The Futures of Institutions are in the Cloud

As a species, we stand at a crossroads. We can either allow innovation and free speech to permeate all of our culture, and transcend not only speech, but into action, or stay stuck in 1984, and suffer from lack of innovation, not only in the economy, but in terms of social structures. We can choose multiple routes, but in order to bring about a renaissance in civil society, but in governance, commerce, and freedom, I believe crypto governance, both personally and on a corporate level, is needed.

How this might look would depend on the application it is used for, but it may be centralized, but in less tolerant countries, peer to peer models might be used. I believe with some work the p2p model might work, but it is still in it's infant stage. Once it matures, I believe we will see more civil disobedience apps as well as apps related to peer to peer governance, but I believe it will reach a fever pitch in about 5 years. At the moment BitStacks is about the only alternative we have to hierarchy, but I imagine that will change with time. In time I believe legal systems will be built around this technology, first civil, then with a bit of luck criminal, although the exact details will have to be figured out. This is where the real potential lies.

We already have seen the seeds of this system in OpenBazaar. With it's dispute resolution already baked in, this is the prophecy that many in the Libertarian camp would come true, and now it is. The problem though, lies in the fact that people are not just commerce. While everything does revolve economics (monetary based or not), institutions could benefit from it in a non economic way. We could create hybrid institutions. securities, contracts, and all other sorts of informal and formal social contracts which will create both wealth and betterment for the world. You may think of technology as an impersonal force, but that does not have to be. While it can surely be used to go beyond national borders and create structures we never thought possible 20 years ago. For instance, instead of allowing government to dictate how a business should be organized, which seeps into the organizational charts and into work practices, we could break free of the bondage of 401c's, corporations, S-Corps, proprietorships, and any other straight jacket governments tries to slip us into.

But before we can do any of this, the Liberty movement needs programmers. While I understand everyone cannot be a coder or tester or whatever, I believe that if the Liberty movement were to invest a little more time in coding and open source projects and a bit less time in politics, I think we could change the world. While politics has an important role to play (especially with land use issues), I believe agorism and crypto-anarchism are the best way to go, even though I myself do invest in different baskets, including the political process and crypto-anarchism. Bitcoin is just the beginning. If we can create things like the blockchain and privatzed courts, there is not telling what we can do. But our kingdom is not of this world. It is in the cloud, and more specifically, in the crowd.