CCG Chronicles #4 - Is there nothing better than liberal democracy?
This episode is a continuation of the CCG Chronicles series which is a collection of interviews conducted during the Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) in Austria back in August 2021. The interviews were also filmed to potentially be a part of a documentary I'm making with a few others. I interviewed Grace Rachmany, founder of Voice of Humanity and DAO Leadership, a consultancy that helps DAOs for communications, operations, governance and tokenomics. She also has extensive experience in he...
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Hi, everyone. What you're about to listen to is an interview that I took in person while attending the Crypto Commons Gathering Conference in Austria in August 2021. The conference itself was a wonderful experience where people of a lot of different backgrounds and political ideas were able to discuss openly and safely about how crypto can intersect with fostering the commons. What you'll notice from these interviews is that these differences in thought are sometimes apparent because we all come from different places. And what was honestly refreshing about the experience is that we could do it in a supportive environment. This This is probably one of the most receptive audiences in crypto to socialism, which was really great for me. Also, a heads up is that you may notice sometimes that the audio was clearly recorded in the house that we were all staying in, which wasn't the best place for recording, but we did the best that we could with what we had. A lot of the interviews will also likely feature in the documentary that I'm making about the world of crypto and its potential futures with a friend. A big reason I was able to make it to this conference was thanks to all the support I received from patrons. So if you find the work that I do important, I hope you'll consider helping out starting at $3 per month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist.
So maybe as just a a start, I know we had, of course, in the beginning of everyone had these introductions, but for for the podcast and to introduce yourself to to this audience, maybe you can give, a bit of a bit of your history and how you ended up in the crypto space. Okay.
So I'm Grace Rakhmani. My given name is Rebecca, by the way. And I've been in technology for about thirty years, something like that. And I've worked in the area of some more of the business side, marketing side, some operations, things like that. And I've been a person the whole time, which means that sometimes I hear people identify themselves as activists, and I think most people are activists in some realm. So when my kids were in school, I was on the parents committee. I was involved in the municipality in one of the local parties that got elected to the municipal government. I've been involved in the peace movement. I'm Israeli. So on the one hand, I've been a technologist, and on the other hand, I've been just a normal activist. I care about my my environment. And depending on my stage in life, that might be just the local school, but it might be, oh, I live in The Middle East. The peace movement is a little bit critical to my long term future. And so and and I'd like to think about activism that way. Like, it's something all of us do. And in fact, art is that way as well. Anyway, about, eleven or twelve years ago, there was this thing called the Arab Spring. And as an Israeli, this was great. It's like, oh, yay. Let's overthrow the dictatorships. This is a smart idea. But at that moment, I also realized I have nothing to recommend you instead of your dictatorship. It's like, it's not like parliamentary democracy is looking great. It's not that representative democracy is looking great. And if you're an Arab and you're looking at, oh, yeah, the American system, that's not gonna be the one you're gonna adopt. So I thought we really need a new blueprint for democracy. What would that even be, and what does it even mean to have a government? What is governance? What is this process? And what should be governed and what shouldn't? And some things are sort of obviously have to be governed. You know, you need a police force and a fire brigade. On what level, like, does that what scale does that have to be done? And some things are really weird, like marriage. Like, why should that be something the government decides who and what can be legally, you know, whatever. Obviously, children need to be protected. But so what is this thing? And I started forming these ideas around something called voice of humanity, and we wrote some documents up, and Blockchain was evolving at the same time. And maybe about eight or nine years after I evolved this, a friend of mine said, you should do an ICO. And I said, what's an ICO? And he told me what an ICO was. He said, oh, you write a white paper and then you make, you know, you raise 30,000,000. I'm like, well, that sounds improbable, but it turned out to be the truth. Yeah. Yeah. And I opened up this website called iridicowitepapers.com. At the time, I was a digital nomad. I had I had left Israel. My children had completed high school, and I thought it's time for me to look for this next angle of my life. And, and so I opened up and I so this irideicowhitepapers.com seemed like a great idea. I've been doing a lot of business writing throughout my career, and I was a nomad, so it was a good way to make a living. Within ten days, I had people from Australia and people from Israel Israelite put up a couple of blog posts, and I've gotten this great domain name. And then I've written for more than a 100 organizations in this space by now. Yeah. And that's just the ones I've written to. Right? Those are the you know, if you consider about half the people who called me didn't hire me or I convinced them that this was a bad idea, which was my entire sales process consisted of saying, look, this is a bad idea. And,
and if you could So this be this would be in, like, 2017, 2016?
More 2019. '20 you know, 2019, 2020. Maybe 2018, I started writing. Yeah. And so I've been writing for about four years, and I've written for, you know, many, many projects, some of which you'll never hear of and some of which you've already heard of. And, and so I really got a lot of insight into what tokens do, what tokens don't do. And I got involved in DAO. I was part of the Genesis DAO, the DAO stack, Genesis DAO. And I actually, you know, hands on used a DAO. And the concept of DAO was really interesting to me and more the soft side than the, you know, voting side and the technical side. I'm not a developer myself. I've been around technologists and I speak engineers, but I'm not a technologist myself or is I'm not a code writer. I wouldn't say I'm not a technologist. Right. Did that was that an issue with writing SEO papers? I've I've been in the technology in business for thirty years. So I've done I mean, I have done programming courses. I have done data courses. I have been in telecommunications. I mean, I know how this stuff works. Okay. Yeah. I can't necessarily program a circuit board, but I know what that is. And I you're right. So and I've had to evolve with the field. I mean, if you think about technology over the last thirty years, it's not one thing. And so I had to always be learning something anyhow. And the basis is I had a minor in mathematics. And so if you've got a minor in mathematics and some computer science, the concepts fit into the basic realm of mathematics and physics. There's some things that I'm not as good at, but but that background has given me enough to pretty much grasp anything. Yeah. So I got very interested in this area of DAO and governance before we had the word DAO. And so here I am in this technology space, which really fits with my experience. Right? I understand technology. I understand bits and bytes. I understand, you know, I understand this idea of democracy. So I'm coming with this kind of different sides, different angles. Yeah.
I guess it was, like, due to your experience in, like, around the Aerospring, I I assume, and, you know, not having not having, you know, the right alternative for people during that moment as, I guess, something DAOs sort of represents a potential alternative, at least on the surface.
Well, again, what's a DAO? Right? But, yeah, it's it the the cons the concept of, like, we need something that is gonna be, more democracy. Right? It's more democratic. More people from the ground up are participating in. So that's part of the philosophy. That I think is the foundation of what we want to believe democracy is. It isn't what democracy is today, but that is the fundamental concept is how do we create an organizational structure where more people are more participatory and have their voices not just heard, but actually expressed in policy. Mhmm.
So then as you were, like, writing hundreds of escape papers, I'm curious what your thinking was in that process. Because I imagine, and a lot of people would imagine that you probably came across people who I mean, I imagine you're writing it, and then you're like, is this a good idea? Or, like, are these people maybe a little bit nefarious as you're writing it? Like, did you have, like what what was going through your mind, and, like, what type of experiences do you have in in writing those? Because I imagine there's some interesting ones. Yeah. So
the first thing to recognize when you're thinking about ICOs and creating tokenomics is that you are not a central banker, and nobody on your team has any central banking experience. And here you are saying, I am going to be a central banker and issue my currency. Now in this particular commons gathering, we have quite a peep few people who have experience with that. You've, you know, Matthew Slater and William Ruddock are people who've been doing this for ten years. Those are central bankers. Now they're not large scale central bankers, but those are people who've actually had experience with monetary policy Mhmm. Over many different communities and experience.
These are people who just for yeah. People may be listening that,
more involved in the community currency. In the community currency. Right? So they've actually had to function. Hey. Let me issue a currency and what happens? And we did a workshop with with Matthew here where he actually had us have a lived experience of, oh, here's some things and you never thought of. And how many people who've issued an ICO have even done that silly game, which is, like, you know, half hour game? None of them. Right? And they're here. They are issuing. So that's the first thing. And one of the really interesting things that is the way it is is that a lot of the tokenomics has been developed by lawyers because this is what's legal and not legal. And lawyers are very smart people who know no math. And economics, like computer science or many of these other disciplines, is fundamentally based on physics and math. I mean, what is economics other than math? And if you do the math, most of these tokenomic systems don't work. And so that's sort of one of my things. It's like, okay. Why are you why do you even have a token? And I'm very open about that. And so most of the white papers don't really I I mean, most of the tokens aren't gonna succeed, which isn't saying much. Right? I mean, I've worked in the technology field, and ninety five percent of those don't succeed, and 90% of regular businesses don't succeed. So what I'm saying, like, 98% won't succeed? I mean, it's like, that's not a big difference from where I've been in the past. The other thing is, like, how to think about money. Right? So sometimes some things are really scamming, and there's some things I won't touch and haven't touched. And it's like, yeah, I won't touch that field. Some fields I won't touch generally. Like, I won't touch the gambling field, and not because I think there's anything wrong with gambling, just because it's really no fun and I never learn anything, and those people aren't particularly fun to work with. And the other one is anything having to do with the beauty industry. I won't touch that and because of the persecution basically of women. And so, so yeah. So there's certain fields I won't work with, but and the same thing went with crypto. There's certain types of coins that I won't write for, and there's certain ones I will write for, but it mostly depends on the founders. And I just get really straight with them, and I say, look. This coin, you can float this coin. It's a little bit of a Ponzi scheme, or you're gonna probably be able to raise money for this and this and this, but probably your, you know, your tokenomics don't work, and you probably won't succeed, but you probably will be able to raise the money. And then when you go to your investors, you're gonna have to tell them this story about why the value crashed. Right? And if they're okay with that, I'm okay with that. It's not like money is now in the right hands of the people who deserve it. And so if you've come up with some scam that and you know you're doing a scam and you're willing to have a straight conversation with me about it, like, yeah, we know this might not work or probably won't work, and this is our plan for getting out and whatever, I can work with that. We know that our token we know that our tokenomics don't quite make sense, but we're gonna try and fudge it and maybe it'll work. Then we can have an honest conversation, but I can't really work with people who lie to me or lie to themselves. Lying to me is well, I can't work with. But lying to yourself about how great this is, that's yeah. I I have a lot of trouble. And also those people tend to not actually finish their white paper because what I mean, this screening process like I said, my screening process was telling people that this isn't gonna work. And first of all, that makes people if you're, like, not desperate, people want you more, especially because of the particular genders of the people in question. But the the other thing is that if you can't take that criticism and if you're not really willing to, like, deal with a lot of difficulty, you can't be a founder. And so what would happen with anybody who kinda didn't pass that test or is they would either not have a lawyer. When they got to a lawyer, they would realize it wasn't working or they would, you know, have come up against some regulatory problem or opening a bank account and opening they would come across some difficulty about halfway through the white paper and not finish it. And I would say about at least a third of the white papers I started never got finished. Another third never made it to any kind of, like, beyond the pieces of paper. Wow. You know? And and a third, they attempted to really raise money. But and it was unpredictable. I mean, some of the best people didn't at match to raise money.
It's really interesting. Do you think it was because of the tokenomics or probably some other factor?
It it varied. Sometimes I knew why. Sometimes I didn't know why. A lot of them did get private placements. No. I don't think it's because of the tokenomics. I think it was because of the economics of that particular moment and what people thought they could do. And sometimes it had to do with a particular environment. One of the best project I had was in the area of carbon credits, and it was a company that or not a company, foundation of people who'd been in the carbon credit market and in the actual forest reforestation thing for ten, twenty years. People who really knew this inside and out. And the way that they were approaching it was incredibly brilliant, But they just couldn't, there just wasn't money in it because of mostly politics in that case. You know, how does a carbon credit become a carbon credit and who verifies and certifies it is a political question, not a question of the environment. So, yeah, so there were there were a variety of different reasons. And I know a lot about a lot of things because everything came through. Right? It would be the environment. It would be games. It would be, you know, whatever supply chain. It would be farming. It would be, you know, just really amazing range of stuff that I got to learn.
Yeah. I can imagine. And I guess through that, I one of the things that that I've heard you say before, I don't remember where, but you mentioned how a lot of these tokens are sort of just vouchers. Mhmm. And what ends up 90% of the time is that they're actually not as, innovative as they think they are, and it's largely just a token that's basically I mean, I guess just sort of like a poker chip that you have within this environment and then but the ultimate purpose is so that you can have, like, more money. Mhmm. There's for some transition into the financial world, the traditional financial world.
Yeah. So, there's a few things. I mean, one thing, and this is not an insult. This is that most people are mediocre and that's by definition. That's the definition of mediocre. Right? And so most things that people say, I've got an idea. I'm like, well, the definition of ideas that, you know, nobody did that before and, like right? So not many people have an idea, and I'm including myself in that category. Right? And if you come here even, these are people who are really on the edge of doing things that are not traditional, and very few of the things you see here are actually ideas. They're like, oh, I've never seen that before. Mhmm. And that might be a spark from each person. Right? But the whole project that it and there's a few projects. I mean, I think the token engineering commons is the closest thing to an idea that I you know, it's like that's here and, you know, striding from nothing. That's pretty interesting. But they weren't the only ones doing it. I mean, the common stack was doing something like that, and Bill Ruddock was doing something like that. So there's like it's an idea building on past knowledge. So in terms of these vouchers, yeah, most tokens are redeemable for the service that you that is in that network. Right? So that could be a file coin that's good for storage. Now the storage points have done better than other specifically storage. Right? I mean, you know, with the j at the end. Yeah. Yeah. You know, see a coin in storage, and we'll see what happens with file coin. So, specifically, that's a commodity that everybody needs, and you can understand that Holochain hollow is working under that same idea that it's a commodity based thing. But most of these aren't commodity based things. If you really think about it, it's like, okay. I'm gonna make a token for, the supply chain of this and this and this, and then people are gonna pre buy these tokens, and then they're gonna wanna use the supply chain. Or I'm gonna make a token that represents this art collective, and then you can buy art with it. That's a voucher. Right? Or Yeah. And they're like, yeah. But what if I have a network of a few different projects that we can share points? Well, that's a frequent flyer mile or a mile that you get on your credit card. And so you've got a coalition of ways you could redeem that. And we know what happens with frequent flyer miles. You get rid of them as soon as you can. We know what happens with your credit card points. You try to cash them for cash. It's much more likely you're gonna get a cash for them than be like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna buy a plane ticket or a Target or a whatever. You know? You wanna put those back into cash. You have no interest in holding those. And as soon as you've got enough that you're allowed to cash them out, you cash them out. And that's the nature of vouchers, and there's no secret about how that looks or how that works. And so almost all the tokens that are on the market today are vouchers, but they're a little worse than frequent flyer miles. You know? Because the the people who issued a frequent flyer mile to you, they actually have an airplane.
Yeah.
Right? And you could use it to get on the airplane. These things are, like, speculative. We hope that one day, we will have the artworks that you're going to buy. But at least for three years, you're gonna have this I mean, can you imagine buying a ticket to the state fair, one of those tickets that they issue you when you go to the state fair three years before the state fair comes? I'm afraid about it. Right? Like, you'd forget you've got it. You get to the state fair. You'd left it at home and, you know, and maybe there would be a, I don't know, pandemic or something, and they cancel the state fair. Right? People don't actually do that. And so it's pretty clear that that's not the reason people are buying up your tokens.
Yeah. Right? So, I think basically what you're describing is sort of the the average crypto issue, and it's kind of pervasive throughout the space. But I think the the the reason that we're having this crypto commons gathering is because we're trying to find an alternative to that. So maybe I I I want to talk about sort of the differences that you see between maybe the this pervasive issues in the crypto space and maybe issues that we're having here and the differences that are that are here. But maybe first, I think a good question to ask would be, like, what what are the crypto comments to you?
Felix and Julio putting together a really awesome group of people. That's what it is. Okay. You know, I I don't like these philosophy philosophical answers about, oh, the group. You know? Yeah. Here we are together, and about a third of us already knew each other, I would say. And we're really glad to be together. It I don't take for granted anymore that you can get together with people. I think they've also done a great job of putting together 50 people. I think it's a good number. Right? That's kind of like just kind of a limit to how many how many people in a gathering I'll probably ever go to again. So this is great. Yeah. And I think that's the other thing is to that when we start to think about scaling, what does scaling look like? A big conference is, you know, that's gonna be online. Okay? So or maybe it's, you know, five different venues of of 50 people and then an online collaboration, and you can start to think about new creative ways. One of the things that when you talk about the crypto commons or this gathering, and I think in general, it's very hard for people to unthink about money. And so I've led eight, I think, workshops where it's basically a trail to try and get people to un think some of the things that we've been brainwashed to think about money and what money is and what money does. And you'll hear people say things like, oh, well, people have always used money, which is, of course, absolutely ridiculous historically. People haven't always used money, and it's only in our recent history that humans have used money. And and, debt based money has only been used for a very short amount of time in human history. And so this idea that people always transacted is just a myth. It's not the case. And in fact, most of our interactions aren't transactional. This interaction isn't transactional. I mean, you're not paying me for my time, and I'm not paying you for the promotion. So what the heck is going on here? I mean, aren't we gonna exchange some little bits of something? You know? I'll use some coins afterwards if you want. Alright. Yeah. I'll give you I'll give you some seeds. You give me some circles. It'll be all good. Right? And it's just most of our transactions throughout the day or interactions are not transactional in nature. Right. And they can't be. We would not have a life as a human that way. Right? Anything humane is kind of not transactional. Mhmm. And and so I'm thinking that the market is the only way to do things. Right? That it's only the market that creates efficiency and that this it's been proven as the best way. And the other thing is what's proven is the best way. Right? So when we start talking about democracy and you'll you know, people quote Churchill as saying, you know, well, democracy is the worst system except for all the rest. But nobody says my iPhone is the best except, you know, right, except for all the rest because next year there's gonna be a better one. And so these are just technological developments. Money is a technological development, and it's outdated. It's transactional money and marketplace dynamics are outdated. And so this kind of there's there's communism and then there's socialism and there's capitalism. That's new. That's only a couple 100 years ago old that we even had those words. And those are technologies that are now outdated. And the question is what's next? But there's a lot of unbrainwashing that we need to do in order to even think about what's next. So when I look at most of the projects here, they aren't really going into the realm of what's next beyond marketplaces. And And even token engineering commons which I would say is a little bit further along than others in thinking about incentivization isn't quite in the realm of what's you know, they're not quite there in the realm of what's next other than the marketplace dynamics and individualistic game theory. Right? Most of the game theory we hear about and certainly in the crypto area is all about what would I do in my own self interest.
Yeah. It's it's the based on, like, the prisoner's dilemma variation.
Here. But people don't operate that way. Yeah. Now young men operate that way more than other, other demographic groups.
For some medication for for patriarchal,
reasons, I would say. Well, again, that's not even patriarchal. Older men don't behave that way as much as younger men behave that way. There are there are developmental reasons why people behave different ways at different points in their life. And, you know, I'm not the same person I was twenty years ago. When I was young, I behaved in a much more competitive way than I do right now. I was trying to get ahead and prove myself and whatever. And now I'm like, alright. No. Just just let me write a white paper. I'm like, I don't you know, that's not a highfalutin' title. Right? And, and so those kinds of things are are we don't operate as individual, and we all know that if you've got a cheater in the system, people do things against their own interest to screw them. Right? Yeah. We all know that. It's like, get them. I don't care. I'm gonna you know, whatever it is. Screw the bad guys more important than gain personal gain. And and we work as groups. Right? It's like, okay. Well, I don't wanna do anything to upset anybody in this room, and so I wanna have a good name in my group. And so I don't operate on a day to day, moment by moment, transaction by transaction basis as an individual in many areas of my life. And so creating an entire economic system based on an individual's prisoner dilemma situation is missing humanity.
Yeah. Absolutely. It it seems to me like the the issue with the prisoner's dilemma again and, like, I did I did research in college on this, but I had some opinions on it. It's very, like, it's imposing the, like, homo economicus onto the individual as being, like, like that that's the hypothesis behind the prisoners of love and fame, is that everyone is, you know, this rational actor, and that you will, you know, do what you can to maximize your returns in a monetary sense. But this is a very, very limited, you know, interaction. And like you said, there's all these other different types of things you have to consider, when you're talking about group dynamics. And the culture world seems to have a bit of this fetishization of, like, prisoner dilemma, based interactions as a way to align incentives a lot of the time. They align incentives by trying to get you to the, you know, the right quadrant in the prisoner's dilemma game by, like, you know, maximizing your return in in that quadrant. Yeah. You know that. When people are,
you know, incentives is such a strange word to me. You know, my goal would be to get rid of incentives. So somebody once asked this question. I I remember who it was. How do you create it was coming out of the t comments and common stack. How do you incentivize people to do the things that they're great at and that, you know, that they love? Like, well, you just don't do anything. Right? You stop making them starve and be desperate. And you stop putting them in zero sum games, and you stop putting them in prisoners' dilemmas. And all of a sudden, they can be creative and do their thing. And some of them are gonna not be good at that because most people are mediocre. And so you've got a lot of mediocre artists out there, and they're doing their thing and being really creative at it. And maybe every now and again, they do something brilliant or a lot of mediocre farmers just making their way through life, and that's fine. But all this incentivizing people, well who's deciding what you should be incentivizing them to do and, you know, why is that good? And so I my goal is to deincentivize everybody, to put people in a position where they're not Pavlovian, you know, they're not in a Pavlovian situation.
Yeah. I mean, when you say that, I think that, you're a socialist.
Well, again, that's a really interesting thing because socialism is only appropriate within a financial dynamic. Right? It talks about the distribution of financial resources.
I would say I mean, my opinion is that it talks about the ownership
of the means of production. Yeah. That's what I always go back to. Right. So this is an ownership issue. Now ownership is interesting. Right? And owner and then you're like means of production. Right? Okay. Well, I own my womb. That's the means of production that's most salient for human beings, and you can't take that from me. Yeah. I mean, you know, it may be less functional at this point in my life, but it's like that's the means of production. And that's really interesting, isn't it? Because none of the means reproduction, I guess. Right. But but, again, like, what is this means of production of which you speak? It's not what I'm thinking. And so much of this thought is masculine thought. I mean, it's kind of a weird thing to say, but what is freaking production if it's not making another human being and bringing them up to be a decent human being? And nobody can take that away from a parent, the ability to make your child a decent human being. This is the and a productive human being and a and a human being that brings good into the world. That is the means of production that is primary to the human race, producing human race people. And that means production is in our hands in this redefining. Of course, socialism doesn't or capitalism doesn't refer to that. And so that's why I think they're these are interesting constructs, but they really they do generally speak to ownership and and and and money. Yeah. And they don't talk about the realm of human experience.
Yeah. The I mean, there there's a book called I mean, that Richard Engels wrote called the The Origins of Private Property or no. The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the States. And in that one he talks about how, the first sort of, the first exploitation, in humans was like man over woman. Sort of like the first one over well, and then people will say of course it's man over nature. And then one of the things he talks about is man over woman. And how women are not, like the care work is not something that is, like, accounted for within the economy a lot of times. Yeah.
So men will always dominate women in physical realms. That's biologically determined. And it's not you can't change that. And I think of, The Hunger Games as a wonderful rendition of what happens when you have a woman who is so good at killing people. Right? You just you get mental illness, and you get mental illness in men if you kill people. Right? Killing people is something that causes you to be mentally ill. And you often can't do it unless you are mentally ill. But, anyway, that's a whole different story. I wouldn't disagree with this exploitation of women. Right? There's no disagreement about that. And and creating a value system that is a masculine value system, which causes this exploitation of women. And I I don't think there's an intentionality around that, and that wasn't predetermined. And some of it had to do with, again, the definition of pre of of means of production, but also you you know, monetization. Right? You cannot monetize people's wombs without being, like, weirding out that whole structure. Right? Yeah. You can't monetize a mother's love or a father's love. You can't monetize any of the family or relationship types of things that people do without emptying them of value. Right? If you start to and and and you see things that are tragic like this, You could buy cuddle buddies in New York City. Right? Like, this thing came into the you could pay for somebody to cuddle you because that's how I mean, that's horrifying, isn't it, that somebody would not have a friend Yeah. To hug them in whole vision. Yeah. Yeah. People. Right. I mean, it's and that's what happens when you say that monetary value is the primary value with which we determine our society, and let's increase GDP. And in order to increase GDP, what we're gonna do is we're gonna put children in a place. And then after that place, their moms won't be home. So we're gonna pay somebody to take care of those children after that school place. And then in the meanwhile, we're gonna take the grandmothers who used to take care of the children and we're gonna put them in a place. And now we get money from each one of those things, and we get money from putting them when you know, the grandmothers in the place and money from putting the children in place while we've really increased GDP a lot. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There is. And that's the monetization of of women's work or care work. That is monetization of women's work. And and it's very dehumanizing. And and it and so, you you know, this is where money really falls short and you start to think about beyond money. And and I get a little bit horrified with this. We have to monetize women's work and give them money for what they're doing. And it's like, well
Yeah. It makes it a bit awkward. But this is one of the things that's because in this, gathering, we were supposed to do this, community currency game. The original idea was to do it throughout, the conference where we would have, you know, basically these tokens that would represent, you know, this pot. But in the end, we decided not to do it because we thought it would be awkward to, cause there is technically, like, some sort of monetary value behind the community currency that we're originally thinking. But then I think it we thought that it would be too awkward to sort of be, trading because we're not really transacting with one another. We're sort of mutual interactions.
Right. Hopefully, mutual interactions. Right. Like, who should be paying for this? Right? Should you be paying for my time or should I be paying for your publicity? Right? Right. And and
and we all know that. You don't tip your mom at the end of the meal because it was good. Yeah. And I I but it's this this sort of gets at I think why a lot of people have reservations about cryptocurrencies that it feels like, it's a group of people just trying to put more of our like, financialize more of our lives. You know, we can tokenize this, we can tokenize that, and, you know, then we will be able to, you know, improve the conditions of of poor people in in the third world, for example. It's it's it's this, like, in my opinion, this neoliberal theory about, trying to make every turn everything into a type of, like, private property that you can then, you know,
get a loan out of or something like that. Turning everything into capital in a way. Yeah. I wouldn't disagree with that. And there's, like, 10 types of capital, eight types of capital when you get these people in whatever. And it's
like
you know, again it goes back to money as an outdated technology. And we do need measures and we do need currency. And, you know, in the Arthur Brock type of a current c. Right? What Mhmm. We do need to see different measures of what we're doing, and the question is how and in what way and what does that look like. My main curiosity is really around what if we start to see those measures as group measures. Right? Instead of seeing, this thing that we're doing together as each one of us contributed to a certain amount of money, let's say. And this is sort of how it really is. The reality is that Felix and Julio had to raise a certain amount of money in order to have this in order and they asked people to pay a certain rate to come here. And then some people sponsored and some people paid more and some people paid less. And some people stayed here and some people stayed in a different place and it was a pool. And then we generated this conference together and the value of each session we generated together. And then it's like, oh, well, I could bring this person in by video and this person whatever. And we generated a whole something together. And how do we look at that pot of something? Right? Like so and that pot of something includes some knowledge base that we created. It includes some relationships that we created. It includes some money that we created. And and I even talk about that in terms of data. Right? What's the data that you created? And we talk about data privacy, for example. And it's okay. Here we have this interview, and you and I are having an interview, and there's a camera person in the room as well. And it's like, well, whose data is this now? Is it mine or is it yours? And then if if we were walking along on that trail like we were the other day and then somebody was taking a picture of us and posting it to whatever media they were posting it to, is that my data? Wait a second. He took a picture of me in a group and whatever. Whose data is that? We don't have good means of saying this is our money. Right? Mhmm. This is our currency. This is our data. This is our measure of something. This is our ecological footprint. And that's my main curiosity because that is the reality of how things are generated. Very few things are generated by an individual. And so how do you start to say, we're gonna have group responsibility for this ecological footprint. We're gonna have group responsibility for these people getting enough health care or enough food. And we've tried to do that through nation state and its work to a certain degree. And again, that's outdated. All I'm saying and I'm not saying anything I'm not an anti technologist or an anti capitalist. I'm just saying, okay. We we've used these technologies called capitalism, socialism, and communism, whatever, and they are now outdated. And we need to start creating new structural realities, new communications methodologies, and my belief is that those need to be group methodologies.
We can agree to disagree on on the socialist part, but,
so you had some of the interesting we were talking earlier about some of the, I would say criticisms that you had about some of the ways that we're thinking about, monetary value and, like, resource value. And then some of your thoughts on, on on voting.
It's really interesting. Alright. So let's start with the monetary value. So one of the things that you've just pointed out is that in the d five space, what we've done is we've actually hyperactivated this financial value thing, which is meaningless value. Right? You've got these people who are moving money from place to place, and that's financial value. Right? And that has financial value because it gets interest in. What it it has zero fat value to human beings. Right? It's like, oh, now there's more money in the world. Or now I have more money. It's just you've produced nothing. Right? And trading another chain with another value or another monetary currency, I think, has no value, and it does get immediately co opted. And that's what you've seen with Ethereum is very clearly a case of completely being co opted by financial system. Yeah. And it started out with this, you know, we're gonna have this one world computer in a better place and whatever, and it's completely co opted. And the reason it's completely co opted is that it doesn't have any resources of an ecosystem and we keep saying this ecosystem. We're gonna have an ecosystem and let me tell you if you don't have food and water and humans are part of your ecosystem then you do not have you have a you have a you know you have leaks in in your ecosystem because you can't sustain the people. And I know that this is you know kind of a little bit silly but if you had an ICO that said okay we're taking all our money from the ICO and we're buying a couple of farms And solar panels now and we're using our money in this ecosystem. The only money you can use is our ecosystem money, whatever it is, Ethereum or whatever is eCash or whatever. And you can come and develop on our ecosystem, and we'll give you the computers and the land or whatever. And you gotta figure out how to grow the stuff on the land. We'll put a few farmers there or whatever that'll teach you. And we won't pay you, but you're gonna have to live in our new society. Now you'd have an ecosystem. Yeah. And then you wouldn't have to sell out to the default ecosystem because all of these systems get eaten up one way or the other. And they will always get eaten up by petrodollars one way or the other. And one way is we're gonna air drop rice onto you like we do to Haiti. Right? And the other way is we're gonna send some troops like we do to Yugoslavia. And, you know, one way or the other, you will be eaten or we're gonna co opt your money by putting a conversion rate on it. And now as soon as you convert to dollars or you're gonna be too small and we don't care what you do with your stupid currency because you don't have food and you don't have petrol. And if you don't have petrol, good luck to you. And so one way or the other you will if you're using monetary currencies that have a translation rate to monetary value you haven't done much. And we know that. We have hundreds of years of history of that. And so I look at these monetary currencies, and they don't interest me. What interests me is everybody eats. Right? If you're in the system, everybody eats. And you might call that socialism or communism or whatever. I just think it's being a human.
Mhmm. But I guess to you, if you if the, DeFi people for the the the crypto people were really wanting to be truly revolutionary and truly making an alternative system, then it's really about, and raising money or using the money that you have to use in order to have productive assets that you can sustain
Yourself. Yourself. And it's not gonna be easy, but you're in a war. If you're really trying to create an alternative if you're really trying to create everybody eats, right, which I think is very simple and we are. Everybody eats and nobody kills each other. That would be good. Right? Most most humans are like, yeah. Let's not kill other humans and let's make sure everybody eats. And and again, I don't think that's a radical thing to say. I mean, it's just human. And so if you're in that pile of people, you have to start thinking from the ground up. What are the resources we need? And there are a lot of unused resources, and we're going in this direction of larger and larger disconnect between financial resources and physical resources. Yeah. Right? Financial capital and actual reality. And you can see it everywhere. You can see it with, you know Dogecoin. What?
Dogecoin.
Dogecoin. Dogecoin is interesting, right? Because it is connected to a specific like certain kinds of tickets you can buy and a certain group of people who are honoring it. But what I mean is like something like if you look at some of the regulations right now about what borders you can cross under what circumstances and then you look at what you actually do in reality. Right? You're like okay. Well there's a very big difference between what the government thinks that's regulated and what has actually happened. And I think that's even true that's gonna become more and more true financial regulation. And you know when you talk about we talked about somebody with here was like talking about squats. Right? Like where are you living versus okay that's an abandoned building but actually there's a thriving art community in that building. Right? So there's a becoming this disconnect between what is happening at this financial and governmental labor and what people are doing. And so the question is how do we capture this, what people are doing, and bring that into, ecosystem. Right? Bring that into, you know, I'm calling it an underground, but what's an underground. Right? Like the partisan movement or the, you know, the, the underground railroad. What's the underground railroad? It's safe houses. It's if you know that if you're in this group, they're gonna make sure you eat, and maybe you have obligations to that group. But what would that look like to be in the everybody takes care of everybody group? And and how does those resources and those kinds of resource allocations look different? You know, money is very blunt. It communicates to you're trying to communicate too many things in one instrument. But if you had just a measure of of, meals a day. Right? How many people in my group had a meal today? And everybody saw that. Here's your country. Here's your city. Here's your rate. If everybody had a dashboard instead of their bank account, meals a day, how many people didn't have meals today? You'd have a distribution of resources that would look very, very different. Yeah. And you can do that now. You used to not be able to communicate that information.
Uh-huh. But it's something that, you know, I I look at, you know, statistics about, you know, The US, for example, being the wealthiest country in the world and still, you know, such high rates of of childhood poverty is
is is is mind boggling, of course. Just yeah. And that's a country I mean, things are cyclical. Right? So that's a country that's on the decline.
Yeah. Yeah. I is to to switch to ACE. I I feel my impression is that there's been a disconnect from, like, the financial world and the real world for a long time. I mean, we just see this with different financial bubbles, and real estate markets, and, and various other types of things. And so I think it's a lot of people are realizing this and, like, they're trying to find a way to, it's like we're in a tough situation where, you know, these prices that are that affect our material needs are based on these, like, narratives going on that don't actually reflect reality or, like, reflect any sort of rational system.
Yes. That is accurate. And I think the more that we can I mean, my assertion is that the more that as an individual and as a group, you can stop saying we need money too? Right? And start saying, how do we do this without money? What do we need? And how do we do it without money? And I think that the more as a you can do that, the more resourcefulness you can bring, the more you can create a reality you want. Now there's some sacrifice but it is this thing where you know it's like this Buddhist picture of like this there's this drying up pool of water and the fish are all fighting each other who's gonna stay in the pool of water. And like how do you just get out of the pool? And to me getting out of the pool means saying how do we do this without money? How do we do this without money? How do we create a system that isn't based based on resources? And some of that is it's very interesting because you say things like well how are we gonna have a cell phone? But if we took all the electronics in our neighborhood that have been thrown out and put them together we could have all the things we needed. We'd need some knowledge. We need some whatever but there's so much and I think that there will be a generation of that right of people saying okay we're off the grid but we're not off the grid and we have our own cell phones and our own networks and we have some three d printers and we're recycling things in ways that wouldn't have normally been done because we're trying to manage without money because we don't have money. I think that I mean, we're in this place of, you know, where are you on the scale of which pond is drier? Right? Is it that one where I'm scavenging and and growing my own garden? Or is it that one where I'm still trying to make money? And I think that answer is different for different societies, different people. But we're all somewhere in that transition of, like, I'm gonna die in one of these systems. And how soon am I gonna die in each one, and how do I move from one to the other? And I think that we're not doing enough as a community in this community of thinking about how do we migrate people out of this desperate situation they're in. And part of that's because none of us are desperate, almost by definition, because of the way this community is. Okay.
Yeah. I would like to also because we had an interesting conversation about voting. Voting. That's that's a big topic in the crypto world in terms of, I mean, governance in general. I guess the the go to that people go to is I go to go to is for basically allowing people to vote on Yeah. Proposals or something or, you know, for x y z. And, you know, we have these quadratic and conviction, voting. There's new mechanisms that are supposed to, open up the space a bit Yeah. For,
democratic input. But you had some you had some interesting insights. Well, the first thing is, you know, just colloquially, when you say let's vote on it, what does that mean? Right? That means the conversation is over. Let's vote on it. And it means I probably think I have a majority or I don't really care. So I wanna vote on something. I will, by definition, wanna vote on something if I think I can win or if I don't care very much about it. And it also means you're gonna lose. Some people are gonna lose. Now that automatically creates a divisive system of me against you. It creates the end of creativity. Let's stop talking about it. And it's very blunt. The other thing is, like, everything leading up to the vote. Now if the quadratic voting or conviction voting or whatever voting, it doesn't matter what what kind of voting it is. What it's gonna indicate is of the proposals that are here, right, which one is there a preference for? Now what proposals are here is a very interesting question. And how did they get here? And that's why voting is very meaningless in today's world. That's why every single country has the same head of state. You could just switch them around for one another. You go down and vote in your local ballot, and you look at the ballot and you're like, this is the best two people in my entire country. This is it. Right? If the process by which someone gets to a ballot is bad, it does not matter that you have the vote. And so I think that none of these systems have solved for how does a proposal get there? How do you get the best proposal on the table? How do you get a proposal on the table that almost nobody disagrees with? It's a very good question. And, also, under what circumstances. And it really depends. And the reason that crypto hasn't solved that is because they don't have to. The only thing that most of these projects are deciding around is where to move the money to and maybe what the interest rates should be and a little bit about what the code should be. Should it be, you know, eight blocks or 16 blocks, which, you know, how many people care about this? And so since you're not deciding on should somebody die because their because their race is the minority race in our region, then, you know, it's like, okay. Well, voting is cool. But if you have a decision, like, how do we make a peace process so the minimum number of people die or whether we should build a hydroelectric dam or wind towers or, you know, nuclear plant, well, now we're talking about some significant interesting issues or maybe we should just reduce our energy use. Right? And if you think about this hydroelectric plant thing, you can see, wow, there really are a lot of things on the on the table that could be done instead of having another electricity thing. It's like, what are we well, maybe we shouldn't have street lights and then we won't need any more power in our country. And if we turn the street lights off at night, okay. Well, now there's a crime problem. Okay. Well, you know, but there it starts to get to be this higher resolution, higher quality questions that you can ask. And voting doesn't say anything about what is the quality of the question you asked before you got to the proposal. Right? So the proposal is also a question of the quality of the question you asked. And so all of these things are extremely, shallow. We're gonna vote on it. And, again, I would say very competitive. And we do have this, kind of assumption in the Western world that competition is good, and competition is a part of the human experience, and collaboration is a part of the human experience. And where do you want competition? Well, I really want competition in my sports. I wanna know who won that Olympic gold medal. And then I'm like, I won the gold. I'm like, well, not really me, but, you know, that guy from my country, I won the gold. This is very healthy competition. Right? You know, in in areas where you really want to have that kind of who's the best and how do we, you know, reward people who are amazingly brilliant inventors and have breakthrough ideas. There's where competition is useful. But there's places where collaboration is useful and most of the areas that humans need to decide upon. What kind of educational system should we have for our children? You know, what kind of electricity should we have for our country? What should the policy be about logging? And where should the vaccines go? And to what country should they go first? And should there even be a patent on them? These aren't yes no decisions that should be voted on by a majority. These are decisions that if we bring a lot of people together, like, oh, you know what? I've got an idea about the vaccines. Why don't we try this? You know? And how about if we whatever it is. And so voting becomes this very and I think it's nefarious. I think it's nefarious that we've been taught that democracy is voting.
Yeah. And my yeah. I mean, I I I totally get it. It's my my perspective, obviously, from from a socialist one, is that, like, we live under, like, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, you know, I would say. Is that sort of all of the assumptions and, like, the the prevailing force is usually in the interest of, like, a particular class of people. You know, when you're given the choice between, you know, you see they say you have you have, like, a fake choice, right? You have, you know, the the neoliberal or, like, you have, like, the the hard right fascist and, like, that's that's all you get. You don't get anything else. And the reason that is is because way before we ever got to the point where you're choosing, you know, between these two people, the the machine has been set in motion so that's any other alternative is just sort of weeded out or not even allowed to be a possibility. And so, no. Yeah. I I I guess that's that's sort of the the perspective that's the reasoning for me why we're having this constant issue and why people are, I guess, losing faith in democracy in general is because we're only given a specific type of we're just given a vote on, you know, the horrible a horrible choice and potentially maybe slightly more horrible choice. You know, it's sort of designed from the start in the interest of, like, the capitalist class.
Well, I would say that that's, one way of looking at it, but I think that that's a way of looking at it that is why I'm in here. Right? Mhmm. Why I'm talking about money. And it's because we would say it it helps the capitalist class. Right? But what what I'm in what what I think we ignore is the flow. So we look at these objects like there are these people and those people and those people. But what we're not looking at is how can we communicate with each other and what are the rules of the game. The rules of the game are kind of invisible to us. And part of that is what is money. Right? And what is money? Just the simplest way to say it is a dead tree is worth more than a live tree. K? And as soon as you have a dead tree is worth more than a live tree, all of the rest is set in motion. And it's not about the bourgeoisie and the catalyst and the whatever. It's about we decided, right, that you've gotta get the ball in that basket. And now all of our communication is how to get the ball in basket, how to get the ball in basket, how to get the ball in basket. That's one way of kind of thinking of it. And then it doesn't matter whether you have capitalism or socialism or communism. If you're using this specific type of value denomination which we're calling money and we're saying a dead tree is worth more than a live tree. And people are like well it's just how you use it. No. It's not. It's not that easy to say from now on we're gonna pay people for hugs or we're gonna pay people for planting trees from now on instead of cutting down trees. It's like that's that's just naive that somehow that's gonna change when we declare from now on, we declare that we're gonna take money away from you when you cut down a tree in the rainforest. It's like, that's not what's gonna happen. So this it doesn't matter whether you're a capitalist or socialist because you're still inside. A dead tree is worth more than a live tree. A fruit tree is worth more than a oak tree. And if so and and now you're starting to kill oak trees because you want fruit. It's and so the and and I the other way I talk about that is the flows. Right? And it's like if you've got train tracks, there's a certain kind of transportation that can come through your set city. And if you've got train tracks and a river, then there's something else you can do. And that's why I think money has to start living alongside some of these other value flows, currencies, whatever you wanna call those. And that's why I'm very interested in nonmonetary resource allocation. That's why I'm interested in these group. What if you can only move a good from somewhere together as a group? What if you had to consult with your whole town before you decide to have lumber? Everybody in the region has to decide. Yes. We're gonna cut down our trees, and we're gonna sell them to the next place over. And then everybody gets a profit from that or not and not some individual. Wow. That would be a really different way of thinking about the forest. And that would produce a very different result.
Yeah. I swear you're a socialist. I just think that that I think that's a meaningless label. Sure. I think I I think that's fine. Yeah. We'll we'll have more discussions throughout the conference than elsewhere. I'm sure we will. But, yeah. But thanks so much for for taking the time to, to express and share with us your knowledge. Thanks. Maybe to Opinions?
Opinions? Yeah. Strongly held beliefs.
Yeah. But, maybe just to finish off, you can share with people who, where they can keep up with you and and your work.
So, you can book for me at daoleadership.com. Voiceofhumanity.1 is my most salient project right now. I've been having these weekly calls, which are I don't know. Sometimes they're more and less populated, but, you know, voiceofhumanity.1 probably consolidates most of my work. And I'm pretty open about consulting, you know, you just wanna I'm not famous enough that I have to turn you away if you wanna pick up an hour time with me. So Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Now that I'm on your podcast, who knows what'll happen?