The open web in the implementation of real adaptation to climate change

• Version 2, Jan.12 2020, 5200 words: this document
• Version 1, Dec.30 2019, 1000 words

Summary
Preamble: The three generations holding the fate of Humanity in their hands
Background: The biological basis for world government in the context of climate change
I. The universal citizenry of peers in the open web
II. Universal conscription into the open web
III. Transferable, mobile, and fungible private property
IV. Sustainable developmental justice
V. The fate of nations and borders
Apology to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, et al.
Postscript: What to expect

Summary

To ethically respond to the climate crisis at all, the GenX, Millenial, & GenZ generations have to act as one, and route around nation-states and the institutional framework built around them.

The basics of this collective action have been described as ‘WWII with everyone on the same side’. The basics of what this entails are obvious, and will not be surprising to anyone who has been paying adequate attention to our collective situation:

1. universal conscription into global service
2. rapid universal cessation of further carbon extraction
3. rapid universal sequestration of carbon
4. universal redistribution of resources on a global scale to effect 1–3

How these basics are to be implemented is non-obvious, and is the focus of this document.

It is natural to assume that some form of global political institution has to be planned, organised, and ratified through a legal process, in order to implement these steps. However, the combinatorial explosion of the negative synergies we face, and the logistics and mobilisation required in steps 1–4, have already defeated conventional institutions.

A defensible path to implementation would require a system enabling continual, integrated, iterative adaptations across local-global scales. Such a system already exists, in full technical implementation, in the form of the global internet and open web.

The first step on the path to implementation of real adaptation to climate change is to transfer the legal status of humans, from that of being the subjects of nation-states, to being autonomous agents in a formally open web.

Preamble:
The three generations holding the fate of Humanity in their hands

Dear Millenials & GenZ,

GenX here. It’s time to make our historical relationship explicit.

In this document, we, the living generations of humanity, speak as one mind and voice, addressing all persons born in the developed nations after 1960: the GenX, Millenial, & GenZ generations.

The relationship of our generations to each other and to posterity is under both the extreme moral burden of the climate crisis, and the extreme duress of systemic resistances to meaningful adaptation to climate change, which clearly violate the letter and spirit of national and international laws and conventions.

GenZ is obviously the last generation that will have grown up in traditional civilization - one with functional nations and institutions as we know them. The succeeding generation born after 2012, the Utopians, are growing up without sustainable social institutions, economies, or a functional open internet.

In 2019, it became clear to rational actors that the negative synergies humanity faces imminently threaten civilisation. By the time the Utopians are adults, civilization may have been become irretrievable.

We have all looked to the paternalistic framework of institutions we inherit for action and leadership. In 2019, it became clear that this framework has been captured by the international collusion of the historical ruling classes, in the face of the ongoing dissolution of their historical status, and the imminent redistribution of their power and wealth. In this context, to remain primarily identified as a subject of nation-states is tantamount to abetment of war crimes.

To ethically respond to the climate crisis at all, we now have to act as one, in routing around nation-states and the institutional framework built around them. We have to rebuild civilisation into a post-oil form now, while we still can. We already have all we need to do so, because the net exists: we are already all tacitly citizens of a global web. By the end of the 2020s, this will be formally true.

The global internet and open web are the literal form and function of world government. Asserting one’s primary identity as an autonomous agent in the open web is to in effect undersign the social contract of world citizenship.

The first actions of this de-facto world government are to implement:

1. mobilisation of all of us into universal global service
2. rapid universal cessation of further carbon extraction
3. rapid universal sequestration of carbon
4. universal redistribution of resources on a global scale to effect 1–3.
   

Background:
The biological basis for world government in the context of climate change

Nation-states have been captured by interests interpreting the global situation as one of zero-sum survival, following the same lines of instinctual reaction which precipitated WWII [1]. The scope of these reactive interests is to survive what they perceive as the collapse of human civilisation, and the subsequent global holocaust, bottleneck, or Jackpot, in which several billion humans lose all human rights and are de facto ‘deniably’ murdered.

Apart from its abject moral and ethical failure, this interpretation of the situation is counterfactual. The bottleneck we face is one of planetary homeostasis and habitability:

If life emerges on a planet, it only rarely evolves quickly enough to regulate greenhouse gases and albedo, thereby maintaining surface temperatures compatible with liquid water and habitability. […] In the Gaian bottleneck model, the maintenance of planetary habitability is a property more associated with an unusually rapid evolution of biological regulation of surface volatiles than with the luminosity and distance to the host star. [2].

If we fail to meet this challenge, which is the goal of the methods described herein, the Earth most likely fails as a life-bearing planet, full stop.

The alternative is to interpret the biological function of humanity not in the terms of selfish genes, but as an evolutionary mechanism designed to both trigger and manage the transition of the planetary biome to self-managing homeostasis.

Human capacity to adapt to climate change now requires the translation of the adaptational mechanisms of evolutionary biology to planetary scale (e.g. [3], [4]). Humanity’s rapid proliferation, extraction of carbon into the atmosphere, development of a single integrated global network, and use of this network to recapture carbon, may be the very mechanism by which this translation occurs [5].

Suspiciously just in time, the major work of translating evolutionary biology to planetary scale has been recently completed. The essential forms and functions of a sustainable human civilisation do not have to be built, but already exist as the open web built over the global internet. In that it recapitulates evolutionary biology as a medium that allows for continual integrated adaptations across local-global scales, the open web itself is the essential form and function of sustainable human civilisation.

A corollary to this is that the apparent reversal of the net, from an open system with utopian promise, into a dystopian one of mass surveillance, results from misinterpretations of the web as subordinated under national sovereignty, when in fact it is organically super-ordinal to it. This is demonstrated in both the dissolution of the political classes in the informational flows of the net, and in the blocking of the open web by nations devolving to authoritarianism.

In this context, the metaphor of the internet as a planetary neural net that has grown over older social systems, in the same way the neocortex grew over the brainstem, cerebellum, and limbic system, is now formally concrete. The neocortex and evolution of the nervous system enabled organisms to dematerialise physical conflicts into symbolic social behaviors. This enabled social-political systems to perform these functions at geographic scales, which in turn has enabled the open web to perform them now at the global scale.

We are now at a juncture where the political-economic ideologies of the 17th–20th centuries are revealed as different partial views of underlying bio-evolutionary trends. Self-ownership or self-sovereignty, for example, no longer resembles an ideological principle, so much as an essential component of network self-organisation.

In the 21st century, then, humanity only makes evolutionary and ecological sense as a nascent, distributed global brain, serving the self-regulation of the biosphere as a whole. The open web must now be literally understood as a globally distributed social superorganism akin to physarum polycephalum, scaled up from the microbial to the global.

Articles

I.
The universal citizenry of peers in the open web

The first step on the path to implementation of real adaptation to climate change is to transfer the legal status of humans, from that of being the subjects of nation-states, to being autonomous agents in a formally open web, i.e. peers.

Portable identity in the open web is not an extension of national identity, but a form of constitutional citizenship for free agents in a self-organising universal polity. This is the foundation for a system enabling continual, integrated, iterative adaptations across local-global scales.

By the end of the 2020s, legal identity in the web will be tantamount to constitutionally viable universal citizenship. Those who fully embrace this identity are formally _universal social network peers_.

This form of identity will be universally available to all people, regardless of national citizenship, class, and educational and material attainment.

This form of identity is the sole constituency from which world government arises, as the fractal redistribution of the sovereignty that has dissolved at the nation-state level over local-global scales.

This form of identity is what will enable every act of openness & temporary zone of autonomy to ‘automatically’ connect into fluid and dynamic larger wholes, able to counter the power of closed networks, and defeat the ancient art of divide and rule.

II.
Universal conscription into the open web

Most humans find themselves morally, ethically, and rationally compelled to participate in the social contract in effect in their environment. The moral burden of the situation seems to require a global draft by which the citizens of the developed nations mobilise to 'clean up their mess'. This involves constituting a trans-national body that asserts sovereignty over nations and other legacy forms of organisation, in order to address climate change. All humans born in developed nations after 1960 should consider themselves de facto conscripted into such a body.

This social contract is militaristic in the broadest senses of universal conscription, mobilisation, and redistribution of resources. However, where national conscription is mobilisation against other social groups, this is mobilisation into cooperation with other social groups, in order to integrate humanity to meet the challenge of climate change. Where national conscription resorts to violence to mobilise subject populations in defense of property and status, this conscription relies on the process by which cooperation emerges as a natural unforced property of social systems (see Article IV).

To achieve this function, universal conscription primarily takes the form of personal data endpoints, representing every living human, in the open web. This makes the open web equivalent to a single universal social web / coordination mechanism for humanity.

These endpoints collect information relevant to the individual, separately from any national, political, or commercial interests. They instead serve the goals of enabling the individual to transcend being the subject of nation-states and other forms of exclusionary power and property, and become an autonomous agent in a globally distributed system prioritising, in order of legal precedence:

Sustainable developmental justice goals:

a. Human Rights
b. Effective collective responses to climate change
c. Sustainable Development, and de- or un-growth
d. These articles, as basis for a system of universal developmental justice

Building upon the legal basis initiated by the EU GDPR, the raw information collected at these endpoints are encrypted and can only be privately accessed by the individual they describe. Further use of these data are possible only with both:

i. the consent of the individual
ii. such use relying on the secondary form of the results of queries using secure function evaluation

Private personal data as described here enables the universal deployment of machine learning (ML) and related methods as direct extensions of the cognition and capabilities of the individual. Each peer in the web is walking a unique and un-prestatable path of development, able to use ML etc. over private data, to ratchet both personal and social development around adaptation to the climate crises.

The collective learning possible in such a hybrid human-ML network is a hockey stick (i.e. asymptotic). The open web can then fulfill its potential to address the wicked problems of both social coordination and developmental justice.

The new level of network power constituted by the open web of autonomous agents has the effect of decentralising and redistributing the social classes, estates, and powers (1,2) into:

a. Peers of the open web
b. Users of the open web
c. Nonusers of the open web (conscientious objectors to universal citizenship)

N.B:

i. Subjects of states in which the open web is blocked cannot function as global citizens, unless they can use non-state sanctioned means to access the open web

ii. Members of states where the web is open, yet whose use of the web is mediated by private corporations, cannot function as global citizens, unless they use non-private means to access the open web

iii. Voluntary membership in organisations, institutions, and political parties defined within national sovereign frameworks is not automatically a form of conscientious objection, depending on how such membership aligns with the cascades of rights and responsibilities flowing, in both directions, from global to local levels of federated sovereignty

Peers of the open web

Individuals who interact with their endpoints in ways formally and continually consistent with the sustainable developmental justice goals above, constitute themselves as peers of the open web.

Peers of the open web:

a. are automatically supported in the basics of survival, and in personal and social development
b. are automatically provided instantiations of their rights to private property and resources, as they require and as the open web is able to provide
c. are not required to hold jobs, titles, and large material stashes, but are on the contrary required to hold themselves largely free of such, in order to fluidly function as peers. Less fixed heavy personal wealth => more fluid light public wealth.

Users of the open web

Individuals who interact with the endpoints mapped to their identities in ways eventually consistent with the sustainable developmental justice goals above, constitute themselves as users of the open web.

Users of the open web:

a. may request and receive resources from the open web, as the web is able to provide them
b. the open web seeks in all cases to help them and their environments develop the capacity to function as peers

An example of users of the open web are persons who still hold material possessions, such as land, as private property, and/or full-time jobs in legacy economies, yet voluntarily engage with their personal endpoints in the open web.

Non-users of the open web / conscientious objectors

Some individuals born after 1960 want to become global citizens. Some do not. Some individuals born after 1960 want to see the UN Declaration of Human Rights and SDGs become guaranteed by an actual world government, with power over national and regional sovereignties, while some are afraid that such a development would become a world tyranny.

All individuals are free to conscientiously object to conscription into global citizenry, and exclude themselves from the attendant rights and duties.

However, whereas conscientious objection from conscription into service has traditionally meant leaving one’s nation of origin, conscientious objection to this conscription means remaining primarily identified as a subject of one’s nation of origin.

Individuals who choose not to interact with their endpoints, constitute themselves as non-users of the open web.

III.
Transferable, mobile, and fungible private property

‘[W]e should [..] view institutions as webs of enabling constraints that may create rich or poor adjacent possibilities for agents in the system. Redundancy, degeneracy, adaptivity, diversity, & resilience may better predict performance in unforeseen situations. Generating desired aggregate outcomes indirectly through the learning and adaptation of multiple interacting agents allows the system to adapt to novelty and leverages the combinatorial explosion that defeats Rawlsian institutional design.’
- Against Design - Kauffman et al. [4]

In the overdeveloped world, identity and social position is tied to what we can claim as exclusive property. The very notion of property and wealth is rooted in excluding others from use.

Personal and private property is a fundamental necessity for healthy development. Yet if this property has to be material, fixed and exclusionary, humanity cannot afford it.

No developed country meets the basic needs of its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. In 2019 it became clear that there is no longer any possibility that any nation could meet those needs without transgressing planetary boundaries.

Note that these are basic needs only: the biological requirements for human survival, e.g. air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, and basic security. Goals higher up Maslow’s hierarchy would require levels of resource use 2–6 times the sustainable level. [6]

However, if personal, organisational, and institutional property must be transferable, mobile, and fungible, there is not only enough for the basics, but the flow of resources can occur so as to distribute development and actualisation according to Rawls’ and Amartya Sen’s theories of justice.

Each peer in the open web is a co-owner and operator of the open web and its systems. As such, their private property is a continual distribution of fungible resources to them, as needed and available.

This in effect constitutes an economic system where property is simultaneously private and public wealth at the same time. This enables social coordination of resources to become recursive across personal-to-social, and local-to-global scales.

Each additional person becoming an active autonomous agent in an open web, driven by sustainable developmental justice goals, adds to the network effect of co-operating peers. The result is that at a certain point, each peer, holding no land or fixed physical property, is in both functional and legal terms more wealthy than the wealthy elites, whose property is predicated on exclusionary power [5].

This shifts the primary locus of both personal identity and economic value from being rooted in private, exclusionary property, to being rooted in human rights, sustainable de- or un-growth, and developmental justice.

IV.
Sustainable developmental justice

If resources are to be distributed to effectively adapt to climate change, rule of law must be maintained, not through military force, but through universal provision of developmental justice.

The starting point of Rawl’s theory of justice is the veil of ignorance:

If each individual in society were to base their practices off the fact that they could be the least advantaged member of society … freedom and equality could possibly coexist in a way that has been the ideal of many philosophers [wp].

In contrast to this ideal, the self-domestication of humans as a species has been driven by social groups of humans attempting to domesticate each other[8]. History has been a series of confrontations by ever-larger social groups in order to determine their positions in hierarchies. The sovereignty of a nation-state is by definition a truce stabilising ‘de facto realities of power’[9], fixing the inequalities and social stratification resulting from empires, wars, and slavery into material social arrangements.

These arrangements shape behavioral specialisation, division of labor, and polarisation into classes and castes[10], ‘leaving visible marks in geographic arrangements of common allele frequencies and gene–environment correlations’[11] in all populations.

These concrete behavioral, economic, political, and gene-environment ramifications of distributions of sovereignty formally define developmental justice:

Since feedbacks between homophily, social influence, and interaction bias define social and developmental fates, human rights and development require that these forces become universally distributed.

The migration path of humanity to a new global social order adapted to climate change, requires enabling and rewarding heterophily, and virtualising and distributing interactions across scales of social organisation[10], leveraging social influence and interaction bias for climate adaptation.

The central function of the open web is to universally distribute these forces themselves, not proxies such as money, titles, or property. An open web, functioning without artificial handicaps, drops its inverted function as an amplifier of financial power, and reveals its natural function as the translation of evolutionary self-regulation to planetary scale.

This reveals a mechanism for generating the sustainable social capital needed to escape the thermodynamic well of the petro-economy, and heal the break between political, social, and ecological realities.

This is not a single or centralised event, but a continual globally distributed process whereby division of labor and political polarization release into the developmentally just life-paths of autonomous agents.

These steps occurring in the open web have the effect of making the veil of ignorance concrete.

Over the 2010s (as throughout history), the universal evolutionary mechanisms of homophily, social influence, and interaction bias were used by elites to control populations and win political contests. Over the 2020s, these same effects will be used by the open web to globally distribute developmental justice.

A peer is an agent in an open web in which homophily dynamically balances with heterophily, and social interactions are distributed across scales. A peer, then, is automatically a member of social networks at each nested level of scale. The private data of each peer allows their fluid integration into each social level, for convergent personal and social development.

They do not have to earn or hold a position in each such social network, as the roles and work at each scale is dynamic and emergent. They do not carry status or rank from one level to the next. They carry instead their unique personal experiences at all levels, to each level in turn. They just have to show up.

This is a self-organising form of federalism that is both bottom-up and top-down:

The federation of social networks of autonomous agents in an open web is legally constituent of the federation of political sovereignty, which in turn is the legal mechanism for the balanced redistribution of resources in adaptation to climate change. The rights and responsibilities of individuals and organisations now flow in both directions, from local to global levels of federated sovereignty.

As a peer, the tribeswoman has as much personal sovereignty at the global scale, as the PhD of political science, who as a peer in turn has as much personal sovereignty at the local level as the tribeswoman. The welder from a flyover state finds herself mediating between warring regional tribes on another continent. The Goldman-Sachs trader finds himself dredging an irrigation canal. The algorithmic variation in scale and role never ceases, ratcheting both individual and social development with each economic movement.

This dissolves the apparent left-right dichotomy of politics at the national scale. The circulation of all citizens through all local-global levels leverages the complexity of the wicked problems of social coordination and developmental justice[7] into the learning and adaptation of autonomous human-ML agents.

V.
The fate of nations and borders

Because institutions change in unpredictable and unprestateable ways, it is impossible to ensure fairness by striking a one-time bargain from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance [...] We must think beyond the design of optimal institutions and even, perhaps, beyond institutions entirely.

- Against Design - Kauffman et al.[4b]

Beginning ca. the 16th century, sovereignty coagulated at the nation-state level. In the late 20th century, it began to dissolve. As of 2020, the largest developed nations have regressed to de-facto one-party states. The regression of national governments to authoritarianism in the face of climate change is not a continuation of legal sovereignty, but the abnegation of it. Nation-states and the institutional frameworks built around them are no longer fulfilling their charters.

Where nations are closing their borders in reaction to the climate crises, seeking to protect pre-existing distributions of private property and lifeways, climate adaptation requires reinterpreting borders as fluid and algorithmic in nature.

Algorithmically dynamic bordering of social networks at nested local-global scales dissolves the borders we inherit from the 20th c., but re-asserts, mobilises, and ‘future-proofs’ historical and regional cultures, languages, and traditions. Algobordering both cantonally dissolves nations as we know them into subnational levels, and coagulates them into supranational levels.

The mobilisation of energy from the release of carbon into the atmosphere immediately requires the greatest mobilisation of humans and resources even undertaken. This is not mobility for some, but mobility for all. The former subjects of the overdeveloped nations are mobilised into the same streams, from global to local levels, as refugees from the underdeveloped ones.

The fate of the political left and right

Universal citizenship has always been framed as an ultimate goal of the left. In one of history’s great reversals, it has actually arrived through the self-determination and bold action of the right.

Among non-elites, so-called nationalists, populists, and right-wingers are the historical vanguard of recognition of the non-viability of nation-states. Theirs has been the pivotal action against the historical ruling classes.

In rejecting remote systems of control, even or especially where such rejection has led to authoritarian capture of formerly democratic governments, they have precipitated the downfall of the nation-state system.

So-called conservatives, nationalists, populists, and right-wingers have sought to preserve their heritage, and the liberty to follow their own lines of personal and social development. By shattering the stasis of the classes and powers, they have made it possible for themselves and all peoples to do so.

Since the dawn of agriculture, the implementation of universal citizenry described here has been the evolutionary trajectory of all sides of human struggles. All sides have struggled to develop as they are autonomously and naturally compelled to do so.

The global availability of public wealth, in an open web of peers, for expressions of religious, tribal, and familial heritage, breaks historical cultures free of material constraints, ensuring their networked mobility and survival. The admixture of agents and resources from both over- and under- developed nations to iteratively enact developmental justice returns the historical debt owed to the peoples who have borne the burdens of history.

To enable this scenario, and ensure the survival of their cultures and bloodlines, those on both right and left are advised to re-invest fixed land and property as fungible public wealth, endowing their social networks as peers with rights to globally distributed property.

Those who choose to do so can claim:

• the pivotal enabling action in fording the gap to planetary self-regulation
• the continuity of their heritage through the Gaian bottleneck, ultimately ad astra
• the full discharge of the historical burdens of empire, wars, slavery, and environmental destruction
• no more and no less than their just share in the common wealth of humanity

Apology to Sir Tim Berners-Lee et al.

To Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the IETF, the Apache Software Foundation, and all developers and supporters of the W3C Web Platform and related efforts:

Your selfless labors on the behalf of humanity have provided the key to solving the climate crisis. Over the course of the 2020s, the web platform will be used to implement these articles.

While it now seems likely that what is described here is the evolutionary function of the web platform you have collectively created, it is nevertheless an alarming second reframing of your work.

The first reframing of your work was the reversal of the net, from an open system with utopian promise, into a dystopian one of mass surveillance, in which the old principle of ‘divide and govern’ became hyper-powered.

The extreme reframing of your work described here is a necessary correction, the abruptness of which which we, the undersigning generations of humanity, apologise for. On behalf of the LifeWeb your work resembles and extends, we thank you for providing the means for humanity’s self-rescue.

Postscript:
What to expect

These five articles are the foundation on which real adaptation to climate change can proceed.

Over the course of the 2020s, the web platform will be used to implement these articles. No applications, companies, or markets - just the raw p2p web itself.

Life is largely made of networks of co-operating peers, with competition arising in relatively limited cases. The economy, the internet, science, and society are at root all networks of co-operating peers. By becoming autonomous agents in an open web, driven by sustainable developmental justice goals, each of us can have the maximum networked effect in adaptation to the climate crises, and midwifing this biosphere into consciously self-regulating form.

This subject is difficult, and you may feel distress and anxiety in considering its claims. But note that this document is not published in hope, but in recognition of what is already accomplished in the formally real circumstances in which we find ourselves, and in the hearts and minds of the vast majority of the addressed generations. In the shared recognition of what is described herein, it is accomplished.

Consider also that those who oppose what has been specified herein, through both legal and illegal means, have already checkmated themselves. Closed and authoritarian powers are being destroyed by their own nature, as the net allows them to reach the point of self-contradiction in months vs. centuries.

Remember that although this social contract is militaristic in the broadest senses of universal conscription, mobilisation, and redistribution of resources within the global network of peers, there is literally no enemy. The net enables, and the situation requires, developmental justice for all.

As guardians of the Utopians, succeeding generations of humans, and the Lifeweb,
- the GenX, Millenial, & GenZ generations

Timeless Being, Spirit who brooded on
the world and raised it shapely out of nothing,
Touch our hearts with fire and burn away
All dross of self, so that we keep in mind
The truth and end to which we now move
In hope. Keep our minds within that Mind
Of which it is a part, whose wholeness is
The hope of sense in what we do. And though
we now go out among the scatterings of that sense,
The members of its worldly body broken,
Rule our sight by vision of the parts
Rejoined. And in our exile’s journey far
From home, be with us, so we may return.

feat. Wendell Berry