Human governance in the metaverse: Part One
For the first time in history, technology is playing a crucial role in enabling decentralized governance in the cloud by facilitating distributed decision-making processes, securing data storage and management, and enabling individuals to control their own identity information.
Various technological innovations provide new opportunities for collaboration, decision-making, and trust-building without the need for centralized control. I went into detail on these points in my two prior articles on decentralization. Let’s have an overview on the status of global governance today and the evolved possibilities that await.
The authoritarian state
Authoritarianism exists across most all nation-states, ie, governments. It is just a matter of degree. Chinese authoritarianism is overt while the form in the US, UK, and EU is covert. We may see a world where it becomes increasingly difficult for not just Chinese people to leave the country or move funds out of the digital yuan ecosystem without CCP permission.
We got a deep look into how COVID restricted movement. In the future, we may have a WeChat system of red/yellow/green travel restrictions based on health status, new lockdowns based on ‘X’ health scare, and passport restrictions together with a surveillance state that can track people globally. In China, the WeChat super app on which the Chinese highly rely as it connects them to most basic services can unperson an individual while a digital yuan then freezes their assets.
The US is far from innocent. As Balaji Srinivasan writes, “The US does warrantless surveillance via the NSA, unconstitutional search and seizure via the TSA, arbitrary confiscation of property via civil forfeiture, censorship of political keywords just like WeChat does, and has pushed for disinformation agencies, civilian disarmament, digital censorship, and the like. The US establishment copied the CCP on lockdown, without ever really admitting it was doing so, and funded the lab that may have leaked the coronavirus. It’s also bombed and destabilized many countries around the world. And if we’re honest, over the last two decades, the US has killed and displaced far more people abroad than the CCP has.”
The US has copied the CCP’s crackdown on speech. The Atlantic ran this article on how big tech controls what we are allowed to say. COVID certainly underscored this point as the mere mention of the word negatively affected a video’s viewership on YouTube.
The US will launch FedNow on July 1, 2023 which will likely pave the way to its CBDC. A CBDC can be used to control one’s spending, rate of interest, and other key variables. Knowing what’s coming, CZ who heads Binance converted its stablecoin BUSD into BTC and BNB. USDC is fully regulated but could be turned off if the US wishes, replaced by the US’s own CBDC.
Same goes for USDT.
This is why Balaji is urging people to convert their assets into BTC since the US government could remove fiat-to-crypto onramps or limit the amount allowed to be transacted from USD into other currencies, whether fiat or crypto. That said, China has tried to do so without success as wealthy Chinese use various yuan-to-BTC onramps to convert and move offshore more than the maximum allowed by the Chinese government.
The Network versus Nation State
The Network (cryptography) is the new Leviathan, separate from God (religion) and State (government). It is the people, the digital land with its interactions (metaverse), the law (cryptographic governance), and the capital (Bitcoin).
In the network state, people digitally migrate fluidly between platforms, unlike the physical nation state where movement is often restricted by passport or during times of COVID, quarantine and lockdown. In the nation state, it’s location, location, location that determines value while in the network state, it’s connection, connection, connection.
Any group can elect to become digitally cloaked for privacy purposes; you can’t hit what you can’t see which is why Jason Lowery of MIT explained why Bitcoin is the greatest form of defence; odds of a hot war diminish as more value accrues into digital forms such as Bitcoin.
In the network state, each person can belong to as many groups or platforms as they wish. Laws can be enforced to retain order just as the big tech companies of today do. But instead of Big Tech controlling, censoring, and de-platforming an individual, the network state has a system of checks and balances. Money, communication, homes, factories, drones, robots, etc can now all be controlled digitally as most are going online via digital registries; private key cryptography creates sovereignty which prevents outsiders from interfering.
This drains power from nation states such as the US and PRC who centralize the power of their big tech companies giving them unlimited power to surveil, de-platform, and freeze the assets of anyone or millions at will. Indeed, private keys empower the individual while decentralizing Big Tech and Big Government. Each person has the choice on which platforms(s) they wish to join or exit.
Unlike nation states which control those who reside in their physical territory, network states can only control those who have opted onto their platform. Each new network state is deployed non violently unlike how land grabs have occurred throughout history.
Any network state with favourable conditions attracts citizens. An oppressive, dictatorial network state would likely lose followers. Each platform within the network state is far more democratic because 100% of its members have chosen to be there, rather than in the nation state where 51% can impose their will on an unwilling 49%. #POTUS
The network state replaces the military since, as stated above, you can’t hit what you can’t see. Further, voters can guide any platform’s direction since DAOs are directed from the bottom up rather than top down. While cyberwarfare will replace military hot wars, advanced forms of digital defense will be created. While it has been said that everything has been downstream from culture and enforced by the police and military, everything in the future will be downstream from lines of code and enforced by cryptography.
Each person’s private keys such as ENS’s .eth domain names will hold their digital belongings. This includes their crypto holdings, their digital footprints and creations, their loans, their credit history, their property deeds, their physical belongings, their medical records, and so on. Each key gives the owner access to say their car or their home.
Public blockchains can connect different platforms/groups within the network state, facilitating economic and social cooperation. Bitcoin or any equivalent, though so far there is no equivalent, is the equivalent of fiat that exists in the network state but unlike traditional fiat, it prevents the printing of money and seizure of funds.
The Network versus Netwoke State
The dawning of the network state is upon us, ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized, starting in the cloud then populating the land, from digital to physical. This is the sovereign state facilitated by Web3/metaverse/blockchain/AI where the individual holds the control and the power over themselves while owning their output, unbeholden to any nation state or netwoke state.
For millennia, such states have used religion as a moral high ground to control behaviour. Saintly selflessness is upheld by the state while those at the top control the capital. Martial power in the form of prisons, police, and military are then used to manage control if necessary.
The netwoke state invokes “morality” to shame, cancel, and de-platform those who go against the woke cultural narrative. It is sophisticated evil promoted in the name of good. The exponential growth of DAOs, DApps, DeFi, DEXs, and NFTs suggest the great reset will not be a dystopian world of maximized control and corruption but rather a more decentralised world of individual empowerment run on Web3 with maximised freedom of choice, freedom to be true to one’s nature, freedom from censorship, freedom of speech, freedom to transact value, and freedom from the cancel culture. Political correctness, being woke, and virtue signalling are all hateful, divisive, and exclusionary. They are actions taken against others cloaked in an illusory, false armour of virtue.
The New York Times holds center court as the MSM communication device of choice where free speech is controlled and censored. While communists claim they are upholding a great moral cause, MSM journalists in the US claim similar to justify the doxxing of citizens and the invasion of people’s privacy.
The Tech State
Within the nation state we have the tech state. Tech companies have become de facto privatised governments. As Naval Ravikant once said, Google coders hold all the power because they decide where websites appear in searches. This now extends to all the majors such as Facebook and YouTube. They hold the power to determine what people can and cannot do in the digital world. The push by the US establishment to wokify the big tech companies is no coincidence. Decentralised Web3 digital worlds are the antidote to this form of control.
In part 2, I will discuss in more detail why the network state is the next logical evolution to current forms of governance.
(͡:B ͜ʖ ͡:B)
Dr Chris Kacher, PhD nuclear physics UC Berkeley/record breaking KPMG audited accts in stocks & crypto/bestselling author/top 40 charted musician/blockchain fintech specialist. Co-founder of Virtue of Selfish Investing, TriQuantum Technologies, and Hanse Digital Access. Dr Kacher bought his first Bitcoin at just over $10 in January-2013 and contributed to early Ethereum dev meetings in London hosted by Vitalik Buterin. His metrics have called every major top & bottom in Bitcoin since 2011 to within a few weeks. He was up in 2018 vs the avg performing crypto hedge fund (-54%) [PwC] and is up well ahead of Bitcoin & alt coins over the cycles as capital is force fed into the top performing alt coins while weaker ones are sold.
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