Notes after the Declaration for the Future of the Internet

Notes after the Declaration for the Future of the Internet

A GATHERING STORM

by Pablo Lobo, STHORM founder & CEO

I

On April the 28th, 2022, a “Declaration on the Future of the Internet”, initiated by the president of the United States was signed by 60 governments at the White House in Washington. Amongst the countries that immediately endorsed the document, there are long-standing European and Asian allies of North America, like France and the United Kingdom or Israel and Japan, but also many of our Latin American neighbors, like Argentina and Uruguay. Insisting on the importance of interoperability, democratic governance, civil liberties and free trade, while at the same time strongly condemning internet shutdowns and digital mechanisms of domestic social control, partners in the declaration appeared ready to antagonize major non-signatories like China, India and Russia. Siding -at least for the time being- with the other BRICS nations, Brazil hasn’t signed the document yet.


Invoking the promising early days of the Internet -as a single communications system, open for all humanity, granting unrestrained access to knowledge worldwide- the international pronouncement denounces that: “Some governments and private actors have sought to abuse the openness of the internet governance and related processes to advance a closed vision.” Although they don’t directly mention any National State in particular, these lines of the declaration can still at least be partially read as an answer to the Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, signed by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping on February the 4th, 2022, during the former’s visit to Beijing, which says “that any attempts to limit their sovereign right to regulate national segments of the Internet and ensure their security are unacceptable.”

II

These clashes around the future of the Internet, with countries on one side advocating a somewhat idealized “open, free, global, interoperable” digital landscape, and rival nations on the other, demanding for “equal rights to its governance”, are of course only a tiny fraction of the wide-ranging conflicts that have pitted states against each other ever since they first showed up in human history, causing boycotts, trade barriers, embargoes, and even military aggression and war. These early squabbles and battles for the future of the Internet, are nevertheless an interesting symbol of the troubles to be expected from the dissent and facetiousness that prevail in current international affairs, and in all probability are bound to grow in importance over the next few years, as the economical and political relevance of the digital world become more and more significant.

Regardless of their respective contents, a specially preoccupying aspect of both the Sino-Russian joint statement and the rival declaration signed by the United States and their allies (repeated also through many other political undertakings at the local or global levels regarding the Internet these days), is the unquestioning focus on sovereign states as sole online policy makers, that automatically sidelines and estranges individual users, groups, societies, companies and all other stakeholders that might and should have a say in the matter. The world wide web -by its very own nature- is only meaningful in as much as it operates beyond the jurisdiction of each and all national governments. And, furthermore, it is already and will increasingly continue to be the breeding ground and even the forcing house for all sorts of new polities that transcend the borders of sovereign states, such as online communities, social networks and DAOs.

III

It should be remembered that nation states might be the quintessential political unit of our day and age, but that this wasn’t always the case. And that -most definitely- things won’t always be so. The prevalence of this particular form of organization will not last forever. Quite simply, because nothing does. Before the rise of countries as we now know them, multiethnic empires were widespread. Most of today’s typical nations were not so long ago part of linguistically and culturally diverse realms. And before the emergence of even the most ancient of these kingdoms, other polities, such as hordes, tribes and clans covered the vast majority of inhabited lands. It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, it is my personal opinion, and many good judges agree with me, that the problems of the days to come, and necessarily so any possible solution for them, will be of a planetary, transnational scale.

The Internet that national governments are struggling to control, is in fact an all-encompassing global network of passionate human souls and dream-like machines. The communities that meet on it, the cryptocurrencies they use and softwares they create, are mostly indifferent to frontiers and centralized authorities. As such, they might already be prefiguring the loftier, cosmopolitan unities of years to come. At Sthorm, like at many hubs across the planet, a mission-driven special unit is creating the decentralized tools that a borderless future requires. Without antagonizing local administrations and actually cooperating with them whenever possible, but relying mainly upon multinational online communities of developers and believers, we are leveraging blockchain technologies to address global problems like pandemics and climate change, with matchigly global and innovative solutions in funding, governance and research.

The core projects incubated at Sthorm are connected to regenerative and decentralized finance for socially and environmentally impactful applied sciences. For years, we have been closely collaborating with world renowned researchers in healthcare, bioinformatics, engineering and other multidisciplinary fields in an effort to prevent, treat and cure diseases that (like Covid-19, Dengue, Yellow Fever, or Zika) constitute a danger for us all, regardless of our nationalities or political affiliations. At the same time, we are beginning to apply similar innovations to stop and reverse the destruction of natural ecosystems. And as of late, we are even venturing into space travel. Maybe because astronautics, for us, are the perfect symbol of the cosmopolitan subversiveness and promise that all these novel technologies share: “The nations that had instituted spaceflight” -Carl Sagan once wrote- “had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world.”


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