15 MIN16 JAN 2026

Story of the Network: From Cybernetics to Blockchain Communities

The tech enabling parallel societies had to be deliberately engineered with the goal of expanding human freedoms

S

Sterlin Lujan

Philosophy

Logos

cypherpunk

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This article traces how cybernetics, post-industrial thought, and cypherpunk cryptography converged to make decentralised, parallel societies possible. It argues that blockchain communities now offer a viable alternative to failing nation-state governance.

Institutions are failing. Confidence in government, big tech, and corporations has hit historic lows across Western civilisation. Banks are bailed out while the middle class languishes. Social media platforms censor speech arbitrarily. Central banks erode purchasing power while denying responsibility. For a growing number of people, the message is clear: institutions meant to serve society have become extractive, unaccountable, and hostile.

In response, parallel societies are emerging. These are voluntary communities that build alternative systems for governance, commerce, and social coordination outside legacy frameworks. Rather than petitioning corrupt systems for reform, they circumvent them, creating their own economic networks and decision-making structures.

What makes this exodus possible are technologies that eliminate the need for trusted third parties. Public-private key cryptography enables individuals to prove their identity and authorise transactions without relying on central authorities. Blockchain creates tamper-proof records maintained by distributed systems. Zero-knowledge proofs allow verification without disclosure. Together, these tools enable coordination at scale while bypassing intermediaries.

The architects of this tech were cypherpunks, a loose collective of cryptographers and activists who emerged in the late 1980s. Their ideology fused libertarian principles with hacker pragmatism: rather than lobby to guarantee our rights, they wrote code that upholds civil liberties and privacy. They developed anonymous remailers, digital cash prototypes, and the cryptographic primitives that later evolved into Bitcoin.

Yet this transition did not happen overnight. The cypherpunks built upon decades of innovation in cybernetic systems theory, post-industrial philosophy, and computer-mediated communication. This article argues that parallel societies and the technologies enabling them are the product of ideologically-driven efforts to move away from centralisation and institutional control. By tracing this genealogy, it demonstrates how countercultural philosophies and technological breakthroughs converged to produce viable alternatives to institutional governance.

The sections that follow explore this evolution through key historical waypoints, beginning with early cybernetic insights, moving through post-industrial visions, the rise of computer-mediated communication, and concluding with the impact of the cypherpunk movement on modern digital communities.

Cybernetics: The first science of decentralisation

Cybernetics is the study of systems, feedback, and control. Coined by Norbert Wiener in 1948, the term derives from the Greek kybernetes, meaning “steersman” or “governor”. The field examines how systems regulate themselves through information flows, whether biological organisms, machines, or social institutions. Early cybernetics researchers examined hierarchical systems and their limits. Building on this, cyberneticians focused on decentralisation – distributing communication and control across a network. In many ways, cybernetics pioneered the science of decentralisation.^[1]

In the 1950s, Norbert Wiener argued society could be seen as a system of feedback and information flows. His work, The Human Use of Human Beings, warned that centralised control systems were brittle, prone to failure, and often dehumanising.^[2] In the book’s opening, Wiener raises concerns about centralised systems, arguing that organisations demanding obedience without feedback reduce humans to mere “effectors for a supposedly higher nervous organism”. He frames his book as “a protest against this inhuman use of human beings”, insisting that any system demanding less than a person’s full status represents “a degradation and a waste”.^[3] A compelling illustration of this can be found in the case of the Soviet Union’s command economy, where top-down central planning stifled innovation, led to widespread inefficiency, and ultimately contributed to the system’s collapse. This real-world example underscores Wiener’s warnings about the inherent vulnerabilities of centralised systems.

Wiener and other cybernetic thinkers questioned the efficacy and nature of centralised systems from the start. However, they mostly explored the theoretical problems of centralisation. Stafford Beer extended their insights more practically into governance and social organisation in the 1970s. Beer worked as a management consultant and founded “management cybernetics”. He attended some of the earliest conferences focused on understanding and expanding the field, including the “First International Congress on Cybernetics” in Namur, Belgium, in 1956.^[4]

In Designing Freedom, Beer described modern institutions as machines that produce outputs based on their organisational design.^[5] When institutions collapse into instability, it is not because humans are flawed but because the system design is maladapted to complexity. Beer envisioned “liberty machines”: distributed, cybernetic feedback structures for self-organisation without authoritarian centralisation. His Viable System Model (VSM) proposed that autonomy and coordination could coexist if governance were designed as a recursive system. Each unit would self-manage while remaining connected to the larger whole.

Beer also took part in one of the earliest tech-mediated governance experiments. In the early 1970s, under Salvador Allende in Chile, he founded Cybersyn, which ran from 1971 to 1973.^[6] The project aimed to enhance governance by promoting decentralisation and reducing top-down processes. Beer wanted to give local control to factory managers by connecting them to a nationwide network of factories. The project was halted indefinitely as a direct result of the 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet. Despite this, the idea represents an early step toward decentralised governance. 

Cybernetics and cybernetic management set the conceptual stage for emergent, decentralised, and parallel governance design. It unlocked a new theory of governance based on a science of decentralisation.

The post-industrial imagination

While cyberneticians described institutions as feedback-based systems, sociologists and futurists charted the changes of late-industrial society. They sensed we would begin to alter how institutions function and coordinate. Put differently, they saw the coming age of decentralisation and offered a post-war, post-industrial vision of the future.

Daniel Bell, in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, described the rise of the knowledge economy, in which information and expertise would replace industrial production as the central resource of economic exchange.^[7] Institutions organised around bureaucratic hierarchies would give way to more fluid arrangements built on the flow of knowledge.

Alvin Toffler, in The Third Wave, expanded on this sentiment. He framed history as three waves: agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial. The third wave, driven by information technology, would fragment mass institutions. In their place would arise micro-communities and flexible arrangements. Prosumers would blur the lines between production and consumption, leading to more fluid, potentially decentralised governance.^[8] In the chapter “21st Century Democracy”, Toffler sums up his position:

In this instance, Toffler not only predicted the rise of decentralised efforts but also foreshadowed the coming age of parallel societies and microeconomies. He was also one of the first to hint at the emergence of hyperlocalism and cosmolocalism, whereby communities could focus on production locally and design globally.

Stewart Brand distilled this cultural shift into a practical ethos through the Whole Earth Catalog. First published in 1968, with a final edition in 1974, it served as his manifesto, encapsulating his vision of “tools for a self-reliant society”.^[10] The catalogue not only provided tools but also introduced DIY institutions and ideas for building regenerative communities, creating a cultural and technical toolchain for alternative ways of living and organising. As a written precursor to the Internet, The Whole Earth Catalog was an access point to utilities, hacks, and alternative lifestyles, often referred to as “Google in paperback form”.

Together, Bell, Toffler, Brand, and others saw a society in transition: large-scale industrial bureaucracies breaking apart under the weight of information, giving way to more open, decentralised, and self-directed modes of cooperation.

The network nation: Digital nations in hindsight

The next step in the genealogy is derived from The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer by Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff. Published in 1978 and revised in 1993, it remains one of the earliest comprehensive studies of computer-mediated communication (CMC).^[11]

The authors viewed CMC, including conferencing systems, groupware, and virtual classrooms, as more than just technical tools; they saw them as a new social infrastructure. By enabling communication unconstrained by geography or time, computer networks dissolved barriers of distance, hierarchy, and access. Digital group communication flattened organisational hierarchies. The authors noted these systems were “shrinking time and distance barriers among people, and between people and information, to near zero”.^[12]

In their speculative scenarios, they envisioned “superconnectivity”: societies where time and distance barriers were nearly nonexistent, allowing for new forms of association. In such a world, people could maintain relationships, conduct business, and participate in governance regardless of location. This vision anticipated both the promise and challenges of our current networked reality.

The Network Nation was prophetic. Decades before blockchain or social media, it demonstrated that virtual communities could be real communities with their own norms, politics, and governance structures. The book foreshadowed how computer networks could evolve into parallel societies, maintaining their own governance structures and communities with distinct identities.

The cypherpunk turn: Protocols and sovereign individuals

The 1990s represented a pivotal shift from theoretical exploration to practical implementation. The cypherpunks, including Tim May, Eric Hughes, and Hal Finney, among others, asserted that cryptography could facilitate new forms of freedom by enabling privacy, anonymous association, and resistance to censorship. Their guiding principle, “Cypherpunks write code”, emphasised that protocols, rather than policies, would define the emerging social order.^[13]

Where Beer imagined liberty machines and Hiltz and Turoff described digital communities, the cypherpunks built the practical mechanisms: encrypted messaging, anonymous remailers, and early digital cash experiments. For them, governance was not a matter of laws passed by parliaments but rules embedded in code. Protocols became intensely political. For the cypherpunks, technology is a political statement as much as it is a tool.

Fueling the fire, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual provided a macro-historical frame for the cypherpunk argument.^[14] Their book became a staple of counter-technological thinking, energising much of the individualist spirit that the 1990s attracted. They predicted that digital technology would undermine the fiscal and coercive monopolies of nation states. Just as the agricultural and industrial revolutions reshaped communities and developed the original state structure, the information revolution would empower individuals and small groups to “exit” from traditional states. In their forecast, sovereignty would become personal, mobile, and economically enabled by encryption and digital money.

Collectively, the cypherpunks and The Sovereign Individual exemplify the convergence of technological protocols and economic prophecy: the means to construct parallel societies and the vision for these societies to surpass nation states. While The Network Nation demonstrated the viability of virtual communities as societies, the cypherpunks illustrated their capacity to guarantee individual sovereignty.

Beyond network states: The liberatory vision

The genealogy from cybernetics to cryptography reveals a consistent liberatory vision: autonomous communities operating outside hierarchical control. Beer’s liberty machines were designed to enable self-organisation without state authority. Toffler predicted decentralisation as a departure from mass institutions, not accommodation with them. The cypherpunks built infrastructure specifically to resist state power, coding autonomy and anonymity directly into cryptographic protocols. The Sovereign Individual prophesied exit rather than integration.

This vision differs fundamentally from more recent formulations. While Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State helped popularise many of these foundational ideas to a mainstream audience, it did not fully capture the history and potential of the concept.^[15] What the entire intellectual lineage points toward is the ability for people to leave jurisdictions and governance regimes that they dislike.

What the cypherpunks are building are not “states” seeking legitimacy from the old order, but parallel communities designed to operate independently of it. These autonomous social formations derive their legitimacy from their capacity to meet human needs and solve problems, not from diplomatic recognition or participation in traditional geopolitical structures.

The critical question, then, is not whether to seek the state’s permission, but whether these parallel communities can actually function as viable alternatives to the state. Can they provide the coordination, governance, and services that human communities require? We now have the answer.

Parallel societies as transitional governance

Parallel societies exist, even if we do not yet call them by that name. DAOs coordinate treasuries larger than those of many municipalities. Online communities enforce rules and norms without the need for state oversight. Special economic zones experiment with alternative regulatory regimes and blockchain token-economic designs.

These developments are not merely theoretical experiments or unrealistic ambitions; they are prefigurative institutions currently in operation. Serving as experimental laboratories, they embody governance models that may become predominant in the future. As Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow contend in Farewell to Westphalia: Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance, this period marks the dissolution of the Westphalian order itself.^[16]

The nation state, they observe, is an obsolete form of governance. It is nearly 380 years old and showing its age. Just as we no longer rely on the astrolabe, invented around 220 BCE, for navigation, we should not assume that political technologies from the 17th century represent the pinnacle of human organisational capacity.

The question is not whether this transition is happening, but what will replace the failing nation-state system. Hope and Ludlow’s answer is straightforward: blockchain communities. These are not nation states seeking diplomatic recognition, but autonomous communities organised around cryptographic protocols that enable “decentralised-yet-cooperative human activities”.^[17]

The distinction is important. Where Srinivasan envisions network states ultimately seeking legitimacy from existing governments, Hope and Ludlow argue that blockchain communities derive their legitimacy from their ability to coordinate human action effectively, without legacy entities or corrupt regimes.

This represents a fundamental reimagining of sovereignty itself. Traditional sovereignty was territorial, exclusive, and recognised through diplomatic channels. Post-Westphalian sovereignty, by contrast, is polycentric: overlapping, flexible, voluntary, and grounded in the capacity to meet human needs rather than control territory. Blockchain communities demonstrate that sovereignty is not singular but plural, that multiple forms of legitimate governance can coexist and even overlap.

The technology of liberation

This reimagining of sovereignty may seem abstract, but the technical infrastructure making it possible is already here. Hope and Ludlow point to projects like the Logos Blockchain (formerly Nomos), a sovereign, modular, and credibly neutral coordination layer designed to enable the emergence of networked communities.^[18] Logos exemplifies the shift from state-based governance to protocol-based coordination. Rather than relying on centralised authorities to maintain order, Logos uses cryptographic tools to create Beer’s vision of “liberty machines”: distributed feedback structures that enable communities to self-organise without recreating broken, centralised hierarchies.

The vision is ambitious but grounded in existing technological capabilities. Blockchain communities can maintain transparent, immutable archives that resist censorship and tampering, ensuring the integrity of their records. They can coordinate economic activity through sound monetary policy, free from the hyperinflation and currency debasement that plague nation states. They can enable secure, decentralised communication that protects privacy while maintaining transparency in governance.

Zero-knowledge cryptography adds another critical dimension to this technological foundation. It allows one party to prove they possess certain information without revealing the information itself. For instance, a user could prove they know the password to an account without transmitting the password, or demonstrate they hold sufficient funds for a transaction without disclosing their balance. Participants can verify their eligibility to join a community, vote in governance decisions, or access specific services without exposing their identity or personal data. Zero-knowledge proofs enable privacy-preserving governance, where accountability and transparency coexist with personal anonymity. This transforms the relationship between individuals and institutions, removing the surveillance apparatus that has historically been inextricably linked to centralised governance.

The technology exists, and experiments are underway. What remains is the commitment to design these systems wisely, as liberatory infrastructures that resist capture rather than replicas of the hierarchies we sought to escape.

Conclusion

The parallel societies emerging today are the culmination of an intellectual project that has spanned more than half a century. Cybernetics demonstrated that distributed systems could achieve coordination without hierarchy. Post-industrial thinkers recognised that information technology would dissolve mass institutions. Computer-mediated communication has demonstrated that virtual communities can develop their own governance. The cypherpunks took these insights and turned them into working code. What unites them is a shared conviction: centralised control is incompatible with civil liberty, and the tools to escape it must be engineered into existence.

This article has argued that parallel societies and the technologies enabling them are the product of ideologically-driven efforts to move away from centralisation and institutional control. This was not inevitable. It required theorists willing to question the necessity of top-down governance, engineers willing to build alternatives, and communities willing to experiment.

The nation state is failing because it was built for a different world. The Westphalian order cannot adapt to instantaneous global communication, borderless economic activity, and citizens who can exit jurisdictions without leaving their homes. What replaces it is already taking shape. DAOs coordinate resources across continents. Blockchain communities maintain records beyond the reach of censors. Zero-knowledge cryptography enables accountability without surveillance, and blockchain communities set the stage for a new kind of human governance paradigm. These are real human networks, not speculative pulp dreamt up by an obscure science fiction writer.

The transition from centralised to distributed governance is now underway. The architects of this transition gave us more than technology. They provided us with a blueprint for voluntary coordination at a civilisational scale. The story of the network is still being written. We are its authors, and we must continue championing the cause.

Logos is an open-source movement aiming to revitalise civil society. We need coders, writers, designers, and all forward thinkers to join us. To get involved, head to the Logos Contribute portal and submit a proposal.