Felix Beer
Felix Beer is a researcher and strategist reimagining democracy for the age of advanced AI. His work advances institutional R&D as a field to address a core gap: while AI capabilities scale rapidly, there is no systematic infrastructure for designing and testing the institutions that govern them. He builds the ecosystem scaffolding needed to develop, prototype, and scale governance systems capable of aligning and steering increasingly agentic systems. Felix's research focuses on how digital protocols expand the institutional design space, enabling democratic principles to be encoded in the coordination substrate of agentic networks. Felix is a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Studies and an Associate at the TUM Think Tank, NYU Protopolis Lab, and BlockchainGov. He is currently an MPA candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate at the Technical University of Munich.
Session
In this talk we explore why the dominant “Network State” model is narrowing the design space for networked sovereignty — and introduce Network Nations as a democratic, commons-grounded alternative built on three practical mechanisms: functional sovereignty, commons governance, and entanglement — so distributed communities can actually sustain themselves, steward shared resources, and govern across distance.