Part IV: Reclaiming Our Systems
Part IV: Reclaiming Our Systems, Our Humanity, and the Future We’ve seen the damage. A legal fiction with no conscience now has immense control over how we eat, how we heal, and how we live. In this series, I’ve tried to trace how corporate personhood mutated into a monster with more rights and power than any single citizen. We’ve looked at how this structure turned our food system into a machine that profits from hunger and disease, and how it hijacked our health system to monetise sickness.
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Part 4: A Cooperative Future for Public LoRaWAN
The dream of a global, public LoRaWAN network is a powerful one. While private LoRaWAN networks thrive for specific industrial and agricultural applications, the vision of a ubiquitous, low-cost network for tracking, sensing, and connecting the physical world remains just out of reach. We’ve seen two major attempts to build this future, each a fork in the road leading to a dead end. First came The Things Network (TTN), a noble, grassroots effort built on altruism. It did an admirable job, proving the power of a community-built network. But without a sustainable incentive model, it relied on the goodwill of gateway operators, a foundation that proved too fragile for global scale.
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Part 3: From Degenerative to Regenerative
The Principles Are Sound After dissecting the broken models of the DePIN space, it would be easy to become cynical and dismiss the entire concept as a failed experiment. But that would be a mistake. The foundational principles of DePIN—of community-owned infrastructure, aligned incentives, and open access—are more powerful and necessary than ever. The failure is not in the vision; it is in the execution. The degenerative patterns I’ve observed are not inevitable. They are choices. They are the choices that lead down a path of techno-feudalism, where technology is used to centralise power, enforce scarcity, and ultimately render communities into surplus populations. It is time to choose a different path.
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Part 2: DePIN's Fork in the Road
A Pattern Emerges The story of Helium, as I detailed in my first post, is not an anomaly. The slide from a grand vision of a “People’s Network” into a centrally-controlled system that primarily benefits its founders and a small handful of insiders is, unfortunately, a well-trodden path in the DePIN space. The issues of opaque governance, extractive tokenomics, and a disregard for the actual community that builds the network are not bugs; they are features of a flawed and deeply ingrained model.
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