S8 Ep. 1 - Localism W/ Macks & Josh

Transcript

Welcome to the Green Pill podcast. This season of Greenpill is all about Ethereum localism. Your hosts are Alex, Max, and Josh of the Ethereal Forest, which is a placebased DAO, which brings localism to the blockchain and the blockchain to localists. Ethereal forests are the creator of a conference which explores how to do that. Gel, the general forum for Ethereum localism, which gives its name to the meme Ethereum localism. They're also the organizers of the local Dow summer and the producers of the Ethereum localism book. They're exploring the big themes of Ethereum localism, how localist coordination works from neighborhoods to bio regions, why it matters, which frameworks localists are using, and how blockchains can horizontally scale their

impact. This season, you'll hear about strategies for bringing local change makers and global developers into deeper collaboration. Why that matters for the future of a free and open internet and how it impacts the shape and function of future network states. We're talking about whether or not blockchain create recreates the extractive and asymmetric systems we know and what must be true to usher in a revolution of global sovereignty and decentralization. To navigate this novel space and complexity of the intersection between technology and localism, you'll hear a different style of podcasts. Your host will be weaving into conversation interviews with experts and practitioners while supplying context into its relation with Ethereum localism by making localism accessible to technologists and

technology accessible to localists. This season serves as a primer you can share with your family and friends to help explain the revolutionary potential you see in blockchain technology and the ways it can impact daily lives in local communities. The next voices you will hear are your hosts, Alex, Max, and Josh. Enjoy this season. [Music] Welcome to the general forum in podcast form. We're your hosts. I'm Alex. I'm Max. And I'm Josh. And we believe that localism is not the absence of technology, but the foundation to it.

There's a lot of talk about scaling these days, disrupting 100xing, but we believe that good technology is technology that fixes real daily problems grounded in a real place. A lot of people think globally and ignore the way that they're living locally. We've become used to planes, trains, and video games that connect us to people on the other side of the planet, and that's great, but we also think there's a risk in getting high-minded in the skies before you've put your hands in the dirt beneath your feet. Global awareness and connectivity can give us inspiration and ideas worth forking. Souvenirs of thought to take back home and share with your friends. But that's just it. You have to do the things at home in your backyard to know what translates.

General forum on Ethereum localism is coming to Greenpill. We'll be hosting a series covering these questions and interviewing leading technologists, community organizers, and masters of mechanism design. Questions like what can web 3 learn from localists? What do peer-to-peer technologies and protest movements have in common? What are the open protocols that have already been trialled and are successful? And why is no one talking about them? How do we decentralize the internet itself? And what happens if we don't do it in time? What role do pop-up cities play in experimentation and triing new ways of living? And what even is a network state? What makes the place fertile ground for developing new technology?

And how do these movements get their start? Techn Greek word from which we take the word technology is related to the doing of the craft or art an advancement in technique. So where do you do your technology? We are not citizens of the internet. We're citizens of a myriad of different bio regions, cities, towns, and localities with diverse resources and histories. In this podcast, we'll be digging into technologies that scale horizontally by being hyper local. We'll be exploring novel mechanisms and new ways of thinking about exchange between human beings and hopefully along the way find some ways to write our lopsided global economies through drawing down power to the local level. We'll explore everything from permaculture to city infrastructure and watershed governance, learning from other technologists

worldwide. We hope you'll get some ideas of how to reinvigorate the ways you move through the places you are with more equitable resilient economies. This is the first episode in this series covering the general forum on Ethereum localism where we explore the ins and outs of localism, how it's practiced, why it matters for society, and the roles that technology can play to augment the efforts of localists. We also discuss why we believe the future of a free and open internet rests in our ability to learn from and build for localists first and that network societies must be built bottom up if we don't want web 3 to end up like the walled gardens of the internet as we know it. Today that discussion is what is localism and why does it matter?

We'll explore the similarities between localist and blockchain values and how the efforts of each can support the work of the other. Today I'm talking with my co-host Josh, a permaculture enthusiast and politically engaged community organizer in our hometown of Portland, Oregon. As he walks through both the globally connected tech world while living and acting locally, I think he's a great person to help us explore these topics. So without further ado, here's our conversation. Josh, well then tell me what localism is. What makes a localist a localist? Well, in some ways to me, localism is the preference for or emphasis on local production, culture, governance, and decision-m over centralized or global systems. It encourages self-sufficiency,

sustainability, and community-based solutions, often as an opposition to globalization. Localism can manifest in various areas including politics, economics, culture, and environment. Okay, we're going to dig into each of those, but first I want to address the potential of political polarization around localism. Would you say that localism sounds progressivecoded? Yeah, pretty much. But also, doesn't government minimization, preferring Main Street over Wall Street, and preserving community traditions sound pretty conservative coded? I think everybody from your rural trad homesteader to your urban community organizer can agree that building and maintaining political, economic, cultural, and environmental conditions that support ourselves is a practical and worthwhile goal, especially if you're also interested in

supporting others. And a preference for the local doesn't preclude an appreciation for the global. You can still be a localist, eat bananas, or use an iPhone. Localism is contextual to place, which we'll be talking a lot about in the series. But I wanted to highlight something special about how preference for the local doesn't preclude appreciation for the global. We'll talk about this concept called cosmolocism, short for cosmopolitan localism. It's a concept that blends global coordination and collaboration with local production and sustainability. It suggests that knowledge, design, and ideas should be shared freely on a global scale while material production, implementation, and governance should happen locally using local resources and labor. All right. So localism sounds pretty much like part of

the human condition, but like what's in it for me? Why should I care about localism? There's a lot of reasons why you should care about being a localist. I personally care about the strength of my local community, the resilience of my town and neighborhood, and the way the decisions are made and where they're impacted. Localism isn't just about buying produce at a farmers market, even though that's a good way to start, or knowing your neighbors. It's about power, survival, and creating a world that actually works for people. First, resilience and self-sufficiency. In a world of global supply chains that can snap overnight, strong local networks mean food security, energy independence, and the ability to withstand crisis.

Whether that's an economic downturn or climate disaster, the more we invest on our own communities, the less we depend on fragile extractive systems that don't have our best interest at heart. Second, relationships of trust. Think about the last time you had a problem and a friend or neighbor helped you out. That's a kind of societal wealth that global corporations cannot provide. When we invest in strong local ties, we build a safety net that isn't transactional. It's based on care and mutual aid. Third, ecological sustainability. A livable future isn't going to come from top- down mandates alone. It's going to be shaped by people stewarding the land and waters where they live. Localism isn't just about keeping resources close. It's about regenerating them for future generations. creating economic

models that don't depend on extraction and making decisions based on lived experience rather than distant one-sizefits-all policies. And fourth, cultural and political autonomy matters so so much. When we strengthen local governance, we reduce our reliance on centralized institutions that are often disconnected from our actual problems and needs. The principle of subsidiarity that decisions should be made at the most immediate level possible means that governance can be more democratic, more accountable, and more reflective of the people that it affects. Finally, there's right relation to place. Industrial capitalism severed communities from their land, their traditions, and their ability to shape their own futures.

Localism reclaims that connection. It's about remembering that economy should serve people, not the other way around. And so why should you care about localism? Because it's about agency. It's about belonging. It's about democratic governance that actually works. And if we want a future that isn't just survivable, but is thrivable, it starts with reclaiming the local. Okay. So, what I'm hearing you say is that at its heart, localism is about decentralization, about bringing power back to communities, supporting local production, reducing reliance on distant centralized institutions, right? And that's what blockchains are built for.

When we talk about blockchains, people often get caught up in the tech, the ledgers, the cryptography, smart contracts, but at its core, it's about shifting control away from extractive middlemen and back to the people. It's called P2P technology after all. So, you're saying localism is about decentralizing our production systems, our food, energy, housing, even currency, so that communities can be self-reliant and resilient. Blockchain supports this as well by offering a transparent trustmin minimized way to coordinate resources without banks, big corporations or government bureaucracies acting as intermediaries. So you're saying that blockchain and localism have a lot of overlapping synergistic values.

Let's break this down a little further. First, autonomy and sovereignty. Localism advocates for communities to control their own resources, whether it's food, energy, or currency. Blockchain enables financial and economic sovereignty by removing the need for centralized gatekeepers. Whether it's Dows governing local projects or community currencies built on Ethereum, blockchain provides the tools for communities to be self-determining, right? And that sovereignty is critical. Uh think about local economics. Right now, small businesses and farms often depend on big banks, global supply chains, and corporate distributors. Blockchain disrupts that by enabling peer-to-peer economic systems. No need for a central bank to approve your local currency. No

need for a giant supermarket chain when farmers can coordinate distribution on chain. And no need for exploitive financial systems when communities can crowdfund and invest in shared infrastructure through Dows. And next, that brings us to transparency. Localism demands open participatory governance. People deciding together how resources are managed. And blockchain offers that through immutable auditable records. Supply chains can be transparent. Public budgets can be tracked onchain. Funding for local projects can be managed in full view of the communities actually impacting. Imagine a town where funding for public goods is allocated using quadratic funding where every dollar a resident contributes is matched based on community support rather than lobbyists

or politicians deciding behind closed doors. And it's happening already in web3 spaces like Gitcoin and bio-reional Dows. Let's not forget free and open- source technology. Localism is about communities owning their means of production. Blockchain is fundamentally open source. Anyone can fork a protocol, launch a local currency, or build cooperative networks without asking permission. It's about commons-based infrastructure and not corporate control. So you're saying that blockchain isn't just compatible with localism, it's actually a catalyst for it. The power to coordinate resources, make decisions transparently, and sustain local economies without external interference. It's both the promise of localism and the reality of blockchain.

It sounds so whether we're talking about regenerative finance, local Dows, or community currencies, question isn't whether blockchain support localism, it's how we can use blockchain to build stronger, more autonomous communities. Okay, so that's how blockchain values inherently align with localism. But like, can blockchain builders learn from localists? The truth is, the future of blockchain isn't just about abstract finance, trading, or the next speculative token. It's about real people, real communities, and real needs. And the most successful blockchain builders will be the ones for localist and bio regionalist systems. I love that. Right. So, if you're building in web 3 and you're not thinking about

ownership economies, you're missing the point. Localism has always been about shifting ownership back to the people, whether it's workerowned cooperatives, community land trusts, or mutual aid networks. Blockchain can take that even further, offering new models for co-ownership, shared governance, and commons based infrastructure. Dows, community currencies, and governance resource management tools are not just tech experiments. They're tools that can empower real world placebased communities. And that's decentralization. Exactly. And this is where blockchain builders should be taking notes from localists. The real opportunity isn't creating another DeFi casino. It's empowering bio regional economies. Imagine tools for local food

sovereignty, energy cooperatives, and circular economies, all coordinated through trustless, transparent mechanisms. And if we're serious about cosmoloism, which we are, the idea that what's heavy should be local and what's light should be global, then blockchain has to provide more than just borderless finance. It has to support bio regional self-sufficiency while enabling communities to share knowledge, capital, and coordination at a planetary scale. Right. So this sounds like where FOS developers, free open source software developers have a crucial role to play.

Blockchain strength isn't composability. Open source smart contracts, public ledgers, interoperable protocols. But what's missing? Real cosmo local coordination. Localist networks already know how to do this. They've been practicing horizontal collaboration for centuries through guilds, cooperatives, and federated governance structures. Web3 can learn from these models. It doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. And there's an opportunity here. While a localist application may only have a few users in one location, there are likely to be localists all over the world who could benefit from that or a similar solution. For blockchains to truly serve localism, developers need to be building horizontally scalable apps, not just monolithic chains. But networks can support localized economies with global

interoperability. Okay? And this isn't just some far-off vision. It's already happening, right? Projects like grassroots economics in Kenya, bio regional dows like Refi Mediterranean are already proving that blockchain can enhance localist systems. But these aren't just users of web 3. The Ethereum localism meme suggests that they should be the core audience that blockchain is designed for. Right. Exactly. The future of blockchain isn't about speculators. Let's be clear. It's about communities coordinating for resilience, autonomy, and shared abundance. And that means blockchain builders need to get out of their white papers and into the real world. Uh so if you're a web 3 developer, here's our challenge to you.

Stop asking how do we scale this protocol and start asking who are we actually building this for? Cuz if the answer isn't communities, cooperatives, and bio regional economies, then maybe, just maybe, you're building the wrong thing. All right. So, we've talked about how blockchain builders can learn from localist movements. How open protocols and decentralized coordination already exist in the world around us. But here's the problem. Localist initiatives are struggling. They're up against a system that overwhelmingly favors large organizations, global institutions, and centralized power structures. Okay, this makes me think of the elephant in the room. If co-ops are so good, where are all the co-ops? We always hear about

cooperatives being an amazing model. democratic ownership, reinvestment in the community, ethical business practices. But when you look around, how many co-ops do you actually see? They exist, but represent a tiny fraction of the economy. And the reason is simple, that they don't have the same access to capital, coordination tools, or visibility as global corporations, Amazon, Walmart, McDonald's. These giants operate at a scale that no locallyowned business could ever match. They can afford to run at a loss for years in order to crush competitors, dominate supply chains, and monopolize markets. Meanwhile, the average local business is just trying to make rent. M okay. And it's not just businesses, it's

politics, too. Local politics actually impact people's lives way more than national politics. Your city council decides on zoning laws that shape your neighborhood. Your school board determines what your kids learn. Your local government controls infrastructure policing housing things that affect you every single day. Okay, but where does most political energy go? At least in the US, national politics, the presidential race, Congress, Supreme Court battles, it's all timeconuming. People spend hours debating issues at the federal level while ignoring what's happening in their own communities. And that's a major problem for localist movements. Without attention, without engagement, local efforts don't get the funding, talent, or participation they need. Meanwhile, corporations and other centralized

institutions have massive budgets for lobbying, marketing, and public relations, and they're able to control the narrative. Yeah. But, okay, this is where blockchain changes the game, though. One of the most powerful things about blockchain is that it provides coordination tools and funding mechanisms that bypass traditional gatekeepers. And it does so in a way, providing free open-source software. It's like taking all of the software from your mega corporations that they spend tons of money on and giving it to a mom and pop store and letting them use it for free. Exactly. And then think about tools like quadratic funding. It's a way to match community contributions so that small dollar donations actually have a big impact. Instead of relying on a handful of billionaires or

institutions to fund projects, local initiatives can tap into decentralized funding pools that amplify grassroots support. And there's Dows, decentralized autonomous organizations. A well ststructured DAO can function like a digital cooperative allowing people to pull resources, make collective decisions, and sustain local economies, all without relying on corporate banks or government grants. And this is one of the missing pieces. Localist movements have always struggled because they lack the infrastructure to compete with the large centralized institutions. But blockchain offers tools for coordination, transparent governance, and decentralized finance. The very things that corporations and nation states have historically monopolized. So

it sounds like the question isn't where are the co-ops. The question is what happens when co-ops, local businesses, and grassroots movements finally have the same tools as global corporations. Well, Max, I think that's the future we're building. And if blockchain can help level the playing field for localism, that might be the most radical impact yet. All right. All right. That's exciting. We've covered why localist initiatives struggle to compete. They don't have the economies of scale, the capital access, or the coordination tools that global corporations and nation states do. But that's where blockchain can step in, not just as a theoretical solution, but as a real practical tool set for localists to scale and grow effectively. Yeah. And

that kind of brings me to my story on how I got into the to the blockchain space. Before I was really aware of it. I was involved in a lot of different community organizing efforts. I was trying to make change through government and also involved in local mutual aid networks. At the same time as I was doing that, I saw Constitution DAO, uh, this kind of interesting experiment of people crowdfunding via DAO to collectively govern one of the last copies of the Constitution that was available to the public. It was really interesting for me to see and compare two different efforts I was involved in locally. And I mean just comparing it to the to like my mutual aid affinity group, we had a Venmo account and a

signal group chat and a Twitter account that was publicly facing. There was problems that us and other other groups had with transparency and actually having participatory governance over the shared funds that we had. When I saw Constitution DAO and then KLMA DAO and all these other amazing Dows that were actually again collectively governing resources, I was like, "Wow, we can bring this to local levels to actually improve the conditions of our organizing." You got nerd sniped into crypto through Dows. Exactly. And this is a paradigm shift for both inter and intraorganizational governance. Right now, local organizations are forced into bureaucratic top- down structures or forced to use other tools that are maybe

not as efficient because that's how the system is set up. The blockchain lets communities organize horizontally and transparently with smart contracts enforcing agreements rather than opaque boardroom decisions. But it's not just governance, right? It's resource sharing. Local groups working on housing, food systems, energy, transportation, they all need to coordinate with each other. But right now, that coordination is slow, fragmented, and often dependent on state funding. And guess what? Blockchain can change that. Imagine a network of housing cooperatives using tokenized governance to allocate vacant units fairly and equitably. Or a regional food system using blockchain to transparently track surplus produce and match it with demand. Or even mutual aid networks

using stable coins and smart contracts to bypass the banking system and distributing funds instantly. That's great. I love that. But also like this is where blockchain's economic power comes in. Localists have always struggled with scalability. Not because their ideas don't work, but because they're competing against global capital flows. Blockchain evens this playing field by giving localists access to the same financial tools that global corporations use. Liquidity pools, decentralized lending, communityowned investment funds. It removes intermediaries that take a cut and make it harder for local economies to thrive.

So like localists can use these global tools that are even better than the tools that the globalists have. I think that might help us. Yeah. So if a local co-op wants to raise funds today, it's applying for loans, crowdfunding, or relying on government subsidies. With blockchain, that same co-op could launch a tokenized revenue sharing model, raise capital from global network of users and stakeholders, and create sustainable communitydriven finance. And the message here seems pretty clear. Localism doesn't have to mean small scale. With blockchain, localists can tap into global capital, decentralized governance, and smart contracts to compete with the economic giants that have dominated for decades. Localist is small in the context of your local, but

everywhere there is a localist. It's time to stop thinking of localism as an alternative to scale and start seeing it as a new model of scale. One that's owned by the people, governed by the people, and sustained by the people. Hey, Max here again. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with my co-host Josh. I have a few notes about what to expect going forward, but first let me summarize. Localism and decentralization are one and the same. Localism rooted in self-determination ecological responsibility, and deep community ties offers a model for the kind of world we want to build. Localists can use web 3 coordination and funding tools to supercharge their efforts and horizontally scale their impact. By using transparent, participatory,

collectivelyowned, and censorship resistant technologies, localists can walk the talk while increasing the effectiveness of their organizing efforts. Drawing power back down to where the impacts are felt the most is one of the best ways to transition our systems away from the current extractive and centralized models toward those rooted in regeneration, progress, and true democracy. For blockchain developers, that means designing decentralized tools that work for people on the ground rather than reinforcing existing inequalities. So whether you're a blockchain builder or community organizer, the call to action is the same. collaborate, experiment, co-create systems that serve people and the planet. By aligning technological

innovation with place-based regenerative principles, we can make the promise of a thrivable future a reality. Looking forward in the following episodes of this series, we will highlight and join into conversation with brilliant localist initiatives exploring cosmolo collaboration as well as web 3 builders already experimenting with localism. We'll explore the new governance and economic tools that localists have at their disposal to level an historically inequitable playing field and the potential for developing and deploying web 3 applications to an already decentralized and sovereignty sympathetic audience. We'll discuss strategies to bring these two groups, the global thinkers and the local doers into deeper collaboration so that asworked societies develop, we may

ensure they do so from the bottom up in a distributed manner so that we can scale the impact of local action while preserving the future of a free and open internet. So whether you're building the global coordination layer or putting in the work to make your community better, tune in next time to see what the future of Cosmolo coordination has in store. If you want to learn more, check out athereumlocalism.xyz, which we'll include a link to in the show notes. If you want to support this work, share this podcast with a friend. It's really one of the best ways to support the movement, which is as much a social movement as it is a technological one.

And finally, if you'd like to get in touch, follow us on Twitter at ETH Forest Dow, or find our handles in the show notes. Thanks for tuning in and see you next week for our discussion on bio regionalism. [Music] Hey, [Music]