Season 8, Episode 3: Tools of the Local Commons

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. This is the third episode in a series covering Ethereum localism, where we explore the ins and outs of localism, how it's practiced, why it matters, and the role that technology can play in creating a more local and grounded future. Today, I'm your host, Max. And I'm Josh, and we will be discussing why we believe the future of a free and open

internet depends on a localist first approach. The network state 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. We'll talk with software developers, mechanism designers, and systems engineers who are crafting the tools to build new economies and means of community organizing. We'll also learn from seasoned localists about what works in creating positive impact for their communities, the limitations they face, and the opportunities for building decentralized networks of people who put impact over profit. This week, we're zooming in again to focus on the practical tools of the local commons.

We're talking about the strategies localists and bio-regionalists use, how decentralized technologies are beginning to support their efforts. Through organizing with communities on the ground, they know a lot about what's working, what the limitations are, and how we keep horizontally scaling local action. Many localists and bio-regionalists cite challenges in creating economic and governance systems that truly reflect the needs of their community without reproducing the same centralized power structures they are trying to move away from. They want tools that make collaboration easier within and across localities while still preserving the unique character and autonomy of each place. Tools of the Local Commons is about addressing these

challenges, exploring some of the existing practical applications, frameworks, and technologies that already empower communities to govern themselves and their resources according to their unique needs and values. Last episode, we explored bio-reionalism, a social, economic, and political framework for how we live together in place. We explored questions around what bio-regionalism is, its importance, and how we practice it, as well as its potential intersections with web 3. And we discussed what happens when our political and economic boundaries follow natural ecosystems rather than arbitrary borders, and when governance happens at the scale where life and culture actually occur. If you

missed last episode, go back and have a listen. For the rest, here's a quick refresher. Bio regionalism is working within the natural flows of ecosystems where you are. The boundaries of a bio region are kind of flexible. It refers to differing scales of bio region. Like you might have a small watershed and everything that the waterways there touch. But like watersheds overlap with each other to the point of a whole global hydraological cycle. So, it's just a way of instead of carving things up in terms of like counties or states or nations, it's how do we relate with each other culturally and with the natural resource flows where we live in

a way that tends to have natural boundaries of where those materials can flow in a way that is sustained within the like carrying capacity of that land rather than extracting from or disrupting that. I would often encourage people to start with was thinking about where their food and water came from. Taking that a step further and thinking about where their electricity was coming from. Just becoming indigenous to the place that you were in is pretty fundamentally important for just being a good human being. I think there's just something that gets unlocked with that kind of curiosity of trying to just like understand how life is sustained in the place that you're in. It also gives you

the ability to have more power by being of service. Uh it also gives you some referential power or like maybe just a lack of a sense of powerlessness and alienation which is a lot of the time what people are seeking to do something about. The first voice you heard was from Magenta Saba who's both an organizer and designer of infrastructure for bio regional economies. She is the principal systems architect at Bloom Network, a place-based social media network with a pure incubator for community initiatives. Not only does she bring a clear vision for systems change, but she is actively in the code building strategies and working with local communities, helping them achieve their goals. The second voice was that of Ben West, a change maker, organizer,

communicator, juggler, anxious Canadian, and climate solutions advocate. He is currently the chief happiness officer at Thrive Protocol, an organization that provides tools and systems that help crypto communities make ROI positive capital allocations and attract, fund, and scale valuable contributions. Ben has a wealth of practical examples for how decentralized technologies can serve community and climate organizers. Their combined work and unique career track serve as examples of how to match technical tools with time-t tested techniques for addressing real life problems grounded in local community need. But don't take my word for it.

I'll let them tell you in their own words. Yeah, I mean I I guess uh I I love that story of taking minutes with crayons. It genuinely is actually one of my first memories. My parents when I was quite young were both pretty involved in different social movements. When I was quite young, I lived in a housing co-op that my parents were both involved in. My father went on to actually work in the cooperative movement for his whole career, basically helping people set up co-op. So, I spent a lot of time traveling with him to different housing co-ops and attending board meetings and things like that. But the uh the memory that I've got of of taking minutes was actually at a co-op housing meeting for the househ, which was kind of an activist space in the Kitalano area in Vancouver.

Fast forward to, you know, when I was in high school and college, I I think I had just kind of been around movements where people had a fair amount of control and autonomy. And it struck me that the way that schools were run was this like very authoritarian like sort of top- down command and control like and it just really did not jive with me uh for a whole bunch of different reasons. And and I think because I'd had this model of people doing self-governance in various different ways, like I just kind of blew my mind that everybody was just going along with being told what to do in ways that felt illegitimate.

Arbitrary sort of exercises of power uh just never really appealed to me. In particular, I saw it as like forms of bullying, you know, just bad ideas being pushed on people. So, I really gravitated to this more anti- athoritarian teachers. as I got involved in student organizing first in in relatively you know less kind of impactful ways really just like looking at how could we make our lives better as students you know how were we being mistreated by the administration in a lot of ways my early work doing organizing was kind of just like the path of re least resistance like it just felt very sort of natural and organic based on sort of who I was hanging out with and the things I was interested in fast forward to college you know it was like the early 2000 thousands. I started

taking pictures in black and white photography of protest movements, students at rallies and stuff and contributing them to the student newspaper. And then this awesome organizer in my college talked me into getting more involved at the college level. Uh I'd gone through a few years of like I don't know, I guess you could say sort of apathy, you know, to to quote Jim Morrison, I was more focused on getting my kicks before the whole house went up in flames. Um, I saw people doing good stuff. So, I got back involved in real activist organizing. I got involved in the student uh society as an elected representative on the college board and realized very quickly that this was the actual governance decision-making body for the whole college that there was

ways we could actually do real things that had real implications on people's lives. You know, managed to get a recycling program when our school didn't have one, which, you know, involved doing a whole creative campaign on campus. We took unrecycled bottles and made art out of it and put it up in the cafeteria and did media stunts and things like that. And it was it was an addictive feeling honestly like going from doing what felt more like protests really in a lot of the time in high school or sort of like smaller little changes to like actually getting large amounts of money moved around. Policies shifted. So I I got recruited into the Green Party uh directly out of college.

I basically started showing up in in the media and an organizer reached out to me and offered me a role. I actually at first turned them down got involved in something called the workless party of BC which was like a worktime reduction campaign which focused on guerilla theater tactics and stuff. I you know had a real distaste for politics for a lot of good reasons. So, we did things like bring uh worktime reduction calendars and gave them as gifts to like people at Rathon and asked them if they would work less uh you know and brought media cameras with us. We'd go to the like the business district and like hand out tickets to people who seem like they're in too much of a rush that like just really stupid stuff honestly, but it was fun and got a fair amount of

attention and somehow actually finished third in a a mayoral election as the mayoral candidate for the workless party. And at that point, the workless party said, "You are way too serious, man. You should actually go and hang out with the Green Party." You know, so uh I graduated from I was working far too hard. I mean, ironically, I was like a student rep on the board, a full-time student, a student union chairperson, made a movie about the workass party called Alarm Clock, Skill Dreams, and ran for mayor, as well as provinially and federally, all in the same year in 2005. So, it was like probably the hardest I ever worked in my life for the Workless Party, ironically. I spent like a good about 15 years uh between working for nonprofit organizations doing all kinds of different stuff largely

environmental nonprofits but some anti-war and social justice stuff as well hung out with folks from No one is illegal and the BC civil liberties association and others and had always been really interested in technology like I was always the guy in the NOS's I worked in who was like wanted to find the interesting new ways to use tech to like have an impact. I'm literally old enough that the first press releases I sent out, I sent out over a fax machine, you know, like we converted the uh the place I worked to like have our first email CRM system was like looking at nifty ways to like track oil tankers with the transponders and things like that, like you know. So was always looking at ways to like find ways to make a difference. I was in particular

really inspired by peer-to-peer crowdfunding. It was always hard to like raise money for causes. Doing fundraising appeals the oldfashioned way. I mean, sure, you can raise money that way, but when you actually give the tools to community members to like go and be the fundraiser themsel for something that they believe in, that was really cool to me. And I was really inspired by local currencies. I got involved in a a local currency project in uh commercial drive area of Vancouver commercial drive dollars which still exists to the best of my knowledge as well as some stuff around like farmers market dollars and stuff like that.

After that I worked for a place called Etho uh for 2 years. It's a digital democracy platform that's existed for like 10 years. I spent two years basically running public engagement processes for local governments largely around major infrastructure projects and climate plans and things like that, but also like pretty traditional budgeting, community budgeting processes and things like that. And it was it was interesting to be like really deep in a space of like trying to take digital platform and like use it to maximize participation in decision-m in meaningful ways. Thanks, Ben. And now Magenta. I'm based in southern New Hampshire right now on the east coast in the US, a little bit outside of Boston. Yeah, I grew up on a

small family farm in the Midwest. And so I'm kind of just like innately connected to the land where I am. And I've been uh organizing with farmers here and material scientists and financial people around building a bio regional economy around the intersection of like food, fiber and biomeaterials for the built environment to help provide more financial opportunities for farmers and start to reconnect our supply chain and you know goods infrastructure to uh materials that can be produced within a bio region and within the natural limits of that. That's really my social life where I I moved here at the end of 2019 from the Bay Area where I was organizer for 15 years. Been getting oriented with

meeting folks who are working on those fronts for taking care of the land. Our local work here is in relationship with several different indigenous tribes. There are many of them on the east coast. So yeah, building like a strong co-governance system with them for bio regional finance. So that's a little bit about my rootedness in the place where I am. I think a lot of us came to this work through our relation, a lot of us being local leaders who are doing, you know, local food system work, repairing their local watersheds, teaching people how to do permaculture, building these bio, you know, bio regional alternative economies. A lot of us like came to it from our experiences with plant medicine and listening to the earth and the

medicines directly and receiving guidance and having that relationship with the natural world and for lack of a better word like relationship with spirit like the embodied living interconnected like life thing that is earth and like earth moving through space whatever. Yeah. A lot of us have uh studied with indigenous elders. um will go travel to study with their medicine traditions. Uh there are indigenous leaders in Bloom who are themselves um medicine people and tribal elders and chiefs. Um and the the whole language of our network and how we talk with each other is rooted in this like direct spiritual and plant connectedness. And that's the place from

which we organize from and less so from like a a mental place or something. And it's more like embodied reconnecting of healthy cultural tend to use the phrase regenerative cultures for what Bloom nurtures more so than um explicitly economy or anyone category of things cuz it's very like holistic like that. Bloom network which is the main network I've been organizing with uh myself since 2011. It began in 2008 and um we had found each other through an online social network where we were talking about Occupy and our psychedelic experiences and kind of these like transcendental modes of awareness that we were experiencing through both of

those things like political breakdown, economic breakdown as well as you know the walls of our psyche being opened to uh what like real reality is and not our cultural conditioning right and everyone was started talking about the vision they were experiencing like we know society can be different. I'm seeing how the place where I live could be different. And so we decided to form local hubs and do skillshares with each other to make that real. And so we we had almost this like spiritual collective experience we were all having watching the global systems breakdown and knowing that would continue. And then we decided we kind of I guess mutually sensed that the the best strategy for us was to work locally,

form relationships locally, you know, teach how to do composting, how to do aquaponics. We've been experimenting with alternative economies that whole time, recognizing, okay, we're going to need different alternate structures to take care of each other as the system continues to break down. And so that that local focus is very tangible for people. Thanks, Magenta. Now I'm going to pass it over to my co-host Josh. In our first two episodes on localism and bio regionalism, we discussed some of the design space localists have already been making progress in for decades.

These efforts include techniques and tools like resource mapping, funding work to support communities and local economies and experimenting with both new and old ways of collective decision-m. People who are fed up with the existing ways are asking questions about how we can build new institutions that are more democratic and transparent. But they don't get to this through naive optimism. They get there by understanding the harsh realities of how these power structures have been operating in the real world. One of the common critiques of blockchain is that it's a solution in search of a problem. But for the people building with a localist lens, they already know the problems for which communities are actively seeking solutions. One of the biggest roadblocks to social change are the issues that occur with governance at every scale. governance breakdown

happens at the global and nation state level but also at the institutional business and organizational level. So I recently I was at the UN speaking at an event with a bunch of specifically like systems technology nerds. I think we're at a good point where kind of like that the impact ontology alignment as well as the technical interoperability to shared data sets that was kind of like a theme of this conversation at the UN and it was in the context of like nation states aren't able to make this transition but maybe bio regional organizing pen it's less topheavy there's less like rooted we're only going to do it this way no we won't do that but you have like getting the data from like Canada and the US who

are right across the border and they're sharing like actual ecological flows is actually a really difficult permissions issue and so working with domain experts have mapping data ontology careful like knowledge framework sharing and like the governance mindful governance processes around who owns that data and so forth is I think that is um I think that's going to unlock a lot of the large scale mobilization speed that we're going to need to avoid, you know, what is it?

Billions of people are going to be migrating by 2050 from like climate disaster. And yeah, I think the willingness to interoperate through very basic standards and to lighten up around like I need to own this standard. In my college, one of the things that was particularly transformative for me was seeing the difference between the university senate and the university board. The board was this very top- down appointed structure. And the senate was representational of all of the different fields of study. It was almost kind of like Plato's idea of the philosopher kings or something like it was like these different areas of study. He'd bring ideas before them and they would bring the best of their understanding from their field of study to an issue

and make what seemed to me to be actually really good decisions which were then often just kind of strewed up by this top down appointed board. You know, I've had that in my mind for a long time in the time since college. There are better ways to organize and sort of better structures for making decisions. We spent a very long time on Bloom because our former parent company um was turned out to kind of be horribly abusive to the local hubs and like oh we had so many problems. Um like the marketing they were putting out was like so out of whack with the community that had built their um following. And ironically, the company would have been successful if they had just like

listened to us and the products that people were making in their network. Oh, it was such a mess. But the result of that was we had these really deep conversations about, okay, this is the power dynamic. This is the power dynamic in many of our families, in our cities, in our nation states, globally, in our corporations where you have this power over and this disconnect between the the people who are, you know, in the day-to-day reality and the diversity of people and contexts to like make wise decisions together. When governance falters from corporations to communities, we're faced with a deeper question. How do we redesign systems that distribute power without replicating the same old patterns? So we really spent like I would say a decade

designing a governance system that could be resilient to power abuse. Uh we had many we had a shamanic facilitator lead us through these very deep processes. Um we had a lot of different uh kind of world governance experts weigh in um and help us design processes. So that's um that's one part of being able to withstand intaking old paradigm centralized financial infrastructure and ensuring that it doesn't corrupt the social movements and the organic ways that they make decisions together.

Experimentation becomes not just a method but a mindset. One that invites us to stay in dialogue with complexity even when no perfect system awaits us on the other side. I'll badly misquote Gandhi here. I'm pretty sure he once said something along the lines of everybody's looking for a system so perfect, nobody has to be any good inside of it. No matter what tools you have at your disposal, like if there are bad actors in the bunch or people who are trying to slow things down or things up, they will find ways to abuse the system and make things worse for everybody. And often one of the biggest problems is really not the tooling, but it's people's time and people being rewarded fairly and compensated fairly for getting involved. there's just so much noise and and even sort of knowing

what the right tool is for the right problem is is an interesting challenge in and of itself. The fractures we see in coordination, security, and communication aren't just technical. They're symptoms of deeper resistance to relinquishing control and decentralizing power. Cuz like I'm in farmland now north of Toronto. The senior citizens in the area around me, there's a group of people organizing to protect some of the freshest groundwater anywhere in the world. just so happens that there's a natural spring that is like cleaner than like deep arctic ice and this group is trying to get a moratorum on a development project that's uh already happening in the area. I got involved largely just as I was moving into this area and the idea of trying to help with local campaign to do something like this

just you know had had been a while since I'd been involved in that kind of organizing because I've now been working full-time in in tech for seven years at this point. Basically, this group was just like communicating over email primarily and doing sort of the public facing stuff on Facebook. you know, nothing wrong with using email, but you know, if you're talking about anything that you might want to have the ability to be a little bit more secure about or you'd prefer not just to be like feeding the AI training or whatever of like, you know, Google or whomever else or even just if you want to be more organized, we got to this place where it was like, well, maybe we should have a Slack or Discord or, you know, and I was like, well, if we're going to onboard a bunch of people onto some sort of an

organizing platform, like, why don't we make it uh a matrix server? So I I set up an element server, just real basic vanilla. Set all the rules to be, you know, the most user-friendly possible. What I learned was that the hardest part was actually convincing people that this was necessary. Like they just didn't really understand what the purpose of it was. And truth be told, like most of what we were doing was stuff that didn't need to be private or secret, but it's nice to have the option to have a space where you can talk about things that are more sensitive. You know, this is kind of often the conversation around privacy. It's like, uh, well, I have nothing to hide. It's like, okay, well, why do you have blinds on your windows then? It's good to at least have blinds that you could close if you want. The

short story long of it all is basically we had a series of gettogethers and coffee shops and and elsewhere. And it was really just like doing it in person with people that made it possible to onboard folks. Tried to convince people to like have screen sharing Zoom calls with me and worked for a couple different people but not for everybody. A lot of the climate narrative, it's very abstract. It's really huge numbers. Most people absolutely cannot think at that scale and the way the media systems are structured at the international and like national business level are very um extractive and so it's how can you get the most attention and glue people to your screens, right? The way we think of

gloom is we want you to be on the screen long enough to find something really cool to go do with your neighbors and then go do that. or you know if you need to start a project here's some starter kits so that you can get off your screen get your hands in the dirt and do what really needs to happen right now and I even like recently coded a little if you um click on load more we don't have infinite scroll it causes you to click a button if you want to load more content to intentionally put the brakes on and remind you to be mindful and it says hey you've been here a while you maybe you want to go outside right and so these hyperlocal solutions it's like just really hard to find. You It's hard for people to see on mainstream media where

they can make a difference, where they can plug in because the grassroots initiatives of the people working directly peer-to-peer don't make anyone else money by and large, and so they don't get airtime on these networks. What does get airtime though is conflict. Ben responds to the Canadian government freezing citizens bank accounts during the 2022 Freedom Convoy trucking protests. I I was like one of the people who was not a big fan of that uh when it was happening and then was completely outraged at how the government dealt with it. I mean it was interesting to see people who were not big believers in in blockchain technology and and the need for it all of a sudden were like oh wait like they can just seize your bank account and take your money away like it's one thing when you are on the same side as the

government but if you you know are in a place where you actually are in very much in opposition to the government uh all of a sudden that becomes quite terrifying from an activist point of view capital always puts its foot down somewhere you know in the places where you can hold a big corporation or some sort of evil people do are accountable for their actions is is usually where that capital is like manifesting a real thing somewhere in the world. For me that meant fighting a particular oil pipeline for a really long time and there was all kinds of reasons to do that and a lot of beautiful organizing came out as a result of it. Yeah. So a lot of um at least in the US I imagine a lot of countries have uh subsidies like this as well. It's uh you know the US

subsidizes shipping food and products from across the ocean with a large carbon spend and the just the way that nation states tend to grow uh lobbyist structures and who has power to get governous decisions made about who gets money for what has tended over time to centralize that power among larger and larger corporations. and in this like extractive dynamic from local autonomy, local well-being, local businesses, and the health of the nonhuman creatures that are there, right? And so a lot of what we do in Bloom network and the adjacent networks that we're in

connection with is work with people who are experts in like supply chain transformation. For example, instead of houses being built with wood shipped from possibly deforestation in another continent, how can we make houses out of hemprete? Uh, so a material that can be naturally grown here within the natural water flows of our ecosystem. And how can we instead of using I mean this is there's all the I'm like a materials nerd kind of so I I'll stop myself from going down the rabbit holes too far but basically you know whether it's myelium hemp clay or seaweed how can we make materials that instead of creating

plastic waste and plastic damage in the soils and toxic paints in our living environments and just these extractive topheavy economic structures. How can we realign how we live, how we do business with each other, how we exchange goods with each other in a way that is in harmony with the the people and plants and creatures that we live around and is done in um equitable process of building wealth together and wealth in the holistic sense of that, right? like wealth of biodiversity, wealth of being able to care for each other and experience like healthy community as well as financial wealth and building, you know, cooperative financial power. Our

localist listeners are probably nodding along right now. These are struggles that they face daily. Lobbying and subsidies manipulating our markets, fragile supply chains, toxic materials in our products, and communities fighting for financial sovereignty. Add to that the shrinking space for protest and free speech, a distorted attention economy, extractive media systems, vanishing digital privacy, ineffective decision-making processes, perfection becoming the enemy of good enough, clunky governance systems, perverse incentive structures and coordination failures at every scale. Despite all these formidable obstacles, we must not lose hope. Transformation begins with clarity. By naming what's broken, we

sharpen our vision for what's possible. Carefully examining these challenges helps us surface the right questions, the kind that lead us not just to critique, but to creation. And that brings us to the tools. If we're serious about shifting the dynamics of power, participation, and resource distribution, then we need to explore the infrastructures that actually support those shifts. So, let's address the elephant in the room. You may have heard that blockchain uses excessive amounts of energy. The reality is while that once was true, the blockchain tools that we've been talking about, smart contracts, Dows, flow funding, use new blockchain designs that consume very small amounts of energy. In 2022, the Ethereum community switched the network from a power hungry system to a much

more efficient one. The change reduced Ethereum's energy usage by over 99%. Making the blockchain much more sustainable. You know, I uh I actually did a fair amount of reaching out to environmentalists around that time to make them aware of what was going on. Like I think arguably this was actually one of the biggest reductions in energy consumption from any industry on Earth in history. You know, if you think about like sort of the scale and scope and the fact that that was done in a decentralized way, not in a top- down way is phenomenal and fascinating and and has been really win-win. Let's address another elephant in the room that crypto is a scam. Let's unpack the nuance here. This season, you've heard us mention sovereignty many times. But

what does that really mean? If we want technologies which draw down power to local communities, it means putting those tools into people's hands to use as they will and not being able to control how they use them. I can tell you that most of my friends from years of being a climate activist cannot understand my interest in cryptocurrency at all. If anything, they, you know, associate blockchain tech with scams and lots of BS and and really a lot of the people that, you know, they see as the enemy, you know, to a certain extent, I think they are right about some of those things like I mean the beauty and problem with open source technology is that anybody can use it and when you take an open source piece of technology and then you tie financialization to it,

there's the opportunity for people like it's going to attract the absolute worst of what humanity has to offer, you know, and I and I think that's a big challenge for people who are genuinely trying to do good stuff with the tech. You know, just like any tool, like people can use it in good ways and bad ways. You know, you could take a hammer and build someone a house or you could hit them over the head with it. And this nuance can be tough to sit with, but it's important to look at the systems that this technology is capable of creating alternatives for. Many financial crimes are committed using the legacy financial system, but cryptocritics don't expect people to abandon that system simply because it generates unsavory outcomes.

This was at the same time that a lot of the sort of like anti-world trade organization type organizing was happening. I just saw the problems with the the World Bank and the big banks and and I saw crypto as kind of like the opposite of that. It's interesting to me now that like so much of what people think of when they think of crypto is like that Bitcoin bro you meet in a uh at a party somewhere who just wants to talk about, you know, the number going up or whatever. Cuz to me it was like this like kind of revolutionary response to the banking sector. While all tools have their benefits and drawbacks, blockchain offers new techniques and can reduce the limitations of existing solutions. Ben will be introducing some new terms and concepts we haven't discussed yet. But don't worry, we'll be

covering many of these topics and more in the following episodes. Like I think it's important to listen to the concerns that people raise, but also like try to show them some ways that there's tech and solutions and strategies that are actually like real, you know, that aren't just an idea, but are something that's actually having an impact. You know, one of the easiest ways to do that is just pointing to things that have actually had a, you know, made a difference in terms of funding. Like just as one little example, like through Gitcoin, I've been able to raise money for indigenous uh land defenders. So even leaving aside the technology like there just is money coming out of these spaces that can be put to use in pretty traditional environmental ways you know and then you know you take that a step further and there is a lot of

interesting stuff beyond the financialization that uh you know zero knowledge proofs provide that you know decentralized databases provide there are ways that you know having a ledger that's distributed and immutable and interoperable and bozosable can be genuinely useful. I love seeing blockchain tech being used for like new versions of local currencies, you know, that uh you can program your money in all kinds of different ways and you know, and I I think we're just at the tip of like what could be a really juicy experiment in that in that space.

everything from renewable energy financing, uh, renewable energy certificates, you know, the ability to like not just do carbon credits, but actually like have monitoring, reporting, and verification, which is actually a big gap in the sort of traditional carbon credit world. I also think there's a fair amount going on in the like carbon accounting space and the uh, supply chain space that's really interesting. The localized energy grids are fascinating to me. So anyway, I could I could take us on about 20 different different directions, but like it's actually a lot of the like uses of blockchain tech as a database um and really as a software stack, you know, that are super exciting as far as I'm concerned. And you know, and as a privacy and security advocate, I feel

pretty strongly that the digital identity stuff, you know, KYC process without needing to dox yourself in the same ways, you know, that uh is something that's really worth paying attention to. There's often like actual financial reward associated to you know messing with the the workings of Dows like with civil uh attacks and things like that. It's actually opened up a whole interesting landscape of like, okay, well, how do we do digital identity correctly and how do we ensure that, you know, the people voting are actually the, you know, quote unquote right people and and being at Gitcoin has actually been a great place to be to be part of that conversation because of Gitcoin Passport and, you know, because of uh, you know, really the whole idea

of voting with your wallet and like sort of harnessing the wisdom of the crowd. Identification, a service usually managed by the state, makes financial misconduct more difficult and enables more trustworthy voting systems. And without it, these systems can break. Okay, let's get real. Putting your community in control of their own financial infrastructure and the services traditionally provided by the state seems like some faroff sci-fi speculation. Are people actually doing something with these tools today? Um, sure. So I'll start with the future that is here now. Boom is very much in that you know William Gibson space of the future is already here. It's not

distributed yet. And so even right now the team in Uganda it took them 20 years but they got permaculture approved through the entire Ugandan school system. So they teach the kids how to do permaculture. They go home and plant organic permaculture gardens. Their families have health fresh food to eat. They also teach the kids entrepreneurship skills and so they're creating businesses around like novel organic fertilizer combinations that then they go on to sell businesses and have like a financial occupation after graduating from school that's integrated with their coffee exports. Like the kid one of the crops the kids grow is coffee. They sell that through their organic like US and EU certifications

like distribution system. the profits go back into the school. And so we're now starting to talk with them about implementing that in the Northeast US, in the Midwest US, in Liberia, in Costa Rica. That's an example already existing and happening now where we're starting to weave these regenerative trade networks of like real authentic relationships and where the whole supply chain integrated with healthy futures for kids and like real education. that's happening now. If Bloom is successful and if we're able to attract more funds into the financial mechanism that we designed, that's just going to exponentially scale and we're going to

be able to share all these types of innovations that we've been iterating and discovering. I mean, that's that's what we're set up to do and we're set up to do it very quickly. That's just one example. So the the Ashwar people in I believe they're in Ecuador have made these solar powered boats and so we like really want our regenerative supply chains to have indigenous designed like solar powered boats. The Bloom in in Texas is restoring their aquafer which is horribly depleted and getting much worse. But they have these techniques that they've done of like the one name for them is like a beaver analog dam.

It's like a smallcale human like leaky dam basically. But they're starting to collaborate with the Army Corps of Engineers to get more people to participate and build these so that they can slow down storm water as it runs off depleted soils and sink it into the ground, restore plant life, recharge their aquifer. And that's just like one example of like many other watershed restoration techniques and experts that are across our network. And so we have envisioned scaling that up over time to like address the global water shortages that are going to going to increasingly happen, restore watershed cycles where areas are floodprone, install water sponges. There's just like this huge capacity of really deep decades and in

some cases millennial long bodies of knowledge around this stuff, right? And so the connective tissue that we've built with Boom Network and the the financial and media infrastructure to help people scale and discover and like piggy back these and fork and replicate these things. Yeah, if we crack the, you know, financial gap that there is right now, I think that's all going to go like extraordinarily quickly. Um, we're also collaborating with Refi Dow um as well. So we'll start to have like multi-et network effects, right? and the the tech is being wired up where we're able to share the knowledge across these networks and share the financial incentives and visibility of who's doing what across networks by sharing APIs and very carefully designed like simple JSON

consistency um for this the data sharing right then we start to be able to collaborate with like government scale budgets and get those start to get those plugged in and then like convert these topheavy extractive governance and power systems s into communitypowered equitable ownership of food, of housing, of energy, and restore this like very out of whack colonial civilization that a lot of people and creatures are suffering under. One of the things that I'm just finishing up on the feature side, we reward people for documenting the regenerative actions that they're doing. It's like the there's an incentive, financial

incentive built into Bloom network for folks to make their work visible there. So peers can learn from them so that they learn to better document their impact. They earn a like a reputation token through that as well as get like a a distribution from our grants pool. But the feature I'm just finishing now is like they can use that reputation token to see what um goods and services and businesses are operating in their region that are values aligned like a way for us to share our surplus with each other. And so that uses this like whole system media/financial engine to bootstrap business discovery in a region by sharing our surplus and then starting to trade more within and across each other

instead of going to Amazon and getting you know this thing you need from China like this local maker that you really have a relationship with and maybe you both went out to a farm together and helped do a planting or a harvesting there and so it's like this the attention is like literally my instructions from Iawaska were to grab hold of the media system and like plug it back into nature. And so that's like what I've been learning how to uh code and engineer so that we can redirect our attention back to her and those like living relationships.

At this point in the journey, a pattern is emerging. Or maybe it's been there all along waiting for us to name it. Many of the challenges we've explored from climate breakdown to extractive economies to the bottlenecks of grassroots organizing all seem to echo a single fundamental dilemma. Coordination failure. We have discussed that wearing the masks of governance and economics. The truth is these aren't separate issues. They're two sides of the same coin. Quadratic funding and different flavors of that really is a form of governance. You know, we don't think of it as governance as much as like a grant program, but you know, it really is like at the most basic sense, you know, it's deciding what to do with scarce resources, how to how to distribute

them. It's kind of the fundamental governance question. Economics and finance are the measures of our resource environments and the tools with which we interact with those resources and how we make decisions about their allocation. That's governance. Being able to make decisions at the local level is important. And so is collaborating to achieve collective goals at economies of scale beyond the capacity of existing market mechanisms. And this is where cosmolo coordination assists localism. Having access to food, functioning watersheds housing transportation and energy infrastructure are all heavy and must be managed at the local level. The knowledge needed to make decisions about

developing and maintaining this infrastructure as well as the capacity to finance that work are light and can be managed at the global level. The trick we're doing with Bloom is to mobilize peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and build capacity for local grassroots action between people and communities and professionals working in an area so that they can find each other and build power together and build relationships and kind of reconnect a healthy fabric of society. while at the globalworked level creating systems to build capacity to share power laterally to do staff sharing so that you know a couple businesses locally might not have enough

money to hire a full-time marketing person or even know what it means to have an effective marketing person, right? But if we have a values aligned team of those folks at the international level then we can share the staff capacity among them and so those people have a high higher context and exposure to what it means to build uh local sovereign economies. Local boom hubs tend to be decentralized in terms of place instead of like land nodes. It's like urban to rural spread and they're very geographically dispersed networks.

And so that's some of the like power and autonomy that can come where we can help build entire local food systems and bio regional economies and are like successfully doing that because it's not the centralized model of like you know one eco village. Bloom itself is like very decentralized. It's not like there's a Bloom brand to doing a thing, right? And that decentralization helps the kind of connective tissue and coalition building and crossmovement resource and knowledge sharing so that on the food systems front we can get people connected with the land trust experts who can crowdfund getting access so farmers have permanent access to growing food or cooperative real estate so that people can take real

estate off the speculative market and into community ownership so they can build longevity of building wealth and care for their place together. And it's very integrative connective tissue like we're modeled on actually how my mushrooms work in nature like connecting um information and different species across the forest floor. That mycelial connection she's talking about is cosmolo flow funding part of the biofi design space we discussed last episode. It's myelial in that it's sensing and responding in real time with diverse inputs into where resources are needed the most while composting the existing rigid institutions and their functions into more flexible form. Let's just do

that and start to break up these silos of who has the data and why and whose business model is tied to what because increasingly we need these like interwoven business models like I think Octant is developing some piping right now to flow more protocol and company profits through into public goods for example that public goods piping is starting to be more and more built out between Gitcoin between like Bloom's unique retroactive public goods funding thing through octant through all these different experiments right at the same time you have these data ontology and interoperability experts starting to really collaborate with and find each other. I think I think something in in between the the data and the financial piping more of that coming together in a

more open interoperable way um is going to unlock a lot of uh magic. Yeah. Literally. Oh man. So we just started distributing the first quarter rewards from a program because it's like quarterly cycle, right? Literally the the indigenous boom hub that's in the Philippines is using the money to plant power trees. I you not, they call them power trees. It's a tree. They're having women collect more of the saplings to plant them for like reforestation. The birds eat the berries so it increases like biodiversity and they can use it to make an organic fertilizer that they'll sell for more income. And like every story of what the bloomers are using the funds for. And these funds come from Gitcoin and the green pill community. Like nearly all of

our funding is from that. Um as well as flow funding. Yeah. All of the stories are like what what the money is going back into more like regenerative holistic entrepreneurship in this like interspecies care for each other is just like so completely mind-blowing. It makes all the work like worth it. Our guest this episode Ben and Magenta gave us a grounded view of some of the challenges and tools shaping today's common-based organizing. We saw how local action rooted in place and equipped with global coordination tools can support a growing substrate for solidarity. They remind us that beneath each barrier to local coordination lies a deeper, more persistent challenge. How we make decisions together about the

resources we share and that technology when it's not extractive can be liberatory. From community currencies to participatory decisionmaking, from Bloom's subversion of corporate media to Ben's visions of dowified civic processes, what's emerging is a whole new grammar for collective action. It's not perfect. It's messy, but it's alive. These aren't just experiments. They're prototypes of the possible. Prototypes of a world where governance is participatory, not exclusionary. where economics regenerate rather than degrade. Ultimately, this is a story of people reclaiming the capacity to shape their own futures, not through centralized fixes, but through the

patient weaving of networks, narratives, and neighborhoods. What we've started laying out is an operating principle for a world where we take care of each other and our ecosystem through shared infrastructure and local autonomy. For localists, this is an opportunity to horizontally scale your solidarity. You don't have to give up autonomy to plug into a global network. The knowledge, tools, and funding streams of decentralized technologies can help you meet these local needs more effectively. For web 3 builders, if you've been making solutions in search of a problem, here are your problems in search of a solution. Ethereum localism offers more than just a compelling narrative. It's a framework for making realworld impact.

The onboarding problem isn't just technical, it's contextual. Cosmological coordination is not utopia, it's protopia. These are the stories of becoming. Just build more awareness of the regenerative place-based local community-led development that's happening all over the world so that more people can find it, more people can participate, more people and companies can financially support. It's not always that the specific fight that you're in that's the one that really bears fruit. It's that larger sort of movement building and community building and relationship building and skill building that comes along with like whatever it is that you're taking on. Just like in web 3 where a lot of the benefit comes out of like iteration and not being too stuck to like one particular set of

goals. I've seen the same sort of thing happen uh in sort of fighting local infrastructure fights. Um you get sort of involved in a placebased thing. it actually does a lot of the really important work that feels a little bit more esoteric around you know community building and like sort of you know building networks that are strong and resilient and all that good stuff. So anyway that's my my activist Indiana capital puts its foot down somewhere. Uh it's a way to compost the failing systems of extraction and build new pathways of collaboration. And next time you hear someone say localism can't scale or that tech can't care, you can point them here to these voices and say we're already doing it. Looking forward

in the following episodes of this series, we will take a deeper dive into the alternative economic and governance frameworks that are quietly transforming how communities organize, allocate resources, and build resilience. We'll explore how economic systems, both mainstream, emerging, and ancient, shape our ability to govern fairly, and how governance, in turn, determines who gets what, when, and how. Together, we'll trace the thread from grassroots experiments to global protocols. Learning how tools like mutual credit, community currencies, and participatory budgeting open up new possibilities for place-based autonomy and collective agency. The next two episodes on economics and governance are two sides

of the same coin. They'll unpack how our resource environments are managed, how financial tools act as levers of power, and how blockchain is enabling new forms of experimentation at unprecedented speed and scale. So whether you're a neighborhood organizer or a developer, tune in next time as we reimagine our economic foundations and explore how cosmological coordination can shape a more just, distributed, and culturally grounded future. Check out Bloom Network at bloometwork.ear and find a chapter near you. Consider starting one or get involved at the global level. We'll include a link in the show notes to get in touch with our guests and follow their work. Check the show notes for

links. If you'd like to learn more, check out athereumism.xyz, which you guessed it, we'll include a link 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 Eith Forest Dow or find our handles in the show notes. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time where we'll step even deeper into the mechanics of economics, rethinking wealth, exchange, and value from the ground up. We're talking about economics.

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