What comes after the 400-year-old nation-state system? Has this revolution already started from the depths of the internet? Farewell to Westphalia explores what is likely to succeed nation states, from cyberstates to internet movements, backed by the authors’ decades of experience.
We believe – and Farewell to Westphalia argues – that decentralised communities and blockchain governance (at every level) are not only feasible but are on the immediate horizon. Furthermore, the seeds have already been planted. Logos' aim is to nurture those embryonic forms of blockchain governance and make their future adoption as frictionless as possible.
Jarrad Hope
Jarrad came to Bitcoin in early 2011 through agorism, countereconomics, and crypto anarchy. Seeing that Bitcoin could operate a monetary policy in a hostile environment, he began to view public blockchains as a voluntary social order, one that did not depend on a monopoly of violence.
From there, he participated in early attempts to generalise the Bitcoin script to advance institutional libertarianism, ultimately becoming an early contributor to Ethereum. While advancing privacy technologies through the development of the end-to-end encrypted and peer-to-peer private messaging client and super app Status, Jarrad realised that privacy technologies are not enough and now advocates for self-sovereign crypto networks and the realisation of a latent cypherpunk dream, the cryptostate. As the co-founder of Logos, Jarrad uses his experience to build censorship-resistant governance infrastructure. On these technical foundations, Logos is building a viable alternative to the nation state that addresses many of the faults of the current system.
Peter Ludlow
Peter Ludlow entered the world of philosophy through a deep interest in linguistics, the philosophy of language and digital technologies. His early work in artificial intelligence and natural language processing showed him the cooperative part of language comprehension – an idea explored in his book, Living Words. This led him to make significant contributions to our understanding of how meaning is a shared, collaborative enterprise.
As a leading voice in the philosophy of mind and language, Peter has authored and contributed to influential works on the intersection of technology and society, including the seminal anthology on how cyberspace is poised to impact human organisation, Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. His current focus is on the potential for digital platforms to foster self-sovereign communities and new, decentralised-yet-collaborative social orders.
