Social Technology, Community Currencies, and RadicalxChange

Transcript

throughout human history people have had ways of developing narratives that have enabled them to cooperate that have enabled them to trust each other that have enabled them to form Community those techniques sometimes don't show up on our radar as technology but this is really just kind of a semantic issue right maybe we should broaden our attention beyond the category of things that we traditionally think of as technology we do need to get better at that Hello friends and welcome back to the edge City Podcast my name is teore and we're using this series to explore the ideas and projects that are pushing at the edges of tech science and culture by the end of every episode you'll have

a clear understanding of the important idea that set to shape our society in the years to come today I was joined with by Matt prit who's the president of the radical exchange Foundation this was a very interesting discussion Matt and some of his colleagues at radical exchange like Glenn wild and others have thought deeply about what it will actually take to reimagine some of society's fundamental systems so we talk a lot about that we touch on social Technologies and why innovating there is just as important as in software and Hardware which is what we typically focus on at least in Tech and we'll dive into some of the experiments that we're running with radical exchange at Edge City to put some of their ideas into

practice so with that let's get into the show Matt thank you so much for joining me great to be here here great to talk to you so what I'd like to do here is to ladder up to a couple of core ideas using some of the essays that you've written as scaffolding and we'll start with some of the ideas around new community and Society movements then touch on the idea of social technology and why it's so interesting and important in our world today then I'd love to get into some of the money systems things that you've talked about Community currencies plural money which I feel like are interesting examples of some of this kind of experimentation but I think a good place to set the scene is with you introducing radical exchange

and in particular I'd love to know the mission of the organization and then what is your theory of change for how you will achieve that goal sure radical exchange is a small nonprofit We we also try to coordinate um a larger movement and a network of of people around the world who are sort of fellow Travelers we started in um really properly in 2019 uh organizing communities of people who had read and were captivated by some of the ideas in the book radical markets by Glenn W and Eric Posner the ideas in that book suggested really radical provocative reforms to the way that we vote the way that we own property the

way that we own data and more and that has set the template for radical exchanges work and and and Mission since then we take a deep look at the basic institutions of democracy and markets so we think about what are the what are the rails on which our Democratic decisions are are are taking place what are the what are the fundamental building blocks of the of the powers and the transactions that constitute a market and how can we how can we improve those institutions so sort of like you know a little bit nothing is sacred right I mean C can we can we do ownership better can we the way that we vote could it

could it make more sense Could It capture more information could it help us lead to uh decisions that better satisfy um the population could it incorporate more Liberation we try to ask these basic questions we try to come up with proposals of uh of improving things rationally responsibly you know in accordance with certain values like you know equality and dignity and you know the sort of some of these kind of high level things that probably underly you know most most people's conception of what a good Society should look like and our you know our Theory our theory of change is to I mean first of all it has to be said that you know we're working sort of pretty far up the lever

if you will of change right we're we're we're definitely thinking about fundamental issues and and big changes to society so part of the part of the uh the theory is influencing ideas inspiring people to think deeply about some of these basic institutions that we might be able to improve and I think part of the theory is also that by working with um you know Forward Thinking sort of institutionalists and in in in government and elsewhere but also very importantly working with like technologists who are building building systems that might constitute the next generation of institutions in various ways that we can we can help build build a culture of of

experimentation and and institutional Improvement that you develops in institutions and in the world of technology and helps us get to a a world in which Democratic institutions work better and economies work better for more people and so on um yeah no that's great I think parts of the reason that radical markets the book was so interesting to so many people was that like you said it is kind of orthogonal to to traditional ideas of left and right I think there are a lot of folks who are on really both side of the spectrum who really liked some of the ideas and I think they were able to thread the needle kind of not attacking but really poking at some of these

things that have felt too big to criticize like markets or the idea of like ownership of private property Etc so yeah I think that's I think that's just like very appealing to a lot of people the ideas in that book and some of the things that have developed from it have been very well discussed on your podcast and others so maybe I'll add some links to those and we won't go too much into you know quadras voting Etc but folks can catch up on that if they want to I would like to focus on a great essay that you wrote called secret societies Network States Burning Man zalu and more and thoughts on new political communities and I think some of the ideas in this piece really offer a good framework for understanding new

Society type project so yeah I'd love to ask you a little bit about that and to kick off you start the essay by referencing a sociologist called gorg siml I'm curious what you learned from siml and what Insight he has into identity and Community yeah um zimmo was kind of one of the founders of Sociology he was a German sociologist in the same generation roughly as like vber and durkheim the other kind of well-known founders of sociology he was interested in he was interested in sort of networks of relationships and formation of group identities and things like that among many other things I mean he had really wide wide ranging

interests but one of the things that that I find quite interesting about zimol is that he he has this really elegant description of the way that information sort of serves as a substrate for relationships um so particular sort of informational bound and secrets so I think there's there's like a there's just a huge amount of richness in his his analysis of um of the role that secrecy plays in relationships and in some ways this is this is obvious like in most good friendships there are things that uh that the friends know that nobody else knows in every marriage for example there are things that the partners know that that that nobody else

knows so in other words there's there's there's shared information between the two parties to relationships and then there's a informational boundary around the around the relationship so that that shared information is not known outside of the relationship this this phenomenon can also happen in larger groups it doesn't just have to be Ono one pairs so there's this idea of of common knowledge which is the sort of the idea that when I know something and I know that you know that thing and I know that you know that I know that you know and so on this enables really really powerful forms of of uh of coordination so we can just be really confident in the fact that we

share context that we share actionable knowledge so we can act together this goes on in in relationships and and in really important ways it it it it constitutes constitutes communities right so there's this there's a sort of there's the fact of the of of the common knowledge shared by the community and there's also the fact that that that knowledge is not shared inside the commun the important thing I think to see is that you need you need both of those so if you sort of lose the uniqueness of information then the community stops being a community its boundaries its boundaries move if that unique information that constitutes the community is um leaked to people who don't have the community's best interests in mind then communities can

be manipulable for example from the outside there's kind of an infinite amount to say about this so I won't go on too long but zimel has a really you know a really elegant Rich analysis of all the different permutations of these kinds of informational boundaries how they constitute can I just give one more example yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah all right so I I think one really beautiful example that that um I think helps land some of these some of this abstraction is that in like ancient Druid culture so like a Celtic Pagan culture or whatever initiates to like the Priestly um class where they would memorize songs they had to memorize these like sacred songs and and they

would learn the sacred songs from the older generation and there was a Prohibition like a taboo on writing down the songs so it could not it could not be written down had to be just like transmitted orally and then and then remembered and then and then passed on again what zimel what Zim's analysis helps show is that that secrecy of the songs is not it's not just about the content of the songs it's not just about making sure that nobody knows the you know secret spiritual text or something out outside of the click it's also about it's also about firming up the relationship between the older generation and the younger generation if the songs had been written down if they were you know public if they were you know carved into stone tablets and you

know put up on the wall for everybody to see then the younger generation wouldn't depend on the older generation in the same way they wouldn't look they wouldn't have this experience of of transmission from from the older generation they wouldn't see the older generation as having sort of a privilege place in society because they could just they could just study the songs themselves and and um and ignore what the older generation was saying so it's like that that you know what and what what what ziml really really beautifully drives home is that that transmission is the point of the secrecy that that sort of use of the information as a medium that helps constitute the social connection between generations and you

know within the druidic Priestly class that's the whole thing that's what's going on and and understanding the powerful role that information play it's interesting for all kinds of things when you when we talk about you know forming healthy communities and and so on and it's also interesting from a technological point of view because a lot of stuff that's you know going on with let's say cryptography and with AI and with you know use of data it all bears upon this it all bears upon the our our ability to construct you know like like an informational landscape in which which common unique knowledge is is is present and is serving that binding role in communities yeah like I think there's an important idea there of Secrets or shared knowledge not just

being a byproduct of relationships and communities but they're actually core to the process of communities forming and I think we see this a lot in with shared memes shared culture shared language even you know like you can just tell when someone uses certain types of slang or yeah just the by the way that people talk that they're really part of a certain group you can like very quickly identify with them and and share a connection there there's something interesting that's almost the opposite of what you're saying where like each generation for example develops their own way of speaking and are able to very easily you you can very easily see online who is like gen Z coded just by the way they interact and so that's almost their own way of identity

formation and difference from the other Generations but yeah I think in terms of some of the communities that we're thinking about and talking about yeah this idea of shared knowledge is actually very important and the the strength of those memes and and the strength of almost the shared memories that you have right like you go through experiences together and then that is itself secret knowledge because you have that memory with the people that were there you know it could be like you were saying before we started recording like 40,000 people at the Final Oakland A's game or it could be you know something that your you and your partner do together but those memories are also their own form of shared knowledge which is or secret knowledge which is

interesting yeah absolutely I mean it's it's actually you know you can start to see the richness of zimol analysis because it in a way that shows the power of of like inperson experiences because the sort of the the the full complement of information that passes between people when they're present in person can't be can't be captured and it can't be shared so therefore you have this sort of builtin secret envelope I mean I think that I think that really is like a big part of of why of the role the social role that presence plays I think that's a big part of the edge City thesis in many ways we'll we'll touch on that in a little bit so in the piece you outlined three types of new community initiatives and I wonder if we could

just walk through some of these and some of the benefits and potential pitfalls so yeah maybe just just go through them one by one sure so in this piece I am um I'm talking about sort of different flavors of intentional communities if you will which is already let's say distinct from you know unintentional communities right there are inherited communities you know things that we things that we find pre-made but you know the project of creating new communities and enhancing old communities is very important and so that's what I'm that's what I'm analyzing here and I'm thinking about so in the context of intentional communities roughly let's say there's three kinds one might be Affinity communities so what that is is like if you want to be with people who are more

like you basically who think like you or who indeed look like you or whatever right if you you want to be sort of like more surrounded by similarity these are Affinity commed obviously there big Dark Side to that one uh but it's not always the worst thing in the world right some you know you can have a knitting club now basically many intentional communities I think are one form or or another of this right it's it's people who are who think that you know the world is full of wrong thinking people let's find some of the right thinking people and get them together so that we can hang out then there's the second category is individualist escapers what this is is is I would say people who are in a way resisting the structures of

community or the structures of of connection that they find in the in the world around them or in the societies that they're already in so you know this is a Libertarian impulse basically right you don't like taxes you don't like your you don't like local government you don't like the the whatever the stat or the other thing you feel that you can do everything better from scratch and that you don't need to be embedded in in in pre-existing structure to thrive a lot of people feel this way and uh you know some of them some of them move to Montana in a cabin uh and but some of them also like end up kind of clustering or forming networks with other people

who sort of think in that in that individualist escaper sort of a way right so you know Preppers bunker Builders you know tax Havens right there's a whole genre of of uh intentional intentional escape and quasi Community out there and I think that this kind of community is like a little bit paradoxical or a little bit oxymoronic because it's it's like it's like anti-community community and I think a lot of these kinds of projects sort of founder because of that internal tension and they're trying to do they're trying to uh they're trying to to build communities that aren't communities they're they're they're against community and they're trying to form you

know connection with other people who are against community so it's like it's just it's like an uphill battle and I think a lot of these kinds of projects they can be impactful but that impact is not necessarily the formation of like a lasting healthy Community the sometimes the impact is just sort of allowing individuals to you know go off on in their own Direction sometimes the impact might be kind of eroding or drawing energy away from like escaped from communities these kinds of things and well I think just on that one I think you make a great point which is Escapist projects are legitimate to the extent that the thing they're escaping from is worth escape from yeah right so if if people are leaving you know like a truly

oppressive place that's great but right when they when they try and leave something purely with the idea of like exit and they form like an anti- commmunity Community it's hard for that to get traction or it can be hard but you know yeah it'll be interesting to see because I feel like there are some current experiments that run along those lines that are more like libertarian leaning and it'll be interesting to see how they how they go yeah totally underline that that's that's an incredibly I sort of forgot and sometimes I forget to tell half the story but that's absolutely right like in a way this is a big part of the story of modernity many people premodernity were trapped within oppressive communities and modernity enabled more individualistic modes of living together

that enable people to to escape from or ease the ease the burden of those oppressive attachments and that's a good thing if those pre-existing attachments are oppressive and harmful and it can be a bad thing too it can it can it can become sort of a you know a bridge to nowhere or an erosion of things that we don't want to erode when it kind of like when it kind of goes too far or when it pulls energy away from communities that are not like on the whole bad all right and the third so with with the third category of what I call in the ESS say responsible experimenters what I'm really trying to do is to sort of suggest a a middle path between these

other two the so the sort of affinity Community thing and the individualist Escape thing they both have kind of dark sides and Light sides but ultimately I for the best kind of you know new community initiatives it's important to hold both of those things lightly to basically not index too hard on creating Affinity communities or creating Escape communities both of those are ultimately kind of shaky ground in my in my view even though they're not necessarily all bad and I think that the sort of substrate for Community experiments that that most interests me is a little bit popping up to one level of abstraction higher which is you know thinking about

like what would it what would it mean to be able to to create Healthy Communities that that are a little bit agnostic to to whether we're Bound by this Affinity or that Affinity or a little bit agnostic to the sort of notion of escape from the old world right maybe we can just come up with ways of living together that that work better and that that provide us meaning that are not fully grounded in Affinity or Escape or at least are sort of holding affinity and escape a bit light that's kind of what I'm getting at for example I think the the kibitz movement is is a really interesting example of Fairly successful intentional community building now look there was obviously pretty strong

Affinity thing there that probably played an important role in its success nonetheless there's something to learn right what what I mean to put to put it bluntly they did a pretty good job like not becoming Cults so one of the big failur modes for like back to the land potential communities is that they become like authoritarian Cults of one kind or another I'm sure that happened at some kutas too but but a lot of of kibot like did a fairly good job organizing themselves along the lines of you know Democratic governance and shared governance and making their contribution to the economic to like the sort of shared economy of the kibuts the center of the center of their communal life as opposed to making some some like

eccentric ideological or spiritual project the center of their communal life and because of that they were incredibly successful and they they they were were the center of successful lives for for many people now a lot of them didn't last more than a couple Generations but so what they did a great thing for many people similar stories to tell about um about many other many other movements but that's an interesting one yeah I wonder if Affinity or creating communities of affinity is is the issue when the Affinity is for One Core thing at the expense of everything else or one or two things are very important and that can often become a person as well and that's kind of the cult failure mode and that's

that's a relatively common thing when you have just one key thing I feel like that can become dangerous because everything becomes about that I feel like there are groups of affinity for example sports fans where yes they are linked by their team but that's not the entirety of their life right whereas if you move to a separate piece of land with a thousand people and it's the Oakland A's Renegade you know community that doesn't accept the fact that they just moved to Las Vegas it's that can quickly spiral out of control because people are just very Dynamic they're very you know identity is very plural right there are many aspects of people and that I feel like is often something that happens in these environments

whereas if if you for example started Community project or kind of a new Society project for an affinity but it was more about ways of being for example curious kind you know people who are building stuff which is what we focus on at Edge City maybe this is just naive hope and optimism but maybe that can work out better because there isn't like a core commandment there is just a way of being as a person there's a way of showing up almost yeah totally agree with that communities seems to me you know that no community or intentional communities that go well have a way of making space for different interpretations of what's going on there so it's it's actually kind of a

beautiful illustration of like plurality I I think that it just as you say it it can it can really go wrong if there's sort of if we're just if we're over indexing on you know the spiritual teaching of Guru X or a particular particular mission for which we will sacrifice our everything in our in our lives you know it gets dark I mean these things these things get dark where doesn't get dark is where you've got Loosely shared alignment where where people can show up there and have reasonably different ideas of what's of of what in fact is is is going on there and that that's okay that you're not sort of being policed into like a like a um tightly aligned interpretation of the project just a quick tangent for folks

who are not familiar with the idea of plurality could you just help Define that briefly sure can I define briefly that's a great question I mean uh you know I'm drawing from a different context here you know which is the idea of plurality as a Counterpoint to techno authoritarianism or corporate libertarianism so you can think of a few other 21st century ideologies out there that are that we might sort of point to and name in a in a broader political sense and the idea of of plurality is has to do with instead of embracing sort of um like hardcore technocracy or hardcore corporate libertarianism can we

find sort of a middle path in in Democratic institutions and in instruction of of of digital worlds that enables democracy to continue to hold differences in in society so I mean there's a lot to say about that and lot you know many of my colleagues have written and elsewhere about about plurality but that's what I'm referencing here when I say and I I think that this this that kind of vision of communities in which people can diverge a little bit in their interpretation of what's happening in the community what community is for and what its Norms are you can kind of picture that in your mind and it's actually a pretty good illustration of of what is what this writing about plurality is trying to point to I think so you make a compelling argument in the

piece about the importance of something you call social technology and this is something we talk about a lot at Edge City and we're actually trying to figure out how to define it ourselves I'm curious what that means for you I think you say something like techniques of deepening and expanding communities like why this type of work is actually as important potentially as what we normally think of as like technological advancement yeah one piece of background here is I think that when we talk about Community a lot of times what we're really talking about is story what we're really talking about is narrative and I think many of us sense the ways in which the sort of narratives that underly our our communities are um threatened or or

are fraying Sometimes some sometimes because of technology sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with technology but as technologists when we think about solving this problem I mean there's this kind of there's a very silicon value way of framing things which is like you know what what problem are you working on right you know if you if you think of things as a problem sometimes that framing doesn't quite leave room for this idea that what we really need is is not solution but story or narrative and that think that's kind of what I'm pointing towards with the idea of of social technology throughout human history people have had ways of developing narratives that have enabled them to cooperate that have enabled them to trust each other that have enabled

them to form Community those techniques sometimes don't show up on our radar as technology but this is really just kind of a semantic issue right I think we we do need to get better at that there's another side of this argument which says that basically we already have all the communities that we need we like our our social Technologies the sort of substrate that binds us together the narratives that give our lives meaning that enable us to to function as communities and trust each other all those are from the past we can just we just take them or we can retrench into them I don't think that's quite right I think there's there's some truth to that but but we also need to get better at building these things we also need to a little bit accept that there's a you know technology is problem that we need

to be paying attention to which is how to get better at building these things how to get better at repairing in Social fabric how to get better at Discerning and developing and interpreting narratives that enable us to to build new communities that sustain us socially and economically and culturally so essentially what you're saying is just like we're spending a lot of effort on creating software and Hardware we should also be thinking about how do we actually use how do we develop narratives and use those as a technology for creating meaningful communities like you know yeah helping people live essentially like how how should we be living our lives in this new well that

kind of thing yeah exactly and this is one of the reasons why I really love the The Edge city project and the popup cities movement because I really see this as a a powerful social technology initiative and you know you feel free to sort of disagree with me or to you know share your own interpretation of it but the way I see it is that you are inviting people into a container in which a story can be can be built in which a narrative can be constructed a narrative that um a narrative that then becomes the basis of a community that supports people that makes people's lives better if successful that narrative will also be will have some

very interesting qualities right it'll be it'll be a very a very 21st century Nar you know a narrative that is in in important and interesting and impressive ways kind of built without deep dependence on historical narratives that's interesting you know not like I don't think again I'm not knocking historical narratives but as the world gets faster and more connected and more complicated they the historical narratives run into limits they start clashing with each other and they you know they aren't giving us everything we need so we need to we need to create some new stories and social substrates that are um that are based on other things too and in my interpretation of

you know the pop-up cities movement that's that's part of what's going on very interesting yeah it's almost like these environments become incubators of new stories kind of new ideas about how to live or how to live well how to you know build products and institutions and Technologies and Etc it's definitely something we're thinking a lot about just one more thing on that is there an example we can think of of a narrative either that we could almost like make up just to like really help ground this so like a potential narrative that gets formed at Edge city is XYZ or or even an example from the past of like a narrative that was created and then had

a big impact on things and the way that yeah as big an impact as like a new technology or something yeah I mean so examples from the past are are pretty easy like you can just look to the founding myth of any like Nation you know I mean America a uh a wonderful new continent where you can be free Germany a region in the middle of Europe with uh you know where where people speak closely related dialects and what you know like the uh uh or ideas of like the enlightenment I guess yeah yeah yeah uh Revolution yeah the enlightenment is you know religions are in there you know um Catholicism Hinduism right these are all big big narratives big stories big

social Technologies essentially so so when you say social technology you really it's essentially bundles of ideas that give impulse to people to live and act in certain ways yeah I mean another I think another layer of it maybe useful to point to is like I mean I think you've all know Harari you know kind of gets something right here the idea that the creation of shared stories through religions and otherwise basically basically it enables strangers to trust each other like that's kind of the that that's one of the most important things that it does so for example if you and I discover that we are the same religion that we believe in the same religious propositions that is like a faster route to us trusting each other even though we

don't otherwise know each other than almost anything else right like I can I could you know if you were a devout Christian and I was a devout Christian I could probably through various kinds of shils and winks and nods convince you that I who was a devout Christian like with much greater ease than you know convincing you in other ways that you could rely on my behavior or trust me it's a very fast path to trust between strangers and um and that's what makes it so powerful that's what makes it so power that and that's what you know it's a social technology and it's and it's something that I mean the reason you know the reason why it isn't that much of a stretch to use the word technology there is that it's it's like something that makes a human species you animals

can't do this the way we we can and uh that's it's one of the reasons why human beings are able to collaborate at at at massive scale yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense cool that's helpful so you touch on several factors that connect communities and it would be interesting to go into a few of these so you talk about associative obligations you touch on John Dewey which would be awesome to hear about and then Mutual vulnerability and I think that will set us up really well for the convers around money sure so here what I'm talking about are sort of different different lenses on connective tissue different kinds of things that that connect communities associative obligations um are an idea

connected to sort of moral philosophy what it boils down to is it the idea that we have moral obligations to one another in virtue of the way that we associate in virtue of the way that we're you know socially active so for example if you are a son or a daughter then you may have duties to your parents parents in virtue of being a son or adult if you're a friend you may have duties to your friend in virtue of being if you are a citizen you may have duties in virtue of being a citizen so if you take these kinds of moral obligations seriously then you know then that's that's like one way of understanding what that kind of connected to Shu in a a social group The American pragmatist philosopher John dwey has another interesting kind of way of looking at

what a public is it's a little different from a community like these are all sort of slightly ideas but dy's dy's concept of a public is an interesting one so here's what it is dwey noticed that in modernity so he was like writing in the early 20th century and you know was kind of witnessing in his life like the disruptions of the Industrial Age and all that so he he he noticed that in in modernity problems would arise from large scale industrial or economic activity for example that cut across traditional communities you know so this so the traditional communities might be things where we have associ associative obligations like no I don't know if I'm if I'm part of the Jewish community of

uh the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1915 or something I might have associative obligations as a member of that Community right and then there might be a bunch of other like let's say ethnic communities uh in lower Manhattan Dewey's point is that is that if a if a factory starts polluting the entirety of Manhattan then um that problem cuts across these other traditional communities and calls forth a new community in response to the problem so do we had this idea of like public like Democratic public as emerging in response to the problems of of of modernity and he dedicated a lot of his thought to to education because he

thought that basically like public education Mass education was critical to giving people people the tools to be able to see themselves as members of these emerging communities and cooperate as members of these emerging communities or emergent publics you know to deal with the problems of mity so that's the idea of like the deian public it's a a a public that cuts across other axes and is called forth in response to problem it's a very important idea for you know thinking about modern democracy I think this is a very interesting idea especially now because because it strikes me that in the past the tools that these publics had were quite limited so for example if if we think

about all of the people that live along a long river right they might be across five different nation states right in the Amazon or or whatever but really those people all have a shared not necessarily a problem but a shared interest or project let's say around this this resource that they live close to but there's really no way for them to collaborate they live across different nation states they have limited amounts of democratic power or potentially none and it seems that now with some of the things that have been happening in the blockchain space and in general with plurality adjacent Technologies there are much easier ways for people to First be able to identify that they are part of a public and have some shared Identity or goal with other folks and

then to actually be able to instantiate some form of some form of you know action that they can take together so resource management on a blockchain for example they can spin up a wallet they can add resources to it they can have voting rights they can use quadratic voting to make decisions Etc so I think we just have a lot more surface area to play with some of these ideas and we can just have a much more not only higher bandwidth democracy but much more multip I guess plural is literally the best word right like a much more plural democracy where we're each part of different publics to varying degrees we care about them different L but we can be part of 50 you know I think that's

something very interesting though yeah complet completely agree and there's also interesting challenges to it you know like I mean I think one of maybe the biggest challenge to sort of this sort of plurality view of democracy I think is is the challenge of um mental bandwidth basically yeah because you know it it's not easy for people to you know I mean every every Community needs a story and how many stories can we hold in our heads this is our this is a real this is a real like puzzle and uh corollary question to that is like you know can we build technologies that help us that help us hold more stories that help us participate in overlapping Democratic processes here you can sort of see here the problem of social

technology coming into coming into tighter Focus right it's like can we get better at can we get better at creating stories can we get better at understanding interpreting stories can we get better at squaring conflicting stories can we get better at participating in community on the basis of conflicting stories and you know building for example maybe voting systems that that enable us to to participate in in all in all this complexity this is it all sounds pretty complicated and and it is pretty complicated but it's sort of like this is where this is where you can sort of see the world pointing us and I you know if we if we can't figure out how to deal with this complexity in a democratic way than one can imagine democracy

simply throwing up its arms and so that's that's like that's that's the worry and that's the you know like the sort of Gauntlet L down for all this social technology work yeah that makes a lot of sense for a lots of us our experience of democracy is you know performing an action once every four years and then to varying degrees talking about the the system but really worrying about other things 99% of the time and so introduced some of these ideas around having more agency over the varing publics that we are naturally a part of the varing communities we're in and I think with stories we have I think you're right in terms of the capacity

that we have for having different stories in our heads but do think that just at a macro level certain stories are shifting in importance a definitely with religion that's that's been a big factor of of being much less important for people I think for a lot of people nationalism is less important certainly than you know 100 years ago but even more so in my lifetime something I've noticed maybe that's just me I've you know grown up all over and kind of certainly I don't have any like necessarily A Link to a certain place right so yeah maybe some of these new network Society type communities can start to take place of those stories and they're almost they are the stories that

we choose to participate in versus the ones kind of given to us by we're born or you know the religion of our parents Etc so maybe there's some agency there that's actually quite exciting and interesting totally totally yeah yeah I mean the other way to think about it is that I mean stories are they're not in isolation they're also like in dialogue with each other so for example I've got two many stories you know I'm American I'm from the Bay Area and you know it's I'm like I'm I'm the ultimate sort of like modern person mess of a bunch of weak stories and there's a lot of people like me the challenge is can we can we work with these weak stories and make them all mean a little bit more so that they kind of add up to something you know where we to where we feel our lives

like you know we we feel we're working for things larger than ourselves basically yeah know or do we need other stories that connect them right you know so I think a lot of times when we're when we're trying to create new communities what we're trying to do is is also layer in other stories integrate other ones yeah if you had to just out of curiosity if you had to say just like okay the most important or the two three most important stories to me in my my life are XYZ like how would you answer that oh my God okay I mean this is just free association sort of a thing but I mean I I think it's that I'm that I'm human that I'm American and that I'm a member of my family H those are the interesting yeah that's an interesting hierarchy yeah well I'm not that's not

in order just those are the yeah yeah very cool I would I would have to think about mine I I really I don't know what are the core aspects of my identity you know I I've lived roughly roughly similar amounts of time time across you know Russia UK us and then Berlin most recently yeah slightly more time in the UK and the us but so nationally I mean I'm a citizen of the UK and the US so that's interesting I guess but I I have varying feelings about these places but uh I almost feel like my identity is more shaped by the groups that I feel like I'm a part of but it's hard to really nail that down so anyway I would have to think about it more cool let's touch on this idea of mutual

vulnerability that you talk about in the peace and that you and I have spoken about in person as well because I think that's a really good stepping stone into money yeah um if you look at these other sorts of ways of thinking about what constitutes the community like the associate of obligations idea which I think is also there's a lot of ways of languaging these things like my my friend um Margaret Levy has has done some really great writing on the idea of communities of shared fate which is I think sort of a related idea we've also got the idea of do we in public you know we've got some of these ideas about you know communities sort of defining themselves through shared secret

information if we look at all these different ways of understanding like what constitutes a community one one of the sort of common threads that that emerges for me is the idea of mutual vulnerability so in other words in one way or another it seems to me that most in in most rich genuine communal structures there is a sense of people being vulnerable to each other in other words a sense of people you know can just think about the idea of like unlocked doors or something like that the idea that people are are able to live with or be comfortable with the fact that they could be harmed by another member of the community in the case of the sort of secret information thing it's like well you know anyone

could tell the the secrets to uh to others this would undermine the community this would hurt everyone individually undermine the community in the case of you know deweyan public it's like coordination is necessary right I mean if people don't coordinate around solving the problem then the problem won't get solved so there's in that sense everyone is vulnerable to one another if if everyone acts individualistically to try to solve the pollution problem then the pollution problem won't get solved people will just put you know put air filters in their apartments or whatever you know it's the same with associative obligations so what I did some thinking about is you know and I get this is a little bit of a transition to the sort of money experiment and you know Community currency experiments but in connection with some of our community

currency work I started thinking about like how to create sort of contained safe miniature versions of this pattern of this of this Mutual vulner vulnerability pattern it seems to me that if you can figure out how to do that in a safe and contained way you're building one of these basic layers of a genuine Community right it also it's kind of a dual aspect thing right because if people are if people are willing to enter into a state of mutual vulnerability with other people I mean first of all that's like a foundation upon which you know deepening of communal connection could could grow and it's also sort of like a test for whether there is some you know some pre-existing trust and pre-existing communal connection there you know I

just want to make clear that I'm I'm like sort of acutely aware that this pattern of mutual vulnerability is is very very abusable and it actually is you know is very often abused by people who are trying to manipulate manipulate groups and stuff so you know for example if you can kind of induce people to to be really vulnerable to each other you know it can be a super dark and manipulative aspect to encouraging people into these kinds of patterns precisely because I'm aware of that like the way that you know the way the way that I think about it is is very much like how to do this in really safe boxes like really safe and transparent boxes so like basically so that everyone understands what we're doing like we're

not you know and the the the way that that manifests itself uh in in our community currency experiment is like super simple let's say let's say everyone takes $20 right an an amount of money that is it's a real amount of money it's a little bit more than just a complete token but it's also not a huge amount of money it's not an amount of money that is creating any sort of really deep or dangerous dependency or encouraging people to go farther than than they might feel comfortable with right it's like a it's a very sort of just barely more than symbolic amount of money is the way that I think about it let's say we we each take $20 we put $20

in a in a pot uh between us and the rule of the game is that is that everybody can take out more than just the $20 they put in so we're all trusting everyone else uh to re fact difficult the community by not doing this is you know the ritual that is and you know the sort of Entry ritual into this community currency experiment that we started at Edge as morala and uh will now bring to uh to Edge Lana well let me let me touch on a couple of things there and then we can actually dive into the money side of things so I think there's an interesting parallel in this idea of mutual vulnerability to just normal relationships and friendships and I

think there's a very clear strong correlation between how close you are with someone and how vulnerable you are to them and if there's a truly meaningful connection they know a lot about you that the people closest to us often have the most power to hurt us and therefore it's not again like it's not that vulnerability is a byproduct of closeness of relationship it it is actually a causal Factor there as well I think and so abstracting that to the level of a community also makes sense again you are close with people and the closer you are with them or with your friend group there are aspects or are things you know about people experiences you've gone through Etc that bind you and and I think that's a very important

point because when people hear the word vulnerability they might think you know I don't really want to be in an environment where I'm vulnerable to someone else or you know I think you touched on this there is something important there that one needs to be really careful of especially in community experiments and that's why I I actually just get a little bit nervous about some of these experiments that have almost like a figure head and poor idea that you know everyone needs to follow especially when you get into things where people are like starting to live together and whatever that can get I think a little dangerous I think this is where plurality plays a very important part yeah but yeah I think this idea of vulnerability and trust is

very interl and very important and what I'm hearing you saying with this experiment that you started to illustrate with this shared money pool is that we can essentially now that we know that fact that vulnerability is important let's almost back into it and let's create a system where we have vulnerability almost from the beginning you're You're vulnerable to your part of this pot being taken out by someone and so you need to do it with people that you trust or it's a way to quickly build trust with people by going through this process yeah exactly sort of backing into the discussion of community currency here but I think it actually works because for example one of the big problems that that I'm interested in in solving or mitigating when I think about

Community currencies is like Community currencies don't work unless there's a community community currencies don't work unless people care about the community if you don't care about the community then you don't want a limited currency if you don't care you know you by default people want the most universal currency po that's basically what currency is you want currency to be something that that that stores value that you can take in as many places as possible and the more Universal it is the more money-like it is the more it's currency the more it's the more desirable it is as additional money now there's a lot of really interesting problems that we could solve and things that we could do if we could get away from thinking about money in that

traditional way and starting to think about it in more of a a muted more bounded Community focused way but in order to do that we need to get away from our attraction into this sort of universal store of value thing and and a prerequisite to that is that you got to care about the community you got to care about the community in which the community currency has value so can you give some intuition around this like why what actually happens if there is a community currency what does it prevent what is the problem that it's solving when you start to think about the idea of money as a like a maximally universal store of value you can sort of see that what is going on with money is that it's enabling people

to acquire value in one context or another and then take that value into a different context you you earn you earn money in City a and the beauty of money is that you can take what you earned in City a and spend it in City B that sounds pretty great what's wrong with that nothing necessarily but because that's what money is doing because it's allowing value to come out of one context go into another context it has this function of sort of popping the balloon of every particular context so if you want to create a particular context of of economic value exchange and keep the attention and the energy of people within that context on that then you work then you know basically money

is working against you right because M money is it's it's literally pulling the attention of all the economic actors within the context up to this Universal level so I'm thinking you know if if I'm if I'm in a a community and I earn some money by providing services to the community the fact that that money is universal means that pulls my attention away I'm no longer thinking about how do I reinvest in this community I'm thinking about how do I invest for maximum return anywhere anywhere in the world so the more Universal the money is the less likely I am to reinvest it into the community where I earn interesting so one of the important ideas of community currencies is essentially to act as a medium of exchange and a unit

of account and to some degree a store value which are the traditional ideas of money but within a certain Community context and potentially to make it hard to exit that context which then just means that more value is exchanged within that Community is that the idea yeah I mean it's you can think of it as like it's just it's like it's about trying to hold energy into a system like a combustion engine or or like a like a like a pressurized container in order to in order to create a internal combustion engine or a or or or a balloon or any sort of a A system that has an inside and an outside including an economic system you need to create some barri some barrier around it you know and and

money just logically conceptually fundamentally money is about Crossing those barriers it's about puncturing those containers and and opening opening everything up which you know mirrors is the conversation we were having we were having earlier about how like sometimes escaping from a community is good sometimes getting out of an oppressive local cultural context for example is absolutely good and that's the same is true with with money I mean gains trade and Global efficiency and all these kinds of things you know it can do many good things but I think we sometimes forget that it's also preventing us from doing this other thing which is to keep uh which is to build you know more

more local more bounded contexts of value exchange if I was to try and argue against that I would say something along the lines of you know it's actually quite beautiful this idea of universal currency because it allows Global collaboration it you know it just removes those barriers it brings the diversity of the world to everyone in some way there's like a a universal Med exchange which is really profound and very cool yeah but at the same time also makes it very difficult for local communities to remain coherent because there's always an exit path right like if you I don't know if you make it big in a small town you can just leave and

buy a mansion in New York or something or maybe that's a bad example but there is there's kind of this interesting parallel of like the globalized nature of our world is such a cool thing and at the same time it has made the process of actually maintaining local communi very difficult right yeah exactly it's a subtle point but it's important to see how these things are not actually necessarily in tension with one another like what's what's beautiful about about like global global exchange and being in contact with the sum total of economic actors in the world which is what's going on when when you have Universal money what's what's beautiful about that is that it's it's enabling us to

experience diversity right it's enabling us to connect with trade with interact with different people different cultures right but nothing is Costless and in doing that we also actually erode the difference we erode the uh the the difference so you know like diversity is almost like a like a it's like a resource that you can mine and it you know it it creates incredible value and incredible incredible beauty but you can also overdo it and create a situation in which there actually just isn't any difference so the idea of the idea of creating more more textured economic structures where you've got you know more sort of more local more midsize kind of internality and externality and

Lasting contexts of exchange that kind of maintain their integrity you know over over time the more you have that the more diversity there is to be gotten from from like Global exchange so it's it's almost about it's about like sort of the sustainable M it's like sustainable Fisheries or something like that right I mean like if if we want diversity to continue to exist in the world we need to make sure that we're not like over fishing and there's not there's not essentially what you're saying is like the world to some degree is just homogenizing right like the world of business is kind of the same everywhere now and it's that's not that interesting right like we want there to still be pockets of interesting local things going on and I don't necessarily

mean geographically local I mean local in the sense that it could be people from all over that are grouped by some but like we want them to have a boundary around themselves be able to create the thing that they're doing and then interact with other other communities right yeah exactly and I mean part of the part of the intuition of you know trying to sort of strengthen our cultural muscle around Community currency and you know local economy and these kinds of things is I mean I just think you know an important context to see it in I suppose is that there are lots of other ways of creating barriers you know and maintain maintaining differ erecting walls and you know these kinds of things so in

other words like through I don't know National politics people can do similar kinds of things right people can use politics and violence and other kinds of things to M maintain these these differences and that obviously you know has its place it has it it has its dark side it but I think that the idea of trying to maintain diversity and texture even within economics even just within economic systems is like an important complement to that right because if we you know other otherwise it's like we don't want economics to just be this kind of like you know uh complete leveling force and then rely on sort of disfunctional politics to maintain diversity right it's like why don't we

start to think about you know economic systems that actually don't just go sort of all the way to 11 in their cultural leveling and you know decontextualizing uh so so I can I think something that's coming to view here is almost a world where there are obviously Global currencies or kind of global mediums of exchange yeah and then there are different levels of currency systems at different scales so obviously to some degree you know every country has a community currency now well most do and they have their own policies for those Etc and and that makes sense I think and that's kind of an intuition that people can take it's like well what about if we just go one level low and then there are City currencies and then one level lower

and there's like a neighborhood currency or for example right an edge City currency right right and or you know I think it's also just important in people's imagination that it's it doesn't have to be Geographic right you can have non-geographic you know localities with currencies but I guess I know this has been tried before yeah but I'm curious if you can talk about maybe one or two examples and what we can learn from those in terms of feasibility and what's interesting here yeah so there's a very very long history of experimentation with with Community currencies many idealistic people for for centuries have thought that you know the creation of more local currencies

would would enable you know not only communities to maintain their their integrity against more powerful outside economic actors or whatever but also just for communities to you know to empower themselves to you to encourage more internal exchange so that they would solve their own problems these kinds of things if you if you look at like the long Arc of the history of community currencies you see an uphill bout like you see mostly failure why let's put that into context people prefer Global Currency people prefer universal currency for reasons that I already kind of touched on right everybody would like if you've got if you imagine a local currency that has like a certain exchange rate to the dollar it's like you know I don't know two local bucks per dollar or whatever you will not want to hold that local

currency at all ever you will just want to sell it for for dull why because unless you unless you know presumably expectations about whether the local currency the dollar is going to appreciate or already baked into the price right so it's always preferable just exchange the local currency that you can spend in fewer places for a Global Currency that you can spend in more places it's just it's like something for nothing you'd always rather make that exchange modern history even even premodern histories are show like a steady March towards um towards more and more Universal stories of value like you know bold and you know most recently the dollar and that's the

that's the direction that that the that the wind blows economically you have to find ways of of sustaining Community currencies and what are so so maybe is there one example we can look at or maybe a couple of like people that have tried this and maybe it didn't quite work out well like I mean I think one one really interesting example from fairly recent history is project called Burk shares which was um a a community currency basically was mostly used by like local businesses in Western Massachusetts in in the past couple decades my understanding is that Burk shares is like largely largely defunct now it had a few years where of pretty notable success but it just kind of gradually tapered off I think it had some success for a while because people

were really motivated in that region to create local economy right so PE in other words you know people in that in that part of Massachusetts feel a lot of local Pride they feel a lot of local local connection and the idea of kind of creating a self-standing economic system there just resonated with resonated with people so people were motivated to use birk shares and and to to accept birk shares and think there's you know part of the story is a success story right I think it's important to see that too but it didn't last the reason it didn't last I think is is what I just said that over the long run people would just rather not hold local currencies which means that there's like a a downward you know there's headwinds on the value of it and that and that's it you know what one

important point to make is that a lot of people who create local currency systems are really really really motivated by the desire to for the local currency system to enrich the local currency in global money term right so everybody wants to be able to tell the story that like you know we're going to create a local currency and through the use of our local currency we're all going to get richer in dollars like people constantly want to tell that story because it's a great story you want you want to empower Community right and Burk shares was like that birk shares was like that so it was like easy to exchange Burk shares for dollars and I'm not sure I think they might have had like a pegged uh uh rate or something so it was it was made in such a way that it

was it was encouraged and easy for people to exchange their bir shares for dollars I think that's a I think that's a mistake I I think that that's kind of a misconception of like it's sort of like the wrong way of directing a community to think about its its own currency it's important I think for people to see the use of the local currency as in a way sacrifice in a way like a sacrifice for the community so in other words holding the currency is not it's you know if you want dollars use dollars right if people are buying the local currency or using the local currency because they are trying to find the fastest route from A to Z where Z is more doll in my pocket then it it doesn't work it has to be understood as

an investment in the economic health of the community itself potentially at the expense of the number of dollars in your pocket but what are some what are some of the things that someone can do with a community currency let's say we we have one like what could someone do with bug shares just to make that really clear for people yeah I mean you could you know you could go to the go to the ice cream shop in North Adams Massachusetts and you know buy ice cream or or you know rent a bike or you know this kind of it was you know local business transactions which you could pay in in Brook shares which were actually they actually printed out you know notes and that sort of yeah yeah okay so let's paint a picture for what it would feel

like to be in a community where this fundamental problem that you've Illustrated is fixed and just to summarize it back to you essentially with Community currencies there's always a problem when exit is free out of the system because there is a liquidity premium on the universal currency in this case dollars where everyone would rather just have dollars let's say there was a way spoiler alert if if things are on chain you can kind of mandate things let's say there was a way that you would have to pay a a discount if you wanted to exit the community right what what does that world look like what does that Community

look like and feel like what do they get from having this system they get a few things first you the community can internally use its own currency to to to buy goods and services from one another the thing to notice is that like if people are holding a local currency then because they're holding a local currency they're going to sort of like look to the local community they're going to see like well what what actually what kinds of goods and services can I get in this community you know they'll think that because they've got some of the local currencies so they're not you know they won't just like Cruise Amazon to find you know X Y or Z they'll think about you know what what the local community offers them they'll also you know again if if they're motivated to to get the

local currency and correctly understanding that supporting the local currency system is good for the community then they'll think about what they can provide you know to the local community they'll think like in this context within this group of people within this circle what can I do that that people will value so it almost kind of like brings you back closer to that you know idealized picture of markets where people are thinking about one another's interests and trying to you know trying to address them so that's that's one piece of it another piece of it is that um is that if this you know if the community uses this internal internally circulating currency to to

deepen its own its own collaboration gets kind of a meaning meaningful internal economy going then the community as a whole is actually very dramatically empowered quite interestingly that this is a hugely important part of the story to see and so here's why that's true because if we create an internal if we create a a group an internal group where people are providing high value goods and services to each other in exchange for Monopoly books right then suddenly every people outside the community are going to want those Monopoly books so you're going to think wow like you know maybe maybe it's like a group of great Engineers or something you know people outside the community thinking my gosh if I had some of those Monopoly bucks I could get some

of the time of some of these brilliant people in this super community of Engineers or something like that right so now the the community as a whole can can Empower Itself by like leveraging the external world's demand for those Services one way of doing that is to print money right can print some more of the internal Community currency and sell it to people in the outside world sell it for real dollars take those real dollars and invest them in in in in real things that become like you know a shared trust for the community so if you can if you can actually get the internal currency going then it's not you you've done more than create an internal currency you've done more than create internal exchange you've also created a

central bank for yourself which can which can use its power to empower the community Visa the external World using real dollar real assets yeah that's very interesting I feel like one of my questions is why now and I guess if I had to answer I imagine blockchain unlocks a lot here but partly just because of proof of identity and transparency and things like that but partly because I feel like we just have a lot of the building blocks now to run meaningful experiments like this or maybe maybe I'm just you know I have a hammer and looking for a nail but is that is that like a fair comment to make there um yes and no I mean I think that there's no doubt that blockchain lets us

experiment with currency systems it lets us build like rule-based currency systems and that is fun and interesting and that's that's part of the reason why you know this work is going on but I think it's also there are also other reasons like sort of non-technological reasons why I think this kind of idea makes sense now just culturally like I think I think that the these kinds of problems like there are the problem of like erosion of local community and local context by you know it's not new but it comes into clearer Focus every day and uh similarly I think when people sort of lose confidence in traditional political institution XY or Z you know to sort of create a insulating bubble

around their cultural context against the sort of forces of universal money yeah people start to think about other other ways of doing that people think you know how can we how can we create you know um different kinds of systems that that will maintain diversity that will maintain uh community that will allow us to uh you know to exist without you know without being sort of uh you know standing naked in the hurricane as it were right which is you know that's just it's a silly metaphor but that's something what comes to mind to me when I think about like you know individual human engaging with the global market it's like you're too small it's too big you know we we need things that either make us a little bigger or make the

market that we're engaging with a little small and uh um that's that's what community currencies are trying to do yeah a lot of interesting ideas there so radical exchange ran a community currency experiment at at J meralda which was a pop-up Village that we did with Edge City in June of this year and you created a community currency called edges I'm curious if you can just very quickly outline how it worked and then now with a few months of retrospection plus this new experiment that you're about to run at our next POA Village Ed C Lana uh what your thoughts are on this experiment yeah so the way that edges worked at Edge Esmeralda was you could

sort of join edges using by going through that ritual that I described earlier literally take $20 and put it in a box and with with the understanding that everyone who has put $20 in that box has the um has the ability to go back to that box take out more than their more than their $20 there's a little bit there's some sort of uh uh Kinks that make it a little bit more complicated than that but that's the general principle so then you so then you do that you put in you put in $20 you get um uh you get 100 edges with the 100 edges you can you can just basically use a very simple app to send them to

other send them to other people you can send them to other people who have sort of joined edges by going through that entry ritual or you can send it to people outside of the edges Network by you know just putting in their emails so to them that way the other important kink in the in the system is uh is the idea of an exit tax so this goes to that idea that we were discussing moment ago about you know creating sort of a barrier creating a disincentive for pulling value out of the of the local context the idea of an exit tax is essentially that if you want to swap your edges for dollars let's say which you might do by simply sending your edges to someone outside of the system and getting dollars back you have to pay

a tax to do that whereas if you send edges to other PE other people within the system like in exchange for their services or something like that it's untaxed so idea is to you know sort of tilt people towards using the edges to exchange services and engage in you know collaboration with one another tilt them against cashing it out there are some other sort of like uh rules about uh you know when when you have to pay an exit tax and and when you don't which get a little bit more complicated and in some cases require like good faith between the uh between the users and that's actually another reason for the mutual vulnerability thing because part of the

idea here is here is that we're not creating a a bulletproof unhackable system right we're creating a resource that will only work as well as people use it in good faith yeah um so starting off the kind of community by asking people to trust one another a little bit creating this you know sort of slightly ritualized trust thing is a way of uh letting letting people know that you know look if you want to if you want to try to break it if you want to try to hack the system this is not this is not for you please please go elsewhere what we're trying to do here is to create a group of people who are interested in using this tool to uh to collaborate

with one another potentially create not only a not only an internal economy but a um a community that um that can that can sustain itself that can help do good things for its members yeah I think that it it was very cool for me to see people start to actually interact people get really involved and send edges around to each other have you know do favors for each other there was kind of a discovery process of like wait how much is this worth how much is that worth it was cool that people started to engage with it in good faith and and good fun like one of the things I'm still thinking about when considering introducing something like this into the community is that and I'd love to get your thoughts on this I feel

like when you try to financialization within a community that potentially is a little bit icky for people especially if it's in you know or if there's like a small friend group and you don't really want to start charging people tokens for you know doing you favors and stuff so I'm curious where that line is and how you think about like having really local almost you know business activity based on these things yeah um so first of all I totally totally agree with all that and I actually I think I think that that's that like the sort of sort of like financializing Goodwill transactions and social things is is actually like a that is like a

failure mode for edges I think like so if that's what edges does then it's like you know we miss um the the way to think about this work is it's very much in the context of like sort of what I was talking about before about how we've got we've got institutions that are sort of Highly we've got institutions that are individualistic institutions that are like very close in to the individual we've also got institutions that are like very Global and we don't have enough institutions that are in that intermediate law and we don't have enough institutions that are like finding that space between that sort of Meso Level of social organization so edges is trying to Target that sort of Meso Level social organization what that means is that if you things that are

happening closer to home interactions between friends and doing favors for people that you just want to do a favor for there's no reason to introduce edges into those really there's no reason to there's no reason to um financialized things are already working well on a non-f financialized basis but there but there is like a layer of activity and a layer uh and collaboration it sits just above that that I really want edges to encourage and what that is is it's kind of like it's like collaboration that goes a bit beyond just what I would do as a favor but is not yet at the level of sort of

global mercenari of like you know like just you know accepting a contract so there's some there's something in between there the the intuition is that is that for example within your community like think about just where you live or or something like that within your community there are there are things that you could be collaborating with your neighbors on let's say that you're not collaborating with your neighbors on because it doesn't make sense for your you know because your neighbors aren't paying enough for you to to do that kind of thing but it's also like too much to ask just Just For Nothing the idea of community currency is to like find that find that in between find that sort of

Gap and if it works it will enable people to build build shared projects that go you know deeper than what could be done with people just doing favors for each other but are like more meaningful and more Community oriented than what uh what what emerge if people are you know just paying each other in nums yeah I think that's a cool vision and I I can kind of intuitively see it where it's almost like people on maybe opposite sides of the edge City Community maybe people who have not met yet but could find ways to collaborate with this shared substrate of value knowing that you know if they get whatever 500 edges they can get they can

spend that on like a discount on the next event or something something like that right so yeah I could I could see ways of crafting the system that allows for that kind of interaction to happen I I wonder if we can come up with like one or two actual examples of this Meso Level of collaboration because I think we're right there it's almost it's almost clear to me like a concrete thing you know so I mean one thing that I think is definitely an area of opportunity is is people building like Community infrastructure so you know people people are building software for the edge City Community or something like that right that's the perfect thing that I would love for edges to to

accelerate um because like to a certain extent some people are going to be motivated to like volunteer on that kind of thing and you know to a certain extent it might make sense to you know find some real money to pay some people to help help out help out with that kind of thing but there's like a there's a gap in between there there's like sort of like a a place where you can ask community members to go a little bit beyond their uh their Goodwill but not go completely into this sort of Market mercenary mentality to help out with things right to to to build to build software for example or to volunteer with the with the community itself like for example at popup Villages there are lots and lots of Hands-On jobs that that that need to get done and there's a lot

of Goodwill in the in the community so you can kind of fill a lot of that with with with volunteers but sometimes the you know the volunteers may not be quite as forthcoming as you want them to be and so that's exactly where you can sort of sense that that you know entering that entering that meso layer right entering that space where Community currency could uh could do something that Goodwill isn't quite doing and that would be better not to do with um with like dollars or E yeah really cool and just to tie it back to what we were talking about at the beginning this is the culmination I feel like of of the conversation because I I wanted to touch on new community ideas than using those as basis for experimentation then what

makes a community good uh and you know things like Mutual vulnerability which leads neatly into this community currency idea and back to how can we use these you know pop-up Villages which is the flavor of new community experiment that I'm working on as a place for actual meaningful experimentation of new ideas and institutions ways of living Etc and so from that lens I'm curious what your view is on all of this on this new movement this kind of popup Village experiment where does it sit in the lineage of similar ideas and thinking that has come thus far yeah I mean this is uh this is just one of these things

where all I can do is kind of give my own take or you know my I don't have any authoritative interpretation here but but I I I I sort of see it as a an attempt to take some of the individualist escaper cultural phenomena that we see in in in TCT and in crypto and in kind of associated spaces and and a little bit sort of tie it back in with a with a spirit of like of with a spirit of of responsible experimentation and like you know thoughtful attempt to create non- Escapist new institutions so um but you know but it's like it's like

an evolving phenomena so I mean I I think it it's hard to say what it will what it will evolve into in a few years but I think I think you look at like the last couple years of it that's kind of what I see I sort of see it as like a attempt to make a slightly less individualistic or more integrated or more like genuinely Community oriented network of of collaborators like I guess I'm not I'm not quite being specific enough like it's kind of a response to the network State phenomenon I think right it's kind of it's sort of it's sort of like taking some of what's interesting about the network State phenomenon and trying to weave it into thoughtful Community Building instead of just making it about sort of financial

Escape right I think it plays an important role for a lot of people who are doing the digital Nomad thing or are um embedded in embedded in the tech World in a way that leaves them like like somewhat you know somewhat disconnected from like other cultural spheres right they kind of like looking for a little bit more connection a little bit more intentional community building I think that like pop-up cities movement is playing a really important and and positive role in in weaving weaving communities where where where it's needed there's also like I mean uh Michelle Bowens gave a really good talk uh at at at jez moraldo where he was

sort of comparing the phenomenon to like the emergence of monasteries in the Middle Ages after the Roman Empire began to collapse which I think is you know I mean it's a I mean there a you know there's a lot of the the dis analogies there are too numerous to count nonetheless it's a it's an interesting analogy because there is certainly certainly true that we're in kind of a weird cultural moment in which many people feel sort of not not satisfied or not sufficiently supported by the communities um around them right I mean there's I mean go back to hunting them and bowling the loan and all that I mean there's a lot of like anob out there in uh modern modern world and um I think

we're all in this journey of trying to figure out how to how to respond to that how to how to not not get into that and um I think that the pop-up cities movement is like a like a really interesting and chapter in that in that story yeah well said well I think I have just one more question to end it out a com a bit of a tangent but I'm curious what so we think a lot about this idea of human flourishing and I'm curious what human flourishing means to you or to put another way what what do you feel like is important in living a good life a happy life what does wellbeing mean to you personally and also maybe at like a societal scale I was talking to my

therapist actually about like sort of you know what are the what what are like the problems that sort of ground out your sense of purpose sort things so we were talking about you know the environment I mean there's all these like huge problems in the world right like this sort of theological crisis and where are we going with technology and you know politics and but I think like the dimension of thriving that just that just attracts me that makes me feel like I'm doing something that matters makes me feel least like I'm sort of C my energies up against UNS solva huge problems is um is is like this sort of human connection thing like I I think that kind of you know creating like

social social experiences and social connections by which people can actually solve one another's material problems and or need for human connection that just feels tracable to me that feels like something I can do and all these other things are real too you know like saving the oceans you know it's all real but um the sort of human thing the sort of like see recognize the other humans and what can you do for that that is what most satisfies me and that is where I believe that's what I feel like I should be doing in order to like Advance my own thriving and other people's

thriving yeah well I think we're very aligned in that and I think that's a great place to end it thank you so much Matt thank you you