Roxana Nasoi - The Digital Renaissance: Privacy as the Intergenerational Commitment Mechanism

Great to meet everyone. Um I'm with Logos. We've done um a great logo circle upstairs. Um the Logos lounge is available throughout the whole two days. Tomorrow we're going to do um a privacy uh boot camp.

Um today specifically I just want to talk about what we call the digital renaissance and um a generational covenant. Um so the question today is not whether you can be private online. Um the real question is whether privacy will exist for generations to come. Um and I'll give you a bit of a a 2030 global view of things. So um it is projected which means um it may likely happen or to some extent it will happen uh 99% of the population of the global population all age groups um will be part of some sort of a digital borderless community by 2030.

Um what does this look like? uh digital first societies, digital care and digital services. Uh digital native knowledge and entertainment uh and digital citizens which are becoming the target of all sorts of emerging infrastructure including blockchains including um um uh government infrastructure and so on. Um, as of April 2026, um, 6.12 billion people, which accounts for approximately 73.

8% of the world's population, use the internet. So, they are connected. We're all connected. Um, and that number is up 7% since 2023, which was just three years ago. Uh, it's up 52 plus percent from 2018.

uh global internet user stats. Um and just in the past eight years alone, we've onboarded 2.1 million people. Um so now they have access to the internet. But what does this mean?

So you're going to have an influx of new people coming um online um unaware of the dangers, unaware of the surveillance mechanisms around it. So um that means that our voice is at risk. It's not just us who have been internet users for a long time. It's also the over two billion people that are coming in and it's also the next two billion people that are going to join and be permanently connected. So we have to choose between privacy mechanisms by default or default surveillance permanence.

Um so this is going to be probably the debate of the century. um public transcripts um become manufactured consent and we've seen this any kind of conversation that is happening online publicly uh feeds into an algorithm and then that algorithm can be used against you. Um authentic discourse is being criminalized. So every time we um criticize or we express uh discontent with some of the things that are happening um depending on the governance regimes we're under. uh this can be criminalized and it can lead to a lot of um repercussions to our freedoms.

Um and the point is we're running out of time, right? So 2030 is just around the corner. And so why is this relevant? If um in the context of the machine, which is the the governance systems that are currently running the world, um we're running on 380 year old uh governance systems. Um it's governance technology that is outdated and obsolete.

It is part of a legacy state system. Um so if you look at it um this started in 1648 with the treaty of um uh Westfailia with a piece of Westfailia where the nation state become becomes the norm. But in the same time um right in 1642 Pascal invents the um mechanical adding machine. And in in the same kind of year gap uh we have the pendulum clock. So we're not using Pascal's mechanical adding machine anymore and we're not using the pendulum clock anymore yet we are using the governance systems that was decided 380 years ago as the default right now.

So why should our technologies for political organization um be set in stone? the future generations are hit the hardest, right? Um there's intergenerational dilemmas um that struggle to maintain alignment uh struggle to maintain universal truths and memories and consensus. So these are three core problems that are impacting us. So no institutions outside of the chain to guard and maintain truth across generations, no alignment and no morale.

Um collapse of economics um of economies affects cross-g generational commitment. Um taxes are not a thing of honor or duty anymore. It is a burden for everyone. And constitutions and treaties depend on collective alignment. Um and this is kind of dying as well because national identity is dying.

But we did have a lineage of of truth tellers. And this is the the baseline of kind of what I want to talk about today. Um, which is a cipher punk covenant and the the intergenerational covenant for privacy. So there's been long-sighted altruism and it has a name. And in the 50s it was called the Quakers that coined speak truth to power.

Uh, in the 1990s there were the co the cipher punks and the cipher punk movement who wrote code instead of treaties. Um, and now we have people like Aaron Schwarz, who's not among us anymore, uh, and Julian Assange, who are essentially paying the cost of truth personally so we don't have to. So cipher punks didn't just advocate and code, they practiced long-term, long-sided altruism. Uh, they solved problems that should not have existed. Right?

So we have the cipher punk generation. We have howiny um that did the first reusable proof of work uh received the first bitcoin transaction and was actually coding as he was hospitalized with um ALS. And then we have Aaron Schwarz um that co-built RSS uh fought for open source access faced 35 years in federal prison um for downloading academic papers and took his own life in 2013. And then we have Julian Assange, which is more recent. You actually know his story from Wikileaks.

Um five years in in Belmos prison and and now he's finally free. But essentially um he was forced to admit um that he was um essentially conspiring to uh reveal um government secrets. So that set the precedent for anyone doing um you know for the freedom of press and for for um truth. So how does the value the architecture of value look like? Um so there's research showing I actually took this research from um climate change papers but I thought it was really relevant because um we also see this in the open source community.

So um we see that developers um are willing to dedicate up to between 14 and 20 hours of volunteer work, unpaid work a week to work on things that really matter for them. Um so humans are actually capable of absorbing costs to protect strangers two generations down the line if they're bound by shared values. Um so 26% of generation one could choose to u a costly long-sided altruism and 65% of the second generation reinvests when bound by a commitment mechanism. And so this gives you approximately a 2x sustainability rate when commitment mechanisms exist and parallel institutions are not theoretical. Right?

So another form of of um long-sided altruism is essentially coordinating and creating parallel institutions and and um mobilizing communities to become self-governable. Um so we have really great examples like the Republic of Pirates um Chiran in in Mexico which is still going and local currencies and these are not national currencies these are community currencies uh and there's been an explosion of them especially in the region um community but beyond that um the best example is the Brixton pound which was developed as um an alternative um to for businesses to become sustainable in Brixham which is a neighborhood in London. um throughout the 20 2008 economic crisis and it lasted up until COVID. So it had about I would say close to almost 20 years runtime. So the the local currencies the community currencies are voluntary local based commitments, right?

Um they're communities that are binding themselves to the medium of exchange. Um but when we talk about parallel, we don't really talk about private. So building something parallel doesn't necessarily mean that it is private by design. So without privacy primitives um at the infrastructure layer um and every parallel institution is just a smaller target for corruptability. So essentially we would create these very small parallel organizations or parallel communities but by sharding them we're not really addressing the bigger picture which is uniting um and forming some sort of permanence as a standard.

Um so the future generations use the architecture as the default. Um the first commitment mechanisms in human history that don't need future generations political consent uh to keep working is actually code. So this is my pitch today. It is the idea of code as commitment. We are committing this is a commitment mechanism um where we have very specific values.

We have end-to-end encryption. We have self- enforcing privacy uh that persists beyond the um any single tool or platform. Um we have decentralized corroboration which means trust uh without central authority and verification that's distributed across the network. Uh we have zero knowledge proofs that allow us to prove validity um without revealing identity. So we have privacy preserving verification at scale.

And then in terms of the architecture of values, two things that are very important. How do we merge community needs with infrastructure? So those are by defining the values themselves. Communities choose their values and the infrastructure must hold what we call the meta values. So what do they look like?

On a first level, community values which are family, freedom, justice, tradition, belonging. Each community ranks these differently. Um hence the stack must be agnostic about the way we prioritize it. And then on the second level is the infrastructure values. Um so they are decentralization, privacy, self-goverty, security.

Um these cannot emerge from nowhere, right? So they need to be instilled across communities and not from within. So the introduction is to logos which is building a stack for parallel institutions that's censorship resistant private Linux inspired um fully open source full stack neutral by design um so we've identified specific um attributes that we need in terms of maintaining this architecture of values uh which is storage especially around u memory and archiving um and records that survive tempering um and survive time uh P2P messaging, right, which provides private censorship resistant coordination and essentially becomes the standard for encrypted um communication across all applications. And then we have the blockchain component um where in our case we really value this this private proof ofstake where we separate um validator identities from staked amount. So this this ensures that the network is more resilient to any kind of external attacks.

So in the architecture of values, every deployment of encryption, zero knowledge proofs and centralized protocols is an act of intergenerational cooperation. Right? The intergenerational covenant starts here. Uh the cipher punk covenant starts here. uh we want to build what they can't control.

Um and this is lifetime work, right? It's not something that we start today, we finish tomorrow. It's an ongoing battle. It's a lifetime work where we look look at localized initiatives, uh long-term commitments. This is how we build the future.

So in this sense, um just a few examples like the Logos movement, we focus on on local action. And this is this happened in um uh I think it was September last year in a Kasha hub in Barcelona. Um the other one is um a crowdfunding campaign tour's first uh crypto crowdfunding campaign um together with funding the commons. We're supporting them and we're we're donating them $10,000 uh to fund internet freedom and essentially um protect over 150 small applications that are providing internet freedom for over 46 million users across the world. So privacy infrastructure is the true generational wealth of of future generations.

Um I hope you can join the movement. There's a few options here. Um you can read Farewell to Westfailia which is the book that I've mentioned written by Jared um Hope co-founder of Logos and and Peter Lello. Um you can download Logos Base Camp which is a sovereign app and allows you to essentially run in terms of governance, messaging, storage um everything in one go. And then you can take action as well by deciding to run something locally, participating somehow or just um spreading the education.

Thank you.