Decent Infrastructure in an Authoritarian World
* Article: Decent Infrastructure in an Authoritarian World. Building the Walk Away Stack. By Cameron Burgess et al. Holo Ventures, September 2026.
URL = https://decent.holoventures.io/
Description
From the preface:
"The convergence of centralised AI, surveillance infrastructure, platform monopoly, and concentrated capital into a single system of control — documented in detail by Prof. Francesca Bria’s research project, The Authoritarian Stack — is not a future risk. It’s a present reality.
Vitalik Buterin, whose credentials as a co-founder of Ethereum require no introduction, named the counter-position precisely:
- "The goal is de-totalization — to create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponised".
He calls this “sanctuary technology” — free and open infrastructure that allows people to live, work, communicate, and collaborate in ways that are resilient to external pressure. Not financial freedom alone. Structural resilience. The architecture of a world where no single actor — person, corporation, or state — can gain total control over others.
This is what Holochain was built to deliver.
And in the face of the mounting centralisation of power and wealth (that “decentralisation” has ironically perpetuated), we keep asking the same question we’ve been asking since the beginning. Not because we’re stubborn (although we are), but because the problem we set out to solve has gotten worse every year, and nothing else in the market seems structured to address it.
The question we continue working to answer is:
What will it take to build economic infrastructure that doesn’t reproduce the value capture dynamics we’ve all been trying so desperately to escape?
Most of the industry asked a narrower question: how do you get a network of untrusted strangers to agree on a single version of the truth? That question leads, inexorably, to global consensus — and to the capturable centre that comes with it. We asked something different: how do living systems coordinate at massive scale without a single version of truth — how does a body, a forest, a language stay coherent with no central ledger and no one in charge? The answer is not global consensus. It’s local coordination that scales globally. That changes the architecture. And the architecture changes everything.
This paper is written by the people building that architecture — the teams behind Holochain (the peer-to-peer application framework), Holo (the bridge that makes Holochain apps reachable through an ordinary web browser), and Unyt (the accounting engine behind HoloFuel and other mutual-credit currencies). It describes what exists, what we got wrong, what we got right, and what becomes possible now that the infrastructure is shipping. It’s not a fundraising document. Nor is it a whitepaper promising a revolutionary yet unknowable future. It’s an honest account of where we’ve come from, where we are, and where we’re going next."
(https://decent.holoventures.io/)
More information
Bibliography
Cory Doctorow, “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok,” Wired, January 2023. wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow
Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andreessen Horowitz, 16 October 2023. a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto
Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic (Crown, 2025).
“The Authoritarian Stack,” n.d. authoritarian-stack.info