Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

The Emergency Protocol: How to Break Glass Without Breaking Democracy

Here’s a fun historical pattern to ruin your day: almost every dictatorship in modern history began as an “emergency measure.”

Hitler’s Enabling Act was a temporary response to the Reichstag fire. Stalin’s purges were emergency actions against saboteurs. Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines for 14 years—technically an “emergency.” Egypt’s emergency law, activated after Sadat’s assassination in 1981, wasn’t lifted until 2012. That’s 31 years of “temporary.”

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben noticed this pattern and gave it a name: the “state of exception"—that uncomfortable zone where constitutional rules are suspended for the greater good. His troubling observation? What was meant to be a provisional measure “became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government.” Emergency isn’t the exception anymore. It’s the operating system.

As of 2025, more than 40 national emergencies remain active in the United States alone. Some date back decades. Nobody even remembers what crisis they were supposed to address. Meanwhile, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán pushed through constitutional amendments allowing him to declare a “state of danger” whenever there’s conflict in a neighboring country—then immediately invoked it for Ukraine. No public consultation. No sunset clause. Permanent emergency, just add paperwork.

This is the problem the Emergency Protocol was designed to solve: How do you give civilization the ability to respond rapidly to genuine crises without creating a backdoor to permanent centralization?

The Roman Lesson: When Cincinnatus Becomes Caesar

We already have an entire article devoted to Rome’s spectacular failure at this problem, but the short version is instructive.

The Roman Republic invented what might be history’s first constitutional dictatorship. When existential threats emerged—invasions, insurrections—they appointed a dictator with absolute power. But the power came with constraints: six months maximum, single-purpose mandate, and liability for abuse once you stepped down.

For three centuries, this worked beautifully. The model dictator, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, was summoned from his farm in 458 BCE, defeated the enemy in 16 days, resigned with five and a half months remaining, and went back to his plow. Romans celebrated him as the ideal: power accepted reluctantly, exercised briefly, surrendered voluntarily.

Then came Sulla. Facing genuine civil unrest in 82 BCE, he marched his army into Rome to “save” the Republic. He declared himself dictator, murdered thousands of political enemies through legalized proscriptions, rewrote the constitution—and then, surprisingly, resigned. He thought he’d fixed the system. He retired to his country estate and died peacefully.

But Sulla’s actions taught a fatal lesson: the rules can be broken if you have enough soldiers. A generation later, Julius Caesar followed Sulla’s exact playbook—emergency powers, extended crisis, promises to restore order. Only Caesar never resigned. His dictatorship went from 11 days (49 BCE) to one year (48 BCE) to ten years (46 BCE) to perpetual (February 44 BCE).

The assassins who stabbed Caesar on the Ides of March thought they were saving the Republic. They were 20 years too late. The safeguards had already failed. The precedent was set. After another round of civil wars, Augustus perfected the trick: he accumulated absolute power piece by piece while maintaining republican forms. The Senate still met. Elections still happened. But everyone knew who really ruled.

The Republic never returned.

The Modern Trap: South Korea, 2024

You might think we’ve learned these lessons. We haven’t.

On December 3, 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol did something nobody expected: he declared martial law, deploying troops to the National Assembly and suspending political activities. His justification? Opposition parties were “paralyzing” the government.

The National Assembly terminated the martial law within three hours. Three hours! South Korea’s constitutional safeguards worked—barely. But the event revealed how fragile even mature democracies remain when leaders decide to test the boundaries.

The problem isn’t that emergency powers are inherently evil. The problem is that every constitutional safeguard depends on future actors choosing to respect it. Term limits work until someone ignores them. Sunset clauses work until a compliant legislature extends them. Judicial review works until you stack the courts.

What we need are safeguards that don’t require voluntary compliance. We need emergency powers that self-destruct whether the power-holder wants them to or not.

The Unscarcity Solution: Self-Destructing Authority

The Emergency Protocol in the MOSAIC framework approaches this problem with what you might call “structural paranoia.” It assumes that any power granted will be abused, and designs the system so abuse is physically impossible rather than merely prohibited.

Here’s how it works:

Activation: The 75% Diversity Threshold

You cannot activate the Emergency Protocol through simple majority vote. You need 75% approval—but not just any 75%. The votes must come from the Diversity Guard, which means approval from demonstrably different Commons across multiple dimensions: geographic, cultural, economic, generational.

This isn’t bureaucratic box-ticking. It’s mathematical protection against what Scott Page calls correlated error. When seven rural farming communities vote on agricultural policy, you don’t have seven votes—you have one vote, echoed seven times. Similarly, when homogeneous groups declare emergencies, they’re likely responding to shared biases rather than genuine civilizational threats.

The Diversity Guard requirement makes panic-driven overreaction structurally difficult. A genuine asteroid impact gets 75% diverse approval instantly—everyone agrees that’s an emergency. But “the opposition is being annoying” or “immigrants exist” or “we don’t like how the last election went”? Good luck getting 75% agreement across genuinely different communities.

Expiration: The 90-Day Auto-Destruct

Here’s the crucial innovation: Emergency Protocol powers don’t just have an expiration date. They auto-destruct.

Not “expire unless renewed.” Not “sunset pending review.” Auto-destruct. After 90 days, the extraordinary powers cease to exist. There is no mechanism for the power-holder alone to extend them.

This isn’t like the Roman system, which depended on dictators voluntarily stepping down (Cincinnatus did; Caesar didn’t). The MOSAIC doesn’t ask permission. It revokes authority automatically, like a password that self-invalidates after a fixed period regardless of who’s typing.

The technical implementation matters here. Emergency authorities are granted through cryptographic tokens with embedded expiration timestamps. When the timestamp passes, the authorization becomes mathematically invalid. No amount of political pressure, military force, or constitutional reinterpretation can make an expired token work again. The system simply stops responding to it.

Renewal: The 30-Day Cooling Period

“But what if the crisis isn’t over in 90 days?” Fair question. Genuine existential threats—asteroid impacts, pandemics, infrastructure collapse—might require sustained response.

The Protocol allows for renewal, but with a critical constraint: mandatory 30-day cooling-off period. After emergency powers expire, the Commons must return to normal governance for 30 days before any new emergency can be declared.

Why? Because the psychology of crisis is self-reinforcing. During emergencies, fear suppresses critical thinking. Media coverage intensifies. Dissenters get labeled as threats. The 30-day cooling period forces a return to normalcy long enough for the collective mind to reset. Long enough to ask: “Was that really necessary? What actually happened? Do we need to do it again?”

If the answer is genuinely yes—if the asteroid is still coming, if the pandemic hasn’t subsided—then reactivation with 75% diverse approval will happen. But if the “emergency” was manufactured or exaggerated, 30 days of normal life tends to reveal that.

The only exception to the cooling period is 90% supermajority approval—not just from diverse Commons, but from essentially everyone. This is reserved for true civilizational threats where even the 30-day pause would be catastrophic. The threshold is deliberately set so high that gaming it is virtually impossible.

What Emergency Powers Actually Look Like

When activated, the Emergency Protocol convenes a Federal Council—a temporary governing body modeled on Switzerland’s federal structure. It includes proportional representation from diverse Commons, ensuring that emergency decisions reflect varied perspectives even when made quickly.

The Federal Council can:

• Coordinate cross-Commons resources for disaster response (deploying fusion generators, mobilizing robot labor forces, redirecting supply chains)
• Suspend certain local governance decisions that would interfere with coordinated response
• Accelerate approval processes for emergency infrastructure or medical interventions
• Temporarily restrict movement in affected areas (quarantine zones, evacuation corridors)

But even during emergencies, certain things remain absolutely off-limits:

The Inviolable Tier

Two of the Five Laws axioms cannot be suspended under any circumstances, even by Emergency Protocol:

Axiom II: Truth Must Be Seen. Emergency decisions must still be transparent and traceable. No secret tribunals. No classified rationales. No “we’ll explain later.” If you can’t show your work while doing it, you can’t do it.

Axiom IV: Power Must Decay. The 90-day auto-destruct cannot be overridden. Not by the Federal Council. Not by 100% unanimous vote. Not by constitutional amendment during the emergency. The temporal limit is architecturally hard-coded.

This creates what constitutional scholars call an “eternity clause”—but enforced mathematically rather than by parchment. The MOSAIC treats these constraints not as rules to follow but as physical laws to obey. You can vote to suspend gravity all you want; the rocks still fall.

Why This Design Matters: The Agamben Problem

Giorgio Agamben’s critique of modern emergency governance can be summarized in one uncomfortable observation: we live in a permanent state of exception, and we’ve convinced ourselves it’s normal.

The War on Terror is entering its third decade. COVID emergency provisions outlasted COVID in many jurisdictions. Climate emergency declarations have no sunset dates. Cybersecurity threats are perpetual by definition. If you’re always in an emergency, you’re never not in an emergency—which means emergency powers become default powers.

Agamben argues that this creates “bare life"—human existence stripped of legal protection, vulnerable to state action without recourse. The Emergency Protocol addresses this directly:

1. Time-bounded by design: 90 days maximum, with mandatory cooling periods, makes permanent emergency structurally impossible
2. Diversity-protected activation: Prevents homogeneous panic from triggering system-wide suspension of rights
3. Transparency-preserved throughout: Even emergency decisions are auditable, preventing the “black site” phenomenon
4. Foundation rights inviolable: The Foundation’s unconditional provisions (Tier 1 rights) cannot be suspended even during emergencies—you can restrict movement, but you cannot starve people as “emergency measure”

The Protocol doesn’t pretend emergencies won’t happen. It just refuses to let them become permanent.

The Heritage Commons Backup

Here’s a subtlety that deserves attention: the MOSAIC treats communities that reject advanced technology not as backward but as civilization’s air-gapped backup.

Heritage Commons—communities that maintain traditional technologies, reject neural interfaces, preserve older manufacturing methods—aren’t anomalies to be tolerated. They’re essential resilience infrastructure. If a sophisticated digital attack compromises the Cognitive Field, if AI systems experience correlated failure, if the fusion grid faces cascading collapse—Heritage Commons continue functioning.

During emergencies, Heritage Commons retain full autonomy. They cannot be forced to adopt technologies or governance structures they’ve explicitly rejected. Their existence ensures that no single point of failure can collapse all of civilization simultaneously.

This isn’t just emergency planning. It’s acknowledgment that the most dangerous emergencies might be ones we can’t predict—and that the best insurance against unknown unknowns is maintained diversity.

The Failure Mode: Oregon’s Lesson

What happens when you skip these safeguards?

The first experimental Free Zone in Oregon—an early prototype of the Unscarcity model—“turned into a cult within eighteen months because we didn’t have the Diversity Guard set up yet.” A charismatic leader consolidated power in an environment without structural diversity requirements. The community declared rolling “emergencies” to justify continued centralization. By the time outsiders noticed, the original governance structure had been completely captured.

It took two years to undo the damage. Some of it never fully healed.

The lesson isn’t that emergency powers are inherently evil—sometimes you genuinely need rapid, coordinated response. The lesson is that safeguards aren’t optional features to add later. They’re load-bearing infrastructure. Without them, even well-intentioned systems collapse into the default human pattern: concentration of power, normalization of control, and the eternal emergency that never ends.

Conclusion: The Temporal Antibody

The Emergency Protocol is, fundamentally, a temporal antibody—a mechanism that treats power accumulation like an infection and deploys time itself as the immune response.

It accepts that emergencies are real, that rapid response is sometimes necessary, and that good people can disagree about threat assessment. It doesn’t try to prevent emergency declarations through moral exhortation or constitutional parchment. Instead, it makes tyranny structurally impossible:

• Activation requires diverse consensus, filtering out monocultural panic
• Duration is absolutely bounded, preventing normalization
• Renewal requires genuine pause and re-assessment
• Transparency remains mandatory throughout
• Certain rights are architecturally inviolable

The Romans had the right idea with Cincinnatus. They just made the mistake of trusting future dictators to follow his example voluntarily. The MOSAIC doesn’t make that mistake. It designs the system so that stepping down isn’t a choice but a physical fact.

Because when it comes to emergency powers, hope is not a strategy. And voluntary restraint is not a safeguard.

The Emergency Protocol is what happens when constitutional design finally learns from 2,500 years of failure.

References

• UnscarcityBook, Chapters 3, 7, and 9
• When Emergency Powers Become Permanent: The Fall of the Roman Republic - Companion article
• The Diversity Guard - How required heterogeneity prevents capture
• Proof-of-Diversity - Mathematical framework for consensus validation
• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2005)
• Emergency Powers: A System Vulnerable to Executive Abuse - Brennan Center for Justice
• States of Emergencies: Part I - Harvard Law Review
• State of emergency - Wikipedia
• Byzantine fault tolerance - The distributed systems foundation
• South Korea’s State of Emergency - December 2024 crisis
• The Abuse of Emergency Provisions - SSRN academic paper
• Livy, Ab Urbe Condita - On Roman dictatorships
• Swiss Federal Council structure