Recipe for a Planetary Immune Response, in < 320 words
Networks of 100s of Ms capable of planetary coordination and resistant to surveillance
The problem
We are deep into the Metacrisis, and, instead of actually working collectively to deal with it, the real power in the world, oligarchy, is actively working against planetary well-being through Trump, Putin, Musk, Netanyahu, Bezos, Thiel, Andreesen, et al, to create a techno-feudal future.
Is there hope?
We have the numbers. Can we make those numbers matter by learning how to emergently self-organize to:
succeed at stopping the oligarchic wrecking ball, and
articulate an achievable better possible future,
without creating a honey-pot for the surveillance state?
Yes. Yes, we can.
tl;dr
By combining safe proof of humanity identifiers and expansion by invitation, we can span planetary solidarity networks that are: a. resistant to surveillance, b. fully accountable, c. very large, and d. capable of forms of emergent coordination as yet unseen.
Recipe
Prep time: 6 months. Serves 100s of Ms
Ingredients
Planetary citizen identifier - aka pseudonymous proof of humanity. The critical first element is a way of representing ourselves online that meets two requirements:
One human / one identifier - Like a Social Security Number, any human should be able to get one and only one
Zero-knowledge - You need to be able to use it without revealing who you are. For instance, sign up anonymously for a direct action that can have confidence you’re not a mole or a bot.
Expansion by invitation - You invite the people you have solidarity with. By requiring invitation, every participant is accountable to the chain of people who invited them. This creates a …
Personal solidarity graph - The people who invited you, and whom you invited, form your personal graph, kept in self-sovereign personal storage. You decide in what contexts to share that information. So it’s not crawlable by bad actors. With you at the hub, you become a ‘logic gate’ that can control, with help from software, what messages pass through.
Big numbers - The union of all personal solidarity graphs that originate from a given set of initiators can be very large. Just as a benchmark, the 10% of Linkedin who are most susceptible to this idea is 89M people, from all over the world, all of whom are at most four degrees of separation from 100 key initiators.
Application ecosystem - Many simple or advanced applications can take advantage of such a large union of personal graphs. For instance, someone can initiate a direct action, and it will propagate through their allies, with each ally in the chain deciding whether to pass it on. Let 1000 flowers bloom.
Results
Most important, everyone in a union of personal graphs can coordinate emergently without there being a single database of participants that can be surveilled. There are many more valuable outcomes.
Current state
The planetary citizen identifier is about two months from readiness. It is currently working in a centralized form, and will be decentralized very soon.
The expansion by invitation also works in prototype, centralized form. The self-sovereign version of it and the resulting personal solidarity graph is about two months away.
We have a highly scaleable deployment of ArangoDB graph database that can hold custodial versions of self-sovereign storage in a centralized database that can function as needed until the decentralized version is ready.