State In A Box – Identity Services Architecture – fifty pages of brain-breaking Gupta-at-his-finest assault on business as usual thinking about biometrics and liberty. From the abstract:

State In A Box presents a coherent vision of overhauling the fundamental assumptions made about nation state infrastructure to enable breakthroughs in SSTR functions. The Identity Services Architecture presented enables low cost, high security financial transaction infrastructure to be rolled out using 2D bar codes, public key cryptography, camera phones and biometrics in a novel configuration which both protects civil liberties and provides strong identity information for legal processes. Furthermore, an approach to international control of a single international biometric database is presented based on the chaordic work of Dee Hock, the architect of VISA. The assessment at the heart of this paper is that the benefits of a correctly-designed rights-respecting cross-jurisdictional chaordic governance structure cannot be forgone if we are to see a realistic implementation of biometrics as an enabling technology for development.

We anticipate the cost of issuing an ID using this technology to be less than $1 per head.

Now, of course, you’re wondering what this has to do with the Hexayurt. The answer is everything. Hexayurts do individual infrastructure. State in a box does state infrastructure. In between there’s a missing piece called “The Citadel” which does municipal infrastructure.

Put it together and you have everything you need to restore, rebuild, reboot or just plain start nation states.

As corporations spread through the 19th and 20th centuries, from a handful of entities created by the writ of kings and queens, so I believe it will go for Sovereignty itself. The various forms of the “sovereign individual” movement are making glacially slow but steady progress, and corporations attack sovereignty itself by doing all of their business in America and paying taxes in Bermuda. Soon somebody will figure out how to get sovereign status without owning their own army, probably by a franchising / defensive services architecture as Ken McLeod discusses at length in his work, and you begin to imagine a patch of land in some African country which has a different State for every square mile, and every single one of them is basically some internet servers and a mail drop.

Say AAARRRRR if you’re with me.

PS: This post made in honor of the upcoming International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Most people take that instruction at a “syntactic” level and think that one must simply say ARRRR and so on to be talking like a pirate.

I find that to be inadequate for my own deepest Pirate Nature, therefore I decided to talk like a pirate at a syntactic level for the entire week.