Thread by @tomaspueyo

The end of you country is coming because of internet and blockchain.

We know this because it has already happened several times in the past. Each time a new information tech appears, a new type of government appears. 🧵

Consider the Catholic Church in the 1500s

Dozens of movements protesting the Church appear over the centuries. But the Church systematically quashed them. It's easy to burn a heretic and his writings.

At the time, the Church was the most powerful entity because of it monopoly on information.

The clergy was educated, it had access to plenty of books, it could read (Latin, which most books were written on), they learned secrets via confessions, they had a monopoly on the word of God (locals spoke vernaculars), and they had European-wide correspondence.

They always knew better than anybody what was happening.

The secular power, under the feudalist system, had a strong hierarchy and a fractal system like the Church, but it didn't have the same sort of interconnected networks. The result? Less power

Then comes the printing press. Within decades, Martin Luther publishes his 95 Theses, which spread like gunpowder: now you don't publish one copy at a time. You can publish thousands. The Church can't stop it.

More generally, they lost the monopoly of information, and hence of ideas. Merchants, academics, lords... All have now access to more information and communicate more.

The Catholic Church, which had risen in power for 7 centuries, splintered in a matter of decades.

What replaced it? Something enabled by the printing press too.

See, before the printing press, in Europe there are areas spoken by Romance languages, Germanic, Slavic...

From Portugal to Wallonia, there's a gradient of change of local vernaculars. The next valley speaks a similar language, but not quite the same. And these changes accumulate with distance.

This stops with the printing press.

Books are printed in the major cities, which have the most writers and the most readers. Publishers publish in whatever will sell best, ie the most widely-spoken vernaculars of the time.

Those close-by will learn to read and understand these vernaculars. Over centuries, entire geographical areas start speaking the same language. They share the same ideas. A brotherhood sentiment emerges. A national sentiment.

So nation-states emerge to displace the feudalism that had been reigning for over 500 years, thanks to the printing press.

The same thing happened with broadcasting media in the 20th Century: they enabled totalitarian political systems, impossible before.

Before them, writing enabled kingdoms, empires, and churches.

And before that, speech enabled chiefdoms.

+details here:
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/internet-blo…

Speech ➡️ Chiefdoms
Script ➡️ Empires / Kingdoms / Churches
Printing press ➡️ Nation-states
Broadcasting ➡️ Totalitarian systems

Now we have new information technologies: Internet and Blockchain. What political system will they birth?

Eg Internet explodes info exchange & hence wealth creation. It also makes it harder to control the message

Blockchain eliminates gatekeepers

I go in depth about all of this in this article, and start gathering patterns that guide us on where we're going

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/internet-blo…

In the next articles I'll explore the patterns of this newly-emerging type of government: taxation, decentralization, inequality, SEZ.. Subscribe to get it.

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/subscribe

What do you think? Will we go in the direction of the Sovereign Individual? Something else?

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