--- title: Chapter Thirteen — A Cognitive Commons book: Purposive Accelerationism author: '@jamie247' position: 19 of 24 canonical: https://whatispacc.org/ebook/#ch13 version: 1.1 language: en-GB licence: all rights reserved; quote with attribution --- # Chapter Thirteen — A Cognitive Commons “Cypherpunks write code.” — Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, 1993 This book began by asking what acceleration is ultimately for, as a question about the human condition. We explored how computational subsumption now routes a growing share of the world’s work, money and judgement through its substrate. But today this is a substrate without ends, which if left unchecked tends towards one of three extremes, techno-capitalism, the autarch or the fully automated totalitarian state, and, most alarming of all, a hybrid Leviathan that fuses them all at once. Whichever wins out, control passes to a party that answers to no one. Our reply has drawn on the cybernetic tradition and recent advances in cryptography to propose a set of governors made of code, mechanisms that hold the forces of the Trinity in tension so that none can close its hand around the others. Together they deliver a practical form of freedom we have come to define as non-domination. It is critical to state here that subsumption is not itself domination. In fact, much of it will and should be welcome. Which is why this book argues for acceleration rather than against it. It only becomes domination where a single party controls access to the world of cyberspace we are reimagining, deciding who counts as a person, who can connect, transact, who may create and on what terms, and who may collectivise. Whoever holds those gates can arbitrarily delete a person from the economy without having to answer to anyone. Teleological subsumption is how that domination arrives, as the purposes of the system themselves pass to its owners, be it a state, a firm or the two in concert. Cognitive subsumption is how it becomes the permanent state of things, as the people who would contest it lose the capacity to do so. Where the two meet is terminal subsumption, the condition in which our ends are set by a process we no longer hold the collective capacity to contest. This chapter and the next respond to both, with something built rather than granted. Rights written directly into the internet’s own protocols hold those gates open on equal terms. Built on that foundation, the ways of steering what they protect, the tests that measure whether we still can, and a single red line keep the choice of ends with people. *** On 13 February 1689, in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, England, the Lords and Commons had a document read aloud to William and Mary before either was offered the crown. It did not open with liberties. It opened with a king, setting out what James the Second had done before him with the help of what it called evil counsellors: dispensed with laws and suspended them without the consent of Parliament, prosecuted bishops for the offence of petitioning him, raised taxes the Commons had never voted, kept a standing army in time of peace. Only when that account was finished did the text turn, clause by clause, and declare each practice illegal, so that every liberty it named arrived as the negation of an abuse its hearers had lived through. A century later the American amendments were composed in the same order of thought against the same crown. Soldiers quartered in private houses, general warrants letting an officer search wherever he pleased, a church established by law: each was a remembered injury before it became a clause. Rights written this way are hard to dismiss, because the grievance came first. Rights for cyberspace should follow the same order, and the chapters behind us have already put their complaints on record. They serve the two aims set out at the start of this chapter. The first is to arrest cognitive subsumption before a population can no longer check what it is told, and acknowledge the fact this can happen while everyone involved is well served, with nobody wronged, no right infringed and no one yet dominated. The second is to limit teleological subsumption, so that the purposes an AI pursues stay with the people it works for rather than passing to the system itself, or to whoever owns it. *** People have tried to write charters for cyberspace before. In 1996 John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sat down in Davos, Switzerland, and wrote cyberspace its first constitution. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace told the governments of the industrial world, in prose of real eloquence, that they were unwelcome in the new realm of mind and held no sovereignty where the internet ran. It remains the most quoted thing ever written about the medium. Its failing was that it was a poem rather than a constitution, since nothing in or beneath it made a single promise hold against a determined adversary. The moment the internet turned valuable, the governments he had waved off and the platforms not yet imagined walked in and made it theirs. The new realm of mind became the most surveilled and enclosed territory ever built, its liberties revocable by a terms-of-service update. Barlow was not wrong. He was early, and unarmed, and he had mistaken a layer running through every jurisdiction for a country one could secede to. Barlow wrote his Declaration on 8 February 1996 in reply to the Telecommunications Act, which Bill Clinton signed that day, and the Act holds the decade that followed in miniature. Its Communications Decency Act tried to police speech online, the very thing the poet told governments they had no right to do, while another part of the same law handed the internet to the market. Two years earlier the Progress and Freedom Foundation, the think tank closest to Newt Gingrich and his Republican revolution, had published a Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, which cast the new medium as a frontier best settled by property and competition. The Act shielded platforms from liability for what their users posted, and in 1997 the administration made the doctrine explicit in its Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, which held that the private sector should lead and regulators avoid undue restrictions. It was a bipartisan choice rather than a conspiracy, a Speaker and a New Democrat president agreeing that business should rule, and what grew from it was the open, fast and largely unregulated internet this book has been describing. An economy left to set its own reference value discovered that the most profitable thing to optimise for was human attention, whatever the cost to society, and that discovery fixed the direction of travel for everything since. The effort to draft rights for the internet did not stop there, however. It passed through several hands into the present day, from the secessionists to the states Barlow had dismissed, onto the platforms and frontier laboratories we now contend with. The institutions came first. In the early 2000s the Association for Progressive Communications drafted a charter of online rights, and a coalition inside the United Nations’ Internet Governance Forum carried it on a decade later. Brazil went further in 2014, writing a civil framework for the internet, with courts able to enforce it by law. An Italian parliamentary commission followed a year later with the first text to say that the threat to a person online comes as much from private power as from the state. In 2019 Tim Berners-Lee, the web’s inventor himself, launched his Contract for the Web, asking governments to keep everyone connected, companies to make access affordable and respect privacy, and users to defend civil discourse. Then in 2022 sixty-one countries signed a Declaration for the Future of the Internet under American leadership, and the European Union answered with a statement of digital principles of its own. Read together they promise much the same things: access, free expression, privacy, net neutrality, digital skills and protection from discrimination. The weakness is who they ask to deliver these rights. Every one addresses its promises to states and platforms, the parties best placed to break them, and simply trusts them to comply. Importantly, almost none gives the citizen anything to use against the state itself. Brazil’s law even obliged providers to keep connection records for the police, and apart from a nod to anonymity in the Italian text none offered encryption, an identity no ministry issued, or digital money no central bank could freeze. By 2019 the conversation had turned to AI. Stanford opened its Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence that year, and the computer scientist Ben Shneiderman later argued in a book of the same name that high automation and people staying in charge could and should co-exist. In October 2022 the Biden White House published a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, promising that automated systems would be safe and effective, would not discriminate, would respect privacy, would say when they were in use and would offer a human to appeal to. It however announced in advance that it was neither law nor policy, and the next administration simply let it lapse. In the vacuum that followed, the AI laboratories wrote their own, though OpenAI had begun in 2015 by asking the larger question, with Altman speaking of reading Madison’s notes on the Constitutional Convention as he thought about how to govern it democratically. Within a few years the question had given way to the product. Anthropic, founded the year before by people who had left OpenAI, described their version of constitutional AI in 2022, a way of training a model to criticise and revise its answers against a short list of principles the company chose. What followed was a form of consultation theatre across the industry, careful to bind nobody to what it produced. In 2023 OpenAI paid ten teams a hundred thousand dollars each to test ways of gathering democratic input, and put none of the results into service. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab gathered some twenty essays as The Digitalist Papers, presented as what Madison and Hamilton might write today. In 2024 OpenAI published its Model Spec, a public rulebook for how its systems should behave and whose instructions take precedence when the company, a developer and a user disagree. In January 2026 Anthropic issued a constitution some twenty-three thousand words long, and treats it as “the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave”. Where any of these named rights were at all, they belonged to someone on the receiving end of a decision: a notice, an explanation, protection from discrimination, a human alternative and a way to complain. Each governs how a machine treats the person at the end of a process. None reaches to what it is actually for, or who gets to decide. For all their limits, the consultations did prove that a thousand strangers, handed the right tools, could write a workable set of principles for a machine. It was perhaps a small proof that the governed can set their own terms, and the published specifications did put declared objectives on record. The trouble however lies in the direction all these documents face. Each treats democracy as an input to artificial intelligence, a source of preferences to be gathered, weighted and folded into training, and none asks how a self-governing citizenry might keep control of a model once it has been built. The public is consulted but never given standing inside the system. The grants were almost always announced as non-binding before a single team had reported, and the text volunteers submitted never touched a model in use. The only constitutions in service today are still written, interpreted and amended by the laboratories themselves, the same parties the rights exist to constrain, with no procedure for an outsider to change them. That is where they fall short, as most earlier charters for cyberspace did before them. A rule its author can quietly rewrite holds nobody to account. Governments did finally arrive, albeit late to the party. In 2024 the European Union passed its AI Act, which banned a short list of uses outright, social scoring among them. It places duties of testing, record-keeping and human oversight on systems that decide who is hired, lent to or policed, and requires chatbots and generated media to declare clearly what they are. The same year the Council of Europe opened a convention on AI and human rights, asking the countries that ratify it to guarantee transparency, oversight and a remedy for anyone harmed. Each exempts the state’s own uses for national security and defence, and both move at the pace of the institutions that wrote them. Two years on, the treaty still lacked the ratifications it needed to take effect, and the Act’s duties for high-risk systems had been postponed. It is a reminder that law made at a parliament’s tempo trails a technology that remakes itself between sittings. That said, these instruments are worth keeping and extending, and the hard coded rights that follow build on them. Washington went the other way in September 2026, with a voluntary accord among six laboratories that the next chapter takes up. Where any of these instruments reaches for something larger, it ends up proposing a programme, a picture of the good life, rather than rules that meet the machine on its own terms. *** Taken together, these attempts share one design. Each was a charter, a list of promises addressed to the parties most able to break them, from Barlow’s governments to the laboratories now writing constitutions for their own models, and each was only as good as that entity’s willingness to keep its word. This book proposes the opposite, rights asked of no one because they are built directly into the internet itself as protocols that enforce themselves, open, encrypted and copied so widely that no state or firm can switch them off. Protections of this kind hold against whoever would breach them, public or private, and they act at the speed the harm happens rather than in a forum convened long after. Nor is any of this a hope. The work began in earnest on 3 January 2009, when the first block of the Bitcoin ledger was mined, and over the years that followed the same approach has given ordinary users money no bank can freeze, keys no registry issued and channels no ministry can close. It is unfinished, and so far it has reached what we own much more than how we think. The task now is to carry it into the systems that reason with us, the data, weights, compute, memory and agents through which a growing share of judgement passes, and that together make up what can be called the cognitive stack, the systems the governance stack exists to steer. Secured against capture by any one owner, those layers would form the title of this chapter: a cognitive commons. None of the rights that follow will be handed down to you. A government that grants them could just as easily withdraw them and even a treaty among states would reach only as far as its collective border, leaving outside many who need the rights the most. Nor can a company be relied on to supply them, since a firm can change its terms and conditions, be bought, coerced, captured or politicised. Apple showed as much in April 2024, when it removed WhatsApp and Threads from its Chinese app store on the order of Beijing’s internet regulator so it didn’t lose access to the market. A commons of this kind only works if anyone means anyone, without discrimination, however we might feel about them. Code alone does not make a right a standing fact. It has to be developed, funded and often secured by the same communities that depend on it, pooled as a commons, until it runs across enough hands and jurisdictions that no one party can capture it. Where governments do create capabilities of this kind, to check the domination of another country or firm they build them for the sovereignty of the state, on terms it sets and can change. That is still a public good, but it is not a right held by the people on their own terms. Of those contesting sovereignty, the rights that follow are built for individuals joined in a commons they remain free to leave. *** So what is being protected? Before anything can be asked of a system there has to be someone able to ask it, a person in a formal sense, who can take part in a polity, have a voice within it and walk away should they choose on their own terms. Nothing in cyberspace, as it has been built, guarantees that such a citizen exists. Each grievance this book has met, from the ration card cancelled in Jharkhand to the models withdrawn from professionals in June 2026, took one of those capacities away from someone, often through the unreachable decision of another, the kind of loss this chapter calls a foreclosure. The commons answers each kind of foreclosure we have witnessed with five rights: to constitute oneself, to connect, to create, to transact and to collectivise. Each holds open a gate that someone else now keeps, deciding who counts, who can connect, who may build, who can be paid and who may collectivise. They are to be used but also held in trust for those not yet able to exercise them, the child who cannot hold keys and generations not yet born, so that nothing done today closes off a choice they will one day want or need to make. The girl in Jharkhand, India, who died of hunger and the 222 political prisoners Nicaragua expelled and stripped of their citizenship in February 2023, are the grievances behind the right to constitute oneself in cyberspace. In both cases a single registrar decided whether a person could effectively stand in society and identify themselves to others. The right in a digital context means holding your own keys, a digital identity that is issued by you cryptographically to yourself, that no authority can revoke, open to anyone without exception and created for a child by a parent or guardian. It does not stop you registering with a state or a bank, and it cannot oblige anyone to accept it in place of the identity a state issues, since recognition always rests on shared norms. What it secures is that recognition can come from many places at once — an employer, a co-operative, a friend who vouches for you, or a new polity you choose to join — each deciding for itself, with no registrar left as the sole source of truth about who you are online. It serves the criterion of all masters, because an identity a state or platform hands out is one either can revoke. It makes a person checkable, because any stranger or machine can verify a signature made with your key in milliseconds, without asking permission. And it is where minimality starts, because a polity of people who may disagree has to be made of members nobody had to approve. Much of this already stands. Anyone can make a key pair on a phone, the World Wide Web Consortium published its standard for self-issued identifiers in 2022, and a bitcoin or Ethereum wallet is already a name no bank granted. What falls short is habit and recovery. The easier path is still to sign in to websites and online systems with Google, Apple or Facebook, and a mislaid key still means losing yourself online unless friends or family can help restore it. Both are solvable. The minimal interfaces now arriving with the post-web already hide keys and signatures behind a sign-in as familiar as any login, and social recovery, which lets friends or devices restore a lost key, is a primitive lying around waiting to be built at scale. The blackout Myanmar’s generals imposed on the morning of their coup in February 2021 and Iran’s from January to May 2026, the longest nationwide shutdown on record, are the same grievance behind the right to connect. It means making sure anyone, anywhere, can get online, connect and communicate through the most basic of devices without anyone’s permission. As such, it is the channel every other right here depends on. It meets the criterion of all masters, since the switch can sit with a ministry in Tehran or a satellite owner in Texas, and it is the precondition of voice, because people who cannot reach one another have no way to speak together. The tools exist but are patchy. Tor has routed traffic around internet censors all around the world for over twenty years and newer messaging protocols pass a message through hundreds of independent relays so no single operator can delete it. Satellite broadband can reach nearly any country whose government has shut down the ground network, so Iran jammed the signal and sent security forces into homes to seize dishes. However, at the time of writing roughly two thirds of active satellites now belong to one firm alone, Starlink. In September 2022 its owner, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, declined a Ukrainian request to extend coverage to Crimea, showing that a single individual could decide, without recourse, who held this capacity in a time of war. Escaping one master by passing through another leaves us depending on the kind master. That dependence can be borne for a while, as alternatives are built, but not as the permanent state of things. Rivals are coming — from the European Union’s planned IRIS² constellation to Amazon’s own and China’s state-backed networks — yet each answers to a state or another firm, and only a permissionless, encrypted channel meets the right. Blockstream’s satellites have broadcast the Bitcoin ledger to anyone with a dish since 2017, a small proof that such a channel can be built. The professionals cut off from the latest frontier model for nearly three weeks in June 2026, perhaps including you, are the grievance behind the right to create. It is the freedom to make things — a business, a program, a song or an argument — with the tools of one’s day, without first asking leave of whoever owns them. The printing press, the workshop and the broadband line each once settled who could produce what, and today that role falls to AI models and the compute that runs them. Through subsumption, an ever increasing share of work now depends on those tools, and access to them decides who can take part in the global internet economy that is cyberspace. The level of access directly determines the level of productivity and wealth creation an individual or group of people can enjoy. So it follows that this means of production cannot be rationed to whoever an incumbent approves of at a given moment. Furthermore, it is a right of access, not simply of ownership, where running a model on your own machine does not satisfy it by itself. If you cannot see what the model is optimising for, you are no better placed than if it ran in someone else’s data centre. And owning the weights lets one person leave, but it does nothing to make those who train the models answerable to the people who use them. The right meets the criterion of the realistic chooser, since a person who must ask permission before making anything has not chosen the terms on which they do so. The right to connect locked out the owner of an off switch. This one shuts out a different master, the model owner whose licence decides who may build on it. For individuals it is largely met. Open models have been free to download since 2023, and one of the most capable yet was released in 2025 under about the most permissive licence there is. Later that year the American government’s AI plan set out to encourage open weights despite calls to restrict them, having scrapped an earlier rule that would have rationed advanced chips by destination. Yet 2026 showed what that support is worth as a guarantee, since the same administration withdrew access months later, and between every buyer and every chip stands a supply chain that a state can close by force or a firm by contract. As with connection, the answer is a commons. Open weights released under licences no one can revoke, and compute pooled from owners across jurisdictions for arbitrage, putting the means of creation beyond the reach of any single government or company, which is the only footing on which the right can stand. That freedom carries a real cost, since a model anyone can run is one a few can misuse, to design a pathogen or to automate an attack. The safeguard belongs at the points where harm is done, in the physical world, screening orders for DNA synthesis and dangerous materials and in hardening the systems an attack would hit, rather than in one company’s power to decide who may use a model at all. The lorry driver in Ottawa, Canada, and the depositor in Beirut, Lebanon, who both found that somebody else could turn off access to their money, are the grievances behind the right to transact. It means being able to hold, issue and trade, to borrow and lend peer-to-peer between people, without requiring a processor’s approval. It is not a claim that every payment online should be final and irreversible. Refunds and chargebacks work well to protect most consumers most of the time, and even the majority of day to day crypto transfers should most likely be reversible too. What it asks is that a settlement of last resort stays possible, in money no single party can freeze and no issuer can claw back, for the cases where being cut off is itself a harm. Its reach stops at the edge of the ledger, since a house or a barrel of oil represented on a chain is only as sound as whoever attests to it, so no single attester should own that link. A transaction nobody can reverse is one anyone can confirm, which meets checkability. It shuts out every master again, since the same off switch can sit with a finance ministry or a card network. Of the five rights it is the most fully realised, and has been since the first bitcoin block was mined in 2009. The network manager who carried her savings out of Herat, Afghanistan, on a slip of paper exercised it in full. *** In the United States, much of what stood in the way of the rights discussed so far has by 2026 been partially achieved, and that is good news. Since 2024 the US courts and the Treasury have accepted that open source code cannot be placed under sanctions, regulators were told to stop banks refusing customers for their politics or their industry, stablecoins were given a legal footing, and central-bank digital currencies banned for four years. On most accounts it is the most progressive jurisdiction anywhere and much of that was won by the priesthood itself. Andreessen Horowitz and the largest crypto firms funded the political campaign that made the industry a voting issue in 2024 and David Sacks carried the case into the White House as its adviser on AI and digital assets, so that a country which spent a decade prosecuting the builders of these tools now aims to be the world’s crypto capital. On the rights to constitute oneself, to connect, to create and to transact, this book and the priesthood are on the same side. The fifth, to collectivise, is where we part company, which is why it comes last and takes longest. What has been won, though, is still only held at a government’s pleasure, on a question that has become openly partisan. A freedom one administration grants the next can withdraw. It is also narrower than it looks. What is being legitimised can be thought of as institutional crypto: stablecoins whose issuers must by law be able to freeze funds, which extend the dollar’s reach rather than offer a way out of it. In the same period, developers of privacy software were in fact convicted over code they published. In the republican tradition (not the party) a freedom held on those terms is no liberty at all, since a power that could interfere and presently chooses not to is a master however benevolent. This book asks for these gains to be secured in a form no later government can reverse. Recognition, when it comes, tends to follow the fact rather than create it. Bitcoin ran for sixteen years without anyone’s permission before Washington, which had spent a decade prosecuting its builders, ordered the creation of a strategic reserve of it in March 2025. El Salvador made it legal tender in 2021 and withdrew the obligation in January 2025 as the price of a loan from the International Monetary Fund, though its president said the state would keep buying, and the network carried on, indifferent to whether either decision was good for the country’s citizens. The gains described above were won by the industry that had grown around it because the incumbent system of politics and finance was forced to recognise it had become too big and too useful to wish away. Acceptance came with conditions attached, as the US stablecoin law shows, and in many ways can be seen as a co-opting of these networks to serve other purposes, which is why a commons must never depend on it. *** In the summer of 2023 the volunteer moderators who kept thousands of Reddit’s communities alive shut them down in protest at the company’s new charges for access to its data. Within weeks the company had removed several of them and handed their forums to friendly administrators of their choosing. That same year the Writers Guild of America went on strike for 148 days. It came back with a contract under which a studio may not use AI to write or rewrite a script, may not treat generated text as source material, and must disclose when it hands over anything a model produced. The moderators were a crowd, with no standing to bind the company and nothing held in common. The writers were a union, with the legal standing to bargain that American labour law gives it, and the difference between the two outcomes is the case for collective self-government. The weakness reaches further up than it looks. A market of perfectly sovereign individuals, each holding their own keys and running their own agents, can leave but cannot bargain, and when the sellers of a capability everyone depends on are few and large, leaving is not really available either. Firms are no better placed than persons. In June 2025 Windsurf, a coding company then reported to be in the process of being bought for around three billion dollars, had its direct access to Anthropic’s Claude models cut with less than a week’s notice. It had no recourse but to find capacity elsewhere, and weeks later the sale to OpenAI fell through and the company was split between Google, which hired its leaders, and Cognition, which bought the rest. What the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in 1952, called countervailing power — the organised buyer set against the concentrated seller — is how unions, buying co-operatives and guilds have always answered this. Here the right to collectivise enters, after the other four because it is built from them, and with a reason that owes nothing to politics. Without it, even the best-capitalised buyer can only accept the terms it is offered or walk away. The right to collectivise means being free to form polities and to join them, to pool what one holds with others under rules the group binds itself to, on its own terms, and to enter and leave such arrangements at will. It matters as much as the others and rests, like them, on the rights to constitute oneself and to connect, since only people who are recognised and reachable can find one another and combine their means. Without it the other rights describe a recluse, perfectly self-custodied and answerable to no one, the figure of the sovereign individual this book has argued against from its first pages. It is how the commons meets the criterion of voice, since those who stay can change things together, and it is where minimality and authorability come to in practice. A rulebook small enough that the new polities formed under it can still differ about everything else. It does not ask that every polity admit all comers, only that none in and of themselves be forbidden to form. Here too there are precedents, and they show both the reach and its limit. A decentralised autonomous organisation can raise a shared treasury, write its rules in code and govern itself by vote, and in March 2024 Wyoming, created a non-profit form built for them, the DUNA, under which the group itself can sign contracts and own property. The insufficiency is twofold: the legal wrapper is still a state’s to grant or refuse, and leaving a community costs whatever the incumbent can make it. The bonds such a group builds are worth protecting only while that cost stays known and finite, which marks where entanglement ends and capture begins. *** A commons built and funded by those who use it can still be captured from inside, as surely as a firm or a platform can be from outside, by whoever buys control of it. That is why its governance has to reach beyond one token, one vote. What the right to collectivise has to secure instead is voice, and the first generation of crypto shows what that is not. Where a chain is governed by its token distribution alone, standing can simply be bought, and a vote weighted by holdings is shareholder supremacy with faster settlement. Steem showed in 2020 that control could be bought in a fortnight, and in 2022 an attacker at Beanstalk, a crypto stablecoin project, borrowed more than a billion dollars for the length of a single transaction, used it to win two thirds of the votes and passed a proposal that drained the protocol’s reserves. This is why voice worth the name needs six things. It cannot be bought or sold. It weighs more than money, giving standing to membership, to contribution and to simply being a person. Commitments a member has demonstrably made to the polity can earn a hearing as well, never a heavier ballot, and any newcomer has the same route open. It binds, because a complaint an incumbent is free to ignore changes nothing. It is cheap to use, or only those with time and money to spare will take part. It gives each member one standing without letting any single registrar decide who counts. And it shields a minority from the majority, so that voice does not become a new way to dominate. The meta-governor asks these six of every layer and leaves the choice of design to the polities formed under it. Those designs have a lineage several decades older than crypto. Co-operatives have kept one member, one vote since the Rochdale Pioneers, and the platform cooperativism met at the start of this book tried to carry the principle online. Few of those platforms grew, and the reasons are instructive. Their profits were capped on principle, so they had little to offer the venture investors funding their rivals, and they could not raise alternative capital elsewhere without surrendering control. Each was bound to the co-operative law of one country, they governed at the pace of meetings, and they had nothing portable with which to answer an incumbent’s network. In stark contrast, crypto’s first generation of communally owned networks had the opposite failure, forming capital and moving it across borders at machine speed while letting the money completely dominate the governance. The arrangement this book advocates for can be considered network cooperativism: cooperative-like principles on a shared ledger, with capital and governance separated by design. Tokens may then pay for the work and fairly reward those who fund it, while the standing to govern rests on personhood and membership and cannot be bought. What is new is not the principle, which the co-operatives already held, but the means to hold it: membership that crosses borders, capital raised without surrendering control, rules enforced by the ledger rather than by one country’s courts, and a shared record the group may carry off when it leaves. This is where Vitalik Buterin returns to the argument. He has argued for most of this for years, against plutocratic voting and for proof of personhood and a form of funding that counts contributors rather than coins. Optimism, a network built on top of Ethereum to make it cheaper to use, runs a Citizens’ House, where every member stands equal, beside a Token House weighted by holdings. Rankings that surface what people who usually disagree both endorse, assemblies drawn by lot, credentials that cannot be sold, and the right of a dissenting minority to leave with its share before a decision takes effect, are all further experiments of the same kind. None is yet proven enough to be required of every polity but they point to an alternative, more sustainable form of governance for cryptographic networks. Every one of these designs rests on the same foundation. A vote not weighted by holdings alone has to know that one person stands behind one account, or it collapses into one wallet one vote, which can be bought, or into one registrar’s list, which makes the registrar a new master. Proof of personhood is therefore the precondition of voice, and unfortunately no design yet combines privacy, freedom of our kind from any single issuer and resistance to machines passing as people at the scale the commons needs. The best-funded attempt shows the difficulty. World, the project Sam Altman co-founded as Worldcoin, scans irises with an orb its own company designs, and says the codes it derives are split and stored so that no single party holds them. Even so, one firm still decides who builds the proprietary orbs and which scans count, and Kenya suspended it within weeks of its launch in 2023. In May 2025 the High Court there went further, ordering World to delete the iris and face data it had gathered. A government identity card has a single issuer by definition, and a web of personal vouching may not survive agents able to pass as colleagues. Until that problem is solved, the commons falls back on older arrangements or polities must stay small enough for members to know one another, as a village meeting or a co-operative does. History has shown assemblies can be drawn by lot from rolls anyone can check, as Athens chose its council, and a second chamber can keep the holders of tokens from ever acting alone, as Optimism’s Citizens’ House already does. Voice needs a way out behind it, and the price of walking away is the hardest problem this design faces. Exit at a prohibitive cost is a door open in law and shut in fact, and the price is not set only by the party being left behind. In January 2021 Parler, a social network popular with the American right, lost its listings on both app stores and then its hosting, all inside three days. Equally, a community can copy its open source for nothing but still be locked in by whatever sits beneath it, as the developers of Tornado Cash found in August 2022, when GitHub removed their open code within days of American sanctions. So departure is only as cheap as the most concentrated layer below. There are two answers to this conundrum. Each of the five rights makes leaving cheaper, since identity, balances and memory that travel with their holder, and code anyone may reuse, put a ceiling on what exit can cost. The second, more dramatic answer is the fork. To fork a protocol is to copy its open code and shared record and run a rival under different rules. Steem’s community did so in 2020, when it moved to Hive and left Justin Sun’s stake behind. What counts is a move made by a group together, carrying their identities, holdings and history, because what makes leaving expensive is usually losing everyone else. Understood that way a fork is less a split than a collective exodus, a community constituting itself again somewhere new. When that is cheap and an alternative destination real, a governor, whether analogue or native to the substrate, that starts taking rights away loses its users and the benefit it hoped to gain. Where the shared record is owned in common, what the members decide together binds, because they can always take it with them. Where it is not, which is still true of most of the cognitive stack today, collective departure is the only sanction the meta-governor has, and moving more layers into common hands is a direction it sets rather than a mechanism it already holds. The five rights, then, are what non-domination asks of every layer of the cognitive stack. With tests of whether people can still exercise them, and voice, exit and the fork to correct any part that drifts, they form the meta-governor over the whole. It is meant as a check that runs itself, not a body that sits over the stack. No layer has to be neutral. A protocol may lean one way, because across the whole stack one bias is set against another in open contest. What a layer owes in voice depends on what it costs to leave, for a typical member departing with their group and the network, data and skills and the time and opportunity they would lose in the process. A layer run by a single owner, however idiosyncratic, might be tolerable where its governance and its leaning are declared, only as long as it forecloses none of the rights. It stops being acceptable once it becomes a chokepoint the rest of the stack depends on, as one operator’s share of the low orbit satellites carrying connectivity already has. Here the rights demand plurality or voice. Foreclosure remains the line. Members speak up first, and if that fails they can copy the layer and leave together. *** The sequence that carried Bitcoin from prosecution to a strategic reserve has to run next across the cognitive stack, where the weights, the memory and the objective matter as much as a wallet does. Carried that far, the work begun with money in 2009 produces the cognitive commons, held so that no single owner can close them. Parts of it already stand, since the open models met under the right to create can now run on a laptop, and nothing stops a person keeping the record of their conversations on hardware they control. Other parts are barely begun, because compute is still made and rationed by a few firms, and the objective a system pursues is set in private by whoever trained it. So the most consequential layer of all belongs to its maker alone. Nor does an open model settle the matter, since the value that drains from anything cheap pools beside it, which on the post-web is the agent working for you and what it recalls. Completing the commons means extending what the right to create asks of weights and compute to the layers it has not yet reached: memory no provider can erase, assistants answerable only to their user, and purposes published where anyone can read them. Crypto spent its first seventeen years showing that money and a form of proto-identity could be held this way. Its next task is to do the same for the means of thought. As we saw with Barlow no matter how eloquent a charter nobody could build is a poem, and the questions drawn from Bitcoin can now be put to the cognitive stack running. There is no reason they cannot apply at every layer — from the data a model learns from and its weights to the compute that trains it, the tests that grade it, the inference that serves it, the memory it keeps of you and the agent acting in your name. Is there something checkable to hold? Is checking far cheaper than producing? Is there a crowd of checkers who cannot be cheaply faked and whose interests diverge? And does the check sit where the action happens? Running the full audit, one layer at a time, is work for founders and the market, and its shape alone is enough here. Today, every layer already has a reference value, just set by an executive in private and changeable tomorrow without notice, so the question is never whether one exists, only who sets it and who else may see it. Three principles recur where those questions come back answered, and none was specifically invented for artificial intelligence. Each was built after a trusted party had been caught failing, to check it without its cooperation, and what they share is a design that makes concealment cost more than disclosure. One is the public log: an artefact is entered in a register anyone can read before it is used, and whoever depends on it rejects anything unlisted, so the penalty for concealment is not a fine but a closed door. Another is the paid stranger: someone with no stake in the outcome is rewarded for each fault found, or stakes a bond and forfeits it when their verdict proves wrong. The last is the re-run: where an outsider repeats a sample of the work, and a mismatch costs the party that produced it. These are requirements, not designs. A log can be a distributed ledger or an ordinary document signed with a key its publisher holds, and a bond can be a token at stake or an escrow account at a bank. A re-run can be a cryptographic proof or a person with a laptop and a grudge. Certificate transparency, the bug bounty and the reproducible build have kept large parts of the internet honest for over a decade without anyone calling them governance, and the five rights only ask for what they achieve, not how they are built. Even so, the argument of this book is that the more of this work that can be proved by software rather than taken on trust, run at speed by checkers with different masters and paid in machine money, the better. That is the case for cryptographic systems, though the commons does not necessarily depend on them. Wherever an artefact has been public, checkers have come forward without being asked. Users caught the update OpenAI had tuned to flatter everyone who spoke to ChatGPT in April 2025 and forced its withdrawal within days. When Anthropic, the maker of Claude, opened its new defences to a public bounty early that year, hundreds of strangers took part and one found a universal break inside a week. Thirteen drivers in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, pooled their data requests and in April 2023 won an appeal requiring Ola and Uber to explain the automated decisions made about them, and the American firm was later fined €584,000 for failing to comply. What is missing at most layers is not checkers but something open to inspection: a rule that a model, an algorithm or a policy be published before it is used on many people, and someone along the way, an app store, a host or a client, who will refuse to run anything that was not. The approach has limits. A bond deters only up to its size of funds, so a party that stands to gain more than it has staked will be tempted to cheat, and a reward with no outside truth to check against gets farmed. Compute is the exception because of the limits of physical reality. Markets can move processors between buyers and sellers but cannot make more of them, since a handful of firms and one supply chain decide how many are in circulation. Plurality here depends on the freedom to build and export, which one of the tests in the next chapter is there to protect. Under all of it lies one minimum: whatever else is built, a person, a polity or an assessor must be able to see where a capacity is being lost while there is still time to act. *** We close with two words, one to drop and one to keep. The sovereign individual has had its time, because the creed the phrase carries is the one this construction exists to defeat, and the meta-governor’s first principle is that no one rules alone. The word to keep is the name Barlow reached for all those years ago for the place we are all protecting. Cyberspace is worth reclaiming, because no other word has stood the test of time as well and names a shared space rather than one company’s platform within it. It is not the realm of mind he declared independent yet could not defend, but the layer everything now passes through, with a constitution under it. What remains is plainer: not a fortress for whoever can afford to keep their own keys, but a set of capacities kept open for everyone who has to live inside the internet and its cognitive systems. Those capacities are enforced by the only thing that has ever made a right hold against power, the ability to walk away from anyone who would attempt to seize it and the ability to build, with others, somewhere better. A commons secures someone’s standing within it, but that is worth little to a person who has lost the judgement to use it, and code alone cannot tell whether such a faculty is held or decide what it is for. Those are jobs for voice, and they are the subject of the next chapter.