Ethereum Localism: Global Protocols, Local Power & Community Currencies

Transcript

Introductions: Ethereum Localism & Bioregionalism

Hello. Hello. >> Can you hear us? >> Y. >> Great. Well, it's really exciting to be here. Uh, let's start out with some introductions. Uh, I'm Sarah Jstone. I am a permaculturist, a bio regionalist and an active Athereum member. And I'm really passionate about the Ethereum localism community. I'm very excited to be here with Benjamin. Benjamin. >> Hi everyone. Uh to those who I don't know, my name is Benjamin Life. I am a co-founder of a DAO called open civics and also uh a co- steward of the localism fund which is a Ethereum aligned uh project funding local public goods which we'll talk about more later

and u more most recently um a co-founder and steward of the spirit of the front range which is a bio- regional nonprofit here in Colorado. So, I'd love to just fill in some context for those of you who are maybe attending this event for the first time. It's obviously the first Ethereum Boulder. Uh, but we had an event last year called the General Forum of Ethereum Localism, which I'd like to think seated uh this bigger event that we're having now. Uh, so I'd love to share a little bit of context, Benjamin, about that event and maybe for you to talk about, uh, where the movement was born, uh, Portland, your experience, and what we're doing here.

Origins of the Movement (GFEL, Portland, Boulder)

>> Yeah, it's really beautiful to have some of the catalysts of GEL as the acronym goes, and the Ethereum localism movement here in the house. O, I want to shout out Christy and Extin um and a few other members of their crew um out in Portland um brought a a group of us together for the first time. It was actually where I first met Kevin Awaki even though we both lived in Boulder. Um, and it catalyzed a tremendous amount and it kind of set a precedent for um, what the Ethereum localism community is and what the shared values are. Um, and it really brought together a kind of cryptoleftist

but also um a more explicitly values aligned subset of the web 3 community that I think by giving it a name and a space um really helped a lot of us find each other. Um, and I would say Gitcoin also has done this. But I think the the GEL event that happened twice in Portland and then again here in Boulder um really establish this kind of core group of us who have started to develop a lot of deep relationships and solidarity. >> And do you mind speaking to some of those values that we hold in the ecosystem?

Core Values of Ethereum Localism

Yeah, I think um it's hard to talk about the values without first acknowledging the kind of underlying contradiction within Ethereum localism. Um which is this tension between this global protocol and the lived realities that you know each of us are actually embedded in specific places. Um, and so while we have this global ledger that allows us to coordinate and support open source software and public goods, um, where is that bridge that actually makes that relevant for local communities? Um because until it touches down I think what a lot of us who got into the space for the values of democratic

Global Protocol vs Local Sovereignty

participation, community ownership and and cooperivism um peer-to-peer um technological architectures that prevent capture by centralized institutions. Um this idea of of combining sovereignty and care I think are at the core of it for me. Um, and so I think this is inherent to Ethereum and why I think Ethereum is a place where these values are at home is there is this global solidarity and then but then the need to apply those technologies in place-based communities where the communities have the sovereignty to define how the technology is used and deployed. Um, and so I think Ethereum

localism sort of sits in the center of that contradiction. Um, and instead of of saying it's one or the other, it's not hyper local only by local um, and screw you to the global commons, nor is it trying to create this kind of abstracted global coordination layer that doesn't actually meaningfully connect to people's real everyday lives. Um, and so by navigating that tension, we look for where can we be in global solidarity. Um, and this kind of has to do with the cosmolo movement as well. this idea of what is light should be global and shared and what is heavy should be local and self-governed. Um we're we're navigating those tensions by

“What Is Light Is Global, What Is Heavy Is Local”

by creating a third thing um that is open source. We're sharing knowledge freely. We're commoning our knowledge and and our protocols and open source software. Um but then we're making sure that local self-determination and community-led um initiatives are are are stewarding how those protocols are applied at the local level. >> So I'd love to hear last year we gathered uh a couple hundred people I think for two days and it was very dynamic lively uh discussions. It was very participatory and I felt like there was some even really exciting movement that happened immediately with ETH Denver and and the formation of the

region commons group. I'd love to know, you know, we have a 4-hour track tomorrow, Ethereum localism at Riverside. H how do you think we're doing? How do you think we're navigating these tensions? I know you've had a major milestone with the Localism Fund. Um so yeah, I'd love to I'd love to know how you think we're doing as a movement. Yeah, I think to hearken back to Kevin's opening this morning, um I I feel that we're so back it's so over dialectic inside of myself on a momentto moment basis. Um the reasons I'm I'll start with the reasons I'm pessimistic and then I'll go into the reasons I'm optimistic. Um I I sense that there's a vibe shift uh in the industry at large.

State of the Movement: Optimism & Consolidation

There's a sense that the kind of free money machine that you know in the early stage a lot of us who had these pro-social values were like oh if we just hang out close to this money printing factory we can change the world and that money printing factory has dried up the the marketing budgets of layer 2 is no longer going to fund the revolution I'm letting you know there was a brief moment where I thought that it Yes, but it's not. And so I think there's a consolidation in the market. There's a way that I think the stable coin success, the deregulation around Trump creates an opportunity and a risk for

our space. And I think a lot of the DAC, the decentralized accelerationism, Ethereum localism. I think these are a cultural nodes within the blockchain space that are attempting to be a kind of like bull work, a kind of uh hedge against the rise of these more authoritarian aspects of our society that probably can have seen the long game of how a protocolized society would circumvent their access to to you the way that centralization is necessary for those actors to maintain their systemic position of power.

Stablecoins, Regulation & System Metabolizing Its Critique

They it makes sense that Black Rockck is getting involved. It makes sense that um we're we're writing legislation that's connecting the issuance of stable coins to the US dollar. That's how the system tries to metabolize its own critique. And I think those of us who got into this industry for other reasons around the pro-social aspects, the democratic aspects, the economic transformations, I think it's very important for us to really stay together and and in that consolidation um find ways where maybe there's a lot there's too much there's not enough space in the industry for all of us to be doing our own thing in the same way that there was when there was a lot of

money. And so finding coalitions, finding, you know, commons, finding open source projects that we can actually start to pull into together, I think that's maybe the positive aspect of the consolidation. There's not as much free money. And so we actually have to get scrappier around actually creating our own economies. Um because in some ways we were still dependent on this infrastructure that was just being inflated by institutional investors coming into the space. And that was never going to be sustainable. that was never going to actually be the alternative parallel society economy that I think a lot of us want to create.

$150K Distributed to 12 Global Localism Programs

And so in that consolidation, I think the opportunity is for us to, you know, get tighter in terms of the values aligned portion of this industry, make a stronger claim of what those values are and work more closely together. On the positive side, uh we just distributed $150,000 to 12 different local funding programs that are all experimenting with a diverse set of mechanisms and that's thanks to Gitcoin and Cello public goods. Um and those stories are really exciting because we have real on the ground communities on almost every continent. Um, we have a a solar cryptomining facility in Nigeria that is

funding education to give people skills that they can utilize and and in the workplace uh with a totally self-sustaining revenue model. We have a network of cooperative businesses in Barcelona that are creating a whole parallel economy and currency system. Um, we have folks in Colombia who are doing really amazing UBI um that creating community hubs that are distributing money to to folks who are living uh under the poverty line. And here in this space, what are we do?

Nigeria Solar Mining, Barcelona Co-ops, Colombia UBI

>> What are we doing in Boulder? >> Uh in Boulder Boulder, it was not part of the localism fund round. Um but we are experimenting with bio regional financing facilities and also creating um the regen hub as a limited cooperative association uh which is a really exciting way for us to create a kind of community venture studio um that's cooperatively owned and hopefully will be a kind of catalyst for local economic development community ownership um and so I think all of these experiments are still very nent Um, but the the cool thing about running a program with 12 grants programs spread

all around the world, all exploring very different methodologies and mechanisms, is that as they start to deploy that capital, we're going to have that kind of cosmoloc learning loop where all of the local experiments then push insights back into the global community. And hopefully if we run that process, we're going to get better and better at really strategically allocating capital, not just to the causes that we think are important, but into the feedback loops that actually support us in creating parallel economies that let people exit capitalism into something else. >> Thanks for sharing on that. And uh one of the things I'd love for you to speak more about is just the process in which you allocated that capital because I think there was a lot of transparency and openness in in terms of how your

Bioregional Finance in Boulder

collective went about that and I just love for you to share with everyone. >> Yeah, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to share about that cuz I think it was somewhat groundbreaking or revolutionary of of an approach when Gitcoin announced that um we were looking to fund domains. I immediately started to think about the governance and coordination problem of how do you bring together the experts of a particular domain in a way that's actually community-led as opposed to some sort of centralized committee that's picking who they think the experts are. How can the the seniors the the the genius that's in the scene in the people who all know each other and respect each other and um how can we make that visible? Um and so we ended up

How the Localism Fund Allocated Capital

working with um some of the members of Dow Dow and layer labs um Jake Hartnell to implement something called a trust graph. Um there's been many other experiments of trust graphs under many different names. Um this basically uses an Ethereum attestation service schema for a particular network um to say here are the criteria that we have for what it means to be a member of this network. And then you seed that network with some people who are are validators. They're attesting. We call them the trusted seed. And those people attest to the people that they trust. And in the attestation, they can give it a weight of how much they trust that person. And all of that becomes publicly available

Trust Graphs & Ethereum Attestation Service

information, which is a very interesting social experiment. Um, but I think normalizing that kind of transparency is really helpful. And then when those people attest to other people, there's this chain of trust. And we use the same algorithm that Google uses to rank web pages based on their number of links and the strength of those links to come up with a kind of numerical representation of the collective amount of trust that that node had in the network. And so we had over a 100 people making attestations, thousand assets attestations and from that we were able to derive the 30 most trusted people within this network. And those became the evaluators of the local

Decentralizing Expertise & Collective Intelligence

funding programs that applied. Um and they stepped in to offer mentorship to help um evaluate the projects. Um and each evaluator was reviewing according to a criteria and then the total score of the evaluators for that project determined what the matching ratio that we provided to them was. And so we were able to use this kind of attestationbased network of trust to generate evaluators to then generate scores to distribute money according to the will of this network of experts. Um, so we're trying to decenter ourselves um, and practice this more kind of exeutional is a word you might hear in the Ethereum localism space. Um, that where institutions

enclose, executions are about the relational um, web of of a network and how can we actually optimize for the collective intelligence that's embedded in the networks um, that we're a part of and and use that to channel resources where they're going to be most effective. >> Thanks. Uh, I'd love to open it up to the group. I see a lot of familiar faces in here and folks that probably identify with the movement or have questions about Ethereum localism. So, I'd love to hear from folks in the audience. Um, I don't know if we have a moving mic or if people just want to uh shout out some of the tensions or uh questions that you're holding.

Open Letter & “Protocol Underground”

And also, no pressure, but there are so many Ethereum localists here that I'm speaking to the choir and and this is meant to be a kind of fireside chat and also like what is the state of Ethereum localism and to decenter myself like I I want to I really want to call in um the my peers um who are also holding this movement and and what you're tracking what what where you feel like we're at as a movement. If no one has questions, then I'm going to put uh a group on the spot who released a manifesto today that I haven't had a chance uh to read, but that I heard a little bit about and feel inspired by. Um is there anyone from that group that would want to speak a little bit about the manifesto you all

put out? Uh, you also >> and your relationship to Ethereum localism. >> Uh, yeah. Hi, I'm Ext. Um, uh, I publish under Exoot. My name is James. Um, I, uh, Christy and I, and Van, um, and Paul and some others, uh, were, uh, yeah, the ones in Portland who threw the first, uh, GEL. Um, yeah, I don't know. uh that original group that was focused on um you know some of the inputs of that group that were more focused on by regional stuff that were more focused on uh decentralized manufacturing and these other aspirations um kind of fractured and I feel that uh like Boulder has

really taken the mantle of that really well. Um, in the meantime, uh, our sort of publishing apparatus that, um, Van and I and a couple others have and Christy and a couple others have, uh, put together, we published the Ethereum localism book. We sort of wanted to take a meta like look at what we had done right by sort of catalyzing that the initial stage of that movement and realizing that it was about um taking different readings of technology from like radically different sides of the space or radically different spaces rather and sort of trying to clash them together in a way that was provocative.

Um, so I'm thinking the the manifes or sorry, not manifesto. We just did it's an open letter to the Ethereum community and it's sort of challenging the Ethereum community to to restage or like restage that same process and think about how uh different different technologists um not just people that use digital technology but people that use technology like uh community technology uh technology that we associate with art or with spirituality. um how those people have or how those different subcultures have spontaneously sort of converged around a set of uh a set of uh values and principles that we call the protocol

Open Protocols Beyond Code (Set & Setting Example)

underground. Um meaning that there you know that protocolization is a really important part of underground culture. Um so you know of course it's important to open source to the extent that it's affiliated with underground culture and Ethereum to the extent that it is. But um but people that never touched the digital web also sort of engage in protocolization as a really important part tactic. Um and so we're interested in I we intend to provoke the Ethereum community to think about how those protocolists those people that share these underground values embody core Ethereum uh core Ethereum um yeah core Ethereum values as laid out by Vitalic Vitalic Buterine. um how those different subcultures could contribute to the Ethereum to both the Ethereum localism

and just the larger Ethereum uh the larger Ethereum community to try to be, you know, imaginative and and empathic about what technology can be and imagine imaginative and empathic about how uh how Ethereum solves problems that are inherent to decentralized technology and to protocolization far outside of digital contexts. Um yeah, so that's what uh sort of a summary of the letter, but much better writer than speaker, so give it a read. It's it's on the Ethereum Boulder um Twitter account as well. So it just got retweeted. So and and there's a hard copy that will be circulated today and tomorrow.

>> I would love to just add to that because I I feel like the Portland crew and open machine in particular has been really instrumental in my thinking about open protocols. Um, for people who are more technical, you know, Ethereum as an open protocol, if you've ever gone into the the governance of the Ethereum protocol, you realize that there is none. And maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing. Um, it's mostly a bunch of nerds fighting in a forum with each other, and that's how they arrive at consensus. Um, but open protocols from a more social philosophical orientation is really about how information spreads among people. And I think looking at these underground communities is very instructive and and the the open

protocol research group and and open machine have done a lot of really great analysis around how the early psychedelic movement, the sex positive movement um have come up with alternative means of protecting themselves, meeting their own needs. I think just as an example, a really great one is set and setting. If you've ever done psychedelics before, you know that you should keep in mind uh how your the context that you're bringing into it and where you're where you are. And if you can keep those two things in mind, you're going to have a much better experience. That's a very simple straightforward protocol that just spreads word of mouth. I tell you, you tell your friend. If they're if they're like, "Oh, I'm going to do mushrooms

this weekend." You're like, "Hey, have you thought about what's your intention? How do you have like a candle that you're lighting or are you going to do in the dark?" like um so protocol doesn't have to just be the deterministic kind of protocol. It can also be kind of these procedural maps of um just general heristics that help you do a thing. Um, and with so much of of I think the things that are not working in our current society, um, giving people both the permission to take direct action to change that thing in their own community as well as giving them kind of best practices. What has worked well in the past? What have other communities learned through this iterative practice?

I think city repair, your interview with city repair is really worth looking at because this was a community that had a real problem. there was a kid that was killed by a driver in their neighborhood. And so oftentimes these protocols emerge from real needs, something that's like like raw and human, like we don't have a solution for this. The government isn't doing anything. Bureaucracy is bloated. And so they decided we're going to do something. We're gonna shut down the street and we're going to create a kind of turn style in the middle that's going to be covered with art and plants so that when people get to this intersection, they have to slow down. Like, yeah, but the city's never going to let us do this. How do we do it? And they're like, "Well, there's

Direct Action & Community-Led Infrastructure

someone in the neighborhood who actually is a cop." So, they go talk to the cop and they're like, "Hey, could you see if that you could make sure the patrol cars don't come around here this weekend while we're doing this direct action?" And he was like, "You know what? The city government is so slow. You guys should do it. Yeah, I'm going to." And so the collusion with the state, you have to realize that every system of authoritarianism is driven by people who are human. And so this kind of bottoms up like community- centered approach to direct action that open protocols open up um creates the ability for people to then fork that pattern and say oh my community is encountering something similar instead of waiting for the

traditional institutions to adapt which increasingly they're so broken. I think open protocols come from this need to do it ourselves. And so I think Ethereum localism is a place where people who are interested in that knowledge commoning and what are what is the way in which we can take the patterns that work in one community at the grassroots level and make that available and visible to other communities and and I feel like the frame of open protocols is what really makes that possible. >> Yeah. Just really understand those tactics that you mentioned as technologies.

>> Yes. Social technologies. Not technology at all. I want to cover technologies >> that blockchains can make possible. Yeah. >> Sorry, I just came in. But I just wanted to understand how do you decide like what like open cities I understand the concept like build open infrastructure but then with limited resources like even with AI like humans have limited time like how do you decide on like what open technologies to build like I for one absolutely love what you built as a non-engineer. It's really great. So, how do you like decide like what is to be built?

Choosing What to Build in Crisis Contexts

>> I'm going to I'm going to riff for a minute. I think so. One of the areas I'm spending my time in right now is the humanitarian aid context and that's because uh the state of our current country and administration and the funding uh that has been cut uh in the international aid landscape is it's super urgent and it's uh super detrimental. And so the last like eight months or so I have been on a bit of a deep study uh trying to understand that space and it's been uh actually quite hopeful in terms of seeing technology from the Ethereum ecosystem and other ecosystems as well uh being applied to real world contexts like refugee

populations and displaced communities or conflict zones uh with crossber payments and stable coins and I feel quite hopeful about this. So for me, that's what I'm choosing to spend my time on. And I also just want to say that I think tomorrow, uh, the Ethereum localism track, the whole point is for us to come together and and and hear peer-to-peer what people are working on and what's working, what's not working. Um, this is one of the reasons I love the Ethereum localism movement so much is because we're trying to talk about things that are working and not working in our own communities, uh, but how to apply that on the global scale as well. So, I also just want to shill our event tomorrow,

uh, 1 to 5:00 p.m. at the Riverside community. It's going to be an unconference. So that means that we really you you can show up with uh something you want to talk about, but we really encourage you to show up and respond to what feels alive and dynamic in the space. So the way in which we're going to facilitate that is we're going to have a 1-hour fishbowl session. Uh so kind of like this, just a casual chat except there'll be five chairs. uh and you and we rotate through people coming up and uh having a dialogue around what's what's moving in the Ethereum localism community. What do folks feel excited about, inspired by? Um and then from there, we'll have folks pitch uh

their unconference sessions, which will be about 50 minutes in length. We'll have two of those. Uh you get one minute to pitch your session. And really, we're we don't really want to do that much pitching your project. We're more trying to be in a space of learning and uh so we'll do two of those sessions and then we'll come back and harvest learnings in another fishbowl session and en encouraging everyone to show up and participate and bring what's alive uh for you. So we encourage you all to be there. We'd love to talk more about your questions. We'd love to hear about some of the folks working on AI. Um this is top of mind for me. I I hope you all will come and propose a topic. Um,

Credible Neutrality & Functional Pluralism

but yeah, I just wanted to give that a quick shill and then take it back to Benjamin. What What have I not asked that I should have asked you already about uh the Ethereum localism space? Yeah, there there's definitely a part of me that I I do want to respond to what you asked. Um, and maybe that I can weave this into um something we haven't talked about yet. Um, which is something I've been calling credible neutrality through mechanism design. Um, I I'm I'm really working on how we can desenter individual binary decisions. um the kinds of decisions that break up communities when you can't come to a

consensus and you either have to fork uh or disband. And usually groups end up arriving at one of those options. And it's very rare that a group has the kind of metabolic or kind of immune system to continuously re-evaluate its alignment to its own stated values. Um, and so one of the ways that I think we can achieve this or make it a little bit easier, um, is instead of having binary decisions, we either do this or we do this, we embrace this idea of functional pluralism where the decision can actually be plural. We don't have to pick one direction or another. We can pick different directions proportional

to the amount of interest people have in pursuing those directions. >> I would say like if it's more guided emergency point of view then we are all likely everybody can find an alignment because this problem is highly urgent amongst 10 other problems that we've defined and then I think there's a national alignment that follows >> totally and that brings up the another important idea in the Ethereum localism space which is subsidiarity um this idea that decision-m should be nested at the most local level to where that decision has an impact and so part of the reason Why localism fund was funding grants programs as opposed to giving out grants to projects was we

Subsidiarity & Distributed Agency

wanted to give $20,000 to regenerate Cascadia which is a nonprofit that has its own network with indigenous nations and local communities and instead of us picking what projects should be funded there giving them the full autonomy to determine how to distribute those resources. So it's not like passing the buck it's more like distributing agency. Makes >> sense. If we have more time. Do we have more time? >> We're good. Okay, we'll take a couple more questions.

Is There a Core Truth Behind Ethereum?

>> I appreciate you. >> Is there like a a central truth at the heart of Ethereum that you all are chasing? There's a lot of talk of alignment, but uh it seems to be all about logistics. How you manage this, how you execute that, how you organize this, and then store the log. there doesn't seem to be alignment on is there universal truth um behind Ethereum as an asset as compared to the current currency system that you guys agree on. That's the mission. Does that make sense?

>> Yeah. Um I I wrote an essay a while ago called what is Ethereum for? um trying to understand are there some sense of universal ethics or values that can that could even bridge across the kind of network state to network society movements or you know there's Bitcoin maxis and there's you know DAO nerds and there's you know there's a whole bunch of subsets of communities within this Ethereum space so that I think is actually part of its identity is that it is really just a neutral substrate. And I think that actually doesn't seem on its face to be val of value. How could a just a a substrate

Pluralism & Consent as Ethereum’s Substrate

like, you know, it's just the thing that you you you print the ink on the paper? Like, does the paper really matter? Um, but I think pluralism as a value means we believe in a free society where people can determine for themselves. they can opt in instead of authoritarian structures that are imposed on them from above. Um, could we have a society that was diverse enough, plural enough where there could be many plural experiments of how society could be organized? And in that is a certain kind of value of of collective determination and self-determination.

Um, and so I think that's what keeps me in Ethereum is that there's other blockchains that, you know, you can write smart contracts on. Now, Ethereum was the first to do it, but now there's many. What What's the reason to stay in Ethereum? And it's because of Ethereum doesn't just represent one way that society could be organized. It it's the belief that we all have a right to consent to how our society is organized. And Ethereum is a space where we can experiment and and iterate on that collectively. >> Yeah.

Community Currencies & Keeping Value Local

Uh yeah, I thought that was well said. Um I'm I'm wondering how you think of value flows from local to let's say national or or global where uh your comment about like the L2 uh kind of treasure chests funding local projects that really felt like we had reversed the value flow where you know big box stores, franchises, chains kind of like insert their needle into a local community and then extract all the value and then we felt like we were maybe getting some of that value back. What's your most kind of current or how is your thinking evolved on how these localism projects, how much of that could and should be about

um keeping value uh within the community? Um how that value is expressed and where we're at with that. Is that like a a possibility? Is it underway? That that sort of thing. Yeah, I would say that that is maybe one of the most important and underdeveloped aspects of Ethereum localism. I know that citizen wallet had some really promising stuff. Um I know that burner wallet was also doing some point of sale stuff. I think basically what we need to really accelerate community currency adoption is it's very hard right now to for a non-technical person to issue a token

define the governance of that token enroll enough people in utilizing that token. You need a point of sale interface. You need to onboard local businesses. There's a ton of of traditional community currency knowledge that we can apply here. Um and Scott Morris who was at at the last GFL and all the GFLs actually is one of the world's leading experts on this idea and um ways that we can get around regulatory constraints where they're just called coupons. They're not it's not money. It's just a coupon. Um but you could still have a token that represents a coupon. I don't know if that legal loophole will hold up in court. I'm not a lawyer. But um there are some success stories of community

currencies really keeping value circulating in their local community. And so I would love to see someone really take that baton and run with it and create the kind of you know sales force of the decentralized communityowned currency space. um because it's that ease of onboarding people and and creating the governance around the token that um I I think it's just been a bit of a learning curve and the tech hasn't quite been there and so I I see that as the highest le one of the highest leverage things that we could do but I actually don't know of anyone who's really driving it forward um in the way that I think it should be.

Mobility, Privilege & Bioregional Responsibility

I >> was already set to ask the next question so I won't shill my project that is essentially trying to do what you just described. I'll leave it at that. Um um kind of pulling on some threads that you talked about throughout this whole conversation. Um the tension between uh the global protocol and local attestation networks subsidiarity. Um I think probably a lot of us in this room are our hearts and minds are located in uh various communities even if we are planted in one particular place. um either nomatically stopping or long-term. We have friends and family who are distributed around different bio

regions that have captured our hearts. How do you all think about um I'm not sure if you'd call it attention, but uh the fact that we are more mobile than ever and we want to be localists and we're involved in various different networks and communities that are not all in the same place at once. >> I think one thing that comes up for me when you ask this question uh that's really just important to surface here is recognizing our privilege. like we are all very privileged to be here. We all travel internationally and show up at different events around the world and I think it's really important for us to uh stay centered in place in our bio

regions and use the learnings um and the knowledge that's happening in our bio regions to inform the work that we're doing on the global scale. So yeah, anything to add to that Benjamin? Yeah, I um that was my main push back in the the network nations. The network nations are trying to respond to the network state and they're like we're going to it's the same sort of thing. It's affinity based networks of alignment globally but instead of trying to like all buy land and create a kind of neoc colonial paradise um instead you know forming these kind of localized clusters of nodes that are more like third spaces that are all connected. And I was like, yeah, but we are people of

Citizenship in the Networked Age

place. Like that really matters. I think what what you're saying is like we can't ignore just because we are global citizens and we are part of global networks that we have a responsibility through our embeddedness in our bio region to take up that project and and participate in that. The an essay that I wrote that I would recommend around this topic is called citizen rights and responsibilities in theorked age. And this idea of um instead of citizenship being something that's conferred by the state, something that is actually conferred by your peers as a recognition of your taking on a responsibility and care for some collective. And that could be your neighborhood, that could be your Discord server, that could be your

family. Um and that we can think of ourselves as playing these. We don't we're not just singular, you know, I'm a citizen of the United States. I am a citizen of this movement. I'm a citizen of my bio region. And that just really means taking on responsibility for caring for that. And so if we can split our identity from just being only one thing and we can recognize that we actually wear many different hats and roles in different contexts and that all of them are important. um and to make sure that we are doing both our citizen duties at the global level but also taking on that kind of bio regional citizenship at the same time.

Closing & Invitation to the Unconference

I think we're we're at time now. >> Come join us tomorrow at Riverside 1 to 5. Uh we're excited.