Ep 12: From Politics to Protocols to Protocol Politics
Guest: Santiago Siri Series: Network Nations on GreenPill Podcast Listen: Spotify
Santiago Siri — co-founder of Democracy Earth and a decade-long builder of blockchain-based democratic infrastructure — explores how political constitutions can be encoded into software protocols, and what this means for Network Nations seeking to exercise functional sovereignty through technical governance systems.
Key Themes
- “Protocol politics” — the idea that designing governance protocols is itself a political act
- Siri’s journey from traditional political organizing in Argentina to blockchain-based democratic governance
- Democracy Earth’s work on sovereign identity, proof of personhood, and on-chain voting
- Soulbound tokens and non-transferable credentials as mechanisms for governance rights in Network Nations
- The Optimism Collective as a governance experiment — lessons for Network Nations institutional design
- The distinction between automating governance (encoding rules in code) and designing governance (creating the conditions for legitimate collective decision-making)
- How political constitutions translate (or don’t) into technical protocols — and what gets lost or gained in translation
Key People & Organizations
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Santiago Siri | Co-founder, Democracy Earth |
| Primavera De Filippi | Co-host |
| Felix Beer | Co-host |
This episode is part of the Network Nations series.