Great Protocol Politics

6. Property rights have become encryption. The state’s conception as the legitimate guardian of private property extends back to at least philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. But cryptocurrencies challenge this view as they establish a full-fledged theory of digital property rights outside the state.

In a real sense, these tech companies are more modern regulators than the paper-based models of the 20th century.

In a pair of recent essays, political scientist Ian Bremmer contends that Big Tech companies will reshape the global order, while FP columnist Stephen Walt’s friendly rejoinder is that states will remain predominant. We take a third view: Not only has technology already changed the global order, but it is also changing the nature of both companies ... See more

About 75 percent of the world’s population, more than 60 percent of global GDP, and around 50 percent of all billionaires are neither Chinese nor American. Those two superpowers may well fight, but it’s not obvious if the rest of the world will want to align with either party. Indeed, with the rise of decentralized protocols, we anticipate that man... See more

Bottom line: Network proximity is now on par with physical geography, and basic geopolitical assumptions about citizenship, migration, power projection, and the use of force need to be rethought for the digital world.

3. The remote economy has created a talent market for citizens: Walt asserts that because proponents of stateless digital techno-utopias still need to live somewhere, a state ultimately has control over them. But in a competitive marketplace of jurisdictions where somewhere can be anywhere, no single government has as much authority as people think... See more

8. Web3 is addressing global inequality by sharing the reward—and the risk. Put another way, if the roughly $5 trillion total market cap of Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft were split across a billion users to give them around $5,000 each, they’d be much more supportive.

9. Companies, cities, currencies, communities, and countries are all becoming networks: We should start thinking of collections of people—whether communities, cities, companies, or countries—as cohesive agents unto themselves, less constrained by territoriality and with different layers aligned with one another in shifting combinations.

4. Bits are finally reshaping atoms: A government that doesn’t understand the digital may not be able to control the physical. Less capable states will attempt to maintain control by making futile, reactionary attempts to regulate emerging physical technologies back into the garage from whence they came while more capable jurisdictions will embrace... See more