Anarchism as a Shopping List
Benn Jordan's guide to privacy-oriented gadgets is structured as a gift guide for "people who don't trust the government," but it functions as something more ambitious: a primer on decentralized technology wrapped inside a surprisingly thorough history of anarchist movements. The video-turned-article toggles between step-by-step hardware builds and philosophical interludes about the Taborites, the Zapatistas, and the selective application of American justice. The juxtaposition is deliberate, and it works better than it has any right to.
Jordan frames the piece with a disarming definition of anarchism that sidesteps the molotov-cocktail caricature most audiences carry in their heads.
Anarchism is formerly defined as a philosophy that resists institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or hierarchy.
From there, the article builds outward in concentric rings: practical devices, the philosophies they embody, and the historical communities that tried to live those philosophies at scale. Each gadget becomes an entry point into a larger argument about individual autonomy in an age of pervasive surveillance.
Meshtastic and the Case for Off-Grid Communication
The centerpiece of the guide is Meshtastic, a decentralized mesh network that uses radio signals for encrypted messaging without requiring an internet connection, SIM card, or any form of registration. Jordan walks through two builds: a covert solar-powered node disguised inside a lawn light for roughly thirty to fifty dollars, and a more powerful community repeater station for around a hundred dollars.
The practical case Jordan makes is compelling. He points to Hurricane Helene as proof of concept, noting that Meshtastic users in North Carolina used the network to coordinate community aid when conventional communication infrastructure failed.
The idea that a $30 investment could keep you in touch with not only friends and family members, but the outside world in the event that a catastrophe knocks out power or connectivity isn't exactly prepper shit.
This is the article's strongest rhetorical move: positioning anti-surveillance technology not as the province of paranoid ideologues but as basic disaster preparedness. The framing neutralizes the most obvious objection -- that ordinary people do not need encrypted off-grid communication -- by grounding it in a recent, widely covered natural disaster. Whether the average reader will actually solder a WiseBlock to a battery terminal inside a lawn ornament is another question, but the argument that they should at least consider it lands with force.
A counterpoint worth raising: mesh networks face a bootstrapping problem. Their utility scales with adoption, and adoption requires a critical mass of users who have already invested in hardware. In rural areas where the technology would arguably be most useful during disasters, the node density may be too sparse to relay messages reliably. Jordan acknowledges this indirectly by building a repeater station, but the chicken-and-egg challenge of mesh networks has historically limited their real-world impact outside of enthusiast communities.
Surveillance Detection as Consumer Electronics
The guide's second major thread concerns detecting surveillance infrastructure. Jordan highlights the WiSpy device, an ESP32-based tool running firmware called "Flock U" that can detect and log Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras. He also covers repurposed mobile hotspot devices that can detect IMSI catchers -- the fake cell towers used by law enforcement and ICE to track individuals through their phones.
Jordan's explanation of how IMSI catchers work is notably precise for a piece pitched at a general audience. He walks through the protocol downgrade attack, explains why older cellular standards are more vulnerable, and delivers a pointed observation about the legal framework surrounding their use.
If you or I did something like this in America, we would be violating quite a lot of cyber security laws as well as the federal wiretap act.
The double standard he identifies is real. IMSI catchers operate as man-in-the-middle attacks that can intercept communications from thousands of uninvolved bystanders, yet their use by federal agencies often proceeds with minimal judicial oversight. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented this extensively. Jordan's contribution is making the detection side accessible: a twenty-dollar device from eBay, flashed with open-source firmware, that turns green, white, or red based on the integrity of nearby cell connections.
Skeptics might note that detection is not the same as protection. Knowing that a fake cell tower is nearby does not prevent the surveillance from occurring -- it merely alerts the target, who must then decide whether to power down their phone entirely. For undocumented individuals whom Jordan explicitly frames as targets, the practical calculus of carrying a detection device versus simply leaving a phone at home is not straightforward.
Historical Interludes That Earn Their Place
What elevates the piece above a standard tech review is its historical anchoring. Jordan interleaves the gadget segments with three extended passages on anarchist communities: the fifteenth-century Taborites who survived five Catholic crusades, the Zapatista autonomous zones in Chiapas, and the sentencing disparity between anarchist protester Casey Gunnin and January 6th participant David Dempsey.
The Zapatista section is particularly well-drawn. Jordan describes their three-tiered community justice system -- local mediation, regional investigation, and restorative punishment -- as a functioning alternative to state-administered law enforcement. He does not romanticize it uncritically, noting the ultimate dissolution of the autonomous municipalities under sustained pressure from the Mexican government and cartel violence.
So, in a region teeming with poverty, substance abuse, and drug cartels, even by national standards, how is it that this area of Chiapas remained one of the safest places in Mexico without a single police officer or prison?
The Zapatista principles Jordan enumerates -- proposing rather than imposing ideas, prioritizing the vulnerable, constructing rather than destroying -- map cleanly onto the open-source hardware ethos that runs through the gadget recommendations. The parallel is implicit rather than belabored, which gives it more weight.
The sentencing comparison between Gunnin and Dempsey is the article's sharpest political statement. Gunnin received twenty years for burning a shrub near a federal courthouse during a Gaza protest. Dempsey received a full pardon after physically assaulting police officers at the Capitol on January 6th. Jordan's conclusion is blunt: the eighteen-year difference in outcome has nothing to do with the severity of the acts and everything to do with the political alignment of the actors.
The Honest Failure
In a genre dominated by curated success, Jordan's inclusion of his failed attempt to build a Jellyfin music server on a travel router is refreshingly candid. After days of attempting to run Docker containers on a GL.iNet router with limited RAM, he concedes defeat. But he frames the failure as generative, noting that the process taught him about router firmware, recovery modes, and the manufacturer's unusual commitment to repairability.
I simply cannot emphasize how much cooler and less wasteful the world would be if the FCC or FTC required every electronic device to have documentation and open access like this.
The right-to-repair argument surfaces naturally from a failed project rather than arriving as a thesis statement, which makes it more persuasive. Jordan is not arguing for open hardware in the abstract; he is arguing for it because he bricked a router and the manufacturer gave him the tools to fix it.
Bottom Line
Jordan's guide succeeds because it refuses to treat technology and philosophy as separate domains. The gadgets are not endpoints but illustrations of a broader argument about autonomy, surveillance, and the gap between the rights governments claim to protect and the tools they deploy against their own populations. The historical interludes ground the tech recommendations in something larger than hobbyist enthusiasm. The piece is overlong in places -- the satellite weather station section, while genuinely interesting, could sustain its own standalone article -- but the cumulative effect is a surprisingly cohesive argument that decentralized, open-source technology is not a niche interest but a civic necessity. Whether readers act on the specific recommendations matters less than whether they absorb the underlying premise: that the infrastructure of personal autonomy is now cheap enough to build at home, and the reasons to do so are mounting.