Postcapitalist Computing & Currency with Zachary Marlow from the Moneyless Society Podcast

During this last Crypto Commons Gathering I had the pleasure to meet Zachary Marlow from the Moneyless Society Podcast. We had the idea of recording a joint podcast with Zachary leading to talk about post-capitalism, crypto, and money. The discussion was also recorded in video format  which you can find  here on the Moneyless Society Podcast YouTube channel which I can recommend checking out!

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"WTF do BLOCKCHAIN and SOCIALISM have to do with each other? More than you might think! Filmed live at a radical gathering of extremist nerds at the Commons Hub in the Austrian Alps, Marlow and Joshua Davila of the Blockchain Socialist podcast  and writer of "Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It" explore the postcapitalist side of crypto, web3, decentralized computing, the future of currency, and life without money.

Stumbling onto this community was radical, eye opening and an exciting dive into one of the most achievable frontiers of design science revolution: the web. Leave your preconceived notions of all these concepts at the door and let's reprogram a better world!"

If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@theblockchainsocialist@social.coop) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everyone, this is Josh. I just wanted to give you guys a heads up that what you're about to listen to is a discussion that I had with Zachary Marlowe from the Moneyless Society podcast While he and I were at the crypto commons gathering in Austria around a month or two ago. Zach had showed up kind of towards the end and we got along pretty well. He is working on a documentary about money that is really interesting, and so I definitely suggest you guys give Moneyless Society a look, and we also Recorded a video of our conversation. So if you want to check that out, you can also find the link to the YouTube video, which is hosted on the Moneyless Society YouTube channel if you want to listen to it through video. But yeah, this is my first time ever doing a kind of joint publication like this, but it was a really interesting conversation, so I hope you guys enjoy.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Okay, so what do blockchain and socialism have to do with each other?

Speaker 1: 1:09

Blockchain and socialism are quite different things, right. Socialism? We're talking about really a, a socioeconomic system when workers own the means of production of the economy. So we have democratic workplaces, we have democratic inputs to the economy and the way that we use and distribute resources, and Blockchain is just sort of a technology that you can. I think it is interesting in that you can embed political values within sort of technological code or software for everything that is Problematic in the crypto world or blockchain space.

Speaker 1: 1:52

I think one of the things, one of the more interesting things about it that I'm wanting to sort of dig into more and more is how can we Use this technological medium which opens up, I think, a very interesting way for people to Think about how our economy is designed in the first place. It's a time when you could feasibly think about what does a socialist economy look like, through the lens, of course, of kind of tech, of software, in a way that is much more legible than, sort of like, just looking at the economy from afar. So I think there are ways that we can. Then, if socialism is about sort of democratic ownership of our resources, of our workplaces, I think blockchain is an interesting tool for facilitating exactly that.

Speaker 3: 2:55

The old world is ending and we have the opportunity to rethink everything.

Speaker 2: 3:00

This is a show about the systemic problems in our world and the real solutions we have today to transition from an apocalyptic storm of war, scarcity and ecological collapse to create an abundantly advanced Collaborative society that sustains all life. You may think it's an impossible dream.

Speaker 3: 3:20

But the alternative is an inevitable nightmare.

Speaker 2: 3:23

Where your hosts, matt Holton. Amanda Smith and Zachary Marla, and together we can move past this economic Absurdity and come together to actualize our collective potential to create something completely new.

Speaker 3: 3:37

We are my society.

Speaker 2: 3:47

Welcome to the show y'all we are Coming to. You live from the crypto commons hub. Actually, hang on, am I peaking? Am I too loud for the mic? No, we're just fine. I'm here with Josh the blockchain socialist. We just finished out an incredible, one-of-a-kind, totally unique, completely beautiful, radical, weird, sense-making and nonsense making conference here in the hills these aren't quite the Alps of Austria, they're the hills of About crypto, all things Rethinking money, rethinking governance, rethinking the technological systems that shape our consciousness. It's just been a wonderful time. Josh, tell us a little bit about the conference.

Speaker 1: 4:32

Yeah, sure. So we are at the commons hub, which is a place where we host an event called the crypto commons gathering, which was the right, I think the one that just happened was the third sort of iteration, the third annual Event. It started, of course, two years ago With my friends Julio and Felix. Felix is doing a PhD in sort of thinking about crypto in through the lens of the commons, so you've been doing a lot of like really interesting research with a couple of different projects like common stack and a couple of others, and he basically, from my understand, just like invited a bunch of the people that he interviewed from his thesis and invited us to a bunch of a bunch of people here. And, of course, I had my Blog and podcast called blockchain socialist and he had invited me as well to come.

Speaker 2: 5:26

We're gonna investigate that. Yeah, in a little bit, sure I just I completely lucked into this. I have been trying to connect with people with the hollow chain team for a while, been very interested in mutual credit in the regenerative Finance community and making connections to this quite wonderfully aligned, radical, beautiful, vibrant, cerebral community, and I just was trying to get an interview with like one of the people from hollow chain and Ended up getting invited to this conference. Thought it was next month, was, thought I had plenty of time. It's talking to Maritz on the phone. He's like no, no, it's happening now, like let's get you out here. So I immediately took a train, like eight hours from Germany to here, and I'm I'm a newcomer into this space in a lot of ways, so for me this was like Rushing. I had the fast-fast, you know, like in six flags, like I got straight to space mountain or whatever. I've just loved every minute. It's been fantastic.

Speaker 1: 6:17

So you fit right in to be, honest, like this is a place like I would you know, for some people, if you like, need a little bit of preparation before they come because of the types of just like Conversations and very niche interests of a lot of people kind of intersect. So much.

Speaker 2: 6:35

It's been awesome.

Speaker 2: 6:36

There's been so many conversations where I've been a little apprehensive Well, not really that many, but a few like early in was like where I was like yeah, I want to create this Application, this ecosystem of applications for a gift economy that connects us with this and is the scaler, fractal, self-organizing system of circles within circles that Ultimately connects us to our highest purpose connecting people with people, creating Circles that scale out and become nodes in a smaller circle that scale out into alert nodes, that the small circle that allows us to have coherence or, you know, distributed governance. And everybody is just like, yeah, what do you mean? Like that's what we do, that's what we do every day. It's been really refreshing and just like. So, like the Grinch's heart has grown to size. You know, Just seeing how many people are out here, really like that they're in this crypto space that so many people assume is all about tokens and NFTs and that it's a big scam.

Speaker 2: 7:33

I know so many programmers who have these post capitals values who Are just completely dismissive of crypto. They don't, they're not interested in the cutting-edge information technology Because of the association and the stain that it has. So, yeah, I would love to hear more about your book and your whole ethos. The blockchain socialist I mean, that's so many people is a contradiction in itself. Yeah, yeah, you wrote a book called the blockchain radicals. We're a whole of the book and sure about it Blockchain radicals how, how capitalism ruined crypto and how to fix it.

Speaker 1: 8:10

Yeah how.

Speaker 1: 8:12

Well, I mean. So maybe to answer the other question With the blog and podcast was, yeah, I mean the name. Really. I made it and thought that I was going to change it afterwards. When I made, I didn't really know what to call myself. It was sort of like, well, I know what I want to talk about, but, you know, it sounded very it's like very on the nose, obviously, but I didn't want to be like, you know, whatever shadow will 69 and then they know I'm talking about this stuff. So, yeah, so it it would.

Speaker 1: 8:44

It turned out to be something that like really turns people's heads because they don't associate, like you know, socialism in particular as a political ideology In the blockchain space, with crypto, since it is cryptos generally seen as like a very hyper speculative and like very Like free market fundamentalists type of thing to to go after or to be just like to be interested in. So, yeah, I tried to bring sort of an alternative lens and framework for understanding this technology through just like explicitly political left-wing point of view. But yeah, so I was doing that. I did that, for I have been doing it now for over three years and Sort of in you know, having done it for a while.

Speaker 1: 9:26

I kind of just got like a random message from repeater books, which is a publisher in the UK they are Well known for being associated with. Mark Fisher wrote capitalist realism, so they write a lot of kind of like radical left-wing philosophy, kind of somewhat esoteric Kind of books. So they're willing to take on the risk of exploring the types of Things that in a lot of kind of left-wing political discourse may not necessarily get very much attention to. Yeah, mark Fisher is One of the greats, really unfortunate loss.

Speaker 2: 9:59

Yeah, I think that's a great thing. It loss, yeah, wrote capitalist realism, which is the basic idea. You know. At that, margaret Thatcher beautifully expressed that there is no alternative, tina, that we cannot imagine our way out of capitalism, and so, yeah, it's a really interesting coming together of these two seemingly disparate fields that I I feel like when I kind of move past that Gut level like need to vomit of people, like trying to create micro transactions for their friend groups or Monetizing monkey pictures, but I don't know, I just I feel like for a long time, like I rounded a curve on crypto, I'm just like this isn't any faker than any other money, like it's all fake. It's all something that's a socially constructed value that you know gains Power through reification and you know, often, well, historically, through use of the state and taxation and the violence of colonialism and all its other things that push us toward being needing to embrace a Anti-capitalist, post-capitalist, leftist, a value system of consciousness that pushes that technology to do what it can do.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Hmm, yeah, I mean like I think we were talking about this the other day, but like the ultimate scam, like Underneath whatever scam you're thinking of now about crypto, the bigger scam is capitalism itself, leading us to think many different things that don't really align with human nature.

Speaker 2: 11:33

to begin with, human nature's- more greedy and quesiton, like to fuck people over. Oh yeah, it's human nature to deprive health care of children, right, very?

Speaker 1: 11:43

natural.

Speaker 2: 11:44

Yeah, I think that's a. It's a great point that in Capitalism, everything's a scam. Health care is a scam, a fucking apple becomes a scam, and there's this inherent Shadow, sort of drive or incentive for people to be duplicitous, for people to lie, for people to do other people, and it's all based on a speculative bubble based on money. That's basically created of nothing and, as a good friend of mine pointed out, like we, or we, were Formed in our creators image, and so we have this economy. That's all about speculation, grifting, duping people.

Speaker 2: 12:18

It's not necessarily based on real value, it's not pegged to any objective, physical referent, and so so many people within that system, in no matter what field they're in, no matter what technology they're working in, whether they're selling weapons or they're selling flowers, they have an incentive to do other people. And no, no, this is the best thing, this is the thing you've got to get this thing, you know. So crypto is just the way it's been interpreted, you know, which is Actually good question. How would you define crypto? Can define socialism? Done that before, but yeah yeah, and what is?

Speaker 2: 12:51

what is the umbrella? That is crypto.

Speaker 1: 12:55

So crypto is a couple of things I mean. Originally crypto was referring to cryptography and cryptography being kind of like this very fancy type of Computer science, mathematical kind of field of study on how do you hide information or how do you send information to people without having People that you don't want to receive the information know about it. So it was like a really important, especially during like different wars, like World War two especially. It was really big because you Want to send messages using radio, like you don't want, because anybody can have like a radio receiver. You know, if you use like, if you use different codes, then you can like encrypt messages in In something that looks like nonsense but to where the other party is the only one who knows how to decrypt that message and then Get the information. So like we'll get back to nonsense. But so, yeah, so they got really, and you know, in in World War two they use like Native American languages and, yeah, co -talkers. So there is a lot of different techniques that like people had already been using for a long time anyways. And then cryptography was like this kind of like mathematical field of study, that kind of studied this in a more abstract way and then with computers, makes it very easy to kind of Create very, very or not very, but like more complex ways of hiding messages, which is important over the internet, because we're sending Packages of information back and forth to another through these communication networks. So this is important to say that, like cryptocurrency, which is now when most people say crypto they mean cryptocurrency Is built on kind of many of the different innovations that have been come out, that have come out of cryptography, and so they use cryptography in order to.

Speaker 1: 14:45

The original intention, of course, with Bitcoin was like how do we make peer-to-peer cash without needing a centralized entity to run it and so like. While I don't think that they really made money per se, they made a interesting money. Like digital system where you can send and receive Bitcoin Cryptographically, which is a very difficult thing to do, because if you think about the internet, think about computers, they're essentially giant copying machines, like information copying machines. When I make an email and I send you an email, like your email client is making a copy of the email that I sent. It's not like you know me sending a letter. That's like physically going to you, like my email that I sent.

Speaker 1: 15:27

I still know what I sent because it's in my client and so, when you're wanting to create a money-like system, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if, like, my dollar is just being copied over To your dollar client on your computer. You know is defeating the purpose and that's a great. So it's a very difficult problem to solve, called a double spending problem, and so, with a different combination of different cryptographic techniques you know, the creator of Bitcoin like kind of solved this problem to a large extent and so, yeah, now since then, there's been this large explosion of People speculating on this. Now we treated this, something that was meant to be like money, into basically like a some sort of speculative asset which money is not really a speculative asset and have built like More and more and different features for different blockchains. This is just the name for the, the most common used form of data infrastructure or data structure For crypto.

Speaker 2: 16:28

I want to say one thing that money is, in many ways, a speculative asset, and a lot of libertarians will post this this like what happened in 1972 website. That's like see all these charts of all these bad things that happened in 1972, which is when we went off the gold standard, which is what they say is the reason that we need to get back on real money.

Speaker 1: 16:47

They're not neoliberal economic policy.

Speaker 2: 16:50

Well, it's the neoliberal economic policy, but it's it's also the fact that we started trading money on the markets. Money markets were opened up, and so Adam Curtis talks about this in one of his documentaries. Maybe hyper normalization, or Maybe all watched over by machines loving grace, I don't know which one it is but basically money itself started to be traded on the open markets money for money, and so there is incentive for traders to, you know, short-sell for currencies of whole countries and things like that, to buy this money and buy that money. It's some enormous amount of the amount of transactions that happens in our world today is just in the money markets, in money for money. It's something like 97%. I'm not gonna quote me on that. I'll link a really good video with, I think, nigel Dodd or someone like that talking about it. But money itself as a commodity is a speculative asset and it has a fluctuating value. That can be. You can profit off of that. You can buy low and sell high. So, yeah, I mean we could get into all kinds of talks about the existing problems with money. But I think, zooming out a little bit into the gathering that we're at here, the crypto commons that this isn't just about Currency isn't just about creating money like substances. It's about a whole lot more. You know, I mean there have been taught I missed most of the talks, but there were talks about transcending the nation-state.

Speaker 2: 18:14

There were talks about Bioregional governance, about new forms of currency that aren't money like, which might seem like a Stretch to people, or you know, we could get into discussing that. You just I actually helped you film a talk last night with Art Brock Hall of Chain and there are some of the, some of the the G's out there that are really working on that infrastructure to make things like mutual credit currencies. We were talking about Currency as something that isn't just money, like college diploma is a currency. Like you know, energy moving through a system can be a current that you see and you remark it and say you know we're logging and accounting this sort of flow. I'm kind of getting lost in a tangent here.

Speaker 1: 18:58

But, like there were, I think, a lot of the things that people are interested in here is kind of like breaking apart or Deconstructing, like this idea that money is the only currency that exists, or like any that, like, has monolithic ability to measure the flows of Value or of anything else. Like in society that we, in fact, I mean one, we do have many different types of Currencies in many ways that, like Arthur Brock talks a lot about, and so, like the, I think, with cryptocurrency, the double spend problem is not a problem about money per se. Right, it's like how do you create something with a very, with a particular Property as, like, digital bits, right, you, it's the same problem with voting, right, you don't want to have a system where, if the intention is that everybody gets one vote, you don't want like people to vote as many times as they want, if you want, like a truly democratic system or for somebody to have more voting power than others, sure?

Speaker 2: 20:09

or, which is really the problem with the whole vote with your dollars thing, because if you're voting with your dollars and that's a ridiculous 99% of the money is wealth, is owned by 1% of the population Like your votes, just don't need shit, you know.

Speaker 1: 20:22

Yeah, yeah, but I think, like yeah, so I mean, I think so, getting to this idea of the commons, right, the commons is like a type of resource where it's still potentially scarce but is openly available, public, available for many people to use. There's a need for governance over those resources. Yeah, and so governance in cryptographic systems also has this problem of double spend. Potentially, like, if you want to encode rules for how you are governing your resources, or whether those be purely digital or physical, like you need a system that people can trust that will not, you know, allow for people to break it, you know.

Speaker 2: 21:08

Yeah, and that seems to be the overarching pattern in all of these projects and the people that are here working on this is basically creating a system that isn't corrupted from the system From the start. Our monetary system is corrupted from the start. Its inherent rules and gravitation produce inequality. Mathematically, they produce patterns of extraction and environmental destruction and disconnection and separate separation within their own logic and ruleset, and our governance systems are exactly the same, and so the idea here isn't just that we're going to create a new kind of money, although that's a big part of it, and there have been so many just phenomenally interesting ideas about that, like the economics based program.

Speaker 2: 21:48

They were talking about fluid value staking, which is like it's just so great being here, because I've been like getting into this sort of rethinking money world and stepping backwards from like money is bullshit, no money into like what are the transitionary steps? How did we turn existing thing, that is, money, into something that so fundamentally alters it and creates new feedback loops and patterns of behavior and changes that it un-makes itself with itself? But I've been talking for a long like months. The last few months I've had these ideas about like well, what if you know, in a mutual credit system and mutual credit is. Can you define mutual credit?

Speaker 1: 22:28

Sure, I mean it's basically mutual credit, rather than the way we think about money now is that you either like have it or you don't. For the most part, you know you have like $5 or you have $0. Even though in the background there are, like there are, you know, things like loans where you can have like a negative net worth or whatever. But mutual credit is a more like explicit acknowledgments. That like basically giving the ability to create money to everyone is how I like to think about it. It's a steady state system as well.

Speaker 2: 23:01

It's not inflationary or deflationary.

Speaker 1: 23:03

Right, so you don't have, like this supply problem per se, necessarily like in the same way, I guess, but it's where everyone in you know, whatever system that you're using, this currency starts at zero and you would then be able to if you anybody can sort of spend their credits towards something, they would pay someone else. So if I pay you, I would have negative five and you would have plus five, so I would be in the negative. But you know, I would be a part of this system or group of people where I have a job or I'm doing whatever work and people are paying me as well, and over time we're kind of like averaging around zero, more or less. There could be different institutions that are part of our system that may be like more likely to be higher or lower because of, like, the way that they work within the system, but more or less everybody has the ability to go to zero and being at zero is not a bad thing.

Speaker 2: 24:02

Yeah, which is a fundamentally different kind of social relationship. I mean it's it requires trust, it is something that is. It emanates not from nothing, but from the promises and from the decisions and interrelationships of community. So for me, I think that represents a really big step toward a sane way to coordinate and to deal with our interactions one to one. I was going to say that, um the staking oh fuck, it's also complicated. It's like I asked the uh Jorge of the economics phase program like to explain their system and he was like fuck man, it's like explaining the Apollo space rocket. It's very it's so complicated that it's beautifully ornate and intricate and I just I find a lot of um like geometry and poetry in the way that people in this sort of engineering and system, science and programming community thinks about these things. We're not going to be able to get all the little details about value staking and all the stuff, but we'll definitely be doing um. I will be personally investigating these things more and making more media about them and forming more partnerships with people in these communities.

Speaker 2: 25:11

I think it's really important for people to realize that economics is not just um about tokens. It's not just about stuff like products and services and business. It is basically the system of how we make decisions in society and who gets what, and how we decide who gets what. And so the value system uh, comes out of that. There've been, there's been, a consistent refrain in conversations here that, um, everyone here really understands, and is working with this in mind, that our consciousness is shaped by our technology and by the mediums that we interact with, the way that we exchange value with each other.

Speaker 2: 25:52

In this exchange paradigm of I'm not you and you're not me, go to the store and you buy a candy bar, you slap your coin down. That's no trust involved, there's no relationship between you and that other person. So that small act reinforces a value system and a behavior. And so what we're really doing here and why this is so radical and, and for me, so refreshing, because it's not just theory, it is theory directly applied to design. So we're designing new information systems, new technological systems to facilitate not just the flow of resources but the flow of information, the flow of trust. You know, and we're a lot of these people are starting to actually measure these things and starting to say we want to diversify the way that we're making these calculations in society, where right now it's just money. Money is the only thing, money is everything. But if we realize that we can start to change it, we can alchemize it into something new and different and by changing those relationships and changing our technologies we can change ourselves in the world.

Speaker 1: 27:00

Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the steps necessary, for sure One of the big ones.

Speaker 2: 27:07

Well, what are some like some of the insights that you've gotten from this conference. We've had a lot of great talks and conversations and it's been nothing but fucking phenomenally high flying, interesting people talking and sharing.

Speaker 1: 27:20

Yeah, I mean this conference has been interesting because now this is the third installment, so like we had, you know, the first one, in which not many people really knew each other.

Speaker 1: 27:32

They didn't know, kind of like, what to expect. They didn't know, like you know, felix and Julia kind of invited us to this place and it was kind of like everybody was throwing their ideas all over the place. And now this is the third installment, so things have solidified a bit more. There's now, you know, at least for the people who have come back, it's been like a reinforcement of our relationships and, like now, shared understanding and like context that all of us have to. Where we have been able to, I mean maybe we have been able to get like more nonsensical, because now we have like inside jokes, we have like, but more we have like shared understanding about like like we know what the commons are, we know what like mutual credit is, we know like we have a lot of shared sort of definitions about things, and I think I felt like this conference was a more mature because of that.

Speaker 2: 28:28

So we were able to like, I think, get fairly deep on a few things, which was really nice it was very satisfying and affirming for me and my own novice sort of like research, my own late night obsessions to be able to come in late in the game and be able to keep up. You're talking about something about the. This is a very special space. Yeah, watch that light. Okay, I kind of want to maybe back up a little bit into we're dealing with tech difficulties. I just went on a blistering rant about post capitalism. Yeah, why don't we kind of pull back there and define post capitalism?

Speaker 1: 29:10

I mean for me post capitalism can be. It is I mean first and foremost the acknowledgments that capitalism will end, whether we like, wanted to or not, eventually, you know, all things come to an end. And there is kind of like, of course post capitalism can be post capitalism as in we're in, like you know, apocalyptic kind of Mad Max future scenario. But I would really much rather that it go towards a more, towards a more egalitarian future where we are relying less on capital in a democratic way to get away from kind of capital as like the main power relationship that drives economic activity in in our society and capitalism. So yeah, so for me, like I don't I don't know if this was a I talked about this but I don't remember if it was in the from the cutoff but like there's a need to kind of identify, like what is the post capitalist subject? Or what is the person, what do they, what do they want and what do they do in post capitalism? Like what is, you know, five minutes after the revolution? What does your world look like when capitalism is officially done? We've pressed the big red button, capitalism is finally over. What does that look like?

Speaker 1: 30:33

And I think, at least for me, I mean one. It means getting rid of capital as the main source of economic power, because capital is the way that essentially, essentially, billionaires and large corporations are the economic planners of society. They have economic, they have planned. You know the way that the world works today. If a billionaire company wants to make a million widgets, they just assign the capital for a widget factory in the cheapest place they can find and labor will move there. They can make they. It's like a magic for resources to move right. And so I think, in order to get away from this, there's a need to essentially democratize the economy, that we need to involve more people, to have the ability to give their voice about what should and should not be the type of you know how they would use their resources.

Speaker 2: 31:24

Yeah, I don't know exactly what all we missed in that cutoff, but two ideas I think are really essential is that the economy, or economics, is not just money, it isn't just, you know, business, it isn't just shopping and stuff. It is the codified sort of relationships between people in terms of power, in terms of decision making, in terms of who gets what and how we make it and where it comes from, and our relationship to nature, our relationship to each other. It's the management of the household and the ability to recognize, that is, the ability to step into our agency, to change it. And until we do that, you know, as long as we're in this space of capitalism, which is not just an economic philosophy, it is not just a way of doing business, a way of, you know, incentivizing people, it is a consciousness, it is this thing that has been reinforced through this medium of money and the technologies, the environments, the places, the spaces that we interact with as mediums shape our consciousness. Our environment dictates our behavior, our material conditions create the mentality that we take into the world, and so the human being is very fluid, we're very adaptive and changeable and we have been forced through, squeezed through this tube of this one very narrow way of being, where more and more and more, all the time is goes through this lens of accumulation, of competition, of dominance, because these are necessities in this system. And so I think that, in the spirit of changing that, creating new tools and systems that allow more people's voices to be heard, that allow us to gain more of an insight and an understanding of the flows of resources, of energy, of will, of I'm doing good, I'm doing bad, with many, many red buttons that we push many times to the day, but I don't think that there is one big red button that we will push that will bring about this revolution that will sweep across the world instantaneously. I think it's more like we will create multiple feedback loops in terms of new structures of organization. There will be apps that will un-make capitalism, you know.

Speaker 2: 33:30

But more than anything, that space of post-capitalism is, in a way, the space of pre-capitalism, which is the mentality of the commons and the gift it is us interacting with each other as each other, as extensions of each other. And so this place, specifically, is a beautiful example of that of the commons, of a common shared space. There are people who work here, there are people who own, there are people who are paid to be here, but really everyone that has been in this space, through this event and structure, has very fluidly interacted and accessed the space as something that is shared, something that we all access collectively. The kitchen is not owned by anyone in particular. There's not a boss of the kitchen, there's not a servile worker in the kitchen washing the dishes. Even the head funders of this place are in there peeling potatoes and washing dishes.

Speaker 2: 34:21

So we're all participating in the work of society and we're in that space of the commons that is the shared space of humanity.

Speaker 2: 34:27

We breathe the same air, we have the same shared set of ideas and values. We know intuitively when we're out of this separatized, I'm me and I'm the only one and I'm just like me and there's no one else out there and I'm in communicable, this space. That is the mentality of capitalism, where we forget that the pain that you feel when you feel pain is the pain that I feel. The love that you feel when you feel love is the love that we feel. We have a shared understanding of reality. We know that when we eat food, we're going to poop it out. You know. We have this base of understanding that is collective and shared, and that is the space of post-capitalism, that is the space of the now. I mean, I would say it's the space where most people live for most of their lives. They don't know it yet and it's just a matter of finding those places, those people, those experiences and expanding them into more and more and more areas of our life as we kick capital out.

Speaker 1: 35:25

Yeah, I think, for me, post-capitalism requires, you know, an optimistic post-capitalism requires an increase in collective intelligence, just the ability for people to know what is the current state of society, where is there place in it, and like to know that, hey, right now, like I know that people are hurting and there are like things that I can do meaningfully in order to like reverse that, to change that within my context.

Speaker 1: 35:57

So, yeah, so I think that has a lot to do with the crypto world being, you know, blockchains and distributed ledger technologies being this kind of like shared ledger, like shared understanding of what is going on, so everybody can kind of refer to and have like knowledge about the fact that this or that is happening and you know this or that proposal or this or that vote and people are leaning towards this or that.

Speaker 1: 36:25

So we can have a more shared understanding of reality rather than our hyper like. What capitalism I think has done is like split people, like incredibly, to an extent that people really they experience reality differently and they see the world very we can get the same set of facts and somebody else can like think completely different of it, and that has, I think, a lot to do with like priming people like capitalism, like a very common strategy for marketing, is splitting the market, so it creates, like you know, sort of particular identities around commodity consumption, essentially to like create the type of consumer you want and then, like all these other things become packaged within it, that like, if you know, one thing says this and it means like it's a right coded thing or it's a left coded thing or whatever else, and this has caused a lot of problems, obviously.

Speaker 2: 37:24

Yeah, I mean the separation and the division is the essential philosophical underpinning. I think the separation of individualism, of I'm me and I'm not you, and money reinforces this, like trade reinforces this Quid pro quo I'm going to do this for you and you do this for me, and then we're done. You know, like that, that is the severing of that bond, of that cohesion of trust that builds up over time. I think it's powerful and insight for me in the past several months has been that ending accounting Well. So we're our organization group movement. Ethos is we want to move beyond money. You know, fundamentally we want to move beyond exchange as the way that we meet needs.

Speaker 2: 38:09

As humans lived from the majority of our history, we did not trade pieces of paper or we did not trade cows for chickens to meet our basic needs. We did things collectively, we did them in a shared way and that's the overarching intention and goal. We want to get, you know, through to a gift economy or an economy of sharing, an economy where we are collectively involved in each other's lives and there isn't this energy loss of exchange and trade and business and you know this is these are just primitive, primitive ways of engaging. We see it. But it's also important to recognize two things One, that we're in a transitional space away from that world of money where everything is money, every fucking thing cost money, everything is monetized and transactional in this society, so we have to transition through that. But also that in thinking of money as an information system, there's a fantastic Alan Watts lecture about money where he's like one of the problems in our world is the failure of one of our information networks and it's called money, and I want to go inside in a minute.

Speaker 1: 39:13

here we stormed out, see storm moving in very fast I can finish this point and we can move inside and report in there.

Speaker 2: 39:19

Maybe more people will be involved, will be more collaborative. But basically, that we don't beat money by just stopping accounting. I do think we need to stop the transactionalism of like. I give you this for you give each other money. We need to be gifting more and taking the transaction out and stopping this conditionality of like. I'm going to do this for you because this but it's like our ability to add more streams of accounting, add more currencies, that we are measuring, that we are making account of more ledgers, of amalgamations of the data and information of like how we're doing, what we're eating, how we're spending. You know that's the power that crypto and AI and oh my God, and it's, let's go.

Speaker 4: 40:00

We'll pick this up in a minute, gang. Hey, friends, we'll return to the main conversation in just a moment, but we're taking this quick break to ask do you want to do something about all the issues we talk about here on our show? Do you want to learn more, get involved and help us help others break out of the cycle? Step one is to join the growing community of rebels and kind hearts, sharing their knowledge and passion. Follow Moneyless Society on our social media pages and spread the message to people who need it.

Speaker 4: 40:26

When you're ready, you can get involved by reaching out and becoming a Moneyless Society volunteer. We need every skill imaginable, large or small, if we're going to resist the powers destroying our planet, and even if you don't have time to volunteer, you can help us build the dream with donations of any size. We create all of this community and content because it is our passion, but we need resources to get it done. Monthly Patreon donors receive cool perks like early access to future episodes, and visitors to our website, moneylesssocietycom, can buy Mosho shirts and other merchandise that help spread awareness. We're glad you're here and we hope that you'll keep learning and growing with us. The goal may seem far away, but we can get there together.

Speaker 2: 41:12

I knew the Commons Hub was a special place when I got here, because the Moneyless Society book by our own Matt Holton was already on the shelf and, as this is a dual pod, if this episode's content is more interesting to you, I highly recommend Joshua DeVilla's book Blockchain Radicals how Capitalism Ruined Crypto and how to Fix it. Okay, so we are back in the flow after a little bit of interruptus, after two interruptuses. Well, back in the Commons, you're the host now.

Speaker 1: 41:51

I'm the host. I'm curious for you what are your main learnings? Trying to not live with money.

Speaker 2: 42:03

Well, I don't try not to live with money. I've tried to live with money and failed horribly. And when I try to live for money or with you know I need money to live. Yeah, yeah, well, it's minimal, I don't. I don't.

Speaker 2: 42:18

Actually, if I had absolutely no money I would be able to live because I would find friends. Basically I would make friends with people wherever I was, like when I was hitchhiking and traveling, I would like very instinctually, like uncannily, like gravitate toward my people, like I really believe, like there's something to like there are frequency receptors in our body that are seeking, like, the vibes of other people. I'm not going to go down and hit the rabbit hole there, but I was able to drift, like quite miraculously, toward people and then connect with them just by being vulnerable and open and trusting, and they reciprocate that. I mean there was one guy in Baton Rouge where I had no place to sleep. I just got into this town, I didn't know a single soul Was at a bar and I just walked up to a complete stranger and I was like, hey man, here's the thing. I am traveling, I'm on an adventure and I don't have a place to stay and I don't know this town, can I stay on your couch? And I was like here's a picture of my ID, take a picture of it and send it to your grandmother just to make sure I don't kill you or something. And you know he laughed and we started to kind of talk. He was like, well, you know, let's talk about it. And we just we had a shot and we talked and we connected and within five minutes he was like, yeah, sure, I'm saying my couch, so we can always find their ability to meet those needs.

Speaker 2: 43:41

Like one of the most beautiful moneyless projects I've ever seen wasn't like some AI, you know, control system that you know managed resources and there was a system that was automated and it was a group of people without houses who organized a community in Echo Park in LA, in the pandemic, and they had a beautiful like tent community in this beautiful park and they had help from other people in the community and they all worked together and at one point they were paying, they were making donations and they were paying people and they found that it destroyed their motivation. So they stopped and they were like fuck it, we don't want the money, we really don't. They had a community garden. They created a thriving, beautiful, moneyless community, which is how they meet their needs. Community, it's the fucking mode of production community and the state smashed it up and, you know, destroyed it and threw their tents in the trash and arrested people.

Speaker 2: 44:34

But I'm not. I don't think people should just go out and get money. Well, actually I do. I think everyone should spend at least some time in their life trying to live without it and even go on one adventure Go hitchhike, go couch surf, go find what your role is in society without money, when there is no money, because you don't truly know yourself if you could just pay for everything.

Speaker 1: 44:56

Right. There is no freedom, really, when everything's behind a paywall.

Speaker 2: 45:01

No, and it's an illusion of freedom to think that if you're rich and you have enough money to step over the paywall, that you're still free Because you're still living in this horrible conditionality. I mean, even billionaires are working like 60 hours a week. That's not a free person. That's not freedom. I really believe we're not free until we all are, and especially with the worsening inequality and the public health epidemic of violence and crime and shootings and, of course, the pending climate apocalypse that's going to happen if we don't learn to share that. It affects all of us directly that the effects of this monetary system and the separation at its core are driving humanity apart. They're just. They're splintering and destroying organized life and reducing it to its simpler evolutionary forms. Like, like we're reducing the earth to a rock with dead thing because of our ultimate belief in this thing money, that we think we need money. That went on this little rant recently on Instagram. It was like that we have to ask money for permission to live.

Speaker 1: 46:04

Like the term, the cost of living, like I feel like people don't internalize Gasly.

Speaker 2: 46:11

Fucked out the cost to live yeah life itself is not free, as my great friend, aisha woke scientists said. I interviewed her on our podcast that, like no creature in this world is intrinsically allowed to exist, even nature, nature has to earn its keep. Humans have to earn their keep. Buckminster Fuller was a brilliant person to point out that this specious notion that we have to earn our right to live is obsolete, that we need to send people back to doing what they were doing before. They had to go and get a job. You know, the work of being human is work, like when I was traveling and I was, you know, in hitchhiking, with people in their cabs, I was working, I was providing a service for them, even as I was gaining service for them, which, for me, was learning, like listening, I mean, I taught as much as I talk. Maybe I'm not the best listener, but being able to deeply listen to people and to give them insight into their problems and to give them perspective that they would never have because they're inside of their life.

Speaker 2: 47:12

You want to be a podcast with us? Cool, one second. I'm talking about Peco. Peco, come be in the podcast. Come on, you're like the most interesting person in the room right now. Thanks, bro. Well, we all are Our collective intelligence.

Speaker 2: 47:33

But look geometrically, we need one more person here. It's going to be in balance. Well, you can just listen. Drink beer, okay, all right, thanks, let's see. How do we. You got to share. You're going to have to share in my let's trade places Post capital shuffle.

Speaker 1: 47:56

Also got to be careful with the when I got to leave for the train.

Speaker 3: 48:01

What time is that?

Speaker 1: 48:05

45 or something like that.

Speaker 2: 48:07

You're the floating poster.

Speaker 3: 48:10

No, no, he's only going to pack.

Speaker 2: 48:13

Okay, what is it? What's the question here? We're bringing him into the convo.

Speaker 1: 48:18

I mean, I've actually. How have you found the CCG? Was it something you expected.

Speaker 3: 48:27

No, but I didn't expect much.

Speaker 1: 48:29

How did I?

Speaker 3: 48:30

experience CCG. Yeah, I guess it was just kind of a memetic brew really Quite interesting stuff, various ideas coming at the appropriate time. Leo was particularly fascinating just because of what he was playing with was speaking to my experience, they were also particularly fascinating. There's a lot of stuff he covers highly meta and just fits a lot of stuff I've been working with. Can you loop the audience in a?

Speaker 2: 49:03

little bit into what those things that were being talked about were.

Speaker 3: 49:09

Leo was talking about the interfacing or the interpreters or interfaces or shapes interacting that changed their shape through the interaction. This is kind of like meta-generalization of life experience, that kind of stuff. So I guess he was kind of getting up into the meta for that. And yeah, the poetics that came out of the machine were particularly beautiful, not that I can remember those. Then, on state box and applied category theories also felt pretty resonant to me in the sense that it was a way of bounding complexity and kind of limiting the complexity in order to ensure kind of effective processes. And so we talked about I've got these mandalas which I'll show you both at this point, not that the listeners here can see, but we're talking about those in relation to state box wiki or process wiki and then the breaking of symmetries to create processes and thus the complexities bound in the sense that you've already bound it in the mandala and then used breaking into symmetries, right.

Speaker 2: 50:30

Well, we were just talking about the structures in society and the technologies that create the consciousness that we have. We were talking last night. I was looking at the notebook, Interesting interfaces.

Speaker 2: 50:40

I was like what are you into and you're like this kind of shit. You open up your notebook and it was like all these mandalas and I was like, oh, I love shit like that. But you were basically taking notes and organizing things into these patterns of geometric patterns and shapes, that kind of. When you look at them it produces an organizational sort of matrix in the brain that you think about things in a different way. So, yeah, that's been a really interesting through line. Here is the way that the mediums that we interact with they shape our experiences.

Speaker 3: 51:13

So if you're looking at one shape versus another, that's changing you in the kind of process of structural coupling. So you interact with your environment, you're changed by, which gets into your discussion or post capitalist systems. In order to actually effectively escape the meme of capitalism, then you actually need to escape it, which is kind of a transcendental trap, because you need to couple with that structure outside of the capitalistic system. So we've got all these different communities trying all these different things in order to just create enough of a gap to transition.

Speaker 2: 51:48

For anybody watching here.

Speaker 2: 51:50

Every single conversation with every single person here has been that interesting and I just want to remind people that your people are out there, that one of my mandates and missions in life is find the others, find them.

Speaker 2: 52:04

They are out there and if you have an idea of how the world should be changed, chances are absolutely. Without a doubt, you are not the only one thinking about it. Chances are there are people who are actually further down the rabbit hole, like I was at a conference the other day talking about these beautiful direct economic democracy systems and I asked the guy giving the presentation who else is working on this stuff and he was like no one. And I kind of raised an eyebrow because I knew people who were working on that shit and I think we have to ask the question am I alone in this? Instead of this Ted Kazinski attitude where it's like I'm the only one who thinks this way, I'm a loner to go off into the woods and write your manifesto instead of working with other people bringing in more feedback Pretty both Harmonic recursion of whole apart, and so where the parts are the simultaneously holes embedded in other holes that are also apart.

Speaker 2: 53:00

I'm going to have to interview you separately. I loved our talk so much. Oh, okay, I got that.

Speaker 3: 53:05

I got that anyway. All right, it was good.

Speaker 2: 53:09

I think it was a small taste a taster of a conversation I was hoping more people would rush in as we go here, but I don't know if we have that much time left here. But you're in the driver's seat here, yeah.

Speaker 1: 53:23

I mean for you. I'm curious, like what for you, was it that made you rethink crypto? I guess a bit I'm assuming, like probably beforehand you might have been dismisses above it because of its speculative nature. What was it for you? That was kind of like the switch, because for a lot of people I think it is quite difficult, and for me it's still difficult, to find out how to help people have that switch. That's why I like to ask people how for them it happened, because I'm still trying to figure it out. I think again.

Speaker 2: 53:52

It was that moment of realization that, like all, money is a monkey picture, like George Washington is a fucking monkey. We have this piece of paper that represents value. That's like. That's an NFT, like the original NFT is land ownership, like I don't know. I just I am in a relentlessly cooperative phase, which I hope is not a phase of seeking solutions desperately, because I am brutally aware of how fucking dire our situation is and I'm really tired of seeing the insulation and isolation between all these different clicks and groups and people that aren't working together to solve problems collectively, collaboratively. They're looking at things in their own way and they're talking about all these silver bullet. Solutions like this is the answer, this is the solution.

Speaker 2: 54:44

I was at a farm recently with this guy who's a solve about Bitcoin, obsessed with Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin. He worships it like a God. He thinks like this is the thing we need to change society, is this uncorruptible ledger? And and it was just really trying to get him to understand like there's parts of what you're talking about that are needed, that are important, that are true, instead of being like, oh, he's a Bitcoin guy, fuck him. It's like we have to cooperate to save our lives and so I don't know.

Speaker 2: 55:10

Part of it is actually interacting with people who are in the spaces, in the region space, who are talking about regenerative finance, and you know we're trying to work with the existing Systems and alchemize them. I don't know when it was a shift, but I just I don't want to be closed minded in anything. I want to be open to any idea, and if anybody is out there saying this is a solution to global problems that are going to fucking kill us all, I will listen. If a crazy dude on the street comes up to me with a stack of papers and says this is my plan to save the world, I will read it.

Speaker 4: 55:45

Maybe not the whole thing.

Speaker 2: 55:45

But I will give it a chance and so, yeah, it's been really great finding this community First, this kind of outsider. It was skeptical. I was skeptical of moneyless society at first because they didn't seem to have a lot of grounding in the Facebook group that I joined. That became this larger thing, that they didn't have class analysis or that they lacked some piece of green anarchist theory or whatever the fuck I was into at the time. But I pushed through that skepticism to see like, oh actually, if I investigate these people's analysis, it's very, very thorough. They have a deep understanding and no more than I do in a lot of instances. But I think that that underlying principle is that we need to work together with all peoples not all peoples, but any peoples to transition from whatever structure we're stuck in and connect in the systems. You know, because we need everybody we need honestly, this is going to be a controversial statement, but to bring about a transition to post-capitalism we need capitalists. We need to change those peoples' minds who have access to resources and money.

Speaker 2: 56:52

Like me personally, I don't live without money as a choice. I just don't know how to make money. So for me to connect with people who have money and believe in the things that I'm saying and the projects that I'm doing and the film that I'm making and all that stuff and support me helps me more than most things. Like, I'm quite self-contained. I'm a crazy little explorer. I can survive in any environment. I can socialize my way through any place I've ever been. I know exactly what I'm doing everywhere I'm going, even if I don't know where I'm going or why. But I need physical support for things like airlines and trains and you know hostels and food, you know.

Speaker 1: 57:28

Of course, yeah, and you have to pay for it.

Speaker 1: 57:33

Unfortunately, yeah, there's not much we ask, but yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 57:37

But I think this I mean for me when I think about the capital is a relationship instantiated in an object, like it's either in the money form or commodity form, most likely, right, the general sort of like formula of capital.

Speaker 1: 57:53

If you know, like MCM prime, like you have money then you turn it into a commodity which you then sell for more money, yeah, and part of the breaking of capital as a social relationship, at least in this formula, implies that there's a need to either break the commodity or break the money aspect. And of course the commodities are nice because we can use them and do shit with it. But the money part is sort of like this abstracted kind of system of trade or a facilitation of trade within, at least as it exists today in its form, in this like social relationship. So I mean I do applaud, like trying to criticize that aspect and thinking about how we can do that more because, like in your story with the guy that you asked you to see on his couch, we have abundance, we have plenty, yeah, and we have plenty of people to meet their needs and, yeah, it's this power relationship that prevents us from doing it.

Speaker 2: 58:54

I want to tell this little anecdote that I've been kind of working up and thinking about lately that, like the absurdity of the commodity, the absurdity of money. Imagine, like someone you know 2000 years ago or five, after 5000 years, someone 10,000 years ago goes up to the people in their village and they're like I'm going to do magic, I'm going to do a magic thing. Watch me, watch me turn this cat into a bag of potatoes. And they're like okay, you're insane, you're a crazy person, you know you're. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard, you know.

Speaker 2: 59:27

But that's really what's happening when we have the commodity form. You know, when something is a commodity, it's like you have the cat and it's worth a certain number of monkey pictures or coins or or whatever. And then you have this calculating mechanism where you say this cat is worth this much, it has this much utility or this much use value, however you designate it, and it's highly speculative. It's things aren't worth what they're really worth, and iPhone should cost, you know, thousands of dollars if we accounted for the environmental externalities and the child labor that goes into making it all this stuff. But I digress. So you have the cat, which is worth this number of monkey pictures and then you say, all right, someone comes up to you and they want that cat and you say, all right, I'm going to sell it to you for this number of this amount of monkey pictures. Then you have those monkey pictures which you can go and convert into potatoes or a thousand potatoes or whatever it is, and this is an insane wizardry. It is not rational at all. There is maybe a rationale to it, a calculation that forms in our brains. Over time. It has been normalized so much that this is the foundation of society, this is how you do things, that it's a desirable, good thing to be able to quantize and reduce reality to something that you can trade for other things, when everything is different and discreet. And you cannot say that any number of potatoes is worth the value of a fucking cat, especially if it's something that's your pet, that's your friend, that you're connected to, that you have an infinitely qualitative relationship to. So I just think that in critiquing money in these forms, I don't think there's something that's always going to exist Commodities or money or trade. They didn't exist for the majority of our existence and people met their needs through community and through other means, through other relationships, other arrangements. Trade was something that you did with strangers, people that were like on the verge of being enemies. David Graber says in the debt for 5,000 years is great line race like.

Speaker 2: 1:01:26

A world based on trade is one that's forever predicated on violence. Like the fist is poised, the world based on trade is forever predicated on violence. The fist is poised. Like we're always at each other's throats. It could break out at any time. It's violence between each other, because what we're doing, when we're separating ourselves into this market paradigm of trading, trading and trading is a violent thing.

Speaker 2: 1:01:53

I was just in Colombia and people come up to you and they're like buy this little shitty flute or buy this little thing, or like they'll come up with a handful of candy Just bullshit. It has no value as an excuse to trade so that you can get their money. And when you say no, in my case, they assume I'm a white person. I have a lot of money and in some ways, I have a tremendous amount of more wealth than they do in terms of privilege, but I don't have that money. So I have to say no and it's hostile. It's a hostile arrangement. It's not this friendly. You know who's supposed this? Someone's dad is calling him.

Speaker 2: 1:02:33

But yeah, this act that we think is so benign in trade, which, beyond just money, is hostile and is separate and gift economies, like my friends, the Arwakos, who I just spent a lot of time with in Colombia, indigenous peoples that live without money. And they say very clearly I asked them why don't you live with money? And they basically said this long, incredibly beautiful answer of like there are two worlds there's a world of darkness and there is a world of light. There is a world of separation and conflict and competition and there is a world of prosperity and community. And they basically said because we live without money, because we live with each other, because we live as equals, we live in the world of light when they see each other, even if they're total strangers there's like 60,000 of them so they immediately walk up to each other. They go into their mochiya, they get a handful of coca, they put it in that other person's bag. That's not a trade. That's saying I'm you and you're me. But when you do the money thing, you ex-gé, you mediate your values. In this thing we think is so neutral, you are severing that connection and that trust. You were telling a story that I am separate from you, we are separate.

Speaker 2: 1:03:40

So I could go on for hours and hours and hours, and our show is hours and hours and hours of talking about why this thing we call money is this ultimately deluded Psychosis that is is going to be the death of us all, because it's an abstraction. It's absurd. It's an absurdity that we have. We think we need to ask permission from the market to save the world, to transition off of energy systems that are destroying life as we know it, and this perpetual need to commodify, this need to sell more, this need for constant cyclical consumption and turnover and job growth. This, these, all these mechanics that are embedded into the system based around this thing we call money that is now phenomenally obsolete, especially with better information systems for accounting resource flows and and energy and and you know, the the currencies of the actual scarce resources of our finite planet that we can, you know, account for in ways that are not accounted for in the system that externalizes them totally.

Speaker 2: 1:04:38

We can transcend this, we can create new things, and it's been a really beautiful thing being at this conference seeing people taking those steps to like how do we take money as it is and split it into these other Currencies and these other systems and we need something to account for things. We do need something like mutual credit to be able to facilitate it's value exchange in society and for people to account for things, even though one of my favorite anecdotes from that book that is this Inuit guy who's like an anthropologist who fails at the hunt, and this Inuit dude brings him this like 800 pounds of meat Walrus meat and he's like whoa, thank you so much. He's like, don't thank me where I come from. We are human. We help each other. That's what means to be human is to help each other. It's not to Remark unless not to take account of you owe me this and I owe you this. That's what makes us human.

Speaker 1: 1:05:30

Yeah, I think Generally there's like kind of like these three ways in which people we talk about like private property, prop. They're like three kind of property relationships I guess you can call them that people generally think of. There's like usus, like being able to use it yeah. There's like being able to destroy it and being able to profit. Use of profit yeah, and being able to profit from it as well.

Speaker 1: 1:05:57

I Think it's a David Graver who kind of point out that maybe there is this fourth one. It's like this responsibility to care for something that actually Like, if you like, that's like these three are kind of like property, private property generally. It's not about, but the desire to care for something like we pay for. For example, we would people buy a pet, they spend money and then they spend money to like feed the pets. Yeah, it's not like you make money off of it, it's not like you, you don't profit off of it. And to profit off of off of it would be ridiculous. If people don't really Like sell so like so much, I wouldn't want to sell the pet that they like bought for their family. Yeah, there's a really interesting, maybe just one last story about crypto and then maybe we should have out.

Speaker 1: 1:06:47

But there's a project started by Terra zero, which is a art group in Berlin mostly, and they had a product. They had a exhibit called flower tokens and essentially you could, at the exhibit, buy a token that would give you the rights to, like you would own one of the flowers that were at the exhibit and there'd be like constantly this video ongoing and like you can kind of see like the health of the flower and that flower gives you the right to water the plant. That's it, just to water the plant. But at the same time they had a marketplace going on where you could buy and sell these flower tokens so that you can buy a way to have a right to water the plant. The marketplace didn't work out because the price that after someone had bought a flower token that they wanted to sell at was way too high Because nobody wanted to get rid of their ability to care for a flower.

Speaker 1: 1:07:41

Like completely against the kind of like homo economic is logic that we generally taught, like econ 101 or classical liberal economics, like we're like utility maximizers or whatever. I Think it just kind of like shows that there is this like need and like human desire to care for other things and to care for each other. That is lost in Oftentimes kind of like this, the way that we think about private property and capital Generally as well.

Speaker 2: 1:08:11

Yeah, the, the third form of ownership, I think, which is Roman, is a use of fruit, and Murray Bookchin talked a lot about that and I think that the seriously wrong podcast boys talk a lot about that with their Library economy. We talk about that essentially. Jacques Fresco talked about that with an access economy, or, basically, where you're accessing things, you're not owning them, like most of the things here in the Commons hub, like our accessed community, where it's like you, and I think this is a very beautiful, elegant Transformation because it's, like George Montbio said really simply, like we can all have nice things if we just share them, like in the Commons. That's what the Commons is like. There used to be communal water parks and theme parks and things like that that were sabotaged Literally just because of racism. So, support people.

Speaker 2: 1:09:00

Black people couldn't access them and so we could be living in a world where we we're all living in an extremely high standard of living. We all have extremely Good services. We have good food, good healthcare, great transportation, beautiful housing. You know we're all participating in the design and the facilitation and the care of that world, but we don't all individually need to own it. We don't all individually need to have a car. You know we can have a system where we Slash the number of cars on the road and you accept you have access to a car when you need it and Most of the time you don't need it because you have access to the train.

Speaker 2: 1:09:35

No one owns the train, you know well. There's private companies that own trains. It's just a fucked up thing. No one should be able to own a train. But when you get on the train, it's like we're all sharing it. When you go into the kitchen, we're all sharing it, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:09:46

So it was like we can all have a lot more if we just give up this neurotic, deluded, metaphysical belief that I own a flower or that I own a car that I own, might even own my own body, you know, which is just something that's ultimately rented. So Little wrap-up. I mean I just think it's really great to connect with you and connect with this community. I'm just very excited to formal relationships and work more in these spaces and and and just do that work of like Connecting more people who are trying to do the thing and save the world, change things and evolve new systems and structures, and no matter if they are totally, if we totally align in all these ways. I mean, the space where we disagree is where the interesting conversations happen. No, but no there is.

Speaker 2: 1:10:33

There are solutions are out there. You know Anybody who doesn't thinks at this point. Not enough people get it. Where there are no solutions, there are no answers. You're not working hard enough to ask the questions and to seek and to look. You're just assuming that, that there's, there's blockchain socialists. At this point, like information explosion is so great that any kind of person you can imagine is out there, like applying X to Y and and synthesizing it into Z and that's. That's a beautiful thing to me. Is this shared future. That isn't a monolith, that isn't a monoculture. There are many futures. There are many worlds possible.

Speaker 1: 1:11:08

Yeah, absolutely yeah, I appreciate you having me on. I appreciate that you were able to come at the sort of towards the end of the of the conference and you're able to see it and have a taste of it and share with others Kind of like the stuff that we're doing and, yeah, kind of the the weirdness of it all I'm glad we can get on camera.

Speaker 2: 1:11:28

Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna help push you to be on camera more as well. This, this, this handsome face here, this guy, he doesn't, he wants to do audio only podcast. So you kidding me? You know, you heard that thing. You got a face for radio, you got a face for podcast, you know well, yeah, it's just been really great to connect. I really found like another piece of my home which is isn't place like I don't. That doesn't intuitively make sense to me ever to like settle down in one place. I want to help build this global village of communities and cooperatives and and new systems that I can get outs around all over the world and you know, know that anywhere that I go, that the regenerators are there, you know the people are there.

Speaker 2: 1:12:08

And the weirdness of it all is this like that's the signal, that's the currency. For me it's like synchronicities. Yeah, things line up like I know, like I'm going in the right direction.

Speaker 1: 1:12:17

Nice, I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 1:12:19

Yeah, all right, cut I like and subscribe, hit, hit, hit, hit that bell. Uh leave a comment and uh donate to our patreon.

Speaker 1: 1:12:34

Me too yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:12:36

I second that. Yeah, if this is going to be like a dual pod, like like I'm gonna, I'll give you a shout out. Follow Josh, the blockchain socials on twitter, youtube, wherever you get your podcasts. Donate to the patreon doing amazing work. They're making a documentary right now, traveling around the world and and exploring other crypto projects, exploring the space of like, this whole crypto future, this whole web three, this new technological paradigm and Gotta. Support each other. Follow money in society. Support us.

Speaker 2: 1:13:08

You know we're working to go against the grain here to create a new paradigm. We are putting food in people's bellies with local food programs. We have a volunteer group. We are starting a systemic support group for people to work on their feelings and and just get more into that space of like, out of the individualization of your life. My life is mine and my problems are mine and I'm on my own Into sharing more and commenting and all things. And, of course, I'm here to shoot this movie which is just getting absolutely out of hand. Mind blowing, amazing, beautiful new worlds. Possible revolution is already happening. We're here, we're gonna do this thing. We're not gonna go extinct or, if we do, we're gonna go down swinging.

Speaker 1: 1:13:49

Yeah, real code on having a good time, at least Cheers. Let's go play smash pros. Yeah, let's go.

Speaker 2: 1:13:56

A special shout out to one of my favorite places on planet earth the commons hub and the crypto commons association, the commons gathering and all the associated projects, movements and people in the collaborative finance and post capitalist movement. This is a movement of people that isn't just theorizing, but they are programming their values both into new protocols, all kinds of transformative new systemic structures. But more than that they're creating a place here where you can come and live in the post capitalist present. We're going to be doing a lot of collaboration with them in the Years to come, as they are one of the most aligned organizations that we've found. But anybody who subscribes to our patreon right now you can get a really great little conversation with julio, one of the heads of the Organization, about collaborative finance platform, co-ops, radical sort of networks, transition economies to build the fucking future. Today, places like this are living proof. The solutions are out there. Go find them.