People need to be physically located somewhere.
People need to have a home.
People need to have a physical mailing address to receive mail.
Just ask a person who has fled Ukraine, or who has lost their home in Palestine, and they will tell you how devastating it is to lose one’s home.
It’s great to be a digital nomad during our 20s, but for most people by their 30s and 40s people want to settle down & have a permanent home base.
Within the global nation-state regime that we have today, people also need to have a nationality, which serves as a basis of identity, cultural affiliation, and affords certain basic benefits such as provisioning of a birth certificate, driver’s license, & passport.
The driver’s license and passport are both essential, as they are linked to freedom to travel within the system of nation states.
If a person wants to cancel their citizenship in China, Russia, or USA because they do not like the fact that the politicians in these nations fund geopolitical conflict, prioritize conspiracy theories, and lie to their people, it isn’t that easy to just exit the international order of nation-states.
The most basic problem is where to live? And how to obtain a passport if you’re not a citizen of any country?
Where does a Chinese, Russian, or American person go to live after they cancel their citizenship? How will they travel to other places in the world if they do not have a passport?
Assuming they at least have a passport, then they can travel anywhere that they want, and at least enter/exit other third-countries for periods of time.
If we create a digital sovereign that substitutes national identity for identity in a networked state concept, we will need to solve this problem of how to give a few million people a passport, so that they are then able to travel freely and chose where they want to live.
There are two obvious pathways to do this, that I can foresee:
(1) Partner w/ an existing Nation State (Transitional Program) at the Outset – perhaps a small or fragile country like Barbados, Taiwan, or Ukraine would be willing to issue a new class of digital residency, which comes with a passport, on a trial 10 year basis. The individuals granted the passport would never be required to physically visit the country, although they would be required to complete a full-blown KYC procedure with notarized application. By this method, we could allow residents of the new digital sovereign community to fall under the sovereignty of an existing nation-state for a period of 10 years, but designed in such a way that the host nation state was fully aware from the beginning of the rationale of the digital nomads who were joining the program to actually escape from the existing nation state order. Such a program would need to come with a zero or near-zero tax rate. Or possibly it could be a flat fee based system, say, $100 per year.
(2) Grow a Digital Sovereign to the Scale Needed to Gain Diplomatic Recognition as a Nation State – we could use the Public Good Protocol that we are envisioning to enable a few million people to aggregate funds in an escrow contract, to fund a legal services contractor to fight on behalf of the group for diplomatic status as a sovereign, which would then entitle the grouping of people to issue its own passports within the existing nation state order. This might be a more protracted process, possibly even stretching out for a decade.
To ensure both expediency, and also to eventually enable the digital sovereign to gain its own sovereign status to issue its own passport, a dual track approach is probably the most sensible.
Humanity 3.0 