The Return of the Commons

Transcript

I hope you had breakfast and coffee and uh I hope you're all excited. Today is the first keynote. Uh yesterday we bored you with a lot of logistics of how this is going to work. Uh I see some new faces so I'm going to repeat myself. Um the way we are structuring this experiment of community living is we have estimated approximately 120 hours of volunteer work we need every week for kitchen help and for cleaning to keep this place running and not burn it down or starve people to death.

Uh that means we are approximately 50 people here. So if we volunteer four hours let's say every week then we are all set. So we have put up a volunteering shift board. Each shift is two hours and you can you can take two shifts per week. I know some people Adam Graham thank you for already putting down your name. Super appreciated. I know a few other people have. Ing Benjamin I think. Uh but we do want people to volunteer their names for shifts so that we can keep things moving along. Uh today was already a bit

chaotic because we didn't have anybody for the lunch shift. Uh that means we wouldn't have had lunch on time and people would have been really grumpy. Um we need people to volunteer for after lunch cleaning, dinner prep, after dinner prep, cleaning. It's all listed when the shift starts, when it ends. It's two hours. If you can take some time to do that, that would be great. Shall we?

Are we all set, Adam? You're not set. We need a few more minutes. Few more minutes. >> Yeah. Yeah. We're good.

>> [clears throat] >> Nice. Thank you. >> Um so basically what I want to do is uh

to anchor the comments in a a long history of civilization. Um there's an author I'm particularly fond of. His name is uh Cojin Karatani or I think in Japan they say Karatani Kojin who wrote a book called the structure of world history and instead of talking about modes of production as Markx would have done he talks about modes of exchange and he says there are four basic ways that we can exchange uh value and the first one is e is commoning basically so whenever you exchange with a whole you're commoning.

So if you're a Linux programmer, you write uh a little piece of code, you put it in the Linux commons, you're you're commoning, right? And there's no one in the commons particularly that owe you something back. But it's more like give a brick, get a house. You're contributing to something that's good for everyone. Or the Amish or Amish when they do barn raising, right? Every time a couple gets married, the whole community builds their house. The couple doesn't owe anything to any particular people but when the next couple marries they will also contribute to building the house. So that's commoning and it's is the primary mode of humanity.

you a family is a common right you're not charging your kids I hope right you're not charging your kids although nowadays we can uh expect everything I think so you're not charging your kids you also not directly gifting to your kids right in that's the second mode the gift economy equality matching so imagine it like this so we're living in tribes we don't have much to carry so we share and then we start settling Now, now when there's a conflict, we can't flee. So, how am I going to make friends? I'm going to gift, right? I'm going to give you things and you're going to be feel good about me.

But here's the paradox of gifting. If I give to you, I'm now superior to you. I'm the giver, you're the receiver. So now you wants to give me something back. And you see this is a more direct reciprocity, right? It's not the general reciprocity of the commons. is a specific reciprocity. Now imagine that this Viking over there, Graham Stewart, making you famous uh is uh leading a band of Vikings and is uh invading your country.

Just imagine, right? com commoning and gifting are not going to be very popular in that context because now you have a conquering people and a conquer people. So that's when authority ranking comes in. So the justification is I'll protect you, you'll pay me taxes or you work you know to sustain the armed um people. Uh and so that's basically the state. Okay. So and then comes the market. So four ways of exchange. But in Karatan it becomes mode A commoning and gifting which is the tribal value system.

Then we get mode B and C the state and the market which is the civilizational exchange systems. Right? They they work together. But then and this is what what's what is so important in his thinking. He introduces something new which is called mode D. Mode D is the permanent attempt to recreate mode A at a higher level of complexity. So what you have to imagine is that extraction regimes, modes of extracting value, hunter gathering, agricultural mining, industry, cognitive are actually very harsh, especially when they when they start, right? So

agriculture, civilization destroys the stripes. Tribes goes to the mountains and the marshes. Industry kills the farmers, right? We only have two 3% farmers left in in Europe. You now imagine what AI is doing, right? It's wiping out everyone basically because labor is can be automated at unprecedented scale. So this is the cost of extraction. and and people naturally yearn for the convivial reality of mode A. We are genetically and anthropologically primed to live together in small groups

and civilization alienates us from this situation. So we want to go back you know we want to go back to this state of affairs. I think a lot of you feel this today like neot tribes you know all that all that stuff. Um and okay and this mode D is expressed in different ways in different modes of extraction. Um so this is where Hanzi Fry comes in. He distinguishes he distinguishes extraction engines from purification engines. Purification engine is mode D.

So you have tribal I think we can say in some way karatani doesn't say that but I say that that actually animism and shamanism is already a mod for animism it like humanizes life the actual religions the world religions that we know today Buddhism Christianity Hebrew prophets Greek philosophers they emerge to make sense of of the civilization ational state. They want to humanize a civilization state, right? Uh don't rape just maybe abroad but not in here, right? Uh don't steal the gold from the the the

churches, right? This is the force of religion that tries to civilize the warriors and keep a society livable. And the in agriculture, it's the religions. And then what we do um is uh this is a in Europe it starts with a monk Yohim de Fior and he says there's the age of the father hierarchy the age of the son love with the church but we are going to the age of the spirit where everybody will will live like brothers and sisters like the monks do today. This was written in the 12th century. And notice what happens here. Heaven becomes the future.

Right? So if you're a real Christian or a Buddhist, you have this vertical relation, you always connected to it. Now he's saying we have to do things in order to make that happen in the future. Right? So you can see that as the market develops and eventually industry is coming in that we get mass movements and ideology, right? no longer just religion that stops working but people who want to change things will stop expressing themselves in religious terms and start expressing themselves in political terms so that gave us social so I would argue socialism anarchism but maybe even

liberalism they're all attempts at doing mode D in the industrial era to humanize that form of extraction and I'm not saying it works I'm not saying they're successful, right? I'm just saying this is what is happening. A permanent attempt to do this. Um, and so then the question is, uh, what could it be today? And this is, I think, why we're here. I think today, I don't think it's politics. I think it'sworked communities that implement their future right now, that are constructing their future right now. Um, think about the following. the reformation and the

Catholics, right? One-third of the German population dies. Who wins? No one really wins. It's the nation state that comes after, right? So the solution is not in that conflict of that old society. It was a new synthesis capital state nation and that became the system that we know today. Right? And I think today you know we have the culture war which is like the current form of the conflict.

This is not where the solution is. The solution is in people already implementing regenerative uh lifestyles that can actually sustain uh the planet. So this is kind of the general idea. Now maybe the question is um what is uh what is the role of the commons in all of this? Um so I think we we can make a brief history. So first of all, if you look at indigenous people, you know, they have this form of part participatory consciousness and there's very little private property and most of the things are

like belong to spirits or divine beings, right? So that that is their form of common. We don't damage this mountain because it would upset the protecting spirit of that mountain. Now look at imperiums like monarchies, empire. So the the eggshell form of society uh after the invention of the world religions, the commons have a place like think about the middle ages. You have you're a peasant. You're living in a parish. You have your own little plot of land.

You have to work on the land of the lord corv because you need 100 farmers to maintain a night. So that's that's your duty and then you have common land right and that's the commons. So you have the three and you find that in every civilization. So I was looking at uh the Ottomans. So you know they were like fighting against the biz Bzantines and and other empires. And so their soldiers were jihadist, right? They believed they were doing a holy war. But as soon as they conquered uh a village or a region, what would they do? They would send their dervish

communities and their aki guilds to reorganize the land. And so they would send their commons forces. So I'm just trying to imprint the idea that the commons were totally normal before capitalism. like they were not anti- feudal or anti-imperium. They could be, but they were kind of part of how these societies worked. They had a place. And for example, you look at Christianity, the third biggest um ritual was the rogen tide procession. And so all the people in the village in the parish would go with the priest around their village and reconfirm their comments.

And it was called beating the bound. So you know these white milestones that you see on the road that's from that era right now it has another function but you can see that for the identity of the people the their comments was actually very very important it wasn't marginal so then what happens and I think this is you know sometimes called a tragedy uh but there are the enclosures so for the first time what we get is a regime a political economy which believes the commons are bad like they're not productive Right. So we change the property regime from the feudal uh obligation system like I'm your lord but I'm also your father. I have to

protect my serves. So there is some kind of like idea of complimentarity and the property is not individual. It doesn't belong to the count. It belongs to his lineage on behalf of his duties. Right? It's different. So once you have pure private property, I can now say I can make more money with sheep than with men. I'm going to chase away the men. And that's what happened on a massive scale in Europe starting in the 16th century. It's called the enclosures.

And so this is where something happens basically that at least western humanity at first we decide that the state replaces the commons. So the the commonality is now protected by the state. And then you have this kind of this is uh if you know him called Pollani the great transformation um warmly recommended a history of capitalism from the end of the 17th century to 1945 where he says you know there's a libl dynamic within capitalism. So we have these economic cycles 60 70 years they're called connorative cycles when they begin you have high growth you need

labor so you need compromise you're going to have higher wages welfare systems this kind of thing right uh this is the lab period then you have a peak crisis 1973 is the last one that some of you might remember uh this is no longer working so you get a revolt in that case a neoconserv conservative neoliberal revolt and you get the lip period. So in order to protect the profits which diminish in the first era you get the liberal period and so this is the tension that we have within capitalism the state people fight for the state and they try to influence the state and the state you

know balances from one polarity to the other. This stops working in the 1980s. Capital, state, nation, right? The three in one that stops working 1980s because the tr capital becomes transational. So now you have a state that is national that cannot change what is happening on a global scale because the let's say the capital class has become transnational is not bound to the local state anymore, right? And that's why you have these weird politics where it didn't really matter what people voted for for the last oh boy it's already 40 years you know it seemed like it was

always the same slight differences but you know the power was no longer there right so this is what I also want to make as a hypothesis and you know I believe in this is what's the solution well maybe everything should be the That's the libertarian option, right? Or everything should be the state. We need a world state. I don't like either of them. Yeah. There's no balance because they are two extractive institutions. They compete with each other and they they overuse their resources systematically. Not once, not twice. Every single society

has collapsed throughout history. It's not an exception. is the rule. Now, if you tell me, oh, what about China? They exist 3,000 years. Yes, but they had three dark ages. India, I think also Europe, because we're so late, maybe we had only one. But anyway, so that's so the idea uh here is what if we need to expand the commons at that global scale, right? So I just planned the idea for now but that's what I believe the only solution to create a balanced global complex is going to be to create these cosmological

commonsbased institutions that can balance out the power of capital. I'll say more about it. What I also want to introduce is this notion of the pulsation of the commons which you see here at at the bottom. Um so there is a cycle within civilization. Uh so phase A is the growth phase. Um and so market and state function well. They're doing well. They're growing. They take more or less care of their core population.

Uh and you know they have institutions. They there has there is law. There is you know the Pax Romana the Pax Britannonica you know all these things right so you have a relative peace and order commerce can grow there's more wealth in society and then it stops functioning for different reasons for example Joseph Painter would say you know as you expand as as an empire the cost of maintaining your empire increases up to the point where the gain of conquest is less than the added cost and then you start unraveling, right? So the same as with econ cycle, you have a upcycle, a peak

and a down cycle. And so here's what happened with the commons which is so interesting is that of course when the market and the state function well the commons will be weakened even before capitalism that will happen. You have weaker commons because you don't need them you know and people change right when when things go well you're less communal. Uh, so I always say this, what is the difference between a working class and the middle class? So I come from a working-class family. If you're workingass, you know, you cannot advance without the others. Like you need to band together for higher wages, for, you know, protection like you can't do it on your own. But once you are in this growth phase, then you say, well actually if I

study hard and I work hard, I can make it. And then you're middle class. Right? So I don't know if you can see but we are switching from this. Right? The middle classes are declining and more and more people are realizing no matter how much I study and and work hard I'm not getting out of this on my own. Right? So we you can feel that we are in a switch period. You know in the 70s we in the 50s and 60s we switched from workingclass culture to individual middle class culture. And now we switching again at least at the beginning of that switch to a realization that we need uh communal link linkages and support. So people are

thinking more about their family, their community. Um we have here Christian Bell uh with this u retribaliz. So you know people are looking to form new types of tribes etc etc. Now very important is that in a dark age what happens in a dark age market and states collapse and the common institutions become hegemonic that's why we have the monasteries right so when the Roman Empire falls when the Han empire falls when the Japanese uh they have several crisis what happens collective institutions ions replace

market and state the monasteries right why because they don't waste their surplus right you have if you like I I I'll know the Christian monasteries better so I'll use that example so imagine this is a community with farmers craftsmen intellectuals and mystics in one community you know intended to do the the truth the beautiful and the And so they farm, they craft, etc., etc. All the surplus goes back into the collective.

So they grow faster than anybody else. Like you know, you can if you visit a monastery in Italy, you will see this, right? They after four generations, they're the richest in the region, right? So I went I don't I forgot which congregation it was, but somewhere near Puglia or Pavia. No, that's not the same. It's small pavia in the north uh you know the Milan region where the rice grows and you know I so they had 12 meditating monks and 24 working monks so [snorts] and when they reached 64 they had to split right uh I can tell you stories about this but just very briefly St. Benedict, no prefect of Rome. He's disgusted by the corruption. He goes

live as a hermit. They call him back and say, "You have to do something. We we're no longer getting the food from Egypt, right?" And he mobilizes, you know, with the Benedicting rules, the monastic communities, and they go back to the old villages which had been abandoned by the Romans. And in two generations, they they recreate the food system in Italy. and the sister sensers I'm not sure I pronounce it right with St. Bernard in the 10th century did the same for the whole of Europe. So in dark ages, common institutions are hegemonic and incredibly efficient, right? But then the paradox happens.

They're so successful, they create surplus that they recreate urban uh centers and then you know then the then it becomes a civilization again, right? So that's that's the the kind of eb and flow of the commons in history. All right, let's see. yeah, I want to say maybe uh one thing about translocalism. Uh [snorts] so um so if you look at history, you see that what we're doing now is nothing new. There's a slight difference though, right? They had fast communication

eventually and fast transportation increasingly so. And they had geographic organizations you know the feudal lords with their you know their land around them but they also had the church the sana the caliphate and these are non territorial entities these are communities of fate that do do not correspond completely to geography right so these are cosmopolices they already existed and then there's a group called which you can find in my wiki and they were talking about files And files is a word for tribe in Greece.

And these were communities that create businesses to support their community. Um I was six months in Ecuador in Ovalo and I I don't see them anymore but they were like 20 30 years you could see them. I don't know where they are now. Onethird of GDP is they come you know pay the pan flute in the cities of Europe. The women sell wool and so this is a file. They create businesses. They sell wool and you know get some money for their music and they support their community in Ecuador, right? And then you have very dark people that sell uh Prada bags and stuff, right? These

are Murabite uh fraternities from Sagal and there you can't marry if you don't do that. So they go out for six months. they get their money and then they can marry, right? So this is a this is a file. Uh so this is different from a company right where you have a company creating probably fake community to make more profit. These are communities which create enterprises and I'm just telling that because these things are coming back right these things are are coming back today. We need we need these kinds of structures.

Um okay and guilds you know guilds would do the same. All right, maybe one more word about um the spiral because I think that's important because there's a lot of discussion about this. Is there evolution? Is there no evolution? There is evolution. Cities got bigger over time. Technology and knowledge accumulate over time. That's the linear part. But then you have cycles, right? societies uh form, grow, peak, decline and collapse.

The collapse does the chaos and the bifurcation, right? You have something that no longer works and then during the chaos societies decide to go a completely different way. And this is very interesting. Uh and maybe Carlos can say something about it later maybe in discussion. Uh because this is very interesting like William Ern Thompson says consciousness only changes in dark ages right like when everything goes down and and you know you know the solution is not in more of that because they just proven that after 300 years everything's collapses right. people will tend to

choose another tangent like not that but this right so every revolution is a value revolution you know the the example that is obvious is the Christians versus the Roman Empire right empire is based on slaves so work is negative a citizen doesn't work he has to take care of the city and philosophy then you're a good citizen actually there's in in Greek I forgot the word, but if you wanted to insult a citizen, you would say like he's a worker. My wife does that with me. She says, "I'm a commoner." And it doesn't and it's not a good word in Thai, right? It's not a good word. I'm a commoner. Uh she was

born in the palace, so it makes sense. But anyway, um the um Oh, no. I lost my thread. I shouldn't mix uh family with a lecture. Uh cuz my you know my fear is uh paralyzes my brain. Uh so what was I saying? Help me. >> Ah citizens. Yeah. Yeah. So now think about the Christians or at labor, right? Work and play. Uh pray work. Maybe now maybe now it's work and play. Maybe that's the difference, right? gamification da but then it was uh work and pray right. So the idea is

very simple. We owe everything to the divine. So we need to pray as much as we can to say thank you and in order to have time to pray we have to work hard. Right? So the monasteries were prayer maximizing enterprises but they actually invented what capitalism would become because they were the only uh disciplined people in a medieval society right they they pray seven times a day they sleep at at different times you know a farmer gets up when it's uh the light comes up and then he sleeps when it's dark so these were highly disciplined people okay um but okay So yes, the spiral linear cycles. Okay, but you get it

right. So it's best to see history as a spiral and uh yeah. Okay, let's see the next slide. Okay, I I also think it's useful to see history as a competition between coordination systems and coordination elites. Um so this is from Michael Hudson. Uh I I tend to agree with his theory. So if you look at the Middle East, you know, uh like 2,000 years ago, they would have things like the clean slate legislation and the Jubilee. So what what did that mean? Every 25 years or every 50 years, all the debts are wiped clean. Why would you do that? Because you don't want to enslave your own

population, right? Because if you do that, then people get in bondage and then before you know it, your own population is enslaved. So that's what the Greeks did. So the Greeks were the first rentier society. The private class came to power. The oly came to power. It's different in China. In China, the emperor is in charge of maintaining the balance of the whole society. Right? The mandarins are the ruling class, not the warriors, not the feudals, right? And they keep society harmonious and the merchants at the bottom. still the way in China the communist party can only

have 3% capitalists in their membership right so you can the Japanese in the shogun if you watch the series you know after the shogun wins his the new system is a samurai on top then the farmers because they make everything then the crafts because they only transform things and then the merchants because they only handle things sell and buy things right so you can see this is a different view of society where the state is stronger than the market. But in Greece, the opposite happens. The rentier class comes to power. The patricians in a row, right? Still the same. And then you have a revolt and that creates democracy. So democracy has always been a mix of unequal property

with political equality and always a tension between the two. So that's the western model. And what Michael Hudson says, it's still that way. So to say it very simple, you can't be the president of United States without oligarchic support and you can't be an oligarch in Russia or China without state support. You know, they both deal with capital, they both deal with workers, they both have commerce, they have states and markets, but they arranged in a slightly different way. Um, and I guess uh, okay, I don't maybe I shouldn't talk about this because it would take too long, but just very briefly, I think we can see that World War I

was a battle between the nation and the empire. Austio Hungary, the Tsar, the Ottomans, they all collapse and the nation state is victorious. World War II is between fascism, communism, and parliamentary capitalism. Right? Three regimes of coordination fighting it out. The fascism are vanquished and then the Russians Russian Soviet system collapses in 89 89 91. Yes.

And so what happens then is very interesting is what happened to China is they succeeded in in making a complex mix of state planning markets and cybernetics right and now we have cybernetics state centric platforms in China and we have private platforms in the west and they this is the current geopolitical tension of course what we are proposing is a third way and I I think I have a slide about this um here.

Um so my basic argument would be that since the Neolithic the extractive capacity has always been stronger than the regenerative capacity. Think about how we see value in under capitalism. It's very easy, right? We think we need to extract and make scarce goods that are on the market, get a price, you buy and sell them, creates a profit. Then we tax them and we redistribute eventually. Right?

This is the the value vision that we normally have left or right. By the way, they both agree on this, right? But notice that if you have a system like this, regeneration is always dependent on extraction, right? So structurally since a neolytic we have systems that favor extraction and marginalize regeneration. As long as that we as long as we had regional civilizations that was not a planetary problem.

The empire would collapse and next door there would be another one. Right? So west west Rome uh collapses but Byzantine uh Rome lasts for another thousand years. Civilization has never collapsed as a whole. It was always regional catastrophes and regional dark ages. But what do we have now? Now we have a serial exhaustion of everything at a planetary scale. Right? And this is why basically I think we can say that we can't continue like this. We cannot continue with a regime that stresses extraction and sees regeneration as a mere like

trying to avoid you know the the worst excesses. We actually I think need a civilization where both are in balance. And this is what Charn Singaporean futurist calls a type one civilization. This is what we're doing right now. Right? How do we cross that narrow path from an extractive civilization to a sorry to a post extractive regenerative model that can last for millions of years and of course that's why it's so and that's where uh the structure of consciousness um is so important and I had a conversation yesterday with Carlos because you know I'm not very clear how

that can happen uh But I I'll I'll call on you when I'm finished. Uh you know, it's like how do you change the structure of desire, right? Because what we want is status and we keep playing the status game and the consumption game because that's how we gain status. And then so look again to the monks. I I only understood this when I moved to Thailand. So ties are very very fun people work and play. Not. Yeah, they pray but they also play a lot. So they drink, they gamble. They actually cheat a lot. Uh so some people call it uh pseudo monogamy.

Uh you know lots of by the way Christians cheat more than the Buddhists. That's surprising. Um but anyway, so Thailand is a fun place as you probably know. Uh, and like the Catholics, you know, they they don't go to confession, but they do merit and then their bad karmic and so it's it's a nice system. It works. So, but then what about the monks? At least in theory, right? Because they they occasionally find a fentinel lab in the monasteries uh there. But you know in in theory and in practice for a number of people you know they don't do that right they

don't drink they don't cheat and that creates their their aura right they can do what nobody else in society can do and because they do that they can pray and they get into the operating system and they can clean out our karma so we support them and then they clean out our karma it's the same in Catholicism right people would pay the monks to pray for them and clean it was called sin but it's kind of a bit the same um okay I I always uh lose my thread so back to the PTP common cybernetics so somewhere I think there is now the capacity why is it not moving oh okay

so I so I think we at the cusp of what I call the third information barrier. So we had remember hunter gathering oral like you know we coordinate by talking to each other there's no writing then writing we coordinate through writing the temples you know accounting and and stuff like that we can we can communicate across generations now then we have printing that creates industrial complexity now we have internet and AI right so here's my thesis my thesis is that just as tribal was overcome by civilizational because they have higher coordination capacities.

We are now at the cuffs where we can see that the market in the state do not solve our basic problems cannot solve our extractive crisis and we need something else and I think that is what we should be doing. That is what we are proposing. So we now have stigma G massive global uh mutual coordination right. So we we communicate of the internet through science. We can coordinate through science on the internet. We can create groups. We can create value. We can create ecosystems. We can create business systems outside of pure state planning and pricing through talking to each other.

to signaling at this higher level planetary scale. Right? So we now have a new sphere, right? We have the geosphere, our material reality. We have a biosphere, the sphere of life. And that's of course very local. But I think we have to admit and and you know, I know there's cables to make the internet work. That's not what I'm saying. But our heads, they're no longer there. Yeah. Now I'm talking to Sterling, but maybe next week we'll have a zoom together. Where are we then? Well, at least our minds are in the new sphere, right? And so this is basically what I call for civilization is this

tension that we have between the old way of doing things purely geographically and scaling geography to now we have another thing new sphere and scaling communities of mind. But here the difference is these communities of mine are productive. We can make stuff. We can have distributed manufacturing. We can connect permaculture. We can connect. And so this is my vision. What I call the archipelago of regenerative villages. Right? And remember I said maybe politics is not the way to go. Now I'm not saying we have completely you know not look at that. Right? I mean if you you know it's better to have support from your local politicians than hostility. So I'm not saying ignore it

but assume you actually have a hostile administration you know which can very much happen right this is the thing today like you don't have to wait you don't have to wait we have all the tools that we need to coordinate globally to get capital from anywhere to get knowledge from anywhere to get technical expertise from anywhere and that is what cosmoloism means right you're locally rooted you with your feet in the mud doing permaculture. You work with the people in your village doing that, but you're learning from the global permaculture community. You can do crowdfunding, crowd, you know, uh, crowd lending. Uh

so I'm very interested in what I saw again from this Ukrainian village you know if you saw their dashboard like amazing in my view like a total integration of the physical and the digital but also the traditional dream factory I know Samuel is coming are you there not yet it seems Samuel Dlesk from traditional dream factory reiilia is also coming with growi so this is what is interesting in my view today I'm not saying they have all their rack together they can do everything but this is where and this is where web 3 comes in right so there's a lot you can say you know critique Bitcoin it energy usage and all of that yes I'm 100% agree with a lot of these critiques but it

created the first socially sovereign currency it's not made by the state and not by corporation but by a community that believes in a protocol then the blockchain is the first universal ledger we didn't have universal ledgers. Now we can have ecosmic accounting, 3D accounting, not just what's good for me, what good for you and you know we have a double entry book accounting now we have anybody can join our ecosystem and we can see how we exchange value in our 3D ecosystem and we can add impact we can add all the things that are related to the thermodynamic reality. So what I'm seeing and I'm you know I I I get a lot of proposals in my mailbox people

thinking about this already money so so far we need it needs to be connected to thermodynamic reality but not just like asset based no bio capacity right so in other words if your soil is improving is your water is improving if your air is improving you have more wealth you can create more money but if your soil is deteriorating and your water is disappearing, you cannot create more money because you you're you cannot sustain yourself, right? So you can see all these shifts of value systems that are about to to happen also for example from commodity to contribution, right? So this is old

stuff from 20 years ago I started working around peer production, right? So what's different? Before I'm a capitalist, I hire Benjamin. I give him as low wage as I can, right? Uh I make a profit and okay, that's that's we know that game. Now I say I want to do open source software. Who's with me? We Yeah, thanks. [laughter] [cheering] No, no, I don't pay you at all. Right. No, I don't pay you at all.

Uh so we we come together. We have a contributory community and if we are successful in a few years you'll see commu companies creating added value on top of the open-source commons and becoming uh entrepreneurs dependent on the commons. So we still have the market and actually you have the state Linux foundation for me is the state of the commons. You see it's like the coordinating collective body for an open source community. so I think you know this is the contri so contribution let's say like this social ecological negative and positive right this is the accounting of tomorrow

we need to know who is contributing socially ecologically but also the negative impact of what we're doing and we have fantastic stuff happening like Austin Wade Smith ecological institutions I didn't finish it because I'm traveling but great book and he says The priority is to make nature visible now, right? We cannot make any decision without knowing what effect it has on nature. Uh and there's lots of loads of things being done. And yeah, so this is basically um what I think is happening now. I think I talked about this. Um okay, I won't say much of it because I'm not technical. I just trust my friends

and their hyper enthusiasm. Um but I think we have a post internet coming and it's based on ridiculum which is a a new uh meshwork that is 100% cryptographic identity cannot be localized no clouds no servers and so we are going to need this right our archipelago of regenerative villages that interconnect together we are going to need trustworthy communication and coordination mechanism because as you can see it's not going in the right direction right so I we I think we'll have a separate presentation on that so

I I won't give you details but and they have quantum proof hardware like amazing stuff so things are happening I think which are uh very interesting um let's see yeah just maybe a little word about AI [snorts] Um, I'm not an expert. Uh, I in the late 90s I did a movie about transhumanism and now I say I I I'm just I just can't get excited about it because I think basically I know we have a lot of tech people here. I don't think tech is the is the issue. We have everything we need. We have already everything we

need. It's a matter of communities getting together choosing what tech is best for them. Now within that of course we can have better and better tech but it's not the key issue. Now AI of course is in my view is going to be if you want to keep our complexity right this is the key. So mode D is not mode A right mode A in a way I think Christian uh monasteries as at least at the beginning of the fall of empire might actually have been mode A right because literacy fell cities emptied roads were not maintained ceramics nobody could do ceramics for a while so imagine that was a huge loss of complexity right I think

now it's different we have nuclear nuclear sites that we need to maintain for 10,000 years, right? So I think we cannot afford to lose that complexity. Uh so we we really need a mode D. So mode A at a higher level of complexity. Um and that's why I do need we do need tech you know and we need to move towards okay this is about Europe very important I think. So remember uh US Europe the usual political situation you know the market centric and the state ccentric thing we are fukkate like we can do it we cannot compete with the Chinese juggernauts and the level of

integration they have already it can be done I don't think by the way the US cannot do it either but we have a lot of land empty And so we need to do repopulation republic in extra madura. We should check it out. Very high-tech high-tech neoloralization. We need distributed manufacturing and Europe is uniquely positioned to do that because we can't do anything else. We can't go back to the industrial system as it existed. But we now have the technology and that's why I am put protect actually. Right.

And I have a a t-shirt that I avoid uh wearing. It says techno optimist. Uh but we we need tech. We need tech. If you want a real mode D rather than going back to mode A, we need some kind of tech. And so open designs, open knowledge and hyperlocal production. So I I come to the following conclusion. We have four levels. the local, the hyper local, the bio- regional with the biohub. So I think this is for Michael Hop, but I I agree with him. So we had markets, you know, the the the technical marks are

today where everything is allocated, you know, Wall Street and all that stuff is going to move to the biohub, right? The biohub is the last station where you cannot externalize further. This is where you say we need to preserve our watershed, our land, the quality of our land. No further, right? So the biohub is is where it's going to happen. Local autonomy biohub for coordination within the bio region. The nation I think we need we we're not going to get rid of the nation. You might disagree. I think the nation has a long cultural and political history. I think a lot of working-class people are for it. we're not we're not going to get

rid of it that easily but the nation can be seen as having an interest in having healthy bio regions right so I I would see like remember I talked about the partner state public common partnerships the commodification of public services I can't go in detail but we we have thought this through you know how the commons can work with public authorities and then the planetary level and okay this is a bit utopian but check out David Ronfeld uh he has a scheme called tribes, institutions, markets and networks and he has he proposes something called the aial entities of the commons of the new sphere aons

his reasoning is maybe not 100% but I I it sounds good. So in the biosphere, in the geosphere we have continental shells, right? Not one, not many, a few. In the biosphere, which creates humans, we have civilizations. Not one, not many, a few. In the nuosphere, we'll have commons based institutions that protect vital domains of life, the oceans, the forest. Not one, not many, a few.

these don't exist yet. So that's the utopian part of my talk. I think everything else I said until now, believe me, people are doing it. But it's still very difficult to get at that level of planetary coordination. You know, everybody in survival mode. So you tend to keep like my project, you know, uh I'm in abundance, you know. I'm in I'm in abundance. We're going to abundance. uh you know uh but so we need to go at a planetary level and then the cosmological level is the integration of the four so that's how far I' I've gotten of course I you know all these ideas they're not mine they are yours right I've been looking

at what people have been thinking and saying and doing for 15 20 years so maybe Benjamin life maybe Erin uh you know we all contribute to this kind of body of ideas. There's just not many people like me putting the puzzle together. That's it. But otherwise, you know, this this is a this is alive in these communities. Yeah. And so AI I see if you want to keep a global, you know, coordination. I think it's the mediator between the human and nature. That's what I come up with. Like I think AI, if you want to keep like think about this. How do we for example keep track of all the vital

resources that we cannot overuse? you know the the manderly table the copper right negative thresholds that we cannot if we don't coordinate then I have no reason to do this you know only if there is like a global compact can we start agreeing that we don't overuse certain things because it's fair for everybody right it's very complex so I think this is what AI is is going to be for and I think human labor can remain central as orchestration Right? We are the orchestrators, not probably not the animals and not the AI, but you know, our deliberative capacity, our planning

capacity is still something that is is unique. And now last but not least, uh this is Jeff EMTT's uh brilliant idea sitting in the back. Um, and I have to admit the first time I heard it, you know, P2P is my thing, you know, like like P4P, do do I want to abandon, you know, my my brand, my identity? I'm not so sure, but okay, you know, uh, so peerfor is really the same. I've been saying is the shift from seeing peer-to-peer individual connecting to each other creating groups to the groups

themselves interconnecting regenerative villages interconnecting and building the infrastructure to make that possible. So that's that's the shift we are uh we're living through and we want to to promote. Um, and then the last thing, um, is, uh, I kind of reorganized my wiki around a new paradigm because here's the problem. We need a politics of paradise and the left doesn't have it. After 89, our paradise collapsed for those who believed in that particular form of paradise. But it had an enormous effect. So from then on we

are protecting what we have. We want to keep welfare. And then if we're ambitious, we want to degrow. We want to prepare for the You know, I'm not saying this is wrong. It, you know, we need people who do this, but you're not going to mobilize masses of people around a negative program. So that's why we need a politics of paradise. And so in so in instead of looking at collapse I start looking what did societies do after the collapse? How did they reconstruct themselves? Right? And in fact of course I had already been doing that but it's just like you know looking it through this new lens and creating a positive

promise. Uh now I'm not promising anything. You know the insurance company just predicted that four billion people will die in 20 or 30 years right? Who knows? It doesn't matter. It's not fully under our control. In the meantime, you know, we can prepare live as as as and I just want to say that if you shift to the commons, it also is very good, you know, individually, right? So, for example, my Thai family is a common, right? So, uh I moved in. I was still a rich guy then.

And I lived two two years for free with an aunt with an aunt of my wife. No food to pay, no rent, just getting everything for free. Then I build a house and my wife says, "Oh, okay." She showed me a little, you know, little um how do you call it? Model. And of course, I don't pay attention to practical matters. So I say, "Yeah, yeah, that's okay." Okay, 10 rooms. I have 10 rooms, four cousins, you know, multiple cousins coming in. It's like the commons up really. [laughter] It's uh you know, because the families are commons. They support me, I support

them. But but you know, understand how how securing that is, right? like that gives you a lot of personal security if you know that they have your back right no matter what they have your back so that's I think what a common does to your psyche and I think it's very important also psychologically okay one more we need a bit of religious uh you know uplift uh so this is berv orthodox thinker in the he lived through the bolshik revolution believed in it for a while, then went back to his spiritual tradition, Orthodoxy, but he

was kind of a not a very strict Orthodox and you know, he was like uh he had issues with the with the church. Uh but he made this uh I think pretty nice uh evolution of technology. So first, you know, we are submersed. We are in this participary mode is indigenous mode. We are not separate. we feel one with animals and and the whole of nature and the spirits you know then we split for them I guess that's the agriculture you know we become more separate the aial age you know we become selves we have a ego we become subjects

um then period three I think that's industrialization is we kind of like lose our autonomy already right it's like who's the master, the machine or the human? And then we go to cybernetics and we lose our autonomy. He wrote this in the 50s, which I think is pretty great. But here's the thing. We can't live like that. We So he's predicting a revolt. I believe that. So they're going to do it. They're going to try to make us into slaves, you know, being just like appendages to the AI machines. They're they're going to try it, right? But it's

not going to work. Yeah, I hope it's not going to work. Yeah. Anyway, I think that's a very good uh closure to my talk. Uh but anyway, that's it. That's it. THANK YOU. [applause] >> [applause] >> I HAVE NO idea how long I talked. How much time do we have left for? So this afternoon we have like a collective discussion more like a round I guess so it won't be like this. Uh but right now

if you have any question if we in time I don't know who's the 10 minutes left. I'm 15. Okay. I'm sorry for the but okay let's go Brian. It's just false modesty, Brian.

>> Yeah. Right. >> Yeah. Yeah. of our time. So I don't know it's just a reflection.

>> Yeah, we need to do that. We need to fund our priests and intellectuals. >> If you don't like priests, you know, >> that's church. But basically you know I think this is like the urgency that you were expressing like we need to own things and we need to acrue things like we need to to be able to say that our you know after one year we have more than the year before because if we don't do it you know all the surplus is going to the other side and we will never be able to do anything serious. So we need so I think about the churches you know the first mod you know how imagine how big they became but what about the labor

movement same thing you know I'm reading uh actually a biography of marks marks in Brussels last year my last trip I wrote Lenin in the train so I still have a a bit of those old stuff in my head but anyway so it tells the story of how poor Markx was he was always begging for money right like me yeah like me Yeah. Yeah. Well, [laughter] yeah. You know, because there's there's no there's no organized network to do that. And so that's the problem with networks, right? Networks like let's say you do Linux. As long as you do Linux, you're part of Linux community. Let's say you get sick and

you stop producing code, people forget about you, right? But in the labor movement, they created all these mutual uh stuff that actually kept people through until they became very very and then became like a state agency eventually, right? So it always turns out not the way you originally wanted. But the commoners, which I think that's what we are, we are in the same position of the laborers in in the mid- 19th century. We h we have to start organizing as commoners.

uh because you know we're not going to going to go back to labor. Capital doesn't need labor and I would argue labor as commons doesn't need capital you know we we we can create our own circuits. Yes. So I there's too many people >> I'll pass the microphone but yeah I just >> so there's Christian and I think maybe Jeff and maybe uh Timote anybody else okay and Adam. So let's do it in the order that I said maybe. >> Okay, I'll pass to Christian. But uh I just wanted to say then perhaps under the P4P banner, we should convene this sort of meta conversation about in your words who controls the surplus controls the direction of the future. We need to

have this as a structured meta conversation about how to make this integrative. >> Absolutely agree. >> Okay, >> thank you >> Christian. >> Hello. Um, so with the monasteries creating this surplus within their commons, it seems that that that came from this like deep culture of discipline and like this like incentive structure around the divine. Um, like you're working with God, for God to create this like flourishing comments in a prayer form.

and I think one issue with the commons right now as it stands is there's lack of culture of discipline to maintain it and to create a surplus. Um, so I'm curious, do you have any like thoughts around like why would someone like it makes a little bit of sense why someone would contribute to Wikipedia or Linux u for like contribution points or something, but if we have like a physical commons again, what's the in incentive structure or culture that like that I guess like incentivizes people to really contribute to it in in a deep way like the monasteries.

Well, I I think part of it is that we're actually still doing really well despite everything. So, you know, I have my issues as Brian suggested, especially this year, but I still have food and shelter, you know, so so that and and don't forget we have like 80 years of hyperindividualization, right? So, we've been trained to be hyperindividual. Um and I imagine it was the same with the Roman Empire at the end of Roman Empire. But then as everything collapses, you know, then they move to hyperdiscipline, right? Because it's hard to imagine like why would you want a life of without sex and obedience and

poverty, right? And yet I think they were in a survival situation which made that obvious that this is the way to go because if you didn't have that discipline collectively, you would go under, you know. Um and I think we are moving in that situation where you know I you know okay he just left so I can say it. Uh Felix you know like he has to maintain his place. Oh he's there. Okay. Uh yeah yeah he's there. He's there. But so you know his psychology is already different right? there's a lot of people that he would have uh tolerated five years ago, you know, maybe do harm to stuff, you

know, and and vandalizing and drinking and, you know, he won't tolerate it today, right? Because he's in a different existential situation. And I think gradually this is going to happen to more of us. And I already sense, so somebody asked me last week and of course I take responsibility for my interpretation. What did I get out of the cryptocom gathering? And I I really had to think because it was so chaotic. Uh but I said a sense of seriousness. It's maybe hard to believe for those who were there. Uh but that's what I felt like a sense of seriousness like we got to be serious now. The play time is over.

>> Sorry. Yes. Go ahead, Felix. Sorry. >> So I want to add Yes. Uh [laughter] I am less patient uh nowadays uh than five years ago and I do kick people out now without five rounds of community discussion and uh stuff when I see I don't want this person around or I don't feel uh I don't feel like I can go to bed if that person's still awake. I'll kick him for good. Uh but I think so the question was uh lack of seriousness in in many commons. I agree

because many and and I will suggest that this is mostly in our still pretty spoiled west where commoning is cosplaying or can often is often just cosplaying and there is no livelihoods at stake. There's no nothing serious is at stake. It's maybe your reputation uh and and nothing more. And maybe even not that if if the group doesn't adapt uh uh your reputation if you up. Uh I do think that in other uh uh in other cultures, in other groups, in other places, commons are just more

central. So they are approached more seriously. And also community reaction to someone uh extracting is more serious. >> Yes. But also since at least here in Europe we are um we're losing uh uh our comfort in a way. maybe comments are becoming more uh more important and thus people react more seriously to others spoiling their comments.

>> Thank you. Maybe one more because I think the time is uh yeah. Okay. So by the way we can also discuss this afternoon right? So if if um so I had already names but uh so we had Jeff we had Timote we had >> oh Adam okay you talk in the afternoon who who who wants to say something essential from those let's let's get Timote because also Jeff we you can talk this church.

>> Okay. Um so we're talking a lot about monasteries and and churches and someone talked about um what is the god that we are praying to and it feels that if capitalism is a religion um what is the religion of commoning and it's like if we're not choosing one consciously it becomes by default decentralization maybe or like yeah what is it today what is it it what it should become so that we get the the focus and the discipline to actually scale this movement.

>> Yeah. I'm I have to be honest. I'm I'm struggling with this question >> and the relationship to maybe in Europe Christianity. Yeah. >> Yeah. I I'm struggling with this. Um uh so I don't think we can go back. I I you know, of course, there are still people who will return to the traditional religions. There are people who will return to traditional ideologies. But I think the bulk of the population as it's constituted today needs something that is adapted to our current situation. And I'm not sure what that is. I am not sure what that is. But I think it has to start in a distributed way like you know social charters right you you are in a community you have your

goal as a commons that this is what we constructing and you can decide like this is what we hold sacred. This is what we want to defend. This is like what's beyond the material that bind us together. I I don't know if we can go further than that at this stage. I was hoping to be honest that the commons itself would be it. Right. That's what that was my bet 20 years ago. Hasn't really worked out the way I thought it would. So I don't know if it's going to work in the future.

>> You are our pope, Michelle. >> Yeah. I'm I'm just uh No, more like John the Baptist. I think, you know, we're very early. Uh, but anyway, I I just continue, you know, like some people like me and maybe some others, we're a bit crazy, right? We we have this thing that tells us what to do. Whether we right or wrong doesn't really matter. We we just feel that an overriding sense of this is our truth and and then we do stupid things and we hit our head and we become poor. Great.

Yeah. uh PCO. So yeah, then maybe we'll just have a little since you know >> just a quick uh reflection on having higher stakes and the example of uh Felix having to have some boundaries on who is invited or welcomed here. makes me think how this reality um conflicts with some principles of inclusivity and how we can navigate that uh pretty uncomfortable tension between wanting to create something that is for the greater

good. But then having to be very uh careful with how we dedicate our energy and which energies may disrupt the flow of uh production and and sustainability. So if you have any thoughts on that let's keep that for the afternoon maybe I think the afternoon just say your your thing. So this will touch base on your base on your hand like utopian P4P method the same P4 is that it's the it's the when I say when I say how you going to

build these how you going to build these structures it's okay even though it's the needs to be soil that's in serve the water and the earth they have credits. It's uh infrastructure services. So then there's all these many companies that have many many resources, servers that they're not using, AI credits that are not using. So my idea what the at least the gifting side of the economy is that you pull all those natural resources out of the neosphere and you create soil.

>> And then we entrust it to someone, >> right? and have people build because there's no you could see it but there's nothing you can anchor to. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's what I I would just want to say that's what people are actually doing. So for example when TDF comes in we can ask him how he does that but they buy so they get they get money from their global community they buy the land put it in the commons for perpetuity right and so for example machines uh this is from Canada sensor they so if they need a machine that is too expensive for any individual they they look at the price they double the price then they do a crowdfunding so they have the machine and it's replacement already and then people pay

for the usage and the people who prepaid the capital they have credit and they use the machine for free. So there this called nondominium it's from no one in particular it's from all of us. Uh so there's this is what actually I keep in my wiki all these solutions there are many but you know the broader question for me I think is like the drones and the missiles they have the missiles but we have the drones and we know what happens with the US and Iran and also you know Ukraine and Russia with the drones right so these centralized technologies are much much cheaper than what these companies are paying for what they need and then you know the networking and and the collective learning. There's many many examples

today to prove that the network community has more intelligence than a state or a corporation. This is already maybe 20 years that we can see this. But we need more organization. We need more solid. We need acrew to acrewue right to so for example and then maybe we end with this you know the Park Slope food co-op in Brooklyn which is like the first example there's like 300 in the US. They said if we didn't own our building, we wouldn't be here because the real estate prices, you know, went up by 10, right? And they're still there because they own their house.

So, I think this is part of the shift to seriousness is that we start have to start thinking in in this way. >> I think we >> I would love to just close with something like that. >> You you closed me up now. >> And I close you up. No, but like I I think we also had this moment yesterday that we were sharing on this how do we see this land ownership into this like private property or the commons and all of these things and it's more about that like how can we get a system that takes care of that the people that contributes any type of value and agree a lot of different values into these like interactions and and and transfers in between the

communities. but as well just basically taking care of having a place to sleep, something to eat, education, transportation. That's pretty much everything we need, right? So, we can totally set up all the pieces for us to have that wired into the like community that agrees with this and then just multiply like misillium everywhere and start growing with two three people. It's okay, but they can already use the templates that we've been like testing and trying with like different things. So yeah, I think it's all here. We we're ready.

[applause] Now uh after talking about the comments, I do want to say that the commons need your help. I need to say that kitchen commons and cleaning commons require more names on the list. The list is now outside of this room in next hall on the whiteboard. Uh you have slots for every day. I think it's five different slots. And at least the kitchen shifts uh need two people. I think the other shifts also. Uh we need people today and tomorrow and for all the other days as well, but today and tomorrow in

particular, please we need volunteers. Thank you. Do we have