Common governance awards all members of a given community equal rights — power is equally distributed. There is no coercive body delegating policy. Common governance is rooted in liberty, not enclosed by a monopoly of force and violence.

For the libertarian this approach to governance is ideal. We do not view freedom in the abstract — we hold it is critical to unleash the creative, innovative potential of human society. Consistent libertarians seek a stateless society. Beltway political circles dismiss the proposal as utopian and incompatible with modern civilization. These objections are easily refuted, however. We are inclined to decentralize. The emergence of democracy, for example, exhibits this societal trait.

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The research finds that people evaluate issues based on the desirability of policy implications. If said implications are undesirable people tend to deny a problem even exists. The study uses the subject of climate change as a specific example. Most discourse regarding climate simply asks after the role of the nation, or state, in addressing global change — to carbon tax, or not to carbon tax is the question. The Washington Post‘s Chris Mooney connects the dots and notes: “Conservatives don’t hate climate science. They hate the left’s climate solutions.”

This is interesting fodder for the libertarian. Beyond the subject of climate change, this study holds large implications for the entire state apparatus.

The scholarly definition of the state is: “A human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” State officials, ideology intact, make sweeping policy decisions for entire nations. After each election, parties gain or lose majority influence, but the problem of centralized governance always remains. It is impossible for a few elected officials to form desirable policy representing the whole public, even if they want to. Successful governance and state are ever at odds.

This cannot be more evident today. The United States Congress enjoys a miserable 14% approval rating and after recent mid-term elections the same miserable party affiliates are crafting policy to govern each and every one of us. It is time for polycentric, common governance.

Common governance awards all members of a given community equal rights — power is equally distributed. There is no coercive body delegating policy. Common governance is rooted in liberty, not enclosed by a monopoly of force and violence.

For the libertarian this approach to governance is ideal. We do not view freedom in the abstract — we hold it is critical to unleash the creative, innovative potential of human society. Consistent libertarians seek a stateless society. Beltway political circles dismiss the proposal as utopian and incompatible with modern civilization. These objections are easily refuted, however. We are inclined to decentralize. The emergence of democracy, for example, exhibits this societal trait.

Today it is of increasing importance to dismantle illegitimate forms of authority and spread power to as many individuals as possible. Systems of power and domination contribute to apathy and quiescence. This hinders the populace and denies us the ability to craft our own unique existence. We are too busy denying problems exist to fully engage and participate in democratic decision-making.

The beauty of common governance is its decentralized nature. The commons are built and sustained by individuals — empowering the commons, by default, empowers all individuals. A society operating under the principles of liberty necessarily rejects the concentration of authority and coercive claims to power. Such an order thus champions individual labor, place connections and civic participation in the political economy. Individual achievement exists not despite of, but due to liberty.

Decentralization is a requirement of successful governance. Concentrated power is unnatural. It holds a monopoly over decision-making. Concentrated power lacks competition, innovation and progress — it is static. Common governance, on the other hand, is dynamic. The commons allow all stakeholders to craft and emulate policy, creating desirable options for all participants. Thus, the commons can overcome barriers to meaningful social change as discussed in the Duke study.

Let us end the state monopoly on governance and reclaim the public.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of October 3, a documented 3,439 deaths have struck West Africa. There are currently 4,792 known infected individuals in the region. Specific to the United States, reports note possible infections in Texas and Washington DC. For this reason, Ebola has ignited interest in pandemic management.

Unfortunately, everything is politicized in the United States. Pick a party and walk the line — the sides have already been drawn. Any conservative commentator of your choice clouds the airwaves and writes columns espousing the urgent need to close the U.S. border and ban travel to and from West Africa. The beltway left trumpets its faith in the effectiveness of existing institutions. Both approaches champion an all-powerful state to battle pandemics — but is this beneficial?

Closing the border will do nothing to protect U.S. citizens from Ebola because it isn’t needed to keep us safe. The spread of Ebola from person to person is actually rather difficult. The virus isn’t airborne. Ebola spreads quickly in Africa because of poor health infrastructure and dated customs in dealing with deceased bodies. This is not the case for industrialized nations where an Ebola pandemic is highly unlikely. The border is just the nationalist right-wing cause du jour. The jargon is simple fear-mongering — the “others,” we are told once again, will only harm us.

As for the liberal approach, an internal investigation from the DHS, ominously titled “DHS Has Not Effectively Managed Pandemic Personal Protective Equipment and Antiviral Medical Countermeasures,” reveals that the existing power structure is under-prepared to handle a true epidemic. The report notes that the DHS “did not adequately conduct a needs assessment prior to purchasing pandemic preparedness supplies and then did not effectively manage its stockpile of pandemic personal protective equipment and antiviral medical countermeasures.” There is troubling inefficiency everywhere in large-scale governance but it is always the liberal cause du jour.

But what of the market? Institutions that work to protect society from disease outbreak are indeed legitimate, but centralized authority limits these institutions and often perpetuates inefficiency. Authority also restricts the libertarian principle of freedom of association and thus a networked, adaptive approach to crisis management. Such restriction empowers a slow to change top-down bureaucracy that is ill-equipped to manage rapid virus mutation.

All government, conservative or liberal, is overdone. Liberated of state monopoly, the market can cultivate alternatives to the less desirable large-scale approach to disease management. Just give social power a chance.

Take Firestone for example. NPR reports “Firestone did what governments have not: Stopped Ebola in its tracks.” When the wife of an employee fell ill with the virus, the tire company quarantined the family to stop further transmission. In addition, Firestone constructed its own treatment center. The chief executive of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Team in Liberia, Dr. Brendan Flannery, describes Firestone’s efforts as “resourceful, innovative and effective.” As the epidemic rages in Africa, Firestone is saving lives where government decree has failed. This model can now be emulated by other private institutions, cooperatives, networks and more.

It is always important to remember that social organization, in liberty, is dynamic and complex. These properties allow for adaptive institutions, federations and systems of governance. In the absence of authoritarian control, coordination and collaboration can craft effective management policies that meet challenges requiring quick action — much more so than any hierarchy or bureaucratic system ever could. The transition to decentralized power structures is a popular trend in the 21st century. This trend may save countless lives if a true pandemic ever were to hit.

Mountain justice is both a call to action, and a call for help, from communities in the Appalachian Mountains. Specifically, Mountain Justice is a gathering of numerous concerned citizens and coalitions who are part of a growing network to abolish mountaintop removal valley fill operations and transition mountain communities beyond coal.

To date, more than 520 mountains throughout Appalachia have been leveled by mountaintop mining. More than 1.1 million hectares (an area three times the size of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park) of temperate forest have been converted to moonscape  and more than 2000 km of streams have been buried. Though there are reclamation requirements, to date, there is no evidence to suggest the environmental impairment of this practice can be offset.

There is a large toll to human populations as a result of these operations as well. Numerous health risks exist in Appalachian communities as a result of air and water pollution and industrial disaster is rampant in the coalfields. As environmental health is depressed, so are markets. Billions of dollars in wealth have been extracted from mountain communities only to enrich extractive resource industries, energy monopolies, state governments and the federal government – leaving coalfield residents in immense poverty. Appalachian history is wrought with class struggle, environmental degradation and corporatism. The mountains are on the front lines of the war with the politically connected – and Mountain Justice is striking back.

For ten years now Mountain Justice has worked on a diversity of tactics to end the destruction of Appalachian coalfield communities — from “paper wrenching” to non-violent direct action. Mountain Justice summer camp has become a staple of the Appalachian movement, it is a community; many know each other and alliances are quickly made. Mountain Justice Summer lasted ten days and featured workshops, trainings, and good old fashioned story telling about Appalachian history and culture. Of course what is a summer camp without traditional foot stompin’ mountain music, films, bonfires, home cooked meals and camping?  All were present at Mountain Justice, accompanied with a healthy dose of revolution.

Particularly interesting about Mountain Justice (and almost all of Appalachian organizing for that matter) is the leaderless coordinating style of the movement. Groups are organized, decisions are made and actions are carried out without top-down hierarchies, but rather cooperative decision-making. The movement operates in the tradition of anarchist, anti-authoritarian social innovation. I cannot claim the entire movement hopes for a stateless society, but it is important to note the decentralized themes prevalent throughout Appalachian transition. The movement strives for economic and environmental sustainability — all to be achieved by local and worker ownership of the means of production, community owned democratic energy systems and solidarity economics.

Most importantly, the movement is achieving its goals. These small scale, decentralized markets are rising in the Appalachian coalfields. In West Virginia, coal miners who lost their jobs to the mechanization of the industry have started developing environmental markets. Worker coalitions are helping communities save money via efficiency programs. Coal River Mountain Watch is achieving democratic energy. Direct action after direct action raises awareness and halts new coal generation, closes strip mines and alleviates poverty. Because of groups like Mountain Justice regeneration is coming to Appalachia.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic 1993 sci-fi novel Red Mars, a pioneering group of scientists establish a colony on Mars. Some imagine it as a chance for a new life, run on entirely different principles from the chaotic Earth. Over time, though, the illusion is shattered as multinational corporations operating under the banner of governments move in, viewing Mars as nothing but an extension to business-as-usual.

It is a story that undoubtedly resonates with some members of the Bitcoin community. The vision of a free-floating digital cryptocurrency economy, divorced from the politics of colossal banks and aggressive governments, is under threat. Take, for example, the purists at Dark Wallet, accusing the Bitcoin Foundation of selling out to the regulators and the likes of the Winklevoss Twins.

Bitcoin sometimes appears akin to an illegal immigrant, trying to decide whether to seek out a rebellious existence in the black-market economy, or whether to don the slick clothes of the Silicon Valley establishment. The latter position – involving publicly accepting regulation and tax whilst privately lobbying against it – is obviously more acceptable and familiar to authorities.

Of course, any new scene is prone to developing internal echo chambers that amplify both commonalities and differences. While questions regarding Bitcoin’s regulatory status lead hyped-up cryptocurrency evangelists to engage in intense sectarian debates, to many onlookers Bitcoin is just a passing curiosity, a damp squib that will eventually suffer an ignoble death by media boredom. It is a mistake to believe that, though. The core innovation of Bitcoin is not going away, and it is deeper than currency.

What has been introduced to the world is a method to create decentralised peer-validated time-stamped ledgers. That is a fancy way of saying it is a method for bypassing the use of centralised officials in recording stuff. Such officials are pervasive in society, from a bank that records electronic transactions between me and my landlord, to patent officers that record the date of new innovations, to parliamentary registers noting the passing of new legislative acts.

The most visible use of this technical accomplishment is in the realm of currency, though, so it is worth briefly explaining the basics of Bitcoin in order to understand the political visions being unleashed as a result of it.

The technical vision 1.0

Banks are information intermediaries. Gone are the days of the merchant dumping a hoard of physical gold into the vaults for safekeeping. Nowadays, if you have ‘£350 in the bank’, it merely means the bank has recorded that for you in their data centre, on a database that has your account number and a corresponding entry saying ‘350’ next to it. If you want to pay someone electronically, you essentially send a message to your bank, identifying yourself via a pin or card number, asking them to change that entry in their database and to inform the recipient’s bank to do the same with the recipient’s account.

Thus, commercial banks collectively act as a cartel controlling the recording of transaction data, and it is via this process that they keep score of ‘how much money’ we have. To create a secure electronic currency system that does not rely on these banks thus requires three interacting elements. Firstly, one needs to replace the private databases that are controlled by them. Secondly, one needs to provide a way for people to change the information on that database (‘move money around’). Thirdly, one needs to convince people that the units being moved around are worth something.

To solve the first element, Bitcoin provides a public database, or ledger, that is referred to reverently as the blockchain. There is a way for people to submit information for recording in the ledger, but once it gets recorded, it cannot be edited in hindsight. If you’ve heard about bitcoin ‘mining’ (using ‘hashing algorithms’), that is what that is all about. A scattered collective of mercenary clerks essentially hire their computers out to collectively maintain the ledger, baking (or weaving) transaction records into it.

Secondly, Bitcoin has a process for individuals to identify themselves in order to submit transactions to those clerks to be recorded on that ledger. That is where public-key cryptography comes in. I have a public Bitcoin address (somewhat akin to my account number at a bank) and I then control that public address with a private key (a bit like I use my private pin number to associate myself with my bank account). This is what provides anonymity.

The result of these two elements, when put together, is the ability for anonymous individuals to record transactions between their bitcoin accounts on a database that is held and secured by a decentralised network of techno-clerks (‘miners’). As for the third element – convincing people that the units being transacted are worth something – that is a more subtle question entirely that I will not address here.

The political vision 1.0

Note the immediate political implications. Within the Bitcoin system, a set of powerful central intermediaries (the cartel of commercial banks, connected together via the central bank, underwritten by government), gets replaced with a more diffuse network intermediary, apparently controlled by no-one in particular.

This generally appeals to people who wish to devolve power away from banks by introducing more diversity into the monetary system. Those with a left-wing anarchist bent, who perceive the state and banking sector as representing the same elite interests, may recognise in it the potential for collective direct democratic governance of currency. It has really appealed, though, to conservative libertarians who perceive it as a commodity-like currency, free from the evils of the central bank and regulation.

The corresponding political reaction from policy-makers and establishment types takes three immediate forms. Firstly, there are concerns about it being used for money laundering and crime (‘Bitcoin is the dark side’). Secondly, there are concerns about consumer protection (‘Bitcoin is full of cowboy operators’). Thirdly, there are concerns about tax (‘this allows people to evade tax’).

The general status quo bias of regulators, who fixate on the negative potentials of Bitcoin whilst remaining blind to negatives in the current system, sets the stage for a political battle. Bitcoin enthusiasts, passionate about protecting the niche they have carved out, become prone to imagining conspiratorial scenes of threatened banks fretfully lobbying the government to ban Bitcoin, or of paranoid politicians panicking about the integrity of the national currency.

The technical vision 2.0

Outside the media hype around these Bitcoin dramas, though, a deeper movement is developing. It focuses not only on Bitcoin’s potential to disrupt commercial banks, but also on the more general potential for decentralised blockchains to disrupt other types of centralised information intermediaries.

Copyright authorities, for example, record people’s claims to having produced a unique work at a unique date and authoritatively stamp it for them. Such centralised ‘timestamping’ more generally is called ‘notarisation’. One non-monetary function for a Bitcoin-style blockchain could thus be to replace the privately controlled ledger of the notary with a public ledger that people can record claims on. This is precisely what Proof of Existence and Originstamp are working on.

And what about domain name system (DNS) registries that record web addresses? When you type in a URL like www.e-ir.info, the browser first steers you to a DNS registry like Afilias, which maintains a private database of URLs alongside information on which IP address to send you to. One can, however, use a blockchain to create a decentralised registry of domain name ownership, which is what Namecoin is doing. Theoretically, this process could be used to record share ownership, land ownership, or ownership in general (see, for example, Mastercoin’s projects).

The biggest information intermediaries, though, are often hidden in plain sight. What is Facebook? Isn’t it just a company that you send information to, which is then stored in their database and subsequently displayed to you and your friends? You log in with your password (proving your identity), and then can alter that database by sending them further messages (‘I’d like to delete that photo’). Likewise with Twitter, Dropbox, and countless other web services.

Unlike the original internet, which was largely used for transmission of static content, we experience sites like Facebook as interactive playgrounds where we can use programmes installed in some far away computer. In the process of such interactivity, we give groups like Facebook huge amounts of information. Indeed, they set themselves up as information honeytraps in order to create a profit-making platform where advertisers can sell you things based on the information. This simultaneously creates a large information repository for authorities like the NSA to browse. This interaction of corporate power and state power is inextricably tied to the profitable nature of centrally held data.

But what if you could create interactive web services that did not revolve around single information intermediaries like Facebook? That is precisely what groups like Ethereum are working towards. Where Bitcoin is a way to record simple transaction information on a decentralised ledger, Ethereum wants to create a ‘decentralised computational engine’. This is a system for running programmes, or executing contracts, on a blockchain held in play via a distributed network of computers rather than Mark Zuckerberg’s data centres.

It all starts to sounds quite sci-fi, but organisations like Ethereum are leading the charge on building ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’, hardcoded entities that people can interact with, but that nobody in particular controls. I send information to this entity, triggering the code and setting in motion further actions. As Bitshares describes it, such an organisation “has a business plan encoded in open source software that executes automatically in an entirely transparent and trustworthy manner.”

The political vision 2.0

By removing a central point of control, decentralised systems based on code – whether they exist to move Bitcoin tokens around, store files, or build contracts – resemble self-contained robots. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase are human faces behind the digital interface of the services they run. They can overtly manipulate, or bow in to pressure to censor. A decentralised currency or a decentralised version of Twitter seems immune from such manipulation.

It is this that gives rise to a narrative of empowerment and, indeed, at first sight this offers an exhilarating vision of self-contained outposts of freedom within a world otherwise dominated by large corruptible institutions. At many cryptocurrency meet-ups, there is an excitable mix of techno-babble infused with social claims. The blockchain can record contracts between free individuals, and if enforcement mechanisms can be coded in to create self-enforcing ‘smart contracts’, we have a system for building encoded law that bypasses states.

Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies, though, are empowering right now precisely because they are underdogs. They introduce diversity into the existing system and thereby expand our range of tools. In the minds of hardcore proponents, though, blockchain technologies are more than this. They are a replacement system, superior to existing institutions in every possible way. When amplified to this extreme, though, the apparently utopian project can begin to take on a dystopian, conservative hue.

Binary politics

When asked about why Bitcoin is superior to other currencies, proponents often point to its ‘trustless‘ nature. No trust needs be placed in fallible ‘governments and corporations’. Rather, a self-sustaining system can be created by individuals following a set of rules that are set apart from human frailties or intervention. Such a system is assumed to be fairer by allowing people to win out against those powers who can abuse rules.

The vision thus is not one of bands of people getting together into mutualistic self-help groups. Rather, it is one of individuals acting as autonomous agents, operating via the hardcoded rules with other autonomous agents, thereby avoiding those who seek to harm their interests.

Note the underlying dim view of human nature. While anarchist philosophers often imagine alternative governance systems based on mutualistic community foundations, the ‘empowerment’ here does not stem from building community ties. Rather it is imagined to come from retreating from trust and taking refuge in a defensive individualism mediated via mathematical contractual law.

It carries a certain disdain for human imperfection, particularly the imperfection of those in power, but by implication the imperfection of everyone in society. We need to be protected from ourselves by vesting power in lines of code that execute automatically. If only we can lift currency away from manipulation from the Federal Reserve. If only we can lift Wikipedia away from the corruptible Wikimedia Foundation.

Activists traditionally revel in hot-blooded asymmetric battles of interest (such as that between StrikeDebt! and the banks), implicitly holding an underlying faith in the redeemability of human-run institutions. The Bitcoin community, on the other hand, often seems attracted to a detached anti-politics, one in which action is reduced to the binary options of Buy In or Buy Out of the coded alternative. It echoes consumer notions of the world, where one ‘expresses’ oneself not via debate or negotiation, but by choosing one product over another. We’re leaving Earth for Mars. Join if you want.

It all forms an odd, tense amalgam between visions of exuberant risk-taking freedom and visions of risk-averse anti-social paranoia. This ambiguity is not unique to cryptocurrency (see, for example, this excellent parody of the trustless society), but in the case of Bitcoin, it is perhaps best exemplified by the narrative offered by Cody Wilson in Dark Wallet’s crowdfunding video. “Bitcoin is what they fear it is, a way to leave… to make a choice. There’s a system approaching perfection, just in time for our disappearance, so, let there be dark”.

The myth of political ‘exit’

But where exactly is this perfect system Wilson is disappearing to?

Back in the days of roving bands of nomadic people, the political option of ‘exit’ was a reality. If a ruler was oppressive, you could actually pack up and take to the desert in a caravan. The bizarre thing about the concept of ‘exit to the internet’ is that the internet is a technology premised on massive state and corporate investment in physical infrastructure, fibre optic cables laid under seabeds, mass production of computers from low-wage workers in the East, and mass affluence in Western nations. If you are in the position to be having dreams of technological escape, you are probably not in a position to be exiting mainstream society. You are mainstream society.

Don’t get me wrong. Wilson is a subtle and interesting thinker, and it is undoubtedly unfair to suggest that he really believes that one can escape the power dynamics of the messy real world by finding salvation in a kind of internet Matrix. What he is really trying to do is to invoke one side of the crypto-anarchist mantra of ‘privacy for the weak, but transparency for the powerful’.

That is a healthy radical impulse, but the conservative element kicks in when the assumption is made that somehow privacy alone is what enables social empowerment. That is when it turns into an individualistic ‘just leave me alone’ impulse fixated with negative liberty. Despite the rugged frontier appeal of the concept, the presumption that empowerment simply means being left alone to pursue your individual interests is essentially an ideology of the already-empowered, not the vulnerable.

This is the same tension you find in the closely related cypherpunk movement. It is often pitched as a radical empowerment movement, but as Richard Boase notes, it is “a world full of acronyms and codes, impenetrable to all but the most cynical, distrustful, and political of minds.” Indeed, crypto-geekery offers nothing like an escape from power dynamics. One merely escapes to a different set of rules, not one controlled by ‘politicians’, but one in the hands of programmers and those in control of computing power.

It is only when we think in these terms that we start to see Bitcoin not as a realm ‘lacking the rules imposed by the state’, but as a realm imposing its own rules. It offers a form of protection, but guarantees nothing like ‘empowerment’ or ‘escape’.

Techno-Leviathan

Technology often seems silent and inert, a world of ‘apolitical’ objects. We are thus prone to being blind to the power dynamics built into our use of it. For example, isn’t email just a useful tool? Actually, it is highly questionable whether one can ‘choose’ whether to use email or not. Sure, I can choose between Gmail or Hotmail, but email’s widespread uptake creates network effects that mean opting out becomes less of an option over time. This is where the concept of becoming ‘enslaved to technology’ emerges from. If you do not buy into it, you will be marginalised, and that is political.

This is important. While individual instances of blockchain technology can clearly be useful, as a class of technologies designed to mediate human affairs, they contain a latent potential for encouraging technocracy. When disassociated from the programmers who design them, trustless blockchains floating above human affairs contains the specter of rule by algorithms. It is a vision (probably accidently) captured by Ethereum’s Joseph Lubin when he says “There will be ways to manipulate people to make bad decisions, but there won’t be ways to manipulate the system itself”.

Interestingly, it is a similar abstraction to that made by Hobbes. In his Leviathan, self-regarding people realise that it is in their interests to exchange part of their freedom for security of self and property, and thereby enter into a contract with a Sovereign, a deified personage that sets out societal rules of engagement. The definition of this Sovereign has been softened over time – along with the fiction that you actually contract to it – but it underpins modern expectations that the government should guarantee property rights.

Conservative libertarians hold tight to the belief that, if only hard property rights and clear contracting rules are put in place, optimal systems spontaneously emerge. They are not actually that far from Hobbes in this regard, but their irritation with Hobbes’ vision is that it relies on politicians who, being actual people, do not act like a detached contractual Sovereign should, but rather attempt to meddle, make things better, or steal. Don’t decentralised blockchains offer the ultimate prospect of protected property rights with clear rules, but without the political interference?

This is essentially the vision of the internet techno-leviathan, a deified crypto-sovereign whose rules we can contract to. The rules being contracted to are a series of algorithms, step by step procedures for calculations which can only be overridden with great difficulty. Perhaps, at the outset, this represents, à la Rousseau, the general will of those who take part in the contractual network, but the key point is that if you get locked into a contract on that system, there is no breaking out of it.

This, of course, appeals to those who believe that powerful institutions operate primarily by breaching property rights and contracts. Who really believes that though? For much of modern history, the key issue with powerful institutions has not been their willingness to break contracts. It has been their willingness to use seemingly unbreakable contracts to exert power. Contracts, in essence, resemble algorithms, coded expressions of what outcomes should happen under different circumstances. On average, they are written by technocrats and, on average, they reflect the interests of elite classes.

That is why liberation movements always seek to break contracts set in place by old regimes, whether it be peasant movements refusing to honour debt contracts to landlords, or the DRC challenging legacy mining concessions held by multinational companies, or SMEs contesting the terms of swap contracts written by Barclays lawyers. Political liberation is as much about contesting contracts as it is about enforcing them.

Building the techno-political vision 3.0

The point I am trying to make is that you do not escape the world of big corporates and big government by wishing for a trustless set of technologies that collectively resemble a technocratic crypto-sovereign. Rather, you use technology as a tool within ongoing political battles, and you maintain an ongoing critical outlook towards it. The concept of the decentralised blockchain is powerful. The cold, distrustful edge of cypherpunk, though, is only empowering when it is firmly in the service of creative warm-blooded human communities situated in the physical world of dirt and grime.

Perhaps this means de-emphasising the focus on how blockchains can be used to store digital assets or property, and focusing rather on those without assets. For example, think of the potential of blockchain voting systems that groups like Restart Democracy are experimenting with. Centralised vote-counting authorities are notorious sources of political anxiety in fragile countries. What if the ledger recording the votes cast was held by a decentralised network of citizens, with voters having a means to anonymously transmit votes to be stored on a publicly viewable database?

We do not want a future society free from people we have to trust, or one in which the most we can hope for is privacy. Rather, we want a world in which technology is used to dilute the power of those systems that cause us to doubt trust relationships. Screw escaping to Mars.

One such crisis is Earth’s impending sixth mass extinction. We live in a time of precipitous biodiversity loss — on par with the extinction rate that ended the age of the dinosaurs. A complete tally of recent extinctions and imperiled species (along with causes) can be found at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) website – IUCNRedList.org.

Stuart Pimm of Duke University, a recognized expert in the field of conservation biology, has published a landmark study in the peer-reviewed journal Science. Pimm’s publication describes the current plight of flora and fauna around the planet. Pimm notes that species are disappearing at least 1,000 times faster than the natural background rate — ten times faster than ecologists previously believed. “We are on the verge of the sixth extinction,” Pimm said in a statement about his research. “Whether we avoid it or not will depend on our actions.”

There are a number of factors causing species decline. The major culprit, however, is not climate change — it’s habitat loss.

Over 50% of the human population now lives in cities, as populations expand, so too does urbanization. This creates an incredible challenge to species conservation as the total size of urban spaces in the United States now exceeds the total size of areas protected for conservation. It is important, then, for markets to develop that encourage biodiversity conservation.

Pimm is right: Whether or not we avoid a biodiversity crisis depends on our actions. It is time to embrace neighborhood environmentalism and reclaim the commons.

“Growth at any cost” economics, the dogma of neo-liberalism and government institutions, utilizes precious landscapes and resources needed for ecological subsistence. Even programs that seek mechanisms for conservation, such as the United Nation’s REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), inadvertently promote the total exploitation of natural areas, simply because regulation diverts resource extraction to unprotected land/seascapes.

Enclosure movements (acquisition of territories for the state or private capital) more often than not exploit natural landscapes. To the contrary, democratic management of natural areas has resulted in best sustainability practices.

The work of Nobel Prize recipient Elinor Ostrom demonstrates environmental protection increases with Common Pool Resource Institutions. Arun Agrawal, in his work Environmentality, notes sustainable forest policy emerged in the Kumoan region of the Himalayas as a result of decentralized, democratically controlled resource management. In our cities, the establishment of urban wilderness areas popping up around the globe, from the labor of civic sector institutions and private citizens, are protecting large expanses of forest and crucial habitat from economic exploitation – my favorite example hails from the Scruffy City of Knoxville, Tennessee, where over 1,000 acres of forested habitat has been preserved.

There are many more examples of freed markets protecting wilderness and ecosystem services. This protection simultaneously provides ancillary benefits to all flora and fauna — including humans. Government institutions and concentrations of private capital are all too often hurdles to the implementation of policies that can ease the current biodiversity crisis. Neighborhood Power is the way of the future — conservation depends on it.

This ecological challenge requires constant revision of natural resource management/policy. If we are honest about the limitations of our natural ecosystems, however, and implement policies that best fit the needs, health and demands of an informed society and its natural heritage, then we also need to take conversations about the nature of governance very seriously. What is governance, where should its power lie, how can its influence best support a healthy, sustainable, ordered biosphere?

Arun Agrawal, in his book Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects, offers key insight to the nature of governance, landscapes and place while offering a promising direction natural resource management can take. In his book, Agrawal introduces us to Komoan villagers who reside in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. Their natural heritage is enriched by tremendous valleys and expansive rivers – the product of tectonic forces that continue to mold the region. Of incredible importance to the villagers is the bio-regions forests tracts. The ecosystem services the Kumoan forests offer the villagers are immeasurable. These forest tracts were, at one time, very beneficial to the colonial British state as well. Often at odds, the Kumoan people and the British state had very different ideas as to how the forests should be managed. Agrawal opens his books with a discussion of intense conflict in the region. As his book progresses, it becomes a story of decentralization, community empowerment and best management practices. Agrawal provides readers with a historical overview of natural resource management in the Kumoan region and explains the emergence of collaborative management, environmental identity, sense of place and changes in the relationship between the state and the local.

Villagers in the Kumoan region of northern India set ablaze hundreds of acres of forest in the early 1920’s. The fires were set in protest of colonial British rule – particularly the rules and regulations placed on the Kumoan people by the British state that served to “protect” and manage the local environment. The villagers used forests at the time to construct their communities, for fodder and other forms of subsistence. The British state saw extensive military resources – specifically a vast forest that could be utilized for expanding the navy. What followed the forests fires and initial protests was a period of decentralization. This decentralization allowed the Kumoan villagers to conserve their forests very carefully – a total transformation from the age of protest.

Agrawal’s investigation offers support for an ongoing trend in natural resource management: Adaptive Collaboration. Adding to the themes of Elinor Ostrom, Agrawal builds his premise that community based forestry is not only possible, but more sustainable than centralized governance. His book is a story of transition, from centralized policy making to adaptive collaboration – from state to village.  This story holds rather large implications for traditional leadership. The success of decentralised policies can be used as an argument to promote the redistribution of power, to rethink the common perception of authority, and perhaps most importantly, to rethink property – the success of decentralised policy making (not only in the Kumoan) builds the case for public, as opposed to state, ownership of the commons. This idea of collaborative governance ultimately empowers the populace, it takes power from authority and promotes the concept of self governance.

Agrawal personally visited forty villages in the Kumoan region. At each village he assessed the health of surrounding forests, conducted interviews with locals and investigated their historical records. His book is an interpretation of the data he gathered. What he illustrates in this book is how decentralized, adaptive, and collaborative strategies in natural resource management change the relationships between states and the local stakeholders within a community as well as the individuals connection to place. Feeding off of Foucault’s “Governmentality,” Agrawal investigates how decentralization efforts have better protected forests. In this book, Environmentality is the theme – as villagers become more empowered and knowledgable they are able to produce policies that best conserved their natural resources. It is a remarkable success story of decentralized natural resource management.

So what exactly is Environmentality? This concept, put forth by Agrawal, is a new way to understand environmental politics. Agrawal’s concept suggests the differences and changes in knowledge, politics, institutional arrangements and human subjectivity concerning the environment “are of a piece and are best understood when considered together.” Concomitant study of these changes then helps extend contributions from three types of interdisciplinary environmentalists scholarship – the three pieces of environmentality: common property, political ecology and feminist environmentalism. Environmentality, he writes, is a unique way to think about environmental politics:

(1) The formation of new expert knowledges;
(2) the nature of power, which is the root of efforts to regulate social practice;
(3) the type of institutions and regulatory practices that exist in a mutually productive relationship with social and ecological practices and can be seen as the historical expressions of contigent political relationships; and
(4) the behaviors that regulations seek to change, which go hand in hand with the process of self-formation and struggles between expert or authority-based regulation and situated practices.

In short, the idea of environmentality allows Agrawal to examine how environmental governance has changed over time in the Kumoan while providing a framework for analysing the problems with centralized governance and the success of decentralized decision making. Instead of “Governmentality” (molding human beings to the wishes of the state), “Environmentality” (human beings collectively deciding to better manage natural resources based on environmental pressures) produced a conservation ethic among the people of the Kumoan. It is communal natural resource management, as opposed to centralized authority, that is achieving sustainable forestry practices.

Agrawal builds his case by first investigating the relationship between power, knowledge and nature. He then investigates the technologies of government and the results of decentralization. In his book, Agrawal builds the case for decentralization noting how destructive centralized control was to the environment (after all, colonial Britiain wanted strict management of forests so they would have resources to exploit for weapons of war). In the opening passages it is clear the British state used the DAD approach to resource management – Decide, Announce, Defend (or perhaps more appropriate: Enforce). The state initially viewed the forests and land for exploitation. It is this view of forest, and the corresponding regulation of Kumoan villagers that led to massive protests and revolt across the region – cumulating in the large, expansive forest fires.

The state’s vision of the forests evolved over the decades in response to village uprisings. Moving from resources for exploitation, there emerged an idea among officials that foresters should view extensive woodlands as commodities and manage them as such. At this time forestry officials continued to insist that the state was needed for proper control and conservation of forests. The DAD approach, though adjusted, was still in full swing after initial uprisings. Government officials continued to work to expand their authority. Conflict and dissent, coupled with internal struggles, soon become more political fodder, however, for the Kumoan villagers. The continued resistance forced Administrators to increase representation, collaboration and policies of decentralization.

Agrawal’s book is a great example of how the cost of bureaucratic control always falls on locals. This burden forces democratic change. The regulatory mechanisms separated the Kumoan villagers from their natural heritage. The burdens of regulation and revolt lead to a decline in ecological health which manifested itself throughout the population. As a result, the Kumoan villagers began to organize – the principles of democracy and the ideas of self governance lead to the development of forest councils. It is during this stage of transition, from revolt to organization, that the state was forced into ceding its power. The entire relationship between the state and community was transformed – there were more channels for the flow of power. This empowerment caused stakeholder participation to increase and best management practices shifted from the centralized state to communities.

The process of decentralization changed how Kumoan’s viewed the forest. The woodlands were now in their control. This responsibility, the reclaiming of natural heritage, generated a needed concern for conservation. Best sustainability practices flourished simply because the Komoans were empowered – those in an environment, as opposed to a displaced authority, better understand human impacts to said environment and how subsistence is bettered/tied to natural resources. This makes sense – humans are part of nature, but nature continues to exist outside of human civilization. It is reckless and ill-informed human actions that pose a great risk to natural areas. The conclusion of many, that in order to protect our ecology there must be a strong government to over see our natural areas, is refuted in this book. The state saw the forest as a commodity, first and foremost, but the empowered Kumoan’s viewed it as their natural heritage. It was decentralization, not authority, that produced sustainable forest management.  The anarchist, who is usually fighting on the front lines for the environment, knows the idea of state management has disastrous consequences. Anarchists will find an ally (somewhat) in Agrawal. Self-governance and the co-operative nature of human beings is celebrated in this text, though Agrawal, much like his mentor Ostrom, never discusses absolute liberty.

None the less, Agrawal’s book echos a theme prevalent everywhere today. As natural resource management has evolved over the years, traditional views of the environment and human relationships between nature and sense of place have too evolved. Today, resource management is characterized by certain “wicked” problems making it difficult to place responsibility of certain issues within one dimension of government decision-making . The complexity of resource problems today often fall outside the realm of traditional policy making. This has paved the way for more adaptive management styles which utilize alternative stakeholder approaches to environmental issues. These new approaches are formally bringing government institutions and the public together to develop best sustainability practices. This new style of adaptive governance is formally educating stakeholders about the challenges and demands of resource management today. As societies ethical considerations of the environment continually evolve, so to are considerations of government. Today, as more people relate to the great outdoors and come to respect nature, the collaborative management between stakeholders and institutions are naturally moving towards decentralization.

The trend is indeed welcome to libertarians and environmentalists. States tend to view natural resources as a means for maximizing utility – especially when considering military strength (as is the case in Agrawal’s book) and neo-liberal economics. As nation states rise to power they continually wage campaigns to acquire more land and resources. The concept of Environmentality offers an alternative to the states view of natural resources. Furthermore, Environmentality offers the method of achieving sustainability – reclaim the commons, understand the nature of power and the making of subjects and dismantle illegitimate authority. It is this unique intersection of common property, political ecology and feminist environmentalism that makes Agrawals book stand out – it is an incredibly concise argument for decentralized governance.

Perhaps most interesting about the concept of Environmentality is its play on Michel Foucault‘s “Governmentality.” Governmentality describes a system by which governments work to produce a populace best suited to carry out the operation of said government. Agrawal departs from the government narrative and instead investigates how the environment itself will influence human action. His book describes the metamorphosis of revolt to sustainable management, based simply on the transfer of power from a centralized authority to local villages.

Environmentality is a success story. It informs the populace that we the people must continually challenge our institutions to ensure their practices are just and sustainable. No longer can we as a species afford to allow ourselves, nor our institutions, to utilize resources to serve self interests. To ensure this practice, we need to step up and take more responsibility in our everyday lives. The growing importance and successes of collaboration, decentralization and partnerships indicates the need for an informed, engaged and empowered citizenry to develop sustainable resource policies that protect both the land and biosphere.

The current environmental movement is a vast, worldwide movement that holds great implications for the future of human civilization.  Beyond our human species, resource management will decide the fate of all flora and fauna, and all of Earth’s vast and wonderous land and seascapes. What are the human dimensions of resource management then? Should human management of resources be the product of states? The product of a system that utilizes natural resources to secure political boundaries – or is a different order more desirable? Political institutions work for their own self interests. This suggest we make careful consideration of our subjected relationship with the environment and our governance – we should not simply accept preexisting interests. Indeed this shift is happening as we progress decentralist themes throughout our society.

Agruwal’s book is an incredible account of how, by simply increasing liberty, common property management results in best sustainability practices. For the libertarian, it is another body of evidence that rejects the idea that sustainability can only be achieved if there is a strong centralized authority. To the contrary, the structure of governance must fundamentally change if sustainability is to be realized. When we tear down the structures of large, centralized governments we liberate ourselves from manufactured political boundaries of the state and rediscover our natural heritage – under the principles of Environmentality the biosphere will take care of the rest.

Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century) by Arun Agruwal, published by Duke University Press. $18.40