Founding Fathers: How heretics, occultists, and cypherpunks are changing the world
The history of technology is full of paradoxes. Some of the most fundamental breakthroughs—from rocketry to cryptocurrencies—were achieved not by corporations or state institutions, but by outsiders whom contemporaries considered eccentrics or dangerous madmen. We examine this phenomenon through the example of Jack Parsons, a man at the origins of the American space program, and his ideological heirs—the cypherpunks who gave the world Bitcoin.
A Laboratory on the Outskirts: The Birth of the Rocket Era
Jack Parsons, a young self-taught chemist from Pasadena, launched homemade rockets in the Arroyo Seco canyon in the late 1930s. His obsession with space was combined with a deep interest in esotericism and the occult, particularly the teachings of Aleister Crowley. Parsons was an archetypal outsider: expelled from military academy for an explosion, dropped out of college due to lack of funds, worked at a gunpowder plant. Together with friends and a Caltech graduate student, he joined the "suicide squad"—a group of enthusiasts that most scientists considered dreamers.
It was in this "laboratory on the outskirts" that composite solid fuel was born—an invention that formed the basis of the solid-fuel engines for Minuteman missiles and the side boosters of the Space Shuttle. From this group, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) emerged in 1943, and Parsons became a co-founder of Aerojet. According to accounts, Wernher von Braun called Parsons the true "father of rocketry." A crater on the far side of the Moon is named after him.
The Double-Edged Sword of Freedom
Parsons was not only an engineer but also an anarchist philosopher. In his manifesto "Freedom is a Double-Edged Sword," he warned about the erosion of privacy, criticized "loyalty oaths" and state surveillance. His main hope rested on the "creative minority"—a handful of people capable of thinking independently and acting against the system. "When the majority is deprived of freedom, barbarism appears on the horizon. But when the creative minority renounces freedom, the Dark Ages set in," he wrote.
Half a century later, these ideas became the creed of the cypherpunks—a movement of the 1990s that proclaimed: "Cypherpunks write code." Like Parsons, they saw in technology (in their case, cryptography) a tool for protecting individual freedom from the state and corporations. From their midst, Bitcoin was born in 2009.
The Cycle: From Heresy to Mainstream
The story of Parsons and the cypherpunks illustrates a universal cycle. Radical novelty almost always emerges on the periphery, where there is no reputation to lose and no bosses to be ashamed of failure. The periphery becomes a laboratory of the future precisely because it can afford to make mistakes.
However, the revolution ends the moment its ideas become part of the new order. The free internet became overgrown with platform monopolies. Open source code integrated into corporate development. And Bitcoin, which began as a tool for anonymous users on forums, received approval for spot ETFs from the SEC in January 2024 and took its place among Wall Street's favorite assets. The same is happening with artificial intelligence: not long ago it was a niche field, and today it is a race with trillion-dollar stakes.
Survivorship Bias
From this story, it is easy to draw an overly general conclusion: since the future is born on the periphery, any persecuted idea must be right. But that is survivorship bias. For every successful revolution, there are hundreds and thousands of projects that could not defy the laws of physics or economics. In the crypto industry, there are dozens of such examples: from EOS, which raised $4 billion but did not become the "Ethereum killer," to countless vanished altcoins.
The success of an idea is determined not by the marginality of its origin, but by whether the technology works, whether it solves a real problem, and whether someone is willing to pay for its implementation. Being on the periphery provides the freedom to experiment, but in itself guarantees nothing.
My view: Today, candidates for the role of such a "peripheral idea" include neural interfaces, decentralized science (DeSci), and network states. The most telling candidate is the open AI movement, which in its social mechanics almost literally replicates the crypto community of a decade ago. History does not provide ready-made predictions, but it teaches us to recognize recurring patterns. What looks like a ridiculous sect of geeks today could become an industry with government strategies and trillion-dollar budgets tomorrow. The question is only which of these "eccentrics" will turn out to be right.