Human rights are important, for example the right to be heard in conflicts.
Let me explain why I believe that a new form of country will appear: Companies will turn into countries.
Currently large companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and so on, don't "offer" human rights. People however want them to have more responsibility, especially in Europe. This is a changing force already in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that the European Court of Human Rights or a similar institution will do the same thing to Corporate what it already does for many countries.
Of course the ECHR is not working well today, there are many problems, but should we just give up and let Corporate become feudal? At least I propose we should think about what we people need from countries and corporate entities and how to gain these needs.
I guess at some point Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people, for example.
And that's one step of them turning into countries.
Perhaps you think, a country, that's something with an army. But an army is not really neccessary if there is some other way to control power. Currently, however, the world doesn't seem to have a lot of power as we see with many different wars.
I am a bit pessimistic about the future of humanity, but I still hope that in the long-term we will find a way without raw material power to resolve conflicts, because this is really wasteful and might even lead to our demise.
> Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people
Maybe not quite what you meant....
.... but the GDPR gives users the right not to be subjected to decisions based entirely on automated processing (including AI).
Thus, you have the right to have a human (an actual person!) consider your bank loan application, parking fine, passport application, membership cancellation etc, rather than just have an automatic system say "computer says no" with no right of appeal.
This is an important law which restricts potential tyranny (and I use that word with its full meaning) caused by allowing governments and corporations to limit public's engagement with wider business and society though the use of a restrictive IT practice.
Probably it's time to rethink what a nation means.
At least I got a vision, citizenship is like being a member of an association.
Currently, citizenship is very restricted, but I hope for a more open world, where citizenship is a lot more fluent than today. Of course many protections are neccessary which are implicit in citizenship. That's why I wrote about human rights and corporate organisations. I imagine an automatic membership bound to residency and what is citizenship today turns into membership to some cultural association.
And customers become members of their corporate entity and thus gain many rights we don't have today. That's why I said, corporate entities turn into countries.
Perhaps in about a hundred years if our civilization is still thriving at least somewhat?
sounds like the setup to a William Gibson novel.
So instead of policy, these citizens would just have common interests? Idk if he’s bullshitting or actually huffing his own glue
I find the idea of new countries fascinating and the constant disparagement of their supporters as “crypto bros” annoying and inappropriate for a supposedly serious news organization like the BBC.
Otherwise, though, I think the obsession with making a new country is slightly off the mark. Labeling yourself as a country puts the target on your back in a way that doesn’t really exist for a global distributed corporation/organization with a specific purpose. Many of these efforts would be better served creating novel forms of corporations that exist within existing states, not trying to found a new state itself. The model should be the Hanseatic League or something similar, not a fully-fledged nation state. Even a private club like SoHo House is probably a better first step.
No mention of how they're going to pay any potential military, so this is a complete non-starter.
And if they ever do figure out how to pay a potential military, then I'm sure the current actual owners of the land they're on (ie the country whose territory they're in) will quickly want to have a chat with them and disabuse them of that notion.
*disabuse
Thanks, fixed. :)
wow, sounds like someone is taking the back story of Snow Crash a bit too seriously!
It's like Hives in Too Like The Lightning. I do admit I like the idea of having a different set of laws in the same geographical space. There are some things that are like that: accredited investor, etc. And it would be good to broaden the amount of things where you can say "I'm an adult; if I lose, I lose" and then refuse it to people who could not possibly reasonably say that.
In this proposed world, whom decides what constitutes “reasonable”?
This whole group of a16z are scared folks who will do anything to keep a seat on the table. One needs to be careful they don't sell state secrets to Saudi. They have no morality or national pride.
Quite vague on any details about how this would actually be workable, but that might just be the reporter's slant.
Is there some version of this that doesn't sound like a corporate technofascist dystopian anti-fantasy?
The most interesting idea for me was about whether something similar could emerge within already existing states, performing some of their functions but otherwise hybridizing with them. Remote work and starlink and so on open up some geographic possibilities for networked communities.
“Seasteading”, Prospera, LiberLand. Lots of attempts. Nothing that stands the test of time. Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy.
> Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy
Yeah, that’s probably the closest, but it only works because it parasitises an actual country (the US), and is very circumspect about what it actually _is_. It wouldn’t be tolerated for a _minute_ if it went around openly calling itself a country.
Human rights are important, for example the right to be heard in conflicts.
Let me explain why I believe that a new form of country will appear: Companies will turn into countries.
Currently large companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and so on, don't "offer" human rights. People however want them to have more responsibility, especially in Europe. This is a changing force already in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that the European Court of Human Rights or a similar institution will do the same thing to Corporate what it already does for many countries.
Of course the ECHR is not working well today, there are many problems, but should we just give up and let Corporate become feudal? At least I propose we should think about what we people need from countries and corporate entities and how to gain these needs.
I guess at some point Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people, for example.
And that's one step of them turning into countries.
Perhaps you think, a country, that's something with an army. But an army is not really neccessary if there is some other way to control power. Currently, however, the world doesn't seem to have a lot of power as we see with many different wars.
I am a bit pessimistic about the future of humanity, but I still hope that in the long-term we will find a way without raw material power to resolve conflicts, because this is really wasteful and might even lead to our demise.
> Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people
Maybe not quite what you meant....
.... but the GDPR gives users the right not to be subjected to decisions based entirely on automated processing (including AI).
Thus, you have the right to have a human (an actual person!) consider your bank loan application, parking fine, passport application, membership cancellation etc, rather than just have an automatic system say "computer says no" with no right of appeal.
This is an important law which restricts potential tyranny (and I use that word with its full meaning) caused by allowing governments and corporations to limit public's engagement with wider business and society though the use of a restrictive IT practice.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
Yes, but it's a half-baked step.
Probably it's time to rethink what a nation means.
At least I got a vision, citizenship is like being a member of an association.
Currently, citizenship is very restricted, but I hope for a more open world, where citizenship is a lot more fluent than today. Of course many protections are neccessary which are implicit in citizenship. That's why I wrote about human rights and corporate organisations. I imagine an automatic membership bound to residency and what is citizenship today turns into membership to some cultural association.
And customers become members of their corporate entity and thus gain many rights we don't have today. That's why I said, corporate entities turn into countries.
Perhaps in about a hundred years if our civilization is still thriving at least somewhat?
sounds like the setup to a William Gibson novel.
So instead of policy, these citizens would just have common interests? Idk if he’s bullshitting or actually huffing his own glue
I find the idea of new countries fascinating and the constant disparagement of their supporters as “crypto bros” annoying and inappropriate for a supposedly serious news organization like the BBC.
Otherwise, though, I think the obsession with making a new country is slightly off the mark. Labeling yourself as a country puts the target on your back in a way that doesn’t really exist for a global distributed corporation/organization with a specific purpose. Many of these efforts would be better served creating novel forms of corporations that exist within existing states, not trying to found a new state itself. The model should be the Hanseatic League or something similar, not a fully-fledged nation state. Even a private club like SoHo House is probably a better first step.
No mention of how they're going to pay any potential military, so this is a complete non-starter.
And if they ever do figure out how to pay a potential military, then I'm sure the current actual owners of the land they're on (ie the country whose territory they're in) will quickly want to have a chat with them and disabuse them of that notion.
*disabuse
Thanks, fixed. :)
wow, sounds like someone is taking the back story of Snow Crash a bit too seriously!
It's like Hives in Too Like The Lightning. I do admit I like the idea of having a different set of laws in the same geographical space. There are some things that are like that: accredited investor, etc. And it would be good to broaden the amount of things where you can say "I'm an adult; if I lose, I lose" and then refuse it to people who could not possibly reasonably say that.
In this proposed world, whom decides what constitutes “reasonable”?
This whole group of a16z are scared folks who will do anything to keep a seat on the table. One needs to be careful they don't sell state secrets to Saudi. They have no morality or national pride.
Quite vague on any details about how this would actually be workable, but that might just be the reporter's slant.
Is there some version of this that doesn't sound like a corporate technofascist dystopian anti-fantasy?
The most interesting idea for me was about whether something similar could emerge within already existing states, performing some of their functions but otherwise hybridizing with them. Remote work and starlink and so on open up some geographic possibilities for networked communities.
“Seasteading”, Prospera, LiberLand. Lots of attempts. Nothing that stands the test of time. Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy.
> Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy
Yeah, that’s probably the closest, but it only works because it parasitises an actual country (the US), and is very circumspect about what it actually _is_. It wouldn’t be tolerated for a _minute_ if it went around openly calling itself a country.