Moving Towards a Fourth Generation Civilization with Michel Bauwens

Transcript

[Music] welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and is published every Tuesday and Thursday if you want to learn more visit our website at Green pill. Network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord and become a member of your local green pill. Network chapter my guest today is Michael Bowens Michael is the founder of the P2P Foundation which stands for peer-to-peer Alternatives and he works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production governance and property he co-founded the commons strategy groups

which is available you can check it out at PP foundation. net P2P foundation. net and he is also an author really excited to talk to Michael he he was one of the most rest most recommended guests uh for me when I asked a few communities that I trust about who I should have on the podcast on this episode we talk about the peer-to-peer Foundation both the meme of peer-to-peer coordination but also what the P2P Foundation does uh to support that which is basically studying history studying the cycles of history and find the threads of how peer-to-peer coordination is going to evolve how humans work together and coordinate together in the future so um on this episode we talk about

peer-to-peer coordination we talk about Cycles in history and we talk a lot about where we think global scale Mutual coordination is going so I quite enjoyed this episode I think it's an episode that stretched my thinking in a lot of interesting ways and almost feels like I just did yoga for my brain by uh recording this episode with Michael and I think that you're going to enjoy enjoy it as well so without further Ado I give you Michael bals of the peer-to-peer Foundation enjoy Valley is an open Global Collective working to finance and democratize the governance of synthetic biology Technologies to protect the future of our planet research and progress into synthetic biology is critically constrained by the world of nation state regulations and bureaucracy

from middlemen but the potential that synthetic biology has for the world is massive it can produce a world in total harmony with nature we can grow stuff using cells like software it's awesome and the best part is we no longer have to pull carbon out of the ground to grow and maintain civilization don't you think we should be funding this Valley da does and that's what they're here to do to try and make the solar Punk World of Tomorrow a reality today so join Valley Dow right now and save the planet at valy dow. bio hey Michael how's it going fine yeah yeah it's uh 900 p.m. here in changai Northern Thailand and you know the the weather is a lot nicer in the evenings yeah I mean in terms of the know the Heat and stuff looking forward to

talking to you and uh yeah I just had a nice dinner uh with the uh Global Chinese Commons people here uh who just settled uh part of them settled here in changai so there's a lot of interesting stuff to talk about I think it's 8: a.m here in Colorado so if it's 900 P p.m for you we're on opposite sides of the Earth but hopefully we can create a meeting of the minds yeah um maybe we can start with a peer-to-peer foundation so can you tell us what led you to found that and what you've been up to there yeah know I was working um I did two startups in the in the '90s and I was um a strategy director um around digital transformation for big Telco and so in the mid 90s I was feeling like this is not going you know there's nothing is going in the right

direction um and if you remember that period it was um the time of the zapatistas and how they basically created the global solidarity movement you know based on the internet it was also the time of Seattle the big demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle and so I was feeling like you know am I part of the problem or am I part of the solution I didn't feel that working in these B big companies was contributing um you know to to any positive action around these negative Trends and so it took it two years about and the aim of the seal was really to study change like how do we actually change things because you know I had

been kind of a Marxist in my youth and obviously that didn't go anywhere and you know the historical record is not very positive uh of this attempt and so I started studying phase Transitions and I came to the conclusion that the key thing is seed forms so in other words you know you have a stable system it has an ending phase a peak and then a descending phase and you know it's kind of when you you you're at the end of the line of a society or civilization you enter into a CTIC transition and we kind of we've been blindsided in the west with the kind of you know revolutionary experience in France and and Russia but this is actually at the end of a very long

process and so what I mean is the following so when the when the old logic is no longer working to solve issues and actually exacerbate the problems then you need people to exit the system and to start experimenting with new Logics right and so seed forms are communities that will start experimenting with solving certain issues with according to certain new Logics just to make it clear like historically you could say you know in the 11th century uh we invent Purgatory in Europe and that was very handy because the cities you couldn't get enough money um and you couldn't lend money because you went you you went straight

to hell so Purgatory you know was like um ideological hack to allow Christians to lend money to each other uh right so they have their premise of a more capitalist World Order and then uh the printing press right would would allow entrepreneurs to copy writing and books and spread it very very fast throughout the continent faster than the old fudal institutions could control it and so you could find like your dou entry book accounting so all of these things would eventually form the basis of a new type of society right so they interconnect then they form a subsystem and eventually they become the dominant system and so I was asking myself so what is the seed form today and it was

clear to me then and it still is now that the peerto peer Dynamic is the key so because we've never been able to do that so the the kind of like personto person you know small group trust was only functioning at the local level as soon as you scaled you had to have basically command and control right and big would always uh win from small so I'm I don't know if you're familiar with Jordan H's uh formulation which I think is very very useful so he said you know you have sublinear and superlinear relationships so if you double the body you don't double the brain the brain only grows 85% so that's

a sublinear relation you lose efficiency when you scale up but the city is super linear so you double a city you get more than twice the amount of innovation and and the level of the wages goes up and so that's 15% and so the key argument here is that peer-to-peer networking is super linear and replaces the necessity for physical proximity with digital proximity right so non-local collaboration is the key so we've we we've scaled up non-local cooperation and okay this this may sound a bit crazy but I'll say it anyway so think about when we invent writing right 5,000 years ago it creates a writing

Elite and the writing Elite will become like the managerial that will serve the Kings and and and and the clergy and and you know and from before the 16th century was always a minority 2% 10% that could read and write and and at this privileged position now we have coders right and coders it's a new language there's only a a minority in the world that can code they have access to their own means of production so they're very much like craft workers they're not like industrial workers but they don't control the networks that they need right and so what what is crypto in in this context well this is the coding class right which is trying to create a world at image and creating

seed forms and experimenting with seed forms so we wouldn't have capitalism without capitalists meaning that you know European cities in the Middle Ages with weak Empires could actually start creating a world where the market was dominant right and so so we have basically a bation point 5,000 years ago where the you know the gift economy and the and the shareholder the common the commons economy of tribes was no longer able to compete with the market and state based civilizations so that became the dominant model and then you could argue which is what I do that we now have reach a stage where these extractive forms these extractive

institutions are no longer able to manage the current level of complexity and we need something new which is massive Mutual signaling in open networks so this is what I call the mutual Mutual coordination economy or civilization where you still have markets you still have States but they're embedded in something that is stronger that can police them so that they don't destroy the planet and so what I see is that peer-to-peer communities become productive they are cosmol local so they combine a real localization of production but they are organized at a translocal level with common institutions that allow them to work together at scale in the whole

world and they are super linear and Hyper productive and so the crisis that we have now which is you know why it's so difficult to change things is that the last 400 years the nation was the locus of change and there is a famous author K Palani who WR wrote The Great transformation you know he calls it a lib lab Dynamic so you have 30 years of high growth it's the productive economy it's good for workers because you know we need work so we need to pay them more we have welfare reforms and all that stuff it reaches a stage Midway where Capital FS is not making enough money so there's a counter Revolution the 70s and the and early 880s right and then you get the financial phase the guilded age

because the growth only benefits smaller minority and it's more speculative and it ends with a second crisis which is a demand crisis so that's would be 1929 or 2008 so I'm trying to make a point that because we have international State systems and transnational Finance Capital right that means that within the nation it's very hard to change anything because if you would would want to change you know within three days your ATMs are empty because you know transnational cap can just cut cut the courts right and so that means that change we have to think as change both at the local level but also at the cosmic level right so I I would argue that pure localization is sublinear a a

lot of people would die if we just go back to the land and produce locally uh it wouldn't be able to sustain the complex society that we have and so we need to and to keep that we need this kind of cosmic level of cooperation so everything that's heavy is local as much as you can so it's called sub subsidiarity and everything that slide is global and shared and I think this is what we groping for I think that what the crypto Community is doing what the open source Community was doing what Urban Commons are doing is developing this alternative and the way you have to look at it is that you know the mainstream institutions are losing their legitimacy

you know people lose more and more trust in them but then at the bottom there's something new growing which is you know like a potential seed form for a new form of human civilization where the trans local is just as important as the local okay so that's like the big picture interpretation of of what I'm trying to do and and so the pp Foundation was a v to get that knowledge to observe to document to try to synthesize so the way I I called it you know the organic intellectual of the commoners right the collective intelligence of the commoners thank you for that I feel like we're distilling many years and and Decades of of thinking into into into only five five minutes but I'm going just try to play that back to summarize it for the

audience so the P2P Foundation is a vehicle for this worldview that you have which which is that peer-to-peer this is going to be really reductionist compared to what you said um but peer-to-peer coordination is going to replace nation state coordination and we're in this this sort of like cyclical World in which uh the nation state coordination uh has kind of had its cycle of being a seed and then growing um and and then sort of declining in legitimacy and now because we have technology we have coders we can imw peer-to-peer coordination that's actually translocal and that's super linear and super linear means better than linear in how it scales as opposed to other forms of coordination which are sublinear I'm missing a lot of details here but how does that sound playing it back it's a very first summary and so let let me add

uh another layer of History to this so this is from Michael Hudson in his book the decline of civilization so he makes the following claim and and I I think this is a a believable claim so since 5,000 years ago we have basically two competing models and that is the you know the Eastern Eurasian uh land mass had Imperial forms State Centric the father Emperor protects the people from the market the mandarines rule not the merchants but in the west we had in Greece For the First Time The Merchant class took power and that created a revolution that created democracy so basically you have a Eastern polarity State Centric

landbased Harmony seeking and we have a more democratic antagonistic Merchant driven Western polarity right and they're fing it out at at this moment but both of them are based on competing for rival resources either through States or through Market mechanism as we enter overshoots this becomes really dangerous and dysfunctional because we're going to fight for scarce resources so this is the problem we need to Sol solve right so until now we had cycles of civilization you know ascending Peak descending collapse transition to something new and civilization never died it just slightly displaced itself right so the Western Roman Empire collapses but it moves to

bantia so in a way civilization as such never died there was a an a lasting Central civilization networks of cities with high levels of knowledge and interconnection that actually never appear but the very fact that we now have overshot the whole of the planet creates a new situation so here's my thesis is then that the commons is the regenerative institution markuson states are extractive institutions and need competition they need growth and they're Dynamic so they you know they do solve a lot of issues at the same time they they have a very hard time limiting themselves without collapsing and when when you have collapse at a global scale then you know you need to say well

that's not working like we cannot afford a collapse at the global scale so how do that's the meta crisis right that's the meta crisis is that it's not just this or that crisis there's like a something else that's behind it that is transcendent you know for the for the different prices right um and you could argue that it's accelerated by by Ai and all of that so but essentially it's an inability to grow within bounds that that is really I think what the problem is so the commment is mutualization if everyone has a fence and and you your Apple Tree dies you're hungry if you share the apples with your

neighbors there's always a neighbor who will have apples so imagine Europe at at you know the fifth century especially the 8th Century every everything had collapsed so in Italy there's no more food because you know they had slaves doing olive oil and wine but the food came from Egypt so when the Empire collapses there's no food in Italy so then you have a craft agrarian congregation the benedictines and the rules of St Benedict right in 50 years they're going to restore the food production in Italy but they are a collective institution that means that all the cplus that they're creating goes into common infrastructure that's very competitive you know there's no waste into like a rer group no no it's everything go and

so they would split you know when they have a certain size they would split like a beast swarm uh so that was a sister censes in the 11th century so they created a surplus and that's taken up by the gills in the cities right and they own their own machinery and they create a surplus in the city so you know takes some time but they would actually create create the conditions for a new extracted system to emerge out of that which you know which gave Colonial Europe and an extremely Dynamic society that ended up dominating the world system but the origin of it right so this is what I imagine they call it the pation of the Commons in the ascending phase marketing States Dominate and do their job well but once they hit the peak they you know they

cannot fulfill the expectations and then people return more to common name to fill in the gaps and the stuff that they that they're losing um and so when you have crisis moments the commons come back and so this is in part an explanation why why we have this revival and I did a study in Gent for the mayor there there were 50 Urban Commons in 2008 and 500 in 2016 so that's a tenfold expans expansion of common Centric citizen initiatives and this happened all over the world I saw studies in Latin America Asian cities Holland Belgium Catalonia this is a general thing that happened is that people starting to mutualize provisioning

systems to make sure they get access to cheaper transport you know housing uh access to organic foods and you know they may have Market aspects but these are not capitalist uh systems to think about Community lands Community Based agriculture right you have a coalition of consumers and they make a deal with a coalition of producers they you know they're they're buying the food but it's around an element of solidarity and so the basically the consumers pay for percentage of the production of the farmer was guaranteed an income that way right so that's actually in my view that's a common because there's a common good there

which is the co Cooperative rules that they have instantiated together so I guess what I'm taking out of this is that the commons is really important for regenerating our community it's super linear and because we now have a digital Commons maybe there's an element about maintaining the digital Commons that's going to be a regenerative backr backbone for 21st century I might be skipping ahead a little bit here no no that's exactly what I what I think so I I think that and so the first attempt would have been open source the Paradox of Open Source and their free licenses is the more you share the more it's dominated by big big companies um and then you had Urban commoning in you know probably by the crisis and then you have crypto which in some sense has solved the economic issue of the open source communities and is

building infrastructures that are comment so for example I would be critical of public goods language because I don't think you're making public goods I think you're producing Commons because public normally public goods is actually State Goods def you're not making State Goods what what you were showing and what you're trying to do is showing that there is a function equivalence between what decentralized networks can do versus What markets and states can do right and that is what you're trying to intuitively prove and say yeah so here's another way and I'll stop with this and let you react to it but here's what I think so the 19th century had a free market domination it started very badly with workingclass people dying at you

know 35 years old until the 1850s eventually at the end of the century they had quintuple their income but you know it wasn't easy right but it created so much tension in society that you ended up with the first world war and the reaction to this was okay we need something else than markets it has to be the state so the reaction to it you know in some way to the market pH failure or the perceived Market fail was to say we need a total state so communism fascism right were the answer to that like let we need more state to tame the Beast you know to tame the animal spirits uh that led to World War I at least that was the view right and that led to the gulak and and fascism in Germany and then we ended up with some kind of hibrid compromise the the welfare state model both in with

the new deal and you know the Scandinavian model and it seems we also reached the end of that so this is from Peter Pani an Hungarian political Economist he says okay you had a global system before Napolean a protog global system but it ended the ktic transition the Napoleon Wars then you have the smithian system it ended in a transition of World War I World War II then in the welfare and neoliberal system which ended in 2008 so we are now in the chaotic transition and so probably the mistake of the welfare state is that we made a compromise with the capital and labor in the west but not outside of the West so that created a lot of issues in the global South and

then that's really where the hockey stick of matter energy usage started right so industrialism itself was already problematic but in the 50s it's like this so it's it's unsustainable for for the audio listeners you're holding your hand up uh in an arc uh which I think which I think stands for an upper and to the right graph so energy usage was going up so yeah pet bani says the next system will have to be a renewal of the social contract but at a global scale strong multilateralism is still a weak multilateralism so we need better protection of Commons of life and diversity and scarce uh materials and so basically we need a contract with nature a new contract between humanity and

nature right and that's very fundamental and that's is actually a civilizational change because civilization was we need to dominate nature and that was you know civilization is a relation between the rural and the urban to manage irrigation that's how it started right and now we're saying well that pure domination idea of man over nature is now actually counterproductive so how how do we do that how do we create new types of relationship with you know what we all depend on right so these are I think all the issues that are related to the idea of the commons because the Comm is the protective institution that says you know you can do this but not that

you look at Switzerland and Austria and Japan why why is it so green it's because the villages manage their Mountain slopes as a Commons and have protected over hundreds of years so that their children and their children's children can still benefit from right so it's it's a protective agree Collective Agreement but it's not the state this is this is the key thing for you know for my libertarian s we are not advocating a total State we advocating free agreements between people to protect what they all depend on we've kind of established that the commons is is the thing that we're that we're trying to protect and that it's super linear regenerative for society and I'm wondering if we could shift the conversation towards what are you seeing

that's exciting in the in in the web right now that you feel like is really implementing this Vision I think there is one one big danger I you probably will agree with this right so there is a danger for an elite especially for nomadic Elite to think we can escape the catastrophe you know if we have our Bitcoins and our blockchains and and and you know if Greece collapses we can go to Portugal If Portugal collapses we can go to Thailand and etc etc I don't think that's a realistic option so you you cannot create an Utopia without the people because they will come for you and so there is this new sociological language which I think is very pertinent so you know this is uh David goodard Eric kofman mat Goodwin you know the no somewhere and the nowhere right so we

have and this explains 90% of our politics including the culture War so you have the people who can't move they're not digital they don't have the skills and they have been facing the full brunt of neoliberal deindustrialization and they want to protect their territory and they yearn for how it was right and that right that is the stimulous for Trump and brexit and and you know what is what is called a populist right and this is where the working class is if if they vote that's how they vote but a lot of Dum V but is when they this is the non-digital native working class are called the sares in this new language right and this is not just a vision because actually this is

how people vote people don't vote on their objective class they vote on their cultural class so you know they so that's why culture is so important then we have the nowhere and we can move around and and so the danger is is this separation right and I think this is what needs to be yield and this is where crypto has largely failed I think and then I went to Montenegro to Zulu Montenegro and you know I had my skepticism because what I what I was seeing is you they're developing all this interesting stuff you know it's a great experimental field but it's all about how to manage the money and flow the money and and what are they what are they actually doing in terms of like like regenerative economics and I didn't see a lot of practical things and and

then I saw that those who do that they're not connected to crypto at all let me let me ask you what zalu had a bunch of different weeks there was AI there was public goods there was Network states which week did you go to so I was uh there for the network State uh with what's his name sorry Joshua you know from the blockchain Socialist and Prim Philipp from Harvard yeah um and that was really interesting but I met my my Chinese friends there you know with a lot of people from the global Chinese Comm with there and when they told me that they were managing their estate through crypto I you know that for me was like a moment because I said wow okay this is different they're not just managing their money they're managing their life

and their physical property and then I saw their engagement for public goods and you know how they want to to to stimulate Chinese coders to do more you know more involvement with the global community and I thought okay this is this is the kind of EOS I'm looking for so and I I saw that in in Z and I can tell you another like you know this purely subjective but so I was sitting at a table and there was a guy a deep adaptationist you know they think we already it's nothing we can do we can just prepare for the worst there was a greenwashing impact investor and you know I'm being a bit mean here but you know what I mean uh and there was a a climate ad and you know what they were all talking together in a friendly fashion and I cannot tell you how rare

that is nowadays that this conversation can even take place and I think the reason you can do that is because you have a comment so whatever you think about 101 different issues you're all building an infrastructure that will be useful for everyone and and so that commment created a joint identity a contributive identity and so that kind of said oh wow so that that I'm really you know that is really interesting to me and so I have to say Maya you know Kevin I I had to bit ignored the kind of work you were doing uh you know I was just doing other stuff for a while I was you know looking at history and reading spangle and Toby

And and you know I was looking at all these long-term things and of course now after the fact I can see how much your work has been instrumental in in the shift as well and by the way you're extremely popular here you know your green pill book is like on every table in every co-working place it's amazing great toar Chinese well uh thank you for saying that I just want to interject that um my work is in a lot of ways a mile wide and an inch deep and there's a bunch of different great people who are going very deep on on these things and I think that I'm just sort of like creating a mtic umbrella for it so um you know the human tendency is to build a narrative around a person uh but like really this is a network and like a system of people who are doing it and I

truly believe that there's thousands Collective organic intellectual yeah maybe uh I'll tell my wife that you said that she'll roll her eyes at you no it's because we can't do it alone right the thing is that we so much you know overwhelmed by social media and and stuff we have to digest that the idea that even a one person can have this kind of like complete overview is is becoming elusory and that's why we need collectives to do and that's why we need places like zalu where where people can meet and we can have that that proximity you know that physical proximity where you know Minds can meet and learn from each other and so in this way I I kind of you know came back to the world of to my interest into world of crypto with the

kind of renewed hope that but here's to to use my own language I think the nowhere should be everywhere right so a nowhere has no roots and everywhere is root full and think about the Middle Ages and the guilds where the the traveling guilds you know building cathedrals in different places and moving around so they were like the connective tissue in a very localized environment they were the connective tissue and I think so I if if I have a wish that is that the people are doing the real urban comment and the crypto world would somehow connect to each other and build tools that are useful so that we can you know accelerate uh these types of

mutualization that we need to survive and let me just tell you this if we the reason we need to relocalize is that we spend three times as much transporting things and making them right so this is a this is a vital part of the transition is that we have to become reasonable about moving matter around we we can move ideas around but we have to be more careful with moving matter around so this is how you can combine relocalized manufacturing using distributed manufacturing on demand without Surplus using circular and uh biom mimetic materials but connected to economic of scope so that every Innovation anywhere in the network can travel very very fast and Infuse the whole network with these

Innovation because then we can transition much faster and historically transitions have taken hundreds of years this kind of a deep transition and it's doubtful whether we have that time I wonder if you know it is fair that it has taken that long to transition in the past but with digital accelerationism acceleration I wonder if we could translate transition faster um although what's the meme about having medieval institutions and ancient brains and Godlike technology I feel like there's different cadences in which change can happen socially versus technologically I actually am a bit more defensive on the medieval because I think that you know if you look at the 11 between and the 14 Century it was a very

Dynamic well organized Society people lived locally they had Parish life they had 150 days where they didn't work they had joint holidays and festivals they had a core of people traveling around sharing knowledge all over the continent uh they had a lot of self rule local self-rule local autonomy free cities and actually a lot of agrarian commment you know where where Farmers would make agreements especially in Northern Western Europe you know where I where I come from in Belgium the Netherlands so in 70 years time like around 975 1050 that was like a real revolution in Europe where all these new institutions were created and created 300 years of you know very rapid growth so there's something to say about medieval institutions because they were quite

more democratic that people imagined yeah that's fair there were lots of assemblies functioning in the Middle Ages this is I've never been a strong history student so forgive me if this is a naive question but uh for me the you know medieval Institution were invented during a Renaissance uh do you think that we're looking to have a digital Renaissance around the commons today yes is I think that's uh yeah I think so because I so maybe I should say a few words about Cycles if you don't mind I you know let's do it let's get into it quite confusing and there's a lot of them and so why is this important matter is cyclic life is cyclic and human culture is cyclic everything that lives has polarities and moves right the shortest important cycle I think is the

conative cycle so that's about 50 60 years 30 years of high growth the the lab part of the cycle midlife crisis and then financialization a guilded age so the it ends with the in the middle you have a supply crisis because Capital field doesn't make enough profit at the end you have a demand crisis because everybody is in deadness and there's no money there's no money to buy things so that was 2008 so this is a cycle where in order to restart it you need to find a new way to combine an energy model an agrarian Model A managerial model and somehow it fits together and it creates this dynamism right so you have the smithian the forist the post forist so

these are like different instantiations of this cycle uh historians see it for the first time in 12th century China in the in the Song Dynasty so wherever you have markets you have these Cycles okay then you have the seculum this is much talked about in the US this is the famous Fourth turning it's double in length from the cerative and it's generational generational Dynamic so you have a big crisis World War II that creates like a consensus to create new institutions so the first turning is the high there's a consensus you know it's the age of the suburbs and the the nuclear family Father Knows Best But you know it's it's working and paradoxically that creates

poor children who are unhappy with this material world that they inherit and so you have a spiritual awakening so that's the 60s right that's the second turning the third turning is called the unraveling and that was the 80s and the '90s and this is where both forces are at equal length so and and so this is the cultural War you know the political correctness of the 90s kind of situation and then it's goes sour so this is the fourth turning this is the crisis the institutions lose all their legitimacy this normally leads to after the crisis to a new Revival a new seculum right there is a relation between the con and the seculum so every

two generation The Awakening and the crisis you know coincide with the secum so why is important to think about these SES because they each have their own agenda the agenda of the Conor is economic the agenda of the seculum is actually public institutions we have to reinvent our public institutions all right okay this corresponds to to 100 years cycles that are called hegemonic or War Cycles the crisis actually is also a crisis that usually has a war because you know that that technological system was dominated by one power and then when that starts unraveling other powers try to take the leading position so you have a period of conflict and then you have a new hedal so this is all

you know all all de fits together then you have longest Cycles so Spangler TB they talk about the 1,000 year cycle of civilization but it's divided in two so think about 500 years of city states in Greece that collapses with the PO poopes and then it becomes the Imperial first Alexander in their role same in Europe European civilization starts in the year 1000 city states it ends with the with the Renaissance and the Reformation it creates the nation state Imperium if you like right 500 years of of planetary integration every 500 years you have a fundamental change that is almost like a reversal of mentality you know from decentralized autonomy to centralized is

for example and vice versa so you know capitalism is not feudalism you and feudalism is not the Roman Empire these are really fundamental you know spiritual shifts almost right take the example the Romans hated work that's for the slaves but the Christians work was something Noble it's like you're you're instantiating the Divine the divine order in the world right a complete reversal of the of the value the central value of the society that's something that happens every 500 years and so I and it's also a learning cycle right so it takes think about this so we start with markets and we decide markets alone are not working so we we add the state oh that's horrible the

total state is horrible so we Institute the welfare state like this hrd uh mechanism between the both right that's a learning mechanism right we try one thing we decide okay that's not working on its own we we need something else or that's not really working we come to some kind of compromise so that takes 16 Generations again around four 500 years okay I have a deeper argument which is civilization a 5,000 years cycle right so we are now because of the digital injecting something in the civilizational model which was a phys physical geographical model and we're injecting the trans local and so this is a this is a shift that is as big as the one from the tribal and it's gifting and

commoning to Market and state civilization I think we now moving to something fundamentally different and that is the meta crisis that makes it difficult right because every cycle has its own requirements but I I think it's worth worthwhile looking into that because it gives you an idea a better idea of what needs to be done right and then we we can become more aware of what needs to be done right so Freedom starts where when you become conscious of your determinism right the more you know what determines you without your knowledge the more really free you can be if you think you're free but you're like pushed around you're not free right that that would be an illusion so anyway so that's the way I think about it so it feels

like there's this cycle of the fourth turning which by the way is a I think a pretty popular mental model uh within the crypto space but um as I understand it it's basically uh Great Men create uh good times good times create weak men weak men create bad times bad times create great men like that that that cycle um and if we're in the fourth turning now these Cycles typically last 80 to 100 years and the last time we were in one of these cycles of World War II in the 50s and now we're 80 years later more or less and so the idea is that we're kind of in this fourth turning and the lessons from history tell us that we have to invest in the Commons and our public institutions as we transition this might be all too reductionist but

how does that sound yeah that that's that's would be my my point yes you know we we have a crisis of democracy we have a crisis of sovereignity we have institutions that are so engaged in the culture war that they're no longer public ins but they're like two tribes using institutions to hit at each other yeah what I'm trying to explain is that you know there's some kind of dynamic going on in transitions right which is so the system can no longer manage the complexity it has with the means at the disposal so either because it's weakening or because some new medium creates more differentiation and so you can either then collapse down which would be like a Dark

Age dynamic or you can move up more complexity more integration of the differentiation but while this is happening because the common narrative is disbanding you get fragmentation and because there is fragmentation you get polarization like who is most like me that can defend me in this struggle right so you get the pagans against the Christians the Reformation against the Catholics and the cultural War as kind of examples of this fragmentation polarization the thing is that historically the solutions are not in that conflict right so you take um this is from to talks about the Jews around the year zero you know you have the zealots who want to rebel

against Rome they will be they will be butchered and then you have King Herod who wants to compromise but the guy who who becomes a dominant figure is St Paul right and he neither one nor the other but has made some kind of new integration that somehow fitted what the society needed at the time and so his type of Christianity became the vehicle for this transformation and so that's the way I you know it's not that I have all the answers of course not you know but what what I'm hoping to do is to share insights and patterns that we can see and give hope to the seed forms actors right so that they can interconnect and and discover what is the common logic that they are engaged in and then create appropriate means of coordination

and Coalition building so that we can become a Force for change yeah I mean the historical context I think is really a huge value out for me I was not a good student of history in high school I don't know how much the audience was but uh with my computer science degree bias just the sociopolitical stuff uh is interesting now that we're building digital systems that will affect these social political systems so um this has been a really fun conversation for me and I'm wondering as we wrap what um where should people go to find your work Michael um online and how can they get involved in helping that helping you with your make your vision come true first I have a Wiki wiki. P2P foundation. net which is a very very rich resource and I've been working on this 15 years 25,000 articles 1 billion views so this is like a

documentary Wiki you know it's not the visually appealing or anything but anything open source Urban comments you know I have sections on crypto governance crypto uh economy um so you know about thermodynamic limits on the earth uh Mutual coordination mechanisms so this is uh I think a very rich resource and then I actually launched a substack yesterday so let me share that with you that's fourth generation civilization. substack docomo fourth generation civilization. sub.com and so I posted my first article

so I'm quitting Facebook because it's just too much censorship um and you know it's just grief every day there um so um you know substack notes is you know very pluralistic medium lots of high level people are there so I'm this is where I will be starting to write articles and do what I call structured cation so structured cation is you take a team and then you recommend what people should watch and read Around the team so that they can kind of like self-study so this is this is what I'm going to do there and so also help people understand you know civilizational history and how transitions have functioned in the past

and what patterns we can see and you know it it doesn't aim to be an ideology uh it aims to give you tools so that you can think better basically and Orient yourself in this kind of you know chaotic world that we're entering thanks thanks so much for um appearing on the green pill podcast Michael I think it's a really a value add to the work that we're doing in the space and I hope to build Bridges between the green pill listeners and your work in the future so uh thanks again yeah thanks for the opportunity uh it's great for me to be reconnecting uh with the crypto world after a bit of uh doing other stuff but I I do think that you are a historical Force you know I hope so and I hope we you know use that Force for the highest

thing that we can use it for absolutely yeah and thank you for doing your best on your side to you know to push that part of the agenda yeah likewise um all right well thanks so much see you later peace and love yeah all right thank you [Music] all righty we just heard from Michael Bowens really excited to talk to him because I think the way he views history and the way he places crypto within this broader context of peer-to-peer coordination and the cycles of history is quite an important frame for us when we're building this uh Network Society of dreamers and doers that are building positive some digital systems in the

world so thanks for listening to this episode um and if you like the work that we're doing please remember to subscribe rate and review please share this episode with a friend who would appreciate Michael's work and thanks for listening I will see you on the next one peace