Forum Post:
Date: Monday, 1 June 2026 (rescheduled from 25 May; the usual last-Monday slot fell on a bank holiday)
Event page: https://luma.com/logos-london
Attendance: 13 participants + host, 24 registered (10 returning, 3 new)
The 10th edition of the London Circle was anchored by a member talk from John McCone, "The Cultural Aspect of Producing Actual Governance From Records," and a wider discussion of intentional communities as the most realistic near-term proving ground for sovereign governance technology.
John’s work is available on his website johnmccone.com
John's talk set out to separate the layers that together produce a working governance system: the software protocol, the records it holds, and the culture of the people who respond to those records.
His central frame: governance is the organisation of human behaviour, and in a society governed by records, governance is the human response to those records. It follows that such a society can change in two ways: either the records are altered, or the cultural response to the same records shifts.
He offered a tree as the organising image:
A provocative thread ran through the talk: day-to-day governance is largely insensitive to the details of the protocol, ledger, or blockchain architecture beneath it. For immediate, short-term governance results, only the record content matters.
The implication John drew is deliberately uncomfortable: a centrally administered protocol run by a trustworthy administrator can replicate the day-to-day governance characteristics of any decentralised protocol exactly, and can even administer a culturally decentralised governance system. The decentralised protocol earns its keep only where two things matter — resistance to attack from the outside, and resistance to administrator betrayal.
This led to a practical sketch of how one might graft a governance "scion" onto a new protocol rootstock: replicate the permissions of the existing protocol on the new one, copy the governance content across, and — the hardest part — persuade the community to accept the legitimacy of the new site of governance records.
John argued that for governance to matter, the thing being governed has to matter — and the irreducible things are access to food and access to shelter. A DAO whose members all still need debit cards and traditional bank accounts to eat and pay rent is neither free nor independent. Sovereignty fails the moment being debanked means losing your basic needs.