White Paper
An executive summary of the Humem-State
The Humem State is a legal, financial, and technological system that provides your digital presence with citizen-like rights, protections, and essential services in a landless state-like environment.
As a modern technological individual, your digital presence has become an integral part of who you are and what you do. Its wellbeing is vital for, and inseparable from, your wellbeing in the classical sense: your physical and financial security, your social and professional standings, your privacy and freedoms, and your legacy—it touches on almost every aspect of your life. As such, this digital presence, or what we can more generally call your modern Extended Presence (EP), has developed needs that parallel your traditional ones. It too requires rights, protections, and services.
In present reality, the advanced nation-state is the optimal system for facilitating your traditional needs. However, the nation-state’s structure and purpose, and the limits of its jurisdiction, are fundamentally incompatible with your digital EP’s comprehensive and enduring needs. The Humem State facilitates the formation, recognition, and empowerment of a new kind of citizen-like entity whose body is composed of the interconnected aggregate of your digital EP. Since no existing term describes such an entity, we have given it a new name—a humem. The Humem State institutes the urgently needed new form of governance to coordinate the common interests of these modern extensions of our existence—our humems.
In its initial manifestation, your humem is a formally-recognized legal, economic, and technological entity. It is intimately identified with and functionally linked to you, but legally separate from you in the nation-state.
A key innovation is:
Your humem is removed from traditional forms of ownership. It is not owned by any person or institution. In fact, it becomes self-owned within the Humem State comparable to how you are self-owned within a modern nation-state. The Humem State endows your humem with the right and means to exist independently—to become a self-sustaining entity which exists for its own sake irrespective of any utilitarian value to others (again, like a modern nation-state citizen, or for that matter, like a whale in the ocean).
A principal outcome is that you acquire a new form of dual-citizenship:
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One is your familiar nation-state citizenship, which addresses your traditional needs. In current jurisdictions, this “person citizenship” is contingent on your bodily existence and terminates when your bio-body dies.
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The second is your humem-state citizenship, which addresses your humem’s needs, i.e. the needs of your technological (digital) extended presence. Since your humem citizen is legally, functionally, and economically self-standing, it is immune to your bio-death—it can persist indefinitely into the future.
A humem-state existing in conjunction with a nation-state creates the essential foundation for our emerging culture in which the union of each person and their humem constitutes the whole modern individual—the new fundamental unit of society.
The creation of these citizen-like entities (humems) in a dedicated state-like environment (humem state) is immediately feasible within existing legal, economic, and technological environments. The principal components of this system have been designed and validated by the relevant professionals for initial deployment.
This system has a broad range of practical applications. It resolves fundamental problems—such as complexity, vulnerability, fragmentation, and lack of privacy and control—that impede your utilization of personal technology. In particular, it includes a comprehensive, lifelong-and-beyond personal data platform that provides you with services such as cyber-security, storage, aggregation, and maintenance. The same system opens the way to amazing developments in personal tech such as your impending integration with AI, highly-personalized health and assistant apps, and critically, the self-monetization of your digital EP.
Like any well-functioning state, the Humem State utilizes the efficiencies of scale of a large and growing populace to provide the things you cannot practically or efficiently provide for yourself. It represents your interests in relation to other states and corporations. It continuously evaluates, procures, integrates, and negotiates best-in-class products and services on your behalf. Its structure and purpose create inherent alignments of interest with your humem. Consequently, the Humem State is able to provide services—such as essential data services—at a level of trust, quality, and cost-effectiveness unparalleled by any existing providers.
The Humem State presents huge opportunities for existing and yet-to-emerge businesses by creating an entirely new market of economically empowered consumers and producers—the humems—who require a spectrum of services and products comparable in scope to those of the citizens of modern nation-states.
In essence, this new framework endows you with a compelling vision and tangible stake in the distant future, while fulfilling your essential technological needs every step of the way.
The establishment and empowerment of our modern extended presences in the form of humems has far-reaching implications for the extent and duration of our individual agency. Humems are tangible entities, increasingly capable of concrete actions that also reach deep into our classical world. They are real in most of the ways that a person-citizen is deemed so. They have bodies, identities, rights, and abilities within their native environment—the Humem State. They require energy, services, and infrastructure. They are dynamic economic entities—they hold and create value, and procure products and services to achieve their purposes. Our humems continually adopt and integrate with technological and cultural progress, thereby improving their capabilities and furthering our aspirations.
The establishment of our humems in a humem-state changes everything. Everything? Well, to a comparable degree to which the internet has transformed how we communicate between individuals, the Humem State will transform how we exist as individuals.