very special down lawyers podcast. We're here with Jacob case and Tony. And we're gonna dig into all the ways in which dals might be able to help coordinate the next wave of resilience. Specifically in Portland, where we might look to the power of a community to sense together, act together in the case of disaster, like an earthquake or some other aspects of unexpected, but somehow predictable potential. There's a set of risks that we share as a commons. And there's a set of resources that we can share as a commons. And I want to hand it over first of all, to case to set some context.
Hello, hello, everyone. This is case. For 16 years I lived in Portland, Oregon. I also studied geology. And I worked for a company called ESRI, which did a lot of geographic information system software. One of the interesting notions about this is that you can take map layers and add them on top of each other to understand whether in an earthquake, you might have a landslide or soil liquification event or whether you're near something like a natural gas pipeline, and that natural gas pipeline might explode on you. Or whether you're in a really intense seismic zone or an okay seismic zone, you can also look at roads and whether those roads might be completely washed away by a river flooding its banks because the West Hills of Portland slide into them, and cause the most of the east side of Portland to be underwater. So I'm really interested in thinking about those things. Except when I lived in Portland, this would weigh on my head almost every day. The idea of a 9.0 seismic eventuality that would last for four minutes, was something that I couldn't entirely prepare for, not because you can't prepare for something like that. But because the city wasn't used to having earthquakes. In places like Japan, especially Tokyo, are used to having earthquakes. There are earthquake kits at stores where you can take little pieces of sticky and put it down on your glassware and have little locking cabinets in these really beautiful ways so that things don't completely destroy themselves or even being in earthquakes there. There's a whole system of care. That's really part of the government that allows you to see if someone's okay or not. Even in some of the worst earthquakes, you still have buildings that are set up to be resilient. In San Francisco people are more used to earthquakes, it doesn't mean that an eventual huge earthquake won't really hurt a lot of people. But it's part of the culture of the city that there is a bit of an intensity below the city. That could happen at any time. But with Portland, Oregon, people haven't really experienced a big earthquake for 300 years. And this is an intense feeling because the ideas, even if you have
people telling you about it, the systems of care aren't entirely there. Now, during the really, really terrible forest fires in which Portland Oregon had the worst air quality in the world. The same people the same kind of anarchists cybernetics, Black Bloc protester unit, organized by signal was there to actually help people with special equipment that could help purify the air, or special breathing masks and or p 100. Masks if you had to go out and work in those conditions. And all you had to do is text. And within 15 to 20 minutes, someone from that group of mutual aid would be at your door with some sort of device for you free of charge. You could also add money to the network and various nodes and it would get routed through and distributed in a really beautiful way. The whole point was that you're not supposed to know how it works. It's supposed to be anonymous, and it's all done through signal. Because that was the same way that you got personal protective gear, if you're going to be out protesting in the streets after 10pm. When people are throwing tear gas at you or shooting you with real bullets, we would have a huge network of people who are getting you bulletproof vests or anti tear gas solution or face masks. So the same system worked really, really well. And when we think about how Dows could actually work at the local level, for something like earthquake relief or systems of local decentralized care, I think of that model vary greatly that the people that are used to distributing those kinds of necessary Three pieces of equipment. And routing the information through and distributing the money are the same kinds of people that have the kind of anarchist Co Op experience that you might need for another type of emergency. And there's two other aspects I've seen that I've been really interested in. One was a local neighborhood organization called ice cream, so you don't scream. A very cute little flyer was dropped off around maybe 60 houses in the neighborhood. And it was this one woman who lived just in this kind of alleyway, this big, beautiful house, and she just gave everyone in the neighborhood ice cream, if they would come by, and learn about how to be safe during the earthquake, and said, When the earthquake happens, I will be here with this radio and all this stuff, please outfit yourself with water and all these things. And then we'll provide a unit for ourselves to be okay, including first aid and ham radio and all sorts of other things you can meet here and you can feel safe, that was organized by somebody with a lot of skill in understanding that they could be a vital node. The second one that I saw was the ham radio enthusiasts, which provide a really great decentralized network as is, by your call signs. And you have all sorts of interesting people in basements learning about ham radio, and they're talking to each other. And when disasters strike, they can still talk to each other. And so the ham radio people in Portland have a ham radio certification course, specifically so that they can be heroes during a disaster. And there are specific locations that you meet in parks during the earthquake. And if you're a ham radio enthusiast, you can basically have this wonderful analog social network, where there's almost a sense of delight when the disaster happens, because you're you get to save people, you get to help people out, you get to have a little bit of a miniature paramedic support. And this is so much different than the Red Cross, which goes into cities and may or may not help and then charges, people a lot of money. There's been a lot of complaints about this. There's also been a lot of complaints about what looks like some decentralized support with places like Haiti that I talked with someone who raised I think it was like 250k for Haiti. And I talked to him five years later. And I said, How much of that actually went to the ground in Haiti? And he said, Well, it took like one or two years to get that stuff to people on the ground, and more of a mutual aid group would have been a better place. Because they already have the community network. So I think there's there's interesting ways to do it. But I think it must be done from people who are already used to doing it. Not a new special way for us to do this thing guided by technologies point like, Hey, how's it already done? How can some digital ledger help people do this, but it's really about helping people already do things that they're trying to do. And I think there's there's another risk of complicating things and making a system that's harder for people to use like for, for people to really adopt something, it should be like 10 times easier than it was to do it the analog way. And I really want to see what these mutual aid groups in Portland had for organization and routing, especially since when you look at ESRI technology. There's like drive time polygons that are expensive to query or how do you rent resources around like that's like proprietary expensive polygon, geo dedic type math, that's very, very hard to do. And yet these people had figured it out in their little zones where they could go to. So it's really about that worked really well with signal and probably a couple maps and a bunch of different centralized nodes at people's houses. I think the other reason why it worked is that there were very few people kind of like Wikipedia Style Editor level that really wanted to be, you know, the house parents that were really good at the organization coordination prided themselves in that. And a lot of people that liked taking orders and feeling good about
it. Is that then an opportunity to provide specific care and coordination support for more of these particular archetype.
They're my might be, there might also be just the, like how to scale up communities of care, which doesn't mean you scale up in a central point. But it's more like Nathan Schneider talking about how his mother's chrysanthemum club gets organized that 3040 years ago, almost anybody in the United States for instance, could set up their own like little tiny club with They're a little bylaws. And they could be self similar and almost rhizomatic at the local level, the regional level, the state level, and the national level. And they knew how to have at least some sort of Robert's Rules of Order to mitigate conflict. They knew how to make a long running organization. And it wasn't necessarily they didn't use any technology, there was some Microsoft Word maybe, or maybe some handwritten docs and some meeting minutes. But it was about that structure, that societal infrastructure that kept people motivated and excited and growing towards this common goal. That had nothing really to do with the technology. So when we think a lot about the technology, disruptions, of let's say, just, let's just try Facebook here, where you had, like, you know, taking the yearbook and digitizing it for everybody. At Harvard. It was interesting, because it was much easier to use that to stock people's friends. But what is the shape that you would have with technology to allow people to coordinate better as mutual aid group? Is it just signal? Or is there more to be done? And I think it's really important to ask questions about this more than just coming up with a technology solution, hoping people will use it, really understanding what people need. And the last example I was give would just be interviewing the the founder of Azeri, Jack Dangermond. A lot of their early software that really took off was about forestry management. How do you visualize your forest and manage and understand how the forest is changing over time, and what parts unhealthy or healthy and what parts you need to chop down to be sustainable. And they really built that alongside the foresters. They didn't just do it in a box and say, Here we go. And they didn't notice how successful they got until they release their software and CD ROM, and I think like 2 million copies sold, and they said, Oh, we probably need to be a large organization. And so also, the idea of CD ROM is like, you can use it and you can just have it, use this for your own thing. So that really enabled even though we're talking about proprietary software, it enabled a whole group of Darwin's finches, basically, everyone can use it with their own content was like an empty glass whose purpose was useful because it was empty, not because it was full. And so it's it's a tough thing to reconnect with the past of how we really do things in the in the kind of social infrastructure level, the social technology level, and really bring new innovations there without truly having a good understanding of how these systems work in the background. And also the risks. For instance, if you have a bunch of mutual aid groups, using what looks like anonymous crypto technology, which isn't totally anonymous, does that out them to law enforcement, if they're also participating in other things that might be illegal? Or, you know, there's a lot of these interesting questions facility
with student comes. Right? But then there's a sort of like a, you know, what are these basic elements of the capacity to organize in a decentralized way? Knowing that you can build up credibility in mutual aid in one capacity, and not necessarily have that revealed across the board, except to individuals who choose to infinity.
Right? And that you might reveal that in person? Yes. Or you might have a dial that's called bakery. And it has nothing to do with baked goods. But they're, you know, in end, but the thing is, it's on chain. So it's still, you know, what, what did it look like behind the scenes of this mutual aid group? Well, you could Venmo into it. Where does your money go? And you don't see anything from there. I think Venmo probably could track it. And maybe they could be audited, I
think once once let's say it is in a collectively managed treasury, that is explicitly for a particular purpose, and can be accountably traced to that particular purpose, but is free of associative potential to any individual right, that as a framework for then empowering individuals from any mutual aid capacity, like an archaic or otherwise but like to step in and be seen in person by whoever is necessary to be seen by who's performing some sort of curative function, curation level function, so This is like a local level of trust network that can be specifically built through trust. And in in non non traceable ways on chain right so this this is like your, your everybody's joining these dials as pseudonyms, but on the basis of mutual trust, and the premises that the collective management of the Treasury is run by people who have potentially demonstrated a certain level of contribution and commitment to the mutual aid frameworks of this particular use case, which is something that as you're suggesting, would benefit so much from the network of individuals who've already had experience in preparing in various different ways, for the capacity to be able to respond as a, as a mutual aid function as a mutually forced mutual aid relationship.
There's also the notion that I love the some of the early ideas of Greek city states, or like Toastmasters meetings, where you don't have, I don't know, and maybe this is idealistic, but I was thought in my head when I first read Plato or, you know, first one to Toastmasters meeting, that maybe you didn't have more than 40 people. Maybe you, if you did, it would raise thematically, like split off, because that's how much you can do with trust. Like, there's no such thing as trustless, like,
pre baked trust parameters, that guides gives me Genesis.
Yeah, and it is all done organically, where you can tell as like the metabolism of a group in person, when you're reading at someone's weird house, you know, your black bloc node, for instance, that someone is reasonable or not by their behavior. And you see that behavior over time, you don't, you know, and then eventually, you might invite just some of those people to the next level, you don't want to invite everybody. And so you kind of have this onion skinning model where you don't let everybody in initially. And that, that does have some, some overlap with various other things like cults and pyramid schemes, but also forums online where the more you participate, and the more you show that you're a decent person, you can grow over time, and that tires people out of like a bad actor that's like, well, I have to be a good actor for a whole year before I can be a bad actor. That's a lot of, of, of energy that I have to spend, you know. And so I think it's a it's an interesting notion to think of these things in analog form before trying to fit some digital scaffolding.
Scaffolding, scaffolding, the scaffolding for coordination in the event of disaster and earthquake. Specifically important, but we've referenced to mutual aid frameworks and anarchic Gladbach networks that already exist. That perpetuates sovereignty and I'm gonna hang on
for the summary, in a giant set
sentences because there's so much in this query.
This podcast also brought to you by couches, that
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Thank you nature for providing us with catches. This podcast is also brought to you by all living systems that contribute towards catching us. Cheers. Cheers the living systems. Just we should do more musical enclaves Jake, you're in charge of cases just being an inviting Musical interlude.
Okay, sounds great. This is one of those moments a lot of who we could we should just have it ready.
Is this more competition from yesterday?
I mean, yeah, we recorded a lot of stuff. I mean, that's the good thing about tape. You know, the great thing about tape is like, you just go and there's like, no stopping so you don't like any like slight mistake. You just keep going.
A little interlude on the joys of tape bass.
I live with MIDI, but I like the philosophy of tape because it's just rolling. And you've just got to keep going. If you're like using the software stuff, it's too easy to just start over, right? Like, that wasn't the perfect take. And then you're just like doing that over and over again, just
to have expression when you know that it's like, this time,
it's like writing with a pen, you know,
undo or no undo changes how you approach the mindfulness of how to do something. So editing physical tape. With a tape cutter, when you're making video is like a very special savory process.
So can we pattern match this analog beauty? Back to what we were just talking about?
Absolutely. In fact, I think there's, there's a little essay on this, I don't know who wrote it, but they were talking about the how you build something as an architect or a drafter, when you just have a pencil, and an eraser and how my drafting teacher always taught me was, think about it enough in your head and draw out enough sketches so that when you do your final, you don't have to erase. And if I see an erase mark, it means you haven't thought it through enough. And it was really, he was teaching me the diligence of rigor, to really know the thing and really respected before I actually put it on the final doc. And the next year, in 10th, grade, we switched all digital tools, and had them do. And I found myself spending a longer time making architectural drawings, because it wasn't about the rigor as much as just being able to undo. And when you look at the difference between drafting made by hand, and drafting made in a digital sense, is that's when we started to get all of those one size fits all new condo buildings that were really a space filling architecture that worked to maximize what you could do within the limits of urban planning, not in a human skill aspect, to amplify the story of light as it goes through your house during the day. And I think it's the same when we do things in an abstract way from a technology sense, versus really understand how communities work and form from the analog sense that when you look at people who are editing film, from scratch, there's like a special poetry to it. There's a special meditation that goes into really knowing your film, and really capturing the right photos, just when you take an analog camera here, network building, it's analog network building yet. So it's kind of like what do you lose when you go from an analog camera to a digital camera? Use the meditation, the meditation over the network
of consciousness? Is it a network of cognitive like threads that don't exist when you're doing it?
I think so. I think there's that deliberation. And that sense of not necessarily earnest. But meaning that's lost, where you're almost being anxious, avoidant, and abstract in a way that having almost pushing that
to the side, because you were talking earlier about the potential energy recognition that one can be sensitive to, with respect to an embodied sensitivity and understanding of the world. And there's a channeling of that that is possible in an analog context that is lost when one switches interfaces to the full capacity of a digital potential space that includes the ability to reverse time and the a wider set of digitally scaffolded potentialities, that potentially through one's awareness and attention space models, one sensitivity to the analog patterns and sensitivities, which include our embodied or potentially intuitive cognitive capacities, that when trained through these various other methodologies, as embodied cognitive beings.
Yeah, I think the abstract means that we don't care as much when we prepare for something and we're more likely to overbuilt than we are to do what's absolutely necessary. And so you almost get this is kind of like when we divorced arts from sciences. We started making systems that didn't have anything to do with reality. And now you know, A lot of people building software that have never worked in food service and never frame to house, never done a blue collar job. And they assume that resources are infinite. And so they don't work with systems and things that are about the minimum amount that's needed, and nothing more. It's not super deliberate. Like just thinking in Japan, when you're visiting someone traditional in Japan, it's like a two week period that happens before you're a guest, where there's the preparing to prepare for the guest. And then the preparing for the guest. And then the guest is there. And then the, like, removing after the guest. Like there's this whole ceremony around it, not because it's super tedious, you know, and it's Japan, and oh, no, no, no, there's this whole idea of, of accepting this guest and understanding versus, you know, maybe going to your friend's apartment, sleeping on the couch, and maybe huddling under some threadbare thing I like to do personally. But it's a very different thing of like, going to a Japanese house and having a scroll that has a specific message for you. In the most beautiful room of the house, and getting to use the bathwater before anybody else while it's still hot. I mean, it's it's a really interesting notion of this deliberation, the specialness, this meaning of everything, versus you look at like, I have this quiz with my friend and song where we quiz each other after we binge on Twitter or something. Do you remember anything that you just read? Versus like a handwritten letter that somebody might give you? Do you remember that? What do you remember and, you know, I like to bring up the notion of Kairos time and Chronos time from Greeks Chronos time being that kind of like, time where it's industrial, and you have to be in a meeting from 8am to 9am. But it's kind of throwaway time, or time in a factory where you can produce the same thing again and again, or Kairos. Time, like the time that you remember, on your deathbed, like, Are you remembering that posts that you've binged or that Facebook posts that you're angry about? Or are you remembering like, those very small moments in which you're actually there? And I think for a lot of the people doing mutual aid in Portland, there's a lot of really big in the moment memories. And it's a way of having meaning. That is not really, you know, I mean, you meet people in person, and then you go on signal, and you know, who these people are kind of with their pseudonyms. And the caveat is that, look, I don't participate in these things. I'm an anthropologist, so I study these systems. And I go, I went into the, the top group, in the one side in Portland, and then the opposing side, and was seen how they were working against each other. And I let everybody know, which is kind of a crazy thing to do, you know. But I also tried to help people get on to signal so that they weren't trackable. There were a lot of people just like, posting on social media, what they were going to do, and I was like, no, no, no, you need to have like blocks. This is this is old school, you know, and you need to have pseudonyms. And you need to have small enough groups that people can't know people outside of these groups, and it needs to be rhizomatic. As a safety thing, you want to distribute information, use a zine, use a printer that's not attached to the internet, you know,
but the beautiful thing is that it's more than just a sacred thing. It's actually a functional pattern of capacity. And real, trust based empowerment that comes from being intentional about the analog nature of a smaller group of people who may be connected from a Knowledge Commons and digital, like coordination capacity on all these various different levels that I'd love, Jake, to introduce. And all grounded by what you've been talking about case, which is the actual, real, authentic, embodied human living systems trust, that is already there. That is premised upon patterns of seeing and recognizing that do not need to be fully legible in every single context, but provide enough legibility that when there is something that like, really breaks down, whether it's because of a disaster because of an institutional failure or otherwise, there is a mobilized bubble but
like there's a mobilize Well, resiliency there's a buffer is a harmonic dampener. Exactly. And
just to speak to the latent space that that creates in everybody's present reality, that's part of what we're talking about in terms of the collective action that is just about preparing and connecting and relating and role playing. But that creates a high postition amongst a bunch of people a collective imagining of a future, which makes the presence so much more beautiful. Because you've allay those fears, you've actually pre cognized not just recognize your pre cognized, this much better future and as a result, your present realities are shaped completely differently in that 40 person group can be a pattern integrity that can play out in other real ways in your present reality now, in terms of how you share other kinds of resources, and, and and commons are the kinds of risks beyond just earthquake. But
yes, and the meaning behind this is if you have meaning in these small groups, and you get to be heroes, when something bad happens, you're less likely to feel sad, depressed and disconnected. Because also this the same kind of group that can mobilize to fix a pothole in the middle of the night, or save somebody from a burning
house, this beautiful opportunity for like, unexpected dopamine hits of like, exactly the collective heroism action, leaving, like container building for this next potential future big thing, but you're actually way more ready for, I mean, almost perversely excited for it, because you're so ready for it. I
think one of the two groups of people that I've worked a lot with, especially, especially just doing interviews with is my best friend growing up was from Nigeria. And I remember talking with somebody recently being like, Nigerians are so entrepreneurial, and innovative, why, and one of the fellows at Mozilla was telling me, it's like, well, no one's there for us. So we have to come up with ways to deal with it ourselves. I was reminded by this, this wonderful podcast that I encourage everyone listening to this to listen to, I think it's by 99%, invisible, but it's the idea of where did the ambulance come from, the ambulance did not come from, hey, the central hospital system has deployed this mobile truck, it was the black community being like, we're calling for some help, we're trying to get to a hospital and we can't get there, we're going to make this mobile solution that can reduce death by a lot. And we're going to do this as a voluntary service to get this off the ground, and it became a major part of the healthcare system. Now, it's still really expensive again, so now we have Ubers, taking people to hospitals, we're almost seeing that gap fill in again. But this idea of innovation often comes from, there's no safety net, and people have to make one. We're seeing this in in India now. Because electric cars outnumber charging stations by so much that people might wait 20 minutes to an hour to get a fill an electric charging station. And so the fill in there is not here's let's build $2 billion, or $400 billion worth of electric chargers, it's we're gonna have a set of chargers on wheels that will come to you charge your car, right? So a lot of this innovation comes from this constraint. And it doesn't come from someone raising a ton of money. It says, Oh, it's this middle thing. You know, that's, that's how the USB drive was invented. You know, it's how do you have storage and it fits into a port that the square credit card reader was from the port on your audio port on a phone. And that hid at a time in which there was a recession, people couldn't afford to open up the business. And if they did, it might be at Flipkart. And they didn't have room for point of sale system. And there would be really skeezy point of sale system, people coming around charging small businesses $40,000 for a cash register. And we're square came out and powered a bunch of people to use what was on their phone to be a point of sale service. So these innovations are really interesting to me that, yes, there's a technology innovation, but it's almost compressing something to use what's available in an environment in a really clever way, versus making something totally brand new. And that's why I think it's really really important to learn from different communities that have to make do with not having a bunch of funding and see what people do. And then also see the aspect to it like What was it like to be an early ambulance driver? What did that? What did that mean? What did that feel like? At what point did you say, wow, I've seen so many pulmonary embolisms, that we're gonna need to fundraise from our community to put in this new device to help with that, or what do we need to put in this ambulance? It wasn't, we're gonna make a plan and raise $100 million to do your thing. It was like, No, we saw 10 People die this week from this thing.
So the thing the ambulance equivalent that you were talking about earlier, is the Treasury. And there's other aspects, I think, that we can sort of speak to but like, we're moving away all of the specific tooling aspects. And speaking more, metaphorically, like, Yeah, so like, how would you play out? What you're what you're thinking?
And this is Jake Hartnell from doubt. Oh, by the way, oh, thank
you. I think it's actually great. You open with such like, real world, like almost visceral examples, like preparing as a community for like, some inevitable disaster, right? Like, I think oftentimes, like in these collective efforts, like money is involved, right. And we want to be able to have our collectivist values, right, but also, like, make sure that no outside attackers who could be, you know, like, we want transparency, right. Because we, if the like, if we have, if we collectively fundraise for something, right, we want to be able to ensure that like those funds, like are used for the right purpose, and under the right circumstances, right. And for that, we need like, really robust governance tools, we don't want to, we don't want to outsource that to Facebook or, or to Elon Musk, right? Like, fuck those guys like this, these these, these sovereign collective organizations, like they need to be able to, like form and like, own everything themselves and not like have to rely on a specific, you know, like, tech platform run by a company with like, potentially adverse incentives, it's so important that the stack is like open source and can be, you know, that everyone can like verify, this is what happened, that we can come together and agree on like, this is how we want to, like run this, like, collective effort, which could be, you know, a co op, or it could be like, I love the example of like, earthquake preparedness, like, that's great. So
specific, like, specific groups, mutual aid groups, along the lines of what case you were talking about, like, maybe between 40 and 60 people large? Is what you're talking about, possible to roll out in a sort of like, pattern style, where there's a couple that we already know exists to could just play out the initial pattern, but then we did the
initial pattern for sure. Right? If it's, it's really easy to create a pattern, but you know, I just picked out tooling, I don't make like whatever, like I don't work make earthquake preparedness, for example, like I don't, I'm not the guy you go to
that case, just described, like quite beautifully a very, very local simple pattern that this particular lady in her neighborhood played out on a totally overlooked basis without any bail tooling or funding mechanisms. And if there were to be a treasury layer, and a simple decision making layer overlaid over this particular pattern, that case describe. How is that game changing? I think it is, but I kind of want you to, like play it out.
I think that the pattern, that specific use case is actually great with like a person showing their own initiative, right? In the day, you don't need that tooling, right? Maybe that's like, you know, the change one person can make in a community and we should give voice to that people not and
give her cash and trust her because I've met her that she's going to spend it in the right way to whatever equipment that she's going to distribute and people turn up on the next Sunday and pick up the set of stuff that she has purchased. That's right. And that's totally trusted because they've met her in person they've
met and they've seen what I've done over time, they can see the result. The main thing with like, some of these larger movements that happened in Portland was that some of them got really big. And there were these like, had people that would accumulate millions of dollars of funds and kind of like in The Lord of the Rings, this is the big pain point. It would get them corrupted, like there's so much gravity. We get especially you have people they've never experienced that amount of money before. Perfect, perfect, are they? Exactly what kind of helicopter to
buy? Now we're holding it. Okay, so this is the fractionalization function is where it's key. So you have the Treasury operating at the higher level. And that's where the Dow tooling really plays a galvanizing force and a major pain point, which is the meta mycelial layer of Resource Flow and transparency and potential enforcement that doesn't need to actually enforce because you've got the latent awareness that everything is operating on this new set of transparent accountable frameworks. And that's the, again, the idea of the collective coming together, and sense making together but publicly sense making together with respect to a certain level of things, which makes being a bad actor in that context, very, very difficult. And so it changes it can places new constraints around the ease with which one might buy a helicopter, or do some of these other things which are in the current system, these little temptation points that are kind of like everybody's afraid of, there's no mechanism to stop it, everybody's, and we
can't really see what happened. There public funds, etc. So
the pattern of rhizomatic distribution
above 5k, and automatically splits and you get a new leader, sorry. Yep. Like in we saw this, like with, I cannot name names here. But I was doing a lot of research on a very early community in Portland, Oregon, and Portland tech. And there was a great set of presentations that people were doing, and they would raise funding. And eventually the funding got above that 30k. And someone just ran away with all the funds. And the funny thing was that people were still friends with them, the community because they liked them as a person. But I think it was about 35k worth of funds, which at the recession was, you know, that was enough to live on for a couple years. And we were all this community, you know, I wasn't involved. I didn't get involved, because I didn't have enough experience in this field. So I just, you know, I kind of watched what happened. But the minute I got above a certain number, it was really hard for the treasurer not to just feel Gollum me about the ring. And it was really sad, because it was almost
such an interesting way to describe the pain point.
And you could also think of like the the attacker can come internally or come externally, right? Where it's like, yeah, because if you're in a politically active, like organization, for example. That is, is potentially very, very tricky, many ways. You want to be able to make sure that you're moving forward with consensus, right? How do we approve decisions as a group? And really, like encoding, and coding that kind of process? I think that there's also just like, real privacy issues like across the board, especially with regards to raising funds. And the fact that you could have like, external attackers trying to like infiltrate your group, right? Like making sure that like, or you could potentially, you're in Alabama, you're trying to provide people with abortions, they shut down your bank account?
Well, I think this is why what case just suggest in terms of the pre baked fractionalization of funds is one step beyond where I was originally, which is just the fact that you can have it now allows for that transparency and accountability and the decisions to be made to create new sub funds and localities and like, you know, these 40 person level operational trust networks that have funds available for them to be able to deploy via this mean, now, what you were suggesting was one level beyond that. And I love the patterns that unfold from actually, like fully fresh, analyzing everything, not having one large central data, but fully fresh, analyzing the funds that come into a Dow that's only purpose, there's no voting or anything in this particular dataset. It's just a smart contract, that it receives funds and fractionalized his voting motion bows. Or that need to be it's like, this is the bare minimum thing for 40 people to be able to like access those resources and somehow validate that they are a analog
value the commons, I think collective ownership over the Commons is like a good pattern like you want. I mean, the alternative is that we have like private entities that just come in there and extract whatever profit they can, right. It's just
that most people, like I've seen people in a small art collective, get a grant for $2,000 and change everything they do, because that's so much money and they've never seen it before, and they act in a very serious way. As if they're LARPing, what they see larger institutions do. Yeah. And it's ruined friendships. It's almost like somebody coming in and training people how to deal with money. Or like there's these missing pieces that people don't seem to have,
which is such an interesting facet integrity, just on a slight sidebar to what we are being invited to consider with respect to the Amazon, sacred headwaters and the impact of money in indigenous forest protection contexts where a lot of the same things happen, right. And so, it's really interesting that you talk about this in the context of nonprofits and, you know, collective action, sort of contexts, like art, and like, things that are motivated so much by much more sacred, like authentic, like, modalities of being and becoming with that gets corrupted by the presence of money, because of the various different aspects that are overlaid with that. And to actually address that, at a fundamental level, I think, is one of the most important functions of Dell to me. And I didn't ever think that I have heard it, so simply or like, cogently, like, manifested. It's like, I mean, I know, dowels are bone, but it's just like really, really focusing in on the like, the Treasury aspect and the governance aspect and transparency aspect, but something about the the notion of like, the connectivity of the column, me,
doesn't affect everybody.
It doesn't affect everybody. But everybody says that the column will be in present.
Some people don't even think about the column, they think, you know, I've seen certain institutions get $20 million, and spend it all on a new, beautiful building instead of paying their fellows.
And I've been, which was kind of a collective column.
It was a collective goal. And this very often happens when an organization that was really cool, like building 20, at MIT, which was kind of a dungeon of a mess, where people were actually making tons of innovations, gets a ton of funding, and you get a new shiny building, and it becomes a museum of itself that
bingo effect, the big institutional
engineer, same with some of the fellowships that he did at Banff Centre, or, you know, it's now it's a cute Museum of what it was, but it wasn't what it was, you know, or going to Media Lab where people used to do all sorts of weird searches going on, I think it's official and unofficial, at some point, administrators take over suck up all the money and the culture dries up. And I've heard some organizations like Pixar, apparently, there was a secret room, that people go into it to actually do work that was hidden away, that could be messy, so that when people from Architectural Digest or whatever came in and looked at the really new beautiful headquarters, they knew that you could actually do something in
Massey's positive exclosure.
That's it? And how do you insulate that? How do you make a decoy, so that the administrators look at the museum and say, Wow, look at this innovation, that real innovation is going on behind the scenes,
legibility boundary.
So it's this big issue that keeps happening where not everybody's good with money. And some people are some people are Bilbo Baggins, and don't care about the ring so much, although the
sometimes I still always had that picture of him getting very hot. I mean, and I think that's, that's the mean, for what we are addressing, with doubt holding in these kinds of contexts and something about the story, and the meme of Bilbo Baggins is like very, very impactful in my, like, psychic space right now.
Yeah, I mean, like, Dallas can also have complete power over their currency, right? Maybe someone gets it, but you don't like for whatever reason, like maybe they commit a crime in your community or whatever, and you want to like slash their community balance.
But the problem is, if you have a doubt, and someone commits a crime in the doubt, and you take away that, that Dow should really be the person should be removed from
the Dow. Yeah, exactly. it out. I think we need to just like give communities power to like enforce, like, their rules. I think Treasury
understanding of like, what does this enforcement mean and how do you also get people to enjoy being a part of something like this? There's a lot of this like analog stuff. It's like why would someone show up at a meeting? Well, because there's pizza.
Yeah, exactly. I think the best actually just like fades into nothing, you even think about it right?
What's the most successful Dow that you've seen? That's still going today?
It just depends on how you define Dow. And I think it's pretty broad definition, right? Like, I think of it as like a high level an organization that's like, enforced or like where the rules are enforced by smart contracts.
Is co up or down?
Well, it depends on like, what sense you're looking at it, right? Because decentralized autonomous organization, we can interpret each of those words in different ways. Many ways, you could say, a co op is a doubt. But then you could also argue that cost is not enough. Depends on like, which sort of, I mean, this is part of the problem with the word Dow is there's just so many different meanings. And I think we should actually like not talk about the definition of Dow and talk about like how we can do like cool collective actions yet, because that's
what I'm asking you is not what's the coolest Dow you've seen, what's the most interesting, sustainable, resilient long term organization you've seen or been a part of, in which there is not so much chaos, and actually does what it says it's going to do over time. And that could be a grocery store? Could be people's food Co Op, it could be, but have you seen,
you'll probably be doubt out, because it's like, in spite of all our challenges, we've definitely had our fair share of challenges. Like it's really tough to like, navigate a really difficult bear market, and we have zero VC funding, and, you know, we're peered out. But like, the vibes are good, you know, and there was this real like, shared sense of purpose, and like awesomeness, and part of that was part of that was you.
As Chief five officer, I noticed that it was pretty easy to have good vibes when the token price was high. And when we all got together to enjoy talking to each other, and teaching each other stuff, exactly, also, when the token price was really high, there are a lot of people that didn't really do much expecting a lot of tokens.
Now that now that we're in a different market, what dynamics can we be optimistic about?
Experiments experimentation, the time we need people to like, try things, we've got this insane space alien technology that allows you to have your own like sovereign like, like, almost like organization, it could be a local government, it could be a collective organization, it could be like a co op. Now, it could be a nonprofit, could be all these things, right? It's just how you term to how you choose to structure the group of people around you and like your purpose.
It's an exciting time to be in relation with all of us, you know, most cats, I guess we're more or less synonymous, but like the
Tony, what you can't Oxford University as a dog schools within it,
I think that it's a potentiality of nested vows that hasn't been fully played out. But watch this space, because in the next episode, we're going to Tao phi, all of the elite institutions of the world.
I mean, I think there's one more thing I want to explore, which is that like, dogs are not just about treasury management, that we can actually I think the notion of the Commons has grown tremendously. And like, look at all these, like social networks that are now like using our data to train AI. Oh, you upload your art to Instagram. You know, well, Lord Zuckerberg is going to be that much richer thanks to the efforts of the digital surf. And
Dows can govern much more than treasuries, they can actually govern software because they're digitally native. And I think that if we want a digital comments in the same way that we want, like, you know, physical real world collective spirit like and especially I think if we're going to avoid the AI like post cap, or like the AI cap, surveillance, capitalism dystopia, like, I think we need other options.
I'll take Jake have any final closing words?
No, it's gonna be a pretty interesting time to get rid of the gap that we have between abstraction and real. And I'm hoping that enough stuff breaks down that we'll be forced to do something that's a little bit more rooted. Again, out of necessity, may the tides wash away the abstraction not to pay For reading
