“The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.” –
Joseph Conrad
Dear Fellow Journeymen,
We’ve been following your voyage with profound admiration and kinship. Because when we read our Rethymno Declaration, it tells a story like a captain’s log from sailors who’ve navigated the same treacherous waters we have, who’ve watched a ship meant for exploration become anchored in bureaucratic harbors, who’ve seen a crew lose sight of the horizon they set out to reach.
We applaud your decision to separate off from the European Pirate Party, and set sail for new shores, when it was clear they were permanently docked in the harbour of neo-liberalism.
It took courage, and we know that, because we made the same journey when we left the ecosystem formed around The Venus Project.
Like you, we found ourselves in an organization that had stopped sailing toward its vision and started circling in place, more concerned with protecting territory than exploring possibilities.
Now we’re both navigating open waters, with charts in hand, asking the same question: where do we sail from here?
We believe our courses should converge.
The Accessist International wants to propose something that feels both audacious and inevitable: that accessism is the natural evolution of what pirate politics should have been, and that together, we can reach shores neither of us could find alone.
Will you hear us out?
When we read your declaration, it revealed something we recognized immediately, you understand that liberating cyberspace while leaving the physical economy in chains only wins half the battle.
But you’ve also seen that these digital freedoms are hard to value for the common people, when they can’t afford housing, when climate chaos drives migration, when oligarchs extract wealth from increasingly desperate populations.
You wrote that “We need a new social contract… democracy must expand beyond the political system to include the economy, the environment, and technology.”.
That is precisely what we believe in.
Because we’re trying to carry that same spark to the entire economy, to show that the principles powering your digital liberation can organize all of human civilization.
The same network thinking that makes your peer-to-peer systems work, the same open coordination that makes free software thrive, the same distributed intelligence that makes decentralized platforms powerful, these are the same winds can fill different sails.
They can move physical resources, coordinate production, distribute abundance, organize society around human needs rather than artificial scarcity.
A Different Kind of Economy: Cybernetic Coordination
Let us paint you a picture of what makes accessism distinct from the deprecated economic systems of left and right, that you’ve seen either stumble, either:
Imagine an economy that works less like a marketplace and more like the internet itself.
Not the corporate-captured internet of today, but the internet as it was meant to be.
A network where information flows to where it’s needed, where resources route efficiently, where the system self-balances through feedback rather than through the chaos of competition or the rigidity of central command.
This is cybernetic economics. A system that wants real-time tracking of resources and needs, bringing automated coordination that responds to actual data rather than price signals.
Production organized through transparent and toil-less collaboration rather than proprietary, labour-based competition, providing distribution based on access rather than exchange.
The world already works that way in the digital realm.
You know the internet doesn’t auction bandwidth to the highest bidder, it routes packets intelligently, using battle-tested, open protocols, while peer-to-peer networks balance load automatically, without admirals or markets directing traffic.
You know open-source projects don’t compete in markets, they coordinate through visible collaboration, while dead projects fail through simple lack of interest, and not because they didn’t make last year’s quarter.
But what if food, housing, energy, and transportation could flow the same way?
What if we used the computational power you helped liberate to coordinate physical abundance the way we already coordinate digital abundance?
This isn’t some distant shore we’re dreaming of, since the technology exists now.
Sensors can track resources, networks can coordinate globally, while automation can handle complexity that once overwhelmed human capacity, even coordinate an entire economy efficiency, cleanly, and transparently.
We HAVE the vessels and the navigation tools. What we’re missing is enough crew willing to make the voyage.
And your crew has logically drifted ever outward on the sea of liberation.
First you fought for digital freedom, for file sharing, copyright reform and privacy rights. It was essential work, but you were mapping only the shallows.
Then you travelled more into the depth, where you articulated a complete vision of digital liberation: net neutrality, open standards, free software in government, resistance to surveillance capitalism, since you understood that digital freedom requires transforming entire systems, not just winning isolated battles.
Now, with your Rethymno Declaration, you’ve connected digital liberation to physical justice. You’re demanding housing rights, economic equity, environmental protection, true democracy. You’ve seen that freeing cyberspace while leaving people trapped in extractive capitalism is like liberating one island while leaving the archipelago in chains.
Accessism is simply the next leg of our common voyage. For us, it was a realization, that without an open, descentralized project, we ossify and are subject to the whims of unelected councils, while for you, it’s asking if the principles you’ve applied to digital systems:
-open access;
-transparent coordination;
-decentralized collaboration;
-technology serving human needs;
should not guide the entire economy, not as reforms within capitalism’s territorial waters, but as setting course for fundamentally different economic seas?
“Digital rights are not a luxury, they are a prerequisite for social justice, democracy and freedom.” This is the exact bridge between our projects, since you have carried the fight for digital freedom with brilliance, but you also know that digital freedom is fragile without physical justice.
What good is privacy if you cannot afford shelter?
What use is open knowledge if you cannot afford food?
You’ve already rejected the false choice between market capitalism and state socialism. You’ve navigated between the Scylla of failed neoliberalism and the Charybdis of authoritarianism, refusing to be dashed on either rock.
You understand the real choice is between open and closed systems, abundance and artificial scarcity, coordination and competition, human needs and profit extraction.
This is accessist thinking, which is why we are offering you this invitation, to collaborate, and join forces.
And we need this now, since the tides are changing faster than most realize.
Automation is transforming everything, with AI, robotics, and digital coordination replacing human labor at accelerating pace, making the old bargain of capitalism, where you trade your labor for survival, is coming apart at the seams.
Even socialism has no proper answer to this, since we just end up the same endgame, of a handful of owners and technicians owning entire means of production(either alone, or with an incestuous relationship with the State), while hordes of dispossessed, starving people outside, except this time, the politicians and/or owners and/or workers might be the same persons.
You’ve proposed Universal Basic Income, which shows you see the storm brewing.
But UBI is like bailing water while the hull cracks, since it tries to maintain monetary distribution in a world moving toward automated abundance.
Accessism asks a deeper question: if machines can produce plenty, why distribute that plenty through artificial scarcity? Why not organize society around access to what exists, rather than competition for deliberately restricted resources?
Your declaration documents what happens when we don’t ask these questions: housing speculation, exploitative tourism monoculture, gutted social services, climate refugees, surging authoritarianism. These aren’t accidents or aberrations, they’re what an economy based on artificial scarcity inevitably produces as it hits the limits of a finite planet.
The future is automated abundance in service of humanity, or authoritarian extraction, be it cooked in the labs of Silicon Valley’s Dark Enlightenment prophets, or the militarized fascism of the Pentagon, Tel Aviv, or Beijing.
The technology exists for either. The difference is political courage and economic vision.
The Greek Thalassocratic Tradition
There’s something poetically just should the Greeks lead this voyage. Your ancestors understood that prosperity flows from intelligent networks connecting diverse communities, since they knew wealth comes from coordination, not hoarding, from open exchange, not enclosed extraction.
The same wisdom that made ancient Greek maritime networks thrive is what makes modern digital networks powerful.
And it’s what will make resource-based networks revolutionary.
You’ve already proven you understand this in your bones. Your embrace of peer-to-peer technologies wasn’t just about file sharing, it was about recognizing that decentralized networks create more abundance than centralized hierarchies ever could.
It was about bringing the Promethean spark of a cybernetic economy to the digital realm, refusing to be trapped, as you so perfectly wrote, paddling between Scylla and Charybdis – between a failed state and a totalitarian one.
Your maritime ancestors knew that the bravest act isn’t hugging the coastline. It’s sailing beyond sight of land, trusting your instruments and your crew, following the stars to shores your charts say might not exist.
You’ve done it before. In leaving the PPEU, you’ve done it again.
Now we’re asking you to set sail once more, to carry that cybernetic vision from bits to atoms, from digital harbors to the entire physical world, from the liberation of information to the liberation of civilization itself.
The horizon ahead shimmers with possibility. Automated production. Transparent coordination. Needs met through access rather than exchange. Democratic participation in economic decisions. Technology finally serving humanity rather than controlling it.
You’re building the political vessel. We’re building the economic one. But we’ll sail farther together than either fleet could alone.
The winds of technological change are filling the sails whether we set them or not, so the question isn’t whether we’re heading toward post-scarcity economics, since automation and climate crisis guarantee that.
The real question is whether we arrive at authoritarian extraction or coordinated abundance.
You’ve shown you choose abundance. You’ve shown you choose democracy. You’ve shown you choose the open sea over safe harbors when safe harbors become prisons.
So we’re asking, comrade to comrade, sailor to sailor, explorer to explorer:
Will you sail with us?
You have already declared that democracy must expand into the economy, that digital rights are inseparable from social justice, and that struggles cannot remain isolated.
This is exactly what Accessism builds upon.
Together, we can transform not only cyberspace, but the material basis of society, into an open commons where abundance flows to need, not profit.
We believe your Rethymno Declaration points to the same horizon we are sailing toward.
Let us sail together, not as parallel fleets, but as a single crew shaping the course of history.
We’re ready to make the voyage together.
With solidarity and hope,
The Accessist International