So it's always interesting for me as, as someone that's quite nomadic, that travels to lots of different groups that are, you know, prototyping different ways of organizing, that are trying to do something critical. It's always interesting to encounter a new group and see what structure is provided. Like, what are the norms? What are the rules? And at the solarpunk gathering, I got to the hub and have that slightly disorienting, like, who are these people? What are we doing here? And one of the first things that I think it was Felix, explained to the whole group was, okay. This is a space that's really cocreated. We're co responsible. This is not a hotel. We're all gonna take care of the place together. And what we've learned from doing this a bunch of times is that having a completely open ended lack of structure probably will result in the tragedy of the commons and the place is gonna be a mess. And so we're gonna we're gonna kind of impose the structure on you, which says there's a kitchen crew, there's a cleaning crew, there's a documentation crew, there's, you know, you kinda listed off just these, like, extreme, like, wafer thin kind of brackets around people's freedom and said, those things exist. We need you to cluster into those five groups or six groups or whatever it was. And then once you've assigned yourself to kitchen crew or documentation crew, whatever, then you figure out as a group, what is the responsibility? What are you gonna do with it? And I thought that was really elegant. It was like, I've had really bad experiences in like squats and Atticus collectives and stuff where there's just like a complete absence of structure, which in my experience mostly, it mostly leaves most people not really contributing significantly. People feel awkward or they just don't know how to how to play the game. Or as you go into these other groups that are more, like, authoritarian, I guess, they're they're more like, there's a positive everything, and we're gonna really rigidly establish the rules, and then everything, all your expectations will be clear, and we've sort of heard about everything. And this was just like a tiny step in the direction of structure. But just enough to allow plenty of freedom, but still that, you know, the house was clean, the dishes got done. So I thought that was a really elegant and inspiring example for me. I'm someone who, who tends to go too hard on the structure. So it was great to see, like you can just have this tiny little sprinkle of structure and that might be all you need to catalyze the self organization. But it's gonna be more than zero. Yeah. I think what,

Yeah. I mean, this this kinda captures one of the conclusions of of the last, like, decade of my work, which is, like, it's great if you want to get rid of the hierarchy. Like, I, I think hierarchies tend to be like really bad as a rule of thumb, but also hierarchies exist for a reason. And so if you've got to get rid of the hierarchy, you have to replace it with something. And, and that's like a long, slow lesson to really grasp, but like just kind of wiping the slate clean as it were is not sufficient. Like there has to be some kind of operating principles or yeah, like Ostrom's principles. There's gotta be some sanctions for people that are spoiling the comments. Like there's gotta be some kind of mechanisms in place that, that do the things that hierarchy does, but in a way that's much more liberating and, and much more just, yeah, that that's the lesson that I've just had to, like, keep coming up against and against again and again for the last, like, ten years. And did you have any thoughts about, like, the the facilitation

It's hard to me. It's hard for me to answer that fairly because, because I'm a facilitator and I'm extremely opinionated about groups run, anything that's not done. So one of my kind of like complexes, I guess, is that I, I sometimes mistake variation for error. So, so people, people do things differently and there's a part of me that thinks, oh, they must be wrong. You know, there must be, there must be something failing here. So there's lots of stuff. If it was my event that I would done, that I would do differently, but as a result, it would, it, it would appeal to a different group of people wanna get a different outcome. So like, for example, I would put more energy into like intentionally breaking clicks and sort of nudging, almost forcing people to form new relationships. Because I'm, I'm the kind of awkward person who Yeah. It's not really easy for me to, like, if, if I see a cluster of people that all seem to know each other and have their in in jokes and everything, it's pretty hard to, like, bust into that. So I would design kind of facilitation processes that really intentionally just create different clusters. That give you an excuse to start a conversation with someone new that you might be feeling a little intimidated around or. Yeah. Yeah. There's something about people who know each other well, when they have that sense of closeness, it can be intimidating to people who don't know them or feel like an outsider and it can create this kind of like separation and social anxiety and stuff. And so like I put a lot of energy into busting through that, but then maybe that's, maybe that's only appealing to a certain kind of person who wants to have their hand held, and other people would be like, get get out of the way, man. Why are you trying to, you know, meddle with everything? Like, just let us let us be adults. So that's what I mean. It's just a different Yeah. That's fair. I think that's,

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, making introductions is really helpful too. So like, as someone who knows, if you're the people that are already there, it's like, oh, you should talk to this person about this topic and just creating that, that kind of handhold to get the conversation started. Like I say, ideally, we'd all be sufficiently confident to just like muddle that way through in your group. But in my experience, it's that a lot of, there's a lot of inhibitions at the start of a group process. And if we can kind of accelerate through them, then we just get more done. And I think this applies to any kind of any event, any new group, any new configuration of people coming together, like some people are gonna have, or maybe even most people are gonna have some hang ups about like, do I fit here? Do people like me? Do I have a role to play? What's expected of me? There's all these kind of uncertainties and they can be, they can either be just like a little bump, you know, and then we need some icebreakers or whatever to let warm up, or they can compound into these anxieties that like really inhabit. The flow. This is this is this is the result of being obsessive about vibes, you know, for for a decade. So I don't know if this applies to everyone or it's just me being a winner. Talking about,

yeah, what is micro solidarity and all these things? Okay. I have a bad habit of taking an hour to tell my story, but I'll try and condense it usefully. So my grandparents are European. I grew up in New Zealand, so like I'm a, I'm, I'm part of the settler class. I was raised in this like Christian community, which when I left in my early twenties, like I left behind the, the kind of metaphysics of Christianity and the, the story about God and sin and hell and everything. I was quite happy to leave that behind. But what I was sad to leave behind was the solidarity in the community that I grew up in. Solidarity being like, this is a group of people that can organize to buy a big community building or to organize a school or to like, cover someone's rent if they lose their job or like bring them meals when they've had a baby, like all of those kinds of practical levels of solidarity that I took for granted as a kid in this Christian community. Turns out they're quite rare these days in a lot, in a lot of the world. And, and those are the things that now I'm yeah, really interested in, in recreating and, and finding ways to kind of bootstrap that level of mutual care in fresh communities without, without needing the religious dimension. I think those two things can, well, I hope, I don't know. I hope those things can be decoupled. So yeah, I come from this Christian background and then left my like small town, small church, went to the big city, got an engineering degree, graduated in 2008. Then we had the financial collapse and I like lost my first job and then entered the void, you know, just like, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really like, I, I, I felt like a bit like the road runner coming off the cliff, you know, and just like what? I spent all of this time, like learning and studying and doing what was expected of me and being good and obedient. And then I felt like I came out the end of the whole education system and there was no place for, for my skills, my talents, my desires. And so I really went into like quite a lost and confused phase. And thankfully I was embraced by some, some punks in Wellington in New Zealand, where I'm from. And because I was hanging out with punks, they kind of gave me an excuse, I guess, to join in with the occupy movement when that started. And, you know, it started September 2011 in New York City and then made it all the way around to New Zealand in October 15, I think. And in 2011. And like, I didn't have prior experience with activism. Like I didn't have any political consciousness besides having read a few ad buses magazines, and being a bit dismayed by the state of the world. But I didn't have any, like, theoretical formulations or idea ideologies that I was committed to. And so occupy was this completely mind blocking. Can't even really describe how profound the impact was on me, because of this coupling between the local and the global. So the local was a very deliberate, direct democracy process, quite laborious. Consensus meetings, but, I say laborious, but they're also like quite transformative to go through this process of genuinely listening to the people in this emergent community and understanding their perspectives and needs, and like not just overriding them because I'm smarter or more confident or think I'm cooler than, you know, like, no, I actually have to listen and try and come to an agreement with you. Wow. That's hard. And so there's a coupling between the local, which is this very deliberate process. And then the global, which was completely decentralized swarm of activity where there was no formal coordination structure. And yet, probably all of the occupy camps had a very systematic alignment between them. Very similar values and practices, very similar experiences, very similar kind of conflicts that they had to deal with. It was like pretty much every occupy camp either got stomped by the police or it got stomped internally from its inability to govern. Like just, it was amazing to witness like this level of integration and coherence happening despite there being no formal structure of coordination between them. And so both of those aspects really, like, completely changed my expectations about what people are capable of, and what what organizations could be like. You know, that we can we can we can become a, collective identity with a huge amount of capacity and resources without needing a hierarchy, without even really needing a plan, you know, that we that we can become a kind of superorganism that has agency and and boundaries and, needs and desires and demands and things without anyone really calling the shots. Like, that was that was really fantastic to encounter. And so from Occupy, as that wave sort of crashed, my friends and I got involved with a project called Lumeo, which is a software tool. Basically just trying to do, hey, we like doing consensus decision making at Occupy, but it was pretty laborious. If we put it online, could we do it more efficiently? You know, could we have more inclusion for less time? And the software is interesting, but what was much more interesting to me was the team. Like, how do you build an organization that's that's coming from these values around non hierarchical organization, inclusion, deliberation, anti capitalism. Like, can you build a company that's an anti capitalist company? I don't know. Let's try and figure that out. So, that, that's been just, just a huge amount of fun for me. Like that, that was a real sort of coming of age process, I guess, to, to not just have some ideas about how society should be different, but to actually start to implement it with the team and with a budget and, you know, with a mission. And then, I mean, the reason that Lumio

it was not a novel idea. Like there were dozens of conversations happening. And if you go and search the Reddit archives from 2011, you'll see dozens of different conversations about people saying the same thing. Like we need to have the the occupied general assembly, but on the computer, like, and lots of, lots of people had that idea simultaneously. And why did Lumio succeed, but all the other ones failed? It's not because I'm brilliant or my co op's brilliant. It's because we were incubated in the right context. And in our case, the right context was this community called Inspiral. And Inspiral is quite a peculiar network of, like, activists and business people, trying to use the tools of business to do something radically different, trying to, trying to solve existential problems in the world, trying to, trying to really do something meaningful. And they provided us with first, just like a coworking space, like, Hey, you've got a new idea. We can't build it for you, but we can give you an office and we can introduce you to people and we can give you an informal kind of training and like project management and how do you build software and how do you test it and how do you make sure it's useful and, oh, you need funders like who we can introduce you to and you need legal structures. Like they gave us a lot of connections and, introductions. And probably more importantly, they gave us the emotional solidarity. They're like, Hey, this is really hard and I want to quit. And having a peer that's like alongside, alongside me saying, yeah, I know it's hard and I'm gonna help you. But don't quit. Like, this is important. Like that's, I think that's why Lumio succeeded ten years later when everything expired. It was just like having that amazing, amazing support network around us. And I mean, I can talk at length about how awesome inspire is. But the thing is, it only works because it's small, like it's less than 200 people. And, and therefore we've got a very high level of trust and people are willing to do a lot to support each other because of this, like, bounded network of trust. And so this brings us to micro solidarity, which is a sort of, an answer to the question, how do we have many more inspirers? Like, how do we, how could we, what's a sort of template or a formula or a roadmap for starting very high trust mutual aid communities that really make a difference to people's life? That's the, that's the micro solidarity project. And now we've got a global network with a few dozen communities around the world that are, yeah, learning how do you actually bootstrap this, these mutual aid relationships, in a sustainable way with accountability, with good structures, that's efficient. That's not too annoying. That doesn't get bogged down in shitty conflict. Like how do you do that? Well, it turns out it's quite hard, but, we've been doing it for a few years and we're, like, learning together. That's the main thing. It's like an r and d project where everyone's learning together how to do that. Yeah. I think if I could, like, crudely summarize Inspiral from what I understand,

Yeah. And and and because of the experience at Occupy and then at Inspiral, it seemed obvious, like, oh, it's so much better when we have democratic decision making, when people are involved, where they get to have a meaningful say in, like, what are we doing? Are we making money? Okay, we made money. What are we doing with the profits? Like, when people are enrolled in that process, it's just obvious that things go better. And and what's been kind of surprising and disappointing for me is finding that there's not as much demand for democratic decision making as I had hoped. You know, that actually, for lots of reasons, people don't always want to take responsibility for the groups that they're in, and often they'll want to delegate and say like, Can you just run it and I'll show up, you know, once a month and do my thing? So, yeah, it turns out that it's I I thought if we just build the tool, then then we'll we'll see this, like, renaissance of democratic decision making, but it didn't quite go as smoothly as possible. Thing where you kind of have to the at the point where we have to make the market type of thing, you have to make the market for people who want to do democratic decision making that requires, like, people to acknowledge and recognize the importance of that and, like, the problems with the current way and

And and, like, in some in some cases, you have to invent when you're inventing a market, maybe it's like Airbnb or something where you're at least it's like people are already buying short term vacation accommodation that already exists, and you're just trying to create a new marketplace where the buyers and sellers can meet. But for us, it's like we're actually trying to participate in a paradigm shift from a way of relating to each other, basically structured around domination and hierarchies, to a way of relating where we're no longer in this, like, parent child dynamic, but more adult to adult. Like, everyone's voice is important, everyone's enrolled, everyone has a say. Like, that's a that's a really significant shift that's that's much bigger than just, like, changing the tools that we use. It's like changing how we think of ourselves as agents in the world and and changing almost, like, how we do culture, how we do- how do you raise kids, how do you do schooling, how do you- how do you run organizations in that way? Like, it's it's it's a paradigm shift. So, one little piece of software is not gonna achieve that. It's more like we now I look back and I think Lumio is like a surfboard trying to catch the wave of this transformation coming, but we're not responsible for doing it alone.

I've I, I keep changing my perspective on this. Like I've been quite antagonistic in the past. I don't know. We'll we'll see what I say. I don't know how antagonistic I am. I, I got into it because, I, there was the Holochain crowdfunding campaign and I heard about Holochain and I was like, well, that makes a lot of sense to me. This like whole agent centric model makes a lot of sense. I've also got friends working on Scuttlebutt, which is another agent centric, like decentralized communication protocol. And I just, I just really buy that argument. I dunno if they're gonna deliver or not, but I, during the crowdfunding campaign, I was like, yes, this is a thing that needs to exist. So I contributed to that crowdfunding campaign thinking it was a donation. And then some X number of years later, randomly looked in my, crypto wallet and found that my like small donation had turned into like this massive windfall profit. I was like, what the? Okay. So like a lot of people, I think I got interested, properly interested in crypto because of the outsized returns, financial returns from, from gambling. Like, that was just a, a random Right. Yeah. There was no intention behind that. That just randomly happened. But suddenly finding, like, wow. This is a big chunk of change that I've never had before. What else is going on? You know? Sort of it's that it was like it purchased my attention. And I found when I got into it, like that there are, I think probably a minority, but, a really important minority of, of projects in the landscape that are really genuine and, and doing good stuff and really have, Yeah, I think that they have a, a grown up understanding of the challenges of the world and like have a set of ethics to guide them and, and like meaningful accountability structures and all that sort of stuff is in place. But the majority is not there at all. You know, the majority is, a landscape of, on the one hand, you've got the scams and, and, and the high violence, but on the other side, you've got, I think you said naive, you know, like this kind of wishful thinking about how organizations could be different. And honestly, I think that's what, that's what the received definition of what a DAO is. A DAO is a blank canvas, an empty container where people can project all of their wishes about how organizations can be different, Which is a good thing to have, like it's useful, it's useful to have that, that terminology, it just doesn't tell you what to do. Right. It's, it's, it's nice to be able to have a kind of, rallying point for people to get behind, but it doesn't actually, doesn't actually give you any suggestions about what's needed. And the experience to me that's been quite frustrating and confusing is on the one hand, a lot of people in the crypto ecosystem welcoming me with a lot of enthusiasm because they know that I've been doing pre blockchain DAOs, you know, for more than ten years. And they, they invite me to talk, to give talks and things, and I say, Well, this is, this is what you gotta do. And everyone's smiling and nodding, but at the end of the session, it's clear that none of them are actually gonna implement what I've got to say, because what I've got to say challenges the fundamental premise of, oh, we can solve all of the difficult problems of being a human by designing the right protocol. It's like, no, it doesn't work that way. The way to organize at small scale is like, you need systems for building, maintaining, and repairing trust. And that's, like, a very squishy, very emotional process, and it can't be bypassed by designing the right protocol. Or maybe it can in the distant future, but in the foreseeable future, we're gonna have to do it the squishy way. And that's just my conclusion from having figured it out from doing it with a bunch of people. It's not coming from an ideological posture. And, yeah, a lot of people that are building doubts don't want to end. So it puts me in an awkward position, and these days, I mostly ignore it.

Yeah. Yeah. And I wanna say as well, like, I described the the the position as being naive, but I actually have a lot of respect for being naive. Like, I think naivety is a necessary precondition of having breakthroughs, creative thoughts. So, like, awesome. Go for it. And and and be like absurdly ambitious. And some people will actually have breakthrough success with that. But it's kind of annoying being being the grumpy old uncle in the corner. Like, okay, I went through that phase and now I'm ready for the next bit where we get where we get down into the details. So yeah. I'd yeah. I don't wanna I don't wanna shit on people, like, do all that agency and and stuff like that. I have my full support. It's just, sometimes I feel like there's a bit of a mismatch between where people are at and and the conversation that I wanna have. So when it comes to the conversation that you do wanna have,

sort of, like, practices, I guess, that people can can pursue in their organizations to, I guess, to create micro solidarity? Yeah. So I guess it's a theory, but it's a theory that's based on practice. Like it's, it's based on experiences that I've had directly building communities and organizations and, and with my wife, Natalie, traveling a lot and, and, and working with organizations all over the world and trying to understand, like, how do you make a roadmap or how do you make a blueprint for something that needs to be adaptive and context specific? You know, like a community is something that's very, it's very complex and it's very adapted to its local place. So to try and come up with a recipe and say, oh, just follow these steps and then you'll then you'll experience belonging and trust and meaningful work and mutual exchange. Like that's actually a kind of an absurd quest. And so I've been on this, on this mission of like trying to articulate what are some patterns or what are some repeatable experiences or like some things that you can do that will then generate a locally adapted context responsive system. And the two kind of headline or like fundamental pieces of theory that I've settled on so far, then I'm sure more will come in time. But the two, I think of them as, rhythm and scale sensitivity. So maybe the scale sensitivity is like really trying to drill at home to people that groups of different sizes are good for different things. And that, you know, some people will be familiar with Dunbar's number as a sort of like pop, pop science, idea that, Oh, people can kind of know about 150 people or something like that. And what I'm really trying to drill home is actually there's Dunbar's numbers and it's plural. And the, and the gist of it is like, there's this progression of like, about five people, then 15, then 50, then 150, 500, 1,500, that there's this, this kind of thresholds that they at each of these different scales, the superorganism that's formed by those people becomes a different species. It's got different capacities, different competencies, get different limitations. And so there's stuff that you can do with five people that you can't do with 50 and vice versa. And really try which sound I I know in the abstract that sounds a little bit like a random insight, but, it really when you start to see these different thresholds and how they play out in an organization that really changes, I think your approach to, well, to social change and to organizational design. So like one of the big takeaway lessons from me, and this applies to anyone, both on the blockchain side and on the socialist side. Like if you are proposing that, you know, capitalism sucks and things should be done differently, you should be able to prove at least some glimmers of what an alternative would look like at the scale of say 15 people or 150 people. And before you jump ahead and say like, well, when we, when we completely transform all of society with its billions of people, like you should be able to prove some of those dynamics at a smaller scale. And what we find with like solarpunk conferences, for example, usually when you get 15 or 50 people together, the kitchen's a mess, you know? And, and like how, how to keep the kitchen in a reasonable state state of hygiene, without excessively compromising people's freedom turns out to be a really sticky puzzle. And you could spend a decade working with different groups to try and come up with different recipes to solve that problem. And that would be a decade well spent, you know? So that's one side is like, prove your, prove your argument at the small scale or learn. It's not even just proving in the abstract. It's more like my experience of organizing with groups is that being in a really humming team, like in a, in a collective, that's really got a high sense of coherence and like collective intelligence, being a participant in one of those groups changes who I am. So it's not like I can stand outside of the group and then design, oh, this is gonna be a new way of organizing. I actually become changed through the process of going through that organizational structure. And so that's why I've got this focus on the small scale thing. It's like, really, yeah. Get get your reps in at the small scale, and you'll find that your priority shift and your, expectation shift about what's possible, what's desirable, all those sorts of things shift through the process of, like, actually starting to implement your values at small scale. So yeah, there's a whole dimension about scale, and then the other dimension is about rhythm, which is to say that often when when you talk to someone about an organizational structure, like if I asked you to draw an organization, most people will draw a two dimensional kind of organogram chart. And it's like either it's a pyramid because it's a hierarchy or it's a snake. You know, if you're in crypto, you'll do these like kind of hexagons with lines between them because it's a network. And, usually people's mental models around organizations are these like two dimensional maps. And I'm proposing a different way of thinking about organizations, which is about time. It's, it's really just prioritizing the temporal dimension and that any, any like creative, decentralized, you know, autonomous, collective of people is gonna be chaotic. That's part that's just, you know, part of the territory. But you can help to, like, kind of stabilize that chaos a little bit by implementing these different rhythms. So knowing that every week we're gonna have a beer and a pizza, and we're gonna talk about what we did this week and, like, what we're gonna do differently next week. Like, that will do so much to stabilize a community project, rather than, like, if you don't have that kind of structure, what happens is tensions and frustrations just kinda have to similarly quietly in the background until one of them breaks through and there's this big drama. And then you lose a few people in the community, or you have to spend hours and hours trying to repair the relationship, like having a, having a re like rapid feedback loop of like hearing about small frustrations and turning them into practical changes. Like that's one ingredient that really is a huge leverage point, but in, in creating an organization that actually fits for its local context. And there's, there's longer term rhythms too. And there's, there's more I can say about both of those, but that's kind of like a sort of tiny potted summary of some of the theory of micro solidarity. I think probably what's more interesting is the practice of it, you know? So like, for me, one of the groups that I started was at the start of the pandemic, I was pretty freaked out. My wife, Natty and I living in, in Italy where we don't really have any friends and family. And suddenly, shortly after moving there, there's a lockdown, there's a global pandemic. It's like there's uncertainty and fear. And one of the first things I did was get myself into a small support group so that at least I could have a video call with them once a week and kinda talk through what the shit are we facing here. And that having that in my life, like, really made fear and uncertainty so much more manageable. Whereas if I was isolated, I think I would probably lose the plot a a little bit. Probably wind up down some really weird rabbit holes or Right. Putting my head in the sand or I don't know what. And it's that small scale practical kind of mundane, having someone to talk to. Right. That's the main that's the main activity of micro solidarity is making sure everyone's got someone to talk to, someone to get good advice from, someone who's gonna, like, encourage them to be more ambitious with their values, someone who's gotta show them when they're, Yeah. Remind me that my shit stinks. You know? Like, I mean, that just really high quality friendship.

I mean, I yeah. I I I share your moral judgment. I'm not I'm not afraid to say it. I think most organizations today, geared around a paradigm which, I mean, sometimes we call it the parent child dynamic where basically there's a few people in the organization which are the grown ups, and they have responsibility and the final decision making saying, and then and they are super empowered. They're like super agents. And then everyone else are kind of like children, more or less, they're like children and they're, they have some agency, but they've got a, you know, they've got a bedtime. They've got a, they've got a defined play area, which they can't leave. They can't say naughty words, you know, there's a kind of like, there's some other grown ups that have set the boundaries for their play. And, and that we as a whole, like most people are, cast in the child role. And what we're proposing instead, and I think like the promise both of the blockchain and of the socialism is that we can all be adults, you know, like, that we can all have agency, that we can all show up and take responsibility and have rights, you know, both, both halves of that dynamic. And that the kind of organizations that I'm working with, the kind of collectives and communities and so on, are trying to change people to become more capable of exercising that agency and more, like, mutually responsible

I love that. I love this idea that you kind of have to imagine that you already were living within the socialist context and how would you behave in that context? Like how would you show up and start doing that now? Like that's a different, a different kind of framing of prefigurative politics, which I haven't quite heard before. And I'll come back to the dishes, you know? I think, I felt the struggle in myself at the Solopunk conference that I want to be in a space where everyone is putting in a small amount of effort and it keeps the kitchen clean and there's no arguments about it and it's simple, right? And so I helped to set up a system and it wasn't perfect, you know, like there was lots of room for improvement and we didn't really have an effective mechanism for like hearing about how things could be improved. And so by day four or five, this kind of resignation creeped into me where where like in the first few days, I'm going to be an exemplary citizen. I'm going to do an extra load. I'm going to help. I'm going to be very encouraging and cajole people along till I keep the place clean. And at a certain point I realized like, we, we haven't designed the system that's right. We haven't got the, the coordination problem hasn't been solved effectively. And now I've got a choice. Either I can just be resigned and be like, well, the system's not good enough. Things are not gonna work, and so fuck it. Or I can show up as an adult and say like, yeah, the system is not gonna be good enough, and that's that's what we're facing, but I can be a good contributor still, and I can still show up even though the system's not not what I would like it to be. And I felt that inner conflict between me, you know, like on a moment by moment basis, like, am I actually gonna go the extra mile or am I just gonna put my hands up and say, well, it's not my problem, not my department. And I think it's that particular switch with the dishes, which is the same as any resources that we have to any comments that we have to share as human beings. It's like we can sit and complain, and this is one of the things that, traditional organizations really train you in, is this like powerless complaint. You know, like to, to be like, oh yeah, it sucks, but it's not my problem. It's not my job. I wish it was different, but, yeah, what can you do? And this kind of like completely impotent, grizzling, like that's, that's a feature, not a bug from the perspective of those institutions, you know? Like, they want you to just sit there grumbling and not doing anything about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

on the left. So I'm curious how you guys have kind of dealt with that. Yeah. The, the kind of leftist that I've spent a lot of time with seem to have these kind of implicit rules. Like it's completely fine to take money from academia. Like if you can get paid to do research or to be a professor or something, that's cool. It's fine to take money from the state if there's like an unemployment scheme or something like that, where you're gonna get social welfare money. And, but then there's all these other kind of income streams which are not fine and they're morally deficient and there's something wrong with you if you take them. And this is, these are kind of like unwritten rules about, yeah, what's legitimate when you're trying to pay the rent. And I say, I, I use Lyft as an example, but every, every organization that I've been in where people are trying to implement a new way of working together, the questions around money tend to be some of the most polarized and charged and like conflict ridden. Because it seems to be a shortcut to some of our deepest psychological issues for some reason that, that we've encoded so much about. Like, like someone who, yeah, has a kind of leftist mindset, but grew up with a lot of wealth. Often those people carrying a bunch of shame and like these confused emotions. Or on the flip side, someone who, who like me grew up with very little has a bunch of shame about being a worthless person and like not really ever feeling like I've fully got, you know, permission to be playing with the adults or whatever. Like we've all got these like weird hang ups, so that's one, that's one part of it, is we need to be able to like, like the reason I think that that capitalism and this sort of individualistic approach to economics is so stable is because it allows us to keep our weird, awkward feelings around money private. And it's like, oh, I've tried doing shared projects with people. You know, sometimes I've been on road trips with people where just the, the thing of like sharing the cost of the fuel or something turns into a drama. You know, like sometimes the smallest little experiment and shared economy can go really ugly. So I think there's a lot of, I think there are strong biases that are not purely political that push us, towards this more individualistic mode. And on the, on the other hand, like I described with my childhood, like I grew up in a religious community where there was a high degree of economic solidarity. And part of that was every member of the community, every family was contributing, if they could, they would contribute about 10% of their income to the church. And that money was used to like pay for the minister's family to live. It was paid to upkeep the community center, and it was paid to provide temporary support to people that had lost their income. And when I look at that now, I'm like, that feels like a utopia. Yeah. Like imagine getting a collective. Yeah, yeah. Imagine getting a a socialist collective, and everyone's gonna put 10% of their income and trust that it's gonna be allocated in a, in a, in a sensible way and not be corrupted and not explode into constant conflicts. Like, that's quite that's quite incredible.

Yeah. Yeah. And the big question for me is like, can you decouple the metaphysics from the organizing structure? Yeah. And I don't know. I don't know yet. Like I think the evidence of the most successful communes, and collected over time have been organized around some kind of spiritual or religious metaphysics. And that's not really my jam. And so I'm like, can we, can we inspire that level of solidarity without, without needing a God story? Maybe we need the God story. I'm not sure. Or the guru story or the, you know, like, whatever. I I would hope I would hope that we can, that that we could have a vision that is basically a little bit more humanist, a little bit more materialist. But still people can see it's in their in it's in their self interest to share some of their income with each other. So anyway, micro solidarity, like the long game is like, like I've experienced with Inspiral, where there is, again, a high degree of economic solidarity, like we just did around. We have another tool, like in addition to Lumio, there's a tool called co budget, which is really a nice, system for collectives to allocate their budget democratically. We just ran a $20,000 co budget round where it's like different members of the community have put money in this hat. We've got $20, how are we gonna spend it? And anyone in the community can make a proposal and say, oh, I wanna do this training course, or I think we should have better childcare at our next gathering, or I'm gonna rebuild our website, whatever. Like anything that, is either beneficial to the collective, or even just beneficial to one person in the collective. Like anyone can put a proposal forward. And yeah, every couple of months we do a round like this, where it's like, yeah, one of my friends, he just did a whole, a whole documentation project and, and wrote up a whole bunch of lessons that we've learned from Inspiral lately, and we can pay him for his time. That's an awesome way to collaborate, you know, like it's really, it makes a big difference to him and his livelihood. He lives cheaply. And so, like, getting a little chunk of change from the collective really makes a big difference. And the output's really valuable to all of us. And, you know, if we wanted to, we we could theoretically monetize that and turn it turn it into an income stream eventually, whatever. And that's not a crypto thing. That's not a that's not a blockchain thing.

Well, the first the first round was basically coexistent with Lumiose. So that 2011. So pre blockchain. Right before. But pretty, but pretty early on in the, in the blockchain swell, the people from Cardbudget were paying attention. It's just that when you're actually organizing on the ground communities, your priorities are different. Yeah. And the priorities for me, organizing it in Spiral is can we collect this money in a way that's legal? You know, like that I can actually talk to the tax department and say like, this is where the flows are and this is the, you know, we're living up to our requirements and responsibilities. And that like, that question just keeps getting bypassed from people that are experimenting with DAO ecosystems. One of the people who architected the Inspiral Foundation is Alana Ebing, and she now works at Open Collective, which is my favorite, absolute world favorite software project in the world right now, because they're enabling tons and tons and tons of collectives around the world to collect and spend money in a transparent way that's legal. You know, that they can show up to their accountant at the end of the year and say, We did this. And the accountant says, that's fine. And they take away all of the headache of doing that, instead of having to do it in the black market, like 99% of crypto stuff is happening. So anyway, rant closed. What we found through, well at least my, my very biased perspective on my experience at Inspiral, the money stuff goes a lot better when you have a sufficient degree of trust, belonging, you know, emotional solidarity, then the financial solidarity goes very smoothly. And I think that's what's happening in the church as well, is that you have enough mutual investment in each other, in your lives as people, not as economic agents. Then being able to do these like shared financial projects is much more doable. And, and so the general roadmap of, of a micro solidarity community is don't even talk about money to start with. Start with, can you organize a book club once a week? You know, can we have a gathering where we get together in the summer and, and spend a weekend together? Like can we just do some really, really basic level of how does scheduling work and what kind of decision making crises come up when we try to do it? Like can we deal with those things first and start building that muscle? And as the collective organizing muscle gets stronger, then we start experimenting with money and say like, oh, what would happen if we asked everyone to put in $20 a month into a, into a shared fund? Like, oh, that's interesting. Suddenly there's a pool of money. What are we gonna spend it on? Well, let's design ourselves some governance around that to make it, you know, the, the appropriate amount of, of freedom for people to allocate that, but also enough checks and balances and accountability. So we're not encouraging people to be corrupt like that, that the financial solidarity comes after the emotional solidarity. That's basically the plan. Okay. And there's a, there's a handful of communities that are experimenting with it, but it's mostly, I will say the majority of them at the moment are still just in that emotional layer, just in the, like, learning to be a group layer. Mhmm. And so, like, these practices of micro solidarity, I guess, help build that

Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm in the same perspective as you. I I mean, I really I think David Graber did an amazing job of explaining this in his book about debt. Like, that on the one hand, the best things about society are built from debt. They're built from mutual obligation. Like the sense that I owe you a favor is actually what brings out the best in us. Like that's where peace and goodness comes from. But the problem is when you quantify that obligation down to the decimal point, that brings out the worst in us. And it's this like crazy, paradox. And it's easy to miss the point, but yeah, my, it feels so much more humane and life giving to me to be in a, a group where they can handle the money in an informal kind of sloppy way, knowing that actually the, the, that we've got enough trust between us, that we don't need to like nickel and dime everyone. That feels so much better than, than someone have, it feels like, I don't know, dealing with an accountant or dealing with an HR department or something when you, when you try and split every bill, like, oh wait, no, you had the sparkling water, which cost 50¢ more than the still water. I'm like, ah.

Yeah. I think it's a good framing, and I don't have a straightforward answer, and I'm glad to think it through with you.

Like Yeah. Joshua Weil who founded Inspiral, he his background is like, he's a programmer and he's a businessman. And so he's got that really kind of beautifully cold hearted business logic in him. And he, he was on a, on a pilgrimage and kind of had his like road to Damascus moment of like, wow, the, the world is really fucked up and we need to, there's a lot of problems and we need to get a lot more energy behind working on, on stuff that matters as he describes it. And for him stuff that matters is like environmental crisis, energy crisis, inequality in society, democratic crisis, like all of these important things need to have a lot of energy behind them, not just the against energy of like, you should stop being unjust and extracting all the world's resources, but the towards energy of like, and this is our alternative energy system and our alternative economic system. Like we just need so many people to work on those things. And so his approach was like, how do we get more people working on stuff that matters? Well, I'm a programmer. I can earn a living from basically doing one or two two days a week, which leaves me the rest of the week to do stuff that feels like more more meaningful. So he just basically recruited people that had high earning earning potential to start with and said like, okay, let's make a living in the smallest amount of time possible and spend the rest of our time doing useful stuff. And then the process since then has been to try and integrate those two halves. So like, can we earn a living and be doing useful stuff at the same time? You know, is it possible to do that? Sometimes for kicks, I introduce myself as a professional anarchist because that's honestly what my job is. It's like I go to organizations and I show them how to organize without domination hierarchies and I get paid good money for it. And, I feel great about that. You know, like, I, I, it's not like, I'm getting paid so much money that I can just kick back and relax, but I'm getting paid enough that it feels like I've got choices. I can, I can work in things that really sustain me ethically, you know, that, that, that give me a sense of purpose and, and meaning? And then I have choices about like, right now I'm living in a van with my wife and we can do that for a while. And if we wanted to do something else, we'll do something else. Like I'm not, trapped in the, in the loop of poverty that I was for a long time. And that just feels like a good thing. And, and so like finding, a path to, to integrate, like what's my income and what's my values, like the closer that those two things can come together. I think, I think it really liberates a lot of energy from people. I think, I think if I get up in the morning and I have to work on something that feels either meaningless, like, I think a lot of people have to work on stuff that they're like, yeah, it kind of sucks, but whatever. This is what you gotta do to end a living. And then there's another group of people that are actively working on stuff that they despise. If those people were working on things that felt more meaningful to them, I think we'd get a lot more energy out of them and they'd have a lot more free attention and creativity to be able to contribute to things that are really important. So that's a, it's a kind of, I mean, it's a radically moderate position, right? Yeah. Like I think it's good for people to work on stuff that they think is important and they should find a way to get paid for it. It's, it's, it's such a moderate thing to say, but it is kind of radical. Like how many, how many anarchists, how many organizers with a radical politics that I know that feel like they have to just basically be living at the poverty line. Right. Instead of doing what me and my friends at Inspire are doing, which is that, okay, how do we just slightly repackage what we're doing in a way that people with money are willing to, to give it to us? Yeah. It just feels like it it feels so much more fun doing it our way. The part the part of it is about fun. It's about yeah. It's not it's not just about the fun. It's about having a long term like, you're saying a long term commitment to action. So not just like a temporary spurt of like, oh, there's a social movement currently underway and I'm gonna, like, make some sacrifices for the next six months. It's like, no, I wanna commit my entire life to, like, leaning towards the future that I want to live in and I want future generations to live in. I've gotta figure it's up to me to kind of figure out how to how to in a livelihood in that context. And I, and I don't see a huge economic revolution coming in a hurry. And so I like in the meantime, I mean, maybe we get the fully automated luxury space, gay communism because of AI coming in the next few months. But if we don't, like, I wanna have a strategy that doesn't completely destroy my soul, and gives me enough freedom to make choices and to have health care and, you know Yeah. Yeah. Like that and again, it's not it's not up to me being super clever and smart and competitive in the marketplace. It's me being in a network of people that are helping me get opportunities, helping me see my blind spots and my, like, psychological hang ups around money and, like, and helping me stay accountable to my values in the process, because this is the this is the real pitfall of the strategy is like, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm doing something that's meaningful. It just happens to be that I I work for the oil company. You know, like that that kind of gradual disintegration of values that happens that we need, I think. I think we need accountability from our peers to to, like, prevent that. For sure. I think there yeah. There is sometimes a fetishization

I think this actually points at a deeper issue about, I I mean, it's kind of about dialectics in a way. Like, before I met the people at Inspiral, my political consciousness was really because of the occupy experience was really anti capitalist. They really prioritizing the anti and, and thinking like there's bad people out there and we need to oppose them with everything we've got. And then maybe if we get enough people on our side, we'll run them over and, you know, then we'll be the good people. And I just, I just don't see it that way anymore. It's more like, I just see it much more nuanced and gray and, and complex than that. And since I've stopped being so oppositional, I've found that there are people. Yeah. That, that I, it's hard to describe, but like that the skills and the competence that I've got is actually valuable in the marketplace. And I don't have to sell out my values to get paid. But I couldn't see that when I was so committed to this position of opposition and saying like, any organization that's got a budget of X dollars must be evil. It's like, nah, actually there's a lot of organizations out there that have massive budgets and they're doing something basically benign, you know? And if I can help them, be a little bit more effective or I can help them to, to develop better communications and better relationships with them and like, right, that the, that the staff are more empowered as a result, like that's a great contribution. I'm satisfied with it. And, and yeah, like I say, it, it buys my freedom to do thing, to do things that are completely unaccountable to the marketplace and awesome. And I, and I, maybe I'm being naive and maybe I'm misunderstanding the degree to which I'm privileged, but I think there's a lot of people that are, say for example, organizers, or like they're busy in collectives and they've got this kind of grassroots energy. Like they've got so many skills. Anyone who's got that kind of grassroots energy has got so many valuable skills that could be, that could with the right packaging, generate a decent livelihood that that feels really great. You know, that that is like ethical and contributing one little step towards the world we wanna live in.

Yeah. This is maybe something worth highlighting. Like I mentioned, scale and and and the financial experiments we've done at Inspiral. Like having having something that's not individualistic, but it's also not global. Right. Like having this intermediate space, and Spiral is a bounded economy. You know, there's like 200 people. And so within that group of 200, we can experiment with financial flows that there's no way I'd wanna open up to a global population. But it's like a way of stepping out of my individualism and being less concerned with, like, did I get exactly my ends met? Or like, did I maximize the things coming my way? And I can afford to be more generous. So for example, like, at Inspiral, we ask all the members to to make some kind of financial contribution every month. And you can choose if you wanna pay the small, the medium, or the large. And personally, I choose the medium, you know, because I feel like, well, I'm probably a bit better off than the average, but nowhere near as well off as some of the people at the top end. So I'm gonna contribute the medium. And this is just the mentality of, like, I, to me, that's kind of a socialist mentality, you know, like, what do, what do I have to give? Okay. I can give that much. And that makes it easier for other people to give less like that with, that I'm happy to do that in a bounded group, whereas I feel like a sucker if I was doing that at a godly time. Right. Yeah. You're yeah. Maybe,

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a simple, it's a simple example, but I think it kind of illustrates what I've learned about building a business in a way that is trying to send us in a direction that's more socialist. So for example, anything that I sell in my, in my different business pursuits, there's always a small, medium, and a large price. We have different framings for that, but usually it's like, Hey, if you're coming to this training or you're, you're coming to this retreat or something like that, here's like the average income, the average salary for people in your area. And if you are like below that, take the small price. If you're a lot above that, take the high price. But it's up to you. You get to choose. And there's always some kind of avenue, like if you're really excluded because of the financial barrier, fill in this form and we're gonna make sure that we've got some seats available for people who can't pay. And even just like adding that level of just that extra little bit of complexity on the sales page, instead of having like this one price and you're in or you're out, but adding the pricing tiers plus, like scholarship fund or some, something like that. Like, I think it really does soften some of the worst aspects of capitalism and still mean that I can earn a livelihood that's sustainable and means that I can do it over the long haul. And so, like, these are some of the small innovations that you discover by doing it, if you're not committed to hating money all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. And maybe another, maybe there's another point here, which is slightly tangential, but the funnest game that I know how to play is that you can get a group of people together and collectively design a different kind of culture than what you inherited from sort of mainstream culture and from your family. And that, that culture can actually evolve over time. And so like in the Inspiral community, I think that we have, we have fused status and generosity. So like the way to be a high status person in that community is to give a lot, is to show up a lot, is to be like recognized as a good contributor. And that just feels so much more pleasant to be around than a, than a community where status is, is fused to like material consumption or like who's the most intellectual. Really expensive monkey JPEG. Different communities have different. Yeah. Look at my awesome monkey JPEG. Like there just doesn't seem life giving to me to be in that kind of community and knowing that we can collectively design a different, a different environment to be in a different social context. Like that's the honestly, just the most hilarious one.

I could make a plug. I could make a plug. We're, gonna have micro solidarity summer camp, which is like a decentralized, I'm not in control of it. People from the community are running one summer camp in, the Northwest Of The Us and one in the West Of Europe in the July. So if anyone wants to come and hang out with community organizers that have got a different way of thinking about, yeah, how, how we can support each other, go to microsolidarity.substack.com and there's like a link there where you can pre register you're interested in that. That's a little plug, but I think that's all I have to say. Cool. And then did you want, did you want to leave, where can they, where can people find you in your, in your other work? Yeah, probably the easiest to find me is if you go to richdesabelles.com. I do a lot of writing on the internet. I'm very busy on Twitter, although I've recently started migrating over to blue sky because that seems cool. It's this new decentralized Twitter. But yeah, go to richdecibels.com. That's the kind of front door for all of my other projects. I have lots, but I'm not gonna be I'm not gonna do a global version. I'll just go and check it out. Listeners, go check it out. There's plenty of stuff. It is a,

Oh, I have one more thing to say if it's not too late. For the listeners, for the listeners, it's really important that when I first met Josh, I actually blushed and kind of stammered for a minute because I realized that Josh is actually a very handsome person. And I was expecting from from someone with such a good radio voice that it wouldn't have a pleasant face. But I want to report to the audience that actually it's a very good looking fella. And you're making me blush now.

Yeah. Hey, guys. You can put that on the ad takes for a good minute.