Will holonic systems take us to the stars

Will holonic systems take us to the stars? What has happened in the last half-decade since “Principles of Holonic Philosophy” was first penned? A plethora of blockchain experiments, many of which innovate on new types of organizational design; some minor iterations; some utopian projects; some massive upgrades; and some questionable enhancements. This essay is built on the research for “Principles of Holonic System Design” and will detail the progress that has been made toward a new holonic world order. At its core, a blockchain is a throwback to a much older decentralized form of recordkeeping, the tally stick—but it includes a novel, Ponzi-like incentive scheme to get people to sign up for its ledger system. This scheme embodies many of the tensions that characterize the overall dynamics of blockchain. First, it is an open threat to the establishment, to banks, and people who like active censorship regimes and things the way they are. Partially due to its obscurity, it is both populist and technocratic, adopted by people who have some animus against the existing system or who simply believe they can do better. The most successful projects in this space have been iterative. Bitcoin itself iterated out of other digital cash systems that were less decentralized and were shut down by governments. This forced the establishment of a pseudonymous creator and a fully decentralized network topology. The most successful project to date, Ethereum, has iterated on many of the core concepts of Bitcoin, but with faster clearing times, better algorithms, and an upgrade on Bitcoin’s contract language that enables all sorts of applications. At the same time, it has reintroduced several elements of centralization: First, in the guise of a central, quasi-mystical figurehead, Vitalik Buterin. Second, in some of the opacity behind the Ethereum Foundation, which does have the ability to make major decisions regarding the evolution of the protocol. Third, in actually making decisions to reverse certain transactions or faults that were deemed to be dangerous to the network. More recently, Binance Smart Chain has risen to the forefront and briefly eclipsed Ethereum in transaction volume. Which leads one to ask the question: What do users really care about? Decentralization, or the ability to make money rapidly without government controls? Herein lies one of the most problematic features of all populist systems, insofar as what is most popular at any given moment may be the least indicative of what is healthy. Hitler is, of course, always cited in such discussions, but any casino-like, quasidemocratic voting structure may also be considered in the same general category. As the Ethereum system was expanding, only a very few people openly dissented from the growth of the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, an obviously flawed project that was overhyped with inaccurate sales pitches—including a poorly designed voting system and what turned out to be catastrophically broken mechanisms. But, in an eerie parallel to traditional banking systems, it quickly became “too big to fail,” and when the question was posed to the voting-inclined via the carbon vote system, those people (who presumably had the ill fortune to put in more than .3% of their ether holdings, as was the case with this author and the Ethereum founder) showed up at the polls and 1 overwhelmingly requested a fork. Similarly, the ICO years can be characterized by a similar cycle of collective enthusiasm, followed by a period of barely anything at all. Likewise, global meme culture, led by the lugubrious Elon Musk, now assails traditional markets under the leadership of the figure of a fluffy dog that pants longingly at the moon. Whether it is a categorical flaw in some structure of humanity that incredible enthusiasm must wash over people to inspire them to action (which in turn empowers a whole caste of collective “hype masters”), or whether it is simply a feature of a monkey species that has yet to evolve all that far from itching and scratching and beating each other with sticks is, in the view of this author, a matter of perspective. From the perspective of an alien visitor circling in orbit, Elon Musk may simply be Monkey in Chief, with Vitalik as more of the lead architect of a new societal vision that qualifies as an incremental improvement over last year’s technology of choice. The alternative, as many seem to advocate, often involves doing nothing at all—which certainly takes us nowhere. That said, what we have broadly spoken of is not net carbon-neutral, and if the species that has created all of these things is to continue to breathe, it must at some point figure out a way to reconcile some of the macro-scale problems. These coordination challenges seem to continue to daunt humanity—except in science fiction scenarios, where some alien species arrives and either unites humanity through an enigmatic, benign master plan or, more nastily, invites all of humanity to vie for this planet’s supremacy through intergalactic combat. However, were such a species with superior technology to actually exist, we can only imagine that it would have access to other dimensions that we are only beginning to explore—and which even the most intrepid of human space-time travellers would only stay in for a matter of seconds. That species might even be able to affect humans’ ability to perceive reality. This means that for certain moments, reality would appear as almost divergent streams, depending on what one takes as one’s core premises and information sources. One clever trick along these lines involves invalidating information sources on moral grounds. Libraries, as any student of history knows, can be used both for learning and for tinder. Or, perhaps most amusingly for the sardonically inclined, as wrapping paper (c.f. Nag Hammadi). Given the current status of blockchain, can one assuredly say that it will be used to build knowledge? Or is it equally likely, perhaps even more likely, that it will be used to empower some massively destructive action? This may indicate that blockchain systems as they are currently structured are only partially compatible with a holonic vision, insofar as they are highly amenable to various forms of global groupthink that is not necessarily compatible with a bottom-up, socially integrated vision of health and wellness. To briefly recap the fundamental thesis of holonic philosophy: It accepts no outside moral or theological framework for evaluating the “good” of its members, only bottomup metrics for health and wellness. This is not always easy: When referring to any 2 collective, there may need to be some communally-inspired way of determining what these metrics should be, including soft metrics that are more difficult to put into a bean counter. For example, when traveling the subway of Paris, I have often heard a faint, ethereal music playing in the background that I describe as the language of the soul; were it to fade forever from the ear, I should consider it a massive loss for humanity. Having observed the many members of the Silicon Valley elite in their quest for global dominance through monopolistic platforms, I do not think they care about such things —and so I believe that those who do care must band together and take up what arms we have to defend the things that are dear to us. As a result, I believe that all things which serve these ends are tools to help us in the quest to be able to make decisions for ourselves—this great aim that we have sometimes called “freedom.” I believe that out of the great burning wreckage of Western civilisation, manifestly observed during this time of COVID-19, there are still people with that original Spartan spirit who will arise like eagles of flame and refuse to cooperate with the attentionzombifying platform technologies that seek to maximize click-throughs at the cost of souls. Perhaps in past lives, some of us heard a distant bird song calling us to fight, and we beat our ploughs and forged them into swords. Perhaps, instead of weapons of steel, we shall use art, memes, and new forms of money as the primary means to forge a new future. Despite a rather poignant reduction in my own wealth as I have dedicated to myself to community projects, I have had the fortune to recently make the first cryptocurrency donation to Burning Man, an organization to which I’ve contributed to both on the functional side (building a camp and several related art projects) and on the academic research side. Burning Man is one of a handful of organizations that make me proud to be American in an era where, in many respects, this is difficult. This is partially because it represents the future, rather than the past that was shaped by the vision of founding mothers and fathers who dreamed great dreams. Burning Man embraces everyone at their utmost in a spirit of inclusiveness and non-judgment, and encourages us all to find our own expression of fullness around a center that can only be describe as sacred. De Tocqueville famously said that Americans are bound together by a charismatic spiritual vision of transcendence, and whenever they lose this they fall into hypermercantilism and materialism. I have personally watched this play out with the latest trendy social app called Clubhouse, which used to be noted for its organic interactions, but now more recently for its congregation of influencers talking about “millions of this” and “millions of that.” During the same period of its massive build-up in ostensible influence, I took the opposite approach and began a series of thoughtful letters, sent out via mail to people who I thought might respond in kind. As of now, I have received only a single response, but some of this may relate to the fact that the postal service apparently no longer delivers all of its messages. 3 At various points in our recent civilization, it has been claimed that “software eats the world.” It seems that the relative success of industries that monetize data have made us forget the absence of other assets—including not only precious metals, gems, and works of art, but the great value that lies in human relationships, and the importance of people who take out the trash and deliver the mail. I have observed, with a bit of an ironic sense, yet another attempt to build a Worldcoin—which I was previously almost advising, but which, in typical fashion, seems to have gone the standard venture route. I have found that the people who are truly capable of thinking through issues, calculating the social impact of those issues, and actually designing solutions are remarkably few. I do not even think that, by this metric, Elon and Vitalik properly qualify. That said, Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey, a man who did not particularly care about wealth, manifestly does qualify. Perhaps if Elon had a “next thing” to pump, or if Vitalik helped birth a new iteration of decentralised autonomous organizations, they could combine forces to achieve something that has true societal impact. I will note that the Burning Man organization, in its back corners, has been cooking up something with true collaborative import. Recently, someone from one of the oldest and most prestigious bitcoin mailing lists noted a message I had sent about meme culture that marked an odd convergence between Elon and Vitalik—notably about the staying power of global memes and their ability to, at times, supersede economic primitives, most certainly including the hidden doge. The doge, for those not in the historical know, was a hallmark of Venetian culture —which was ultimately most renowned not for its love of masks, but for instituting an egalitarian framework of law in which the highest was not exactly erected on a pedestal. The doge is also beloved by cults that have floated in the underworld of global crypto culture. Regardless, it was Vitalik who gave me my first doge, which must still be locked away in a wallet somewhere, in exchange for some governance rights in my own utopian project called Swarm. Swarm started with a manifesto that was published on the anniversary of the day when Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin and crushed the voices who were working towards selfgovernance. As anyone from that part of the world knows, this was a battle that took decades to win. It was also not a battle where “he who has the biggest gun wins” (although that was one element). Rather, it was a battle where the people had to band together to determine what was the most valuable and true for them, despite strong campaigns of state censorship and death sentences for those who dared to speak the truth. I do not believe that a single builder of any major social platform today has ever read Havel or Solzhenitsyn. I do not believe that a system based purely on market primitives —in which a company is built on profit, and in which any voice can be “turned off” if it somehow affects the bottom line of its corporate benefactors—can ever be the foundation of anything meaningful. Among other things, this is because I actually believe in something that constitutes truth and beauty beyond the ken of market 4 systems, as opposed to “what makes me the most money.” And I believe in something that means “beauty” beyond “what gets me the most followers.” The US Constitution fades into background as the concern only of loud dissenting voices that are, in the greatest of all ironies, on permanent vacation in Russia. This leaves a great void. Swarm, and various related topics which I work on, such as a Decentralized Autonomous Society, have stepped into that void with a bold intention— something that is less about specific technologies and more about what is important to us as humans. Do we believe it is important to have platforms where we can find out what is actually happening, as opposed to what those at the top deem acceptable to publish? Do we trust the internal teams at Facebook to determine what is “fake”? And just who do they report to, anyway? This is no longer a simple conversation, and it is partially for this reason that in the course of this Bitcoin and Ethereum and ICO and cryptocurrency boom I have, many times, stepped aside from taking about the “rise and rise” of any particular cryptocurrency. I am, for the most part, extremely thankful that these financial alternatives have gained some manner of meaningful adoption. Despite creating the first educational material about the use of smart contracts, I have been hesitant to “shill” any particular projects for quite some time. That said, I recognize that wealth and power are inexorably linked, and if someone like myself participates in some deeper universal moral sense as well, they must have some means to implement those things. This was one impetus for the project called “Swarm Fund,” which was the earliest (and probably the most resilient) project related to the tokenization of real-world assets. With the utopian flair I have already mentioned, I have pushed strongly for the institutionalization of decentralized governance, starting with efforts to develop voting mechanisms based on coloured coins on Bitcoin. Along with various political disputes (including a particularly nasty one with Bitcoin core developers as to whether anyone *should* build using coloured coins), the project was variously dismissed as a scam, a fraud, and/or dead. Now on its fifth iteration and fully community-governed, it seems that the market may finally be ready for it. One notable feature of blockchain projects is the extreme amount of enthusiasm people have for them at various moments, but also how quickly and thoroughly that enthusiasm dries up. In this sense, the Swarm Fund project most certainly had phases of popularity among various groups of people. In some way, I was happy for people to believe for years that I was working on a “scam” or that the project was “dead,” even when there were still people working on it every day—including the same collection of artists, visionary thinkers, activists, and engineers. Somewhere in the mix I even built the team for the most popular blockchain wallet (then called Vapor, now called Metamask). 5 If one is betting on VC companies, one is often betting on market readiness. I can’t say I’m any good at this. When we did our in-person interview with YCombinator for Metamask, the interviewers seem to think Ethereum was an odd thought experiment and asked us why anyone should care about it. In this sense, I suspect I may be partially autistic and have no great sense of market timing. What I seem to be better at is resilience, and consistently working on something that I believe that humanity needs, regardless of whether anyone else cares about it. In this sense, I have been in the red more than once on this journey, I have had source code and cryptocurrencies stolen from me more than once, and I have been hacked and verbally assaulted more than once. Yet compared to those whom I consider my betters, I have barely suffered. I have not been spat upon, I have not been put in jail, I have not been tortured, and I have not been asked to betray my friends. After a brief exchange with Naval, Silicon Valley’s Twitter philosopher par excellence, I once made an art piece celebrating one of his pithy quotes to hang upon my wall. That quote is as follows: Fast, lift, sprint, stretch, and meditate. Build, sell, write, create, invest, and own. Read, reflect, love, seek truth, and ignore society. Make these habits. Say no to everything else. Avoid debt, jail, addiction, disgrace, shortcuts, and media. Relax. Victory is assured. https://twitter.com/naval/status/1254177712945500160?lang=en However, during the editing process I had a brief conversation with Naval on Clubhouse about phases, including the use of the world “jail” and its inclusion here. It turns out that Naval also had some hesitation about that precise phraseology. I have always had a strong admiration for those innovators who risked appropriation by society and braved the captors who would destroy all they held dear. This is not to say that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have not learned certain life lessons correctly, but they miss a cardinal virtue, namely courage. In any battle worthy of historical stature, you can be assured that standard venture capitalists will not be standing on the front lines (that said, I would not necessarily say the same about the crypto natives who I am happy to regard as my countrymen). I found the quote inspiring—enough to hang it on my wall with that minor modification. I have even added sprinting and a second daily meditation into my schedule, partially due to the inspiration I gained from Naval. I am currently turning it into a crypto-art piece, which is all the rage these days, and as soon as I finish this essay I plan to email Naval to see if he will tweet it, talk about it, and donate the proceeds to some meaningful charity to kick off our impact NFT program. At this juncture, it may make sense to return to our idea of holons and discern how they can apply here. One potential application is through the notion that sovereignty, as 6 an idea, is not a binary: We can be more sovereign or less sovereign depending on our ability to maximize our own wellbeing. A person is not sovereign if they are not healthy enough to leave their room, and a certificate of eligibility to vote means nothing if one cannot vote on anything of significance, or if the votes are tallied by someone who has the ability to print votes at will. Sovereignty, autonomy, and freedom all go hand in hand, but they are also linked to one other critical and primary feature of human existence: gender. There are many theories about how humans originate, but one of the most ancient is that humans are born of a soul that was split from an androgynous being, and that both our sexual and emotional passions—and many of our monetary endeavours—are ultimately attempts to bring us back to that original state. Although I do not take this story at its word, I believe it reveals something about the mysterious nature of human passion—namely, that we are seeking some sense of wholeness. Consequently, there is a whole section in my book about holonics that focuses on sexuality, something I believe cannot be neglected. One of the most notable features of sexuality is that it manifests itself in a way that is similar to religion, in the sense that it has very strictly enforced norms and is often seen as a subject that is impossible to research from a scientific or quantitative vantage point. All of the supposedly progressive civilizations have many areas that are clearly forbidden. Even within the world of people who identify with different genders than those of their birth, many types of questioning are forbidden and those who question are forbidden, shunned, banned, and unemployed. If this is the reality in a community that self-identifies as progressive, imagine what it is elsewhere! We use quantification in every other area of sport and health; why not for sexuality? Martin Buber spoke of the “I and Thou,” and most forms of mysticism from Teresa of Avila onward make some reference to an “other” who we come to terms with in the process of awakening. If you want, you can refer to this as God, either with a capital letter or without. The reality of it, from a historical standpoint, is that this notion has been deeply embedded in civilizations—and even the great architects of libertarianism were not hostile to it, provided that it was accompanied by self-knowledge. However, one of the original realities related to this concept, which also seems to be one of the most violently contested in all of history, is that the force of the “other” has sometimes been described as a “Father” and, in the wisdom of many indigenous traditions, as a “Mother.” In certain more esoteric traditions, the “Father” is represented as originating “above” and descending, whereas the mother is depicted as originating “below” and ascending, and the two forces meet in the middle at the tip of a pyramid. Why is this so important today? People who have been involved in the peer-to-peer foundation world for a long time may know that my involvement in alternative economies precedes cryptocurrency. My first project was a digital currency with an ecological backend that was specifically engineered for ecological impact. While I believe that the Ethereum community has been historically the most coordinated in 7 approaching problems of the public good (including the great work going on now at Bitcoin), it is only in the very early stages of finding real world applications. My own path has been quite different. Despite the initial enthusiasm of four out of six of the board members of the Ethereum Foundation for setting up a decentralized accelerator model with co-living “holons,” I was the only person to actually create and maintain one—something I did for five years with only occasional external support. For a while, this holon was the default Silicon Valley office for the Ethereum community. Yet, ultimately, the interests of late Ethereum adopters seemed rather different from those of Ethereum’s founders, and the space moved on to focus on more financial applications than utopian DAO projects. That said, we managed to attain something that felt more like a family than an incubator, and which integrated biohacking, yoga, music, art and other forms of wellness. I suppose, at some level, I was inspired by the early home-brew computer club days, and by the moments in which activism seemingly integrated with the creation of microprocessors and where a “party” was an underground mixing ground. My less than sanguine appraisal is that those days are long gone from California. The California I know today is a mere shadow of its former self. If YCombinator is any indication, Silicon Valley favors elite universities and lives only to produce unicorns. Similarly, the streets of San Francisco cry out with social need—yet the tech-inclined, in their software bubble, seem to be completely lost when it comes to community engagement. Occasionally, a Californian woman would come through our artist incubator embodying the spirit of the 1970s: Bold designs, fast cars, a thirst for emancipation (sexual and otherwise). But these people, to the settlers of the early 21st century, were extremely scary. New ideas, especially if they challenged the existing structure of society, were shunned. It is emblematic of the early 21st century American mindset that all great business magnates focus their “greatest” philanthropic engagements furthest from their home: Bill Gates is giving away vaccines and laptops in Africa. YCombinator president Sam Altman is trying to provide basic income through a venture-backed startup. Elon Musk is wanking to a picture of Mars. One cannot help but wonder, at least a little bit, about the tech elite’s approach to racial consciousness, given that they are all very white. Having listened ad infinitum to various members of Peter Thiel’s brain trust and other members of elite groups, I believe there is at least an element of “light nationalism” that is racialist but not necessarily racist in the extreme sense. It implicitly believes in genetics as a factor that can be improved—and thus there is a qualitative aspect to their approach to genetics, which then filters into their appreciation for math, science, music and other more quantitatively-enhanced elements (most certainly including the ability to program computers). One of the greatest articulators of this elitist philosophy is the eminent Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital—who, in addition to being pretty smart, has an 8 incredibly soothing voice. Eric states frequently that, as a Jewish person, he cannot possibly be racist. What is he, then? Well, at the very least, he consistently makes the point that we still know nothing about what happened with disgraced billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s money—despite the fact that multiple government agencies should be able to track its whereabouts. So in this sense, he appears to be something of a moral crusader. This turns the question to the nature of governance today. Is it “for the people, by the people?” If so, shouldn’t the people know where the money is and what it was used for? Shouldn’t they be able to at least have some degree of confidence that their taxpayer dollars aren’t being used to support people’s pedophiliac habits? If not, what confidence can any person have in paying taxes or supporting the regime as such? It doesn’t seem to matter who the commander-in-chief is if they have literally no control over what happens on private islands, no ability to protect the underage, nor the ability to determine what happens with the money that they are in charge of printing. There are many different overlapping genres of conspiracy theory literature which I mostly enjoy as a side habit, or a counterpoint to more conventional historical works— but it seems that with the basic collapse of journalism, we are at odds with. Do Peter Thiel and his associates represent some form of modern-day Nazism? A new conspiracy led by tech platforms that seek to addict all the darker-skinned people on the planet and lead them into a new form of techno-slavery—where they are drip-fed whatever it is they should believe from the top of the pyramid, as determined by an algorithm-selecting elite? Where Trump is almost a benign test case in comparison to Facebook, which is truly expressing what it can do after having studied Agent Smith and The Matrix? Are they, instead, the true heroes who will expose the truth behind Epstein? Or are they merely pawns in some larger meta- game? I don’t know. I only know that I don’t stand on the top of this particular pyramid, nor have they done anything particularly meaningful to affect my life for the better. My days are always better when I’m far away from Facebook and Instagram. The less time I use these platforms, the clearer my own thoughts are. That said, I believe only a few people will read and understand those thoughts—but perhaps it is enough to be a seed. If that seed can grow, then at long last it might grow into a tree that can provide shade for the world. I should take a moment and apologize for my writing style, which does not fit seamlessly into global meme culture. At some rather impressionable period of my life I spent significant time reading Kant and Schopenhauer in German, in turn believing that the search for a universal moral impulse was perhaps the greatest of all human quests and superseded the need to be popular—and that a grammar that includes moral impulses necessarily included an elevated and seriously-developed sense of thought. Consequently, I believe I shall always be less popular than the a16z fellows who seem to have created the best platforms for meme-ification and capitalization. 9 I have written this elsewhere long ago, but I do not even know if Western civilization has a future. The enlightenment, which seemed oh so enlightening at the time, always had a Faustian element at its core, and the racial and Marxist battles of the past half century at times seem so wearying—partially due to their “winner takes all” violent dynamics. On the one hand, the United States has the greatest vision for the reconciliation of all peoples. On the other hand, Walt Whitman is lying in his grave and I appear to be the only poet still carrying that vision (if you want to see the volume I wrote on this topic, feel free to message me). In this moment I admit my affinity for Oswald Spengler. I personally am taking a bit of a break from white people, partially because that label means nothing to me, and partially because I find that I can do business just fine with people of other skin tones who do not find it a necessity to spend a large amount of time convincing me of their standing on some moral high ground. I noticed that with certain white people you must always play a game of “king of the hill” to erect yourself as the moral superior, which seems, sadly, like some misplaced penis envy. In fact, even the word “white” seems to be stolen from a swan and somehow foisted on some monkeys to show either that they are better or worse than someone else. I can’t imagine a dumber or more unconstructive game, other than perhaps Russian roulette. If I were to present my political philosophy (which I have articulated at length when I was still in the academic circuit), I would say that I am a Daoist anarchist. This means that I believe society is like a game, and we should follow the rules of the game, but only insofar as we are in society. I am an anarchist in that I believe we should find spaces outside of the game where we can be truly free, but recognize their temporally bounded nature. In this sense, the temporary autonomous zones originally posited by Hakim Bey and the Cacophony Society that preceded Burning Man are two beautiful articulations of this philosophy. There is no formalism, there is no appropriation, there is no judgement; there is only expression and, perhaps, an element of technoshamanist alchemy. With respect to the standard construction of political entities, I can only say that I do not believe there is one single right answer. Each system has its checks and balances, its own system of laws, its own system of punishments, and its own way of solving public goods problems, usually with some quasi-religious flair. With respect to the success factors of such entities, besides GDP it seems that they are by and large not very well defined. Data scientists, beware: I am about to wander into your eminent domain. What if you were able to take all of the data behind societies and pick a couple of success factors to optimize for? What if I could give you all the data you wanted? Do you think that, collectively, we could build structures that are more amenable to human wellbeing than the feudal, territorial, totalitarian systems of the past? If I didn’t think so, I would not spend so much effort writing about ‘holons’ and my own emergent political philosophy, which has been arising in large part from a rejection of 10 the strong theses of other people rather than any particularly strong feeling of my own. That said, with every new form of would-be totalitarian, winner-takes-all system emerging, I believe the time is now to act. The week before I arrived at Burning Man for the first time, I had a burning desire to have children. It was almost as if a voice spoke to me and said “now is the time.” But after considering the practicalities of such an endeavour, I realized I could not raise my children in any society that did not allow them to grow unmolested by those with ideological beating sticks. So where are we today? Will blockchain deliver us from something? Will it create a new distributed web that is the foundation for a new financial internet? My 2012 prediction remains exactly the same: We will be saved from a fixed system that is governed by various elitist power brokers by a populist system that will be highly volatile until something better replaces it. This new system will not be based on yet another venture coin; it will be something that represents an emergent global collective vision of the world, and knits together core innovations in the rule of law, engaged governance, technocratic guidance, and populist global assent. As with everything else in this space, it seems likely that this will be a highly iterative approach, with everyone clamouring for a solution after they have created a problem. Will it be holonic? Yes: Insofar as holonics is a system of appraisal that excludes external, top-down evaluation mechanisms and takes into account the social and biological nature of constituent parts, we are certainly iterating in that direction. While DAOs were, for a period of time, exciting and experimental, today they have become intuitive and commonplace. Today, almost no protocol launches without some sort decentralized governance structure, and funds like Polychain now have internal positions dedicated specifically for this purpose. When it comes to a corporation or “government,” particularly if one is educated by some standard means, one can easily cite any sort of ideological reference point from the last hundred years of these institutions and their related disputes. Conveniently, at least from the standpoint of holonics, for DAOs there is no such reference point. One has only internal metrics to rely upon; the industry remains too nascent to have created its own -ism and doesn’t even have its own management consulting firm, unless you count me. Were there to be the need for an emergent “-ism,” I would suggest “polytetrahedronism,” insofar as the ability to appreciate more sides leads to greater lucidity and creative potential; the need for multiple variables is related to success; more data is better; zero-sum games are wearying; if we set up our games for mutual success we are more likely to achieve it; and blockchain systems naturally lend themselves to experimental and economically-aligned mutual successes. With respect to wealth, it is notable that I received most of my own wealth from building education and community—something that has always been a core passion of mine, and that also motivated me to co-lead 123mastery.com and other related projects. Partially because of this, and the related co-living endeavours I have 11 discussed, we formally established ourselves as a church—first in the Czech Republic, then in England, then in California. The formal legal name of this church is the “Church of Ascension Technology,” and it remains something like a holding company for the assets of the Burning Man camp and related infrastructure of our co-living community. As a church, it held regular services that included crystal singing bowls, tuning forks, and meditations that are popular on the West Coast, until our local town council told us that we needed a special permit to run a home church. Consequently, this group of people, which includes a great number of folks who would self-identify as priestesses, troubadour artists, and community builders, is looking for a new home or homes conducive to its aims. Sadly, the artistic movement that partially inspired it, whether the minnesingers of the Middle Ages or the Wandervogel, seems to translate poorly into English, where people seem barely able to distinguish between sensualism, poetic sentiment, and pornography (https://techcrunch.com/video/lovenests-co-living-space-helps-birds-fly/). In this sense, we hope to reinvent and reinvigorate the sense of church in the 21st century in a way where women are not treated as second class participants, where communion with Mother Nature is held hand in hand with a concept of a Father God, where individual health and wellness is facilitated, and where a broader sense of community with the planet and ecological impact is encouraged and fostered. One of the core projects I have built along these lines has now merged and become a collective identity shared by many artists: Icarus Steel. This is because we recognize that the more we surrender our egos and come together, the more powerful we are. It deals with the ancient mysteries of sexuality and nature, because it is there that we come from, and if we do not honour the fact of our birth we will never find true peace and happiness. Together, we create art and dedicate the proceeds to transparent global impact. To return to global governance and the banking system: Who trusts it? Not a single government agency of any country has any capability of figuring out where missing funds have actually gone, as I have discussed above—or of bringing it to light, or stopping it. People will be dazed and confused, and fed soundbites to make them think that somehow their emperor has clothes—when in fact he has taken their social security and pension funds and rendered them utterly worthless, hoping that he can simply be out of the public eye on his own private resort by the time the rest of the world realizes it. Is that what governance means today? No wonder so many people are opting out. I do not believe that cryptocurrency itself is anything more than a tool. However, some of the women and men who wield it are heroes, and they are heroes for insisting that this system simply cannot go on any more—that we the people deserve something more and better. Personally, I do not care much if it has the face of a Shiba Inu, a Kanye fish, or a rainbowy space cat, or that it represents what we wish to become, instead of simply what we are. Ad astra per alas porci. 12