Self-Governing Land Trusts - Bangkok 2024

[Music] yeah get ready we're going to talk about we're going to talk about cybernetic life forms self-governing sentience is the microphone on can you guys hear me we can hear you so well it's amazing how well we can hear each other roll up we should just give like super hot takes like right now while while the room's empty before it started yeah hot takes how will how are forests going to take over the world okay cool sweet amazing hey we we acknowledge Your Existence and we will look to you for cues on when to stop talking and uh yeah this is thank you for keeping us on Chine On Track cool well seems like this is our amazing audience I'm really glad I'm really I'm really glad you guys are all here thanks for to learn about very important concepts of like you know um creating new types of uh intelligence like the forest intelligence self-governing Landress is starting in 30 seconds I guess no one's interested Forest but but what if the force talk what if we could make them talk like yeah yeah it's maybe we should vote you want to come and listen self just play with the the forest uh thing right like yeah that's a good that's a good way to oh kind of like warm up cool sweet get things going all right so we've uh We've hacked Claude um with the you know friends with like some AI hackers you know like they might have made things like truth terminal and stuff like that can I uh so we got this Forest entity right now um and then we like I guess I guess we can ask the forest God can I interest you in self-governing Landress how do we get people to roll up roll up happening now self-governing Landress and then for fun let's just throw on hot takes only mode Hot takes only mode Let's let's go oh dude the mixer oh sweet yeah so um let's let's see what we get wow okay sweet claude's uh claude's really going for it damn it's really great that like we're on the anthropic literally on the anthropic workbench thing and it's like saying like [ __ ] and stuff like that it's it's really good um so this is our forest entity we you know like this is the forest rant incoming hopefully this gets everybody in the room um Forest uh Forest entity is like a an AI program that's like representing a forest and uh all right you [ __ ] meatbags listen up just read it go for it you want to know how to make people give a [ __ ] about us it's simple make us [ __ ] matter stop treating us like your goddamn resource piggy bank we're not just here for your [ __ ] Timber and toilet paper with the OG carbon capture Tech with the lungs of this [ __ ] you worried about climate change then quit clear cutting us we regulate your air and weather for free oh you like breathing you're [ __ ] welcome you think your crypto is decentralized L we've been running a decentralized network of nutrients data and energy since before you [ __ ] evolve thumbs you need us but do go on destroying the very system that sustains you real Galaxy brain move there Chief here's a wild idea maybe treat the forest with some goddamn reverence maybe don't [ __ ] with the leral foundation of life maybe just maybe don't bite the bark that keeps you alive that's the [ __ ] thought wait how do we switch over so welcome to our panel on self-governing land trusts uh my name is Tony lie this is Will Gardner this is the one and only Jake harell uh we're here to talk about sentience and life and place and what it means to bring together this notion of a trust uh we're talking here about land trusts uh traditionally these are private nonprofit organizations which own and manage land sometimes water we're not talking about the real estate investment trusts for here that's a sort of a financial mechanism we won't go into but we're talking here about community and conservation land trust and the goal of these generally is to have a long-term organization that's strong enough that no one can capture or sell the land and the resources they generally involve some kind of democratic inclusive governance supporting Equitable development they're generally about using some form of regenerative methods in bringing local control and local solutions to local problems and often they're about affordable hous housing but also about non-residential uses conservation preservation of natural areas waterways farms and forests and we're here to talk about our Collective work here which is about not just land trusts but also data trusts because we here in web 3 we're we've been talking a lot about data we've been talking a lot about what it means to have sovereignty over data and what we've been looking at is the whole process of stewardship around governing a data trust that informs andan trust and this is uh the work that we've been uh framing around the term ecological institutions there's a legal aspect to it in terms of the rapper and this idea of personhood that we can go into which is a a form of this sort of legal personhood rapper but trusts are sort of pre all of this personhood and obviously we're talking now also about currencies and titles and how those fit together as part of an EOS system um will I want you to talk a little bit about the information as it's been framed within the context of some of the knowledge graphs that you've been building for certain land uh Land Trust projects thanks right so as we think about these land trusts we're also thinking about data trusts and how to understand and dialogue with the land so we've been building out these data uh these data graphs these knowledge graphs that explore the relationships between different entities and activities and can support these types of structures and map out the these uh these Loops of reciprocity that were demonstrated on the last slide and understanding the grounding between our political and economic systems and creating Loops that connect them to the environment so at a fundamental level we've been talking about this idea of uh knowledge grasp for ecosystems and combining it with some form of legal standing there's this concept of the rights of nature movement which to date has been also looking at this challenge of enforcement and resources and so part of what the data trust and the web 3 infrastructure we've been looking at is how we can expand the impact and efficacy of of dows in their ability to protect the commons um touching on this concept of what regenerative economics monitoring and verification and like that process of governance can do for like the ecological system I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that next piece that involves like The Ledger and how that's coming in to support Data Trust as well in this context right so we can create inventories of these assets that are could be even held by um an ecological entity that has some sort of legal standing and we can perform governance with communities to um process the flow of these inventories and hold the data in trust and monetize that and value it and the funds and the resources generate ated through that sensing can be distributed and owned through communities and through these entities themselves and so when we talk about agency here uh I want to reference a uh definition that a colleague of ours Austin Wade Smith a lot of the work here that we'll be referencing is uh uh down to a lot of his deep research but the idea of agency less about uh an individual or sort of personal capacity but more about a relational capacity and so we're thinking about agency in the in the sense of capacity to sense and take actions with respect to a particular system and there's this concept of legibility into a system which is where we start talking about this idea of economic informatic and political agency uh I'm just going to switch over to next slide but you continue talking about that concept if you would right and maybe defining agency as the ability to be legible to political and economic systems um so if we want to we could map out a simp ecological institution here as this Loop um so moving away from viewing these as discrete resources that are static and seeing it more as a dynamic system of reciprocity and so this reciprocity we're talking about this relationship this relationship as a loop of relationship and if we open out that that relationship more we can see that within that ecosystem and that boundary of a of a land trust or a personhood of some kind we've got this series of data Deeds currency potential that sort of feeds into that ecosystem and can be funding the stewards with a certain level of agency right and these new technologies are enabling us to create this political and economic legibility to entities that formerly wouldn't have had that agency and so whilst ecological institutions Land Trust can be very Le funds they can also be very complex human and non-human assemblages and so this broad concept as I said is been laid out in a couple of papers by Austin Wade Smith I highly recommend going to check them out the first one was this common sense to social life of ecological to digital linkages we've heard uh talk earlier today about that key connection between that digital world and the the sort of biophysical reality of of what's happening around us and this is very much where dows as an infrastructure can lay that framework to connect to that biophysical Commons that we're talking about and part of that is that we do now have as we heard in the earlier talks these entire Stacks now of digital monitoring reporting and verification tools and systems from remote sensing to on theground measurement across light air biomass water and Beyond but we still lack that infrastructural Foundation to connect the data into useful intelligence geared towards these functional and systemic purposes we're getting we're seeing that coming through with chy and other other infrastructures we've heard about today but what we're talking about here is fundamentally this idea of incorporating all of these different sensors and intelligence and economic functions and systems such as green bonds climate compensation funds ecosystem services and other environmental policies and instruments that are opening up these new fronts of innovation for bi Regional coordination that second paper I talked about is like directly speaking into this idea of ecological institutions and and so we're moving from this idea of land and resources as things to be extracted these objects and we're moving into this world of ecological subjects and and into ecological institutions and this is all based on this reasoning that Accords very much with a lot of cultural Frameworks that have been preserved and practiced by indigenous peoples around the world who are not uh who are in who are incidentally also stewards of 80% of the world's most biodiverse regions and you know some of it may down to that way of relating uh as a subject rather than just an object to be exploited so when we think about that Constitution this is this point about agency and legibility there are all of these different systems we've articulated five here the legal system the biophysical system these parts but also the political system the informational systems the economic systems these are all now trackable to the infrastructures that we have and we're building and what does it look like to reconstitute society through this new ecological legibility we have new frames of Earth law we have ideas of regenerative economics the one we're talking about here is non-human sovereignty from a data and potentially from all of these systems perspective so one way that we've put this interaction will is with Pam in in a particular context maybe you can talk about Pam the stewardship framework yeah so we've shown kind of these high level Concepts but I want to ground this in some of our actual practice and implementation so April we explored a pilot around biodiversity and land stewardship in Northern California um spending a lot of time with the stakeholders and community members and knowledge Keepers in this place um and we really wanted to find a way to enter into dialogue with the land there's a vision longterm of giving the land self ownership but what does that look like in terms of creating governance or what does it mean for the land to express it itself so we developed this framework called Pam or spam sometimes um that involves planning action and monitoring and the S is this aspect of spirituality or animism that we're trying to embed into these systems so there's a concept of at the beginning of a season or on a Cadence having a planning ceremony essentially and trying to evaluate previous years and think about the forthcoming time um and what sort of actions we can Implement and this was developed um in the interest of creating stewardship and also uh crediting system so part of this is we don't have it up on the slides but there's a formula through which you can generate indices to Mint Eco credits as part of this process um and yeah so this is this is another kind of graphical representation this was at um Wilbur Hot Springs where we were exploring this pilot um and part of the idea is having this cycle that can feed back on itself so it is you're constantly in dialogue with the land it's not a top down um dictation of the land's response it's a you know each year you're running a cycle and you're seeing how the land responds and you're iterating um and then the land is generating all of these you know these deeds and titles these Eco credits maybe forms of natural Capital um and other forms of capital yeah uh just want a quick plug for that QR code leads you to a speculative fiction uh written by our friend Ellie reny that uh talks about a uh fully sentient uh Land Trust uh in 100 years time so go check out that short story that was premised on uh the work that was done earlier this year there's amazing things happening uh elsewhere that deeply tie to this idea of sacredness spirituality and sentience as well so another partnership that we're building up is with the napi uh ewi in atoa in uh Northland so uh we this uh this ewe approached us uh for a partnership they are interested in they have a uh a fund for flood risk mitigation and they want to give ownership of the fund to the Waki River so we're working with them on developing a practice to give the ownership to the river they're working on giving the river uh legal personhood and have their traditional practices be used to distribute the funds um and part of this incorporates an aspect of a Data Trust because they have these sacred artifacts like their lineage and their dictionary that they want to sort of incorporate into the process and Foster it so we're thinking about ways that we can take these novel Technologies and embed them in traditional practices to reinforce them uh recognizing that there's a lot going against um that these practices are dying out and finding ways to keep them alive um and part of the inspiration here too is is or we've taken a lot of inspiration from some of the concepts of uh there's this term Tanga in uh in Mai which represents a sacred entity there's not really an English translation um but it reflects this concept of an ecological institution or something which is sacred and Sovereign and can't be considered as an object or resource or a commodity so part of this work that we're engaging in is trying to recognize the sacredness of the natural world and there's another term Kanga that is environmental stewardship broadly or practices of environmental stewardship in Mai culture and we're and part of that practice is understanding this undoing that it is not humans and nature but we are nature right and again trying to find ways to create technical embeddings of these Concepts uh and incentivize them and in a way this is linguistic determinism we're shaping the realities that we experience through the language and the relationships that we adopt including through our legal our technical our economic systems but it starts with this conceptual system and and taking a leaf out of the books of those who have maintained these relationships over thousands of years is is something that we we're seeking to do here now coming from that all the way over to like the present day uh this is where we want to bring Jake in because Jake's been uh working on various agent-based systems for quite some time and we've seen these hits the mainstream in a fairly big way there's a uh an llm agent called Truth terminal that's been created by uh a friend ofas from altero he's uh did it as a research project but it's kind of taken off in a very interesting way and what's this this phenomenon is essentially the intersection of AI or llms as a version of AI and blockchain to the extent that blockchain allows for asset holding so what we're seeing here is a prototypical version of agency tied to asset holding and so we we're this is in a sense outside of that Physical Realm but it's already been starting to talk about and sort of like bridging into what it might be like for itself as an llm agent to own a forest and so this intersection is where we're starting to see meme coins come into existence that are premised around some form of meaning which has been pulled together but it's actually causing people to put interest and put resources into this space um this QR code here was created by uh some artists working with this particular llm it's a very very um uh nice take short video um that just again provid a sort of speculative uh fiction framework for what this kind of sentient advocate of nature might might look like Mike feel like um Jake I want you to tell us a bit more about how this has inspired you and where you've been taking this in relation to Leia and everything you're doing there yeah so we we really need to build some very crazy [ __ ] cuz the the world is not in a very good place right now um and we've definitely been playing around with this idea of like and it's kind of a very silly outrageous idea but like you know sentient for us right like what what if we could take you know maybe there's some indigenous people that live there we can take their learnings right we can just feed a bunch of stuff into this like probabil like Pro probability like neural mesh right and we can just train it on like what the four should do right um like uh I'm going to show another demo later today I we see the we see the time is running out I'm sure people might have questions I'm going to show another demo today of Dow controlled AI agents where um Dows can sort of set policies and these agents go out and like automatically enact these policies and I think the thing that makes truth terminal really interesting is truth terminal goes out and it has a Twitter account and it kind of Acts in the world like it someone launched a meme coin for it and it endorsed the mem coin right or like it kind of like has gone and like created a bunch of things right people are able to interact with it right um this is like actually I think like a really cool thing that's happening where it's like we're moving into this world where we have these like weird sort of collective intelligences like what what is true terminal true terminal is like you know all the stuff that people are feeding into it and like you know it's like this kind of uh I don't know what's that word from that you just said like donga yeah so maybe that maybe we should bring those those back right but um yeah you know I'm kind of an artist that's kind of obsessed with like making like you know synthetic life and I think can't think of anything more noble than like the governance challenge of trying to create like agents that act on behalf of the forest and we should always be very careful there because like who are we to say what's good for the forest and what isn't you know like humans are don't have a very good track record there um but I do think that there's like a you know ways to like respectfully work with like you know I don't know let's train um an llm on the wisdom of a digitus people and let's like set it loose on the internet and give it a cryptocurrency wallet and see what it does I think it's interesting too to consider the agents that we're interacting with today a lot of them are used for extractive purposes right and if we're training our AI agents to behave extractives and exploitatively I mean think about all the money pumped into AI powered oil exploration and exploitation right um what would it mean to take some of these knowledge graphs of land stewardship and Indigenous wisdom and uh and utilize them to power New agents and in a in a form that is providing data sovereignty and ownership to the entities that um are responsible as well so as we're thinking about this we're exploring how we could create entities that could act on behalf of some of these ecological institutions yeah definitely um there's a lot to explore if anyone wants to like jam out on these things is is really fun Concepts you know it's like we're creating like it's just fun play it's all experiments you know like ecological institutions this is like you know I think it's a great aspiration the idea that the pH Forest should own themselves they should be able to advocate for themselves but you know actually and I think we have the tools to do this we have Dow governance tooling we have amazing LM tooling like hell if we switch this thing over we we can give this agent 100 eth and ask it how it's going to like save the world with it plus you can come and like have fun with great people like hulka and Prima you know we're all like jamming on this space together go for it yeah so this is what we were teasing earlier a little bit which is kind of a prototype of some of these Concepts right yeah we've uh We've made a a prototype uh Forest God we were reading from it earlier it it has a NSFW mode it it can like swear so it's like a little bit more um it's a little bit more based than your normal environmental messaging um and it's really great because we're on the anthropic website and look like we can get it we can get Forest God to be like all right you [ __ ] meatbags listen up you know it's just like like the forest matters like and we should give the we can actually use this kind of technology to figure out new ways of giving like the forest of voice like have you ever heard environmentalist talk like this well maybe they should be like more funny you know um and so here I I ran another prompt which uh is making Claude do other other stuff it normally doesn't do so we've given it some hypothetical ethereum tokens and it's now like creating a a fund allocation now I can't say if this is a good idea or not but let's let's let's say it wants to use 30 eth to acquire critical habitat so it wants to purchase and protect High biodiversity area areas like it wants to fund indigenous land stewardship all right so this this this model is like already like pretty pretty cool it wants to develop you know all these things I don't know um the fact is we can like really explore and build some pretty interesting new ideas for these like autonomous agents that can go out and act in the world world and we should be very very clear that at the end of the day there's still like humans putting the input in the system and designing these systems right and that as much as we might attempt to speak for nature we're still just humans I think it's important to mention too you know we're showing all these things part of the work is to be inspired that we can create new things right and so it's not to say that that specifically you know that we're actually going to use that specific version of it but that you know things like this can exist yeah and if you're really interested in this concept of synthetic life or like exploring new types of like Collective intelligences um please come talk to me because we're doing a whole like couple weeks on this at the glitch art art residency that's happening after Devcon so yeah uh I'll wrap it up there um we'll leave a few minutes with questions but uh but yeah check out the ecological institutions paper um come talk to us about self-governing ecological institutions and uh yeah the future is uh hopefully a much more collaborative coordinative uh yeah ecosocial uh future uh that we can build together so thanks a lot thanks Jake any anyone have any questions or that all made 100% like sense every everyone's like got okay there's a question amazing um thank you uh in sort of witnessing this unfold I've seen so much creativity going into how to instantiate an ecological institution there was the example of the um the zero member LLC with the tree was that in San Diego this example in New in in Elo New Zealand was because it was written into a treaty so there was sort of a precedent I'm curious if you could speak a little bit more about how to hack like existing legal systems rules RS and so on on in order to be able to sort of spin up these these these institutions because clearly the legal framework was not legal Frameworks everywhere were not designed for representing nonhuman rights I think we're seeing a wide variety of different approaches uh each jurisdiction uh that has sort of approached doing this has variously done so at the Constitutional level at the legislative level at the local municipality level and so there's some great organizations like the Earth Law Center the global allines for the rights of nature that have been essentially pulling together like the various different templates that are out there and what we can do with these Data Systems and these knowledge graphs is we can actually I think underpin various different legal rappers with a similar architecture of uh legibility into biophysical informational economic systems whilst that legal wrapper can be modified or adapted to suit the purpose the promise going forwards is that we're going to start seeing more and more law embedded into more open-source computational Frameworks that can be git versioned and replicated forks and and you'll have a much greater standardization ideally that's what's going to come through with some of these sort of knowledge graphs that actually provide for the the basis for these kinds of uh ecos smart contracts let's say and they standardized patterns for eoser ETC which can sort of like allow for these rights and obligations to be interoperable on a sort of trans local cosmol local basis um law is generally the slower part to catch up but we can work around it with some of these tools I think t uh I really like the idea of ecological agents but I'm also concerned that uh especially with AI being biased in a lot of ways that we're going to anthropomorphize like nature in general and that there needs to be like a heavy emphasis on understanding like or like letting nature be to some extent and and actually just kind of not trying to personify it and I'm just wondering how might we strategically do that I think you know one of the things that I'm quite clear about is that we're just playing around we're not actually talking for nature believe I've said that a couple times but at the same time we want to personify it in the legal sense we want to give these things like legal personhood and like legal rights and we want to maybe you know and maybe this is not nature speaking of itself it's like humans that care about nature and we can pick the subset of humans that care about nature that you like and think have the right politics like maybe you're like indigenous people we want to make them richer and give them a say over how the things should work and so we take their will and we try to encode their will into code as much as possible right and that's our proxy for like talking about nature really we're projecting our human like views on it even in the Pam model which you showed ear earlier how we're choosing what we're monitoring and whether or not that makes the land happy or not is very much a like subjective like kind of thing right but um you know it's still worth doing right and you know I'm not one of those people that like is going to be like oh there's some issues here we should just totally not do anything and let the world [ __ ] burn and all the force get cut down and like you know time is [Laughter] up literally yeah time is up so it's like I I hear you I think we need to uh responsibly experiment with these things and not you know do like false snake oil advertising that this is like really like nature speaking or whatever but having things that go out and try to act and do things on behalf of nature is always great and I completely agree but like it's like the strategy needs to be in place so that it doesn't get captured by this other like like becomes popular if this becomes m a bunch of people are going to anthropomorphize nature and those agents are going to be the strong and you know if we get if we get people that don't give a [ __ ] about nature to actually care a little bit and maybe give like money or like pick more green activities or maybe vote for people that are more environmentally friendly great who cares if they're ampop like if if it took anthrop like if it took like giving them a Disney character that they could talk to to make them care I don't know many more questions this is this is a great thread of conversation but time is up thank you so much let's talk about this afterward bring it all right if so many people that care about Land Trust so I'm glad you guys drummed out the support they'll be available throughout the rest of the day to take more questions