The first part of the book is mostly setting the stage, explaining why privacy is more fundamental than popular opinion allows and how the cypherpunk approach fits together with Austrian economics. While, I begrudgingly accept that one cannot always plunge straight in to the topics at hand, and I appreciated that Hillebrand didn't take too much time with the initial setup stuff, I think I would have liked a more throw-me-into-the-deepend approach.

Hillebrand does a very nice job explaining why privacy -- the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world a la Eric Hughes --

is not a separate property right alongside ownership of one’s body and ownership of scarce external resources. What ordinary language calls “privacy” is what self-ownership of the body, property rights in physical devices and premises, and contractual confidentiality produce when respected.

And if you can actually maintain your privacy, you can retain some significant power even with respect to the state:

An adversary who wants to control, seize, punish, censor, or preempt must first observe. Without observation the rest of the sequence stalls. A state that cannot see funds cannot freeze them on command, a platform that cannot inspect messages cannot rank or suppress them with the same precision, and a regulator who cannot map the network cannot identify the soft points where pressure will hurt most.

Observation is why the fight over privacy begins so early in the chain. It looks passive. But it is not. Observation is what lets every later intervention become targeted and cheap. The defender’s advantage lies exactly here.

This may sound overly cypherpunk and you might wonder where Austrian economics theory comes into it. Hillebrand tries to identify where the two approaches overlap, describing some shared conclusions:

• Human beings act on private judgments before those judgments become public.
• Exchange works better when parties can choose what to disclose.
• Free order can emerge without a master plan.
• Surveillance and coercion damage the process they claim to improve.
• A tradition that starts with action is pushed toward privacy.
• A tradition that tries to defend freedom in code is pushed there too.

While it does seem like there is a lot of shared real estate, I'll be curious to see how Hillebrand develops this. I think there is an interesting tension between the cypherpunks write code ethos and the more theoretical Austrian approach. I tend to believe that the world works the way people say when they can build things that function in that world. But I'm also sympathetic to Austrian descriptions of how the world seems to work. I suspect that Hillebrand will have to do some interesting work to keep them always aligned.

Whatever the case, I know a book is going to be interesting to me when on almost every page I find myself chasing down leads on other things to read. Here is the list of things from the first part of The Praxeology of Privacy that I want to look into further:

• Samuel Edward Konkin III, An Agorist Primer (2008)
• Smuggler and XYZ, The Second Realm: Book on Strategy (2018)
• Stephan Kinsella, “Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property (2024)
• Timothy May, Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities (1994)
• Peter Boettke, Living Economics (2012)
• Phil Zimmermann’s “Why I Wrote PGP” (1991)
• Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets (2012)

I plan on reading Part II: Axioms (40pps) for next week if you want to join in.