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! ---------------------------- "WTF do BLOCKCHAIN and SOCIALISM have to do with each other?...
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Transcript
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.
Okay. So what do blockchain and socialism
have to do with each other? Blockchain and socialism are quite different things. Right? Socialism, we're talking about really a, a socioeconomic system, where 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, 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 a 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.
The old world is ending. And we have the opportunity to rethink everything. 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. But the alternative is an inevitable nightmare. We're your hosts, Matt Holton. Amanda Smith. And Zachary Marlowe. And together. We can move past this economic absurdity. And come together to actualize our collective potential. To create something completely new. We are Marlowe Society. 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.
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 we'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 Socialists,
and he had invited me as well to come. We're gonna we're gonna investigate that Yeah. In a little bit. Sure. But I just, I completely locked into this. I have been trying to connect with people with the Holochain team for a while. I've been very interested in mutual credit in the regenerative finance community in 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 Holochain and ended up getting invited to this conference. Thought it was next month, was thought I had plenty of time, was talking to Maritz on the phone, he's like no no it's happening now, like let's get you out here. So 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 pass, you know, like, in Six Flags. Like, I got straight to Space Mountain or whatever, and, I've I've just loved every minute of it. It's been fantastic. So,
You fit right in, to be honest.
I know.
Like, you 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 niche.
It's been it's been awesome. Like, 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 where I was like, yeah. I wanna create this, application this ecosystem of applications for gift economy that connects us with this and is the scalar for fractal self 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 nodes that the smaller circle that lets us 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. Yeah. Yeah. 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. I know so many programmers who've had 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. 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. And you you wrote a book called, Blockchain Radicals.
We're hold up the book and and I should have wrote a copy of it. Blockchain Radicals. How how how capitalism ruined crypto and how to fix it. Yeah. How? 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 the thought that I was going to change it afterwards. When I made it, I didn't really know what to call myself. I was sort of like, well, I know what I want to talk about, but, you know, it sounded very it's it's, like, very on the nose, obviously. Love it. But I didn't want to be, like, you know, whatever, Shadow Wolf sixty nine and then, you know, I'm talking about this stuff. So yeah. So it it would 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 or with crypto since it is crypto is generally seen as, like, a very hyper speculative and, like, very, like, free market fundamentalist 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 the technology to 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, I kinda 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 who wrote Capitalist Realism. So they write a lot of kind of, like, radical left wing philosophy, kind of somewhat esoteric, kind of book. 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 on unfortunate loss. Yeah. Wrote,
Capitalist Realism, which is the basic idea, you know, that Margaret Thatcher beautifully expressed that there is no alternative, Tina, that we cannot imagine our way out of capitalism. And, so, yes, it's a really interesting coming together of these two seemingly disparate fields that I feel like when I kind of move past that, gut level, like, need to vomit of people, like, trying to create microtransactions for their friend groups or monetizing monkey pictures. But I don't know. I just I feel like for a long time, like, I I have rounded a curve on crypto and was 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 violence of colonialism and all this other things that push us toward being, needing needing to embrace a, anti capitalist, post capitalist, leftist, a value system of consciousness that pushes that technology to do what it can do.
Yeah. I mean, like, I think we 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 to begin with.
Human natures were greedy and inquisitive. We like to fuck people over. Right? Oh, yeah. It's human nature to deprive health care of children. Right? Yeah. Very, natural. Yeah. I 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 dupe other people. And it's all based on a speculative bubble based on money that's basically created out of nothing. And as a a good friend of mine pointed out, like, we are we were formed in our creator's image. And so we have this economy that's all about speculation, grifting, duping people. 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, and 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 dupe other people and be like, no. No. This is the best thing. This is the thing. You gotta 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? You can define socialism. I've done that before, but how would you define crypto? And what is what is, the umbrella that is crypto?
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. Yeah. Well, that's yeah. But, so yeah. So the I really, you know, in in World War two, they use, like, Native American languages and, yeah, code 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 kinda, 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 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 and 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, 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? It's defeating the purpose. And that's a very so it's a very difficult, problem to solve. It's called the 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 to a large extent. And so yeah. Now since then, there's been this large explosion of, people speculating on this. Now we 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. I wanna 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 oh you need to get back on real money for They're not neoliberal economic policy. Well it's 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 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 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 the money markets, in money for money. It's something like 97%. I'm not don't 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, So, yeah, I mean, we could get into all kinds of talks about the existing problems with money. But I 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. It isn't just about creating money like substances. It's about a whole lot more. You know? I mean, there have been talk I missed most of the talks, but there were talks about transcending the nation state. There were talks about, bioregional governance, about, new forms of 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 of Holochain. Mhmm. 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, a 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 kinda getting lost on a tangent here. But But 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 Yeah. 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. Or Which is really the 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 and wealth is owned by 1% of the population. Like, your votes just don't meet shit. You know? 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. So governance in cryptographic systems, also has this problem of double spend potentially. Like, you if you want to encode rules for how you are governing your resources or whether those be purely digital or or physical, like, you need a system that people can trust that will not, you know, allow for people to
to break it. You know? Yeah. I mean, it's 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 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 rule set. And our government systems are exactly the same. And so the idea here isn't just that we're gonna 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 space program. They were talking about fluid value staking, which is like it's just it's 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 do 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 unmakes itself with itself. But I've been talking for a long like months, last few months and had these ideas about like, well, what if, you know, in a mutual credit system and mutual credit is well, can you can you define mutual credit?
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, that, like, basically giving the ability to create money to everyone is how I like to think about it. And it's a steady state system as well. It's not Right. It's not inflationary or deflationary. Right. So you don't have, like, this supply problem per se, like, in the same way, I guess. Where 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 could 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 a group of people where I have a job or I'm doing what other 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 to go to zero. Yeah. And being at zero is not a bad thing.
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 gonna say that, mistaking oh, fuck. It's also complicated. It's like I asked the, Jorge of the economic space 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. It's beautifully, ornate and intricate and I just I find a lot of, 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 we're not gonna be able to get all the little details about value staking and all that stuff, but we'll definitely be doing, I will be personally investigating these things more and making more media about them and forming more partnerships with people in these communities. I think it's really important for people to realize that economics is not just, 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, comes out of that. There have been there's been a consistent refrain in conversations here that, 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. 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 and the world.
Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's one of the steps necessary for sure. One of the big ones.
Well, what what are what are some, like, some of the insights that you've gotten from this conference? We we've had a lot of great talks and conversations, and and, it's been nothing but fucking phenomenally high flying interesting people flocking and sharing. Yeah. I mean, this conference has been interesting because now this is the,
third installment. So, like, we have, you know, the first one in which not many people really knew each other. They didn't know kind of, like, what to expect. They didn't know, like, you know, Felix and Julek 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, there'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 get through. We have been able to get, like, more nonsensical because now we have, like, inside jokes and we have, like, but but but more importantly, we have, like, shared understanding about, like, like, we know what the commons are. We know what, like, mutual, credit is. We know, like Yeah. 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. So we were able to like I think get fairly deep on on a few things which is really nice. It was 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?
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 wherein, 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, I talked about this, but I don't remember if it 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 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? Where capitalism is officially done. We've pressed the big red button. Capitalism is finally over. What does that look like? And I think at least for me, I mean, one, it means getting rid of capital, as a main source of, of economic power because capital is a way that essentially essentially billionaires and large corporations are the economic planners of society. They have 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 it's like a magic for resources to move. Right? And so I think in 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.
Yeah. I don't know exactly what all we missed in that cut off. 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 understanding of the flows of resources, of energy, of will, of I'm doing good, I'm doing bad. There's many many red buttons that we push many times today 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 it's more like we will create multiple feedback loops in terms of new structures of organisation. There will be apps that will unmake capitalism you know. But more than anything the 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 the 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. 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. We breathe the same air. We have the same shared set of ideas and values. We know intuitively when we're out of this separate eyes 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 it's incommunicable. The 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 that we feel. We have a shared understanding of reality. We know that when we eat food we're gonna poop it out. You know, we have the space 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 as we kick capital out.
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 their 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.
So, yes, 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. So we can have a, a more, shared understanding of reality rather than our hyper like what capitalism I think has done is like split people like incredibly to 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, in capitalism, like, a very common strategy for marketing is splitting the market that you create like, you know, sort of particular identities around, commodity consumption essentially, to, like, create the type of consumer you want. Yeah. And then, like, all these other things become packaged within it that, like, of if, you know, one thing says this, then 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.
Yeah I mean the separation and the division is 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 gonna 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, it's powerful. An insight for me in the past several months has been that, ending accounting, well, so we're 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 our needs 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 very primitive ways of engaging as 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. Is 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 might wanna go inside in a minute here.
Yeah I see
storm moving in very fast. I can finish this point and we can move inside and report in there maybe more people will be involved, it'll 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 gonna 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 that's the power that, crypto and AI and, oh my god, and it's Let's go. 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 wanna do something about all the issues we talk about here on our show? Do you wanna 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. 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, moneylesssociety.com, can buy Moso shirts and other merchandise that helps 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.
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 Davila's book, Blockchain Radicals, How Capitalism Ruined Crypto, and How to Fix It.
Okay. So we are, back in the flow Yeah. After a little bit of interrupt after two interruptuses. Back in the comments. You're you're the host now. I'm the host now. Too. Yeah. Well, I'm curious for you. What what is your,
what are your main learnings trying to not live with money?
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, like, I need money to live, you know? Yeah. Well It's minimatable. I don't. I don't, 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 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 gonna go down a hippie 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'd just gotten into this town, and, you know, a single soul. I 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, you know, 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 I was like, here's a here's a picture of my ID. You can 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 come talk. He was like, well, you know, let's talk about it. And we just we we got a shot, and we talked, and we connected. And within five minutes, he was like, yeah. Sure. Let's lay on my couch. So we can always find our ability to meet those needs. Like, one of the most beautiful, moneyless ex projects I've ever seen wasn't like some AI, you know, control system that, you know, managed resources. There was a system that was automated. 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 pay they were making donations, and they were paying people, and they found that it destroyed their motivation. So they stopped, 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 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 and But, I I'm not I I don't think people should just go out with Well, actually I do. I think everyone should 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.
Right. There is no freedom, really, when everything's behind a paywall.
No. And it's an 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 sixty hours a week. Like, that's not a free person. That's not freedom. And 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 and, of course the pending climate apocalypse that's gonna 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, to a 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.
Like, I've the term, the cost of living. Yeah. Like I feel like I people don't internalize how fucked up that is.
The cost to live. Yeah. Life itself is not free as my great friend Aisha, a woke scientist, 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 was a do a brilliant person to point out that this specious notion that we have to earn our right to live is is obsolete. That we need to send people back to doing what they were doing before they, had to go and get a job. Mhmm. You know, the work of being human is work. Like, when I was traveling and I was, you know, in I did try hitchhiking with people in their cabs, I was working. I was providing a service for them even as I was gaining service to them, which for me was learning, like, listening. I mean, I talk as much as I talk, or 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. You wanna be on a podcast with us? Sure. Cool. Hang on one second. I'm talking about Peko. Peko, come be in the podcast. Come on. You're like the most interesting person in the room right now.
Thanks, bro.
Well, we all love Offensive. Our collective intelligence. Myself. But but look, it geometrically. Peko. Geometrically, we need one more person here. It's it's gonna be in balance. No. Actually, because I sort of reserve my hotel. Well, you can just listen. Drink beer. Okay. Alright. Alright. Yes.
Okay. Thanks.
Let's see. How do we we gotta share we're gonna have to share in my here. Here, let's just trade places.
I'll be honest. Post captain Also gotta be also gotta be careful with the when I gotta leave for the train. Oh, what time's that?
Bunch of little books. Forty five or something like that? What You're you're the party floating host. Yep. Bring No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
No.
No.
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No it's an interesting one. Was it something you expected?
No. But I didn't expect much. I, I've really had I experienced CCG. Yeah. I guess it was just kind of a medic brew, really. Quite interesting stuff. Various, various ideas coming at kind of the appropriate time. I found Leo particularly fascinating just because of what he was playing with with speaking to my experience. I found yeah. They're also particularly fascinating. There's a lot of the stuff he covers is highly meta and,
just a bit it's a lot of stuff I've been working with. Can you loop the audience in a little bit into what those, what those things that were being talked about were? Oh,
so Leo was talking about the, the interfacing or the interpreters, that interfacing interfaces, I think, is what he's talking about, or shapes interacting that change their shape through the interaction. This is kind of like meta generalization of life experience reality, that kind of stuff. And so, I guess he was kind of getting up into the meta for that. And, yeah, I I I dug, the poetics that came out of the machine were particularly beautiful, not that I can remember those. Yellow then on state box and applied category theory also felt, pretty resonant to me in the sense that it was a way of, bounding complexity and, kinda limiting limiting the complexity in order to ensure kind of effective processes. And so, we talked about I I've got these mandalas, which I've shown you both at this point. I hope that the listeners here can can see, but, we're talking about those in relation to Statebox Wiki or process Wiki and then the breaking of symmetries to create processes. And thus, the Okay. Complexity is bound in the sense that you've already bound it in the mandala, and then you're just breaking into symmetries. Right?
Go ahead. Well, we we were just talking about, the structures in society and the technologies that create the consciousness that we have. Mhmm. We were talking last night. I was looking at the notebook. The interface. I was I was like, what are 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 you were, basically taking notes and organizing things into these patterns Yep. Of geometric patterns and shapes that kind of, when you look at them, you it produces an organizational sort of matrix in the brain that you think about things in a different way. So, yeah, that's that's been a really interesting, through line here is is the way that the mediums that we interact with.
They shape our experiences. So, you know, if you're looking at one shape versus another, that's changing you in the kind of process of structural coupling as you interact with your environment, you'll change by it, which gets into your discussion on post capitalist systems. And 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.
For anybody watching here, every single conversation with every single person here has been that interesting. And I just wanna remind people that your people are out there, that one of my mandates and missions in life is find the others. Find them. 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, you know, these beautiful, direct economic democracy systems and I asked the the guy, like, talking to him, giving the presentation, who else is working on this stuff? He was like, no one. And I kinda raised an eyebrow, like, because I knew people who were working on that shit, you know? And I think we have to ask the the question, like, am I alone in this? Instead of this kinda Ted Kaczynski kinda 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.
You know? It's a bit of both. It's the harmonic recursion of whole and part. Right? And so where the where the parts are simultaneously holes embedded in other holes that are also apart.
True. I'm gonna have to interview you separately. I just loved our talk so much. No. No. Oh, okay. Okay. I got that. I got that. Anyway. Alright. That was good. Goodbye. It was it was a small taste a taster of, Yeah. Yeah. That was the thing conversations were like. I was hoping more people would avoid rushing as we go here, but I don't know if we have that much that much time left here. But, you're you're you're in the driver's seat here. Yeah.
I mean, I mean, for your habits, I'm curious, like, what for you, was it that made you rethink crypto, I guess, a bit? I I I'm assuming, like, probably beforehand, you might have been dismissive of it because of its speculative nature. What was it for you that was kind of, like, the the switch? Because for a lot of people, I think it is 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 how for them it happened because I'm still trying to figure it out. Well, I think again 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, you know? Like, I don't know. I 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 cliques 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 they're talking about all these silver bullet solutions, like, this is the answer. This is the solution. I was at a a farm recently with this guy who says all 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. It's this uncorruptible ledger, and and I 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 just 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. Part of it is actually interacting with people who are in the spaces, in the regen space, who are talking about regenerative finance and, you know, trying to work with the existing systems and alchemize them. I don't know when it it was a shift, but I just I I don't want to be, closed minded in anything. I wanna be open to any idea. And if anybody is out there saying, this is a solution to the global problems that are gonna 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. Maybe not the whole thing, but I will give it, I will, I will give it a chance, you know? Right. And so, yeah, it's been, it's been really, it's been really great, finding this community, you know, first as kind of outsider, a little skeptical. I was skeptical of moneyless society at first because they didn't seem to have a lot of grounding in in the Facebook group that we 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 know 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 gonna be a controversial statement, but to bring about a transition to post capitalism, we need capitalists. We need to change those people's minds who have access to resources and money. 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 I'm a crazy little, explorer. I can survive in any environment. I can socialize my way through any way or 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 and, you know Of course. Yeah.
And you have to pay for it. Unfortunately, yeah, there's not much way out. Yeah. Yeah. 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 the general sort of like formula of capital, 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. So like 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 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 that aspect and thinking about how we can do that more because like in your story with the guy that you asked so you could sleep on his couch,
we have abundance. We have plenty. Yeah. There's enough for people More than enough. To to meet their needs. And and, yeah, it's this power relationship that that prevents us from doing it. I I wanna tell this little, this little panic that I've been kinda working up and thinking about lately that, like, the absurdity of the commodity, the absurdity of money. Imagine, like, someone, you know, two thousand years ago or five thou after five thousand years ago. Someone ten thousand years ago goes up to the people in their village, and they're like, I'm gonna do magic. I'm gonna do a magic thing. Watch me. Watch me turn this cat into a 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? 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 Bless you. Or whatever. And then you you have this calculating mechanism where you say this cat is worth this much, it has this much utility or this much use value, whatever however you designate it, and it's highly spec speculative. Some things aren't worth what they're really worth. An iPhone should cost, you know, thousands of dollars if 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 you say, alright, someone comes up to you and they want that cat, and you say, alright, I'm gonna sell it to you for this number of this amount of monkey pictures. Then 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 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 Graeber says in, Debt the First Five Thousand Years, this great line where he's like, 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 and trading and trading is a violent thing. I mean, I I was just in Colombia, and when people come up to you and they're like, buy this little shitty flute or buy this little thing or, like, they'll come out with a handful of candy, just bullshit that has no value, as an excuse to trade so that you can get their money. And when you say no, for my in my case, they assume I'm a white person. I have a lot of money. And Yeah. In some ways, I have 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 it's a hostile arrangement. It's not this friendly, you know And who who's supposed to say this? I have no idea. Someone's dad is calling him.
Okay. Who's gonna pick?
But, yeah, this this this act that we think is so benign in trade, which, beyond just money, is hosting and it's separate. And, in gift economies like my friends the Awakos who I just spend 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 and conflict, and competition, and there is a world of prosperity and 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 a world of light. When they see each other, even if they're total strangers, there's 60,000 of them, so, they immediately walk up to each other, they go into their molchia, they go 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 the money thing, you ex you mediate your values in this thing we think is so neutral, you are severing that connection and that trust. And you were re you were telling a story that I am separate from you. We are separate. And so I could go on for hours and hours and hours on our shows, hours and hours and hours of talking about why this thing we call money is this ultimately diluted psychosis that 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 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. 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, value exchange in society and for people to account for things. Even though one of my favorite anecdotes from that book, Debt, 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, woah, thank you so much. And he's like, don't thank me. Where I come from, we are human. We help each other. That's what it means to be human is to help each other. It's not to, remark. It's not to take account of you owe me this and I owe you this. That's what makes us human.
Yeah. I think, generally, there's, like, kind of, like, these three ways in which people, when you talk about, like, private property, there are, like, three kind of property relationships, I guess, you can call them that people generally think of. There's, like, uses, like, being able to use it. Yep. 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. I think it's David Graeber 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, thought about. But the desire to care for something, like, we pay for for example, we we would people buy a pet, they spend money, and then they spend money to, like, feed the pets. Yeah. But 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 that people don't really, like, sell so, like, so much. They 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 head out. But there's a project started by Terra Zero, which is a art, group in Berlin mostly. And they had a pro 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 would 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. Like, completely against the kind of like homoeconomicist logic that we generally taught in, like, Econ one zero one 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. Yeah. The, the third, form of of ownership, I think, which is Roman, is use of root. And Murray Bookchin talked a lot about that. And I I think that the, the Seriously Wrong podcast boys talk a lot about that with their library economy. We talk about that essentially. Jacque Fresco talked about that. 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, are accessed community, where it's like, you and I think this is a very beautiful, elegant, transformation, because it's like George Monbiot 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, just so poor people, 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 health care, 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 could have a system where we slash the number of cars on the road, and you access 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. No one owns the train. You know? Well, there's private companies that own trains, which is 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? 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 or that I own my even even own my own body. You know? Which is just something that's ultimately printed. So little wrap up. I mean, I just think, it's it's really great to connect with you and to connect with this community. I'm just very excited to form more 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 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, you know? But, there is there is solutions that are out there, you know? Anybody who doesn't who thinks at this point not enough people get it, or 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.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I appreciate you having me on. Appreciate that you were able to come at the sort of towards the end of of the conference, and you're able to 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. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna help push you to be on camera more as well. This this this handsome face here, this guy, he does he wants to do audio only podcast. Are you kidding me? You know? You heard that thing, you got a face for radio? You got a face for for podcast. Yeah. You know? Well, yeah. It's just been really great to connect. I really found, like, another piece of my home, which is is a place. Like, I'm I don't that's doesn't intuitively make sense to me ever to, like, settle down in one place. I wanna help build this global village of communities and cooperatives and and, new systems that I can bounce 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. And the weirdness of it all is is like the 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. Nice. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Alright. Cut. Like and subscribe. Hit hit hits hit that bell. Leave a comment and, donate to our Patreon. Me too. Yeah. I second that. Yeah. If this is gonna be like a dual pod, like like, I'm gonna I'll give you a shout out. Follow Josh, the blockchain socialist on Twitter, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. Donate to the Patreon. They're 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, you know, web three, this new technological paradigm, and, gotta support each other. Follow money in society, support us. 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 commoning in 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. It's 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. Alright. Yeah. We'll go down having a good time at least. Cheers. Let's go play Smash Brothers. Yeah. Let's go.
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 networked transition economies to build the fucking future today. Places like this are living proof. The solutions are out there. Go find them.