Rewilding the Community
Building Parallel Societies and Preferable Futures for Humans
Sterlin Lujan
'Community' in the crypto and peer-to-peer (P2P) ecosystem should not be about schemes, grifting, or cynical memes. The status quo focuses neurotically on building communities around extraction, exploitation, and dehumanisation. Instead, our communities should venerate what matters most: human relationships and the technology's liberatory potential.
This is why Logos pushes boundaries by building open-source infrastructure for network states. It is our raison d'être, our North Star. We have the Logos tech stack, which includes Codex, Waku, and Nomos. We also have Status and Nimbus in our toolkit. Alongside developing technology, we execute grassroots campaigns and foster an open-source movement.
We intend to renew the human spirit by assembling heroic communities and contributing to network state education. Every operator involved in our GitHub network, Discord, socials, and locus of action is a part of this initiative. Being involved in the movement means being relentlessly optimistic and motivated. We are not just technology pioneers. We are tinkerers and techno-alchemists working on the fringes, playing with ideas optimised to futureproof our existence.
This article will discuss the current Meaning Crisis running through society, the techno-optimist response, the nascent hopepunk movement, and our intentions. We aim to lift people out of black-pilled mindsets by producing a network state infrastructure of rewilded communities. A parallel society or network state's purpose is not just to buck the system with exit mania and farewell mantras; it is about crafting healthy networks, uplifting the human spirit, and steeling our resolve against black swan events to build a preferable future.
Meaning Crisis
The current political milieu seems bleak and hopeless. Messages of violence and tragedy permeate the airwaves. Cultural memes convey images of destruction. Talking heads speak of drone swarms, bioweapons, and mass surveillance. When someone turns on their TV, they are inundated with political gestures, left or right, red or blue, this or that president. The stations are tuned to the signal of collapse.
The same unnerving transmissions contaminate the internet: people admit they are 'black-pilled', exposing nihilism as a popular doctrine. Messages of hope, a bright future, and perseverance emerge in short supply and with minimal zeal. No wonder psychologist John Vervaeke says we are amid a 'Meaning Crisis', suggesting people feel lost in the face of overwhelming despair.
Philosophers have attributed much of the modern crisis to poor governance, broken monetary systems, and corrupt social structures. In Genes, Memes, Culture, and Mental Illness, Leigh Hoyle argues that 'memeplexes' (meme communities or collections of memes) interact with the environment and our genes to produce what we call mental illness. He refers to this as the Gene X Meme interaction. One could easily infer that negative cultural memes could instil depressive tendencies and usher in uncertain futures.
Psychiatrists such as Thomas Szasz came to a more direct conclusion when he wrote The Therapeutic State: The Tyranny of Pharmacracy. Szasz argues that the 'therapeutic state' uses psychiatric principles as a tool of social control, labelling dissenting or nonconforming behaviours as mental illnesses. The net result is often more damaged and depressed individuals.
Thankfully, not all hope is lost. People have a path toward healing and liberation. There is a crack in the armour of the dominant paradigm. The light of a new order is shining through. As the cliché goes, it is darkest before dawn. What is happening worldwide could be seen as a spiritual emergency — a birthing process the species is enduring before a transformation, like a butterfly erupting from its chrysalis. This transformation represents the creation of network states and parallel societies, heralded by the rise of the cypherpunks.
Techno-optimism
The cypherpunks were the first techno-optimists. They realised society could erode if corrupt institutions usurped control of the internet. They believed someone needed to protect civil liberties and build technologies to safeguard individuals from unlawful spying. The cypherpunks saw the internet as an opportunity to permit more freedom and experimentation. However, they also saw it as a conduit for creating mass surveillance if we were not cautious. They decided to act on this instinct. As a result, they helped keep the internet free while imbuing many with a positive outlook on the future.
In the 1990s, they won the so-called 'crypto wars'. They fought to keep strong encryption open and available to everyone. Cypherpunks like Phil Zimmermann fought the federal government in court to ensure that PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) could not be treated as a 'munition' for export purposes. John Gilmore ensured that the work of cryptographers would be available for all and that the government could not keep it a secret. Their efforts enabled the internet to maintain its encrypted standards. To learn more about their story, read Steven Levy's insightful book, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age.
The cypherpunk victory eventually led to more profound developments in cryptography, setting the stage for the invention of the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Its purpose was to give people control over their money to regain economic sovereignty. Bitcoin's enigmatic creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, inscribed a message in the Genesis Block, 'Chancellor on the brink of second bailout.' Satoshi's message was political. It questioned the practice and logic of centralised banking and the validity of Wall Street. Underneath the Bitcoin tech resided a philosophy of disruption and disintermediation meant to liberate the individual from the fetters of the fiat system.
Bitcoin led to the eventual creation of multiple competing cryptocurrencies and DeFi, or decentralised finance. This achievement represented a high point in the parallel financial revolution, providing activists and ordinary people access to programmable money, including trading, staking, and lending options. These tools led to the rise of communities focused on building parallel establishments, supplying an outlet for positive engagement and hope for a better future. In other words, it created self-sovereign communities with unique values, principles, and ethos. The next evolution of crypto foreshadowed growing techno-optimism in the form of exiting territorial states altogether.
The crypto endgame: Parallel societies
Praxis Nation refers to this exit ideology as the 'crypto endgame'. They characterised the idea as an exodus, where people leave the nation state to move into parallel societies or network states. Before we delve further into this notion of a 'crypto endgame', let us define 'network state' and 'parallel society'. What exactly are they? Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan coined the term network state. He provided a succinct definition:
The term 'parallel society' means the same as 'network state', except parallel societies do not necessarily believe they must gain diplomatic recognition. They also tend to espouse more cypherpunk ideals. 'Parallel society' is a much older term previously used to describe religious communities living on the outskirts of civilisation. The cypherpunk vision for network states and parallel societies is not fantasy or a Utopian pipedream. The idea is being experimented en masse, with investors injecting millions of dollars into the nascent industry. Here are some of the network state projects that exist at the time of writing:
The cypherpunk godfather Timothy May was the first to discuss the idea of these kinds of internet-based parallel societies. In 1992, he wrote 'Libertaria in Cyberspace'. In the article, he envisioned a digital governance structure of communities assembled to exit corrupt systems. In this way, the growth and development of the network state was initially a cypherpunk design. The cypherpunks saw the idea as an ambitious endeavour to give humankind more open space and options for living freely.
This drive for freedom is why the network state idea represents the 'crypto endgame'. The cypherpunks hoped to secure privacy-enhancing cryptocurrencies and a parallel economy on a network controlled by peers. Their dream was always about living in parallel with the established order. It was about being able to voluntarily exit their communities and join new ones at their leisure. Their aim of creating parallel societies was the original impetus taken to its logical conclusion. However, the early cypherpunks left out an important consideration. They did not sufficiently analyse the importance of building strong communities.
Logos: Hopepunk and resiliency
Without resilient communities, one cannot reliably build network states or parallel societies. A network state requires a deeply human component and an understanding of emotional intelligence. The communities comprising network states sometimes consist of people solely interested in capturing the value embedded in a blockchain. These groups focus on teasing out the monetary aspect of the tech rather than forging human connections. These monetary-focused regimes are known to orbit around complexes of memes, such as Doge, Pepe, and so on. This focus is excellent for a strictly digital community, but it is not optimal if they construct network states, drive governance experimentation, or crowdfund physical territory.
The strength and resiliency of a community rests in the human relationships that reside in those networks. To survive and thrive, financial gain or grift should be disavowed for network states. The memes should contain humanness. The community should pursue our most treasured values: association, compassion, and sincerity. This human-focused orientation also means building trust, which seems antithetical to an ecosystem that has notoriously relied on 'trustless' tech. However, trust never vanishes, especially when people congregate in physical spaces. So, trustlessness in peer-to-peer tech makes sense, but trust in human relational activity exists and exerts influence in perpetuity.
We relish this component because it allows us to stave off symptoms of the Meaning Crisis while conveying a message of hope. Indeed, hope relies not only on techno-optimism but also on creating new social structures and human arrangements where the actors share values and contribute to building something sustainable and beautiful.
In this sense, Logos embraces a hopepunk mentality, where we construct the future of social organisation to rewild humankind's relational appetites and passions. The idea of 'rewilding' denotes returning to a time when people focused on relationships and the spirit of meaning and connection. This rewilded, hopepunk ethos struggles with the opposite mindset: grimdark. In a grimdark worldview, only the apocalyptic vibes and memes of destruction resonate and gain appeal. In a grimdark world, communities become corrupt, withered, and toxic. We disavow and combat grimdark memetics with every fibre of our being.
In The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna makes a case against the grimdark worldview, suggesting that culture has been sick with 'dis-ease' and that once a culture becomes deathly ill, it naturally generates antibodies to fight the infection. He wrote:
The development of the cypherpunk ethos, with its attendant swashbuckling, piratical-yet-liberty-loving attitude, expresses a rejection of linear values and the embrace of the profoundly human. This situation is how we have arrived at a hopepunk vision for the future.
Our answer: Rewilded, open-source communities
We have initiated our hopepunk aspirations by assembling stalwart and resilient communities. While we heavily support our technology-building efforts, we have also deemed the human element one of the most vital engines for driving creativity at the centre of our work. Parallel societies and network states will not survive and mature without strong relationships. The community must be nourished and strengthened to allow the proliferation of network states. We want to ensure these communities exist in numbers and have the technological and community resources to maintain their vitality. With this goal in mind, Logos is focusing on several key areas:
- Building open-source communities: We strive to engender the formation of lasting, open-source communities by providing real human connections and developing authentic relationships. These relationships mean we do not just want to encourage the dissemination of stereotypical crypto memes. We want human interaction, communication, and shared trust. We will build real-life communities using a boots-on-the-ground approach, showing up at conferences, having meetups, and eventually deploying pop-up cities leveraging our suite of technologies to apply good governance. We hope that all of our community devote their time and resources to developing the tech that reaches its pinnacle in human liberation.
- Fostering an education ecosystem: We will continue to develop the Logos Press Engine (LPE) as the nexus for all network state education. We will regularly produce articles, videos, pamphlets, and materials on the LPE. We will open the Logos Press Engine to contributors and fellow Operator submissions. We recognise that knowledge is power and that our whole community is a braintrust of expertise and knowledge.
- Rewilding the human spirit: We understand that emphasis on technology can sometimes lead us to over-rationalise to the point of forgetting what it means to be human. This loss of connection can be dehumanising and lay the foundation for developing what Theodore Roszak called the technocratic society. In this sense, Logos focuses intensely on the human element of the network state. We want our content and interaction to contain deductive and logical argumentation but also poetic, romantic, spiritually meaningful, and humanitarian engagement. It is part of the rewilding of our community in preparation for the Cambrian explosion of parallel societies and the tech that supports it.
Conclusion: A clarion call
This message is our clarion call to prepare humankind for radical transformation and a paradigm shift. We are in an age of unprecedented, significant disruption, which futurist Ray Kurzweil called 'The Singularity'. The increasing prowess of artificial intelligence, climatological upheaval, and social unrest currently besets us. We could self-cannibalise and self-destruct if we do not build our communities around the coming transitional period and deploy resilient network states to improve human flourishing. However, at Logos, we maintain a sense of celebratory optimism, knowing that we are armed with the technical capabilities, social acumen, and spiritual fortitude to gird ourselves for incoming change. We embody the hopepunk ethos and vehemently reject all anti-values and grimdark realities. We push for the infinite, expansive beauty and Utopian outlook of the unencumbered human spirit while hurtling toward our preferred future.
Want to be involved in a bleeding-edge initiative, help build a rewilded community, gain a world-class network state education, learn more about the Logos Operators sparked by Bitcoin ordinals, or simply connect with like-minded cypherpunks and dreamers?
Join the open-source community now!
Logos
Jarrad Hope