💻💶🌏 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet
Mar 6, 2024
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Exploring regenerative accelerationism, Greg Landua & Speaker John Ash discuss bending finance for land stewardship. They critique extractive capitalism and advocate for AI solutions. Reflecting on sustainable fisheries in Alaska and redefining trust for biospheric health. Trust in technology is emphasized with new models and decentralized structures for community management.
Proposing a biosphere alignment currency system requires grounding ecological definitions in specific locations to address diverse failure modes and cultural dynamics.
Acting in time to prevent negative consequences involves balancing long-term and shorter-term evolution, emphasizing foresight and constant regeneration to rectify occurrences.
Advocates for a socioeconomic transformation critiquing extractive capitalism urge a deeper understanding of trust, money, technology, and value to empower a shift towards regenerative land stewardship and shared wisdom principles.
Deep dives
Challenges of Prescribing Biosphere Alignment Currency
The podcast delves into the challenges of proposing a biosphere alignment currency system. It highlights the complexity and diversity of failure modes in such a system, emphasizing the need to ground ecological health definitions in people's specific locations. The discussion stresses the infinite complexity of soil types, biodiversity, and the cultural dynamics of human inhabitation.
Question of Timely Action for Preventing Negative Outcomes
The episode raises the question of acting in time to prevent negative consequences. It explores the interplay between long-term evolution and shorter-term memetic evolution, contemplating the need for foresight to avoid destabilization. The dialogue emphasizes the importance of always being in a state of regeneration to rectify negative occurrences and discusses the significance of taking proactive measures to address impending challenges.
Transition Towards a Socioeconomic Transformation
The conversation explores the potential for a socioeconomic transformation that prioritizes collective well-being. It critiques extractive capitalism's influence on sustainability discourse and information technologies. The podcast advocates for a deeper understanding of trust, money, technology, and value to empower a shift beyond techno-utopianism and doomer thinking, towards a system aligned with regenerative land stewardship and shared wisdom principles.
Challenges of Monetary Units and Inflation
The podcast explores the challenges associated with using monetary units as a fixed frame of reference in a world of constant changes and inflation. It discusses how the value of tokens is constantly shifting, leading to the need for constant recalibration in individuals' relationships with resources. The discussion delves into the limitations of monetary units in recordkeeping and decision-making, highlighting the lack of consideration for externalities in transactions.
Exploring Qualitative Record-keeping and Collective Intelligence
The episode delves into the potential for qualitative record-keeping and leveraging collective intelligence, particularly through AI technologies. It emphasizes the importance of moving beyond traditional quantitative record-keeping approaches to capture the nuanced and dynamic aspects of human interactions. The conversation centers on the intersection of meaning and numbers, highlighting the potential for more intelligent and nuanced systems of record-keeping that can adapt to the complexities of human relationships and decision-making.
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Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom.
Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.
It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we’re doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it’s well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.
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