Farewell to Westphalia
Farewell to Westphalia: Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance is now available in physical and ebook editions and as a free download.
Coauthored by Logos cofounder Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow, author of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, it explores the shortcomings of the nation state, presenting sovereign cyberstates and blockchain-based governance as an alternative order for the post-Westphalian era.
Get Farewell to Westphalia now
More purchase and ebook options coming soon.
Reader persepectives
“Farewell to Westphalia presents a vision for decentralised, blockchain-based governance to enable self-sovereign communities and is a nod to the real-world 'crypto city' experiments in cryptocurrency communities. Importantly, it also acknowledges some of the challenges of fostering a culture of responsibility within blockchain communities and the limitations of enforcing societal order through computational means.”
– Dr Kelsie Nabben (Research Fellow, RMIT University)
“It's a compelling manifesto on the future of governance. A critique of the nation-state and a visionary look into blockchain-based political systems [. . .] It's mind boggling how well-researched and multidisciplinary it is.”
– Frederico Ast (Kleros Founder)
“Farewell to Westphalia makes crystal clear that the nation state is no longer the best governance system for today's digital society. More important than formulating the problem is to develop an alternative societal governance system that serves citizens, and this is exactly the main strength of the book. It imagines a future society built on blockchain technology, creating what is desperately needed today: a human society.”
– Bob de Wit (Society 4.0 author and Emeritus Professor of
Strategic Leadership, Nyenrode University)
A blueprint for a blockchain-based social order
In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War – an event in which Catholics and Protestants had clashed across Northern Europe. The settlement not only ended the conflict but made sovereign nation states a permanent fixture in our world. It was a solution in which everyone agreed that what nation states do internally is their own business.
Sovereign nation states are human technologies, designed to facilitate the peaceful organisation of human beings and solving for their ideological, political, and religious differences. However, they are technologies that are almost 380 years old and, like all technology of that era, perhaps not the optimal solutions available today.
Can we not do better? We believe that we can. Our solution involves diving deep into developments like blockchain technologies and smart contracts, and showing how they can be productively applied to cooperative human governance.
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.
When they arrive, they will provide us relief from the failures of the Westphalian order and offer creative alternatives for humans to govern themselves in effective-yet-self-sovereign ways. We should be optimistic about the promise of these new forms of governance. After all, we have nothing to lose but the tyranny of centralised governance, its corruption, and all of its barbed wire fences.
About the Authors
As the co-founder of Logos, Jarrad focuses on building 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. 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.
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.
In making the case for blockchain governance, Peter and Jarrad consider:
- The Cypherpunks, hacktivists, and other ideological forefathers of today’s post-state innovators.
- How technologies like blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, and artificial intelligence can lay the foundations of a more just social order.
- Where our vision overlaps with Balaji Srinivasan’s network states and where our ideas diverge.
- How corruption costs society trillions and is an inevitable consequence of centralisation, and how blockchain and crypto are the solution.
- The conceptual limits of blockchain technology.
- The concepts of rights and responsibilities as they relate to blockchain communities.
- Issues surrounding exit and exile from and access to network states and cyberstates.