Amish People 2.0 — Declaration of Independence

We, the signatories of this declaration, declare our withdrawal from the era of digital feudalism. We do so not out of nostalgia or hostility toward technology, but from the understanding that every concentration of power inevitably leads to servitude if it is not constrained by tangible, verifiable, and reversible structures. The digital order of our time has crossed these boundaries. It replaces citizens with accounts, identity with data profiles, autonomy with permanent synchronization. What began as progress has become invisible serfdom.

This declaration is addressed to those who have understood that freedom never resides in the cloud, but in the space in which one shapes one’s own life—physical, tangible, local. We are not against technology. We are against the monopolization of technology by a small caste of actors who define not only access, but the very meaning of reality. We are the Amish People 2.0: not a return to the past, but a conscious step back into control over our own living conditions.

I. Principle: Offline as the foundation of human sovereignty

Offline does not mean the absence of technology, but the absence of dependency.

Offline is the space in which decisions are not moderated by algorithms, in which words are not tracked, movements not cataloged, thoughts not pre-structured. Offline is the realm in which a human being ceases to be user data.

A society that possesses no offline zones is not a free society.

A culture that knows no offline identity no longer possesses an inner life.

A person who can no longer exist offline is not an independent subject, but a digital vassal.

We declare:

Offline is not an option, but a necessity.

Offline is not escape, but recovery.

Offline is not refusal, but self-determination.

II. Local structures as protective spaces against centralized digital power

Locality is not regression. It is the natural counterweight to global concentrations of power.

Those who seek global control must weaken the local.

We reverse this logic.

Local energy supply, local information circuits, local decision-making spaces—these are not romanticizations, but concrete counterstructures to systems that derive their legitimacy from total connectivity.

We declare:

A community is only as free as its ability to function without external digital infrastructure.

A village, a street, a neighborhood, a family, an individual—all are more sovereign when their basic needs are not sourced through networks beyond their control.

Local structures do not prevent globalization.

They merely prevent globalization from becoming domination.

III. Autonomy as the highest political objective

Autonomy means resilience against every form of loss of control.

Autonomy does not mean isolation, but independence from enforced nodes.

Autonomy is the ability to remain human even when the servers go down.

An autonomous society can cooperate with others without submitting to them.

An autonomous community uses technology without dissolving into it.

An autonomous citizen remains a citizen even when systems no longer recognize them.

We declare:

Autonomy is the new measure of political freedom.

Everything that creates dependency is a political risk.

Everything that creates self-reliance is a political value.

IV. Digital feudalism: diagnosis and consequence

Today’s world is structured like a feudal realm with a modern surface.

The nobility consists of proprietary platforms, tech giants, infrastructure monopolists, data exploiters, security architects, identity managers, and AI providers.

The citizen is no longer a citizen, but a user. Access can be restricted, blocked, monetized, prioritized, or degraded at any time.

This order does not resemble the internet of its early years, but Europe of the 13th century:

a small circle of lords owns the castles—today data centers—sets the rules, and distributes the privilege of existence within their territory.

Those who live online live within the sphere of power of others.

Those who are fully online no longer belong to themselves.

We declare:

A society that fully digitizes itself disenfranchises itself.

A population that exists exclusively in networked form relinquishes its political agency.

A future that knows no offline sphere is not a future, but a technocratic end state.

V. The new ethic: reduction, decoupling, decentralization

The Amish People 2.0 are not rejecters of modernity.

They are those who do not allow modernity to overwhelm them.

The new ethic is as follows:

1. Reduction: use technologies, but depend on them as little as possible.
2. Decoupling: prioritize local value creation over external infrastructure.
3. Decentralization: build systems that do not collapse when the central node fails.
4. This ethic is not nostalgic, but strategic.
5. It is not romantic, but rational.
6. It is not against the future, but against the totalitarianism of a future that knows no zones of freedom.

VI. The three pillars of the new sovereignty

1. Sovereignty of information
2. Knowledge that is stored locally and accessible without external platforms is independent knowledge.
3. Anything that is accessible only through clouds, user accounts, or digital identities is not possession, but borrowed insight.
4. Sovereignty of infrastructure
5. Those who cannot operate their own energy, communication, data, and hardware possess no sovereignty.
6. Dependency is the gateway to control.
7. Sovereignty of identity
8. An identity that exists only as a login can be deleted at any time.
9. An identity that exists offline is real.
10. Digital identity is a tool; offline identity is the foundation of human dignity.

VII. The self-commitment: our new rules

We commit ourselves:

– to protecting offline time as a fundamental right and practice;

– to mastering as many technical skills locally as possible;

– to using no systems whose functioning we do not understand or control;

– to building communities that can function in crises without external networks;

– to treating digital identities as tools, not as places of life;

– to securing knowledge locally, physically, and independently;

– to educating children and young people to be capable of surviving with and without digital systems;

– to using technology at all times in ways that strengthen autonomy rather than weaken it.

VIII. Conclusion: why this path is necessary

We declare this independence not out of defiance, but out of foresight.

The coming decades will not be endured by those who are most deeply integrated, but by those who remain independent.

It is not the most networked who are fit for the future, but those who can secure their foundations of life without permission from external systems.

Offline is the return of human control.

Local is the return of political self-determination.

Autonomous is the return of dignity.

We solemnly declare:

The future does not belong to globally networked vassals, but to locally sovereign people.

This is our declaration of independence against a system that reduces all human beings to function, data set, and availability.

We withdraw from this order.

We choose the freedom that begins offline, lives locally, and finds its highest expression in autonomy.

IX. The new economy of freedom: neighborhood as currency, resilience as wealth

The digital world sells us the illusion that value is created digitally—in wallets, in tokens, in artificial markets that can be shut down at any time. Yet the history of free communities shows the opposite: the true currency was never data, never money, never capital. The true currency was always relationship. Trust. Neighborhood.

The coming years will expose this truth like a foundation washed free. The currency of the future is not called Bitcoin, dollar, euro, or any state-licensed digital central bank unit. The currency of the future is called:

Neighborhood.

People who can stand up for one another without first activating an account. People who can bridge supply chains because they know each other, not because they have access to a platform. People who, in an emergency, act faster than any app.

A world that digitizes everything does not destroy our technology—it destroys our bonds. And it is precisely these bonds that sustain communities in times of crisis. A neighborhood connected not by Wi-Fi, but by loyalty, is stronger than any digital identity.

We declare:

Those who know their neighbors possess more real security than anyone who relies on cloud-based policies.

Those who are locally embedded are harder to manipulate, harder to isolate, harder to control.

In an era in which states begin to treat the citizen no longer as sovereign, but as a managed risk factor, neighborhood becomes a new form of wealth: not accumulated, but cultivated; not speculative, but stable; not transferable, but lived.

And in this new economy of freedom, an ancient principle applies, confirmed by every generational experience:

Real security does not arise from wealth, but from resilience.

If earlier generations said that gold was the last lifeline in times of state overreach, modern history shows a different pattern:

Gold can be frozen, confiscated, digitally blocked. The state has means to neutralize any external value.

What it cannot neutralize is the internal structure of a community that refuses to be intimidated.

Anyone who traces the history of resistance against feudal structures recognizes that it was not gold but lead that ensured the freedom of the individual and their group. Not without guarantee—but with it.

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

This right of every U.S. citizen to keep and bear arms in order to defend themselves even against an overreaching state and its government dates back to 1791 and remains valid to this day. The Founding Fathers of the United States therefore already relied more on lead than on gold to defend individual freedom.

Lead is the metal of consequence—the material from which people forge dignity when states degrade the citizen to an object.

The overreach of modern states grows in proportion to the powerlessness of their citizens.

But a community that organizes offline, is locally rooted, and preserves its autonomy is not a matter of state security—it is a bulwark.

Its loyalty belongs not to algorithms, but to people.

Not to platforms, but to relationships.

Not to promises, but to lived structures.

The Amish People 2.0 know:

A state attacks first those who are isolated.

Never those who are connected.

Never those who are prepared.

Never those who belong to themselves.

Neighborhood is the insurance that cannot be canceled.

Offline is the new organic—because all real life processes take place offline: birth, death, courage, resistance, faith, community.

And everything human beings defend, they do not defend in the cloud, but on the ground they call their own.

Is human dignity inviolable?

The COVID era taught us that it is not.

Anyone who wishes to defend human dignity must recognize that, at the end of the day, words are not enough. The sovereign citizen must recognize—and above all must signal—that they are prepared to truly resist. Or, as Bertolt Brecht summarized it in a single sentence:

“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.”

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Thanks to the author for the right to publish this contribution.

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Image: LANCASTER, USA — June 25, 2016 — Amish in Pennsylvania. The Amish are known for their simple lifestyle in harmony with nature, their plain clothing, and their rejection of modern technologies.

Image source: Andrea Izzotti / Shutterstock