Why "a people" and not an NGO or a movement?
Let us state honestly what an opponent regards as an exposé: today, before practice has accumulated, the operational gain from the category "people" is small. Everything Earthlings does is already lawful by virtue of freedom of association, and the outcome of the dispute about peoplehood does not affect that lawfulness.
But by the same test recognized peoples also count for nothing: what operational consequence does the status of a people give the Kurds today? Outside the context of decolonization the right of self-determination is of little operational use to anyone - the category "people" does not determine everyday life; it determines what accumulated practice becomes, and what happens at a turning point.
The first real consequence of the category is already at work: it determines what the practice matures into. In international law the significance of acts depends on the capacity in which they are performed: in the doctrine of historic title only acts à titre de souverain - "in the capacity of a sovereign" - are counted; private acts create nothing. Ten years of self-government in the capacity of an association mature into a well-established association; the same years lived openly and on the record in the capacity of a people mature into evidence of peoplehood.
The second consequence concerns the source of existence: an association is a creature of a legal order and is ended by an act of that order (winding up, prohibition); a people is a fact, derived from no national legal act and therefore not terminable by one. For a community whose participants live in dozens of jurisdictions this is an architecture of survival, and the model of replaceable legal entities acting as bearers follows from it directly.
At the same time, Earthlings uses the instruments of an NGO without any contradiction: the people is the bearer of the mandate, legal entities are procedural bearers. This is how peoples take part in international life everywhere: the Saami Council holds status with ECOSOC as a non-governmental organization, and no one considers the Sami people a non-governmental organization. Using a door does not redefine who walks through it.
This is yet another DAO. There have been projects like it before, and they all slid into plutocracy.
The objection is strong, and we accept its first part: the infrastructure really is the same. A distributed ledger, on-chain voting, rules enforced by code - none of this is new, and none of it guarantees anything by itself.
They slid into plutocracy for three recurring reasons, and each deserves to be named precisely.
One token, one vote. This is not decentralization but plutocracy in a new notation: whoever has more funds decides. What changes is not the mechanism of power but the currency it is denominated in.
No identity verification. Without it one person votes with many wallets, and any count ceases to mean anything: no one knows how many people stand behind it.
No unamendable foundation. When any rule can become the subject of a vote - including the rules of voting itself - it is enough to assemble the necessary majority once in order to entrench it forever.
Hence the general diagnosis: a DAO is technology without philosophy. It is a mechanism of coordination that does not answer the question of what the coordination is for. Decentralizing infrastructure does not mean decentralizing power.
Now to what is built differently - and we are speaking of the design, not of intentions.
The vote is tied to a confirmed human being, not to a balance. The unit of account gives no votes whatever the amount held; economic weight and the right to decide are separated architecturally.
It is confirmed that a participant is a living human being and that there is only one of them. A participant's uniqueness is checked when their identity is confirmed, and this is a condition of signing the Declaration, not an aspiration: a passport issued by circumventing verification is annulled (Declaration, Article 8).
The foundation is placed outside voting. Belonging, equality of the vote, the right to leave, and the values with their guarantees are not put to a vote at all - these are not questions requiring a higher threshold but questions that are not on the ballot (Declaration, Articles 3, 4, and 5).
Organizations do not take part. Only living human beings belong to the people; a legal entity can neither enter, nor receive a vote, nor accumulate influence.
No mandate creates an office. Any authority is revoked immediately and at a threshold no higher than the threshold of its grant; delegation creates no permanent advantage.
And there are two limitations that we name ourselves.
The first: what is listed protects against known methods of capture, not against all of them. No one has yet built a design that no one could devise a way of breaking.
The second: our scheme has not been tested at scale. We do not assert that we have found the solution; we assert that the three causes of failure in previous attempts are named and that answers to those specific causes are built into the design. Only practice can confirm this, and until there is practice we will not invoke it.
A contribution on entry, and exit by a single action - that is a subscription to a service, not belonging to a people.
Belonging is constituted by a free act - signing the Declaration. The contribution covers the cost of the procedure - confirming a person's uniqueness and issuing the passport - and sustains the people's infrastructure: it goes into the common treasury and is allocated in published shares. We should also note that identity verification is free during the founding period: before the text is adopted, no one pays anything.
As a rule, entry into a people by legal act works in the same way: naturalization carries a government fee, and citizens by birth also pay for their passports. A fee pays for the procedure; it does not buy belonging.
There is one difference from naturalization law, and it is in our favour. There, a person without means is exempted from the fee - that is, they are obliged to declare their poverty and prove it to a body that is entitled not to believe them. Here there is no exemption at all: the contribution is always paid in full, and only the payer differs. Whoever cannot pay joins, by a single action, an open queue in which only the number and the date are visible, and the contribution for them may be made by another person or by the Treasury; there is no guarantee that it will be. No one declares anything about themselves, no one proves anything, and no body decides whether a person is poor enough. That is how the main regime works, in which entry is paid: during the founding period identity verification is free and the queue does not apply (the document "The Founding Period").
Anyone may pay for the queue, but no one may choose whom to pay for: payment always goes to the head of the queue. Otherwise a patron would appear, and dependence would follow. The payer does not know whom they paid for; the person paid for does not know who paid; the registry does not record by whom the contribution was made, and the passport is indistinguishable from any other. This matters more than it might seem: exemption on application always creates two categories of participant - those who paid and those who were pitied. Here there is one category.
What we do not promise: that a payer will be found. A person in the queue waits for the passport to be issued, and there is no way to know in advance how long: payment for them is possible but not guaranteed - and in this we see an honest limit of what is possible, not a solution to poverty. Belonging does not depend on this: it arises by signing the Declaration, not by the contribution.
Free exit does not weaken the durability of the community - it is the only thing that makes the proof of that durability clean. In a people one belongs to by birth, staying proves nothing: exit is unavailable or ruinous. Here every day of continued belonging is a renewed choice, and leaving costs nothing. No traditional people can present such a measure of durability.
An eternal record on a blockchain makes your "free exit" a fiction.
Freedom of association requires that belonging genuinely end - and here it ends more fully than the law requires: an earthling burns their passport themselves, cryptographically, from their own wallet; the server holds no keys and can neither prevent exit nor require permission for it.
When a passport is burned, only a pseudonymous mark remains on-chain - names, document data, biometrics, and verification hashes are not written to the blockchain on issue. Freedom of association does not require the erasure of history: renouncing citizenship does not burn state archives, and in European practice on church registers the model of annotation predominates - the entry remains, the status is marked (Italy, France, Ireland); whether this model is sufficient is now being decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (Case C-12/25). "This person belonged to the people from date X to date Y" is a fact of the past, not a continuing belonging.
The other side of the same coin: if only the person themselves can leave, then no one can expel them. No procedure for expulsion from the Earthlings people exists, and the right to vote cannot be taken away for a person's views, for how they voted, for disagreement with decisions, or as a general measure of liability: the vote is the substance of belonging, and to take it away on such grounds would be to expel the person while leaving them the name. The single exception is proven undermining of the integrity of the voting itself, for up to six months and by a procedure with a right of defence and appeal.
For gross breaches of common rules there is one measure addressed to a person - a warning, and it takes nothing away: not belonging, not the vote, not the right to submit proposals, not the right to create Cells and to join them, not access to services, nothing at all. The other measures under the Charter are addressed to a project or a Cell: they may concern common resources and cannot concern the rights of a person.
The only case in which a passport is burned against the holder's will is exhaustively defined in the Charter and is not a measure of liability: annulment of an invalid issuance, where it is established that the passport was issued in breach of the conditions of issuance. The death of the holder is not such a ground: belonging ends on death by that fact alone, and the passport remains in the registry - a ground resting on unverifiable information about a death would become the cheapest way to remove a participant, since notice, a period for objection, and appeal presuppose the person's presence. Annulment of an invalid issuance is not expulsion: it establishes only that the issuance never lawfully took place, and does not prevent the person from going through the procedure again.
The inalienability of belonging mirrors Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - "no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality" - and distinguishes a people from services and clubs, which expel at their own discretion.
We make one qualification ourselves. The legal grounds for burning are exhaustively limited, but in the deployed version of the contract the technical ability to burn a passport remains with the holder of the owner keys: the restriction in Article 21 of the Charter is procedural, not technical; until the Declaration is adopted, there is no Independent Council and no Assembly (Charter, Article 38), and against the holder's will, the temporary document of a participant in the founding is burned under the procedure set out in the document "The Founding Period" (Part 2, section 5). Separating the rights of issuance and burning, a delay on execution, and transfer of ownership to a multisignature have been added to the roadmap.
Your "unamendable core" was written by a founder before there was a people. That is not self-determination but accession to someone else's text.
The core has not been adopted, and until adoption it binds no one.
The text is open to proposals from 22 November 2026 to 20 February 2027 - and not just the Declaration but the whole corpus, including the Legal Basis and this document. Any person may submit a proposal: entering, confirming identity, and agreeing with our conclusions are not required, and anonymous proposals are considered on the same footing as the rest. Each is published together with a reply - both those accepted and those rejected, with the reason for rejection given. On 13 March 2027 the record and the final editions are published. On 3 April 2027 the text is adopted by a vote of confirmed living human beings on the principle of "one person, one vote", subject to a two-thirds threshold and a quorum. The whole order, including the limits of authority for the duration of the period, is set out in the document "The Founding Period".
That is, the core becomes unamendable not because someone wrote it that way, but because it was adopted by those whom it unites. Who held the pen before adoption has no legal significance: a text that was not adopted has no force, and a text that was adopted is in force regardless of who drafted it.
Unamendable cores are standard among self-determined peoples, not an anomaly of ours. The Basic Law of Germany (Article 79(3)) places human dignity and the democratic order permanently beyond the reach of any majority; the republican form of government cannot be revised in France (Article 89) or in Italy (Article 139); in India even a unanimous parliament cannot alter the basic structure of the constitution. No one infers from this that Germans or Indians are deprived of self-determination: the function of such norms is to protect an order from being abolished by its own democratic means.
That a founding text is written before the subject it founds is a property of every act of founding: the Constitution of the United States was drafted by fifty-five delegates before any ratification, and "the People of the United States" was constituted by the very act of adoption.
The difference from constitutional states is in our favour, and it is material. Most citizens now living in any country never agreed to their constitution: they were born into it. Earthlings is an order in which no one is bound by a text that does not carry their own personal, confirmed signature. What the core protects is not the will of a founder but the consent given by each signatory: to let a future majority swap the values for others would be to betray all the consents already given.
But one difference from constitutional states is not in our favour, and we name it ourselves. Behind the German eternity clause stands a constitutional court with real powers. Earthlings has no court, and we do not pretend otherwise. The core is protected differently: the Declaration is published in an unalterable record, the registry of participants is kept on a public network, and an attempt to rewrite the core does not abolish the authentic version - it creates a branch whose divergence anyone can detect. Such protection is weaker than judicial protection in enforcement and stronger in verifiability; we consider the trade-off honest and do not pass it off as something else.
The right of revision is not taken away. The principles of Part I of the Declaration - the five principal ones among them are named in Article 11 - are not repealed by any majority. The people itself changes their wording and all the rest of the text of the Declaration - by two thirds of the votes cast, subject to a quorum, and only so that no principle is narrowed and no guarantee to any person becomes weaker. And if the Declaration can no longer be implemented, confirmed earthlings are entitled to continue the people on a different basis, relying on that same registry, which is kept on-chain - subject to the conditions of Article 11 of the Declaration, the first of which is that the core is preserved in full.
What remains unamendable is what protects every person from the power of the people itself. The people is entitled to correct everything else, our mistakes included: a text that cannot be corrected preserves a mistake forever, and a text that can be rewritten entirely protects nothing.
Your institutions are working software, not working self-government. Legally you are a foundation's user base.
Let us be plain about the stage we are at: the founding text has not been adopted, there is not a single earthling, and there is no practice of self-government. The passport registry contract, identity verification, Cells, and the accounting of the internal economy are deployed and working; the public voting channel is deployed, but no substantive votes have yet been held in it, there is no tool for secret voting yet, and the founding vote will be held openly, and the Treasury smart contracts have not been deployed (the document "Where We Are Now"); practice within this infrastructure begins with the adoption of the text. We assert that the scheme works, not a scale that has been reached, and we do not pass one off as the other.
Effectiveness, moreover, is judged in proportion to the claim, and the law readily recognizes the capacity of small communities.
The question "what happens when decisions are not carried out" is asked from within the state model, where a decision is separate from its execution and requires coercion. Here a substantial proportion of decisions will be self-executing: the outcome of a vote is put into effect by code, and the Charter assigns payments to approved projects by milestones to a smart contract (Charter, Article 11). Not one Treasury smart contract is deployed, and there have been no substantive votes of the Assembly yet (the document "Where We Are Now"). And where decisions are a matter of coordination, the absence of coercion is not a failure but the design: coercion is prohibited by the people's own core.
The differences from a "user base" are observable and verifiable, without relying on a single self-description. A user accepts a service agreement - an earthling signs a declaration of belonging to a people, whose text was open to proposals from any person and was adopted by a vote of confirmed people. Users hold no rights of governance over the operator - here everyone has an equal vote that cannot be bought, detached from payment and from capital. A service extracts profit from its users - here there is a common fund and a non-commercial framework. A service expels at its discretion - here belonging is inalienable.
And the decisive point: a user base cannot take the platform and leave - a people, once it is constituted, will be able to. The registry of passports lives on-chain, not on the operator's servers, and if, after the Declaration is adopted, its implementation becomes impossible, confirmed earthlings will be able to continue the people in existence on a different technical or organizational basis, relying on the same registry (Declaration, Article 11).
We ourselves disclosed the residual centralization of the founding period and of the structure-formation stage, which begins with the adoption of the Declaration (Charter, Article 39), in the same place, together with a plan for reducing it - an opponent is quoting our own audit. It is not a disqualifier: the ICRC is to this day governed by a self-co-opting committee made up solely of Swiss citizens, which hinders neither its subjecthood nor its observer status at the UN General Assembly.
You chose the category "people" for its legal advantages. A group's consciousness of itself that is constructed for advantage is a fiction.
The motive is published in our own documents: a people is the only category in which the law allows private individuals to build up collective legal personality, and that is why it was chosen.
But a fiction in law always consists of two elements together: a divergence between the declared form and the actual content, and the concealment of that divergence. Here there is neither: the behaviour matches the label - confirmed living human beings sign up to values, vote with an equal vote, and run a common fund - and the motive is declared on the first page. Openly declared instrumentality cannot be deceit: it is fictions that are concealed.
Choosing a form for its legal consequences is legitimate throughout the law: everyone is entitled to arrange their affairs so as to obtain more favourable consequences; what is censured is deceit, not calculation. The test is the same everywhere - not "why did they enter" but "do they live it": a marriage of convenience, lived as a marriage, is a marriage.
Instrumentality is not a vice of self-determination movements at all; it is their definition: the law is precisely their aim. The United States Declaration of Independence is an openly instrumental status document, expressly listing the legal consequences for the sake of which the status is claimed: "to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce". By the logic of the objection, 1776 is a fiction.
And the main point: the subjective criterion is the group's consciousness of itself, and a group is not a founder's strategy but people, each of whom has performed a personal act. An ordinary participant has nothing to feign: the vote cannot be bought, the fund is non-commercial - the architecture contains no channel for private extraction. A pretence would be an absent will: signatures without people, a dead registry. A will with a purpose cannot fail the test of will.
You speak "in the name of humanity" - that is an imposture.
No. The Earthlings people speaks only on behalf of those who voluntarily accede to the Declaration, pass identity verification, and knowingly take on this belonging - not the whole of humanity. "Humanity" here is the addressee of an offer, not a mandate.
As of today, before the founding text is adopted, the Earthlings people speaks on behalf of no one at all, and we do not conceal it.
The gap we name is not that "there is no one to speak for humanity" but the absence of a mechanism for people to take part directly in planetary questions.
Your planetary horizon is a bid for world government.
This is expressly rejected: Earthlings builds a discipline of responsibility, not a pyramid of power. The founding documents do not abolish the constitutions of states, international law, or the rights of peoples, and create no authority over them; a limit on power is set for Earthlings itself as well - coercion is prohibited by the Declaration's own core.
A voice on planetary questions (climate, AI) is a claim to power in global governance.
What is established is a right to be heard in the discussion, not power over the decision. The powers of states are not abolished.
The basis is the doctrine of the common heritage of mankind, already enshrined in law for the seabed (Article 136 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) and for the Moon (Article 11 of the 1979 Agreement): it allows for an interest of humanity as a whole, but creates no bearer made up of human beings themselves: in the Area, the Authority, whose members are the States Parties to the Convention, acts on behalf of mankind (Articles 137(2) and 156).
If everyone joins, you will coincide with humanity - and humanity, by your own admission, has no legal voice. Success will dissolve your peoplehood.
Humanity lacks a legal voice not because it is large or has no one to differ from, but because it is unconstituted: there is no act of belonging, no institutions, no mechanism for expressing a common will. Subjecthood is a function of being constituted, not of contrast with "the others".
A hypothetical people that included every human being would not coincide with humanity as an aggregate - it would be humanity organized: with a registry, a will, and institutions. The difference in who makes them up would disappear; the difference in how they are constituted would remain - and that is the whole point.
In practice the question does not arise: at any realistic scale those who have not joined number in the billions, and Earthlings speaks only for those who have. An objection that begins to work only at an unreachable limit confirms the scheme across the whole realistic range: no one argues against French peoplehood on the ground that, if all humanity were hypothetically naturalized, the French people would coincide with humanity.
