Decentralised Indigenous Organisations (DIOs) — Part III : The Third Leviathan
Networks as Hypersocial Species
Part III on the DIOs series.
‘Humans are the networked species. Networks allow us to cooperate when we could otherwise go it alone. And networks allocate the fruit of our cooperation. Money is a network, religion is a network, a corporation is a network, electricity is a network’
Naval Ravikant
In the PART II we have seen the Conventional and Unconventional Forces to support the creation of DIOs, let's now explore an extraordinary one : the network.
When it comes to create rapid organic growth within an economical model, network designs are tremendously powerful. Let’s think for example to Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, or Visa, all companies based on networks which all started with a confined network effect within a small atomic group of people (sometimes only few peoples), before growing exponentially and bringing billions of humans interacting with each other while generating billions of dollars. However, these companies maximize their profits at the expense of the network itself and the society as a whole.
Prior to corporate network like Facebook, other social networks profoundly shaped our humanity: religions. Religions is the perfect example to demonstrate the power dynamic of a network. It starts from a small atomic group of faithfull humans who share a common beliefs around the same idea, god(s). From this small atomic group grow a larger community of believers coordinating with rituals and protocols in order to enable a network effect1 that will attract even more believers to join their community. More believers means more legitimacy to defend their vision of god(s), creating a positive feedback loop to join this religion.
Like corporate network, religions actively seek new members while creating barriers for former members to dissuade them from leaving the network, instauring a “spirtual cost” to exit. Social network is nothing new, and it's no coincidence that some people compare Apple to a religion, because it uses similar patterns, and it works. People love to be part of a community, we are social animal and networks are hypersocials by design.
However, we need to approach network theory in a different way, to avoid the pitfalls of religions, cults and corporate networks. Alongside this legacy, a network revolution is rising - web3. Web3 is creating a more open, permissionless, interoperable landscape for networks, distributing fair value to all participants, where the traditional company model is automated by a blockchain acting like a public good. In this context, we believe web3 has the potential to create healthy networks for humanity.
Going further in this direction, there is a particular type of network that seeks positive externalities for society : the Impact Network. For David Ehrlichman, author of 'Impact Networks Creating connections, sparking collaboration and catalysing systemic change', impact networks create ‘bridges across divides, prioritizes trust-based relationships, shares leadership, and recognizes the inherent interconnectedness of our lives and work’.
What if the “third attractor” lies in creation of positive networks that do not aim to be a new Facebook or cults, but a network based on ancestral knowledge, life principles and web3 technologies ?
By combining Indigenous sovereignty to Web3 technologies, we could create a network of DIOs, inspired by the notion of Network States developed by Balaji Srinivasan in his book: The Network State: How To Start a New Country or more recently to the notion of Coordi-Nation developped by Primavera De Filippi, that gives a central place to a sense of nationhood and collectiveness. Both are great alternatives to the failure of nation-states, which are often too rigid, dense and slow to follow the path of upcoming planetary shifts. These new network substrates open up a whole new field of reflection for human coordination.
How could we use the power of network to create digital communities similar to the sense of nationhood we have today with nation-states ? Could we imagine the creation of Indigenous Network States or Indigenous Digital Nation2 ? Could we based such networks on the legal basis of the UNDRIP and other international texts ? Would it be relevant to create Indigenous Networks with nascent technologies such as DAOs and DeFi? Would the existence of such networks create radical hope in the midst of the metacrisis? How this network of DIOs would interact with other jurisdictions? Would these Indigenous Networks constitute their own sui generis jurisdiction? In this case, what would be the resistance encountered?
These questions remain unanswered, but one thing is certain, by considering its 400 millions years iteration to bring life on planet Earth through the mycelium, its immense profit for the most powerful companies of our time, its driving forces behind new currencies such as Bitcoin, networks might be the most powerful force at our disposal to face our time. According to Balaji Srinivasan, networks even constitute, after religions and nation-states, the third Leviathan of our species3.
. . .
Wrapping up
By coordinating DIOs with Conventional, Unconventional and Extraordinary Forces, we want to draw a new framework at the crossroads of evolution.
Paradoxically, this predominantly digital approach could lead to a more local and physical anchorage for humans who interact with DIOs. As it would only require an internet connection to work this ‘digital land’, whether to vote, circulate funding, communicate or take collective actions in the digital to impact the physical.
DIOs reclaim radical freedom globally and locally, digitally and physically, ancestrally and prospectively, beyond duality.
. . .
Decentralised Indigenous Organisations - A Seed from the Future, tries to present briefly a conceptual framework for dealing with the challenges of our time. There are certainly many approximations, and a lack of depth in concepts introduced here, but we hope that this has not distorted the message behind.
As an indigenous saying goes, ‘the future is behind us'.
It is time to let our future be managed by those
who are still nurturing the Garden of Eden.
Meaning that the benefits of the network for each members increase with the total number of fideles in the religion. More members inside the same religion allow to create bigger events like the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, which each year brings together 2.5 million Muslims from the 4 corners of the globe (and which is Saudi Arabia's second-largest source of revenue after petrol).
A Indigenous Digital Nation ? Proponents of modernization theory describe nations as "imagined communities", a term coined by Benedict Anderson. A nation is an imagined community in the sense that the material conditions exist for imagining extended and shared connections and that it is objectively impersonal, even if each individual in the nation experiences themselves as subjectively part of an embodied unity with others (Wikipedia).
‘What’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption.. It doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation’ Balaji Srinivasan, God, State, Network