Create Your Own Nation - by Tarkowski Tempelhof - Part I

We’ve just setup a ‘Start Your Own Nation’ center on BITNATION, where aspiring nation builders can register their nations, build up a following, and get a support community of other nation founders.

When I did my first TEDx Talk in October 2012 I stated that “...my goal was to see thousands or millions of nations competing against each other on a free market”. That statement came on the back of having resigned from my primary contracting engagement just ten days earlier, after having spent nearly seven years working for the US Government and others in various conflict zones, from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Egypt and Libya, and elsewhere. The blatant inefficiency of the so called “nation building” activities I had engaged in had left me psychologically exhausted.

During those years, my primary work was to assess and empower local governance structures, as well as track popular perceptions on everything from security to infrastructure and foreign intervention. In Afghanistan the most peaceful time in modern history was during the time of the Shah, before both the Soviet and Western occupations started. It was more stable because the regions outside of Kabul were largely self-governing. In one village there could be multiple languages, legal codes, and court systems -- and it all worked in relative harmony. After the overthrow of the Taliban regime, UN tried to install a ‘one-fit-all’ model on Afghanistan, based on token Western values such as Democracy, Women’s Right, Education and more in that vein - through centralizing power to Kabul. Just like the Soviet one-fit-all model did, the UN led Bonn Agreement created chaos and violence through attempted uniformity.

While I was in Rebel territory in Eastern Libya during the civil war, that society was at first relatively well functioning. Volunteers did everything from neighbourhood security, to traffic policing and even trash collection. But as the Transitional National Council (TNC) - the Rebel Council - progressively became more established, and expanded their authority, all factions started fighting for control, and it progressively descended into the chaos we know as today's Libya.

Throughout the years, I eventually came to the conclusion that the most dangerous people in the world - the greatest threat to human peace and prosperity - were in fact not terrorists, rogue nations or neocon warmongers. Rather, the greatest threat to humanity were the well intentioned do-gooders from Ivy League Universities, sitting in air conditioned State Department and European Commission conference rooms, and in the UN headquarters in New York, Geneva and Vienna, thinking they somehow hold the moral highground and right to plan how others should live, drawing up a one-size-fit-all model for humanity based on their own moral compass. It’s this approach which will lead to perpetual war in the world, like I had already witnessed firsthand in places like Afghanistan and Libya. I no longer wanted to be part of that process.

Hence, I spent the end of 2012 and early 2013 finishing of and closing down all my government contracts, while dusting off an old idea I had started writing about 10 years earlier. The idea was to create a world of competing non-geographically based governance services providers, inspired by my father's decade long statelessness. Then I signed with Nortia Press to write a book called the “The Googlement - The DIY Guide To Starting Your Own Nation And Change The World”. To research the book, I took a one and a half year trip around the world to explore existing self-governing communities. I started of with the favelas in Rio de Janeiro and Peru. I visited the now infamous Galts Gulch project in Chile, and spent a month in what can best be described as a ‘hotel turned private city’ in the Dominican Republic. I travelled to Guatemala and Honduras to try to understand the private cities (ZEDE’s) and Seasteading movements better. Later I travelled to Europe to attend a ‘political festival’ in Scandinavia and regular meetups with Bitcoin and Libertarian communities in UK, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Then onwards to Asia, starting with the Yellow-shirt revolution in Thailand, to setting up an altcoin mining enterprise in Indonesia, and exploring the grey market economy in Vietnam.

It was sometime at the end of 2013, in a hotel room in Bangkok I first came across a blog post called “Lex Cryptographia”, and shortly thereafter a company called Invictus Innovations (now Bitshares) writing about Decentralized Autonomous Corporations (DACs), and then a few days later, I read an early draft of the Ethereum Whitepaper. I flew to Zug in Switzerland to better understand these emerging technologies, and slowly the light came on for me: the blockchain technology could solve probably 75% of all the functions the Googlement needed to contain. A few weeks later I encountered a health issue which was trivial in terms of physical impact, but had a significant effect on my emotional state, which led me to examine my priorities in life.

What was more meaningful, to write about something - or to actually do it? Hence, I decided it was pointless to simply write about the ‘Googlement’ as a theoretical concept of future governance, when blockchain technology had made it possible to actually build it straight away. So in 2014 I set up BITNATION, turning my life-long plans into action.

Since establishing BITNATION, I’ve had ample time to test different governance concepts - some successful, others not. At least once a week I receive a message from someone wanting to set up their own nation, asking me for guidance. So, beyond the resources you can find on Bitnation’s Create Your Own Nation community, I have made a brief list of some basic Do’s and Don’t’s I’ve learned over the last ten years of experiments in both nation state and the virtual ‘nation building’ arena. Enjoy, and good luck with starting your own nation!

Donts

Don’t attempt to create a ‘one-size-fits-all model’. It is foolish and divisive to assume that all people share the same ideas, perceptions and aspirations as yourself. If people want an one-size model they wouldn’t go to you - they would choose the UN, EU or one of the existing centralized nation states. Either create a rigid model for a small niche community, or create a modular concept for more mainstream adoption purposes.

Many aspiring nation founders, both of secession movements and micronations, focus an extraordinary amount of time on rather pointless things, like creating a flag, stamps, a national anthem, etc. Instead, focus on providing real value for your community in terms of governance services that they either currently do not have access to, or that you can provide cheaper and/ or better.

I’ve often encountered people who say something along the lines of “our aim is to “provide global love, peace and democracy”, when I ask them what services they intend to offer their citizens. Those things are aspirational values, not actual services. You’re doing yourself a disservice when confusing your and perhaps your community’s values with actual value added -- concrete and tangible benefits to somebody’s life through useful services.

Don’t be unrealistic about the time and effort required. It might seem easy to start a nation because of an exponential increase in certain technologies, from blockchain to seasteading and so forth. However, the ecosystem is still very immature, most technologies are in pre-Alpha or Alpha stage, and beyond our own ecochamber these ideas are still slow to take hold. If you embark on a nation building adventure, be prepared for years of significant work before you reach your vision.

Dos

Read up on what a ‘nation’ actually is (both in terms of community, as well as in terms of governance services), and make sure to provide at least part of the most essential services, like security and jurisdiction. Nonetheless, services such as economic security has come to gain significance in the West World as well (social security, infrastructure etc.) in the past century as one of the services expected as a core governance function. That being said, private companies, cooperative organizations, as well as charities still perform much of those services.

TL;DR: Before coming up with nifty names, slogans and flags, consider carefully what governance services you can provide, and how those can realistically out-compete the services provided by nation-states and other governance service providers.

Set rules of engagement - what is the relationship between the nation and its citizens? Is it a service provider or a community, or both? Is it democratic, holocratic or something else? Constitutions and rules of engagement need to reflect these aspirations.

Be financially realistic. Even if your financial plan does not work out from the beginning, you need to always keep financial realism in mind over the long term. You can have donations, sale of spin-off products, advertisement, taxes, membership fees or a percentage on service rendered as an income model, there are many alternatives. However, the revenue concept need to be part of the initial plan, and treated as a core component of the long-term sustainability of your nation.

Be careful with whom you engage when starting your nation. Early supporters are generally either: fantastic and dedicated optimists and do-ers you should do everything to keep by your side, or cynical opportunists - vultures attracted by the latest media buzz and opportunity to make a quick buck. Ever so often, they’re a combination of the two, which can make the judgement call difficult. Keep everyone at an arm’s length until they’ve proven themselves over time, through both good and bad periods. 6-12 months is generally a long enough period of time, if you work together on a regular basis. While this might seem rather standard advice in any industry, it’s particularly worth keeping in mind in frontier environments like crypto, where high risk-takers, opportunists and misfits are attracted in greater numbers, for better and worse.

In short, if you attempt to build a nation, blockchain based or otherwise, you’ll attract both the very best, and the very worst of humanity.

With Love,
#BlockchainsNotBorders
Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof
BITNATION Founder and Chief Unicorn