A Protogovernance Framework for Accelerating Humanity - Buenos Aires 2025

Hi, my name is Shahi. Nice to meet you guys. Uh, today I want to continue the conversation that's already begun about how do we lay out the human layer, right? I think a lot of the challenges around uh, say like privacy or such as dispute resolution or govern governance around the technology that we're building all comes down to if the systems that support us and nourish us aren't functioning well, then what's the point? and how do we actually form uh cultural substrates that allow us to safeguard this human layer.

So I'll be talking a little bit about protogovernance which is uh how we're thinking about these cultural substrates in small intimate uh scenarios and I'll speak a little bit about one of uh the major missions that we have at human tech which is a framework we've built out at Holland Foundation for embedding digital rights into technology. Um so I would love to maybe make this a little interactive since we have a intimate group here. Uh who here feels like that the the frameworks and constitutions that have been established by our governments and our civic nations uh do you feel that you you you experience or feel those when you're online? Right. So for example, right to free speech or right to uh security.

Do you feel that these things are actually instantiated in your tech? Raise your hand if you feel like that your constitution matters in digital settings. Okay, so about half. Does anybody feel like the opposite that when you're online it's kind of like a wild west and it doesn't matter what your government says? The majority.

Okay, there's more than just half. Uh so that's the situation we're dealing with now, right? We had uh an incredible period in history after the enlightenment. We broke away from divine right by monarchs. uh and now we uh are at this new new phase where a lot of these frameworks are very difficult to enforce in digital settings, right?

Because of the way that they're set up. So I'm going to talk about how we can embed digital rights into humanity. And there's a very short time window to do this because uh tech is accelerating. Uh things are moving faster and faster. And if we don't act now to set up public good systems with uh kind of the values that we care about, then the moment may just kind of slip away from us as things become more stable, more structured, at least for the time being.

Nothing is always truly stable. Oh, got the order mixed up. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, I think uh we all feel it that times are changing quickly and faster, right? there's this big consolidation of infrastructure from say uh like Cloudflare going down yesterday and breaking half of the internet with it and also in this in this like big race that we see in in this kind of um ambition to build the next big thing the next atom bond the next big civilizational project uh and that itself is also being consolidated it's becoming almost like a n it is a nation state interest so I just want to make sure I can see my slides here okay um and I think one big thing we're seeing seeing too is the internet acting as this interface for human agency and we're starting to delegate more and more of our agency into these interfaces.

Right? So at first it was just a Google search bar. Uh later it became say like uh a Facebook timeline or an Instagram story and now our agency is being even shuttled more into agents that can actually act on our behalf. So where's the line? where where do we actually draw the line and say, you know, I have these natural rights, these these rights uh that that uh are self-evident and these digital systems are going to have to abide by them.

So the answer is technology won't save us. Technology actually will not save us. I'll just say that one more time. Uh what can save us is community applied to action. So what do I mean by this?

Uh this is what I'm talking about when I mean uh what I mean when I'm talking about protogovernance. So how do you bring people together to share some local context and then take action on those and is that something that you can do in a reproducible manner? Um I take a lot of inspiration from cybernetics uh systems and perspectives where cyberneticists really don't see a difference between a for loop in a machine uh and say photosynthesis right these are all positive feedback loops that are following control uh engineering uh control theory from engineering. So what we can do though is we can actually add humans in the loop because humans are interesting. Humans add structure to the universe around them.

And by adding humans into the loop of these things uh such as like a Dow governance vote or a protocol design or deciding what to do next with the tour network, we're going to be able to get closer to the outcomes that we want. We have our first layer and that's communities. Communities that are organized and co-invested in each other uh to see something through. But communities on their own can't can't can't thrive right. So one missing element that we've seen kind of uh seen you know seeded here and there for example with the tour project or for example with rail gun or other open source projects is where communities actually can erect protocols around themselves as defense.

So what do I mean by that? I mean things like that are very difficult to take away once they're granted. So, for example, public key encryption with the RSA paper, right? Was it really a state uh was it something that really should have been subject to weapons arms control for export, right? Was it really as bad as exporting the secrets for nuclear weapons or was it something that is open knowledge, right?

And that had a huge impact in the world we're living in today. So, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to show you guys a video. Oh, oh, oh, it's moving. Ah, okay. We got a ghost in the machine.

uh that's introducing uh a framework through a web app that helps us bring protocols as defense with communities in action. Technology is accelerating. AI, biotech, digital systems reshaping everything. But if technology moves without responsibility, we risk systems that harm instead of help, divide instead of connect, exploit instead of empower. That's where the covenant of humanistic technologies comes in.

It's a framework for building technology that serves people and technologies that must serve public good and planetary health. It started as a printed document, something tangible you could hold and read. Manifest.hum.te is where the covenant becomes an active community, a place to explore the principles and contribute ideas and artifacts.

Artifacts are proof of human contribution. Essays, art, research, open-source systems, evidence that humans are still creating, still building, still at the center. This isn't just a website. It's a movement of people. We're connecting with others who believe technology should be human aligned.

On manifest.hum.te. Explore the covenant of humanistic technologies. Sign the declaration, prove your humanity, submit your artifact, and join the conversation.

Innovation is powerful when it's human aligned. Be part of the community. Be part of the movement. Thanks. Uh yeah, really excited to share that with you.

We just soft launched it uh last week at Edge City uh where I'm going to I'm going to give a little bit more uh insight on what we did there. But I wanted to just double click on the Covenant. So the Covenant started off really as hey we're building these cryptographic infrastructure, these protocols, um these web apps, these services that millions of users are starting like we didn't really expect this, right? This are starting to use it for really sensitive things. So as we continue to iterate and develop and decentralize our tech stack, how do we actually you know embed them with the values that we started off with especially say after we've like you know uh done financing or when we've begun to include other people into the conversation around the governance for this thing and how it goes on into the future.

So the covenant started off as this kind of like constitution right of these 10 principles that we care about and over time we recruited a community attracted a community of folks that began to get become invested in how these values were instantiated and actually started taking them outside of this context kind of establishing this uh wider sphere of humanistic technology as its own design philosophy. So we extended this uh at edge city. I think like you know Vitalik and and Roger both spoke about how important it was to be in person and protogovernance really is about uh being in shared local cultural contexts to build this like substrate of what you care about and how you care about it. So uh we ran um a residency for 25 folks that were recruited from multiple disciplines. Uh artists, photographers, documentarians, uh cryptographers, uh quite a few neuroscientists, folks working on open hardware, people building um you know doing protocol design and I'll show you some of the some of their outputs.

And we we did study circles. So we did deep dives into the history of accelerationism. uh differential accelerationism was one of the main topics that we were interested in really trying to establish kind of a a good grasp grasp like a really good understanding of where this idea came from and why it's so relevant today. So we did a lot of readings of the cyberneticists the Norbert Weiners of the world and then leading up to Nick Bostonramm and all of that and this was coupled with workshops that were open to the wider edge community. So folks coming in roundt discussions and open exchange of information and expertise and we had fun as well.

So one interesting bit in in cybernetics literature artifacts are actually defined by um Herbert Simon uh he's the guy who kind of like really doubled down on AI after it was coined uh by Rand Corp uh back back in the 50s artificial intelligence. there was like a big debate about what do we call this thing? Uh and so he came up with this idea of sciences of the artificial and artifacts are actually an interface between the internal and the external of a system, right? And so that's like where AI is supposed to live. It's supposed to live in the interface.

Now what we've kind of approached is these artifacts are actually uh little pieces interfaces between the wider world and the community. So where we're treating the internal side this like protogovernance local intimate community and then the artifact acts as a kind of like a funnel either through art science or technology uh to the rest of the world. So what are these artifacts? Uh they could be anything. They could be like essays.

Uh they could be you know prototypes of apps. They could be films. And a big part of this is in this residency kind of creating this a culture of co-accountability where you begin something and you know someone else can either help you take it across the finish line uh or encourage you to do so. So what did some of these artifacts look like? At the end of the residency, which was 10 days, I think we'll probably do a much longer one in the future.

Um we had uh some really kind of eclectic contributions that were all along the same lines. Uh many of them were inspired by these 10 principles that are within the covenant which you guys can go check out. Uh I'll give you a link for that later if you're interested. But uh one of them was a documentary called Nura Codeex that uh collected over 180 hours of footage in Patagonia at Edge City and interviews with folks from Logos Network uh from folks building an AI intersection, pop-up city building. And uh the purpose of this documentary really was to bring this like kind of cybernetic lens to uh through magical realism uh to really explain why what we're building is really important and how this time is super special to open up the conversation to a wider mainstream audience.

And so this was submitted on the Covenant web app uh which is the Covenant is our you can think of it as our DAO. uh and this basically acts as kind of a a nucleation for the kind of conversations that we want to be having about the culture, the values, where we want to go forward and how we really project humanistic technology. Another really interesting piece was uh uh two a backend engineer um and uh from from from Luxo and uh uh one of the organizers of Zugrama had this kind of uh Eureka moment where they realized that's the architecture of the internet kind of changes drastically if you take agents as a first design principle. Uh so we were really excited to see kind of like a brand new potential field open up thinking about basically core primitives on the internet uh as agents themselves like a research paper etc. Um you can actually check out this and all these artifacts on the website which I'll link to you guys in a sec.

Uh I'm going to speed through the rest of these but there was some other really cool stuff. For example, proof of human from neural signatures really early work trying to do proof of concept. We had some folks from uh a neuroengineer from Brian Johnson's kernel company that was doing feasibility studies. We also had uh folks that were neurode divergent that selfidentified as neurode divergent and were really interested in how we could expand design philosophy thinking when we really include those that perhaps you know most UX is designed for the middle of the distribution. What happens if you create UX design patterns that uh embrace the tales of the distribution as well and how does that create new distributions uh in terms of how we interact with technology and what kind of experiences we get out of it.

So this framework I think like a 10 12 no 20page paper uh act as uh inspiration for a lot of folks that were that were building apps u lots of other stuff including some open hardware hacking. So one of the really important things I think uh one of the main principles of the covenant is this idea of self- custody. Uh so all of these artifacts were submitted with the trust that hey we're open we're working out working on this out in the open. I might start like a a company with this. Maybe I'll launch a token and one interesting thing that we've experimented with is these ideas were submitted to the covenant but the users were given their own keys when they create this account.

So they sign an att testation, a cryptographic attestation that hey I'm in alignment with this, you know, cryptographically hashed text and actually I'm contributing this piece of uh intellectual property or data. And so there's some really interesting things you can do with that, right? in terms of uh sharing the contributions along with the community including say uh collective uh ownership or even accountability to make sure that these things survive in the future uh or that have the support that they need without constraining the original inventor of that technology to go off and do amazing things. Uh did I want to say anything else on that? Yeah.

So yeah, I mean um I think this is a really powerful primitive. This this web app is uh open source. So if you're thinking about protogovernance or small shared cultural substrates to uh bring people together to establish your the nodes in your human layer, you can take a look at uh our GitHub at hollowm-foundation github.com/hollow-foundation. or if you'd like to join the existing community if some of these projects are exciting to you or you want to join the conversation around what does it mean to embed digital rights into tech and how do we actually practically bring that to life uh from design to actual product engineering you can you know join the community by going to manifestte uh and you can yeah sign the government uh sign sign the covenant and contribute your artifacts and upvote your favorite ones.

So, it's an open invitation to y'all. Uh, thank you so much. It's been incredible to be here at the end of the year with FTC and thank you for your attention.