Mission

Tackling Humanity’s Greatest Challenge

The greatest threat to humanity is not climate change, not nuclear war, and not even AI, but th disastrous nature of our current dominant digital communication and media systems.

In recent years and decades, poverty, disease, and violence have greatly diminished worldwide. We must rejoice altogether, but much more needs to be done, and the future is highly uncertain and fragile. 

Economic and power inequality have sharply increased, placing more of real world power in the hands of blind greed and away from democratic institutions.

We live in a moment of rising divisions within and among nations, of mounting authoritarianism, of increased risk of major powers’ conflict and nuclear war, and of a glaring failure of nations to agree on actions needed to tackle climate change and other catastrophic risks.

Accelerating technological innovation has made our future highly uncertain, placing humanity on a cusp between unimagined progress opportunities or unprecedented catastrophic risks. Our actions and inactions to tackle the challenges of climate change, nuclear war, and technological disruption will be decisive, with very few chances for middle-ground outcomes.

Global Nature of our Challenges, Global Coordination and its risks

Given the global nature of those challenges, only a sharp increase in structural global coordination can tackle them by enforcing climate change commitments and adequately overseeing the use and research of increasingly accessible and destructive exponential technologies, like biotech, AI, hacking, drones, and their combination.

Yet, such a global concentration of power is itself a challenge because it can increase the already high risk of entrenching "durable forms of inhumane global governance" if implemented excessively or incorrectly. 

Hence, we need to be initiating open global constituent processes that are very carefully designed to evolve as reliably democratic, competent and resilient that only can maximize the chance that those global institutions will be and stay suitable.

The quality of those processes derive from careful to-be-agreed rules and digital media and communication systems - for use by individual participants in those processes and the general populace - that foster the emergence of shared truths and fair and effective global dialogue across all levels of society within and across nations, languages and cultures. 

Crucial Role of Fair and Effective Global Communications

The greatest catastrophic and existential challenge to humanity is the nature of our prevalent digital communication systems.

The key source of these challenges is shared. The reason key catastrophic and existential challenges have not been properly tackled, if at all, and have been let grow so large, is that our digital communication systems structurally foster untruths, division, and spying, within and across nations, instead of the emergence of truth, deliberative dialogue, and understanding.

In fact, effectively tackling existential and catastrophic risks - due to their inherently global nature - can only be achieved only by timely and extensive increases in adeqaute structural global coordination, which will be impossible to achieve in a timely way without proper digital communication and media systems, and the open multinational governance structures that are need to sustain them.

This in turn, primarily requires digital media and communications systems, and platforms, to enable a digital global dialogue within and across nations, at all levels of society, that is conducive to the emergence of truth, wisdom, understanding, and conducive the humans’ convergence on a joint rational course of action - through effective deliberative discourse - to stave off the huge risks and realize the unprecedented opportunities, that arise from accelerating technological progress.

Culture

We say please, and we say thank you.

We say good morning with a smile.

We apologize when we make a mistake.

We recognized that love of true self, and love of others, coincide.

We respect our time and that of others as a precious resource.

We recognize that company mission and company culture are one.

We recognize there is never a valid reason not to communicate with courtesy and respect.

We strive to cultivate wellbeing, wellness, mindfulness, critical thinking, and wisdom.

We strive to promote the wellbeing of our co-workers, family members, and any person, and to nurture all relationships.

Vision

The Promise and Reality of Information Technologies

Back in the year 2000, most assumed would make us all more informed, more connected, wiser and bring us closer to a happy global village. Twenty years later, we have come to realize that the contrary happened: democracy and freedom have been fast receding, and people are more divided within and across nations.

As IT pervades our whole lives, it empowers one set of few unaccountable entities to deeply manipulate the majority to push onto them their products, candidates, opinions, and “alternative facts”, and another set of unaccountable entities to deeply control global civil society and elites, like journalists, elected officials, activists, and business leaders, by continuously and undetectably spying them or their close associates.

Both leaders and ordinary citizens are captive of entrenched oligopolistic US and Chinese social networks, messaging apps and devices. These digital platforms leverage "insecure-by-design" IT systems, vast amounts of personal data, and Artificial Intelligence to foster deep spying, disinformation, divisions, blackmailing, and manipulation, for the benefit of a handful of powerful nations, ultra-billionaire shareholders, corporations, and also inadvertently criminals and foreign enemies. 

What went wrong? Why adequate regulation is at this point impossible?

This has happened because, as we’ve learned, since the 90s powerful nations have systematically weakened all IT and standards through so-called “bug”-doors to maintain legitimate lawful access in the face of encryption advances they could not decrypt in transit.

Those same powerful governments also let a dozen huge global tech firms entrench pervasive semi-monopolies and oligopolies over our digital lives, mostly ad-based business models, obscure in their algorithms and largely unregulated in security levels, so that they can be hacked, gamed, or rented to achieve undisclosed political goals.

The process of weakening all IT and IT standards, while retaining plausible deniability, has come at a huge collateral cost: our freedoms and democracy: innumerous resourced criminals, rogue nations, and abusive groups in security agencies, to hack or game those systems at scale, or rent those capabilities, resulting in the erasure of civil liberties, deep manipulation of public consent through the planting of misinformation and divisions, leading to authoritarianism, and bringing our democracies to the brink.

Unfortunately, their adequate regulation is by now nearly impossible, when the lobbying and direct political power of tech giants has grown enormously, 50 US senators and 27 EU nations each have a veto. It is too late. We should keep trying but dedicate a small minorty of our time to it.

The Solution: The 1st Open Democratic Global Digital Sphere

The only viable solution remains for a critical mass of diverse pioneering nations to unite in an open coalition to build and govern the first democratic transnational digital communications and media infrastructure, that will be meant to run conveniently alongside those platforms that today we can't live without- including hardware and software, apps, clouds and devices. It will comply with current national and international laws, and will run on the public Internet, and alongside the current semi-monopolistic private US/Chinese ecosystems.

By being uniquely democratic and trustworthy - with transparent and battle-tested technological and governance safeguards - such a democratic cyber-social platform can transform the unstoppable increase in data, IT, and AI capabilities - from an instrument in the hands of a few to further enslaving us - into an agent in our hands and those of our trusted associates to improve our lives individually, as well as collectively by defending and improving global coordination and democracy at all levels.

Seevik Net will substantially or radically increase the security, privacy, democratic control available to world citizens for their sensitive digital communications and social interactions. It will foster fair and constructive digital dialogue and understanding, within and across nations, in a true “free market of ideas”. We aim to defend and reinforce democracy, civil rights, and public safety worldwide, and stem the rise of authoritarianism, at home and abroad.

Seevik Net will not aim to replace current dominant US and Chinese devices and apps, but complement them with apps and seamlessly portable devices that can satisfy the most sensitive computing. Initially for the needs of millions of the most sensitive citizens and organizations, and then for all, as price decreases with scale - and over time extend its features replacing more and more of such foreign platforms, and expanding around the world as a new EU-originated open model of digital society for the World that will bring together the best of all civilizations.

Seevik Net will get inspiration from the creation of EU public TV broadcasters, the French Minitel, and the European GSM standards - with an open, direct, and representative democratic governance of the participating nations, and global citizens - while strongly safeguarding the innovation and oversight role of private initiatives.

Ours is an organizational “moon shot” initiative to leverage transparency, battle-tested IT, trustless engineering, and social models to radically advance democracy, freedom and global cooperation in the Digital Age.

Such infrastructure will have substantial dual-use advantages. Due to the key role of the trustworthiness of military and civilian communications have in the defense of a nation from cyber, informational or attacks to its territory and to its democratic institutions, the creation of such infrastructure would substantially raise the military defense posture of the participating nations or group of nations.

Seevik Net aims to build the 1st ultra-secure and ultra-democratic social computing platform, by enacting win-win solutions that maximize the collective and individual values of privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, crime prevention, public safety. It strives for an information and communication sphere constituting a fair and resilient free market of ideas, based on scientific evidence and rational reasoning.

Seevik Net users will typically rely on Seevik Net as their private and personal sphere, for their most sensitive communications and informations - while keep using their ordinary smartphones, devices, messaging apps and social apps as their public sphere.

As our endpoint computing platform and certifications will have proven to be the most resilient for the most sensitive human communications, they will be positioned to become the default choice for the root-of-trust sub-systems of society most critical and sensitive artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, radically increasing the actual and perceived trustworthiness and democratic control of such all-important systems. This will help to steer advanced artificial intelligence towards its huge potential to eliminate scarcity, and become the most powerful instrument to promote prosperity, peace, liberty, solidarity, wellbeing, wisdom, wellness and happiness.

Context

Exploding technological progress driven by information technologies has made it much easier for very harmful biological, cyber, AI and nuclear attacks to be enacted by even small state and non-state actors, and much more difficult to attribute. This has caused and will inevitably cause a further deepening of surveillance (i.e. “watchfulness from above”) of public security agencies, directly and through large corporations.

Yet, maintaining public safety and wellbeing will be impossible unless we prevent the world to consolidate into digital public-private autocracies, by enacting an effective restrain and democratic control on such surveillance, and ensuring widespread access to human computing and social networking that are radically more accountable, transparent and conducive to constructive deliberative discourse based on facts.

This can be achieved via an effective transfer to the digital realm of the checks and balances, and citizen-witness and citizen-jury processes, that we built with success in our pre-digital democratic institutions. Together with an uncompromising trustless approach to client endpoint security and to new battle-tested privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols, these can adequately protect digital civil liberties while also turning surveillance on itself by enabling effective sousveillance (i.e. “watchfulness from below”) and metaveillance (“watchfulness of the watchfulness”).

As we enter a new age of inevitable co-existence with ever more powerful digital technologies - currently controlled by very few unaccountable actors - we therefore need to design and start-up the seeds of new transnational ultra-democratic decentralised cyber-social systems, that will realize intertwined social and digital ecosystems that will achieve levels of competency, accountability, solidarity, and trustworthiness that are radically higher than current state-of-the-art, and sustainably so through sophisticated constituent and evolutionary safeguards mechanisms, to radically mitigate their future degeneration even under huge pressure and unforeseeable changes.