The Decentralized Country

Beyond DAOs and toward “promiscuous nationalism”

 
We have not always lived in nations. Before there were structures like “France” or “Germany,” empires reigned. The dominion of Rome stretched up to two millennia, depending on one’s definitions, and both the Byzantine and Ghana empires lasted roughly a thousand years.

Compared to those reigns, unions like “the United States of America” look short. Two hundred and forty-five years is the blink of an eye in the Anthropocene. Even the US looks ancient next to constructions like “Russia,” its current incarnation created thirty years ago.

Comparisons of this kind are meant to illustrate two simple points: nations are not very old, and there is no species law that we must organize beneath their banner. Across human history, we have cobbled ourselves into tribes and fiefs and city-states of varying prosperity and endurance. We have favored other configurations and flourished.

We will do so again. Just as mechanical advancements gave rise to national systems, the technological revolution enables new structures. While the internet was the dominant force in the current shift, cryptocurrency represents the missing piece. Though much discussed, we remain in the early innings of understanding how profoundly the blockchain “vernacularizes” economics and empowers digital, censorship-free homesteading.

The result will be a new kind of civilizational structure: decentralized countries. “DeCos” will operate above national borders in the digital realm. In that respect, they resemble the “cloud nations” theorized by one of decentralization’s poet laureates, Balaji Srinivasan. This piece owes a debt to his thinking and the writings of Benedict Anderson and Marshall McLuhan.

While Srinivasan’s “cloud nations” seek to proceed “cloud first, land last,” DeCos may never attempt to settle terrestrial territory. Rather, these entities recognize that our digital lives are more real and valuable than our corporeal ones.

In stating this claim, DeCos begin to fulfill it, drawing groups into meaningful digital communion. Eventually, this will allow them to supersede nations as the primary recipient of our time, attention, capital, and social fealty. Our descendants may not identify themselves as “Italian” or “Turkish” but from a specific digital clan that can be carried with them, regardless of their physical location. Once Romans walked the breadth of the empire protected by the phrase “civis romanus sum” — I am a Roman citizen. In the future, we may jump between a range of such identities — civis Bored Ape sum — promiscuous in our nationalism.

 
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Πηγή: readthegeneralist.com