The Noise Floor of Latent Dissent // Harry Halpin – :: DIFFRACTIONS ::

4/30/2026

The Noise Floor of Latent Dissent // Harry Halpin

This is an interview with Harry Halpin. Harry Halpin  is a technologist and philosopher who moved from building Indymedia during the anti-globalisation protests to earning a Ph.D. in Informatics under the philosopher Andy Clark and to working under Tim Berners-Lee at the W3C/MIT, where he led the Web Cryptography API. As mass surveillance escalated after the Snowden revelations, Halpin co-founded Nym Technologies as its CEO, steering the development of a decentralised, blockchain-incentivised mixnet designed to withstand global passive adversaries that can monitor the entire Internet, like the NSA or Palantir. His role at Nym fuses cryptographic research, cryptoeconomic design, and an explicitly political commitment to embedding freedom-preserving rights directly into internet infrastructure.

DIFFRACTIONS : Could you share the story behind the creation of Nym? What were the individual backgrounds, interests, or hobbies that intersected and ultimately led to the development of Nym? How did the diverse perspectives shape the project’s vision and direction?

Harry Halpin : The genesis of Nym really comes from a desire to rebuild the foundations of the internet in such a way that they enshrine fundamental rights into the architecture of the internet itself. This is important because the internet is incredibly powerful – perhaps the most powerful technological development since the Gutenberg Press. Just as the release of the Gutenberg Press triggered various civil wars and even the collapse and reformulation of empires and nation-states, similarly the internet is causing massive political, philosophical, and ultimately ontological upheaval in the world.

Nym is an attempt to graft onto the internet a system that makes it impossible for someone to surveil you or control you. This is in line with the ideals of philosophy since the time of Socrates, and to be frank, the Enlightenment – the concept of the autonomy of reason, the ability to be critical, to reinvent yourself despite past actions, and the ability to take power over your own agency. Having a permanent record of your activities and those activities being constantly under surveillance for the purposes of control is incompatible with the ideals of the Enlightenment and many other cultures. We’re trying to deliver not just privacy-enhancing technologies, but technologies that preserve and even spread human freedom.

I became interested in this from quite a young age. As an undergraduate student, I was originally a systems administrator at the University of North Carolina, and hosted my first website on Sunsite, the original place on the Internet that let you download GNU/Linux. At that point in the United States and across the world, we had the anti-globalization movement, which was based on the premise that another world was possible. The primary problem we encountered was that when we had a protest, the mainstream media would silence us by simply not reporting on these protests. So many of my friends, in particular Evan Henshaw-Plath (also known as “Rabble”) and others, helped build a network of websites called Indymedia that allowed anyone to publish news, and I started the site for North Carolina Indymedia on Sunsite. Indymedia stood for “Independent Media.” It was maybe the first social media site that allowed anyone to report on live news. Eventually its core concepts were commercialized and led to Twitter thanks to Evan Henshaw-Plath and Blaine Cook, former Indymedia volunteers who were founding engineers at Odeo and Twitter. I wrote some of this story down with Evan in “From Indymedia to Tahrir Square.”

After I received my doctorate, I started working for Tim Berners-Lee on web standards for protocols, which I believed at the time was one of the best ways for us to effectively evolve the web into a more superior form of knowledge sharing, which would then in turn enable new forms of collective intelligence. That’s the original vision of Tim Berners-Lee, Douglas Engelbart, and J.C.R. Licklider, a vision that I found very compelling. Their seemingly apolitical vision of the Semantic Web, human augmentation and human-machine symbiosis is ultimately political as it would allow both the decentralization of power via the enabling of humans to work together in a vastly more effective manner across time and space. Through my activities as an anarchist and activist, I knew humanity was facing problems that seemed unsolvable, that seemed to go beyond the grasp of our current technology and of what is even thinkable by individual humans – problems such as the climate crisis and other species-level catastrophes.

As artificial intelligence started taking off, I built an early language model as part of my doctorate as part of a paper with Victor Lavrenko. After my experiments with machine-learning, including a short stint at...