Farewell to Westphalia

Farewell to Westphalia: Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance is now available for ebook preorders (physical and open-source edition coming 16 September).

Co-authored by Logos co-founder, Jarrad Hope, and the great Peter Ludlow, author of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, it explores the shortcomings of the nation state, presenting sovereign cyberstates and blockchain-based governance as an alternative order for the post-Westphalian era.

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A blueprint for a blockchain-based social order

In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War – an event in which Catholics and Protestants had clashed across Northern Europe. The settlement not only ended the conflict but made sovereign nation states a permanent fixture in our world. It was a solution in which everyone agreed that what nation states do internally is their own business.

Sovereign nation states are human technologies, designed to facilitate the peaceful organisation of human beings and solving for their ideological, political, and religious differences. However, they are technologies that are almost 380 years old and, like all technology of that era, perhaps not the optimal solutions available today.

Can we not do better? We believe that we can. Our solution involves diving deep into developments like blockchain technologies and smart contracts, and showing how they can be productively applied to cooperative human governance.

We believe – and Farewell to Westphalia argues – that decentralised communities and blockchain governance (at every level) are not only feasible but are on the immediate horizon. Furthermore, the seeds have already been planted. Logos' aim is to nurture those embryonic forms of blockchain governance and make their future adoption as frictionless as possible.

When they arrive, they will provide us relief from the failures of the Westphalian order and offer creative alternatives for humans to govern themselves in effective-yet-self-sovereign ways. We should be optimistic about the promise of these new forms of governance. After all, we have nothing to lose but the tyranny of centralised governance, its corruption, and all of its barbed wire fences.

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About the Authors

As the co-founder of Logos, Jarrad focuses on building censorship-resistant governance infrastructure. On these technical foundations, Logos is building a viable alternative to the nation state that addresses many of the faults of the current system. Jarrad came to Bitcoin in early 2011 through agorism, countereconomics, and crypto anarchy. Seeing that Bitcoin could operate a monetary policy in a hostile environment, he began to view public blockchains as a voluntary social order, one that did not depend on a monopoly of violence.

From there, he participated in early attempts to generalise the Bitcoin script to advance institutional libertarianism, ultimately becoming an early contributor to Ethereum. While advancing privacy technologies through the development of the end-to-end encrypted and peer-to-peer private messaging client and super app Status, Jarrad realised that privacy technologies are not enough and now advocates for self-sovereign crypto networks and the realisation of a latent cypherpunk dream, the cryptostate.

Peter Ludlow entered the world of philosophy through a deep interest in linguistics, the philosophy of language and digital technologies. His early work in artificial intelligence and natural language processing showed him the cooperative part of language comprehension – an idea explored in his book, Living Words. This led him to make significant contributions to our understanding of how meaning is a shared, collaborative enterprise.

As a leading voice in the philosophy of mind and language, Peter has authored and contributed to influential works on the intersection of technology and society, including the seminal anthology on how cyberspace is poised to impact human organisation, Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. His current focus is on the potential for digital platforms to foster self-sovereign communities and new, decentralised-yet-collaborative social orders.

In making the case for blockchain governance, Peter and Jarrad consider:

• The Cypherpunks, hacktivists, and other ideological forefathers of today's post-state innovators.
• How technologies like blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, and artificial intelligence can lay the foundations of a more just social order.
• Where our vision overlaps with Balaji Srinivasan's network states and where our ideas diverge.
• How corruption costs society trillions and is an inevitable consequence of centralisation, and how blockchain and crypto are the solution.
• The conceptual limits of blockchain technology.
• The concepts of rights and responsibilities as they relate to blockchain communities.
• Issues surrounding exit and exile from and access to network states and cyberstates.

If these ideas speak to you, please consider preordering or signing up for email updates about Farewell to Westphalia, using the form above.