Cyber Sovereignty

This article is part of a group of articles on Agora's ethos.

Cyber Sovereignty in context

The modern debate

A key debate in current society is between those who believe in human society's broad-scale organization, via government, to make society decidedly more equal and those who believe that individuals should have freedom from greater society letting each individual be rewarded or suffer according to their own actions.

The government for the people?

The problem with large-scale governmental organization is that government often ends up organizing for it's own benefit, as problematic concentrations of centralized power inevitably prioritize their own interests over public welfare.

When the United States was founded, the whole country was rural, and even New York was inhabited by only 31,000. This led to a form of representative democracy where people intimately knew the representatives they sent to Congress, and where people's actions at home spoke louder than their campaign speeches.

Regrettably, contemporary electoral processes have individuals unknown to their community, representing millions of people they don't know and often the only other choice is someone else unknown.

The result is political parties who make decisions in their own interest with little meaningful accountability.

A life of equality?

The problem with individual liberty is that, in reality, opportunity is not spread equally. A disease, a freak accident or even riches are achieved often not by action alone but by time and chance.

If everyone lives and dies purely by their own actions, the reality is people will fall through the cracks imposing considerable taxpayer burdens for remedial services (healthcare, policing, incarceration) that could have been avoided if some investment was made upfront into their lives.

Cyber Sovereignty as an alternative

Cyber sovereigntists first and foremost advocate for an internet of true freedom.

Upon that foundation of freedom Cyber Sovereigntists advocate for the creation of digital societies that organize whatever does not require broad top-level government organization.

It begins by digital societies duplicating the systems of government and seeking to outperform them. Individuals can then choose a society whose rules they appreciate. By delegating powers to online communities, we can organize a society where people can live by values they choose ensuring individual freedom while creating an environment of mutual benefit.

Cyber Sovereigntists believe communities organizing in their own benefit allows for the freedom sought by individualists and the collective advantage of those who seek to build a society.

Agora and Cyber Sovereignty

Agora seeks to discover what digitally organized communities can do for people better than large-scale governments.

Examples:

Currency: Decisions concerning the creation and distribution of monetary units.
Social services: Decisions as to how collective insurance is distributed.
Labor: The regulation of labor relations between its members.

Agora needs to prove a higher level of efficiency between its members to the extent that it's members become advocates of this new way of doing things.

Vision of Cyber Sovereignty

For a long time, people have been frustrated by representatives who have failed to truly represent the interests of people. This has led to a system of government which seems to be failing people in many different ways:

Total lack of government transparency, accounts and audits
Spying on citizens
Lagging education systems
Waste and inefficiency
Broken justice and incarceration systems
Arbitrary often unchecked power use
Legal corruption and undue influence
Taking out massive debts in our names.

People live under a system that does not function well, that they don't endorse and under rules in which they had no real voice.

From how a state educates people to its judicial system, to its laws, to its system of punishments, to the rules that are enforced, people can see our system's dysfunction.

So what if we could switch systems? Change the rules one lives under? It would lead to:

True accountability for decisions made
The ability to live under systems we agree with
Judging working systems rather than "representatives"
A system of government evaluated by results not by intentions
A return of true power to the people.

The vision of Cyber Sovereignty is a radical call to revolution—a world in which people vote by choosing from working systems not long speeches.

A world of individual freedom, mutual benefit and systems that work for the people.

Learn more about how Agora organizes itself by reading about Agora Genesis >>.