Great Protocol Politics

5. Cloud-based regulators are outcompeting state-based regulators: Traditional taxi regulators might do cursory inspections of medallion holders. But they do not regulate their drivers as aggressively as Uber, Lyft, Grab, Gojek, and DiDi do. That is, they do not GPS track every ride, ensure both driver and rider can complete a transaction, record s... See more

the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was set up to regulate Merck and Pfizer, not 1 million biohackers; the Federal Aviation Administration was built for Boeing and Airbus, not 1 million drone hobbyists; and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was created to go after Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, not 1 million Web3 developers.

1. Network proximity is now on par with physical geography: Within this cloud continent, the unit of distance between two people is not the travel time between their positions on the globe but rather the degrees of separation in their social networks.

Bottom line: Network proximity is now on par with physical geography, and basic geopolitical assumptions about citizenship, migration, power projection, and the use of force need to be rethought for the digital world.

In other words, it’s short-sighted to think technology will remain indefinitely confined to the digital realm.

7. International rule of law is becoming rule of code

3. The remote economy has created a talent market for citizens: Walt asserts that because proponents of stateless digital techno-utopias still need to live somewhere, a state ultimately has control over them. But in a competitive marketplace of jurisdictions where somewhere can be anywhere, no single government has as much authority as people think... See more

For example, GoTo Group, parent company of the ride-sharing service Gojek, now powers more than 2 percent of Indonesia’s over $1 trillion GDP, creating millions of jobs and bringing nearly 2 billion annual transactions into the taxable formal economy. This gives Gojek a massive base of public support. Second, these companies won’t remain companies ... See more

9. Companies, cities, currencies, communities, and countries are all becoming networks: We should start thinking of collections of people—whether communities, cities, companies, or countries—as cohesive agents unto themselves, less constrained by territoriality and with different layers aligned with one another in shifting combinations.