Civic Voice

The section stands first deliberately: it defines what this document is within the corpus, and what it is not under any circumstances.

This document establishes nothing. It creates no rights and imposes no duties, confers no powers and limits none, permits nothing and forbids nothing. Nothing enforceable follows from it. No provision of any other document of the corpus rests on it or can rest on it.

It explains and it supposes. All the other documents of the corpus describe what is, or establish what ought to be. This one also speaks of what does not yet exist: of rungs, not one of which has been climbed as of today, and of possibilities, not one of which is promised. Section 20 lists nine ways in which all of this may fail to come about, and section 21 states what has been built and what does not yet exist.

Binding force belongs to the Declaration and the Charter. Where this document diverges from either of them, they apply. A divergence discovered is removed by correcting this document, not the Declaration and not the Charter. The interpretation of this document can neither lower a guarantee to the person nor extend the powers of the people or of any of its institutions.

It may be rewritten or withdrawn in its entirety, and nothing will change as a result. If in ten or twenty years not one of the rungs described here turns out to have been climbed, this document is to be reworked or withdrawn - and the Declaration, the Charter, the registry, the order of voting and the belonging of people to one another will remain exactly the same. This property is not accidental and is preserved deliberately: a text that predicts must carry nothing that would collapse together with the prediction that failed.

It stands second in reading order, not in force. It should be read straight after the Declaration, because it explains what the rest is written for. In legal force within the corpus it stands below every document that establishes anything - and that is the right place for it.

Proposals to it are accepted on the same footing as all others. The procedure is in the document The Founding Period. Joining, identity verification and agreement with what is set out here are not required in order to submit a proposal.

A person thinking about joining asks a reasonable question: what will change? The earthling passport does not replace a state one. Citizenship remains. Taxes are paid where they were paid before. A participant obeys the laws of their country as they did before.

What, then?

This section answers in full. It can be read and the document closed: what follows is the same thing, but with the evidence, with every procedure examined and with a list of what may fail.

What is broken

There are more ways to speak out today than at any time in history. What is short is not the channel but the proof.

Signatures under a petition can be drawn. A poll can be commissioned. Comments can be manufactured by machine in any quantity. That is why any utterance of society is rejected without argument on the merits: it is enough to doubt that living people stand behind it. The addressee is not rejecting the opinion - they are doubting the proof, and doubt looks like caution rather than contempt.

How serious this is can be seen from a single case. In the mandatory public comment procedure conducted by the US Federal Communications Commission in 2017, out of more than twenty-two million comments almost eighteen million turned out to be fake - as established by an investigation of the New York State Attorney General. It was not the fakes that lost their value. All twenty-two million lost it, the genuine ones included.

What we are building

Not one more way of speaking out, but an order in which confirmed people answer a question once each, and in which the count can be rechecked by anyone at all - including the person the result does not suit.

The caveat without which this sounds dangerous: the instrument is a procedure, not people. It is not the person who is measured; the person answers or does not answer, of their own will. What we call the instrument is the order in which answers are collected and verified: the question, the deadline, the registry, the signature, the publication.

How it works

A holder of a non-transferable passport takes part - a person who has been through identity verification. Verifying uniqueness does not require disclosing identity: it is known that one living person stands behind the record, and it is not known who they are.

The question is not composed by those who run the operational management of the people. It is published in advance and goes through an adversarial stage, where it is attacked by the party whom the expected answer does not suit. Once voting has opened the question is not corrected: a defect discovered means the measurement is cancelled, not corrected on the fly.

Questions come in two streams. Internal ones - what the treasury is spent on, which projects to support, how the rules change: here the consequence follows at once and for certain. And planetary ones - those that no state resolves on its own; they are put at the point where the consequence falls on the person, and not where institutions negotiate about it.

So that scale does not turn into shallowness, two layers work: a panel selected by lot spends several weeks getting to grips with the question and formulates the options, and the whole people votes on what has been prepared.

Together with the result there is published everything by which it is checked: the verbatim wording of the question, the deadlines, the objections submitted, the number of those entitled to vote, the share of those who voted and the way to recount the result yourself, without trusting us.

Where the people comes into this

The people is not added to the instrument from outside. It comes out from within.

A measurement needs a defined composition - otherwise it is not known what the share is a share of. The operator must not be able to change that composition - which means the participants have rights against the operator, and that is a founding text, not a user agreement. The instrument must not be purchasable - which means it has no owner, and the participants own it. It must be fit for all sides - which means it belongs to no state. And, publishing the result, it says "we", and not "so many users of a service".

A body with those properties is what we propose to regard as a people. This is our position, not a generally recognized legal test.

How it gains weight

By rungs, and some of them require no one's permission: the first incontestable measurement, the opponent using the same instrument, a public chronicle of non-answers. After that comes what no longer depends on us alone: citation by third parties, a position being asked for instead of materials being submitted, embedding in other people's procedures, and one day a norm.

The decisive threshold is not one of size. It comes on the day when the opposing side cites a measurement because it supports their own argument: from that moment the instrument stops being ours and becomes common.

What it does not do

Not power: decisions are binding only within the people. It replaces neither citizenship, nor elections, nor laws. Not a party: the people puts forward no candidates and takes no part in the internal politics of states - at any size. It does not compel.

And a sober point. Even full recognition of the people as a subject of international law would give no ability to change the law of any country: no subject possesses such an ability with respect to another.

What it gives a person

Today - a confirmable "I am a living person, I am one, and anyone can check it", an equal vote in all decisions of the people, and taking part in the first measurements.

At millions - measurements that cannot be written off as marginal; work and payment independent of access to banking services; the resolution of disputes by a procedure that does not depend on a jurisdiction.

At tens of millions - a counted position of the confirmed people of the planet on a question that concerns everyone. So far as we know, no one holds an artefact of that kind.

What may fail

Much. Section 19 lists nine ways, and the chief of them is low turnout: a measurement in which three per cent answered is worse than no measurement at all, because it undermines what has already been accumulated. That is why the chief vital indicator is named as the share of those who answer, and not the size of the people, and it is published always.

Section 20 states what of what is described has already been built and what has not. Not one substantive measurement has been conducted so far.

And where to go next

This document establishes nothing. The rights of the person, the guarantees to them and the limits of the power of the people itself are written in the Declaration: it is the text of the corpus holding the highest force, and the only one put to a vote. If one document is to be read out of the whole corpus, it must be that one.

What follows here is the same thing in detail: what proves each assertion, how each procedure works, and what we do not guarantee.

This section sets out the same thing as the rest of the document and is not a self-standing text. Where the brief and the detailed accounts diverge, the detailed one applies: the brief one exists for ease of reading, not as a second source.

It is customary to say that people have no way of being heard. That is inaccurate, and the inaccuracy gets in the way of seeing the real problem.

There are more ways to pass an opinion upwards today than at any time in history. A petition is gathered in an evening. A letter to a representative goes off in a minute. Public hearings are open. In most countries a procedure for public comment on draft acts is in force. Social networks carry anything at all to anyone at all. Polling companies measure moods weekly. A rally remains lawful almost everywhere.

There is a surplus of channels. What is short is not the channel.

What is short is the proof. Everything that travels through those channels breaks against one and the same question, and that question is legitimate:

• "A million signatures" - how many of them were put there by living people? How many people signed twice? How many signatures were sold, generated, or put there in someone else's name?
• "The poll showed 70 per cent" - who was asked, how many of them were there, how did the question read word for word, who commissioned and paid for the poll?
• "Two million comments came in" - from people?
• "A hundred thousand people came out" - who counted them, and on whose behalf did they come out besides their own?

Note how this objection is built. It does not argue on the merits. It does not say "you are wrong". It says "it is not known whether you exist". And that is enough to make no reply without losing face: the addressee has not rejected the opinion of people, they have doubted the proof, and doubt looks like caution rather than contempt.

That is why a civic voice can be ignored. Not because those in power are wicked, but because the count is broken, and broken in earnest.

How much in earnest is shown by a case worth knowing in full.

In 2017 the US Federal Communications Commission was conducting the mandatory public comment procedure on repealing the net neutrality rules. That procedure is not decorative: it is built into the American Administrative Procedure Act, and the agency is obliged to consider the objections received. More than twenty-two million comments came in - an unheard-of number, a triumph of civic participation, one might think.

The investigation by the New York State Attorney General, published on 6 May 2021, established: almost eighteen million of them were fake. A large part were submitted in the names of real people without their knowledge, using their genuine names and addresses.

Both sides of the dispute forged, and that matters more than the numbers themselves. The industry association of communications providers spent 4.2 million dollars and obtained more than 8.5 million fake comments in favour of repeal. From the opposite side, one nineteen-year-old submitted more than 7.7 million comments in favour of keeping the rules. Half a million fake letters went to Congress on top of that.

Stay with those two numbers. The industry campaign cost millions of dollars - and one person with ordinary programming skill did almost as much for nothing. That was the price of forgery then. It has only fallen since.

The upshot of this story is heavier than it looks at first glance. It was not the eighteen million fake comments that lost their value. All twenty-two million lost it, the four million genuine ones included. After a case like that, any agency in any country obtains a legitimate ground for not believing public input at all - and it has that ground now for good.

It will get worse from here, for a reason that depends on no one's ill will. Producing plausible human text in any quantity has become cheap and will become cheaper still. Telling what a person wrote from what a machine wrote, by the text itself, will soon be impossible in principle. The only thing that will remain distinguishable is not the text but its source: whether a living, single, willingly speaking person is confirmed behind the utterance.

That is exactly what the Earthlings people is able to do. How, is explained below.

Saying "politics has degraded" is easy but useless: it is unclear what to repair. So let us take them apart separately. There are five faults, they are of different natures, and our tool does not strike at all of them.

The first fault: aggregation

Elections compress the whole variety of a person's views into a single choice once every few years.

Imagine a voter who agrees with party A on health care, with party B on taxes, with no one on foreign policy, and who holds a sharp opinion on a question that appears in no programme at all. What can he express with his vote? One of two or three ready-made combinations, each of which suits him a third of the way.

The consequence matters more than it seems. The position of society on a particular question, in this system, is not merely measured badly - it has no representation at all. There is nowhere to take it from. Referendums are rare, expensive, and in most countries are held by decision of those in power, not by decision of people.

The second fault: the horizon

Decisions whose consequences will arrive in thirty years are taken by people whose horizon is bounded by the next election. This is not a defect of character but the design of the incentives: a politician who sacrifices today's well-being for a result a generation away will not survive in office to see that result.

The injured side - those who do not yet vote and those who are not yet born - has no representation in any political system in the world. Their interest by construction has no bearer.

The third fault: territory

The largest questions of our time have no national address. Climate change, the taxation of transnational profit, the rules for artificial intelligence, resilience to pandemics, the fate of the ocean and the atmosphere - not one of them is resolved within the borders of a single country, and not one parliament in the world has sufficient competence over them.

States know this and try to coordinate. Coordination stalls for an understandable reason: every government answers to its own voters, while the benefit of a coordinated decision goes to everyone, including those who did not take part. No one is re-elected for international agreement.

The fourth fault: the collapse of trust in input

This is what was discussed above. Telling genuine public input from manufactured input has become impossible. It is not the forgery that loses its value - it is the genuine article, because it is now indistinguishable.

The fifth fault: the asymmetry of organization

This fault is the deepest and the least known, although it was described long ago - by the economist Mancur Olson in his 1965 work "The Logic of Collective Action".

It comes to this. Take a decision that brings twenty companies a hundred million each and costs twenty million citizens a hundred dollars each. The companies' total gain is two billion. The citizens' total loss is two billion. The forces are equal, one might think.

They are not equal. Twenty companies find it easy to organize: there are few of them, each knows the others, each has a hundred million at stake, and the outlay on defending the interest pays back hundreds of times over. Twenty million citizens find it impossible to organize: they do not know one another, each has a hundred dollars at stake, and spending even an hour of one's own time defending those hundred dollars is unprofitable for each separately, though profitable for all together.

That is why a concentrated interest defeats a dispersed one almost always - regardless of who is right, regardless of the honesty of politicians, and regardless of the form of government. This is not a flaw of democracy but the arithmetic of organization, and it works the same way under any regime.

From this comes an important conclusion: a dispersed majority loses not because it is few or because it is wrong, but because gathering is expensive for it. Anything that radically cheapens gathering changes the outcome.

Not one of the five faults was created by ill intent.

Representation was invented when there was no other way: millions of people physically could not discuss common matters and take decisions without intermediaries, and there was no way of counting their votes honestly. Choosing those who would decide for us was the only way out, and everything was built on it - from the local council to the United Nations.

That worked, and achieved a great deal. One thing it did not do: it gave people no way of expressing a common will themselves.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 says in Article 21: the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in Article 25, secures the right of everyone to take part in the conduct of public affairs. The UN Charter opens with the words "We the peoples of the United Nations".

The right is recognized. A procedure by which that right would be exercised directly does not exist. A recognized right that no one can assert remains a norm without application.

We do not consider that anyone is to blame. We consider that the reason why it could not be done has disappeared.

From Part I follows a simple thing worth saying plainly, because it sets everything else.

We are not building one more way of speaking out. We are building a measuring instrument.

The difference is fundamental. A channel delivers a message; there are dozens of them today, and one more will change nothing. An instrument establishes a fact: so many confirmed unique people answered thus and so to such and such a question, and this can be rechecked.

From this comes the formula that is perhaps the only thing in the whole document worth remembering:

Anyone can be heard today. No one can be counted.

And at once the caveat without which this word is dangerous. The instrument is a procedure, not people. It is not the person who is measured: the person answers or does not answer, of their own will, and the answer belongs to them. What we call the instrument is the order by which answers are collected and verified - the question, the deadline, the registry, the signature, the publication. The people is an instrument for no one, itself included: an instrument is what it builds, not what it is. Anything else would contradict Article 10 of the Declaration, where the dignity of the person is called inviolable, and the person is called not a means.

The task of "making it impossible not to notice us" has been solved in the world many times, and the solutions are known. From an examination of the successful and unsuccessful cases (they are examined in Part III) five properties follow. A tool that has all five is expensive to ignore; a tool that is short of even one is ignored for free.

Property one. It produces what is needed and what is not obtainable anywhere else. Not an "important opinion" but data or a procedure whose absence stops someone from working.

Property two. The procedure is visible in full. Not only the result but how it was obtained: who asked, how the question read, who could answer, how many answered, how to check the count. There is nothing to contest when everything is visible.

Property three. It works regularly and comparably. A single measurement is news. An annual measurement of the same question by the same method is a series, and a series shows movement, and movement has to be reckoned with.

Property four. All sides use it alike. A tool useful to one side is a weapon, and it is rejected along with that side. A tool useful to both is infrastructure, and both take care of it.

Property five. The composition is verifiable. It is known and confirmable that living unique people stand behind the measurement, each of whom spoke once and willingly.

Now honestly about where we stand.

The fifth property we have and, so far as we know, no one else does. Not a polling company, not a petition platform, not a civic organization, not a social network, not a state outside its own elections. Confirming uniqueness without disclosing identity is what the passport and the registry were built for, and it is the one thing in the design that cannot be repeated without building the same thing.

The first four properties we do not have yet. They are not invented - they are observed. This is a matter of discipline, and that discipline can be checked from outside, which is what is required.

Indices and rankings

The Corruption Perceptions Index, published by Transparency International since 1995, carries not a gram of legal force. It obliges no one, compels nothing and entails no consequences. Yet governments hire consultants in order to rise in it, and announce a rise as an achievement. Credit rating agencies are private companies whose opinion of a state's solvency moves the cost of its borrowing by billions.

The lesson. A number published systematically acquires an influence that no one granted it. The mechanism is regularity, comparability and citation by third parties.

The death of one ranking

The World Bank published the Doing Business ranking, which assessed the conditions for doing business in a hundred and ninety economies. Its influence was enormous: states rewrote legislation in order to rise in it. After irregularities in the 2018 and 2020 reports were reported inside the bank in June 2020, publication was suspended and the review was entrusted to an outside law firm. The investigation established that pressure had been put on the team preparing the index to alter the indicators for particular countries. On 16 September 2021 the bank announced the discontinuation of the ranking. Not a suspension - a discontinuation. No attempt was made to restore it: there was nothing left to restore.

The lesson, the reverse of the first and more important. The whole capital of such a tool is trust in the procedure. It is not spent gradually; it is lost entirely and at one stroke.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The IPCC has no powers at all: it decides nothing, obliges no one and allocates not a penny. Yet its assessment reports set the frame of every climate negotiation - the argument runs inside its conclusions, not outside them.

Where does the influence come from? Not from the authority of the scientists: authoritative scientists are many, and their opinions diverge. The influence comes from the procedure of assembly: open review, published comments and the replies to them, recorded disagreements, line-by-line approval of the final summary with governments taking part. There is nothing to contest, because the process is visible in full, including the places where there is no agreement.

The lesson. What makes something impossible to ignore is not the content of the utterance but the transparency of the procedure by which it was obtained.

Technical standards

The standards on which the internet runs are set by the IETF and the W3C - associations constituted by no state, acting voluntarily and holding not the slightest powers. The IETF's working principle, formulated in 1992, runs: "rough consensus and running code". The world economy stands on those standards. No one asked anyone for permission.

The lesson. If what you produce is needed by everyone and is obtainable nowhere else, status comes afterwards and by itself.

Citizens' assemblies

Ireland twice changed its constitution as a result of the work of bodies that held no powers whatever.

The Constitutional Convention of 2012-2014 recommended allowing same-sex marriage - at the referendum of 22 May 2015 this was adopted by 62 per cent of those voting. The Citizens' Assembly, constituted by parliament in July 2016 and concluding its work in the spring of 2018, recommended repealing the Eighth Amendment - at the referendum of 25 May 2018, 66.4 per cent voted for repeal on a turnout of 64.1 per cent.

The compositions were selected differently, and the difference is instructive. Of the hundred members of the Convention, sixty-six were citizens chosen by lot, thirty-three were serving politicians, and the hundredth was an appointed chairman. The Citizens' Assembly went further: its ninety-nine participants were selected by lot every one of them, there were no politicians in the composition at all, and the chair was appointed separately. In both cases the participants studied the question for several months, listened to specialists and to both sides, discussed publicly and voted.

The lesson. Legitimacy is conferred not by election but by a transparent procedure of selection and open discussion. People selected at random, having got to grips with the question, turned out to be more convincing to society than elected politicians.

And the counter-example that has to be known

The Russell Tribunal on Vietnam of 1966-1967 and the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal established twelve years later delivered carefully prepared findings on the gravest questions. Their composition was self-appointed, their representativeness in no way established, their powers absent. Morally they are respected. Politically they are ignored completely, and have been for sixty years now.

The lesson. Without a verifiable composition, any procedure, even a flawless one, remains the private opinion of a group of respected people. That is exactly the place where we differ - and exactly what we shall lose if the composition ceases to be verifiable.

The instrument is described above as a design. Here is how it has to work if it is not to turn into one more poll. The requirements without which a measurement does not take place are established by the Charter, Article 8 bis: who may not approve the question, what is published together with the result, who finds a defect, and whose money a measurement is not conducted on. The Charter left the order in detail to a decision of the Assembly and required that it be published before the first measurement; as of today it has not been adopted. What follows is the same thing with an explanation of where each requirement came from, and the design where there is as yet no rule.

A holder of an earthling passport may take part - that is, a person who has been through identity verification and has received a non-transferable record in the registry.

What this gives the measurement:

• one person, one vote, because there is one passport per person and it cannot be transferred;
• a vote cannot be bought, because the passport is non-transferable and inalienable;
• a vote cannot be accumulated, because property is separated from the vote by the unamendable core of the Declaration, Article 13;
• anyone at all can check, because the registry lives in a blockchain and not on our servers, and is read directly from an open smart contract.

How identity verification works, and why it does not turn into surveillance, is described in the documents Biometric Verification and SBT passport. What exactly in this infrastructure is open, what is closed, and where today one has to take our word for it, is in the document Where We Are Now.

What matters is this: verifying uniqueness does not require disclosing identity. The instrument knows that one living person stands behind the record, and does not know who they are. For a measurement that is enough; for surveillance it is not.

This is the most vulnerable place in any measurement, and therefore the strictest.

Whoever formulates the question determines half the answer. "Do you agree to pay more for electricity for the sake of the climate?" and "Do you agree that the polluter should pay for the damage?" are one and the same question, put in such a way that the answers will be opposite. A single leading wording, discovered publicly, is enough to devalue not only that measurement but all past and future ones.

The order for forming a question is therefore bound to meet five requirements:

1. Separation. The wording is not approved by those who run the operational management of the people. These are different hands.
2. Publication in advance. The question is published before voting begins, with a stated period during which it can be challenged.
3. An adversarial stage. The wording passes through the objections of the party whom the expected answer does not suit. The objections and the replies to them are published together with the question - as the IPCC does with its reviews.
4. No change after the start. From the moment voting opens the question is not edited. A defect of wording discovered means the measurement is cancelled and a new one held, not corrected on the fly.
5. A connection with the participant's life. The question is put where the consequence falls on the person, and not where institutions negotiate about it. This requirement is not about courtesy to the reader: it determines whether a measurement takes place at all, and it is explained separately below.

The subject matter of a question is limited by Article 7 of the Declaration to two criteria that operate at once: no state can resolve the question on its own, and the consequences fall on people whether or not they took part in the decision.

The criteria are exhaustive; the list of questions is not. Falling under them are, for instance, the taxation of transnational profit, the rules for artificial intelligence systems, the fate of the atmosphere and the ocean, resilience to pandemics, responsibility towards future generations. Nothing from the internal politics of a particular state falls under them - on which see section 11 separately.

The question is bound to touch the life of the person being asked

This is the answer to the most likely cause of failure - low turnout, of which section 20 speaks separately. It is cured not by reminders and not by appeals, but by the question. If the questions do not touch the real life, interests and difficulties of people, the sense of voting disappears entirely: there is no point in asking, and no point in answering.

There is a genuine contradiction here, and we name it rather than go round it. The criteria of Article 7 select planetary questions - those that no state resolves on its own. And the planetary sounds far from the person: between "agreeing a rate of tax on transnational profit" and the cares of a particular day the distance seems unbridgeable.

It seems so. A planetary question always lands somewhere - otherwise it would not be planetary: the consequences fall on people, that being its second criterion. So the question has to be put at the point of landing, not at the point of negotiation. Compare:

On the right and on the left is one and the same question. The wording on the right is not a simplification and not a lure: it is more precise, because it names the place where the consequence actually arrives.

And immediately the boundary, because from this technique it is one step to disaster. Wording for the sake of a response is the door next to wording for the sake of the answer wanted, and the latter is already directly forbidden by requirement 3. We draw the distinction thus: a wording is admissible if it names where the consequence falls, and inadmissible if it prompts how to feel about the consequence. "Whether a company should be able to pay tax nowhere" names. "Is it fair that corporations profit off you without paying taxes" prompts. Both touch life; the second is not a measurement. The adversarial stage exists among other things to sift such wordings out, and the objection "the question is worded for the sake of the answer wanted" is considered on the same footing as the rest.

The second boundary is Article 9. The questions closest to a person are almost always questions of domestic politics, and that is exactly why they are closed. A suitable question lies at the intersection of two conditions: it touches the life of the person and at the same time has no national address. That intersection is not empty: the taxation of transnational profit, the rules for the systems people speak with every day, the fate of data about a person, the price of medicines, resilience to pandemics, who pays for damage to the planet. Each of these has a point of landing in the life of any person, and there is not a single parliament that would resolve it entirely.

Two streams of questions, and both are needed

There is a second and simpler reason why people answer: the answer does something. A person takes part not where it is interesting but where the outcome depends on them.

The questions of the people therefore come in two streams, and one cannot be substituted for the other.

Questions of the internal life of the people - what the treasury is spent on, what the contribution amounts to, which projects to support, how the rules change, what to do about mandates. Here the consequence follows always and at once: the money really is spent, the rules really do change. It is these votes that create the habit of answering, and habit is the only thing that holds turnout up over a long distance. Their subject matter is limited not by Article 7 but by Article 11 of the Declaration: these are questions of the life of the people, not of the position of the people towards the outside.

Planetary questions are those discussed above. Their consequence is not guaranteed: we can measure and publish, but we cannot promise that anyone will answer. That is their weakness, and it is not removable on the first rungs of the ladder.

From this comes an intention that we record here so that we can be held to it: no period consists of planetary questions alone. A people that votes for years only on things no one answers stops voting - and will be right to.

Here we answer the strongest objection to the whole undertaking: polling millions of unprepared people on a complex question is no better than polling a thousand unprepared people, it is merely larger.

The objection is just. Scale by itself confers no quality of judgment, and a large number of ill-considered answers is a large number of ill-considered answers.

The answer to it is the two layers. What is described below is a design: it is established as a binding rule neither in the Charter nor anywhere else, and it cannot be applied today in any case - drawing lots from a registry of a few hundred people yields no cross-section of the people. The design is arranged like this:

Layer one - the panel. For each question a panel is selected by lot from the registry. Selection by lot has no opinion: it gives a cross-section of the people, not its active part, and that is fundamental - the active part is always skewed. The panel spends several weeks getting to grips with the question: it receives materials, hears specialists and representatives of the opposing positions, and discusses publicly. At the end the panel does not decide - it formulates the options and sets out the arguments for and against each, together with the points on which the participants did not agree.

Layer two - the people. The whole people votes on the prepared options, with the work of the panel before it.

We know of no system in which such a combination has been achieved in full.

The closest to it is the deliberative polling that James Fishkin has conducted with Stanford University since 1988: a random sample, the study of vetted materials, discussion in small groups, questions to specialists of opposing views, and a repeat measurement. More than a hundred and fifty such exercises have been carried out in over fifty jurisdictions. There is selection by lot there, and preparation, and measurement before and after. Two things are missing: scale and a verifiable composition.

The second closest case is the Global Assembly of 2021: a hundred people selected by lot from across the world so that the composition matched the population of the planet by age, sex, origin and income; sixty-eight hours of work over eleven weeks; the final declaration read out at the climate conference in Glasgow. This is, by all appearances, the upper limit of depth reached to date - and it runs up against a hundred people.

Citizens' assemblies have depth without scale: a hundred people have got to grips with the question, but they cannot speak on behalf of society. Referendums have scale without depth: millions have voted without getting to grips, often on a wording composed by those in power. What prevented joining the one to the other was exactly what we have already resolved: the impossibility of selecting people honestly and counting them honestly at a distance.

Here too lies the practical value of the registry for others: a pool for selection by lot. The weakest place in any citizens' assembly is where to get a list from whose randomness of sampling no one will contest. A registry of confirmed unique people closes that task, and closes it neutrally: selection by lot has no position and is equally fit for any side.

A result without a trail is an assertion. A result with a trail is a fact. Every measurement is therefore published together with everything needed to verify it:

• the verbatim wording of the question and the answer options;
• the date the question was published, the dates voting opened and closed;
• the objections submitted at the adversarial stage and the replies to them;
• the materials of the panel: its composition by method of selection, the documents studied, the sides heard, the arguments set out, the disagreements recorded;
• the number of those entitled to vote at the moment of opening;
• the number of those who voted and the share of those entitled - published always, including the cases where it is low;
• the distribution of answers;
• the distribution of participation by country and region, broken down in a way that does not allow a person to be identified;
• the way in which any person can recount the result themselves: where the signatures lie, where the registry lies, by what query each vote is checked.

The last point is the chief one. Verification must not require trust in us. Votes are signed by the wallets of those voting, the addresses of those who voted are public, and the presence of a passport at each address is read straight from the smart contract. We can neither add a vote nor forge someone else's, and this is checked not by our word but by someone else's query to the blockchain.

One place where today one has to trust us we name ourselves: at the moment of voting the right to vote is confirmed by our server. After the vote this no longer matters - all addresses are public and each is rechecked in the contract, and a divergence would become visible. The same is said just as plainly in the document Where We Are Now, and the second such place is named there too.

If a measurement turns out to be defective

Elections have the recount; scientific journals have the retraction. An instrument that has no order, announced in advance, for acknowledging its own error loses everything at the very first error, and an error there will be: there will be hundreds of measurements, and at least one will turn out to be spoiled.

A defect of a measurement means: a leading or ambiguous wording of the question discovered after voting has begun; a malfunction because of which part of those entitled could not vote or voted twice; a breach of the order for forming the question; and any divergence between the published result and what is read from the registry.

The order is then as follows:

1. Any person may make the claim, not only a participant and not only us. The claim is published together with the date it was received.
2. The defect is found by someone other than whoever conducted the measurement. If the decision is taken by those who conducted it, an error will never be acknowledged - this is known in advance, and that is why it is not done that way.
3. The cancellation is published in the same place and with the same prominence as the result, not as a footnote. At the same time it is published what exactly the defect consisted in.
4. A cancelled measurement does not vanish from the chronicle. It remains, marked as cancelled. An instrument whose past can be cleaned up is no better than an instrument whose present can be touched up.
5. A repeat measurement is conducted afresh and from the beginning, including a new adversarial stage. Correction on the fly is not permitted under any circumstances.
6. The number of cancelled measurements is published in the common row of indicators. A zero in that column over many years is not grounds for pride but grounds for a question.

We prefer to describe this in advance, while not a single measurement has been conducted and the order cannot be suspected of having been written for a particular inconvenient case.

An instrument with which everything can be measured will be used against someone. The limits are therefore written into the Declaration and not into a set of rules, and they are not lifted by a decision of the majority.

The internal politics of a particular state. On such questions no collective position on behalf of the whole people is taken at all - Article 9 of the Declaration. The Earthlings people takes no part in the struggle for state power, supports no parties and candidates, funds no election campaigns and calls on no one to vote in a particular way.

A particular person. No collective position is taken with respect to a particular individual. The people speaks about phenomena, decisions and arrangements, but not about people. An instrument aimed at a person is a lynching with a procedure, and we shall not build one.

The principles of the unamendable core. They are not a subject of voting - and this is not a question of a raised threshold but a question that is not put at all. The list of those principles is closed and is established by Article 13 of the Declaration; we do not reproduce it here, so that it keeps a single source. The core may be added to; it may not be weakened.

These three limits make the instrument less powerful. It is a deliberate trade: a tool with which no blow can be struck is far harder to take away.

After the question "who authorized you" there always comes a second, and it is no less dangerous: who pays for the measurement.

History knows how a wrong answer ends. A rating agency paid by the party it assesses loses its credibility regardless of the honesty of its staff: the staff may be beyond reproach, yet the arrangement of the relations still produces a favourable assessment. This is destroyed not by ill intent but by the very direction of the flow of money, and therefore it too is cured only by design.

The rule is therefore recorded not here but where compliance with it is mandatory: Article 8 bis of the Charter and Article 31 bis of Earthlings Treasury. What follows is the same thing with an explanation of why it exists.

The instrument is maintained by the treasury of the people. There are no periodic payments for taking part in measurements, and none are provided for: a person is charged once a contribution on joining, covering the cost price of identity verification and the issuance of a passport, and after receiving the passport there are no annual or monthly payments. The sources of the treasury, the shares of distribution and the order of spending are established by the document Earthlings Treasury; what a person is to do if the contribution is beyond their means is described there and in the document The Earthling Path.

Note the consequence that follows from this by itself: paying in order to take part in a measurement is never necessary. The vote is tied to no payment, neither once nor repeatedly, and a person whose contribution was made by another holds exactly the same vote as everyone.

The people never conducts a measurement for a client's fee. Not for a state, not for a company, not for a foundation, not for any other association. No commissioned questions, no priority in the queue for money, no paid-for wording. The offer "we will pay for a poll on our subject" will certainly be received, and the answer to it is one and the same regardless of the sum and of how sympathetic the subject is.

Earmarked funding of measurements themselves is not accepted. Even a gift without conditions, received for a particular question, creates the same distortion: the next question is chosen with an eye to whoever gave money for the previous one. Donations coming to the people go into the common treasury and are not tied to a particular measurement.

The costs of measurements are published as a separate line. How much identity verification cost, how much the work of the panels, how much the infrastructure - in the general accounts of the treasury, available for public audit.

From this comes a consequence, unwelcome but honest: there will be as many measurements as the people is able to pay for itself. This limits us in number and in speed. We accept that limit deliberately: an instrument that can afford ten measurements a year out of its own funds is worth more than an instrument that does a hundred on someone else's.

And a caveat about what we do not guarantee. The funds of the treasury are money too, and a majority inside the people may also want a convenient question. Against internal pressure the source of the money is no protection at all: against that, protection comes from the order for forming a question in section 8 and from the ban on measuring what is listed in section 11. Separating the money from the question removes external pressure, not internal pressure - and we say this plainly, so that the rule does not look stronger than it is.

Weight is not issued and not announced. It is gained, and gained rung by rung. Below is each rung with its mechanism, its condition and a statement of whether it depends on someone else's will.

Rung 1. The first measurement that cannot be contested

One question put to the people, counted and published together with the full trail under section 10.

What is required: a working instrument and participants who will answer. Whom it depends on: only on us. What it gives: an artefact of a new type appears. Not "a poll showed" but "so many confirmed unique people answered thus, and here is how to check it".

Rung 2. Citation by third parties

An academic paper, a report by a human rights organization, a piece of journalism cites the measurement - because no other source of that kind exists.

What is required: that the measurement be on a question someone needs, and that the method withstand a professional eye. Whom it depends on: half on us. Citation cannot be compelled; grounds for it can be given. What it gives: the number begins to live without us. This is the first real event of legal and public cognizability.

Rung 3. The opponent uses the same instrument

The decisive threshold, and it is not about size.

While the instrument is used by one side of a dispute, it remains that side's weapon, and it is rejected along with that side. On the day when the opposing side cites our measurement because it supports their argument, the instrument stops being ours and becomes common. From that moment it cannot be rejected without rejecting one's own argument.

What is required: flawless neutrality of questions and a readiness to publish results that we ourselves find unwelcome. Whom it depends on: on our discipline above all. What it gives: the shift from "we can be left unnoticed" to "we cannot be left unnoticed".

Rung 4. A request instead of a submission

The difference between "we sent in materials" and "our position was requested" is cognizability in its pure form. A committee, a city, an agency, a commission asks the people to measure a question.

What is required: several years of presence and the reputation of a party that speaks to the point. Whom it depends on: on others. What it gives: the channel stops being pressure on authority and becomes a service to it. That position is sturdier than an oppositional one: a service is not abolished, people grow used to it.

Rung 5. The chronicle of non-answers

A public registry: the question was put on such a date, the addressee was such and such, an answer was or was not received, and this is what the answer said.

The tool is cheap and underrated. Being ignored costs nothing in itself, because it is not an event. Being ignored where it is entered in a publicly available list with a date, and where the list grows year by year, does cost - because others cite that list, and because silence stops being an absence and becomes a fact.

What is required: only the discipline of keeping the record, including the duty to record the answers we find unwelcome. Whom it depends on: only on us.

Rung 6. Embedding in someone else's procedure

A regulator accepts confirmed-unique comments in a public comment procedure. A city takes our registry as the pool for selecting a citizens' assembly by lot. An international body includes a measurement in its order of consultations.

What is required: rungs 1 to 4 climbed, and technical reliability confirmed by independent audit. Whom it depends on: on others entirely. What it gives: ignoring becomes not politically awkward but procedurally impossible: by breaching its own rules, a body puts its own decision at risk. This is the sturdiest form of influence in existence, and it requires not a gram of power.

Rung 7. A norm

Consultation becomes first expected, then owed.

That this is not a fantasy is shown by the history of the duty to consult indigenous peoples: from complete absence to an article of Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization in 1989 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 - within one generation. It began not with a norm and not with recognition, but with persistence and accumulated cases.

Whom it depends on: on others entirely, and over a horizon we do not control.

Add the rungs together and you see the main thing:

Rungs 1, 3 and 5 depend only on us. The first measurement, the neutrality of the instrument and the chronicle of non-answers require no one's permission and are attainable with a relatively small number of participants. This is what we can promise - because we are the ones who do it.

Rung 2 depends half on us.

Rungs 4, 6 and 7 depend on others. Those we do not promise and will not promise.

From this comes a formulation we consider honest:

The section exists so that a person joining does not build up expectations we shall not meet.

This is not power. The Earthlings people takes no decisions for states and exercises no public authority. Its decisions are binding only within itself and only on those who belong to it.

This does not replace citizenship, elections and laws. A participant remains a citizen of their country, votes in its elections, obeys its laws and pays its taxes. The people does not require and cannot require otherwise: belonging adds to, it does not replace - Article 8 of the Declaration.

This is not a party and not participation in a domestic struggle. The people puts forward no candidates, supports none and funds none. At any size. This limit is not tactical but constitutive, and it cannot be lifted by a vote.

Here it is worth saying the non-obvious: this limit is not a weakness but a condition of existence. A transnational community of tens of millions of people that interfered in the domestic politics of countries would be banned in its very first year, and banned justly. A community that supplies a tool used alike by both sides of a dispute is hard to call interference.

This is not compulsion. The people speaks but does not compel - violence is excluded without exception. From the result of a measurement follow no sanctions, boycotts or punishments announced on behalf of the people. What to do with their knowledge, each person decides for themselves.

This does not annul anyone's rights. The existence of the people diminishes no rights of those who have not entered it, and lays claim neither to territory, nor to power, nor to the right to speak for the whole of humanity. The people speaks on behalf of those who made this choice, and in exactly that measure.

And the most important thing for sobriety. Even full recognition of the people as a subject of international law would give it no ability to change the law of any country. No subject of international law possesses such an ability with respect to another. International legal personality gives the right to speak where subjects speak - that is, a place at the table, not power over someone else's parliament. Whoever promises otherwise promises the impossible.

Today, with tens of thousands of participants, a person receives little, and we shall not exaggerate it: a confirmable "I am a living person, I am one, and anyone can check it", one equal vote in all decisions of the people, and the chance to take part in the first measurements - that is, to be among those who create the precedent rather than those who use it.

Let us say separately who needs this most already now. Not the comfortable resident of a country with working institutions - he has all of it.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at the end of 2025 about 118 million people in the world were forcibly displaced, and registered stateless persons numbered about 4.5 million; their actual number is higher, because no one counts the unregistered. The number changes every year, and we give it with its date so that the reader can see how fresh it is.

For these people, a confirmable "I exist, I am one, and this is verified outside the state that does not recognize me" is not an abstraction but the thing they do not have.

As it grows, when participants number in the millions, what requires number appears: measurements that cannot be written off as marginal; an economy in which one can work and be paid independently of access to banking services; the resolution of disputes by a procedure that does not depend on a jurisdiction; help that does not cross borders, because it is already on both sides of them.

At scale, when participants number in the tens and hundreds of millions, what no one can do today becomes possible: a counted position of the confirmed people of the planet on a question that concerns everyone. Not a sample with a margin of error, not a vote in which one person can cast a thousand votes, but an established and verifiable fact.

So far as we know, an artefact of that kind exists neither with states, nor with international organizations, nor with polling companies. It is impossible without verification of uniqueness and impossible without number. And it is quite likely that it, and not any recognition, will be the first thing to make the people something to reckon with: people begin to reckon not with whoever has status but with whoever has what no one else has.

In Part I it was said that the injured side - those who do not yet vote and those who are not yet born - has no representation. Usually the conversation ends there: naming the harm is easy, and there is nothing to repair it with.

Here there is something. It follows not from our good intention but from the construction of the text. Article 9 of the Declaration says: "No decision of the Earthlings people shifts its consequences onto those who had no opportunity to take part in making it, including future generations." Article 9 belongs to the unamendable core (Article 13), and the principles of the core are not put to a vote at all - this is not a question of a raised threshold, it is a question that is not asked. A decision that contradicts the core is void from the moment it is taken and is cured neither by time nor by execution.

Out of this norm a standing procedure may grow: an assessment of every significant decision for its effect on those who come after - with a published opinion and the right of any participant to demand it. No such procedure exists today in any state or in any international organization. Nor do we have one yet: we have the norm from which it follows, and those are different things (section 21).

And one more thing has to be said, or the picture comes out prettier than the truth. There is no court behind this prohibition. The Earthlings people has no constitutional court, and we do not pretend otherwise; there is no one to compel performance. The force of the norm lies elsewhere: a breach is visible to everyone, it is cured neither by time nor by execution, and in any case of doubt the provisions of the core are construed in favour of the person. Such protection is weaker than a court's in compulsion and stronger in verifiability.

Even so, the position remains singular. If the people ever acquires a voice anywhere outside, it will be the only party at the table whose founding rule expressly forbids it to win at the expense of the generations that follow. Not because we are kinder than others, but because we are forbidden it by the very text by which we are constituted.

We are bound to say one thing plainly to a person joining, because it makes the picture honest.

The value of everything described is non-linear in the number of participants. At tens of thousands the instrument is a curious experiment. At tens of millions it is infrastructure that cannot be walked past. The difference is created by those who came in between, and their input is worth incomparably more than the input of those who join once everything is already working.

The reverse follows from this too, and it also has to be said: an early participant takes on the risk that it will not work out. They pay the contribution, spend time on identity verification and take part in votes whose result may interest no one. We do not know how it will end, and section 20 lists what it may fail on.

The only thing we can set against that risk is its size. Joining is reversible on any day without giving reasons. It requires giving up neither citizenship, nor country, nor language, nor faith, nor anything else. It obliges no action against the law of one's own country. If it does not work out, little will have been lost. If it does work out, the participant will be among those who did it.

Up to now the subject has been the instrument. Now about where the people comes from in this design and why it is not decoration in it.

The people is not added to the instrument from outside. It comes out from within, if the requirements on the instrument are met honestly to the end. The easiest way to show this is by a derivation in steps.

What this path does not require

It is worth beginning with what a people is not needed for at all - otherwise the derivation will look like a thing fitted to a conclusion.

Most of the instrument really is built without any people at all.

Confirming the uniqueness of a person without disclosing identity does not require a people - such systems exist and work. Verifiable voting by wallet signatures does not require a people. A pool for selection by lot is an ordinary statistical task. Deliberative panels are run by states, universities and non-profit organizations, and have been for a long time and well.

Moreover: a foundation would have built such an instrument faster, more cheaply and against less resistance. It would not have had to answer the question of the status of a people, to tie its own hands with a ban on positions, and to explain to states that it lays no claim to their sovereignty. And it would have grown faster, because "register with a service" is a far lighter proposal than "join a people".

So the question has to be put more precisely. Not "what would become harder without a people", but what would become impossible.

Six steps

Step one. A measurement is needed whose count an opponent will verify. Hence: verifiable uniqueness of the participant and an open registry.

A people is not needed yet. A company can do this.

Step two. Every measurement is a fraction. The numerator is who answered, the denominator is who could have answered. Without a defined denominator the number means nothing.

For a service the denominator is "registered users". This is not a natural quantity: it is set by where the service advertised itself, where it is available, whom it let in and whom it did not. "Sixty per cent of our users think so" is a fact about marketing, not about the world. And the main thing: the operator can move the denominator, recruiting some and not recruiting others. This is not a flaw of execution, it is the nature of a user base.

Hence: membership is needed - a boundary drawn by the act of the person, not by the act of the operator.

A people is not needed yet. An association has membership too.

Step three. The operator must have no ability to influence the result. Which means it cannot include a person in the composition, exclude a person from the composition, change the rules along the way, change the question, or leave an inconvenient answer unpublished.

But that is exactly what it means to say that the participants have rights against the operator. And rights against the operator exist only where there is a document the operator cannot rewrite.

Hence: a founding text is needed, not a user agreement.

An association is no longer enough: its own governing body amends its statute.

Step four. The instrument must outlive its owner and must not be purchasable. What can be bought is bought sooner or later, and the buyer inherits the right to measure. Institutions whose capital is trust rarely survive a change of owner with that trust intact.

Hence: the instrument must have no owner. Which means the participants must own it. Which means self-governance.

Step five. The instrument must be equally fit for all sides and must not be a national player - otherwise it is used by one side, and it turns into a weapon.

Hence: it cannot belong to one jurisdiction and cannot be subordinate to any state.

Step six. And the last, the decisive one. In publishing a result, the instrument says one of two things:

The first is data. The second is will. It is the second that has to be answered.

Now add the steps together. A body that has a verifiable voluntary composition, a founding text beyond the reach of its own operators, self-governance instead of an owner, non-belonging to any state, and the ability to say "we" - is what we propose to regard as a people.

This is our position, not a generally recognized legal test. International law does not establish that the combination of these features constitutes a people, and we do not pass off our own reasoning as a norm.

We assert only what is visible from the derivation itself: these five features were obtained not from a wish to be called a people but from the requirements on the instrument. We went from what has to work and arrived at something that has a name - not the other way round. A category is defined to fit oneself by starting from the name; here the order is the reverse, and it is visible from the steps set out above.

A people is not a decision taken before the instrument. It is what the instrument runs up against, if it is built properly.

And why not a social movement

The same conclusion is seen more briefly in a comparison with the nearest familiar form.

What is meant here is a social movement. National liberation movements are a different legal category: their position took shape in decolonization, and they were recognized precisely as speaking on behalf of peoples exercising self-determination. The three upper rows do not depend on how the fourth turns out.

Five reasons, each of its own kind

The derivation above is one argument. Below are five independent ones: if the derivation is mistaken, they still stand.

The first. Will cannot be measured - it can only be produced.

A thermometer is accurate regardless of who holds it, because temperature exists on its own. With will it is otherwise: there is no "what humanity wants" lying somewhere and waiting to be gauged. There is only what a defined community, by a known procedure, having discussed the matter, has decided. That is exactly why elections do not discover the will of the voters but create it: before the count it exists nowhere, after the count it exists.

Hence: a procedure that produces will requires the one whose will it is. A polling company can assess the distribution of opinions, and no one forbids it that. It cannot produce will, because there is no bearer.

An opinion can be measured without a people. Will cannot be produced without a people. And an opinion is ignored; a will is answered.

The second. The question "who authorized you to ask".

It will sound on the very first day, as soon as a measurement begins to mean something. Look at the available answers. A state answers: the law. A company answers: no one, and it lays no claim to significance. A foundation answers: the board of directors - and the next question, "and who elected the board", ends the conversation. A people answers: its participants, by a procedure that anyone can check.

Only two answers withstand the second question. A foundation building such an instrument is forever open to the retort "you are a private group of unelected people deciding what to ask humanity about". For a foundation that retort is unanswerable. For a people it is answerable in full, and the answer can be checked.

The third. The unamendable core is not only ethics, it is protection of the instrument against capture.

The five principles of the core read as values. Look at them as a technical specification.

"A vote cannot be bought, sold, accumulated or transferred irrevocably" is a requirement that the result of a measurement cannot be acquired. "Property is separated from the vote" is so that weight in a measurement cannot be bought with money. "Power does not accumulate, a mandate does not become an office" is so that the instrument is not captured from within by those who service it. "Leaving is free, and expulsion does not exist" is so that the denominator cannot be cleared of the inconvenient. "The people speaks but does not compel" is so that the instrument cannot be turned into a weapon, and therefore so that both sides use it.

Now ask: what protects from capture an instrument belonging to a foundation? The good faith of its board. That is not inherited, is not verifiable from outside, and does not survive a change of composition.

The core is the only design known to us in which the attack "buy it" has no object: there is nothing to buy, because the vote is inalienable. But for such principles to exist, a document standing above the management is needed - that is, the same step three.

And here there is a live test of the whole argument, which is more honest to name outright than to skirt with a hint.

The largest project of confirming the uniqueness of a person built without a people is World, formerly Worldcoin, created by the company Tools for Humanity. It is arranged as a product: confirmation of uniqueness by the iris of the eye, its own token, a reward for passing the check. Technically the task is solved, and solved in earnest - this is not amateur work.

Then begins what we cite this case for. Regulators saw not a civic institution but a commercial collection of biometrics, and in three jurisdictions this was set down in decisions that can be read.

• Spain. On 6 March 2024 the Data Protection Agency, by a precautionary measure, ordered the company Tools for Humanity to stop collecting and processing personal data in the country and to block what had already been collected. The company challenged the measure, and the Audiencia Nacional upheld it.
• Brazil. In January 2025 the National Data Protection Authority prohibited offering cryptocurrency or any other reward for the collection of biometrics, and by a decision of its Board of Directors of 25 March 2025 rejected the appeal, keeping in force a fine of 50,000 reais for each day of resumed processing. The ground was precisely the payment: consent bought for money is not recognized as consent by Brazilian law.
• Kenya. The High Court, by a decision of 5 May 2025, established a breach of the Data Protection Act of 2019 - the mandatory impact assessment had not been carried out - and ordered the irreversible deletion of all biometric data of Kenyans within seven days.

And not one body in any country treats that registry as a source of socially significant measurements.

The instrument there works. Its readings carry no weight.

We do not consider that project to be in bad faith and do not dispute its technical side; much in it is done better than in ours. We point to something else: the same instrument, built without a people, met exactly the fate that steps three and four predict. It has an owner - which means it can be bought. It has no composition but users - which means the company sets the denominator. And to the question "who authorized you to ask" it has nothing to answer with.

The fourth. Who will answer the fortieth question.

The instrument needs answers regularly and for years. Ask yourself what will make a person answer the fortieth question in the twelfth year, if the previous thirty-nine changed nothing visible.

Benefit? The return on a single answer is near zero - that is the same Olson from section 2, only now he strikes at the working of the instrument itself. Money? A paid answer devalues the measurement, and paying hundreds of millions for ever is impossible. Compulsion? Excluded by the core, and rightly excluded.

What remains is belonging. People come to elections although one vote almost never decides anything and taking part is individually irrational. They come because it is their own, and because not coming means dropping out of "we".

A user base does not produce that. A people does. An instrument running on voluntary participation for decades requires not motivation but belonging - and the reason for that is an engineering one, not a poetic one. How this is connected with the choice of questions is stated in section 8.

The fifth, the legal one. The upper rungs of the ladder of weight - embedding in someone else's procedure and turning practice into a norm - are open to one who is someone, not to something that is something. The instrument of a company is at best cited as a source; a party it will never become, because parties in international law are subjects, while the right to self-determination is attached to peoples. We repeat the caveat at once rather than a page later: whether it applies to a voluntarily constituted non-territorial people is not established by international law, and we do not assert that it does. But a foundation has no chance at all, while for a people the question is not closed.

What a people costs

Since we are being honest, let us name the price too. It is not small.

Slower growth: joining a people is harder than registering. A proposal harder to explain. An open legal question that the opponent makes use of. The wariness of states, which a foundation would not have met. And voluntary limits - no positions on domestic politics, no compulsion - which a foundation would not have taken on.

All of this is paid for the five features above. The trade is deliberate, and it may turn out to be a bad one.

How to check that we are wrong

In the spirit of the rest of the document, let us name the condition of our own error. If in ten years a verifiable poll by some foundation or company is regularly cited by treaty bodies and states, and no one asks "who authorized you" - then the people was superfluous, and we chose an expensive road where a cheap one would have served.

And the reverse question

It is worth putting that one too. What does a people need an instrument for?

A people without an instrument is a statement of intent that has no way of expressing a common will. That is exactly what we complain of ourselves: the right is recognized, the procedure does not exist, and a recognized right that no one can assert remains a norm without application. A people without a procedure would repeat the complaint instead of removing it.

An instrument without a people is data that there is no one to present on anyone's behalf.

These are not two things one of which can be discarded. They are two halves of one. Verifiability without mutual recognition gives statistics. Mutual recognition without verifiability gives a petition. Together they give what has not existed until now.

It may seem that without powers one cannot have influence. That is untrue, and practice refutes it. Below are six cases - five successful and one instructively unsuccessful. We cite them not as proof that we are right but as a source of requirements on ourselves.

The section is not there for balance. Every one of the outcomes listed is possible, some are likelier than the good ones, and for each it is stated what we do and what we do not guarantee.

1. Taking a party side

What happens. The people - or a noticeable part of it, or its leadership - publicly takes one of the sides in someone's domestic political split. From that day the instrument is, for half of society, the enemy's weapon, and its readings are rejected along with it.

Why this is fatal. A tool of this type cannot be restored: the example of Doing Business shows that trust is lost entirely and at one stroke.

What is being done. The ban on positions on the domestic politics of states stands in the Declaration, not in a set of rules. The people has no opinion about parties, candidates and elections anywhere and ever.

What we do not guarantee. We cannot prevent participants from speaking on their own behalf, and we must not do so. The risk that someone else's statements will be attributed to the people remains.

2. A question composed to fit the answer

What happens. The wording of one question turns out to be leading - by design or by carelessness. It is discovered.

Why this is grave. What is devalued is not one measurement but the method: all past and all future ones fall under suspicion.

What is being done. Separating those who formulate from those who manage; publishing the question in advance; the adversarial stage with publication of objections; the ban on correction after voting begins.

What we do not guarantee. That the procedure will withstand pressure if the answer turns out to matter very much to someone very strong.

3. Low turnout

We put it third, but by significance it is first.

What happens. The people has a hundred million participants, and three per cent take part in a measurement. The opponent gets the perfect reply, and that reply is just: "you speak for a hundred million, and you asked three in a hundred".

Why this is the most dangerous of all. A measurement with low turnout is worse than no measurement at all: it adds no proof but undermines what has already been accumulated.

Where it is actually cured. Not in reminders and not in appeals - in the question. A person answers when the question touches their life and when something depends on the answer. Hence the two requirements set out in section 8: a planetary question is put at the point where the consequence falls on the person, and not where institutions negotiate about it; and no period consists of planetary questions alone - alongside them there always run questions of the internal life of the people, whose consequence arrives at once and for certain.

Let us say the reverse too, because it is of the same order: if the questions cease to touch the real life, interests and difficulties of people, the sense of voting will disappear entirely - and low turnout will be the participants' correct answer, not their fault.

What else is being done. The share of those who voted is published always and first of all, including the cases where it is low. We shall not hide turnout behind absolute numbers.

What follows from this for ourselves. The share of those who answer is the chief vital indicator of the project, more important than the number of participants. A people of ten million with a turnout of forty per cent weighs incomparably more than a people of a hundred million with a turnout of four per cent. We say this in advance, so that one indicator cannot later be substituted for the other.

What we do not guarantee. That a suitable question will always be found. The criteria of Article 7 are narrow deliberately, and questions that are at once planetary and close to the person are fewer than one would like. We shall not widen the criteria for the sake of turnout: a people that has started asking about anything and everything in order to be listened to better has ceased to be what it was created for.

4. Shallowness

What happens. Measurements turn into polls: millions of answers given in ten seconds, without any examination of the question.

Why this is bad. Such a result is no better than an ordinary poll and deserves no greater trust. Scale without deliberation is not the voice of a people but a sum of reactions.

What is being done. The two layers from section 9: the panel gets to grips and formulates, the people votes on the prepared options.

What we do not guarantee. That panels can be assembled, that people will agree to spend weeks on the examination, and that the prepared options will be read.

5. The "foreign interference" frame

What happens. A transnational community of tens of millions of people is declared an instrument of someone else's influence. Taking part in it is restricted by law.

Why this is likely. It is an expected reaction, and it has its own logic: an organized transnational presence always raises the question of whose interests it acts in.

What is being done. The people holds no positions on the internal questions of states, funds nobody's politics and supplies a tool, not an opinion. Everything the people does is public and in its own name.

What we do not guarantee. Nothing. That decision is not ours to take.

6. The registry seen as a threat rather than a resource

What happens. A verified base of millions of unique people is perceived as a security problem rather than a public good. Precedents for restricting similar uniqueness-verification projects in particular jurisdictions exist.

What is being done. Raw biometrics are not retained, identifying data are not held in the registry, there is no reward for passing the check. The architecture answers the known objections of that kind.

What we do not guarantee. That this will turn out to be enough.

7. Capture of the instrument from within

What happens. Control of the instrument concentrates in the hands of those to whom the result matters: the choice of questions, the timing, the interpretation. Formally everything is honest; in fact the instrument serves one group.

What is being done. Separation of those who formulate from those who manage, selection by lot instead of appointment, revocability of mandates, publication of the whole trail. The design of the people resists this more strongly than is usual: the core is outside voting, a mandate does not become an office, leaving is always possible.

What we do not guarantee. That it is protected absolutely. It is not.

8. Success that corrupts

What happens. The instrument becomes influential. The influence begins to seem too valuable to risk for the sake of neutrality. There appears a temptation, just once, not to publish an unwelcome result, just once not to ask about what would split the composition, just once to touch up a wording.

Why this is worth recording in advance. Because it happens not to bad people but to those who value what has been achieved, and it is always recognized after the fact.

What is being done. The duty to publish a result whatever it contains, and the full trail of every measurement. The sign of trouble is visible from outside: measurements stop producing unwelcome answers.

9. No one will ask

What happens. The instrument is built, works flawlessly, publishes measurement after measurement - and no one uses them. No citations, no requests, no embedding. Rungs 2, 4 and 6 never arrive.

Why this is the most likely of the bad outcomes. It requires no one's hostility. Indifference is enough.

What is being done. The chronicle of non-answers is the only answer to indifference that we have: it turns silence into a recorded fact. It works slowly and may not work at all.

What we do not guarantee. Nothing. Use cannot be compelled.

We assert that Earthlings is verifiable, and that assertion has meaning only when it is stated exactly what has already been built and what is so far a description of a design.

Built and working:

• identity verification and the issuance of a non-transferable passport;
• a registry of passports in a blockchain, read directly from an open smart contract;
• a public channel for votes, where every vote is signed by the wallet of the voter;
• an on-chain treasury, every transaction of which is available for public audit.

Not built:

• no substantive measurements have been conducted. The voting channel is deployed and technically works, but there have been no votes on the merits in it yet;
• no procedure in detail for forming a question exists. The requirements without which a measurement does not take place are established by Article 8 bis of the Charter; the order in detail is left to a decision of the Assembly and has not been adopted;
• no panels selected by lot exist. The two-layer scheme from section 9 is a design, not an implementation, and it is established as a binding rule nowhere;
• no chronicle of non-answers exists. It has not been started;
• no independent security audit has been conducted.

The full list of what is declared as a principle but not yet done - including the unfinished verification of the contract, the undivided owner rights and the absence of a multisig on the treasury wallet - is in the document Where We Are Now. We prefer to name these places ourselves rather than leave them as a find for an inspector.

So that what is described here can be checked rather than taken on faith, we name the indicators by which we should be judged. The obligation to publish the share of those who voted out of those entitled to vote is established by Article 8 bis of the Charter; the remaining indicators this document does not establish and cannot establish - it offers them as a measure that it turns upon itself. Not one of them is promotional, and on several of them we shall certainly look bad in the first years.

There are no dates here. Not one rung has "in three years" written against it, because that would be an invention: the speed is set by the number of participants, by accumulated practice and by other people's decisions, not by our plan.

There are no probabilities here. We do not know which of the rungs will be reached, or whether even one will be.

There is no promise of a result here. What the people is bound by and what it is not bound by is established by Article 7 of the Declaration, and we do not reproduce it here, so that the norm keeps a single source. In short: recognition is not within its power, and the existence of the people does not depend on recognition.

And there is not a single assertion here on which anything depends today. The infrastructure is built, the founding period is under way, the Declaration is being put to a vote. If not one of the rungs described here is climbed, that will annul nothing of what has already been done and will make meaningless nothing of what people chose one another for.

The norms the document relies on:

• The UN Charter, the preamble and Article 1(2) - text
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 20, 21 and 28 - text
• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Articles 1, 22 and 25 - text
• Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, 1989, Article 6 - text
• The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007 - text

The facts given in the text:

• The investigation by the New York State Attorney General into fake comments in the procedure of the US Federal Communications Commission, 6 May 2021 - report. All the numbers are taken from it: more than 22 million comments, almost 18 million fake, 8.5 million for 4.2 million dollars from the industry association, 7.7 million from one person
• The discontinuation of the Doing Business ranking by the World Bank, September 2021 - statement
• The procedure for preparing and approving the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC procedures
• The working principles of the Internet Engineering Task Force, including the formula "rough consensus and running code" - RFC 7282
• The Citizens' Assembly of Ireland of 2016-2018 and the Constitutional Convention of 2012-2014 - assembly materials. Dates and results of the referendums: 22 May 2015 (same-sex marriage), 25 May 2018 (the Thirty-sixth Amendment, by which the Eighth was repealed, 66.4 per cent on a turnout of 64.1)
• Data on the forcibly displaced and on stateless persons at the end of 2025 - UNHCR statistics
• The precautionary measure of the Spanish Data Protection Agency with respect to Tools for Humanity, 6 March 2024 - AEPD announcement
• Decision PR/ANPD No. 18/2025 of the National Data Protection Authority of Brazil of 25 March 2025 rejecting the appeal and maintaining the prohibition - ANPD website
• The decision of the High Court of Kenya of 5 May 2025 in the case on the activity of Worldcoin - analysis by the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law, Strathmore University
• The Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International - methodology

The work on which the examination of the fifth fault relies:

• Mancur Olson. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press, 1965.

This is a doctrinal source, not a norm. We cite it because the mechanism described in it is verifiable and observable, not because anyone's opinion obliges anyone.

Documents of the corpus to which this one refers:

• The Declaration of Self-Determination - Articles 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 and 13
• Legal Basis
• The Earthlings DAO
• Digital Platform
• SBT passport
• Biometric Verification
• The Founding Period
• How a Subject of Law Arises
• Where We Are Now