Civitas Eterna

A book about institutions their founders cannot break, and, in its most important chapters, about everything code will never keep.

Its first sentence is bad news. However good an economist you are, or a lawyer, a politician, a cleric, an elected official; whatever system you find to save humanity, building a near-perfect one means nothing, because the human being, like a careless child, eventually breaks what is in his hands. History's figures will take the book you wrote, carry your flag as though the idea had been theirs, and when they finally reach the power they wanted, their real selves arrive with it.

The book is written against that pattern, and it does not pretend the pattern is anybody else's fault. Its diagnosis is not that people are bad but that the technology carrying our promises has not changed in three thousand years: writing, a seal, a signature, a witness, the threat of punishment, all hanging from the same weak link, that somebody must still choose to obey the rule when the rule turns against them.

What follows is an attempt to remove the choice: a state whose constitution executes itself, whose treasury cannot be overspent, whose court settles and collects in the same act, and whose founder, this is the part that matters, is locked out of it on the day it opens.

And then, in the chapters the author considers the most important, an honest account of what none of this reaches. Code does not know persons: a keypair is not a human being, and recovery, inheritance and guardianship all require trusted people. Code does not know mercy: perfect enforcement can be perfect injustice, which is why the mechanisms are given deliberate human valves. Code cannot manufacture legitimacy: a perfect system nobody believes in governs nothing. And code cannot create the wanting, the desire for justice is the mechanism's input, never its output.

Code will not save humanity. Humanity saves itself, as it always has, with its institutions. What code does is multiply their holding strength.

The volumes

Civitas Eterna: A Peer-to-Peer Government, the main work, in Turkish, compiled from the author's manuscript and notebooks. A preface, four parts, twenty chapters, four raw interludes left untouched, and an appendix of twelve chapters not yet written, because the book is a growing structure rather than a finished object. Read the current draft (PDF, Turkish)

The Unbreakable Promise, the shorter companion, written in both languages: why coded institutions matter, told without a single line of code. English (PDF) · Türkçe (PDF)

Five further volumes are in draft, each taking the same machine into one domain: peace and the commitment problem, the tragedy of the commons, constitutions in the age of artificial intelligence, writable democracy, and the architecture of paid work.

Drafts are published here as they are written, and they are published as drafts. If a passage is wrong, the correction is more welcome than the compliment: [email protected].