Some time ago, I was surfing around Twitter and the news about Uganda came to my feed—the elections, the dictatorship’s control over the elections, and the social/technological organization flourishing in the society there.
We talk a lot about sovereignty here, and understanding the context of how this unfolds in different parts of the world can bring even more clarity to the possibilities of how to approach this whole thing.
How do you act and exercise your sovereignty against huge structures like a Government
That is exactly where the new ways of doing Business and the real economic alternatives live.
Bringing together the possibility of making an impact at the same time you guide your own evolution, connected to things that really matter to you and the people around you.
For me, what’s the thing that really matters? Freedom.
Inflection point in Uganda
What Museveni tried to do in Uganda is exactly what our traumas, society, and the “Old World” try to do to our minds every day: force centralization through pressure. And the response of the mesh network is the exact same organic response of the human psyche: when central pressure is too strong, life finds decentralized routes to keep flowing.
Let’s contextualize:
The dictator Yoweri Museveni secured another electoral victory through traditional methods of brute force and ballot control. During the election period, the regime took down fiber optics and blocked Starlink.
It seems that this is a continual practice in his way of leading the elections there:
- Block the Internet
- Force people to receive the news (and even electoral propaganda) from just 1 source
- Leave the opposition with no space to even be considered a true opposition
However, the true historical event was not the ballot result, but, this time, the failure of his internet “kill switch”.
BitChat was downloaded by over 400,000 people in a week. For the first time, the opposition did not need permission from a state antenna to coordinate in the dark.
BitChat: The Fabric of the Sovereign Internet
BitChat uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to work.
Can you imagine? No SIM card, no registration, no phone number.
It subverts the logic of the colonial internet: your connection doesn’t come from a multinational’s transoceanic cable; it comes from the human being less than 100 meters away from you.
Basically, it works by transferring data from one cellphone to another by proximity.
All Bluetooths are open, and there are routes or paths through which you can send information from your phone to the recipient of your choice.
Because, if you really think about it: How does the Internet really work? Why do we, as humans, have to rely on this thing that is essential to our modern existence and, at the same time, is made available by “who knows who” (those guys)?
BitChat is one of the only alternatives right now that, even coming from “top to bottom”, seems like a legitimate way of rethinking the internet… at least at a first glance.
How does it works?
Messages bounce from device to device up to 7 hops (a technique where connected devices constantly and rapidly change the radio frequency they use to communicate).
The most interesting part of this alternative to elections, or to acting and communicating independently of governments and Big Tech, is that to track or censor this network, they would have to ban human physical proximity itself.
It would be way more complicated than just shutting down antennas, right?
Another very interesting thing about the mesh network is that it can transport real value (Bitcoin via Lightning or Cashu).
The mainstream approach to technology nowadays is still very connected to what those other “people” (most of the time, the ones who have way more money and control the distribution of innovation) bring to the marketplace.
Web3 is growing in the realm of software and what’s inside your computer.
But we can see this sovereign attitude and growing curiosity in how people are starting to acknowledge composition and creation with hardware as well:
We can almost say that the “Dark Forest” economy comes to life:
sovereign financial and technological exchanges happening in the middle of a total grab for power and control of hardware and data (the Internet).
“New” way of Create and Connect
Jack Dorsey created Twitter, the pinnacle of Web 2.0 (social media, and literally doing nothing but commenting and liking other people’s posts).
Twitter (now X) is an empire of central servers and arbitrary terms of service.
After 2020, not just X, but even more so other social media channels like Meta and YouTube (Google), became the dictators of how we connect with each other and how we exchange value as humanity.
However, it seems that this weighed heavily on Dorsey’s conscience, and he is actually the head behind BitChat(launched under an open protocol in July 2025).
(That’s why I said “coming from Top to Bottom” because we never know. But the concept is solid.)
Jack is acting as an architect who understood that the Old World is unsustainable and, in this move, he didn’t create a new startup to go public. He funded an open-source protocol.
What’s even more interesting here is that he validates the New Richies motto:
We don’t need new platform owners;
We need free protocols (like Nostr, Bitcoin, and mesh networks) where the middleman’s veto power is zero.
Creative Exercise: “Uber for Data”
About all of this, the best part is The Juice 🧃
How do we visualize possible new alternatives for what’s coming next in the new creative ways of exploring the Internet, or this paradigm of human connections?
The future of information distribution does not depend on static cables in the streets, I suppose.
Imagine if we used just Bluetooth as a way of connecting and, actually, as the main Internet?
To exchange data, we would need to be very close to each other, OR we would have to come up with new alternatives for making data move fast.
A dystopian blend of the human connection we already know, with old ways of transporting information—like a ride-share driver, a bike courier, or a delivery motorcyclist cruising the city with Bluetooth open, receiving messages and money transfers literally in their pockets to redistribute across the city.
They would be something like the new arteries of the internet. Something like a courier picking up encrypted data packets in Neighborhood A (they don’t know what it is, can’t read it, and don’t know who sent it). As they ride to Neighborhood B, the data automatically bounces from their pocket to local recipients.
As I said: I like to go further in imaginative futures.
Because the New Richies transform the natural flow of urban life into a decentralized and indestructible infrastructure by its very essence.
This is the exact materialization of the 45° Shift and the Preservation of Inertia.
Authentic revolution does not freeze life…
It hitches a ride on existing inertia and subtly redirects it toward sovereignty.
