# Introduction Under the prevailing economy, human civilisation has achieved the height of its industrial and technological success. Yet, increasing inequality, environmental degradation and the climate crisis are forcing us to consider whether the paradigm is serving people and the planet. Looking for alternatives, we recognise that a viable economy must begin to respect ecological boundaries and social wellbeing, and shift from prioritising self-interest towards encouraging prosocial relationships. How can we transcend the established paradigm and bring about systemic change in the real world? With the advent of the internet, and with the latest advances in AI, complexity science, and blockchain technologies, we now have the opportunity to create novel protocol-based social coordination systems. Widespread transition to a new paradigm now involves people opting in to a digital social-economic network when they are ready, instead of necessitating the difficult and slow process of conventional political transformation. The need for elected human representatives and centralised institutions is replaced with consent-based protocols which define how we conduct our relationships with one another and our environment. These new ‘economic’ protocols can be designed with different rules and explicitly defined objectives embedded into their architecture. This living gitbook is a collective open-source proposal for one of such protocols, therefore any contribution to its definition and refinement is encouraged and welcome. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.theos.io/introduction.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.