Crypto for Real: From the Commons for Capital to Capital for the Commons - Bangkok 2024

[Music] [Applause] thank you so I don't have a slideshow so I just have this in background uh just for those who don't know we have 25,000 articles on everything related to The Commons peer-to-peer crypto um you know bsection so if you want to know peer-to-peer in housing in transportation in food you'll find what people have been doing for the last 15 years uh all the experiments successful or not um so and the condition to be n Wiki is that you have to exist so not just an idea but actually a really existing practice all right so um crypto for real um I have a tendency to give you like historical uh framing so I'm going to do that again today um so I I I first want to give you a geopolitical reasoning so there's no such a thing as a perfect Society uh but there is such a thing as equilibrium uh within a society so we need different institutions that keep each other in check and so basically I'm going to argue why today the commons needs to be the central institution in our society right so 5,000 years ago we left uh tribal kinship based uh gifting commoning based modes of exchange I mean they still exist but they're quite marginal to the the world system and we move to civilization uh division of labor division of classes separate institutions from the people you know we we live in it uh and so the the basic first form was Empire and the way to think about Empire is to think about the Emperor as the father of the nation uh keeping uh equilibrium within within the Empire uh and so typically in in Empires on the one hand it creates the the conditions of Peace for trade to emerge but it also really constrains markets uh in a kind of really subordinate position right um and I don't know if you're familiar with history history uh they had things like clean slate legislations uh the Jubilee so for example every 25 or 50 years the debts would be cleared right and so why would they do that to avoid internal slavery right so because if you uh if rich people lend to poor people uh then of course you're at some point they can't pay back and they become slaves right um this was an equilibrium of of sorts right it uh and so maybe important thing to say that Empires had Commons so you look at the European system in uh before the 16th century if you're a farmer you have your own land a little bit for your family you work for the land of the Lord and then you have the commons which is like common land used by all the farmers in a particular Village right even today if you look at the picture of the world from a satellite what is green it will be Austria Switzerland Japan because their Mountain slopes are are commons and they've been protected from degradation over hundreds and hundreds of years right and kind of that's the system that broke down in Europe in the 16th century right and we replaced it with capital state and Nation uh and how is the equilibrium in in that system uh basically um you have a cycle that's called a lib lab cycle by Carl Pani in his book The Great transformation and so basically here it goes you have a up upward cycle of the economy these are called conative Cycles you have a up cycle of the economy you need a lot of Labor that's good for labor so you get higher wages welfare systems etc etc after 20 30 years that breaks down Capital feels it doesn't have enough uh profit and you're going to switch to more let's say neoliberal type of system right so in the in the recent history 1973 1980 would be that crisis a supply crisis and then it's replaced by the ne neoliberal Reagan Tater model right so the the but the thing is that every 30 years more or less you have a change of equilibrium right if there's too much Market there's a revolt against it and you have re-regulation if uh the the if there's too much regulation after a while you have a revolt against that regulation and you have deregulation and this is the system that stopped working in the 1980s right why is that because at that moment Capital became transnational so from that moment on the equilibrium within our society stopped functioning because there's nothing you can change with within a nation state anymore and that's independent on whether you're left or right uh you know within a few days your bank stop working if you do something that goes against the interest of transnational Capital so what's the solution so one of the solutions could be oh well we need a bigger state right we need to re reinforce the state and you can see today Russia China they go back to more sovereignist uh ideas uh so they want to rest strengthen the State against the market uh but also maybe more scary is the idea of a world state right so in order to regulate the market we need a world State and uh that is probably not uh very good idea either so what's the other solution and there's only one it's we have to inflate the commons now so I want to insist on the regularity role of the commons right because basically markets and states are extractive institutions they compete with each other and historically have always collapsed so they always overuse their resource base and it ends up with soil degradation deforestation and these types of things so every so often maybe 300 years you have uh a collapse of a particular form of society or a form of civilization and then you have a transition to something to something new uh um and so in these uh um in these down Cycles the commons is always the regenerative and protective institution so the way to see it when things go well with market and state the commons weaken when things start uh going bad with market and state the commons come back because people locally go back to their Commons to ensure their livelihoods right and then in Dark Ages when there's no marketing State then then the commons becomes hegemonic that's why you have monastic institutions in the history of China Japan Europe and that's in those periods when Market States collapse then the monastic institutions become really like almost like the state in a certain way right and they're Collective institutions um so today uh so how do we inflate the commons that's uh that would be uh my first argument um and so let me then in introduce the second reason why we need to think about the commons more and that's of course the ecological crisis right so one way to say it is that civilizations would ex would exhaust their region they would collapse and then another civilization would come up anywhere somewhere else when you have Global resource depletion and Global uh climate instability and all these things then there's no there's no way to go right and so that means that the commons which were local need to become Global right and I use the concept of cosmol localism which is a very simple rule if it's heavy it should be local if it's slight it should be Global and shared so cosmol localism is basically one the need to re localized production why would we need to do that because 2/3 of matter energy expenditure is transportation today and I would argue that is unsustainable in the long run right so this is one thing second thing is mutualization itself what is mutualization is um you know when when things are readily available you don't have to worry every individual can have access to something when things become scarce mutualization becomes an interesting solution right why do we have co-living co-working uh shared Transportation today is because young people today in this you know especially in in Western countries have a hard time not just buying a house that's already impossible for the last 20 years but even renting becomes really problematic today right and so you mutualize uh these costs to you know to still have basically a a decent life right okay so um maybe one more argument uh so this is from biologist called Olivier amama in France and he says so when you have resil when you have efficiency in the beginning resilience grows with efficiency but there is a point where if you continue with too much efficiency resiliency starts going down typical example be our neoliberal uh Supply chains highly efficient Global but anything that goes wrong and the whole supply chain uh is affected right because there's no fat in the system you look at nature uh to to choose a really bad example you need a million sperms and only one is going to get somebody pregnant right so that's a super abundant uh phenomena that is really typical uh for the resilience of Nature and so okay so the the important thing is that that we are at a shift today from basically efficient as the sole growth factor to resilience as the growth factor we need to grow resilience and we actually need less efficiency we need more fat in in our systems okay so where does the web come in in that story uh web 3 and all of that right so here's here's the kind of historical framing in 93 we democratize the web and what does that do with what I call peer produ ction right the capacity to create an open ecosystem which allows anybody to adhere their skills and passion to Collective projects what it does is not trivial what it does is it creates the capacity to globally coordinate labor trans locally outside the full control of the state in the market so that's a great achievement of free software open design and shared knowledge that we you know gradually achieved after 93 technically this is called stigmergy right it's coordination through social signaling you don't necessarily need Market signals nor command you actually can see what the system needs and you can decide whether you adhere or not and then we create an economy around it but this is very significant because we shift from commodity labor I need to find a job to live and that job is for four other five people not going to be a meaningful job but I need to do that job to a system where we have contributory labor where everybody in those open ecosystem actually is passionate about their engagement uh and and so you have a meaningful work again right okay where does crypto come in so crypto basically solves a basic issue of free software which was we couldn't fund the collective work right so you have people who do free software uh for the market they can get uh uh create an economy around their work so they create added value around their comons like lenux and stuff and they create their economy around that an entrepreneurial Coalition around the core Commons of shared code but then the people working on the in general infrastructure couldn't get funded right and that's why you get IBM and all these big companies having a huge influence over open- Source communities right and I like to provocatively say the more common is the license the more capitalist the practice right because a fully open license allow these big companies to come in and basically have a huge influence that's where web 3 comes in it fin it allows not just the global coordination of labor but the financing of that labor right so you invented things like crowdsourcing Finance so yes CS can still play a role yes Banks can play a role but it they're kind of surrounded by a sea of donations and and financing from many many small uh entities right um so that's a really important step that we not just can coordinate labor at a global scale but also the financing so let me go back to civilization uh so what is civilization civilization was a geographic Arrangement between the rural and the urban this for 5,000 years this has been the key uh organizing Factor what are we doing now is different we are massively coordinating translocal uh entities right so we move from a geographic situation where we now have translocal self organization at scale and I would argue that is in part already post civilizational now the Second Step I I don't know how much time I have but but uh o wow okay very very fast um Second Step the universal Ledger is very important right uh we invent accounting 5,000 years ago it's a temple with a rise coming in and out invention of the state in the 14th century Double Entry accounting a narcisstic accounting where you only see your profit and your Capital but you you don't know the impact now we have a universal Ledger that allows really to see open ecosystems and impact uh uh automatically uh through these three L another important step okay so now I need really need to come to my uh sub to my topic um uh all right uh yeah all right um so basically how do we inflate the commons that's my topic right so and I think this is the critique of web 3 I see web 3 mainly as an exit strategy for the moment so you have factions of capital which which see the world not evolving in you know very very positive ways so you Arbitrage nation states and it's democratized to people like us the coding class the educated uh class we can move around right so it's it's an exit strategy and that is not sustainable over the long term because as things get uh more tricky at a local any Force which is not contributing to local resilience will will be seen as parasitical right and so now we have two kinds of Commons that are not connected and that's really the theme of my proposal so I did a study in in Gent about Urban Commons we had 50 Urban Commons projects in 2008 and we had 500 in 2016 so a tenfold increase in people locally organizing local Commons for their provisioning systems like Collective purchasing organic food housing Commons share Transportation not Uber but associations and co-ops that do that right so an explosion maybe 2 3% of the urban population today is engaged in those activities and they don't use crypto right and what that means is they can't really scale right and so pure localization is sublinear so what that means is as you scale you lose efficiency and superlinear is what a city does you double the city in size you have more than uh more than double The Innovation well actually it's 115% uh when you double you have 150% more innovation in a city right and so basically this is the answer we need to we actually need to work on is how to connect local resilient urban and rural Commons Biore regionally reorganized with cosmol local knowledge and financial Commons right so that every node locally yay so that so that every Lo no locally can be supported by a cosmol local Alliance in a network right and so if the nation state cannot resist transational Finance translocal Commons that combine thousands of local nodes with very strong uh cooperation protocols and capacity to move Capital around right so I'll I'll I'll end with this you you you need to start thinking about Collective property at a translocal scale Commons can no longer stay local and I think all the Technologies are there to do this like like fractional ownership uh so okay I could say more uh I'm just going to give you one example this is actually a local one but in Holland we have something called huban uh and is it 64,000 Acres or something that they want to buy so basically it's a consumer Co-op right and yeah and is buying up land to then lend it uh to uh organic farmers so this is I I hope that you can start thinking about this in this way and so basically I I'll um finish with Austin A Smith who says we need two kinds of people the B Regional guilts right the people who do local work are embedded like you do permaculture you have your feet in the mud you work with your neighbors right but you learn the global permaculture design course right and that's a global one and you can have Global Investments uh to support the local right so I invite you to start thinking that way um and just remember when civilizations fall is not sure that your money will be worth anything after the Roman Empire there was no money for five centuries right so think about this to have access to people who know where the food is coming from and energy coming from this is basically where uh things are are going to play okay the second Guild would would be the da Guild and these are people like the guilds in the Middle Ages are traveling between nodes and basically seeding the local with the knowledge of the global right they know the global protocols they know how to get the fundings and they so you shouldn't be nowhere with no roots you should be everywhere you should be root full and should be connected with these local nodes that's kind of uh the conclusion of my presentation thank [Applause] you awesome [Applause] [Music]