The first quarter of the 21st century is marked with rapid development of new technologies that enable entirely new ways of coordinating and organizing society - at the same time the application of these technologies have been focused on reinforcing the old ways that humans structure society.
Limited by laws designed to make up for the shortcomings of available technology at the time they were written, the decentralized technologies created in the last century were used to build centralized monopolies that created new power structures controlled by a few parties with limited oversight.
The creation of Bitcoin and Ethereum has ignited a new spark of dedicated builders and super coders who are determined to complete the mission of decentralized technologies first dreamed of by the cypherpunk generation of the 20th century.
When first envisioned by the Greeks, dēmokratía (rule of the people), was theorized to be the solution to a the recurring problem that autocratic or oligarchic power always led to abusive tyranny for most humans.
In 1776, the founding fathers of the USA created the US constitution, by the people, for the people, which led to the longest lasting decentralized technology still around today: the US democratic republic. However when the system was designed, technologies such as motorized transportation, instant communication, electricity, the computer chip, and the internet, did not yet exist.
Thus the core of the system was designed with the limitations of existing technologies at the time, and have been updated to the extent that the limitations of that system allow.
Modern technologies by contrast, allow for new dynamics that were not even dreamed possible at the time: instant information dissemination, instant communications and rapid consensus forming, automatic execution of written agreements, and much more.
Given these new tools, parts of the old system that were previously considered sufficiently decentralized due to the infeasibility of manipulation, are now very vulnerable to corruption and capture by autocratic forces leveraging the new technologies for their own gain, to the detriment of the public.
Compounding this problem, humans of the world find themselves beholden to the system of government that they are born into, often with little choice to escape from or opt out of that system.
While the treaties of Westphalia created the system of national sovereignty that gives every country sovereign rights within their own borders, there has never been such a treaty that grants all people of the world their own sovereign rights.
As powerful centralized interests globally continue to subsume and corrupt the old systems, whether democracies or otherwise, there is a corner of the digital universe that is dedicated to building the modern tools of organization and coordination needed for a new modern form of dēmokratía, or a “Network State”, to emerge as a viable alternative for people to turn to, and opt out of the old system that no longer serves them.
We term that new system network0
and we aim to enable the creation and accessibility of all the tools needed for humans to opt-out of the old network1 and thrive on network0
.
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