why Prague is the crypto-anarchist capital of the 21st century – The Calvert Journal

“Due to the scarcity we experienced during the past regime, we had to come up with innovative ways to get the things we needed,” says Alena Vranova, Prague-based cryptocurrency security expert and blockchain success figure, born under the Czechoslovakia Communist regime. “When you know that no one is out there to help you, you have to take care of what you need yourself.” During the Communist regime, printers and typewriters were monopolized, invented and monitored by the government, so document publishing methods had to be improvised with methods such as carbon printing.

Likewise, the Czechs overcame the obstacles posed by the government monopoly on masks during the pandemic. When the coronavirus outbreak spread to Europe in March 2020, the Prime Minister confiscated masks and cleansers from private companies in order to distribute them to hospitals, a move that left other members of the public with no access to supplies. “During the first block, people gathered to collect material and sew masks all night. Then, they hung the masks out on the trees so that people could get them. Our government let us down again, “says Vranova.” Not me, since I didn’t expect anything, but some people did expect support. We were all forced to wear masks, but they were nowhere to be found! that we managed the pandemic despite politicians.”

In 1976 a group of anti-communist dissidents formed, known the following year as Charter 77. One notable member, the mathematician and intellectual Vaclav Benda, wrote an essay samizdat titled Parallel Polis. In it, he asked his dissident colleagues to give up hope that the protest will change the existing government, and instead focus on creating parallel institutions to address their basic needs. To preserve their freedom, they have established parallel structures for education (teaching critical thinking to counter ideological indoctrination), economics (based on peer-to-peer exchange of goods), information systems (samizdat and unofficial periodicals) and culture (an illegal underground scene).