# Within Our Reach By [Juvenalis X](https://paragraph.com/@juvenalis) · 2022-11-12 --- Today is a day to look forward. I imagine the garden as a world in which all living beings co-exist in harmony. No violence, and no need for violence. Abundance. Scarcity needs are met and belonging needs can be freely pursued. Harmonious, regenerative living. This reality — Eden — never existed, except perhaps as truly inert matter. Since molecules developed agency, violence — which in its broadest sense consists of destructive action without the consent of that being acted upon — has saturated the interactions of communities of living beings. As awareness evolved, our capacity to perceive the consequences of our actions developed. This gave rise to intent — consideration of the effects of our actions. As the complexity of life developed, organisms began to coordinate, due to the competitive advantage it conferred. This is the origin of our need for governance — amongst communities of individuals and within one’s self. Being the living creatures on Earth with the most advanced capacity for critical thought, humans have developed the most sophisticated interpersonal structures to coordinate. But this coordination has always been backstopped by the threat of violence. This is the [underlying basis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence) of the power of the state. Our societies function because laws are enforceable via threat of violence or expropriation. Expropriation and encarceration are forms of violence. Put another way: they state will take your body and put it into a prison if you break the rules. Or they will take your money, they restrict who you can contact, they track your location. Now --- The Garden of Eden seems to be within reach — perhaps in the next century. (If we don’t grasp it by then I fear we never will.) We are discovering new ways of coordinating, new governance structures and incentivization mechanisms. Ways of inspiring humans (and (semi-)autonomous machines) to behave in ways we mutually agree they should. This includes money, the attention economy, our classical governance structures like governments and regulators, as well as norms and habits and traditions and protocols like http or our country code systems or different grades of oil or steel. Each of these are expressions of our values, which are personally and collectively held beliefs in what is good or right. Fundamentally these governance structures rest on common understanding — meaning, shared between communicators. So it stands to reason that advancements in information technologies result in new governance capabilities. Now, for the first time, these information technologies and the governance structures they enable can be created by anyone (albeit with the requisite skills, knowledge and equipment to participate). These governance systems can be created and adopted without requiring the permission of an authority or action from a representative body. Furthermore, once created these structures are, due to their nature, effectively [impossible](https://jacob.energy/hyperstructures.html) to kill or remove. We have radically lowered the barriers to formalizing the norms and traditions and rules and principles that govern us. How can we most accurately define what it means to cheat? How can we dissuade people from engaging in antisocial behavior — activity that tends to result in reductions in measures of human dignity and planetary stewardship? So, how can we move towards the garden, towards our destiny? ![Adam and Eve, Titian. ©Museo Nacional del Prado](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/8ef0a8ae310c25d2c251ac9b7fe8bdb361efe0187e06b0e78dc9d2d03d6d02c9.jpg) Adam and Eve, Titian. ©Museo Nacional del Prado An unformed proposal -------------------- Here I'll unpack several loosely related, unformed ideas on how to leverage emerging information technologies to reimagine our systems of governance. I should note that I am not a techno-utopianist, but I do see much potential at the intersection of many of the technologies we are beginning to discover. When the UN was formed, Alan Turing was still alive and Claude Shannon had not yet published _A Mathematical Theory of Communication_. The United Nations’ founding documents were crafted by brilliant people who understood the way things worked — but had no idea how they would work. They could not foresee that as the noosphere matured and our ability to exchange sophisticated messages with anyone on or near Earth in an instant developed, our capacity for coordination would also proportionately expand. The time for a global governance system is past due, but it has not been achieved because we are using systems of government designed to administer local territories. I am excited to see early work pointing towards a global system of governance built on smart contracts. As I imagine it, this system will allocate and distribute funds and information to pursue goals that are mutually agreed by the people of Earth. This will be a global governance system built on self-sovereign identity. I believe in that the privacy-security trade-off can be overcome, and that we can implement global oversight using privacy-preserving technologies. This applies to our financial lives — to detect financial criminals without violating the human right to privacy. It applies to our right to communicate — I imagine a global monitoring system to identify individuals intent on perpetrating violence, which intervenes to prevent it, while preserving the individual’s right to choose privacy. This global governance system would be designed to fulfill many of the functions of the state. This system must not be like its precursors — it must evolve at the speed of code, not of a horse. Every person who would choose to participate is entitled to, in whatever capacity they care to — a civic life that is opt in and inclusive. ### Collective sensemaking How to uncover mutually agreed goals? One semi-formed idea: people could “vote” by swiping through statements designed to glean that person’s values. We could also mine social media activity, search patterns, financial activity, etc to take the pulse of the global demos. By analyzing these voter surveys using advanced analytics techniques, we could approximate a more accurate understanding of our society’s values than asking directly every few years, or distilling this power into the hands of a few elected officials. These understandings could be further refined by analyzing the public discourse, and by including respected voices from across society to engage in more formal ways, with their choices weighted as trust in their justness and consistency develops. In this way, we can extract our collective values in an increasingly sophisticated way. Based on the values we continuously assess and identify, we can use measurable metrics as indicators of their state and progress. Individuals could submit proposals for ways they think they could promote the collectively-identified values (locally or globally), along with the resources required to pursue them. These proposals could be assessed by other Citizens, and if they seem credible, funding could be unlocked to pursue them. By measuring metrics the projects intended to impact, further [impact funding](https://protocol.ai/blog/hypercert-new-primitive/) could be unlocked. All participants could be compensated by governance tokens. These could have monetary value, and earning these tokens could also mean a person’s weight in the system is enhanced. In this way, we could incentivize civic engagement, and compensate genuine participation in governing. To get your UBI, spend a small amount of time each day or week participating in civic life. This system must be designed to adapt as society evolves. This could be achieved by upgrading the smart contracts that run the system, and the algorithms trained to identify collective values, assess indicators of these values, and allocation funds and information. Further, the system could be designed in such a way that malicious actors could be detected, and stripped of resource, before they could do much harm. In such a case, a group could investigate their behavior and intent — if found to be a false alert, their rights could be restored and those responsible for raising the alarm penalized (slashed weight and / or slashed funds). The Garden of Eden is in front of us, not behind us. --- *Originally published on [Juvenalis X](https://paragraph.com/@juvenalis/within-our-reach)*