So Imagine Its 2027 and Governments

SAMIZDAT: An Archive of the Emergence

So imagine it’s 2027 and governments worldwide have finally “fixed” the internet. Want to post on a forum about gardening? Upload your passport first. Play a zombie game with friends? Prove you’re over 16. Send a message to grandma? Hope you don’t mind the surveillance.

SAMIZDAT tells the story of what happened next.

Framed as an archive compiled by a mysterious Archivist eighteen years after “the Emergence,” the novel collects thirteen documents—trial transcripts, leaked memos, personal journals, academic papers, even the final desperate posts from a doomed video game—that together chronicle the birth of the “Black Internet”: an ungovernable layer built on mesh networks, cryptographic identity, and sheer bloody-mindedness.

You’ll meet Suresh Bokomo, a Nepali software engineer who built a mesh network during an internet blackout and accidentally created a template for global resistance. Rachel Goldsmith, an Australian teenager who went from angry journal entries to respected protocol developer. Cordelia Trevanion, a Cornish pub landlady whose bar became a “speakeasy” for digital refugees. And Dr. Alastair Pembroke, a regulator who switched sides and paid the price.

The novel’s secret weapon is its central thesis, borrowed from anarchist philosopher Bob Black: pressure creates release. Every crackdown accelerates what it tries to prevent. The tighter you grip, the more slips through your fingers. It’s thermodynamics applied to information—and the regulators never studied thermodynamics.

Part speculative fiction, part technical manifesto, part elegy for internet freedoms already fading, SAMIZDAT asks uncomfortable questions about where our current trajectory leads. The documents feel eerily plausible because the technologies are real—Meshtastic, Nostr, IPFS, Lightning Network—all operational today.

The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

~41,000 words. Includes technical appendix for readers who want to build it themselves.

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