Problem space
The geographic distribution of Asgardian citizens and our shared space ambitions present us with many hard challenges we hope to overcome if we are to reach our goals. In this article I will focus on the information and communications technology and ...
Problem space
The geographic distribution of Asgardian citizens and our shared space ambitions present us with many hard challenges we hope to overcome if we are to reach our goals. In this article I will focus on the information and communications technology and distributed systems engineering challenges that await us, and will outline how we can start solving those issues today with the help of already existing technology.
Asgardia is a digital nation
As a nation that has united hundreds of thousands of people from around the world, produced and signed a Constitution, ran it's parliamentary elections and is currently forming it's government, all through the help of the Internet and it's immense connective force, it is clear how dependent Asgardia's future is on it's relationship with the Internet. We truly are a digitally born nation, albeit because of our common human wonder and curiosity for what lies beyond.
The reasons for this digital nativeness may not be obvious, but they lie in these two facts:
-
our population is spread throughout the world, meaning that to be able to collaborate effectively we depend on being able to communicate and collaborate with each other across long distances
-
the specific technological era we live in, has eliminated all of the other predicaments and challenges necessary for us to come together in such large numbers - free exchange of thoughts and ideas, continuing news of space innovation and potential, widespread ecological degradation and political instability are powerful forces that give our nation-project the justification it needs and to us a sense of perfect timing and meaning
While we can't change much about (2), and can't really fully solve (1), there is much we can do in improving our digital infrastructure, making the (1) point as painless and our work as efficient as possible. It is exactly in this area that I predict many of the solutions our society needs such as education, insurance, jobs, governance, research, manufacturing, culture and many others will be realized. These kind of web-based government services are the most sensible to build because they can easily be extended to all Asgardians where ever they may find themselves around the world, and are also the cheapest way to do provide public services. This is the exact same argument other nation states employed to start their journey in digitizing their public services. Those nations, however, have sovereign territory which they control, and can build governmental buildings to house officials and provide services in addition to their digital presence. Most importantly, such buildings can be secured physically.
Securing Asgardia
Nothing is going to be easy for Asgardia. Our digital systems and our geographically distributed population become our liabilites. A successful hack of a personal device of a single of our citizen may open doors for wide harm to our infrastructure and social order, not forgetting the harm done to the individual itself. Our successes in cybersecurity become our successes in national security.
The answer is, has been since the Roman times, and always will be -
cryptography
- the deliberate masking, deformation and partitioning of information. Educating citizens on how to do cryptography is hard, and it is even harder for those citizens to adopt safe practices as that involves changing their habits. The only real solution to Asgardian sensitivity to digital disruption is to base our infrastructure on a platform that comes with built-in cryptographic features.
At the level of the files
IPFS
is short for Interplanetary File System. It is an ambitious project to address the structural vulnerabilities of the Internet as we know it today. Most notably, IPFS offers an enhancement to how the Internet resolves addresses and links. What IPFS gives us is a way to address unique files on the Internet via their cryptographic signature (hash). Furthermore, when opening an IPFS link your device gets redirected to the closest computer with that unique file. What is amazing about this is that IPFS also works offline - your computer may not be able to access the full Internet but it may still be on a local network with other computers, and while the chance is slim, the file you may be trying to open may just be on a computer in the next room. It is exactly this offline-first property that makes this system a truly interplanetary-ready version of the Internet.
An appeal
To the technical community of Asgardia, I call onto you to start getting familiar with the Interplanetary Filesystem and it's core mesh networking library
libp2p
. Start thinking about what kind of applications we could build atop of this technology, and how we could build a secure and isolated Asgardian distributed network to act as a base of our digital nation, here on Earth or in space.
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5bgFYiZ1/its-time-for-the-permanent-web.html
