Hi! I'm Rick Falkvinge, and during business hours, I'm Head of Privacy at the VPN company Private Internet Access, which ttobmk is the only VPN company to have court records prove we don't keep any logs whatsoever. We love decentralization and privacy.

However, I'm more known for being the founder of the Pirate Party, an international collection of technopunk parties that have won elections to take office in the European Parliament and elsewhere. The Pirate Party in Iceland is currently the largest party in the polls there, leading to very interesting scenarios worldwide after the next election. (It only takes one country out of 196 to create a safe data haven and guarantee freedoms of speech and expression worldwide.)

I've also written a book, Swarmwise, that outlines how we were able to beat the establishment in the elections - their struggle for centralized power - despite having less than one percent of their campaign budget. Basically, it comes down to the tactical and strategic advantage of running an organization on decentralized voluntaryism.

I normally write a lot on the Private Internet Access blog about policy analysis and commentary around privacy and other liberties, but there are thoughts and ideas that don't really fit on a corporate blog - so I figured Steem would be a nice place to try such ideas, given the immediate type of feedback on those ideas. (But because I believe in a truly decentralized information flow and trust no centralized publishing point not physically under my control, I'll also be posting my columns on my own blog at https://falkvinge.net/, but with a short delay after having posted them here on Steem.)

Oh, and if you want to read more about my personal life and so on, there's a Wikipedia page in 14 languages. ;) And I respond to anybody mentioning my name anywhere. A distinct advantage of having a globally unique name.

Looking forward to writing here on Steem! My first post is already out, which observes that both capitalism and communism promise decentralized voluntaryism as their utopia endgames, but in practice, both corrupt to centralized use of force along different paths. Thus, the real question about power was not about capitalism vs communism, but about centralization and use of force on one hand, vs decentralization and resilience to use of force on the other.

Cheers to the whole community!