“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”
~Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village
Humanity is swimming in a sea of Nation States and throughout much of history has had little to no available anti-environment which would allow it to perceive this. We are embedded in a matrix in which the State is expected to provide a solution for all of society's problems. This governance modality has repeatedly demonstrated its ineptitude and is fundamentally incapable of providing solutions to any problem because it is the problem. The solution can only be a new model of governance, an anti-environment that exposes and renders irrelevant the dying paradigm of Nation State governance.
Emergent Properties of Being
Personal responsibility and sovereignty are powerful fundamental elements of embodiment as human beings. These are the very properties of being that motivate and enable us to create, to innovate, to invent, to solve problems, to have empathy for other beings, and to make choices towards our own happiness. What we do with these powerful properties of being lays the foundation upon which the rest of society is built. To the reality of the personal responsibility and sovereignty that arise from embodiment we can respond with either love or with fear. Love enables and empowers while fear restricts and restrains.
The Case Against Nation States
The Nation State model of governance is predicated upon a collective fear response to the reality of our personal responsibility and sovereignty. We outsource these properties of being to the Nation State for it to manage. When we outsource these properties of being to government, we are relinquishing control over the very elements that make us human beings. In the execution of the social contract between citizen and government we are minimized, stripped of much of our power and of our essence of being.
This social contract between citizen and government renders us subservient to the institution of government as it requires that citizens repay the government for its services, for handling the sovereignty and personal responsibility of its citizenry. In this way we are born into debt and servitude and mature into a scenario in which we are expected to earn a monetary income in order to repay this debt. The resulting social fabric pressures us to choose work that yields an adequate monetary income in lieu of its productivity or alignment with our talents, passions, and gifts. It is increasingly rare and a luxury for an individual to be doing work that yields an adequate monetary income, is productive, and is resonant with the individual’s talents, gifts, and passions.
In this sea of Nation States in which we swim we’ve reduced ourselves to pseudo-human beings. We’ve sacrificed our personal responsibility and sovereignty to the Nation State. In doing so we’ve created a centralized institution which return these elements of being to us in a standardized, tyranny-of-the-majority and oligarchy-approved package. The glue that holds this arrangement together is made of fear and violence.
A society built upon fear and violence cannot thrive and will certainly give rise to increased suffering and manufactured disparity over time.
Anarchy is for Lovers
A society built upon love honors responsibility and sovereignty as emergent properties of being and seeks to nurture these properties rather than restrict and control them. Love recognizes that human beings are designed to create and to steward the creation that has preceded us. A thriving civilization responding to the reality of personal responsibility and sovereignty with love allows for a social fabric to arise through voluntary co-creation. This is anarchy.
For quite some time now anarchy has been cast aside as an unrealistic utopian ideal as we've continued to submit to the fear and violence leveraged by the Nation State paradigm. For the anarchy within each of us to come forth, however, only a framework by which voluntary co-creation can effectively manifest is needed.
Decentralized Technologies as Tools of Anarchy
Humanity now has widespread access to a first generation anti-environment which continues to enable more of us to perceive as it is the Nation State context in which we’ve been living. Computer technology and the internet have made human beings across the globe more connected than ever before and enabled access to unprecedented quantities and varieties of information, thoughts, and ideas that were previously accessible only through prolonged and focused research. We are now able to interact directly with our peers without physical proximity. We are building a collective awareness of the ways in which technology can help us birth a new way of being.
Although it was the internet that opened the floodgates, it is not without its drawbacks. Its infrastructure has become increasingly centralized and therefore prone to access limitations and censorship. Nations States use it for surveillance, data extraction, public opinion management and curated information dissemination. Large conglomerates use it to mine data, target advertisements, and condition consumers. It’s becoming apparent that if technology is to continue to serve as an anti-environment that decentralization of its infrastructure is paramount.
Decentralized infrastructure paired with cryptography allows us to control our own data, interact trustlessly on a peer-to-peer basis, and restrict impediments such as censorship, information curation, and access limitations. It provides a platform upon which humanity can build new models of social and economic exchange, compete with and make obsolete the dying Nation State paradigm, and begin to reclaim its personal responsibility and sovereignty.
Enter Bitnation Pangea
Bitnation was conceived in 2014 and presently consists of over 100,000 lines of code drawing from an impressive array of decentralized technologies such as mesh networking, Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), InterPlanetary Filesystem (IPFS), and Ethereum smart contracts. After more than three years of intensive design, research, testing, and development its core infrastructure is currently that of a smartphone chat-based poly-legal blockchain jurisdiction known as Pangea powered by an ERC20 Ethereum token, the Pangea Arbitration Token (PAT).
The first service offered on Pangea allows users to create and join Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nations (DBVNs). Each DBVN will have its own Constitution and operate according to its own code of laws. Eventually, Pangea will facilitate group and personal chats wherein users can write peer-to-peer smart contracts, resolve disputes and access additional governance services provided by third-party decentralized applications.
PAT will be awarded when users and the Nations they create fulfill agreements with one another, resolve disputes and otherwise provide quality governance services. Via this mechanism, both human and automated artificial intelligence reputation and arbitration systems, as well as arbitrator code of law registries, will incentivize contract compliance.
As more governance services are added to Bitnation’s ecosystem and more people learn how to implement them into their lives and communities, we will begin to witness and experience the incredible utility of a framework that facilitates voluntary co-creation and self-governance. The presence of competition in the market for governance will make the Nation States increasingly irrelevant and give way to a new paradigm of being built upon love, nurturing our emeregent properties of being, and flourishing human potential.
The future is governance, not governments. The future is Bitnation.