There’s no such thing as rights in nature; you take what you can get. All rights are human-engineered, built by humans for whatever they think must be protected. And because they don’t naturally happen in nature, rights must not only be created but also enforced with human effort and resources to ensure their application.

A society that can’t enforce a right won’t have that right, it will slip away through the course of natural lifecycles. Rights always exist in more or less imperfect ways due to their artificiality. There’s no inherent right to life, or to property, or to justice, or to education, or to privacy. All of those rights must be created and then enforced, even with violence if that right is considered a cornerstone of social life.

The birth of rights had to be simultaneous with the birth of the state. There are no rights without a state, just as there are no state without organised humans. The problem of rights isn’t the existence of the state, but rather the engineering and architecture of the state.

If we give the monopoly of violence to a badly engineered state, we should expect many undesired outcomes. However, if properly engineered, it would foster prosperity. The engineering is in the hands of the people, who are bound by the ways they share things in their daily lives, drawing their own culture.

Once they become proudly conscious of their culture, they form a nation, that eventually desires to take control of its destiny through rights on its own terms, creating a state in the form of a nation-state.

All of this has happened within the limits of geographical space, but the internet broke those limits. We might be starting to form nation-states outside the classical geographical nation-states. A suggested term for this, as named by Balaji Srinivasan, is the “Network-state”.

Nostr feels like the embryo of a Network-state. It tries to create and enforce rights that some people believe to be cornerstones through its own terms and capacities. For example, Nostr is great as a censorship-resistant network, but are privacy rights properly enforced? Is our data truly in our own hands?

The right to be forgotten is an example of this: if we cannot enforce the deletion of our own notes to the relay operators, can we properly protect that right? That is, assuming we consider that a right at all.

So, what are the rights that Nostr aims to protect? Is censorship resistance compatible with privacy rights? Again, rights always exist in more or less imperfect ways due to their artificiality. And maybe we can’t have them all.