October 11, 2024

099 - Dr. David Bovill: Future States, Regenerative Cities & Open Source Law

3 hours 2 minutes

Privacy, Identity, Future State Congress, Network State, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Open Source, Nomadism, Regenerative Cities, Digital Utopias, Intentional Communities.

Timothy Allen talks with Dr. David Bovill.

David is a former medical scientist, hacker, programmer, and artist, currently known as—and I’ll quote his brief bio from the current Future State Congress website here—“Liquid democracy OG, Ethereum early adopter, commons platforms like WikiWiki contributor.”

As you will hear, he’s been involved in quite a few projects, most interesting for us being his work at the Network State end of the Free Cities spectrum, which includes a lot of unfamiliar territory for me.

In this conversation, we talk about privacy, identity, grassroots action, digital utopias, intentional communities, nomadic communities, regenerative cities, and open source law, to name but a few. I also learn a new word: 'Anarchive', from the word 'anarchy,' of course. I like that one.

Although we share much in common, we also disagree on quite a bit, so hopefully this will be an interesting discussion for you, as a fly on our wall.

Enjoy the conversation.

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:30) Introduction to episode

(05:29) Dr. Bovill's career path

(11:25) Why do you have a much more public persona these days?

(19:15) Just about any technology, any biological knowledge, economic process tends towards centralization

(22:29) The UK party scene in the 1980s and 90s

(31:09) Are we're doomed to keep repeating cycles of authoritarianism?

(38:33) Network state infrastructure and abstract power

(44:18) What is a network state?

(53:26) How do you deal with the physical aspect of someone taking over property?

(01:00:48) Building a regenerative city in Ukraine

(01:05:49) What is a regenerative city?

(01:14:04) Experimenting with governance models & choosing leaders.

(01:20:03) Who is funding the Futurestate project?

(01:24:59) How do you keep nomadic people from moving on?

(01:25:55) Ideological cities

(01:34:05) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's involvement in Futurestate

(01:41:54) I.P. rights

(01:46:29) What are some examples of successful governance projects that you've encountered?

(01:57:23) Crypto is not robustly decentralized & Bitcoin is

(02:04:13) Some amount of centralization is essential to good governance

(02:07:34) The base chain must be decentralized or else truth is lost

(02:13:34) Why wouldn't you use a normal database instead of a blockchain?

(02:16:31) Name something in existence that is really decentralized

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By Timothy Allen

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