Food for thought: could Ukraine or Taiwan continue to exist as a concept of identity, culture, and public service delivery for their constituents, even if they lost all of their physical lands?
If there is a large enough community of Ukrainians or Taiwanese around the world, who continue to self-organize on the Internet to administer the identity card, coordinate public services, and support a social security program, would this allow Ukrainians or Taiwanese to live anywhere in the world and still be a part of the concept of Ukraine or Taiwan?
But where would they all physically live?
Probably they would all scatter to different locations, wherever their best option lies? Does it matter where they all go if they all can connect with digital tools via the Internet?
Does the physical proximity even matter anymore in maintaining a sovereign state now that we all work from home and share holidays with family via Zoom calls?
If we can unite a diaspora of people who share common values into a network, could we administer the public services necessary to support and defend this network strictly in the digital sphere?
If land is deemed important, at least for some level of socio-physical cohesiveness, could millions of Ukrainian or Taiwanese people coordinate to buy blocks of land in half-a-dozen different locations around the world where they could group together to maintain local social and cultural ties?
Could it be a two step process, first where we set-up the digital infrastructure needed to serve the community and administer identity cards, social security, and public goods, and next where we use the success/ heft/ and scale of the network to start to buy physical lands for physical congregation of members?
These questions are at the nub of why I started the Humanity 3.0 project, to blog about the idea of digital sovereigns that are designed with informal institutions that serve the basic needs of humanity – without a presumption that land should be the basis of how humans are “grouped together”, but, instead, moving to focus on common values as the more important foci.
These ideas are intended to be in stark contrast to humanity serving the needs of the nation state to fund war mongering, divisive politics, unstable fiat currency regimes, & excessive taxation.
Instead, we seek to harness the neutrality of the blockchain to administer informal institutions at scale, in a way focussed entirely on serving the needs of the citizens, in order to save us from the labyrinth of problems introduced by the egos and desire for control of politicians and their minions who assume that all people born on a chunk of land must vote in their election and pay their tax.
Humanity 3.0 