I’ve been sitting with this question since May 2025, when I first learned about Anarchism from a political science perspective from a podcast (kudos @eschulmann). Surprisingly, I immediately saw many similarities to my daily life as someone building a DePIN startup. And the answer is way more uncomfortable than most crypto people want to admit.
We love to talk about decentralization as a purely technical concept. Nodes, consensus, permissionless protocols. Clean engineering. But DePIN isn’t just engineering or at least not only technical engineering. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we’re building something that has a 200-year-old philosophical playbook.
That playbook is called anarchism. Not the chaos-and-Molotov-cocktails Hollywood version. The real thing. The political philosophy that’s been arguing for voluntary cooperation, horizontal organization, and the elimination of coercive middlemen since before your great-great-grandparents were born. And DePIN fits it like a glove.
Smart contracts are 180 years late
In 1842, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the father of mutualism, proposed an economy built entirely on voluntary contracts between autonomous actors. No landlords extracting rent. No state enforcing compliance. Just free individuals agreeing on terms and exchanging value directly. In 2025, we call that a smart contract. Proudhon was mass-adopted 180 years too early. He just didn’t have Solidity.
Then there’s Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist and not a memecoin, who argued that cooperation, not competition, drives human progress. His whole framework was “mutual aid”: people voluntarily pooling resources for collective benefit without anyone holding a gun to their head. Sound familiar? That’s literally what a DePIN node operator does. Sharing idle bandwidth, spare storage and unused compute for token rewards. We didn’t invent mutual aid. We just rebranded it as tokenomics.
Federated syndicalism with better UX
In 1936, during the Spanish Revolution, anarcho-syndicalists organized workers into decentralized, federated unions. Each union governed its own industry. Together they ran factories, farms, entire cities. No bosses. No state. Just federated coordination between self-governing collectives.
Now look at Helium’s subDAO architecture. $IOT governs IoT. $MOBILE governs 5G. $HNT sits as the meta-governance layer, the “One Big Union” of the ecosystem. Each sub-network operates autonomously while contributing to the whole. And with HIP 141 in 2025, they streamlined everything into a veHNT-only voting system. Federated governance is scaling.
That’s not a loose analogy. That’s the exact same organizational blueprint.
Or look at Filecoin’s Data DAOs, where communities collectively curate, govern, and monetize massive datasets using the Filecoin Virtual Machine. Instead of a single corporation hoarding your data to train proprietary AI, the original creators govern its usage and share the economic value. Filecoin is even launching its Onchain Cloud in 2026, making programmable decentralized storage more accessible than ever. If that’s not workers seizing the means of (data) production, I don’t know what is.
The uncomfortable checklist
Here’s where it gets real. DePIN checks every single box of classical anarchism:
- Voluntary association? Permissionless networks: anyone joins, anywhere, no gatekeeper.
- No coercive authority? Code is law. No CEO, no board, no regulator decides who participates.
- Workers own the means of production? Node operators own the hardware.
- No extractive middlemen? Smart contracts replace corporate rent-seekers.
Yes, the parallels might be a stretch and a bit idealistic for the reality of the DePIN industry. But they’re following the same playbook.
Simply put, every infrastructure or software decision is in fact a political decision. Who controls the network? Who captures the value? Who gets censored? When you decentralize a telecom network across 80+ countries with no “central” authority, that IS a political act. Whether you call it that or not.
Now the part that upsets the true believers
In 1911, German-Italian sociologist Robert Michels wrote something that still haunts every democratic movement ever built. He called it the Iron Law of Oligarchy: every complex organization, no matter how fiercely democratic at birth, inevitably becomes an oligarchy.
His reasoning was brutal and simple. Mass coordination is logistically impossible at scale. Most people are apathetic about complex governance decisions. And a specialized elite always emerges to fill the vacuum.
DePIN is not immune.
Token-weighted voting means one token, one vote. Not one person, one vote. One dollar, one vote. That’s not anarchy. That’s plutocracy with extra steps.
When VC whales holding massive token supply can dictate governance proposals, manipulating emission schedules, collateral requirements, technical roadmaps, we haven’t eliminated the ruling class. We’ve replaced suits with wallets.
And then there’s epistemic centralization. Modifying cryptographic protocols and tokenomics requires insanely specialized knowledge. The average hotspot owner or bandwidth contributor simply doesn’t have the time or technical literacy to audit a complex GitHub pull request. So governance defaults to core developers and official Foundations, entities that, whatever their stated mission, operate as a de facto technocratic ruling class. They control the narrative, vet which proposals reach a vote, and hold the multi-sig keys to the treasury.
“Code is law” until a catastrophic bug hits and the engineering elite orchestrates a hard fork (right, Vitalik?). Then we discover that the ultimate authority doesn’t live in the code. It lives in the social consensus of the people who write the code.
So is DePIN anarchy?
Opinion: DePIN is the most sophisticated attempt in human history to build anarchist infrastructure at (inter-)planetary scale. The cryptography works. The incentive design mostly works. The permissionless coordination works. Protocols like Filecoin, Helium, and Titan Network have conclusively proven that complex, global infrastructure can be bootstrapped and operated without the state or corporate monopolies.
AND it’s already falling into the same traps every anarchist movement has fallen into since 1840. Token plutocracy. Technocratic elites. Regulatory capture. Commercial dependency on the very systems it sought to replace.
Both things are true. Simultaneously.
The real question isn’t whether DePIN is anarchy. The real question is: can DePIN learn from 200 years of anarchist failures and actually solve the governance problem? Can we build systems where one-token-one-vote doesn’t inevitably mean plutocracy? Where technical complexity doesn’t inevitably produce an unelected ruling class? Where commercial pragmatism doesn’t inevitably swallow the original mission?
Because the technology is ready. What breaks every time is the human part.
Fellow DePIN builders, we’re not just building infrastructure. Whether we like it or not, we’re running a 200-year-old political experiment with mass adoption potential.
Maybe it’s time we start reading the playbook.