Accidental Gods Gathering the Memes of Production: Building Co-ordi-Nations with Josh Davila of Blockchain Socialist podcast
Those of you who've followed the podcast for any length of time know that I feel our capacity to connect across long distances, to share ideas in real time, is one of the things that has shifted our culture from being complex to super-complex, or hyper-complex, or whatever adjective we want to create that intimates a massive increase in the complexity of our communications and our actions. One key part of this is the evolution of blockchain, particularly in its Ethereum incarnation. Most of us know blockchain, if we know it at all, as the core of Bitcoin, but it's progressed far beyond this in the last decade, not only in the core technology, but in the thinking around it. Once, a libertarian playground, there is now a whole infrastructure of interconnected mycelial webs of progressive, regenerative communities who are building on and with Ethereum. I know this can often feel as if it's not part of our world - and it isn't an integral part - yet - in the way mobile phone technology is, or Zoom, or using a banking app, or a meditation app, or measuring your blood glucose in real time... but it's going to be a part of things in the same way these are soon. In the same way mobile phones became indispensable, I think some of the experiments in smart contracts and ways of hooking up currencies are going to become integral to our lives. And even if I'm wrong, there are a few certainties: The old paradigm is crumbling; the superorganism has to be dismantled; we do need to learn to live more regeneratively, connected more deeply to ourselves, each other and the web of life.
And it's this connection that inspires our guest today. Josh Dàvila is host of one of my must-listen podcasts, Blockchain Socialist, where he, often joined by Primavera de Filipi hold fascinating, deep, thoughtful conversations that take me right to the edge of my understanding so that I have to listen to each episode three or four times to really get to grips with the ideas. Josh is also an author. His book 'Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It' is essential reading for anyone who's remotely interested in this space. Like Diana Finch in last week's episode, he has the capacity to take mindbendingly complex ideas and render them straightforward and even obvious - and in Josh's case, he's rendering social concepts of how our culture is run and how we can change it, in parallel to the evolution of blockchain, the nature of Ethereum and what can be done with it. And then he and Primavera are right in the middle of a whole host of conversations about the concept of Coordi-Nations - which are what I would have called communities of passion and purpose, as opposed to communities of place (though there's nothing to stop a community of passion and purpose arising in a specific geographic location. In the end, I think that's likely to happen). But we're getting ahead of ourselves: If I'm right that 2024 is the year when the tipping points become obvious even in the mainstream, then we need the ideas that will shift us out of business as usual and into new ways of being. Josh and his co-thinkers are having those ideas and I dearly wanted to share some of them on the podcast. So here we go.
Josh's Website https://theblockchainsocialist.com/
Blockchain Radicals book https://theblockchainsocialist.com/blockchain-radicals-book-announcement/
in the UK here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/blockchain-radicals-building-beyond-capitalism-josh-davila/7441624?ean=9781914420856
Josh on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist
Check back here for the Audio book after February 6th
BlockchainGov.eu https://blockchaingov.eu/
Primavera De Filipe and Jessy Kate Co-ordi-Nations Blog https://jessykate.medium.com/coordi-nations-a-new-institutional-structure-for-global-cooperation-3ef38d6e2cfa