A Declaration of Open Secrets

Recent years have proven the fragile interdependence of the Earth’s polities and exposed significant flaws in the ability of governments to cooperate and provide for their peoples. Operating on coordination technologies over 250 years old, geonations cannot keep pace with the rapidly changing needs of our commons, and so a new social contract must arise.

We, the citizens of Kong Land, the first global metanation, do endeavor to preserve these commons and open our borders to all who will support, build, and maintain:

• A private, verifiable, and ubiquitous secure element: To evade identification by adversarial geonations while still remaining resilient to network manipulation, we must produce auditable secret identities beginning at the hardware layer: generating, storing, and sharing secret material. We will define the standards by which open-source secure elements are manufactured and distributed, ensuring compatibility with any secret-sharing protocol.
• An intact and unpartitioned secret-sharing network: To pierce the boundaries of a suppressive geonation, lines of communication and coordination must remain open and operational with the outside world at all times. We will contribute to the proliferation of encrypted traffic, steganographic messaging, and mesh infrastructure so networks cannot be persistently partitioned by hostile forces.
• A cooperative, composable, and combinatorial governance layer: To preserve unimpeded right of entry, exit, and fork, individuals must be able to coordinate trustlessly within the jurisdictions of both novel metanations and legacy geonations. In collaboration with other DAOs, we will support the funding, development, and upkeep of flexible voting and auction technologies, comprehensive treasury solutions, and other contracts for successful DAO operations.
• A functioning and efficient supply chain: Where a geonation seeks to identify and sabotage individual prosperity, a sparse and redundant network of suppliers, processors, and deliverers must exist to circumvent these controls. We will support the design and construction of microfarms, microfactories, microfabs, and microlaboratories to create more resilient supply chain networks with comprehensive cryptographic identities and redundant failover.

The digital commons and their physical network infrastructure have transcended the borders of our motherlands and indelibly connected the citizens of every territory together.

So long as this network infrastructure remains intact, supporting private and anonymous traffic, our borders can evaporate in all domains but those dependent on physical space. As a result, individuals can align and cooperate together anywhere in the world, and the scope of geonations’ power will necessarily unbundle into their localized services.

Proposals like the Sovereign Individual, Functional Overlapping and Competing Jurisdictions, and the Network State insightfully predicted these diffuse coalitions, and their notions of citizenship can be elaborated further to better understand the behavior of network natives today. Here we reimagine the domain of sovereignty, even the very idea of nationality itself:

Metacitizenship is our new fundamental reality: simultaneous distributed membership in competing, exclusive, complementary, and redundant functional groups, with overlapping rights, privileges, and responsibilities.

The advent of cryptocurrency systems and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) has enabled individuals everywhere to freely associate and take on treaties and covenants as they desire. A climate accord, an embargo, a social security scheme are no longer solely the domain of a nation, but that of any motivated collective with a treasury and a consensus mechanism.

The free entry, exit, and fork of such schema: the permissionless replication and upgradeability of infrastructure, further enable the individual to build, compose, and combine a custom stack of policies that suits their preferences. Cryptographic anonymity and privacy further protect such individuals from coercion by distant actors, and set boundaries on the duplication of their identity.

The persistence and expansion of these four pillars: the secure element, the network, the governance layer, the supply chain, together constitute the inviolable duty of a Kong Citizen. Whosoever attains a citizenship token, cryptographically signs the charter, and dedicates themselves earnestly in support of this mission, will always be welcome as a citizen of Kong Land and shall hold all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities appertaining thereto.

The Boons of Metanationality

The inadequacy of legacy governments to solve for problems in the global commons has illuminated the need for new “metanations” that overlap and interleave to provide for our shared prosperity. We believe that cryptocurrencies and web3 technologies more broadly have uniquely enabled new, composable governments to address our collective requirements.

The defining characteristics of a metanation are:

• Bottom-up membership control flow: Where geonations claim all residents within their borders as members of their jurisdiction, a metanation comprises individuals, associations, and DAOs who continuously self-select into the membership of the metanation.
• Composability and combinatorics: Where geonations require unilateral buy-in from every citizen in their jurisdiction, a metacitizen can instead enroll in multiple narrow interest groups, each dedicated to a specific good, and form them into one cohesive, comprehensive network of services.
• Permissionless replication and modification: Where conflict in a geonation may require violent revolution and removal of the leadership, a metanation can be openly forked and updated such that metacitizens will then self-sort into the community which best matches their preference.

These three characteristics are uniquely enabled by the dynamics of cryptoeconomies. The rise of the metanation could not occur in previous eras without triple-entry accounting and Ricardian contracts, without ZK-STARKs and token-curated registries. These tools ultimately give token holders the final choice in their participation in cryptoeconomies and metanation governance, and they limit the tools of physical violence and coercion available to a hostile force.

Kong Land is only the first of many metanations. We interact with the real world: we have diplomatic relations, economic covenants, state functions, and social services. We exist in physical space for corporeal humans with real resources, just as we do in the digital. Informed by those who came before, we forge a path into the future that every metanation can follow hereafter.

Models of Coexistence

Questions remain in the details of how a distributed, illegible identity like a metanation and its individual metacitizens interact with a monolithic state entity supporting capitols and military bases. Kong Land is dedicated to investigating these questions, building these relationships, and securing the safety and legitimacy of its metacitizens.

We are not fully without precedent: religions, suzerains, diasporas, revolutions, multinational corporations, and the like have long existed in the liminal boundaries of traditional states; if lessons can be learned from the past, they will be found among such examples. These historical models and the immediate competing forces of the Information Age will shape new ways of being for the metacitizens of tomorrow:

• For those who believe in rights of sovereignty, the geonation is the original sovereign and the citizen’s controlling authority. Metanations will organize around lawful interfaces to legacy institutions, another corporate body that nonetheless owes dues to the geonation.
• For those who believe in contractualism, constrained only by acts they can get away with: the citizen completely hides their metacitizenship behind a pseudonym. Each metanation is a black market side-hustle until it earns legitimacy within its geonation.
• For those who believe in rights of exit and have the means, the metacitizen chooses their jurisdiction. Brain drain will be the ultimate competitive pressure to adopt more agile geonational policies that reap the benefits of metacitizen productivity.
• For those who believe in rights of conquest, there is a point where the metacitizen dumps tea in the harbor and says they will no longer capitulate to geonational power. The metanation operates as a revolutionary group: the Sons of Liberty, the People’s Action Party, the Arab Spring.

We expect all these models and more will converge to force geonations to unbundle services and compete for policies friendly to metanations. The cost of resistance will be much greater than the rewards of cooperation.

As ever, the goals of a good metanation must be to create ties that promote peaceful resolution of crises and satisfy the unique needs of every intersection of concerns. The citizens of Kong Land will endeavor always to meet that standard.

Call to Create

Kong Land’s vision of the future is a bright one: hyperlocal communities and tight-knit support networks energized by global microfactories and microfarms; a rich and vibrant metaverse connecting individuals around the world through silica and sunlight; metacitizens collaborating and contributing to global prosperity through their unique intersections of the collective; composite metanations that interleave and support every other through small-world networks safeguarded by cryptographic guarantees; a woven mesh of mutual benefit that lies on top of traditional geopolitical boundaries, insuperable and inseparable.

It all starts with a private, verifiable, and ubiquitous secure element. An intact and unpartitioned secret-sharing network. A cooperative, composable, and combinatorial governance layer. A functioning and efficient supply chain.

This future begins today. And Kong Land invites you, Citizen, to build it with us.