Mike Leigh's film "Naked" (1993) can be seen as a portrait of the English underbelly during the late Thatcher era. However, if we strip away the sociological lens, what remains is a figure that resonates with crypto culture: a wandering intellectual who has rejected the state, the institution of residency, and faith in humanity.
ForkLog delves into why Johnny is not just a misanthrope with a Manchester accent, but an early prototype of a cypherpunk without the internet.
A Fugitive Without an Address
Johnny appears on screen in a Manchester alley—he steals a car, drives to London, and breaks into his ex-girlfriend's apartment. What follows is two days of wandering through the night city, conversing with random people, and making no effort to settle anywhere.
Leigh portrays a character who has consciously erased himself from official records. There’s no job, no home, no documents in sight. Johnny lives outside the state's address book—not due to a lack of stability, but as a deliberate stance.
This behavior can easily be mistaken for asociality, yet it is driven by a total rejection: of registration, tax residency, and participation in a deal where loyalty is exchanged for state protection. Thirty years later, a similar stance will be adopted by digital nomads and advocates of self-custody—only instead of a stolen Skoda, they have a wallet with a twelve-word seed phrase.
1990s cypherpunks articulated the same principle: sovereignty begins where mandatory transparency to authority ends. Timothy May wrote in the "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" (1988) about technology that would "completely change the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax, and control economic interactions."
Eric Hughes noted in the "Cypherpunk Manifesto" (1993) that privacy is the right to selectively reveal oneself to the world. Johnny chooses not to reveal himself to anyone except for random interlocutors he will never see again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1axEqfItxg
The Number of the Beast as a Foreboding Interface
Johnny spends half of his screen time talking. His monologue about barcodes, the number 666, the Book of Revelation, and the inevitable collapse of civilization, delivered to a security guard in an empty office building, is typical conspiracy theorist rambling from the end of the last millennium.
But if we replace "the number of the beast" with "Digital ID" and "chip in the hand" with "KYC linkage to a wallet," the text no longer sounds archaic. Johnny's fear is the fear that a person's identity will be reduced to a set of data.
One path leads to state CBDCs with programmable restrictions: the ECB continues the preparatory phase for the digital euro, aiming for a launch in 2029.
The other path involves public blockchains, where identity is reduced to a key rather than a passport. Johnny would be horrified by both options, but at least the second allows for the possibility of not revealing one's real name.
Intellectual Squatting
The cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope lived in a barrel, spat on conventions, and asked passersby uncomfortable questions. Johnny occupies other people's sofas, stairwells, and empty offices—doing exactly the same.
As mentioned earlier, the security guard in the empty building listens to his sermon about the end of times. A waitress in a café hears his musings on the futility of labor. A random woman at a window listens to his monologue about printing and control over knowledge.
This is intellectual squatting. It’s not about seizing territory, but capturing the attention of a conversation partner unprepared for such discussions.
The crypto community behaved similarly. The Cypherpunks mailing lists, the Bitcointalk forum, early posts by Hal Finney and Nick Szabo—all of this was an incursion into academic economics from the perspective of a street philosopher.
By 2026, this intervention had institutionalized: spot Bitcoin ETFs in the U.S., crypto regulation in many countries.
A Prophet Without Followers
The film ends on an ambiguous note: a wounded Johnny limps away into an empty London alley.
This is perhaps the main divergence from crypto culture—and simultaneously its greatest reproach. Blockchain was conceived as a means to record what would otherwise vanish: a transaction, a signature, the fact of a document's existence at a specific moment.
An immutable ledger is a technical solution to Johnny's problem. The thoughts he shares with random people could have remained a timestamped record in the world of public blockchains, accessible to anyone a hundred years later.
Johnny despises not only the state but also the very idea of preserving oneself. His nihilism runs deeper than that of any crypto-anarchist: an anarchist wants to build an alternative, while Johnny wants to build nothing.
The Grimace of the Future
The 1993 film predicted not specific technologies, but a type of relationship with the system where the only reliable asset is the ability to disappear from the registry. Bitcoin, private L2s, decentralized identifiers, self-custody wallets—these are the technical realizations of this stance.
The grimace with which Johnny looks at his conversation partners in the film is not the malice of a marginal figure, but the expression of someone who sees the structure from the inside and understands that an exit exists. Just not for everyone and not right away.