# Logos - Relational Governance for the Lunarpunk Ethos│Sterlin Lujan│ETHDam 2024

- Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal)
- Date: 2024-10-07
- Duration: 21:31
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-eZB4wWHnTeg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZB4wWHnTeg

## Description

Join Sterlin Lujan from Logos for a talk “Relational Governance for the Lunarpunk Ethos” at ETHDam 2024. 
https://twitter.com/SterlinLujan https://logos.co/ https://twitter.com/Logos_network

James Campbell - MC of ETHDam, Hackathon Organiser, and Web3 Developer.

ETHDam - a conference and hackathon held in the heart of Amsterdam, Netherlands from April 12th to 14th, 2024, celebrated its second edition, gathering more than 600 participants. 

In the dynamic space of ETHDam, privacy and security took center stage, featuring groundbreaking discussions on hacks, recovery, and the revolutionary work of figures like Pertsev. Privacy is dead in crypto, people that know, know. People who don’t know, should know. 
ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform growing in Amsterdam, spreading its roots to Rotterdam and Zürich.
Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ 
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We would like to thank our partners that made this event possible. 🌷
Battleship Partner 
🛳Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/

Jet Ski Partner
🛩⛷  NEAR https://near.org/

Canoe Partners
🛶WAKU https://waku.org/
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🛶Threshold https://threshold.network/

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🛶dRPC https://drpc.org/

Sponsor
🤝EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation/

Paddle Partners
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🚣Lido https://lido.fi/
🚣Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/
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🚣Beefy https://beefy.com/
🚣0xbow https://www.0xbow.io/
🚣Obscura https://obscura.build/
🚣Panther https://www.pantherprotocol.io/
🚣Maven 11 https://www.maven11.com/
🚣Zama https://www.zama.ai/
🚣zkSync https://zksync.io/
🚣Secret Network https://scrt.network/

ETHDam AfterParty Fren
🥳Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:10 - The Lunarpunk Ethos
00:04:05 - From Philosophy to Technology: The Evolution of Lunarpunk
00:05:50 - Embracing the Lunarpunk Ethos
00:07:37 - The Forest: Building a Canopy of Protection
00:09:27 - The Tragic Death of Aaron Schwarz
00:11:10 - Relational Anarchism and the Importance of Working Together
00:12:50 - Connecting and Understanding Each Other
00:14:35 - A Perpetual State of Risk Management
00:18:01 - Waku and Codex: Decentralized Communication and Data Storage
00:19:45 - Unraveling the Nation State
00:21:19 - Excellent Performance

## Transcript

[Music] how are you guys doing I dude ice cream right before the talk the endorphins are going to be flowing you're going to be a tint right you're going to be add attention so fellow Cipher punks freethinkers ice cream eaters beautiful people so happy to be here in Amsterdam this is absolutely amazing so we have an interesting today we're going to talk about death right we're going to talk about my death we're going to talk about your death we're going to talk about our Collective death who fear death by ice cream that's that's right who here is familiar with the work of Cody Wilson anybody by show of hands okay so like a fourth of the room maybe so Cody Wilson is the founder of a company in Texas called defense distributed and Cody recently wrote an article in a in a magazine called agorism in the 21st century and in this magazine his article is called death athletic and one of the things that he said in this particular article is that as human beings we have a tendency to pursue a hedonic principle we have a tendency to seek out pleasure above pain and he specifically said that the Ancients as well as modern philosophers including Friedrich n said that men have an interest in pain they have an interest in carrying burdens and I think that's what a lot of us are doing in this particular space we have an interest in carrying a burden taking risks and risking ultimately our livelihood so I'm referring to this speech as the lunar Punk ethos the lunar Punk ethos and relational governance and the modus operandi behind this talk is to figure out how we can push our vision forward how can we engage with the Greater Community while building privacy preserving Technologies for greater social change for paradigmatic shift for change in the World At Large right because it's not just about the technology the technology is important and it's one methodology but there are a number of other things that have to consider so that's really what I'm here for to discuss this vision of where we're ultimately going and why it's so important so there's going to be two main things I'm going to talk about and we're going to focus on today and that I hope we can engage in a discourse about the first one is the idea of the lunar Punk ethos who are we why are we here and where are we going the second part of this talk is going to really look at this idea I've been muing over for some time called relational governance the idea of being able to work together working work together with each other in an empathetic and compassionate way for the purposes of altering Society altering our communities on a fundamental level and we'll get into that at some length now you're probably wondering well who the hell are you to talk to us about these ideas right who am I so like you I am a fellow traveler a fellow journe that is also carrying a burden probably about 15 15 years ago now I almost went to prison for 40 years almost went to prison for 40 years and I'd love to talk about the reasons for that but there's no time now please see me after this but that experience that interaction with the United States criminal justice system that experience of having my Liberty trampled really woke me up to the depr depredations and the vagaries of the current system and the status quo that we live in and how broken and abor the whole thing has a tendency to become so I started studying philosophy I read books like Murray rothbart's Book for a new Liberty I started engaging in forums with different people online and as a result of that I came into contact with the cipher punks right so my initial gut reaction to these problems was there's got to be an epistemological way to solve these problems right an inquiry into knowledge where we can ED educate people into Freedom we can help people wake up from what Charles tart called consensus trance and that would be the direction that I would try to go until I learned that there is a technological element to this too we can build encrypted technologies that help protect us and that allow us to preserve this is very important human Liberties and civil rights the guy with Panther talked about that a lot and at logos at logos this is a discussion we have all the time what we're doing is Ultimate ultimately for the preservation of those Liberties and to promote and to build a new kind of society right so let's jump into the first part of this and I want to probably need to explain the idea of lunar Punk is who's here familiar with the lunar Punk ethos and idea generally okay fourth of the room so the idea behind lunar Punk is that we're attempting to develop privacy preserving Technologies for the defense of civil liberties but the thing with lunar Punk that is important is I think we have an inherent skepticism toward just putting Technologies out there in the public transparently in the hope that they're just going to grow because we expect to have these systems entered into an adversarial environment where people will try to stop us they'll try to thwart us they'll try to cut us off at the past and sometimes they'll try to hurt us again back to carrying this burden we're constantly risking death either metaphor orical or literally now one of the things that I really love about the lunar Punk ethos is I think that we don't have to exist in a left right Paradigm we don't have to think binary we don't have to have a dichotomous form of thinking instead we can try to reconcile ideas we can engage in what Edward O Wilson a famous scientist a biologist called consilience or the consilience of knowledge and so I like to although I come from a more right leaning spect I like to analyze all different kinds of ideas so there's this notion of prefigurative politics that the left anarchists have popularized and it's the idea that if we're building tools and Technologies encrypted Technologies various blockchains that try to preserve our anonymity then we're actually prefiguring the way that Society should be you see prefiguring the way that Society should be so we're we're injecting our values our ideology our mindset into the system at large for it to become adopted and embraced completely and thoroughly in an unobstructed fashion and that to me is an absolutely beautiful thing I would go in so far to say that that it's not just prefigurative politics it's prefigurative a politics right because we're creating an abundance of different ecosystems with people who have different value sets than our own and I really think that's a key takeaway here we need to figure figure out ways to be able to work together even if we're divided or we think we're divided upon political lines so absolutely important for doing the great work of what we need to do now I'm going to refer back to our friends at dark fight I think Amir talk is actually here speaking at at this event and one of his compatriots Rachel what's her name help me out Rachel Rose that's right Rachel Rose oir Rachel Rose so she has this idea that's metaphorical referred to as the Forest right this idea that we're trying to develop a forest or a dark Forest that acts as a canopy of protection that insulates us from the state apparatus from Bad actors or from anyone who tries to harm us right so the forest just means using encryption right encrypted Technologies to ensure that we remain protected and that we can build the tools that want to build something that I've mentioned to some of you guys in person we've already had discussions the reason that we do this one of the main reasons is if we have transparent Technologies like Bitcoin right the fact that it's transparent actually psychologically and fundamentally changes our Behavior we're not doing what we actually want to do because there is a effectively a chilling effect that prevents us and stalls us and thwarts us from doing what we want to do to actually try to change the world so so this is why we have to have this Forest that she talked about so eloquently now I want to elaborate on the forest idea a bit more and what what that means infrastructurally but I think really right now it's story time I like story time do you guys like story time yeah okay so who's who's here familiar with the the tragedy of Aaron Schwarz cool so I would expect at least half the room so you guys who don't know about Aaron Schwarz he was a activist he wrote an amazing piece called the gorilla Open Access Manifesto and he was a huge fan of getting information out to as many people as POS in his mind information was a public good and is a public good and it should be easily accessible to everyone at MIT he actually got on to to the he hacked into the J store service and J store by the way is just an academic firewall or an academic pay wall with a bunch of papers and citations research articles and he just Mass downloaded all of this information with the alleged idea of handing it out to everyone because he believed in this open accessibility uh by the way Schwartz was also he was the co-founder of Reddit right while he was alive we'll get to that the tragedy here in a minute co-founder of Reddit he was also involved in developing RSS what ended up happening was he got arrested and then because they were easily able to find him he had no insulation he had no Forest he had no protectionism and as a result of that the pressure was too much for him he was dealing with the possibility of going to prison for 30 years and he ended up committing suicide right at his home I think after two years of going through the legal process it's important to note that MIT actually exonerated him they didn't go after civil charges so that that to me was that says that speaks a lot right there they were willing to say okay he did this he had ideological reasons f but the state pursued him aggressively as they tend to do to activists and any anyone who's attempting to protect civil liberties and protect human rights which I believe is what Aaron was trying to do so the point I think is twofold one back to this idea of carrying a burden and risking death in a very literal way Aaron died for what he believed in he was involved deeply in death Athletics right death acrobatics and that's what we're all doing we all take these risks every single day that we try to push these ideas forward that we try to build new tools and Technologies right the second part is just as important it's this idea that we need to help each other out we need to work together we need to develop that insulation and try to protect each other as much as possible that could be anything from having the tools and technologies that properly anonymize us or it could simply mean giving each other emotional resources being able to connect on a deep level with one another and to have that accessibility I know that a lot of us want to stay completely anonymized and that's great especially from the public eye but in our communities we should try to get to know each other as much as possible and I thoroughly believe that so let's talk about how that's going to work that moves into the next segment of this talk and this is an idea that I've written about in my book dignity and decency the idea is called relational anarchism in this case we can refer to it as relational governance so what we're trying to do the ultimate vision of this yes privacy encryption the technology great but that's one part that's part and parcel of the ultimate goal that we have and the ultimate goal I think is to be able to create autonomous political formations to create networks of societies where there's people working together for the purpose of continuing to maintain civil liberties and human rights and my idea of how we succeed at doing this is to work on being able to learn to relate to one another to overcome schisms and differences and try to understand each try to understand each other for who we are try to stand in other people's shoes right one of the people that I'm really fond of who talked about similar ideas a lot is Marshall Rosenberg and his idea of nonviolent communication if we're able to non-violently communicate with each other to connect with each other and to understand each other's needs then not only are we able to firm up and steal ourselves against assaults but but we're also able to help each other out I think that's a beautiful thing and the next factor is that this actually demonstrates that we can have communities where we all have different views Visions be it economic left be it economic right and we're coming together to actually change the world and just get people to see that we don't we can be different we can have different perspectives we can be Cosmopolitan by our nature we are heterogenous we're all different and that's the purpose of what we're doing I believe on a fundamental level creating new political formations creating new Sovereign territories where we get along we get together we build the Technologies and we continue to protect human rights and I think that's an absolutely amazing thing I do want to mention that there is one fear or one concern that I have and it's this very gibsonian idea when I say Gibson you guys are familiar with William Gibson the famous SC cyberpunk writer so he had this idea that maybe the future is obsolete that the future is not being it's non-existent and I think it was in his eighth book uh pattern recognition he said something to the effect that the future doesn't exist because the present is too volatile and all we have is a Perpetual state of risk management and it's this the spinning of various scenarios in the given moment over and over and over again without a direction toward the future so I think that if we can come together and solve for the social engineering ing problem that we have as well as the technological engineering will be able to develop these communities and these enclaves that speak more to our differentiation as a human species and I can think of No Greater goal than that and I want to speak to the fact that yes I'm with logos and logos is an organization where we have a lot of these philosophical discussions internally because to us it's more about the technology it's also about the movement it's about the storytelling it's about the communication it's about getting people involved in what matters the most the tech plus the ideas plus the love and the enthusiasm for everything we're building and I personally think the future is bright I think we keep building keep connecting keep developing in order to Spur and catalyze this ultimate change so thank you all very [Applause] much yeah question at the back we got a few uh so since you start with this when you will going to die so man I'm so glad you answered that question we're kind of in a situation right because I'm talking about just that you know the Greeks had that idea of Youth in Asia which originally meant the art of The Beautiful Death but ironically I'm also in in Blueprint with Brian Johnson so there's this longevity thing that I'm looking at as well so I hope I don't die anytime soon but I am going to try to pursue the Beautiful Death when it does happen but I certainly have died metaphorically many times I've been censored online of course I've been almost went to prison so I was on probation for a number of years and so I've I've experienced a multitude of death just like Cody Wilson talked about experiencing deaths being censored Etc yeah yes hi cool talk thank you uh I have just one comment to your talk that I think there's one other thing worth mentioning around the burden or like how we approach Our Lives is is more Tido and libido like the will to live and and the will to die and if I think no matter how big of a burden we all carry individually or collectively if we do it with libido and having fun and kind of enjoying then it's not the same as if we would all want to go down the drain together so kind of that that uh that's that's important to have fun together and the question is yeah could you pitch logos in two minutes for me I don't know what logos does I'm really curious and I really I don't know can you do this so this is this is exactly why I don't shill because now people ask the relevant and Salient questions right so so logos logos is one part of an organization that has many different components to it LO logos can be seen as organization that helps do the communications and maintain an infrastructure stack right so there's three organizations that we have that are involved in in developing hardcore infrastructure for the creation of these autonomous politic iCal formations I talked about so some of the guys are here you've probably heard of the most popular one is waku waku is peer-to-peer communication privatized and Anonymous by its nature right and I think uh the rail gun guy here and he's they're using waku as well the other is that I'm personally really fond of and excited about is codex and codex is durable decentralized data storage right because there's a lot of threat vectors in terms of data storage right now you know with Amazon web services Google cloud and D app front ends have a whole bunch of vulnerabilities around this piece so codex is that part and they just release their test net right so they're moving along and the other one is also exciting it's nomos it's the consensus layer which is going to be a more privacy preserving form of blockchain specifically geared around the development of network States right so we can create these autonomous formations and have the rule sets and the procedures built into the protocol yeah so that's that's logos in a in a nutshell it's so like my for instance what I do is strictly the communication so I work with logos and help communicate these ideas on behalf of the organization uh you mentioned Network States very briefly just then is there any particular area you think that Network states are going to be where do you think we're going to see network States being the most successful kind of the earliest yeah that's a good question so it's hard to say but I mentioned in my talk that that we have to be able to demonstrate these ideas and I personally think that it's going to be very hard to unravel these ideas in the context of the nation state first so I I do think that things like special economic zones third world countries smart cities things like seasteads when the libertarian future comes to fruition right that that's a POS I think those are possibilities personally I would prefer to see it just start unraveling in midst of the nation state because we've built infrastructure that's very hard for the to penetrate again the idea of the forest so there's a lot of different ways this could happen and if you guys want to have a longer discussion about that this there's this idea of of panarchy or crypto panarchy that I've been talking about a lot that has it really the network State idea has its roots in that idea although a lot of people don't discuss it so I'm happy to talk about that more later on too sorry thank oh yeah yeah yeah happy to happy to yeah yeah we can talk I mean the the basis of panarchy is just the idea of non-territorial exit the idea that we can live wherever we want and not relocate physically and be able to choose what kind of governance service that we live under so this goes back to some things I were I was talking about if we're living in an area my next door neighbor probably does not share my values or my I very unlikely right and probably doesn't with you guys either so how do we solve for that one is the panarchy idea being have a governance service in the cloud or some type of directory but then on a base level we have to solve for that too so now we have it gets into things like polycentric law common law how do we solve for human Liberties and civil rights for the people living directly next to each other so there's a couple of layers to it so you can see how the dimensionality of the discussion is extremely deep yeah all right thank you very much that was excellent [Applause] [Music]