Logos and Status co-founder Jarrad Hope recently wrote about the origins of the Logos collective for Logos Press Engine in a piece titled From Offline to Online Piracy: A Genealogy of Logos. The article documents Jarrad’s early life, much of which was spent hacking around online, leading to a lifelong interest in p2p tech, the cypherpunk movement, and piracy as a mechanism to unlock new modes of commerce and create new value.
The piece goes on to discuss how these themes influenced his immediate appreciation of Bitcoin and, later, Ethereum — passions that led to the creation Logos. Jarrad also highlights that Logos itself is inspired by Ethereum’s original vision in which the network was just one component of a technology stack that also featured p2p messaging and decentralised storage. Because development stalled on the messaging and storage components, the full stack never materialised as Gavin Wood originally envisioned. However, Nomos, Codex, and Waku — aka, the Logos technology stack — are carrying the torch today.
Preaching to the choir here but I think this goes beyond the idea of network states altogether: this is a last ditch effort to save the internet from being fully captured and sanitised. If we manage to do it (with the technology, the ideology and the people) we can then imagine the next phase, where we upgrade long standing human societies and institutions.
More and more of the crypto ecosystem has lost sight of the original Cypherpunk vision. In accordance with Timothy May’s “Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto,” peer-to-peer cash and privacy-preserving technology were supposed to be the mainstay of our overarching development efforts.
Now we have a watered-down, milquetoast crypto environment where industry players are afraid to build the tools that actually work toward liberating humanity and preserving human rights within the Internet commons. Now, crypto degens proliferate on the internet, focusing on “Moon” and “Lambo.” Further, bitcoin maximalists mirror the degen movement, focusing on “laser eyes” and “when number go up.” In this regard, the ecosystem is a shell of its former self.
With that said, what Logos is building has the capacity to resuscitate a dying ecosystem and bring the Cypherpunk vision back to life. If we do not maintain the tools to preserve privacy and prevent capture of the digital commons, then we incrementally cede more of our rights to the totalitarian regimes that seek to control every bit of the internet and destroy the spirit of innovation and freedom.
In other words, what Logos is doing represents a true “exit” philosophy, which Albert O. Hirschman eloquently put forward in his work, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.”
Indeed, we must exit and build. There is no other option.
I agree with @ [Sklujan] 's (Profile - Sklujan - Logos Forum) assessment of the current crypto environment, but we can look outside the crypto crowd at large to find communities that share our principles.
Start-up cities and societies are currently siloed geographically but share many of the same principles. There is an opportunity to build a powerful movement by using Logos technology to unite communities that are already disaggregating services from the state and are founded on similar cypherpunk values.
“[The Logos Stack] provides a base upon which we can develop stable, fair, and just institutions for anyone connected to the Internet, enabling a new social order by which we can govern our lives.”