Hope for Collective Action: $53 Million Raised For Assange Legal Defense Through DAO
A decentralized autonomous organization has drawn considerable attention for raising some $53M for Assange's legal defense fund at a time when democratic collective action has a target on its back.
An online collective rallied behind Julian Assange in support of press freedoms to purchase an NFT that will provide the Assange legal defense fund with over $50 million at a time when the need for public pressure is absolutely essential.
In December, the U.S. government won their appeal of the January 2021 decision, opening the doors for the extradition of the journalist. A month later, a pathway was paved that would allow Assange's defense to make an appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court, making room for a glimmer of hope at first, but in the end reminding everyone that this is a process that does not look like it will come to an end anytime soon. Regardless if he's never extradited, this whole damning charade can easily be prolonged until Assange passes away— a horrific prospect not out of the realm of possibility given his degraded mental and physical state.
The main reality that emerged from last month's news allowing for the defense's appeal was that this matter is no longer at a point where the legal process can do much more than it already has. If change is indeed going to occur, it must be demanded.
As is well known in this atomized, online society, trying to muster any widespread, coordinated support is difficult, but all it takes is one attention-grabbing show of force—the force of collective will—to further the growth of the movement, expanding solidarity and overlapping common interests.
For years, Julian Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton tried to accumulate support among the crypto community, attending cryptocurrency conferences to try and appeal to a group of individuals that are, as Shipton put it, "totally aligned with Julian's philosophy."
That philosophy: challenging centralized power and empowering an inherently democratic process.
Assange played a major role in exposing the crimes and injustices of the U.S. empire, from the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars to Guantanamo Bay to the abusive National Security State, and he did so by going against the grain of the traditional media pipeline.
America had been well engaged in the propagandized "War on Terror," and the legacy media played a major role in that travesty, working, even at that time, as spokespeople for the establishment, bound together through the corporate connection.
Chris Hedges was vilified and forced to leave his job at The New York Times after being chastised for his 2003 anti-war speech at the Rockford College commencement ceremony, willingly resigning from the outlet after refusing to comply with their demand to toe the desired line.
The establishment was ripe for war, they benefitted from it, and the portrayal of its reality was therefore ridiculously skewed. The dissemination of responsible information was tainted, as had been a growing trend, and something needed to wake people up.
When WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video in 2010, it shook up the scene, and the publication came under intense fire from this country's power giants.
WikiLeaks was seen as a danger to the establishment from the outset, not only because it exposed and continues to expose the crimes of the U.S. government, but because it is something that cannot be reasoned with from their point of view. WikiLeaks is not and never was owned by corporate magnates, it has always relied on individual donations from the public as its only source of funding. It is a decentralized source of information wherein the goal is to inform the people—those who fund it—and not to appease the agenda of corporate power.
Concerns regarding the crypto frontier are well documented, namely the specific worry that crypto could end up replacing one model of financial inequality with another. The mere concepts associated with it—cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, NFTs, etc.—go over the heads of most, and understandably so. The complexities of crypto are, admittedly, even confusing when earnestly trying to understand, so the exact future of it is hard for most to imagine. However, what is clear, even now, is that this frontier is already providing ample room to achieve something from the standpoint of collective empowerment.
Ross Ulbricht founded the dark web marketplace Silk Road in 2011, which amassed over $200 million in revenue prior to Ulbricht's arrest in 2013 where he was given two life sentences. Supporters of Ulbricht were outraged, seeing Silk Road as a promoter of cryptocurrency, a symbol of individual freedom, and an inherently democratic front. Regardless of how one personally feels about a guy who founded a marketplace that sold drugs, weapons, ad other contraband with the use of Bitcoin to making transactions harder to trace—some think he's monstrous, others believe he was on to something that's more than just a libertarian fantasy—if a group of people wants to support the guy, what, if anything, should be able to stop them?
In December, as a means of gathering both support and further finances for Ulbricht's legal defense, the FreeRossDAO was created.
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is essentially a group of online people that coalesced around a common goal or cause. Without central authority, DAOs are are owned and managed by its members. These collectives allow members to commit funds to the goal or cause that can then be pooled together with the rest of the members' donations, providing maximum purchase power among a group of individuals that is hard to orchestrate on its own.
The FreeRossDAO planned to use its collective power to pool together as many funds as possible to bid on Ulbricht's Genesis Collection—a collection of sketches and writings Ulbricht has done while incarcerated which was compiled into one non-fungible token (NFT). The plan was to use the pool of funds to place a winning bid so that the money could be distributed to legal fees, public relations expenses, and charities supporting prison reform. In the end, the collective pooled together 2,836 ethereum, or over $12 million total, and won the NFT for over $6 million.
Since many, many people contributed, the NFT was fractionalized into $FREE tokens that are distributed proportionally based on individual donations. Those tokens, aside from recognizing fractional ownership of the NFT collection, also "represent governance rights" within the collective, as the DAO wrote in its announcement.
This was an inspiration to Gabe Shipton and others at a time when the U.S. government's appeal had just brought the threat of Assange's potential extradition closer to existence. Shipton, who coined the phrase "punishment by process," understood the reality of his brother's helpless existence within an endless web of legal processes that, at the end of the day, threaten any chance for freedom to a similar degree as extradition does. In early 2021, Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against extradition, the U.S. put up an absurd appeal that won in December, and the endless tunnel was and is showing no light at either end.
Collective public action was needed— something make some noise, to raise a few eyebrows.
In his years-long effort gain support within the crypto community having amounted to nothing so far, FreeRossDAO gave birth to an idea in December 2021. Then, Shipton teamed up with British crypto developer Amir Taaki, Irish encription journalist Rachel Rose O'Leary, crypto lawyer and mathematician Silke Noa, and two hacktivists who go by the pseudonyms McKenna and Fiskantes. Their goal was to help Assange after the U.S. appeal, and the plan was a DAO of their own.
Julian Assange and digital artist, designer, and programmer Pak—who is speculated to be a group rather than an individual person—teamed up to create a series of NFTs called Censored that would be put up for auction, and the AssangeDAO would raise lump sums of money to either buy the collection or at the very least raise the floor price.
Similar to the FreeRossDAO, the money pooled together and spent on the NFT collection would go to the Wau Holland Foundation in order to be used towards Assange's legal defense.
The AssangeDAO collected what ended up being more than $53 million in ethereum through the crptocurrency crowd funding platform Juicebox. The DAO contemplated setting aside some of the funds for other matters, but opted to go with the bigger splash, sliding all the funds into the bid that won and was about $40 million more than the second highest.
Contributors in the AssangeDAO were granted proportional amounts of $Justice tokens—which, like $FREE tokens, grant governance rights within the collective—based on the donation amount.
The DAO and the sale was a tremendous success, and at a time when that kind of an impact was desperately needed. Assange's partner Stella Moris acknowledged the novelty of DAOs, noting that they "provide a new model for political prisoners and causes to galvanize support."
That may be coming at a good time, too.
Last week, news emerged that GoFundMe had barred the petition for the Canadian Trucker Convoy— the massive demonstration protesting mandates and restrictions up in Ottawa. After it rose tens of millions of dollars, GoFundMe shut it down saying they "now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation."
The Ottawa Police responded:
In short, the crowd sourcing company succumbed to the wishes of the police force, the enforcers of the law, thus stomping on the ability for ordinary people to donate their money to a cause they choose to support.
The convoy also has since had funds frozen that were accumulated through the site GiveSendGo.
Again, regardless of any one person's opinion of the trucker convoy, should a cause or movement's ability to source individual donations from willing people be prohibited? Think about the slippery slope here.
What if this were happening to Black Lives Matter? BDS? Medicare for All promoters? Living wage advocates? Anti-imperialists?
Protests and mass demonstrations are meant to disrupt, they are meant to make the powerful uncomfortable by raising awareness. This demonstration is notably doing just that.
Contrary to popular portrayal, the trucker convoy is not any one thing, which is what makes the effort beautiful— that it’s drawing support from all over the place. This support is standing up to power, and the hollow lunges to portray this in a dumbed-down, binary, good vs. evil framework are desperate attempts to divide in a time when people are uniting.
That's what deems things like this dangerous.
Far reaching movements coalesce with other movements, they build solidarity, drawing a larger circle around the masses so that the collective voice becomes louder and clearer. Protesting brings people together to affirm their shared reality, therefore refining ideas and expanding the scope of their goals. Once people get together and begin thinking and talking about the things they are too busy or too propagandized to think and talk about, it creates a domino effect of collective demands for change.
Sounds like democracy . . . And the establishment just can't have that, can they?
That's why WikiLeaks' ability to receive donations was blocked by payment providers in 2010—just months after Collateral Murder's release—and why it had to innovate and begin accepting Bitcoin donations the following year.
They were giving people too many ideas.
Challenging power is becoming a difficult thing to do on a large, coordinated scale— it's inched this way for decades. Narrative silos, informational earwax, and efforts to stop any dissent are commonplace, and finding overlap is difficult in a climate where your neighbor is your enemy.
The manner in which power is trying to degrade, misrepresent, and crush demonstrations and movements that seek change means that ordinary people may need to find innovative means for garnering change. The success of AssangeDAO therefore cannot be overlooked, especially at a time when collective public action is a prime target of the establishment's fist of power.
Update on the trouble in Ottawa:
. . . That escalated quickly . . .
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