1. How to start your own country

Republishing this article here that i wrote for a privacy magazine.

When the internet was still in its infancy, it was envisioned to enable a borderless utopia. It was thought in the world of internet, everyone would be equal. walls between nations and communities would be torn apart, and geopolitical conflicts would become redundant in the digital sphere. The thinking was that the internet would herald an information revolution where anyone in any part of the world could access all the knowledge in the world.

Two decades hence, this vision became increasingly distant. not only has the internet failed to effect a radical shift in international politics, but it has become a component that reinforces existing global relations. Internet has become entangled with global and local politics. Internet has reestablished boundaries, and become a tool for censorship and control of human lives. now we are more in chains than ever before. Instead of turning the world into an open society, internet helped to enable a surveillance state. Internet has become a tool to disperse propaganda directly to the citizens without any resistance.
This has been predicted by a dystopian novel 1984, written by George Orwell in 20th century. The story revolves around a totalitarian society with mass surveillance and repressive regimation of people and behaviours within society. It tells the story of a totalitarian state Oceania, led by Big Brother, supported by an intense cult of personality. The ruling part engages in omnipresent government surveillance and persecutes dissents.

In recent years, privacy and freedom have come under attack. state surveillance has intensified, financial regulations have tightened. The old world is crumbling, and from its chaos, we will forge a future built on freedom and innovation. so we need to build our country to grant us free human values, respect human rights, protection from any kind of surveillance or control, have laissez-farre free-market (libertarian socialist free-market anarchism/socialism), rights to privacy and anonymity ingrained, universal basic income and people should not have to stick to fighting for survival their rest of life.

Impact of economic system in our society:

The status of our current society is troublesome, with capitalism running in the blood of most citizen, they do not care about anything else except making a profit. whether it is their factories producing plastics, chemicals, killing millions of livestock, sucking natural resources from the earth, polluting the environment, or landowners cutting trees on their lands to plan extra profit. Owners take the most of produce, while exploiting the workers who do all the work. Churchill famously said "Land is the mother of all monopoly". A capitalist system forces everyone to accumulate as much private property as they can because everyone is doing so. It creates artificial competition among people and compels them to fight and secure their survival and of their generations. It forces individualism, because everyone is thinking of their interests, there is no incentive to be left behind and turn from oppressor to the oppressed.

capitalism is an economic equivalent of dictatorship. It leads to concentration of wealth in hands of a few which leads to high economic inequality which in turn leads to social instability. capitalism enables military industrial complex, billions of dollars are made by contractors. socialism/communism requires collective action for the society to flourish as whole, unlike capitalism where individual action is called for. you cannot force masses to work together- that's why most communist nation turned into dictatorship (alongwith other reasons). while capitalism doesn't care about society as a whole, those who work accumulate as much as possible, and those who don't are left behind. Just like everyone is a closet dictator, there is a capitalist in everyone. capitalism will be around as long as there is an identity of self in human consciousness. For communism/socialism to work without force, needs a collective identity which would require a certain rise in level of human consciousness.

For a nation to sustain and flourish requires a sound economic system. it would need to be debt-free, have less economic disparity and fair distribution of resources. economy is not a zero sum game and the economic pie is always growing, so everyone can have a piece of it and we all can flourish. It would be favourable to have free/affordable basic necessities available like food, shelter, healthcare and education.

what have we learned is our economic and social systems are completely broken. There is a dire need to rearrange the power structure and give power in the hands of people.

The role of technology in human society:

Historically, the discovery of every major technology has changed the societal structures in some way. First was the discovery of wheel which brought the world closer, trade and empires flourished. Then the invention of printing press where information flourished, this helped in strengthening democracy, organising protests and revolutions. Steam engine and railways enabled easy trade and connected the places, it was used by imperial powers to loot resources from colonies as well as by protestors to fight back. invention of radio equipment, transistor and computer brought us to modern age. It is a double-edge sword, used both by ruling powers as well as citizens to strengthen and attack their social structures.

so now we understand, technology is the element which will have major role to shape our society. Technology has allowed us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies. do you wonder, every major technology which built our society has played the role to connect humans in one form or another. whether it was wheel or railways, printing press or telegraph, radio or internet. so the technology we will be using to build our nation will play the role of connecting us in a way better than earlier. A key idea is to go on-line first and land last, by starting with an on-line community network, and then materializing it into off-line physical world.

Archy or Anarchy: the governance for our society.

anarchy calls for the absence of rules, while archy thrives when a population serves and obeys rulers. sometimes a few rulers (e.g. monarchies), and sometimes many (e.g. social democracies). Hierarchies exist for rulers to maintain their social control & power over the population. This control is maintained with violent forces by authorities appointed by the rulers: the army, the bank, police, prisons, courts, tax collectors, etc.
so it is clear we don't want any hier-archy or any authority. we all have heard the phrase "all power corrupts". The Net is an anarchy. This truism is the core of crypto anarchy. No central control, no ruler and no leader. No single nation controls the Net, no administrative body sets policy. The Ayatollah in Iran, or Minister of State Security of China or CIA, they can't stop sites, web pages, on-line services, which give away their secrets. At least not in terms of the Net itself. This essential anarchy is much more common than many think.

Every doctrine has its Leviathan, that prime mover who hovers above all. For a religion, it is God. For a political movement, it is the State. For our country, it will be the network. By the late 1800s, Nietzsche wrote that "God is dead". what he meant is that a critical mass of the intelligentsia didn't believe in God anymore, not in the same way their forefathers did. In the absence of God, a new Leviathan rose to pre-eminence, one that existed before but gained new significance: the State. And so in the 1900s, why didn't you steal? Because even if you didn't believe in God, the State would punish you. The full global displacement of God by the State led to the giant wars of 20th century. Democratic Capitalism vs Nazism vs Communism. These new faiths replaced GOD with GOV, faiths which centered the State over God as the most powerful force on earth. That brings us to the present. Now, today, as you can see it is not just God that is dead. It is the State that is dying. It is the Network - the internet, the social network, the crypto network - that is the next Leviathan. So in the 1800s you wouldn't steal because God would smite you, in the 1900s you didn't steal because the State would punish you, but in the 2000s you can't steal because the network won't let you.

Put another way, what's the most powerful force on earth? In 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, cryptography. As Assange put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. Encryption limits governments in a way no legislation can. It isn't just about protection of private property. It's about using encryption and crypto to protect various freedoms, fundamental rights and human values. In the truly equal protection under rule of code - even as the State's paper based guarantee of the same become even more hollow. Because the computer code is deterministic and will run the same computation everytime when called, unlike the fallible human judiciary and various organs of government with its error-prone (or politicized) enforcement of the law.

Elements of our parallel society/shadow country:

1. Virtual Communities : These are networks of individuals or groups which are not necessarily closely-connected geographically. The virtual space on internet would be like chatrooms, groups, mailing list, etc which would be created in federated or p2p form. The groups will scattered around the world, communicating electronically (if possible locally off-line). The members will use pseudonyms to communicate with the others. The virtual communities are typically opaque to outsiders. It will be beyond state controlled physical surroundings, beyond the reach of local laws, governed by its own laws in the form of computer codes and regulations. decentralised or federated community ensures there is no single point of control, or failure. Network can't be censored by government completely. It will live as long as there is even single node active in the world. development in peer-to-peer messaging has removed the requirement of depending on single organisation to run the server, which controls it. now communities can form in decentralised way, and they can't easily de-platform citizens from the network. leaders in the community can be elected and their moderation power can be governed by code, so they won't be able to abuse their power to control the network. decentralization also makes the network censor resistant, so the government can't just dissolve the union, users not need to be present physically to be part of community. anyone anywhere present remotely in the world can be part of the community and the network. Most internet users already pay little attention to local laws, and apparently see themselves more as members of various virtual communities than as members of locally-governed entities. Modern spam prevention technology like HashCash, monetary-fee, reputation system protects the community narrative, voting or control to be influenced by adversaries.







2. Cryptography : Although cryptology is being practiced since thousands years, The past two decades have produced a revolution in cryptography (crypto, for short) the science of making ciphers and codes. Beyond just simple ciphers, useful mainly for keeping communications secret between sender and receiver, modern crypto includes tools for authentication for messages, digital timestamping of documents, for hiding messages in other documents (steganography), and even schemes for digital cash. public key cryptography, the creation of Diffie and Hellman, has dramatically altered the role of crypto. cryptography protects us against state violence. when there is strong encryption government can't crack, that means states can't eavesdrop on such communications, digital transactions they can't intercept, and digital border they can't penetrate. It means nothing less than the ability to organize groups outside state control, and thus a diminution in the power of states to control.
   
   Mention should be made here the role of David Chaum, founder national association of cryptological research, in defining the key concepts here. He introduced the ideas of using pubic key cryptography for anonymous, untraceable electronic mail, for digital money systems in which spender identity is not revealed, etc Recent real-world development in decentralisation, peer to peer and cryptographic technologies has allowed us to build fault tolerant, censorship resistant, private, secure and unfalsifiable applications like blockchain, a digital ledger (to store verifiable and unfalsifiable single source of truth). It's the ultimate triumph of technological truth view of history. To foreshadow a bit, this ledger of record is history written by the network than the real-world state. There are now technical and financial incentives for passing down true facts, regardless of the sociopolitical advantages any given government might have for suppressing them.







3. Digital Cash : Our government favours the rich and themselves, to stay in power and remain in control. Central Banks print money unregulated, loans them to rich, if they default bailout them. while the farmer of our country are poor and dying. they can't even get MSP for their crops. All the corporations and state mechanisms work for the rich people, while poor are getting poor. the poor are dying in debt trap, while rich get bailout. Our economy is centralised and controlled. The state can easily freeze, seize, ban, or put up higher taxes on all your profit. Taxation has become a legal tool of theft. Taxing on selling, buying, storing and earning. They take large portion of earning resulting from your hard work.
   
   It is the poor who has to suffer debt, taxes and unaffordability. Rich don't even have to work hard- banks print money and lend them to the riches, who after using all the money, don't have to pay back, they will get the bailout in exchange for their political favours. Furthermore, the current state of our banking system is we don't own our money, banks own them. they lend them to rich people, or buy their shady stocks. later those people will either run away with your money, get bailout or their empire of lies will crash (see Hindenburg research). Furthermore banks have whole history of your financial activities, which they sell to companies for targeted adversiting, as well as used by the governments to spy on people. If you are spending your money to favour some regime-critical organisations, journalists, activists, or make regime-critical speech and do something they don't like, they can direct to put your account on blacklist, the tax-authorities might come to harass your and your loved ones and as well freeze your account (see congress party bank account frozen), because they know if they can control your money, then they can indirectly control all your rights. central banks are a central point of control and failure. your transaction passing through a chain of intermediaries means every participating party can see your financial activities as well as control its success or failure. they can see what medicines you bought, who you are funding, which subscriptions you took, which cause you're donating to, if you've funded any protest or strikes, etc. As Snowden famously put "If you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide, it's like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say".
   
   Digital Cash (crypto-currency) like Bitcoin and Monero solves this. They remove intermediaries in your financial transaction, between sender and receiver. you own your money in a wallet derived from unbreakable complex mathematical equations, and history of your transaction is stored digital in a distributed ledger worldwide as a chain of truth, which is verifiable and unfalsifiable by anyone. so no one can seize, freeze or prevent your transaction. Latest development is such that, no one can see your financial activities, who/what/where you send and receive. no one can trace your identity from the wallet and transactions stored in digital distributed ledger called blockchain (see Monero). It is totally private. There is no scope of fraud, or chargeback. you can send your money to anyone anywhere in the world in a second without levying heavy transaction fee. One very important feature of crypto-currency is no one can print unlimited money and every minting of new coin is transparent to every party of the network, unlike the modern opaque decision activity of central banks. crypto-currency printing is governed by code as a form of law which is put in stone. It also limits its inflation rate at certain percentage. Banks or any government don't control them, and can't seize or censor the network because it is decentralised and connected in peer to peer way to the network (see China bitcoin ban unsuccessful). There is no single website, or company running it. It is run by community, for the community, by the community. It is impartial, permissionless which means it is open for everyone. It doesn't discriminate on the basis of race, religion, political inclination, gender or caste. (see USA sanction RUSSIA account freeze on Ukraine war, SWIFT network kicked out Russia from its payment network).
   
   So crypto-economy > state-controlled economy.







4. Social Network : Social networks change many things, but a critical one is that they change the nature of community. your community is your social network, not necessarily the people who live near you. Various Twitter (X) alternative are being developed as decentralized alternative to function as Townhall of the world. Like federated Mastodon, Nostr, Bluesky, etc. On social media, every citizen is a journalist, they can share events, speeches and opinions. government will not be able to freeze their account, because there is no central party controlling it.


5. Constitution : The constitutional structure can be written on code and run on the network, protected by cryptographic proofs and verifiability. Traditional state's paper based systems are unpredictable. most of the judiciary is compromised, biased, and delay delivery of justice. Legislatures often make law which contradicts earlier law and curtails our fundamental rights. In a mathematical system, two statements to be used in a proof must not contradict each other otherwise whole proof will be invalid. judiciary often make different ruling for same kind of facts in two different cities in a same country. (see judiciary rulings for governing party and opposition).
   
   It can be approached the compiler way. assume our constitutional fundamental rights like UN charter of human rights are syntax of a hypothetical programming language "nation governing language". then any statutory law passed by legislature would be functions of these law. If legislature makes any law like recent draft IT bill curtailing online speech of citizens, then it would be tested by the compiler against fundamental rights, for contradiction and would present the illegal syntax error and stop the compilation and embedding into the constitution. our government of the network, won't have the ability to slowly turn our anarchy into dictatorship. so they will be forced to rewrite it to comply with the nation governing language, after then the compiler will compile it down and embed into the constitution.
   
   SO WE FORMULATED THE COMMUNITY, ECONOMY, SECURITY AND CONSTITUTION. I THINK THAT IS ENOUGH FOR NOW TO START OUR OWN COUNTRY.
   
   In the next article, I will talk about how to bridge our virtual country with real world. Then we will talk about the technical details, laws, social and economic structure necessary to run the country.

Acknowledgement:

[1] Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities [TCMay]

- by ayushraj at disroot dot org