Why a People, and Why Without Territory
A community of people spread across the planet could have called itself many things: a movement, an association, a network, a platform. It chose to call itself a people. The word is not decoration. It is the form that gives such a community a standing of its own, and it is the only form that can.
A people is a subject, not a member
An association exists inside a legal order. It is registered by a state and can be dissolved by a state. Whatever it achieves, it achieves as somebody's creature. A people is different in kind. It is a fact rather than a licence, derived from no national act and terminable by none. International law recognizes peoples as bearers of a right of self-determination, a right that states have bound themselves to respect. For a community whose members live in dozens of jurisdictions and under governments that may not like it, that is the difference between something that can be switched off and something that cannot.
The form also decides what the community's practice becomes. In international law, the meaning of an act depends on the capacity in which it is performed. Years of self-government in the capacity of an association add up to a well-run association. The same years, lived openly and on the record in the capacity of a people, add up to evidence of peoplehood. The Earthlings people is building that record from its first act, the adoption of its own founding text by its own members.
The law does not require land
The usual objection is that a people must have territory. The objection sounds like law, and it is not. No binding norm, not the UN Charter, not the human rights covenants, not any convention, makes territory a condition of a people's existence. The United Nations has itself recorded, in an official study, that there is no accepted definition of the word "people" and no way of defining it with certainty. The body of decisions that reject claims by groups concerns secession, the taking of land from a state; those precedents strike at a claim the Earthlings people does not make and are silent on the one it does.
What follows is not that the question is settled in the people's favour. It is that the question is open. Questions of this kind have always been settled the same way, by practice accumulated and verified over time, and the people submits its practice for examination rather than its name. The full argument, with the norms and the cases, is in the Legal Basis and on the page Self-Determination Without Territory.
What a people without a state could never show before
A people that has its own state exercises self-determination through it: the state knows who its citizens are, has a procedure for deciding, and sits where decisions are taken. A people without a state could never establish, by itself, who belongs to it, what it wills, or that its will was counted honestly. Those who had the right hardly needed it; those who needed it could not exercise it.
Modern technology removes that obstacle. It is now possible to confirm that one living person stands behind each member without disclosing who they are; to hold a vote in which each person counts once and a vote cannot be bought or accumulated; and to publish the result so that anyone, including an opponent, can recount it. A dispersed community can for the first time answer the question that was always put to it: who are you, and who speaks for you. That is what the Earthlings people presents, and it is why the form of a people is attainable now when it was not before.
Why no territory, by design
The people claims no land and renounces territorial claims in a part of its Declaration that no majority can change. This is not a concession made to reassure states. It follows from the first principle. A society with no power of some over others cannot hold territory, because holding territory means coercing those on it. The people adds a belonging to each member's existing citizenship and takes nothing away: no borders change, no sovereignty is limited, no law of any state is overridden. Where the people's rules and a state's mandatory law conflict, the state's law prevails.
Questions
Is this a state in the making?
No. It has no territory, no coercive authority, and a founding text that forbids seeking either. The page Not a Network State sets out the distinctions one by one.
Who decides whether Earthlings is a people?
No one decides it in the abstract. The question arises when a specific claim is made in a specific forum and is judged on the practice behind it. The people's task is to make that practice real and verifiable.
Does belonging change my citizenship?
No. It is additional to it and replaces nothing.
Where is the full legal argument?
In the Legal Basis, written for lawyers and sceptics, which states plainly where it has no answer.
The founding period is open
The founding period of the Earthlings people is open. The Legal Basis, like every founding document, may be challenged by anyone before the Declaration is put to the vote. See The Founding Period.
The legal argument in full
The Legal Basis, written for lawyers and sceptics, sets out the norms, the cases and the open questions, and says plainly where it has no answer.