Baptism by Fire.
How I was spied on Argentina.
When I was a newborn, I accidentally threw boiling coffee on me and my left arm burnt to the bone. My whole life I have seen this scar on my bicep. My mother instantly reacted pouring toothpaste on it and taking me to the hospital. I was 8 months old. In war, there’s an expression used for the first time you encounter yourself in battle: baptism by fire. Che Guevara worte about his own during the Cuban Revolution in his personal diary and letters to his family:
… I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.
A big driver for entrepreneurs is being foolish. Not really knowing what you’re getting into until you get into it. Otherwise nobody would dare to innovate: facing uncertainty requires certain degree of ingenuity usually perceived in the everlasting optimism that characterizes most founders. Steve Jobs noticed it:
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Politics is playing with fire. I understood that as I discovered how I was being spied upon in my own country by the State during a supposedly democratic regime. And I’m not blaming any particular political faction for it but rather the even darker forces not usually portrayed in the very same media politicians own and control.
The process of starting up a political party in Argentina, The Net Party (Partido de la Red), led to meet a lot of likeminded citizens that wanted to see positive change in their community. But as you get into the guts of the system, this also means you’ll get to know dynamics that often far surpass your capability of understanding what’s going on as they unfold. Power does not become powerful by being foolish.
The first weird events happened as we found people with strange attitudes attending our party meetings. A group of three — let’s call them Pablo, Alejandro and Mauricio, collectively nicknamed as the “super agentes”— kept coming with a consistent attitude for conflict. They used a similar discourse to ours with slight variations: while we called ourselves The Net Party, they pretended to come from a non-existent party called the Entrepreneurial Party. The large majority of us were not politicians nor had any activist experience until then. We cared for respectful dialogue and tolerance within our diversity. Yet these three “super agentes” always came with trouble in their hands. For instance, I was told by a party member that one of them, Alejandro, tried to bribe him showing 10,000 US Dollars in cash in order to get a place in the list of candidates. He explained to him this was not the right place for that.
Coincidentally they appeared when we formally started the process in the Federal Court to get legal recognition as a political party. The law required us to present 4000 signatures to run for one election, and after that 4000 full affiliation forms if we wanted to run indefinitely for the City of Buenos Aires. Knowing this, Alejandro appeared another day with the strange proposal of 6000 fake signatures. Again, it was not our idea to get into politics with the intention of breaking the law.
In August 2013, after presenting 6500 signatures, we were granted official status for that year’s election by the Federal Court with the signature of Judge Maria Romilda Servini de Cubría. She’s considered one of the most powerful judges in the country and oversees everything related to political parties (and, to my surprise, even something as small as our own local party). We had an audience with her before the approval. One thing definitely caught my attention: her office had hundreds of small and large collectible owls. All of them facing you.
When the campaign started, so did the trolling. Alejandro opened a Twitter account for the Entrepreneurial Party and consistently attacked me and my colleagues every single day. Even pretending to be multiple people using an account that obviously (and intentionally) was just him using different names. And along with Mauricio and Pablo, they started a dissident faction of The Net Party that consisted of the three of them and a Google Plus page (you read that right). I’m used to online trolling but the attacks sometimes went far beyond the line: flat out lies about us, often exploiting common prejudices that aim to generate doubt among those who might be interested in our proposal but didn’t know us personally. Trashing me for my entrepreneurial background was a common attack that resonates well in a society that is usually resentful about business owners. The attacks went as far as contacting each one of my followers during the 2 months the campaign lasted.
One day I decided to google them and it turned out that Pablo had been sentenced 6 times for fraud and tax evasion and was condemned with his father. All three of them were common faces usually found in other political environments like the political party Libres del Sur and the public communes of the city. In each of these places they appeared with the same attitude for conflict and attempts at generating division among members. Every time I saw them in person there was something shady about their attitude that wasn’t common to see even in strangers. I suspect that whatever sentence Pablo had, it was reduced as long as he provided this kind of service to certain political interests. After all, being a proven scammer is a good qualification for the job of spying on others.
After the 2013 elections finished (we got 1.2% of the votes), the harassment stopped. But only for a while. Somehow they knew we only had one year to present the 4,000 affiliate forms (by triplicate) required by the city law to run indefinitely or otherwise we would lose legal status. As the deadline for presenting these forms approached in November 2014, the Twitter account of the Entrepreneurial Party managed by Alejandro became active again. Every single day he constantly attacked me, non-stop from 8am till late in the night, obviously this was his job. Of course I tried blocking it but eventually I saw friends replying to him since he was also spamming my contacts with aggressive messages. By then, I had enough. I decided to contact Alejandro.
All I had was his e-mail address. I invited him to have a coffee and talk out our differences. Until then, I had never met Alejandro in person before (only his other two partners) and if there’s one thing experience taught me is that conflict is usually sorted out with a personal chat. His reply came right away with the same psychotic language he often used for the Twitter account and a shocking detail:
Sure, let’s meet. But first give me a call: 15-XX00–0000 (nice number right?)
Who the hell has a phone number with six zeroes in a row? I recently told this story to a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist and right away from the other side of the table he said: “government!”. Of course, I had to call and figure out if that number was real. By the time I’ve got that mail I was in Strasbourg participating at an event in the European Parliament. I thought that calling from abroad was safer than using my own phone line. So I gave it a try and dialed the six zeroed number.
— Hi, Alejandro speaking. Who is this?
— Hi Alejandro, it’s Santiago Siri. Do you have a minute to talk?
— Hello Santiago, sure. Can you call me back in 5 minutes?
He had a soft voice. The number was real. The fact he asked to be called back in 5 minutes could likely mean one thing in hindsight: he needed time to plug in a recorder. Over the next half hour I had one of the weirdest conversations of my life. It became clear to me that Alejandro had a technique to set the pace of the dialogue. He constantly went from praising me to insulting me: “You were able to build an incredible team that can drastically improve our democracy; but you’re a businessman with a hidden agenda; but everyone at The Net Party is really smart; but all you want is the contracts every legislator gets; but you’re great I really like the way you think; but I hate you for not letting me be part of this…” and so on. I had never had such a psychotic conversation of this nature and it seemed scripted since his speech lacked a natural fluidity. But the technique worked: after 30 minutes listening to him going from praise to insult, I had enough and screamed: “Please stop the psychotic attitude and tell me what the f*ck do you want”.
He paused for a couple of seconds and bluntly said:
— You have one month left to present the 4000 affiliation forms and we know you won’t be able to make it. Put a million pesos in an envelope for Judge Maria Romilda Servini de Cubria and we’ll get you a political party legally able to run for the 2015 elections.
My instant reaction at the time was of shock and anger: “Are you out of your mind? I’m not that kind of person and this is definitely not the reason I got into politics”. The conversation ended. As the days went by and I told this story to friends and colleagues, I could start building the full picture of what was going on. I doubt that it was literally a bribe for the Judge (who I have nothing against) but rather the intention of building a file on me so I can be pressured in the future with the audio of this conversation among other attempts. That said, this event in my life showed me the real nature of the game we were trying to play. When you get into politics everyone warns you about how dirty it can be but the truth is that it’s even worse than what you would expect. This kind of intimidation tactic also aims to weaken you psychologically so you don’t make any further moves to get into the political arena. The trolling and harassment, combined with the attempt of dividing our team, were part of a similar plan executed by the same people who seemed to work for some obscure entity that come from Argentina’s Judicial Branch.
In January 2015, the murder of federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman who accused the President of negotiating a secret deal with Iran guaranteeing a cover-up for the perpetrators of a terrorist attack the country had in 1994, revealed the level of involvement that Argentina’s Intelligence Agency (commonly known as the SIDE, our own CIA) had with the Judicial system. The Executive branch was in a silent war with Judges and the Supreme Court because it knows that this agency is not used for preserving our country from foreign attacks as it should (we don’t have any real enemies out there) but rather it is strictly used to spy on citizens and activists in the same way the Stasi did in East Germany. At the end of the day, it is institutionalized mafia what you’re dealing with and this is especially true in developing nations. Since then, my distrust for professional politicians grew: it is only those players who accept the corrupt rules the system demands that get to flourish and prosper. Not only was a file being built on me, but I was also being tested.
When the national election happened in August 2015, I got proof. At the Federal level there are only 18 political parties that have the right to participate in the election. Usually only 6 or 7 of them get most of the headlines in the media and might have a chance to win. But the remaining parties are usually weird alternatives that nobody cares much about. To my surprise, one of those parties was the Partido Popular who had as a presidential candidate one of the three “super agentes”: Mauricio. And among the candidates for Congress of that party, the name of Pablo was on the list. This meant that this unknown group actually had the legal rights over a political party and were able to sell it for a price (if they could find a potential buyer like me). Alejandro was not bluffing in the call and considering that they were able to run in a national election, something that’s extremely hard to achieve for any party, they had some very powerful connections within the Federal Court and, quite likely considering their strange allegations in the media, the Intelligence Agency.
We live in times where cynicism seems to be the norm. And telling this story, I am often met with skeptical reactions of all sort. During the 3 years I worked to get The Net Party to become a well-known brand in our local political arena, I had two strong panic attacks that were a consequence of the pressure and intimidation I was constantly facing. Developing a sense of paranoia is inevitable as you dive into this kind of deep water. Everything I have stated here are things that happened directly to me since I took it as a responsibility to protect the larger group involved from these attacks. I have kept and stored all proof of the messages received and I have witnesses that were with me during some of the described events. After all, only the paranoid survive.
There’s one thing I do know now. Ideology is bread and circus: a façade for politicians to profit on your behalf. Feeding the narrative of a left and a right is the way any powerful system is able to preserve itself. The only enemy that must be fought with full strength is corruption. And corruption does not recognize ideological configurations of any kind, it’s a property that emerges in the loopholes that every system has and aims to tempt its best players with the kind of pact with the devil we often perceive our politicians have made.
We have no option left but to beat corruption if we want to see our societies prosper. As I traveled and got to know different cultures, I became convinced that the level of corruption in the goverment makes all the difference in the quality of life you get as a citizen. Ideologies aim to fool us from the real problems, and if you’re ideological, you are flagging yourself as docile, prone for easy manipulation of established power. Ideologies are imposed by the same Caesars that aspire to rule over others by dividing and conquering, knowing too well that the better you’re able to repeat dogma, the more likely you are to not care about their real actions. After going through the experience of building a trojan horse tactic for the Congress of Buenos Aires with candidates committed to vote according to the internet with The Net Party (trojans even literally speaking), I am extremely doubtful about the idea of changing the system from within. Don’t get me wrong: Parties help to shape political consciousness when they have a clear message to tell. But the story I’m sharing here is not uncommon: I met activists from the Pirate Party in Europe that faced similar threats and saw how the post-crisis citizen grass root movements like Occupy or Podemos either die out of fear of leadership or get coopted by professional politicians willing to play that dirty game.
We need a new tactic, one that honours the full potential of the digital times we are currently living in. Because the real revolution, the one that has changed the way you look at everything surrounding your social and professional life, didn’t came from a bureaucracy that is over 200 years old. It came from the bits and bytes that are bringing you these very same words. Power to the people can be turned from promise to reality if we stop listening to the sweet-talk bred by constant surveys and start caring for our own personal sovereignty without asking for anyone’s permission.
The great San Francisco architect Buckminster Fuller said it best:
You never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Corruption at the end of the day is the consequence of a public sphere that is really not that public: deals get cut behind curtains, votes get counted by a central authority and assemblies end up gathering only those who have enough time to waste on bullshit (a.k.a. politicians that sell ideology). Talkers are never doers.
The internet needs to grow beyond the initial phase of disrupting communication and culture towards the horizon of global governance by enabling new kinds of institutions using trust technologies that can render obsolete many of the functions we take for granted from —more often than not— governments ran by corrupted interests. The internet is borderless, permissionless and in everybody’s hands. More than anything else, it is now driving our interests and making us all too familiar with problems impossible to face by single Nation-States like global warming, refugees and inequality to name a few. It’s the global commons for the generations to come.
A step in the direction of bottom-up empowerment is where we are aiming to go with democracy.earth: Join us. Even if you are one of the three “super agentes”.
