The Stardust Collective, Emergent Sovereignty, and a Copernican Revolution in Technology. Part 1

Download or read book The Stardust Collective, Emergent Sovereignty, and a Copernican Revolution in Technology. Part 1 written by Brian H. O'Beirne and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Please note this updated version of the article contains a correction. The previous version claimed the Stardust Foundation wallet was staked in the soft node program. This was a mistake. Thanks to the community members who pointed this out. The Stardust Collective is the community-driven governance group of the Constellation ecosystem. It exists separately and largely independently of the company, Constellation Inc., but to date is not very well understood by the Constellation community. In these articles, I outline the history of the Stardust Collective. I then explain how important this group is, in the context of achieving a truly distributed and decentralised “internet of devices” (what we might call the “internet of individuals” or what Jonathan Zittrain calls the “self-sovereign internet”). To this end, I focus on the founding documents, which enshrine the value of “emergent sovereignty” as the “mission statement” of the entire network. I explain what this value is and how it is the “conatus” (the telos, purpose or raison d'etre) of the Constellation ecosystem, but also how this is the value that all of blockchain and Web3 are really referring to when they speak about “decentralisation” (a term that still is not adequately defined in the wider ecosystem). This conatus is fundamentally human in nature insofar as “decentralisation” necessarily implies the existence of independent autonomous human beings who own and manage the private property on which the internet of devices is hosted. I then show how the Hypergraph in its capacity as a “distributed existential operator” points to (and proves the existence of) these human beings as the implicit sovereign from which the network derives its efficacy and also its legitimacy as a self-governing entity. The Hypergraph thereby enables what I call the “Copernican Revolution in Technology” which puts humans qua extended human-technological symbiotic selves (per JCR Licklider's vision) back at the centre of the technological universe (per George Gilder's Cryptocosm), with emergent self-organising, self-governing structures as the vehicles (or “low entropy carriers” as Gilder puts it) through which they give effect to their sovereignty at the individual, collective and global levels. I demonstrate why we are justified in calling this - as the Constitution does - a sovereignty for planet earth. I explain why a separation of powers (similar to that in Constitutional democracies) amongst these structures is envisaged by the Constitution as a corollary of decentralization and how this comports with Balaji's vision of the Network State. We then come full circle back to the Stardust Collective as the initial prototype for these structures. I conclude with a number of concrete proposals.