# Post Nation-State Governance by Santiago Siri (Devcon4)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Duration: 29:01
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-t0_dSFJI2L0
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0_dSFJI2L0

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/4/post-nation-state-governance

The contemporaneous world order we have today emerged during the Westphalia Treaties of the 17th century after 30 years of war in Europe following a clear set of principles: frontiers, non-domestic intervention and power alliances that keep the peace through a Nash equilibrium. As the internet and blockchains become a dominant economic force able to break the limits imposed by Nation-States (ie: "Facebook and the Russians"), the quest to seek a new equilibrium of power has begun. Democracy Earth researches smart contracts able to deliver an alternative to traditional democracy using the Ethereum network addressing key issues of voting systems including coercion and bribe resistance.

Speaker(s): Santiago Siri
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Society and Systems
Keywords: global, democracy

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Devcon 4 was held in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018.
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## Transcript

I'm from democracy not earth and we're an organization that is trying to figure out what democracy means or stand for democracy with encrypted networks any kind of network including nation-states so we're in an organization that it's in the middle of activists in politics and crypto and hacking so every coin has two sides and in governance those two sides it's certainly you know moving between the land and the cloud this was a thesis originally exposed by Balaji serene inverse and he's now the CTO of coinbase so he certainly is closer to the cloud now but if we look closely at what's happening in the land and the cloud the land is pretty much broken democracy the voter turnout even in developed nations has been going down since the 70s there's complete lack of citizen control in electoral processes no transparency nation states are fragmenting and there's the rise of autocrats which some people you know perceive us are very bad thing and other people perceive us just an acceleration of the system ending soon the land consists of government's consists of those entities that control the territory consists of those entities that control or bodies and the cloud consists of those entities that control the mind that control information and the the challenge that we're facing right now is that the influence in social of social media in democratic processes around the world is undeniable and social media we know this problem very well there's centralization of data no ownership of identity they are farming user attention you know I'm preaching to the corporally over here so what's the origin of the nation-state most historians agree that after 30 years of war in Europe they came to negotiate the Treaty of Westphalia which was a peace treaty that brought a particular novelty in the process to deliver peace in Europe that was this principle of non domestic intervention with will draw borders and you don't mess on my domestic affairs and I won't mess on your domestic affairs and this gave rise to another new consciousness on how to execute politics notoriously in France for example was the rise of Cardinal Richelieu who started prioritizing the interest of the state over Catholic or religious interests or over monarchical interests so for example keeping fragmented Germany which seems to be like a pattern across Europe throughout history was strategically relevant for France who made a strong alliances with German people in order to keep strategically stronger than relative to Britain so the origin of the nation-state is this nash equilibrium of nations where the best move is not to move you know if i attack this nation then this nation will attack me so we are all threatening each other in a way that keeps an equilibrium of power and we can try to keep the peace within a an extended third territory so eventually these equilibriums start breaking apart and notoriously is the fall of the Berlin Wall the fall of the Berlin Wall according to the thesis of the sovereign individual is not the first that the beginning or the end of the Communists or the Soviet bloc and the triumph of Western civilization and capitalism but it's actually the first episode of a greater mega political trend that has to do with the end of the nation-state and the reason I am picturing Tetris there is because the same year that the following Berlin Wall fell the most successful video game in the Western world was Tetris that was developed by a Russian who never saw a dime actually the Russian government still saw the royalties of that but it was a game about turning bringing down a wall it is a game about you know bringing walls down so it's certainly interesting to see that you know how digital technology has been shaping and influencing our perception of the world since the early days even in handheld devices so now the problem with this equilibriums is that eventually you have these players that exploit them that find some than some specific strategies and specific vulnerability within the countries or within the nations that that are trying to sustain the piece and get the benefits notoriously was Napoleon in the 19th century Hitler in the 20th century and now we're witnessing this strange fight between Russian interests subverting democracies around the world through the use of false propaganda fake news or maybe real news who knows by exploiting social media by exploiting the algorithms that have been used before to actually instill or tumble government's elsewhere like in the Arab Spring where Facebook was also very influential in driving those riots in Egypt so the interesting thing now is that it's you know having an impact home you know the big question after the election of Donald Trump is whether or not there was influence of social media or fake propaganda frake Russian propaganda in the election or in America itself so you know it's interesting that the election of Trump seems to be very much dialectic connected to the fall of the Berlin Wall most of the Russian money after the end of the Soviet bloc was actually being laundered using you know Trump Tower and Trump properties around the world so we are witnessing this greater geopolitical trends that are shaping up our relation with with with the political world that we're living in the bottom line is that the internet is incompatible with nation-states I think this is a very relevant narrative that we need to start putting out there we need to start you know getting everyone to embrace the fact that you know we have globalized commerce we have globalized merchandise and finance but certainly you know keeping political tied to silos to territorial silos it's no longer possible in a world that it's already connected by the internet so I think that a big lesson of the trauma that came after the election of Donald Trump through fake propaganda exploiting Facebook algorithms coming from Russians question mark is that you know let's assume the fact that the Internet is incompatible with nation-states so how bad is it really you know are we in this mr. robot world where everything is coming down is you know our democracy has been hacked you know are we getting you know all kinds of weird thoughts in our minds as we keep interacting with these networks well I always wonder when I was watching this show mr. robot what would it look like like if suddenly everything hacked and how would it be portrayed in the media and you know we would get all paranoid trying to get our cash out of the bank something that I actually experienced many times living in Argentina well it is pretty bad actually like a very quick search on Google and gives me these headlines from all different kinds of news sources that are about this massive identity leaks 50 million users on Facebook you got one title saying 29 million another title saying 90 million won only one is already enough LinkedIn 6.5 million stolen passwords it's actually 72 million uber 57 million users data Equifax 143 million credit reporting history of Americans in the u.s. so it looks really really bad when you start you know putting all of these headlines together and actually there is people putting these headlines together there's someone that is actually this is a very cool decentralized application by the way it's 45 gigabytes it's not as big as the block chains out there but it's getting big and that is aggregating each and every single one of these leaks on a single text-based file that you can access via BitTorrent and for example this this file has 1.6 billion email password combinations and if you are wondering if your email combination is there I have done a test with my friends 80 percent chances is that it is there at least a password that you'd use until 2012-2013 from what we've been able to analyze from this and like everyone is there yeah you know you can look I look for the President of Argentina I look for you know a lot of personalities and I look for Zuckerberg of course and you know karma and the interesting thing is that you know among they of course many of these are you know probably not real but this looked pretty real to me and you know the thing about Zak is that he's colorblind and he cannot see the color green so makes you wonder maybe you know these could be some of the passwords he used on the past it's it's karma you know Tom York said that the idea of karma was a good idea because the minute you start believing in it it becomes true so there you go suck so we you know someone said the other people don't vote that's people both everyday voting is the main interaction of what we do on the Internet we call it likes on Facebook we we call it you know it's links on Google Google is basically tallying links is counting votes voting is the main interaction on how we use the internet on a daily basis the problem is that this kind of voting is just surveys that are being designed to increase the advertising revenue from these companies and you know computation itself began in the 19th century as a way to be able to effectively tally votes in a much more speedy manner so the the challenge of what we're facing right now is that we need to figure out a way to change this interaction by something that is able to carry value by something that is able to to become valuable to the users not not to the orders of the network so we are a you know a democracy earth were thinking about tokenizing the like interaction and tokenizing it with every token not just orthogonal specific token but a every single token that is out there lets you know make use of the ERC protocols in them in a way that can foster more opportunities and more moments where we can start transacting these tokens in interesting and creative ways and each one of these tokens has their own governance logic embedded in its code so we can have different governance mechanisms competing in a common playground you know we have to go against advertising which is the model of the web and advertising is just slang for corporations corrupting or attention that's advertising they are telling you know advertising is about telling you what to think what to desire and you know in a democracy you need to have a free and healthy mind it's not healthy for a democracy to cup your opinions being shaped by organizations whose 97% of revenue depends on corrupting your attention so I'm gonna make a quick demo here to show you what we're talking about about the reason the upcoming release of sovereign which is our liquid democracy application that we're working at democracy earth so I have here a quick instance this is running locally on my machine on the previous talk someone said we need products people want to use products not protocol so we're trying to shape up our technology as simple as possible have a social media you can feel there are some patterns of social media that are very very good for democracy they ask me anything pattern is a very good pattern for for deliberation and simply here you know we're gonna be launching this by the way on November 15 so very very soon you log in with meta mask you sign the transaction you're it recognizes your address if you already have an account on this account I'm checking IRA so go figure and you can start simply posting you know let's take over Cuba oh actually they already done that but this is just a demo so the idea is to replace the like button with any token you know any token any or c20 any token that operates on the network itself let's say we can use some decentraland if you want to make this a debate on virtual reality or something and you can even restrict it by nationality maybe we want to talk to a specific you know people from use this token from a specific country and that have this country associated associated with their ID and as simple as that you just post content and you engage people on debating this issue whoever votes on this proposal you know we support two types of voting off chain voting by simply signing a trance signing a verification that will use your balance in that signature so you can use your stake to vote in an off chain way and online odd on chain voting by simply making a transaction on the blockchain which is more secure less corrupt corruptible we just want to allow and provide a toolkit that allows for all kinds of Democratic transactions happening across social media the interface file also has this threaded conversation which is new trying to bring to girl a little bit of the best of Reddit with the best of Twitter and find interesting ways to use the tokens for example steak tokens on hashtags and discuss on how to use steak tokens on specific hashtags in the platform is another idea that you know we are actually implementing so let me tell you about what the reality of implementing these types of systems the the background of democracy earth actually started as a political party in Argentina called partido de la red or the net party that has candidates committed to vote in Congress always according to what people decide online we run for elections in 2013 we got one percent of the votes and in 2017 we actually had a very big internal decision in the party that was very high stakes everyone had a very strong position on this decision and was whether the party would be allowed to make alliances with other parties or not you know would be willing to to deal with the traditional political system or we would maintain ourselves as a purist party you know not turn you're not working with anybody else and the interesting thing about that internal election is that because it was a very high stakes election there four central points in the organization that were prone to corruption and in particular it was the database administrators we didn't have a blockchain implementation back then so whoever was running whoever had control of the database had the ability to delay the registration of certain voters and accelerate the registration of other voters benefiting the outcome of the election to their bias rather than keeping the election as a whole neutral and this election took only a hundred voters but this effectively happens and I've seen it in elections in Latin America in Argentina when it's also about millions of voters the moment the authorities of the smaller parties are not there the authorities of the larger parties start stealing the votes from the smaller parties so there are a lot of points that are prone to corrupt ability in democratic processes so the in this experience you know where we saw suddenly the VB admins tumbling the election to their own bias by the language istration Sun and accelerating others was a very clear example in our view of what needs to be built in terms of technology to prevent this type of behavior so we need decentralize self sovereign civil resistant citizenship and I highlight citizenship because you know identities are very broad in your concept and can be tied to many different things machines and humans but you know were specifically concerned about the role that humans by play in decentralized networks and this is the the big problem that we've been trying to crack at the democracy earth what is the approach that we think that could be pursued forward in in relation to to tackle this problem so first I'm gonna use as an example the way I thought I did the birth certificate of my daughter if you look for the coin desk article meet the blockchain dad that's me three years ago I did the birth certificate of my daughter by simply doing a proof that is you know I wrote their Turing impossible something that requires enough bandwidth that will exceed computing capacity or commonly available computing capacity and that requires some kind of human judgement of the of the proof in the case of my daughter's birth certificate I've used video I simply showed a video of myself in the hospital my wife that she was like very very mad at me of me doing that video my mother and my mother-in-law as witnesses each one of them stating their own identity and the last moment of the video I'm shooting the week on blockchain with the last block of the blockchain and the and the hash related to that block so I can demonstrate that that video was shot in that moment of time now that video is only for me I don't need to polish this video anywhere I don't need to share this video on any platforms it's strictly can be a strictly private video and in case of conflict in the future I can use the evidence what I submit is among a trusted peers I simply submit a hash and these trusted peers can develop a consensus that works as a as a trust graph and it's it's done strictly through voting and the reason that this has to be done strictly through voting is that in order to acknowledge human participants in networks and a is machine learning in your software only recognizes patterns it never really recognizes human participants it cannot acknowledge other humans only people can acknowledge other people so we need to put in place a protocol that really brings the attention variable in the way the consensus is being built so a democratic trust graph and then the score of this trust graph it can be you know we can be based on reputational algorithms like PageRank the score of this trust graph then helps mean a claim that can be put in an EOC 7/25 identity and the claim that we care about is simply asking if there is the proof that is being on the hash that is going to be included in the USC 725 is a non civil human is it a human being and not a machine and does it have keys in the system already that that's the main main claim that we need to verify by doing a democratic trust graph that uses these types of proofs the challenge is to build a system that can be deployed in those places where identity is being denied there are 65 million refugees in the world right now refugees are those who's who who no state no no state actor anywhere in the world is given them an identity I work very closely with Julio Coco julio Coco is an dissident an activist activist in Venezuela in Caracas and he runs a Twitter account that has over 300,000 followers he's giving workshops on blockchain technology every weekend and the challenge that when I met Julio in in Caracas three or four years ago he told me you know he asked me Santiago what is politics to you and I gave him a lame answer like I don't know the art of the impossible and he said no no no no politics is one thing and one thing only politics is what you say in a given moment in time that's all politics about what you say in a in any moment in time and my mind kind of exploded because that's literally what lodgings are we've been using blockchains mostly for financial systems but when it comes to governance when it comes to politics is by understanding what is being said and what what kind of meaning is being attached to a specific transaction and and something that that Coconino asked me back then is that he has a very important need to organize his network of dissidents using social media using digital networks but it's a very huge risk because all of the ISPs are controlled by the government to expose any kind of identity even email or any kind of identity that could track them down inside Venezuela so being able to organize online while preserving their anonymity by being able to effectively signal identity and at the same time signal the legitimacy of those identities but without revealing revealing any personal information is extremely relevant for these political communities to organize in an environment in a Victoria in the duct Oriole environment like the one that Venezuela has is being transformed into the metric we care about in what we are designing as a system is fundamentally inclusion you know we have a lot of metrics to benchmark and measure crypto networks out there you know most of them are tied to financial performance but the challenge for us is to figure out a mechanism that we were by allocating you know this claim on Yossi 725 identities that you know other states that you are effectively a human participant and you don't hold keys in the system and by doing it through a democratic consensus that can use a trust graph then what we can end up measuring in the network is how many people we are including we should be able to easily include each one of us in this room or each one of us in this city in this country eventually scale hopefully if you know the roadmap of the theorem is able to deliver the whole world so I will end up with a closing statement from beautiful text by written by John Perry Barlow in 1996 a declaration of the independence of cyberspace and he ends that that beautiful manifesto saying we will create a civilization of the mind in cyberspace maybe more humane and I highlight the in his choice of words by saying that you know this network needs to be humane we need to put you know power in people's hands the AIS are already ruling the world you know a eyes have already put a meme in the White House and so we need to may be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before and he's talking to he's talking to the industrial governments of the past beautiful text I encourage you to look for this and you can you know follow me on Twitter and at Santa City Santa at democracy dot Earth we're gonna be launching the new version of sovereign which is liquid democracy in a social media form and enable it by with every token that is out there not just our token and we're going to be launching this November 15 so if you register on the website before November 2nd I've heard you're gonna be hearing interesting news from us that we cannot share in public probably due to regulate regulatory aspects and stuff so thank you and if there are any questions we have time for one maybe two questions does anybody have a question I have one question given that no oh great we got someone not me not sure if you I'm not sure I think thanks for your talk was enlightening I'm not sure if you mentioned it but I think it's really important especially in governance to also think about the transitional moment when people are not Unchained and not in the blockchain right and how do we cope with this transitional moment right of because you talked about inclusion what is this chasm that will basically be a challenge to basically create from one point inclusion well excluding the ones that are not in the inclusion if you see what I mean it's it's critical question we're doing a bunch of projects right now for example we're working with the Congress of Wayne Osiris and we're you know we have implemented with them before a Digital democracy platform traditional web app and now we're gonna take the opportunity to try to figure out how to airdrop at least one token and on each of the validated accounts using a traditional mechanism for validation through phone call and through email and we're gonna on this pilot you know we're gonna airdrop the token then it's the matter of well they will they be able to use the token prolly a lot of them not because of gas cost or myung because you know getting to teach them how to install meta masks you have those onboarding barriers but at least we can start doing you know boating mechanisms that have no gas cause like off chain signing a message and using that as a way of you know tallying the vote eventually signaling the boat and those techniques can hopefully be a very cheap way to get people starting using you know blockchain based networks without having a huge payoff on on gas that and the gas would be on us I think we need to find very simple ways of using block chains now not you know most people out there expecting a user experience that is web like so you know thinking from the from the economics I'm from the user experience side of things you know making apps that look like the traditional web apps but at the same time are able to expose you only a much more frequent basis to not just to the idea of tokens like on crypto Twitter but to you know start getting curious enough to you know get some actual tokens get some actual you know a crypto currency and and understand what's the purpose behind of each one of those tokens we are also you know working providing governance to crypto networks I think that the stage of the industry right now is scripta for crypto a lot of the projects are thinking in those terms we're working with block stack providing the governance for their developer platform all of the subsidies that globster blocks that keeps - developers are being decided by the governance we provide with democracy earth we're going to be working with the governance of the central land which is a very exciting project has already implemented some solutions around boating and we are eager to provide you know the governance interface for any token that's out there that's why we're making our or application multi token you