The pace isn’t the problem; the direction is. Humanistic technology embeds digital natural rights by design so acceleration expands agency, not control.

Fork in the road: Do nothing. Resist. Or guide. Only one path scales human freedom.

Humanistic technology for Human Autonomy

Technology is not inherently liberating—it depends on how it is built and who controls it.

human.tech by Holonym Foundation was launched with the urgent mission to embed rights-perserving technology in everyday online interactions, providing open access to peer-to-peer payments and self-sovereign digital identity. These pathways are enforced by applied cryptography and secured by decentralized protocols that are governed by the beneficiaries of the technology, not by the organizations that build them.

Holonym’s Covenant of Humanistic Technology provides the guiding principles to ensure that human.tech infrastructure is built to defend and liberate human agency.

Humanistic Technology for Human Flourishing

Humanistic technology is technology embedded with digital rights for its users, by design. This framework is a reaction to the erosion of “natural rights” within digital spaces that force new power relationships between people and service providers.

Digital experiences are built on code, and in many cases, code without guiding principles can subvert legal protections that have enshrined modern rights for self-determination, expression, ownership, and privacy. Institutions can only enforce what they understand in the context of the laws that define their scope and jurisdiction. Institutions can also only react as quickly as people can make decisions and coordinate together to enforce those decisions. Whereas a piece of code does exactly what it is written to do, as fast as the speed of light allows for information to be transmitted.

Code is powerful. With the right intention, it can be written to further strengthen rights that serve as a cornerstone for liberal and free societies that elevate the autonomy of the individual. Yet, code is only as secure and persistent as the infrastructure it runs on.

Digital rights may be fortified by resilient networks that are borderless, censorship-resistant, and maintain persistent records of the social contract we enter into with technology. human.tech is a strong defense against methods of mass control, intentional or not, by other humans, organizations, or synthetic minds that may emerge from advancements in AI.

“We seek to direct the spirit and momentum of accelerationism toward human.tech that fortifies human agency with the establishment of digital human rights that are difficult or impossible to revoke, elevating them to the status of “natural rights” that are universal, inalienable, and self-evident.

Key to this moment is the alignment of those who seek to advance technologies that defend humanism and elevate individual agency, ensuring parity with the advanced minds and non-human organizations that will emerge in the coming decades.

Holonym Foundation hereby shares the first draft of its covenant and, as always, welcomes collaboration and participation. This is a movement for our collective future and the future of technological life.”

What “Humanistic Tech” means

Humanistic technology explicitly defines digital rights in code into protocols. Protocols have greater inertia for modification, making rights difficult to revoke by design. Accelerationism simply notes that technological progress speeds social change; we won’t safely slow it, so the leverage is the direction. In Vitalik Buterin’s terms, the goal is decentralized, democratic, and defensive acceleration (d/acc)—advancing technology that strengthens individuals and public goods, not centralized control.

Covenant of Humanistic Technologies

To unify collective alignment efforts, we enter into a Covenant of Humanistic Technologies, grounded in principles we hold self-evident: Universal personhood, Inalienable ownership, Privacy by default, Free flow of information, Free flow of capital, Capital serves public goods, Universal security, Voluntary accountability, and A Covenant of adaptive resilience.

Read the Covenant & Contribute Your Work → manifest.human.tech

Contribute to the Covenant of Humanistic Technologies

We are seeking academic, scholarly, technical, and creative contributions to co-create a new framework for human-aligned technology by putting defensive acceleration (d/acc) principles into action.

Join us as an early partner by helping draft the principles, contributing essays, technical work, illustrations, artistic interpretations, or applications of Human Tech.

Here are a few prompts to inspire contribution:

• In a world where the Covenant becomes reality, what would you be able to build that you couldn’t before?

• How does the Covenant help tackle difficult problems in decentralized governance?

• What does a world look like with Covenant Principle x?

• What are the interdependencies between Principles x,y,z?

• How does Principle x take root in existing systems or cultures?

• What elements of humanity are augmented through Principle x?

• The emergence of novel virtuosity through these principles.

• What practices, systems, or philosophies will disappear because of Principles x,y,z?

Learn more, sign the Covenant & contribute your work, or join our Signal group and take the best seat in the movement by showing up at one of our Town Halls (details via the Signal group).