Regulation is the innovation space that unlocks all other innovation spaces — AI, biomedicine, self-driving cars, space, crypto, robotics, nuclear energy, education, transportation, construction, and anything else you can think of.
This is why we need charter cities, special economic zones, network states, seasteading, moon, mars, and space colonies, and whatever else might give us a chance at a fresh slate to innovate outside of the constraints of the current, outdated, often created but rarely deleted, incumbent favoring, highly harmonized, excessively risk averse regulations.
All of the above approaches aim at securing a piece of land (or sea, or space) with some degree of sovereignty. That's because, as it stands, laws are a function of latitude and longitude. But what if we could unbundle the age-old tie between the land and the laws? Could there be a way to achieve a fresh slate without fresh land, sea, or space?
The tie between land and laws makes complete sense in the physical world. But it makes little to no sense in the digital world. The internet is inherently global.
Fundamentally, laws are meant to govern how people interact, whether that’s individual people, organizations of people, or governments of people -- it’s all just people. So there was really no need for someone in America and someone in Australia to recognize the same laws a couple hundred years ago. They would be very unlikely to ever interact.
Today things are much different. Many of us spend as much or more time interacting with people in the digital world as in the physical world. On Twitter, I am far more likely to meet and message with someone from Australia than I am to meet and message with someone from the apartment building that I live in — that would just be an insane coincidence.
So just like it made sense to have local laws based on the land, to set the ground rules for the interactions most likely to occur due to physical proximity, now, on the internet, it makes sense to have “local laws” for the interactions most likely to occur in the digital world, due to digital proximity. That could mean laws by platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), laws by cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.), or laws by something else entirely, like a digital-first network state, which may acquire some land, though it will hold most of its clout in the cloud.
Platform "laws" and cryptocurrency "laws" already exist in a sense, but they are not seen as sitting at the same level as national laws. They are seen as either downstream or independent, but as the power dynamics change, so too could the power ranking of rules.
It’s a hazy view, but if you squint you can see it. The opportunity to innovate at unprecedented speeds awaits us. We simply need to effectively innovate on the way in which we regulate.
