Why Ethereum Changed the Game

In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi speak with Santiago Siri, founder of Democracy Earth, DemocracyOS, and Proof of Humanity, to explore a central question of the digital age: Can we escape politics with protocols or do protocols simply create new political arenas?

Santiago shares his journey from building Argentina's internet political party Partido de la Red, to creating open-source democratic infrastructure, to running one of the most ambitious on-chain identity and governance experiments in Web3. They discuss identity as the core bottleneck of digital democracy, governance failures inside protocols, DAOs as political systems, AI as both promise and threat, and what Network Nations must learn from a decade of real-world experimentation.

A deep, honest conversation about legitimacy, power, and why politics never disappears it just moves layers.

🌱 greenpill.network 🌐 networknations.network 🐦 @owocki @greenpillnet https://x.com/santisiri https://x.com/yaoeo

⏱️ Timestamps

00:00 – Can protocols help us escape politics? 01:00 – Introducing Santiago Siri 02:15 – From activism to political parties 04:10 – Partido de la Red & proxy voting 06:40 – Using technology to modernize democracy 09:00 – DemocracyOS & global adoption 10:45 – Why political systems resist change 12:10 – The limits of centralized digital voting 14:15 – Why identity is the core problem 15:45 – Leaving politics to build infrastructure 17:50 – Democracy Earth & global pilots 20:00 – Bitcoin vs Ethereum for governance 22:00 – The birth of Proof of Humanity 24:20 – Early identity failures & attacks 26:40 – One person, one vote challenges 29:55 – Proof of Humanity mechanics explained 32:10 – UBI, incentives & DAO governance 34:40 – Delegation farming & power struggles 36:25 – Quadratic delegation as a fix 38:25 – Removing founders from power 40:25 – Identity, justice & money tensions 42:00 – AI breaks video-based identity 44:05 – Worldcoin & biometric approaches 46:30 – Protocols still create politics 48:30 – AI governance experiments 50:25 – Why AI is still unsafe for governance 52:25 – Centralized compute as a risk 54:15 – Who governs the governance layer? 56:40 – Proof of Humanity as a proto–Network Nation 58:40 – What's missing for real Network Nations 01:00:45 – Shared identity & legitimacy 01:02:55 – Lessons from 10 years of experimentation 01:04:40 – Final lesson: legitimacy is enacted, not declared 01:07:30 – Where to follow Santiago & closing