michel on network sovereignties
michel bauwens @mbauwens on network sovereignties [https://globalgovernanceprogramme.eui.eu/new-network-sovereignties-the-rise-of-non-territorial-states/4/]:
Network Sovereignties in the Context of Macrohistorical Patterns
In my response to Primavera’s excellent overview of where we are anno 2024 with the development of the ideas and practices around network nations, network states, and more generally ‘CoordiNations’, I want to draw on historical precedents, as we can learn from them in the classic accounts of macro-historians. So the basic argument is that there have been previous ‘non-local’ forms of governance, and that it is likely that this previous historical experience is to some degree significant for what is happening or possible today. My focus will be on explaining key concepts of these macro-historians, and to see whether they shed a particular light on the issue of the relation between a world governed by territorial powers, and a world governed by non-territorial powers.
to me.. history ness is a cancerous distraction.. since always been in sea world
black science of people/whales law
The generic point I want to make here is that the civilizational model is essentially a geographic-based response, prompted by the decision for a population to stay in a particular territory, and with civilization being based on a particular relation between the sedentary farming populations and the cities, usually originally controlled by a ‘invading force’ of ‘nomadic’ origin.
If that definition of civilization is accepted, that means that the creation of a non-local digital layer of infrastructure, which allows for the massive self-organization and mutual coordination of trans-local projects, is in itself a fundamental challenge to the civilizational model as we have known it for the last five thousand years. (See in this collection, how Vitalik Buterin highlights the problems around visas, which is a permanent threat to digital nomads and remote translocal workers, and his proposal of how this could be solved trans-nationally with network nations acting on behalf of their members.).
vitalik on network sovereignties
Quigley will then show us what the mechanism is for this new synthesis to take root, through institutional innovation.
How this helps us explain Crypto ?
I am offering a phased interpretation of the role of crypto-based institutions, to make my thesis clear, and I will relate this interpretation to potential analogies with macro-history.
Dating from the invention and development of the microchip technology (from the 1970s onwards), digital technologies are initially used by corporate and state institutions, laying the groundwork for the coordination of global supply chains..t by large private commercial firms, aided by trans-national financial flows and the neoliberal institutions of the Washington Consensus.
need coord of 8b itch-in-the-souls as data to connect us
ai as augmenting interconnectedness
In 1993, the invention of the browser and the Web democratized the conditions of access to the internet, and created a massive push for the mutualization of shared knowledge, code and design. This is the emergence of ‘commons-based peer production’ as first defined by Yochai Benkler, and of the open source / free software / open design ecosystems, which succeeded in creating global ‘holoptical’ ecosystems for the global coordination of associated labor.
This occurred at the same time as the exponential rise of mutual provisioning systems in the declining urban systems that we have documented in a report for the commons transition in the city of Ghent, Belgium, and which is creating a first generation of ‘cosmo-local’ productive ecosystems, which we have described in the ‘Cosmo-Local Reader’. Indeed, whereas most commons-centric city initiatives are still focused on the consumption side (mutualizing use of capital-produced goods), the new cosmo-local initiatives have started considering production itself. My suggestion is that what is missing, as the third stage of digitally enabled global productive networks, is the potential fusion of productive ecosystems with the coordination infrastructure developed by crypto communities. We are far from having achieved this, but there are some signs of initiatives going in that direction, such as a planned Gitcoin funding round on distributed manufacturing that will be coordinated by Sensorica.
ghent.. michel on cosmo localism..
CoordiNations
This brings us to the concept of CoordiNations, as pioneered by Primavera de Filippi et al. While the concept of Network States by Balaji Srivanasan has strong libertarian and venture-capitalist undertones, the CoordiNations offers a broader canvass to understand the current evolution, which is not dominated by private city projects, but by a wide variety of cosmo-local collaborations.
Following the pioneering work of Tiberius Brastaviceanu et al. on creating ‘Fourth Sector’ forms of collaboration, in which a networked commons becomes the meta-organizational structure of both the older 3 forms (state, private, non-profit) and of distributed productive associationism, different attempts are underway to finance the deployment of these new networks:
<the “fourth sector”: a hybrid of the state, the market, and the nonprofit sector – including foundations and NGOs – all interacting in a system of open cooperation and operated by a network of peer-to-peer nodes. This network’s mission is to organize our public goods and our commons, using systems of cooperation and modularity that are interoperable between all these entities.>
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
One recent example is the proposal by Hugo Mathecowitsch, which proposes an appropriate financial system, based on a new type of agent with alternative sovereignties:
<We are currently living in a system where economic flows are organized by the State or by private companies. We wish to establish sovereign bonds but for alternative types of sovereignties, *such as consensual communities that establish their own nation and social contract. We seek to capitalize on the social capital, NFTs, real assets, and even GDP of these communities, using tokenization to finance these companies.> (ibid)
*not legit free
So we believe this is the frontier today: a synthesis of local but interconnected regenerative production initiatives, but with a digital identity, associated with new forms of recognized non-territorial sovereignty, that can initiate flows of ‘capital for the commons’, and ‘reverse cooptation’ of the geographic-capital system (the Capital-State-Nation system identified by Kojin Karatani). The challenge of the new ‘fourth civilizational’ order, based on ‘fourth sector’ organizational models, is the new synthesis between geography and the trans-local, under the cosmo-local conditions of the meta-crisis, that can be tools for the emergence of a new type of planetary commons, going beyond the current ‘global commons’ based on inter-state cooperation.
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be you. 