Is the state DEAD? Farewell to Westphalia with Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow
In this episode I spoke to Jarrad Hope, founder of Logos, and Peter Ludlow, philosopher and research advisor at the University of Hong Kong, and co-authors of the new book 'Farewell to Westphalia.' In the book they detail the historical trajectory of nation states and what they perceive to be their failures as well as propose an alternative to Network States through Blockchain Communities. We discuss critiques of traditional nation states, the potential of blockchain for decentralized govern...
Top Keywords
No salient keywords identified yet for this episode.
Transcript
I saw this message come across from this guy, Butalic Uterin, about, oh, he wants to launch this coin. I said, well, that sounds cool. So I just sent a Bitcoin to him. I used to be into the piracy scene and PWP file sharing scene, and it was just everything that
sparked my imagination.
It's like Chiquita and Dole Bananas both controls. They hire paramilitary forces to maintain order. So it was like literally a banana republic inside of a certain region of Colombia.
A libertarian that I interviewed about this before actually said that he has, like, a weird state jealousy where his desire
for states is to build a different state. I think it's his quote or mantra, privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful.
This episode is sponsored by NIM, the world's most private VPN that protects your Internet traffic and metadata. Unlike traditional VPNs, NIM uses a decentralized mix net to scramble your Internet data, hiding who you're talking to, when, and how often. You can switch between full mix net mode for maximum anonymity or a faster VPN mode for everyday use. Pay in crypto or fiat, and even your payment stays anonymous thanks to z k powered anonymous credentials. Take back control of your online life at nim.com. Sign up today using the code blockchain socialist and get an extra month for free. Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialists podcast. And for this episode, I have Jared Hope, who is the founder of Logos, and Peter Ludlow, a philosopher and research adviser at the University of Hong Kong. And they are both the coauthors of a recent book called Farewell to Westphalia. It is a kind of, I guess, you know, on this podcast, I've covered a lot of content around the network states, my critiques of it, the alternatives that we propose as well in accordionations or network nations that Primavera de Filippi and I have been working on. And so this book is really interesting to me because it's coming out, you know, after the network states by people who are, you you know, at least Jared, who is kind of like, I guess, I could say crypto OG as they like to say, and Peter Ludlow, who is an actual philosopher unlike Balaji Srinivasan. And when you look at it and you read through it, you know, I can say I I didn't get to finish the book, but it's very obvious there it's a lot more robust and it's a lot meatier than the actual network state book. So I was really happy to see that, and I was able to read through tidbits of it. And so, yeah, I came to or I brought these guys on to to talk a little bit about it. And so maybe as a kinda starting point, I would love to hear maybe the introduction to what brought you guys together to write this book. I think it's, you know, interesting to see a a crypto founder as well as a philosopher come together to to write a book like this.
Yeah. I mean, well, thanks for having us. Yeah. I think, like, to answer that question, like, what brought us together, I reached out to Peter. I think it was probably out of the blue for him. But for me, he was, yeah, he was hugely impactful on my life. So I used to be I will probably get into these things later on, but I used to be into the piracy scene and P2P file sharing scene and BBSs and freaking in my formative years. And, you know, found out about these sort of, you know, sort of cypherpunks and crypto anarchy, these sort of ideologies, which are very attractive to me at the time, you know, as well as libertarianism, I guess. And within that sort of field, you know, there was a lot of talk of, like, libertarian in cyberspace and, like, the idea of creating, like, these virtual zones in cyberspace. Space. And I came across this book that Peter had edited, Cryptography, Cyber States, and Pirate Utopias, which was an amazing collection of essays. And I was reading this book at the time, and it was just everything that sparked my imagination. And I could vividly imagine these sort of structures existing, especially interacting with virtual worlds in the mid nineties, such as active worlds and seeing economies like Ultra Online having GDPs the same size as some smaller nation states. So, like, when I first when I started getting more serious in crypto, my first GitHub repository open was Blockchain Society. Now that turned into Singh, which turned into Status. And that's something that's been this sort of, like, Status is kind of like a a compression of, like, the state of us. So, like, this idea has always been there. And then, like, I hadn't really seen this idea come into fruition, and I was getting quite frustrated because we started seemed like we were deviating as an industry away from this sort of ideal. So I wanted to reach out to Peter and see if he was interested in exploring these ideas further, and developing with our knowledge of the technology to today.
That's super cool to, you you know, reach out to someone who's influenced you and write a book together. That's good. I was super nervous in the first call. Yeah. I'm sorry. I mean, I'm curious what your reaction was, Peter, because, I mean, as far as I understand looking into your background, you know, you've a lot of your work I think maybe in the start, you were setting a lot of, like, Chomsky and I think it's called, like, universal grammar or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. His linguistic program. But, I've done some work in artificial intelligence and then all all of the work surrounding
few conceptual issues, at least with cyberspace itself. But then as Erin mentioned, I had that collection called Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, which was it came out in 2001, something like that, so well before Satoshi's white paper, but it it explored a lot of these areas before we got to them. So when and so I was somewhat aware that, well, what we say, like like, Hume's essay, the that volume fell stillborn from the press. But, like, twenty years later, I noticed that people were starting to pick it up and read it. And then a lot of the themes from that book, they started it appear not in the forms that I would like, like in Balaji. You mentioned Balaji's book, for example. Then I started to notice how how the some of those ideas were starting to percolate into the infosphere. And then when Jared called, I was like, oh, wow. This is cool. Let's yeah. Sure. Hell, yeah. I'll I'll work with you. Yeah.
I mean, was were you already involved or, like, you know, aware of the crypto world before he reached out? Or
get in right away. I mean, I the sense that I knew it was coming because I'd been interested in digital cash and so forth. And I'd been interested I had taken a class on the the generals problem, so I knew these theoretical issues beforehand. And, so I was busy with stuff when Bitcoin first came out, but I was aware of it. And then I became a Bitcoin, like, a hobby miner in around 2013. And and Too early. Sort of very early into Ethereum. Like, I've got somehow you you know, I saw this message come across from this guy, Butalik Butalic Buterin, about, oh, he wants to launch this coin. I said, well, that sounds cool. So I just sent a Bitcoin to him, and then so then I was in on that that Ethereum ICO. So, yeah, I was I've been dabbling at it from the beginning, but nothing significant. I I I'm not a developer. I'm not, you know, I'm not doing anything serious. It's more like I was in it as a hobbyist and more like interested wanting to learn about it. So then I would explore different parts of it, beginning around 2013.
Sure. I mean, what I'm hearing is that I think all three of us had kind of, you know, fantasies about using technology and the Internet for exploring alternative governance systems, which I think is yeah. It's always a good uniting force.
Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. I think the design space is so large, and if you can decouple from, like, this territorial notion, right, like, you it allows you to experiment with these different structures and, you know, who knows what the outcome of that will be. Right? But that idea is just so compelling to me.
Right. So now so I would love to start getting into some of the ideas in the book. So farewell to Westphalia. Westphalia, I think, is a reference to the Peace of Westphalia or the famous treaty that was signed after the thirty years war, which was an incredibly brutal European war. I think I read something like six to eight million people died. It was, you know, during the time of the Holy Roman Empire. So before Westphalia, you know, there didn't really exist the concept of nation states as we know them today, at least. The Holy Roman Empire was a was an empire with many different fiefdoms kind of under its control with various levels of overlapping sovereignties. But if we're saying farewell to Westfalia, I guess what that means is there is, you know, some sort of critique of nation states that you guys have as part of the book. So maybe I wanted to kind of start from there for people who maybe haven't heard these types of arguments before. But I guess for you guys, what is the what is your critique of nation states, and how does that relate to the piece of West Valley?
Do you want me to take that, Jared? One of the chapters that we have begins with the Rwandan genocide, and that's the case where nation states become this mechanism for kettling together people of diverse views, and that's an unsuccessful model, we think. But the other aspect of nation states that we don't particularly like is that they're exceptionally centralized, and then they come along with all the problems of centralization. And so there's a litany of issues that that we discussed concerning nation states. But I guess the theme that goes along with that is that, you know, it's not like we're arguing against them so much as we're observing that they're failing and they're falling apart all around us. We don't necessarily notice that when we sit in places like England or The United States or sort of large successful nation states. But as you travel around the world, you realize that there are lots and lots of failed states. I think probably half of the states, the official nation states in the world are failed states. And so part of what we say is a critique of nation states, but another part of it is, well, okay. Open your eyes and look what's happening. And things are these things are unraveling rapidly. So what is it we should expect to see? You know, what is our response going to be to that situation?
Yeah. I I think you mentioned, you know, prior to Westphalia, there's, like, these overlapping sovereignties. Right? And I think I was introduced to this idea sort of resurfacing in, like, Hedley Bull's book, The Anarchist Society, where he looks at models of world order. And even in the, you know, history of, like, the League of Nations to the United Nations or, like, the Liberal World Order has actually radically transformed, like, three or four times. And And so we kind of view this as a static thing, but like the rules based order is kind of changing right now. You're getting a in our modern world, we're starting to see more influence over nation state governments from foreign, foreign agents, for example. You know, you have overlapping, you know, religions and, you know, other identity groups from, you know, whatever denomination or how they, establish their kinship ties. And so Hedley Balkan argues that we're starting to see this sort of reemergence of overlapping sovereignties that sort of go beyond the sort of territorial borders that were established by the Treaty of Westphalia or Treaties of Westphalia. And to me, like, I can see his argument, his points. He calls this neo medievalism. So, you know, we're not going back to, like, the dark ages per se where, you know, we have horses and carts, but there are some patterns in sort of destabilization that we're seeing, which is, you know, kinda sounds scary as well, but it's also an opportunity for new technologies or governance structures or new sovereigns to to emerge.
Yeah. Yeah. I think there's something like I think, like, mid medieval is in vogue, I think, right now. So I mean, we've heard, you know, Janis Verfakis has this term techno feudalism when describing kind of, like, the monopoly power of tech platforms. One way, maybe you can point at Curtis Yarvin in some way being a monarchist and having influence in the kind of in the Trump movement in some way. But, yeah, I think that there's definitely something I I resonate with in that with nation states, there is this kind of contradiction of professing to be a kind of monolithic sovereignty in which you live under when but at the same time, the truth is that we live under many sovereignties even though we don't live in the holy Roman empire or what have you. There is still I think you guys I do parts of the book that I read. You know, I think this is an interesting kind of example of, like, you know, the mafia or, like, large crime syndicates. I mean, they are, in many ways, expressions of alternative sovereignties in, like, physical space that you can't really you know, like like, they exist in both at the same time, like, in relation to the sovereignty of the nation state and its enforcement of, you know, of law. And this kind of I think with the rise of technology being more and more advanced and, like, a single person being able to exert his own sovereignty in ways or groups their own sovereignties in many ways via technology, decentralized technologies in particular, and blockchains in particular. That contradiction seems to be getting bigger and bigger, I guess, is kind of the
maybe it's another way to say it. Yeah. That became very vivid to me when I was living in Mexico. I was living in Mexico for about eight years, and I had a restaurant slash well, honestly, it was a dive bar in Mexico. But I had to navigate a lot of you know? So there is an official government as it were, but I also had to navigate who is actually in charge and pay taxes to who is actually in charge. And I spent a lot of time in Colombia too. And, you know, I actually literally, I keep a map of who's really in charge of different parts of Colombia, whether it's cartel x or the ELN or FARC. I was recently in an area, and I asked a taxi driver who is running the show here because I wondered if it was the ELN. He was like, no. Actually, this zone, it's like Chiquita and Dole Bananas both controls, and they hire paramilitary forces to maintain order. So So it was like literally a banana republic inside of a certain region of Colombia. So so it was sort of and I'm sure Jared has experienced similar things in his travels. You don't, you know, we talk about nation states and we assume you know, we have these nice maps with the different colors and clear borders, and we assume that's telling us who runs what. But the reality is rather different. Even here in The United States, it's it's not entirely always crystal clear for me, me living here in The United States, who is in charge in different regions that you happen to be walking through.
Yeah. I think also, like, there's a propensity to look at these sort of structures, maybe, you know, particularly from a Western point of view, like, with a sort of negative light. But, you know, the reality is also a lot more grayer. Right? Like, these institutions, you know, if we could call them that, also build legitimacy with the local populations that they're building in. Right? It's not just a matter of, like, pure coercion. So yeah.
Oh, yeah. For sure. Like, the take some of the cartels in Mexico, like the Knights Templar, formerly the Familia Michoacan. The you know, they're doing things like building schools, building hospitals, or they were they don't exist in the same form anymore. But you will find this a lot where cartels and other organizations do provide aid to the people that the government is incapable or unwilling to do. Yeah. Yeah.
And that is that, like, I think the it's I feel like the American mind can't comprehend a little bit, but, you know, giving by giving, like, these types of services or, like, building things for people for free, that is a way and expression of sovereignty and as a way to, like, build legitimacy amongst the constituency that's most relevant to you, I guess.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Sure.
Yeah. So I would love to hear so what I'm hearing is, I guess, I feel like you're touching on a bit of, like, the main thesis of Westfall. Yeah. It sounds a little bit both descriptive and normative that, you know, kind of nation states are are failing in many respects and as well, like, as a description and as well, we are proposing, you know, something different that we grab the tools and we build something else. But one thing I wanted to get out of the way because I think it's important because it's going to be maybe confusing for some people, but maybe you can just answer it directly. But in the book itself, you refer to them, I think, as cyber states rather than network states like the network state book by Balaji. But I'm curious if you guys, in your own words, how would you describe the differences and the things that maybe he proposes versus what you guys propose? I think one of the things that that I'm hearing at least is that, I mean, kind of my big critique, one one of the many big critiques of Balaji's book is that he's kind of, he like, a libertarian that I interviewed about this before actually said that he has, like, a weird state jealousy where his, his desire for like, his his answer to states is to build a different state. And so there it's kinda he doesn't really question sovereignty all that much. And as well, I I believe that thing something that is also very sorely underlooked at and I think may become more prevalent over time is a kind of neocolonial implications of a lot of what he's proposing. But
curious to your words. Can I take the can you can definitely start because I know you were good? Yeah.
No. Completely triggered by that part. Yeah. Yeah. You I love the way you put that because it's sort of like Balaji wants to sit at the cool kid table. Right? Like, he's been with the nerds and he wants to sit with the cool kids, which means he wants to be recognized as something like a nation state. So he wants to build, like, a virtual nation state or build some and so he wants to have diplomatic recognition of a nation state. He wants to have a sort of a connected archipelago of physical territory and so forth. And in chapter eight, we have a sorry. We have a chapter eight, which which is entitled are cyber states the answer wherein we take a network state to be a version of a cyber state. And what we should have added to that is no because they people often try and say or think that we are proposing something like network states, but that's not correct at all. We are offering a critique of the very idea of state, and we walk through the various points of which we disagree with Balaji on this. One of them is the idea that one of them is the idea that we should have recognition by other nation states. We don't care about that. One of them is the idea that we need to have or must have some sort of physical footprint or physical territory. We don't need that. We don't need to all get together, you know, members of the state. We don't have to have a little island we can go to or something like that because we could be connected to each other through a network. Where we are in physical spaces is somewhat irrelevant. So we go on and on with the various things we disagree with Balaji about. One of them is well, one of them which I don't particularly like is this idea that there should be some sort of charismatic founder or something like that. I don't agree with any of that. And so what we ultimately settle on is that we should be thinking in terms of communities or blockchain communities and decentralized communities. And so forget about states. Right? I mean, we have the very idea of the state is should be called into question. Let's think in terms of communities of varying sizes of granularity, like small
communities to very large global communities, if you will. And then I'll let Jared follow-up on that. We had some very amazing talks or debates, you know, over the period of writing the book, And it became very clear that, like, the term sovereignty and the term state were near nonsensical. Right? Like, they're not particularly very useful terms. So, you know, in the research, like, I think we collected over 30 definitions of the term state. Right? You know, people have most people think of the sort of pop idea of, like, the Webarian notion, but I I think well, let me find it. So what radically changed my like, I had you know, we had 30 definitions or so. They're all, like, have different perspectives. They all, like, varyingly degree varyingly rely on, like, you know, the monopoly of the authority of violence, for example. But there was this great passage that I found from George Selle, who was a French international jurist and a member of the International Law Commission. And I think it was in the UN yearbook of 1950 when they were developing the rights the declaration of rights for and duties of states. He's on quote saying he himself had been active in international law for more than fifty years and still did not know what a state was. He felt sure that he would not find out before he died, and he was convinced that the commission could not tell him. Right? And through this research, I kind of agree or understand his perspective. Right? Like, it is absolutely not clear what a state is. So, like, after this, like, you kinda throw it out the term, and it's like, okay. Well, what are you left left with? You're basically left with, you know, some kind of potentially group of entities or people that have some kind of capacity organized and create some, you know, set of rules or processes that they all adhere to and abide by in some sense. Right? And there's, you know, a lot more that goes into that, you know, both on the wetware and on the technical side. And, you know, you know, Peter was talking about communities or decentralized communities and, like, you know, a little bit hesitant to to bring in blockchain there, and there's probably, like, a slight sort of not difference, but, like, two very close and overlapping views on this. Right? And I agree, like, you know, we're talking about sort of technology intimated, decentralized communities. From my take, I recast sort of, like, public blockchain consensus as, parliamentary sovereignty. Right? And this isn't a new idea. It's not even really my idea. You know, it goes back to Lessig's paper, the part time parliament, you know, in that he describes a sort of fictional story of this island of Paxos, of these sort of, like, merchant traders who, you know, want to go out and make money by trading, but also recognize that they need to have markets. They need to have legislation on their island, you know, to maintain order and, you know, have property rights and these sort of things. And so they develop this parliamentary protocol that allows them to come and leave, like, basically churn from the parliamentary proceedings while also having, like, a maintained order. And that's kind of how I, you know, interpret a blockchain. And it, you know, it it's basically a form of automated parliamentary consensus depending on what your algorithm is exactly, and it allows you to maintain an order. And it can do so in while operating in a hostile environment, right? In an adversarial environment where there may be other sovereigns that are working to undermine it. And this is true that was also compelling about Bitcoin. It was able to secure a monetary policy in that kind of environment and has still managed to do that and thrive today. Right? And, so that's why I like blockchain is important to me at least in the current inception, but that doesn't mean that future technologies won't, you know, may supplant that in some form.
Jared, you said Lessig's paper, but you meant the part time parliament paper. Yeah. I did. I I might have got the author wrong. Oh, sorry. Leslie Lamport. Leslie Lamport. Okay. Okay. But, I mean, it's funny that you do mention Lessig since he, you know, kind of accidentally a kind of, like, important person in the crypto space as far as quoting this term code is law. I had him on my podcast actually, a year or two ago, which is really interesting to to get his takes on the network state. And, like, it was funny. He's kind of, like, regrets around around the phrase code is law since I it's been so misused in the crypto space in so many ways.
And if you read what he says, he doesn't that's not his thesis at all because he's got that pathetic dot or whatever. And then it's like, where it moves depends not just on code, but on, like, physical limitations, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah.
Mhmm. Yeah. I'm I'm kind of in between worlds on that. Right? So, like, I can recognize that, you know, say case based law, for example, you know, you can probably codify, like, an arbitration system on chain, for example, as an institution, and then you hand you all legal proceedings in off chain in you know, through normal means, but then have your resolutions codified on chain and, like, you know, how the decision went about. But there's also, like, the American Law Institute, right, has basically taken common law and was able to distill it down into these, like, series of black letter rules. It's still, like, a very large and multi volume set, but it's a reduced form that basically interprets these laws and puts them into sort of procedures in a sense. And so while I think, you know, today, it would be unrealistic to, you know, codify that into a smart contract in some sense. I think that there may be a way to have some kind of automated interpretation of those sometime in the distant future. Maybe quote coder's law is not so far fetched in that case.
Yeah. Sure. I mean, I definitely think I think the there is I mean, my understanding of his work is that, like, what you're saying is kind of what he was hinting at. I guess, forewarning about the ability for platforms, I think, at the time, more specifically, to kind of govern people or regulate people and their behavior in many ways that is different than, like, what has previously been done before. But I guess what that I mean, for me, what, you know, I mean, for me, the next question is what kinds of communities would you imagine being a kind of creating a cyber state? So in in your guys' vision, so, like, you know, Balaji, one of the examples he gives, but I think it's kind of hilarious is, you know, you know, people who are into, like, eating red meat or something like that as, like, a basis for your new state or vegans creating their own network state or something that I find a little bit silly. Yeah. Like, when we're talking about kind of sovereignty and the use of technology to enforce a particular, like, way of being, I guess, I'm just curious what kinds of communities you think would be
wanting to create this. I guess before we get into that, I wanted to talk, like, you before we started recording, you were talking a little bit, you know, telling us a little bit how you got into the space and you were talking about, like, Uber without Uber kind of visions, you know, that we were talking about. And for me, like that was kind of what I thought DAOs were supposed to be, right? That was like the original idea is that you could have like, you know, for example, a self driving car that could own itself and, you know, pay for its own repairs and this sort of thing and then participate in the market that was completely open. And like today, like most organizations, like particularly human organizations, you know, have this sort of bureaucratic management style, but like in operations research, there's this whole other field like called algorithmic management, which is much closer to this sort of idea of coders law, right? And, you know, one of the critiques of something like Uber is that whole algorithmic management is done in kind of in a silo where the gig workers or gig employees don't contractors don't really have any say or understanding of the internal operations of that. So for me, like, what I thought was also transformative about, you know, a transparent public public blockchain was that you'd able to have these kind of automated algorithmic managements that were auditable, and you you could assess its own fairness or even fork it and create a more fairer version of those kinds of algorithmic forms of management. So I yeah. That to me is like a form of code of law. But yeah. I'll I'm sure Peter has formulated a fantastic answer to your other question. No. I haven't. But I I do have a fantastic
objection to the your formulation of the question, which was like Okay. Well, how do these communities become cyber states or whatever? But just retire the expression cyber state. Just say, like, I I realize that I am partly to blame for this because I have that volume that came out, whatever, twenty something years ago about, you know, cyber states. But we just stop with community. You have a blockchain community or a decentralized community. You don't you don't wanna there's no nothing in what we say that says, well, you should nurture it into something bigger and grander or create a state out of it. Right? So the issue is we have all these communities, but they have all of them have some form of governance, whether it's a homeowner association or your condo board or a a cub scout troop or a a sort of church management or whatever. Every level of community that has some form of governance to it needs tools in order to govern better, and it and the critical thing is that there should be transparency, for example. And the idea is that all of these communities with all of their different forms of governance would benefit by being structured in a decentralized way. And lo and behold, we have the tools to enable that to happen. Right? So so stop get get Balaji out of your head. Stop thinking about I know that's a horrified thought. I say, get him out of my mind. It's like we're not interested in evolving something into a state. Let's just think about the communities we already participate in and belong to. How can we make them better? And the way we make them better is to provide them tools in which they can be more decentralized, in which we can cooperate with each other and be transparent with each other.
Yeah. I mean, you're also, you know, the whole blame of cyber states is not entirely on your back either. Right? Like, another book, you know, Jerry Everett is partly to blame with his book on virtual states. There's another book that came out of the nineties. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with Peter wholeheartedly. Right? Like, I, you know, within the design space, like, it's not like it wouldn't, you know, preclude what people would probably conceptualize as a state from being able to be formed with these technologies,
but that's not the entire design space. Right? Coming at this from the blockchain socialist perspective. So we have in theory, I mean, for Marx, for example, the state's supposed to wither away. Right? So we don't, I mean, that is correct. Yes?
Yeah. In the arc of history that Marx kind of lays out and proposes that would theoretically happen, you know, moving towards communism, I mean, communism would be a stateless society. Yeah.
And I guess I'm sort of more of a Bakunin guy than a Marx guy, so I sort of vibe with his critique that he shouldn't have been talking about temporary states to begin with at all. So shouldn't a blockchain socialist be thinking in these terms as well? Like, maybe maybe the way we collaborate with each other, quay worker, quay whatever group, we don't need something like state apparatus in order to get that rolling. Now we Mark's did Mark's hadn't read the Satoshi white paper. He didn't really quite have the idea down of sort of decentralized yet cooperative systems or tools to enable those. If Marx were alive today and he read the Satoshi
white paper, what do you think his reaction would be to that? Wow. Okay. I mean, I've I have it's not that I haven't thought about this. I've thought about this actually quite a bit. There are people who've written about it, and I think I mean, it's hard I don't wanna speak for Carl. You know? Yeah. I don't know if I can read his mind what he would think. I think he would be like, what's a computer, first of all. That'd be his first question. I think the main it's also similar to my critique. I guess, my critique of Bitcoin broadly broadly is that its focus is mainly on a critique of a monetary system, I guess, and that there is kind of, like, larger not larger, but there are at least other political structures that are worth reckoning with in like like, like, money is obviously extremely important, and it affects a lot of other things. But I don't think that by only answering the money question, will you answer other types of political questions around governance and around, like, you know, the power of, you know, the tensions between the capital and labor? It will affect those things, but it won't answer them. So, I mean, I think I mean, Marx did have
Why do you think this is just about money, though? Right? So what so why not think of Bitcoin itself as just being a proof of concept for what blockchain technology can do? So it's my understanding this is like this is Jared's perspective on this, and this is Jared's project, which is no. It's not just about this one case of money. It's about it's a tool for human governance.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that would be, like, my, you know, the thing that that I see in it. I think yeah. I I think Marx would probably be, like, that's an incredibly interesting use of technology. But as a political if we're looking at it strictly from the political things that are mentioned in the white paper, we'll probably have some critiques. But, like yeah. I mean, I think that's why I think it's, like, really interesting that Jared earlier you were describing, you know, blockchain consensus is, like, a parliamentary system. I think that's, like, absolutely, like, at least for me, one of the first things that came across when I was learning about blockchains was, like, this is just effectively technology mediated governance in a way that we haven't had before that has a particular hardness to it that, like, we just haven't had available to, like, the, you know, average person, I guess, or whatever. Yeah. Definitely. And it's, like, interesting to think of, like, you know or, like, the consensus, like, proof of authority. Like, I feel like kind of lays that out a little bit bare more so than maybe proof of work or proof of stake in a sense of, like, you know, you all just take turns on who has the authority to make a decision. But, you know, the whole design space of consensus mechanisms is a whole lot wider than I think we've even, like, necessarily touched on quite yet. So, yeah, I think that, like, like, to me, that was that's kind of, like, the big meta inspiration for me or, like, revelation that I had learning about blockchains that, like, this is something truly different and truly allows some sort of, like, the potential to to enforce the type of governance system that, you know, we otherwise wouldn't be able to try because the states maybe wouldn't even allow us to experiment in this and that way as a worker owned,
you know, x y z or whatever. Yeah. Definitely. And, like, when it comes to consensus algorithms, like, you know, proof of authority or, you know, something that's based on, like, reputation, you know, I I think one of the reasons you fall back to something that's maybe a little more agnostic or, you know, monetarily based in some, or value based in some way, is that if you'd working on POA, like, or some kind of reputation system, you should still have to prioritize your secondary markets, right? Like, if the chain is, like, incredibly valuable, then, like, your authority and that network is incredibly valuable, and then there's going to be a secondary market of some kind that will probably, emerge as a result of that. Right? And that might just just be, you know, you know, political conflict within organization. Right? But, if you're not accounting for that and, addressing it, this is more prevalent in a public reputation system, like, as an issue. But yeah. Or it's a feature, not a bug. Yep. Double the dictator. Sure. See, I don't know if that was a
a good answer, Peter.
That's fine. Yeah. That's excellent. It's interesting.
Yeah. So I guess, like, now that I have, like, kind of a, like, understanding more what you guys are talking about, I guess maybe I guess the thing maybe maybe it'd be most easy to touch on that I have in my questions is, like, how you imagine you know, if you're saying that states are kind of largely failing, they're going to continue to fail over time, sovereignties are going to change, There's likely to be a more complex web of sovereignties, more overtly kind of seen than we have seen so far, at least in, like, modern times. I'm curious if you have any thoughts about, like, the use of physical resources, water, minerals, I mean, the use of land. I think one of the things that's, like, very much missing, at least in the network state book, for example, even though I know I need to kill the network state book in my head and stop talking about them. But just because that's something for me to kinda compare to is that the he'd like, he doesn't answer for resources or land and kind of, like, the ramifications of it. And right now, like, a lot of that is under the purview of a state, or if not, it's under the purview of, like, you know, some sort of corporation, I guess.
Yeah. I guess I I can start I can start with a story, actually. Right? Cause it's not like, you know, when you hear these ideas, you might see them as like science fiction or perhaps like a little impractical. But prior to COVID really hitting, I was starting to develop a relationship with the Kachin Independent Organization. Kachin is internally displaced peoples North Of Myanmar that basically intersects with China and India and so on. They're, they're tech savvy. So like they use WeChat because they have such an overlapping border with China, for example. So they all have a smartphone and coordinate this way. They don't really have any physical, like, institutions as buildings, you know, so there's no census, for example, it's hard to have hospitals and so on because they get bombed pretty much immediately. Right? Now, you know, technically they have domain over over their territory since I think the forties or something like this is which is why the Kutch independence army is fighting for their freedom. But the problem with it is that area is incredibly rich with natural resources. And so they suffer from what's called the natural natural resource curse or something. I forget the term now. And what's actually happening there is, like, the Burmese military is securing the mines and that almost all of the military families have their own mines. They extract a lot of the minerals that are there, like, set up hydroelectric dams on the mountains and so on. And they take all of that and then sell it to China. And that trade accounts for, I think, close to 40% or 30% of their GDP. It's enormous. Right? And so there's kind of this it's like the kind of almost like a perfect illustration of this issue. And so one of the ideas, and it's very politically challenging to implement this. Right? But one of the ideas that they wanted to do was first use the technology so they could start building a census and, you know, having these sort of on chain institutions because of the bomb resistance, right? Like if you can distribute your database across the planet, maybe you can still access it from your smartphone. It's pretty ideal for them. Right? So that was attractive to them, from one one standpoint. But another reason it was attractive for them is there was this sort of hope that you could establish a digital currency and circulate it to the majority of the Kachin people that they could find and they're, like, the family heads and then, like, you know, the rest of the families. And then work with the Burmese and the Chinese, giving them some percentage of allocation of the currency and then pay for the extraction and do the trade of those minerals in that currency. And as you do that, you start to encode the value of that minerals into that currency, which then increases the purchasing power or the value that's held per coin, let's say, which then allows the Kashan people to be more prosperous while the Burmese and then, you know, China state can continue doing their trade. Right? It hasn't materialized again, like, you know, we don't have to go into all the specifics, but it's very politically hard to accomplish that. But that, you know, that doesn't have to imply a representation of assets directly on chain, but, like, it would also help you could start thinking about tokenization to physical assets there through oracles and so on. Let me
say two things. One is that we think of natural resources, and we think, well, states should be in charge of that. And I wonder, first of all, if that's true. So we have an example of in the book about an indigenous community in Mexico called the Cheran, and they were living in an area which had what they considered to be a sacred forest. And one of the cartels was mining it out, and the government was not particularly helpful to them and so forth. But they were able to seize control of their sort of sovereignty of their community as it were by standing up and resisting against both the government of Mexico and the cartel, which which was the aforementioned Familia Michoacan. And so it sort of gave an example of how a community can establish control over resources. Now the you they they did that without the help of the blockchain, but we can envision cases in which communities are able to organize themselves. And by having a kind of transparency to it, then you can understand that individuals are not hoarding resources, for example, right, once you have a level of transparency. I also wanna point out that, you know, a key element to all of this is the idea that you have immutable records on top of everything else. So one of one of the experiences that I had in Mexico was the realization that just because you have a piece of paper that says you own some property, it doesn't mean you actually do. And in many places, particularly through throughout Africa, I think there's a sense that the system that exists for maintaining not just property ownership, but all of the infrastructure that surrounds that is is corrupt. And at least in Mexico, I had a Spanish teacher that had formerly worked for a noteria where, you know, someone comes in with some money and says, I want that property, and then suddenly there's a change made and that's it. Right? So throughout the world, it would be nice to have immutable records. Now then that raises questions. Yeah. But are you not let's think of this from some sort of Marxist perspective or something. I mean, do we really is it that important that we codify these records? Because, you know, throughout revolutionary history, one of the first things you do is you go in and destroy the property records or something like that, which the Zapatistas did, right, in Mexico. But but there's an element to this that's often overlooked, which was that a lot of the large haciendas were basically taking money from the, sorry, taking land from the peasants, right, which they did not have a record of any form, immutable or otherwise, in order to establish their original claim. So there's a kind of two way element to this thing, which is that well, right, you might be ossifying ownership of land, which is not just maybe, but also there are certain individuals that have just claimed to certain resources, and we would like that to be immutable as well. So so there's a whole thing here about the importance of immutable records. Right? And you may want to you might want to sort of undo that. Right? You don't like that distribution of resources. But I think, personally, that it's important to always have the even if you change things, it's important to have a record of how things were before.
Yeah. I'm definitely for that. Like, I'm a I believe in property rights. You know, I think they can probably be changed, but, like, having, like, immutable record, you know, is important for historical purposes. And like, you know, Peter can go on about that, I guess. But like to illustrate the point, I was interviewing a gentleman from Kenya. He basically bought some property in rural Kenya. And then there was a dispute where another person had presented their own deed over that property. And so he had to basically take a week to travel to the land registry in Nairobi, and then find out that this wasn't a case of corruption. It was just a case of bad accounting or records. Right? And, you know, he basically lost two weeks and the money of that land. And I guess, like, maybe, you know, to your question that you're asking, like, earlier, like, or alluding to is that, you know, in some African states, there are mining companies such as PMC Wagner or Barrick Gold that hire private militaries to secure their mining operations. Right? Because there is, I mean, there's basically the wild west out in some of those places that they're working. Right? You know, whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, you know, is kind of aside from the points that I'm trying to make is there's, like, you can kind of have these sort of virtual organizations that are able to deploy enforcement in in the real world through these kinds of mechanisms.
Yeah. I mean, I think there's, yeah, it's a often overlooked thing is, like, the the, like, property records are a terrain for political battle, I think, is what's a is
a history like, of any kind of yeah.
And being able to control, you know, that history or the story of what is told after the fact is, like, a important part of important part of the psyops of the war, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the the our we spent a lot of time talking about archives, and one of one of Jared's central projects is about building better decentralized archives. And that and that's really huge. And one of the people I to my surprise, surprise, I got into some work by Derrida, and he has a paper call or book actually called Archive Fever. And he makes a couple of good points. It's not just to have the archive. I mean, one thing is that, you know, archives are important, but, secondly, you want the archive to be accessible to everyone. So we we give the example of Leibniz, the philosopher, talking about writing a proposal to to one of a local duke or whatever, making a proposal for an archive where all this information could be saved. But the other l but and it involved the safe and so forth, you know, hidden in a wall and all that. But the sort of more important thing is that you want the archive to be accessible to everyone. Right? Which is something that blockchain technology famously does. Right? And another point that he makes, a point that Derrida makes, is it's not just that you have the archive and it's safe, and it's not just that it's visible to everyone, but that the interpretation is something that everyone can participate in well. So if you think about the kinds of things that blockchain technology could do or in the form of DAOs or whatever, then you not only have a way of securing an archive, making it immutable, you have a way of presenting it to everyone. Right? And everyone knows that we're all reading the same thing. And we also it seems to be we also have a format in which we can all discuss it together. There's a record of our discussion, and our active interpretation of what that archive means can be negotiated in a way that's transparent to everybody.
Yeah. I think Jacques de Rita goes so far to say there is no control of the archive. Right? There's another quote here saying, like, effective democratization can always be measured by the participation and access to the archive as well as its constitution and its interpretation. Right? So it's not even it's like, it's your not only your ability to access it and read it, it's also how you understand what is being said in there or not being said or not included into the archive. That's really important. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I need to find that there to
Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. It's actually clear. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Because he has this reputation as being an obscurantist, but this is it's actually pretty clear. Yeah. That's like a really good point. I mean, we don't think about it enough. Right? How basically the DNA, you know, the archive information of a government, that is basically the DNA of the government. So if you had something like an archive bomb, right, that could just wipe out an archive, you would effectively destroy the government. Right? It would be like destroying the DNA in your body. You just collapse into a puddle of goo. Right? And so then, well, we wanna think about, well, given how important this information is to the functioning of any body politic. Right? How can we make that better and what's important for that? You know? You want the archive to be stable. You want it to be immutable in a sense. You want changes in that archive to be visible to everyone. You want the discussion of its interpretation to be recorded as well. So so all of that information is precious, and that involves whether we're talking about something at the state level or even at the community level, you know, whatever level of granularity of governance, all of those things are
important. I like that idea of the archive bomb. That sounds to me like a more a generalization of Tom w Bell's law bomb from ex government. Generalization of that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. In that argument, you know, he argues that if you had this sort of law bomb, then you would wipe, you know, pro approximately $380,000,000,000,000 off the planet. Right? Because, you know, in his view, laws underpin, you know, property rights and then, like, that underpins, you know, real estate, which is, like, 208,000,000,000,000 company formations, you know, and so on. So
yeah. I mean so I think building on this on this idea that kind of, like I mean, archives are kind of, like, a fundamental aspect of the state, I guess, you can say. I've So we're gonna ban we're not gonna use that word anymore. But, yeah, I'm Yeah. But in the sense, I'm being descriptive. Right? Yeah. Yeah. That's true. True. I've you know, before, I think one of the things that's kind of I found interesting, you know, crypto being so kind of also enmeshed in a lot of libertarianism, and, therefore, a lot of what's prominent in crypto space is kind of like an anti state, but also anti world states, I think, is kind of like a general feeling, I think, in the crypto space people have. But what I find ironic is that a lot of the technology kind of leads to the creation of coordinate coordinate coordination systems that are that could facilitate the world government, you know, quote, unquote. It can also facilitate state subversion because of the fact that the technology is kind of in like, that we kind of broadly include in the crypto space of centralized technologies, including, you know, decentralized storage and whatever, subvert, like, the act actions or, like, responsibilities of the states we consider to be often the case. And, also, I I think as well, there's an argument to say that much of what crypto can do could also be used as an enforcement of hard power by the states, at the same time if the states were to if a state were to use it and and and and and apply it in such a way. Yes. Yeah. I'm curious what you guys think. 100%. Yeah. I think this is kind of like a moral dilemma that's, you know, I've had a bit of a disillusionment, you know, in the crypt in my own journey in crypto.
And this is that was part of, you know, past the few years for me. I mean, it's like almost like any technology. You could argue, you know, you mentioned techno feudalism, right? And I have a worldview where I basically view everything as like a some kind of CIA or intelligence agency program, right? You know, I find it very curious that, you know, DARPA had a project called Lifelog, and it was about recording all of the activities that the general public, you know, would do. And it was canceled in 2014 due to criticisms or concerns over its capacity. And yet in the same month that it was canceled, Facebook was launched and had some principal investors such as Peter Thiel. Right? So this sort of capacity for information asymmetry and the capacity to deploy technologies over the internet at mass scale is kind of terrifying to me, right? And this is actually one of the things that scares me about Balaji's network state conceptualization, of this, right? You know, he's a very strong leader need needing to be, you know, at the head of this. I think one of the sort of maybe the copium that I'm huffing at the moment, you know, I don't know if it's true, but I like the idea of it is like, you know, if you think about it in sort of, like, a neo medievalistic terms, maybe you could look at someone like Vitalik Buterin as sort of, like, a neo king in some form, but it's not the same. Right? It's kind of like a soft power and, you know, he has a massive network effects around Ethereum, you know, he's obviously a key public figure in that space. He's almost like a demigod in some ways. Right? And if he says something or he, you know, does a blog post or whatever, then he has the ear of the vast majority of people. But I say it's a soft power because there is an indirect relationship to him and the actual changes that would happen in protocol. You know, the the Ethereum Foundation does exist and, you know, it does have resources and capacities to make those changes, but you kind of need the compliance of, you know, validators and miners, node operators, you know, a whole bunch of DeFi projects that are on top of that. There's a lot more actors that are involved or entities involved that have to kind of go along with the protocol changes to to make it make it in in, which is why you see ossification in these protocols. Like as you get more and more vested interests, there might be changes that become harder and harder to make on certain protocols. So I kind of view it as like, I don't know if it's like an influencer. Like, it's a terrible name, but like there's this sort of soft power that's there that is quite strong, but at the same time, the people have the ability to reject it in some case. I'm not fully satisfied with that thought yet which is why I call it copium but yeah, I thought it was worth mentioning.
I mean, like, I maybe just to mention that there seems to be a similarity like with empire or just like a Vitalik as the emperor that has many states that also pay tribute Yes. To the Ethereum mainnet. So I think, like, a lot of these layers
Every l two is a vassal. Yeah. I wanted to add something by way of follow-up, which is and Jared has been driving this point home in his Institute for Free Technology, but also with status. And he's always reminding me of this, which is that, you know, we sit here and we talk about immutable records and so forth and transparency, but there's a but, you know, we have to keep in mind that transparency of the government is important, but also at the same time, we need the privacy for individuals. Because if you don't have privacy for individuals, then you really are doomed in that sense. Right? Then what you then all that crypto is bringing us is like an even worse surveillance state. So one of the cases where you see this is with the adoption of stablecoins and, you know, people are arguing against, well, you you don't want the Fed to have its I forget what the name for the stable coin that the Fed was going to produce or whatever the case. But the idea is that even if you have a stable coin, all of that is completely transparent records of who owns what, where it's transferring, etcetera, etcetera. And this can be a tool for for worse and worse totalitarian systems of governance. So commensurate with all of this transparency and immutability, we need to establish tools for individuals to be able to communicate with each other in ways that are private at the same time.
Yeah. I mean, like, I definitely work on privacy technologies. I would say that's my forte first and foremost. I'm very and I'm heavily influenced with, you know, Mendex or Assange's, you know, I I think it's his quote or mantra, you know, privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful. But, like, this is kind of also being empirically shown when it comes to, say, public institutions. I think, Bjorn Lomborg, you know, has a new book out. It's called The Best Things First. He has made a bit of a career out of getting economists together and being quite critical over the United Nations sustainable development goals and then putting, like, dollar values to them and seeing what, like, what the most effect of them of them is. What was I gonna say? But, like, one of them that he found in Best Things First was believing that if you can bring transparency into the tendering process, you can actually radically reduce the amount of corruption that happens at that level. I've done a talk on called corruption KYC and the cost of compliance, where the vast majority of, like, illicit financial flows, you know, is in trade misinvoicing, for example. And so you have, like, these elites that apply these rules to the vast majority of people, but they are the ones that are instituting it and, like, actually the ones are moving hundreds of millions of dollars around. And so they aren't subject to the same rules that we are. Right? Another sort of argument in favor of making, you know, public spending transparent is if you look at flows of transactions, is if you look at flows of transactions. Like, we typically think of, like, when you spend a dollar or, you know, whatever currency, it kind of the value will it eventually diffuses throughout the entire network. But the vast majority of funds tend to flow within certain sectors. Right? So a lot of public spending moves into, say, contractor companies who then hire other contractor companies, and then they, you know, kind of circulate the money or economy within themselves to the large degree, which I, you know, I find quite interesting when you come to trying to, like, design like a protocol. And then like, this is way too early to talk about, but you could have like, you know, if you imagine colored coins and you labeled, you know, some coins white and some coins black, for example, the public spending coins are in white, you would probably find the vast majority of them would move into these sectors and more or less stay there or circulate around. And so you could have almost a public spending economy that is not entirely separate, but, you know, if you're thinking about, you know, you know, think, you think about things in terms of regulation and you realize that regulation isn't like, you know, a foolproof solution. Right? You kind of create secondary markets or, you know, black markets. And, you know, there are ways around it, but doing these sort of things can capture a lot of that. So it is kind of like a form of regulation in that sense, in terms of its capacity for mechanism, applying that mechanism. There are additional things that they're exploring right now to strengthen that idea.
But, you know, I find that quite attractive. So maybe just the last question. So if you guys want to share, since I'm also a writer of technology or I have written a book, Blockchain Radicals, and I know how difficult it is to write about technology in a way that stays relevant just because the companies and the protocols, they change so fast, especially in crypto. So the best way to write generally is to so anyway, it's in particular, if it's long form, I think, is to focus on concepts, a particular, like, messages that you want to get across. So a morning just to to end it off, if you want to share what are some of the last concepts maybe you want to share with the readers that you think they can discover more in the book and that you think will become more relevant in in in the coming decades and the final plugs of where where we could find the book since the book is also freely available online as well.
The book is in many forms. You can find it everywhere. Just Google it. We've uploaded it to all sorts of archives. Feel free to remix it. I forget what copyright version we have for it, but feel free to download it, borrow from it, remix it, whatever you want. The I forgot what I forgot the first half of the questions.
Any concepts you would like to part the reader with for the end? Yeah. I have a couple. First of all, forget about nation states
just for the last time. The key idea is that we wanna be decentralized yet cooperative. And so, ultimately, that's the tool that we want this at every level of granularity of governance. So it's not just about states. It's not just about large institutions. It's about every kind of community that you engage in that has some form of governance. Though those are among the key things to me. The other key concepts are think about archives, how important they are, how important it is that that they be they be transparent, that they be accessible, that we are free to that we are free to discuss those and interpret those together in a cooperative way. And you when you read the book, you'll see there are things that we didn't get a chance to get to. I know they were in your questions. So all these issues of, like, exit, for example, which is a huge issue. So they were like, we I know we've haven't gotten the even we've only scratched the surface here. So if you have questions, you think, why didn't they talk about this? I'd suggest you go to the book for that.
Yeah. You can get the book at you know, you can Google it or, you know, whatever search engine. You can also go to logos, logos,.co/book. You can download a free copy there or go to whatever. You know, if you want a print copy, you can get that. It's Creative Commons attribution share alike four point o international. As for yeah, topics, like, I I think, Peter, you may maybe said mentioned
forget nation states, but maybe you meant network states or both. Right? Forget all of them. Forget the forget network states, but nation states, they're they're dissolving.
So, yeah, forget the network state. That's not what's gonna replace nation states. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, like, one concept that got me into to crypto in general is, like, the alarming concern around, you know, sovereign debt that nation states hold. Right? So I don't view this as like a collapse of nation states per se, but like a gradual decline in which they probably privatize or outsource a lot of their institutions. And they'll probably end up, you know, focusing mostly on physical security. So I don't fully get rid of them entirely, but I guess it also depends on how far you are thinking out in your timeline as well. So that's kind of but definitely look into sovereign debts. And there's quite a wide variety of institutions that are concerned about this over the next two decades, and I think that's worth looking into. So you have a kind of a backdrop of understanding why this stuff might be happening. Things that we've done. We could. Thank you for having us. Love to be on. Thanks, Lytt. Yeah. Thank you, guys.