Thread by @punk6529

1/ On Not Failing Decentralization A Second Time

[record scratch]

We've been here before. In 1996. We were going to build a digital world, not tied to nation-states.

John Barlow of the EFF wrote the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

I will tweet it in full

2/ "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

3/ "We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us"

4/ "You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you."

5/ "You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions."

6/ "You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions."

7/ "You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means."

8/ "We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different."

9/ "Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live."

10/ "We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth."

11/ "We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity."

12/ "Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here."

13/ "Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions."

14/ "The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose."

15/ "In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us."

16/ "You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves."

17/ "In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat."

18/ "In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace."

19/ "These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media."

20/ "Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world."

21/ "These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost."

22/ " The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom"

23/ "and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies."

24/ " We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996"

25/ Do these sentiments sound familiar?
Have we heard this in crypto?
Do my OG BTC friends believe that BTC will lead mathematically to world peace?
Are people replying to me today and calling me a nationalist (of all things)?
Will the system naturally fold to crypto?

26/ The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was a beautiful piece of writing and expressed beautiful sentiments.

But it turned out to be 100% wrong in practice

27/ What was turns out to be the mistake was that we don't live in cyberspace, we live in meatspace.

And in meatspace, men with guns can enforce laws. They can arrest you, put you in a box.

They can place black boxes in your server rooms

28/ And this is what has happened in practice. Digital darkness has descended fully over China and shadows are coming across the rest of the world.

Russia is next and the USA/EU instead of fighting for digital freedom, want control themselves

30/ And everyone bends the knee because centralized corporations have to.

Your favorite online service / defender of freedom, follows the relevant national security orders of china, russia and turkey or they get shut down, either at the human or ISP level

31/ It would be great if we live in world peace, without nationalism, without borders, all holding hands.

Maybe that is achievable, maybe it is not, but that is certainly not today's landscape

Today's problem is electing politicians in your jurisdiction that respect your views

32/ Today's problem is educating our fellow countrymen, who also vote, that perhaps we should not sleepwalk into a centralized dystopia.

Today's problem is running and supporting candidates in meatspace that understand the potential of Web 3.0

And helping them make their case

33/ The difference between good policy and bad policy could be decades of suffering. Nothing is inevitable in this world.

The "War on Drugs" was politically popular in the 1980s and we are still paying for this pandering today in the 2020s.

34/ So yes, I believe we have to engage with nation-states and, in particular, with democracies.

We should explain why it is in their interests to trust their citizens a bit, to support innovation, to grow their economies.

35/ The alternative is not that they do not engage with us. They will engage with us anyway, but the people who will be explaining to them web 3.0 will be Citibank and JP Morgan Chase.

Is that who you would like to advocate for you?

36/ So let's try to not lose a second time. This time, if we play our cards right, we can maybe do it.

LFG!

37/ If you are new around here, you can learn more about NFTs and the plan for an Open Metaverse here:

https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1448399827054833668