In Conversation

Manda: This week I am talking with a friend of the podcast, Grace Rachmany. Grace said, on her sideways.earth GitHub paper the following: “The ecological movement is the largest movement in human history, Yet it’s fragmented because it’s using the tools of the master for coordination, resource sharing, and conflict resolution. While many technologists have created social networking technology, they have not succeeded in creating good coordination. Because social networking tools do not address enough of the primary coordination mechanics for scalable trust”. So this is what we’re exploring today. And Grace is one of the best people on the planet, I think, to be discussing this. Grace is a mother, a tech industry troubleshooter, author of over a hundred white papers and co-author of the book, So You’ve Got a DAO; a Handbook for Distributed and Connected Leadership. In terms of what we want to talk about today, she’s the executive director of the Decentralized Identity Foundation, which does what it says on the tin. And yes, there is a link in the show notes.

Manda: But if we unpick it just a little before we start, it has long been established on this podcast that the old paradigm is not fit for purpose and is in fact, in the process of disintegrating around us. We know that we need to create communities of place and purpose and passion. And I hope that if you’ve listened to any of our recent podcasts, you have ideas of how to do this. But having done so, we need our communities to link up with each other, to talk to other communities who share our values so that we can share all the things that matter in the world that we’re building; social credit, fiscal credit ideas, technology, and probably most importantly in the near future, food. And it’s this knowing who we can trust, working out systems of building that trust, working out what happens if the trust breaks or how we can grow it. This is the missing link that is so often overlooked as we craft our way forward to a world that works. And clearly, Grace has been thinking about it very hard. So I’m delighted she’s here. And just before we kick off, I want to talk a little bit about Elinor Ostrom and the concept of the Commons, because we mentioned this tangentially, and if you’re relatively new to the podcast, then you may not have come across this before. So Professor Elinor Ostrom is the only woman so far, I think, I’m fairly sure about this, to have won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Let that sink in for a moment. Kate Raworth definitely should have it, but we’ll talk about that another time. She won for “Her analysis of economic governance, especially in the Commons”.

Manda: And until then, thinking around Commons had been influenced a lot by a guy called Garrett Hardin, who had written an article called The Tragedy of the Commons. I’m not going to put that in the show notes, because it makes my toes curl and my teeth ache. But if you really want it, you can go off hunting. Hardin said, basically, that commons don’t work because people are selfish. I’m not going into any more detail than that because it’s fundamentally untrue. It’s just one of those things that people of a particular mindset want to believe. So Elinor looked at successful commons, of which there are many, and proposed eight guiding principles for those commons that work. She wrote a book called Governing the Commons; The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, which came out in 1990 and you would think that this was pretty much common knowledge by now. And even so, people still talk about the tragedy of the commons as if it were a thing. Anyway, I’m going to very briefly unpick Elinor’s eight principles, because I think they matter in the context of what Grace is saying.

Manda: The first is we need clearly defined boundaries. Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw units from the Commons must be clearly defined, as must the Commons itself. Then you need congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions. So we only hunt the deer that move from east to west on this phase of the moon and we might hunt the ones that move from west to east on another phase. Or we all share the inbye in the croft, and everyone is allowed to put one cow on it, but nobody is going to put two cows on it. And if anybody takes their cow off, nobody else slips another one on just in case. Then third: collective choice arrangements. Which is to say, people affected by the rules can participate in modifying those rules. And if that’s going to work, you need monitors who check that everything is working as it’s intended to. And then key, and this is something Grace talks about a lot; graduated sanctions. Which is to say, we don’t just throw you out of our entire tribe the first time you step a foot over a line that we all know is there, but maybe it’s a little bit flexible. So the grandmothers will talk to you, take you for a walk, explain why this is not a good idea, and perhaps there’s a timeout for a while, and perhaps there’s something that you need to do to demonstrate that you’re really sorry. The current pope has done this rather interestingly with the Society of Saint Pius the 10th. Let’s not go down that rabbit hole, though it’s quite interesting. So graduated sanctions, then six: there are conflict resolution mechanisms, which I hope is self-explanatory. But the key thing is that the people involved in the Commons have prearranged the conflict resolution mechanisms and all agreed on them. Whatever it is that we’re going to do, everybody buys in and everybody agrees in good faith to take part. For Commons that exist within some kind of state structure, then there is minimal recognition of rights to organise. Which is to say, the rights of people within the Commons to create their own structures, their own sanctions, their own conflict resolution mechanisms, is not challenged by the wider state authorities. We basically leave the Commons to self-organize.

Manda: And again, if you’re part of a wider system, then there is the concept of nested enterprises. And this really is where Grace’s work comes in. How do you create layers upon layers upon layers of multiple common systems working together? Who sets the rules? Who has the right to change the rules? Who checks that the rules are being kept? What are the sanctions? Who agrees to the sanctions? These are all the kinds of questions that have a tendency to get lost when we’re talking about how to create the communities that we want. We are pretty much versed in how to create local communities. We have a lot of ideas on governance structures and new political formats and all of those things. But stretching upwards from a commons to multiple commons, all working together, that’s where the gaps are. And that’s what Grace Rachmany has been thinking about with her amazing, beautiful, wide, sharp, deep thoughtfulness. So here we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome Grace Rachmany of Sideways Earth and the Decentralised Identity Foundation.

Manda: Grace Rachmany, welcome back to the Accidental Gods podcast. It’s a delight to be speaking to you again. So how are you and where are you on this brand new August morning?

Grace: Likewise, it’s a pleasure to be here. A delight, a delight as you said. I am in a coworking space in Slovenia, in Ljubljana, the capital. I mean, the capital is called the City of Love. What could be wrong with that?

Manda: Does it feel like that?

Grace: Well, it’s funny. I mean, that’s a whole cultural question. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, but I certainly love the city. And there’s lots of dragons, which I also love dragons, that’s kind of the mascot of the city.

Manda: Oh, cool. Yay!

Grace: Yay! Exactly. Yay!

Manda: All right, so a city of love. At some point we’ll explore the culture, but let’s not do that just now.

Grace: Yeah. Not this podcast. That’s a different podcast.

Manda: Yeah. Which we might get to at some point. You are doing so many really interesting things. You’re working with the Decentralised Identity Foundation, which we will get on to. And you have a GitHub called Sideways Earth, on which you say: ‘The ecological movement is the largest movement in human history’. And I would say that we talked to Liam Cavanagh a couple of weeks ago, and he says 86% of people are on board with this. So absolutely, it’s huge in our culture, and we are currently living with 8 billion people, which is more than the sum total there have ever been on the planet. So yes, ‘the ecological movement is the largest movement in human history, and yet it is fragmented because it’s using the tools of the master, the old paradigm, for coordination, resource sharing and conflict resolution. And the tools that we have do not address enough of the primary coordination mechanics for scalable trust’. Which makes all of my neurones light up. Somebody’s thinking about the stuff that really matters. So, Grace, tell us about scalable trust, what it is, why it matters and how we can build it. Over to you.

Grace: Okay, so the first thing is scale. When you start to talk about scale, almost everybody goes into a top down structure. We’re going to have our eco-whatever-it-is groups, and then we’re going to have the coordinator of the eco groups. And then above that, the next coordinator and above that…and that’s scale. And that is not what we want. Those are the master’s tools, right? It’s a hierarchical thing. We’re going to all be in one big organisation or on one big platform, and then we’ll all be in like, that’s not how it works. And so there’s two levels on which I’m not working. I’m not working at how to coordinate a community, and I’m not working at the global scale. I’m working at in between communities. That is, I’ve already coordinated my community or my pod or my local branch of the thing. And now I need my community to coordinate with other communities. And so this is really the infrastructure for coordinating among organisations.

Manda: Okay. This feels a lot like Primavera de Filippis Coordi-nations. Is it along similar lines?

Grace: It is along similar lines. I feel like some of the stuff that she’s worked on is a little less specific than mine, but it’s certainly the same level. And in fact, I ran into her at the De web camp recently and I said to her, you know, you and I have never had a one on one conversation, we should find an excuse to do that. And so we’re going to do that.

Manda: Oh, anytime the two of you want to come on the podcast and hold that conversation in public, just let me know. We’ll make the space.

Grace: All right. I will ask her. That would be super fun, wouldn’t it?

Manda: That would be exciting. Anyway. Go on.

Grace: So I’ve gotten down into more technical specificities of what that means. And in particular, as I mentioned to you, what’s the invisible infrastructure that we all take for granted that we’re using and that causes us to get the same results? And one of the obvious ones, which I don’t technically take care of, but I think is really important is ownership, right? If there’s no way for you to co-own something with a community, and the only way that we think about the commons as publicly owned by a government, then you don’t even have the legal structure for commoning. So you can’t do that.

Manda: That feels really important. Let’s maybe come back to that.

Grace: Yeah, we can get to that. And that is going to be more locally based and probably civil disobedience based, rather than a technological solution.

Manda: Okay. Right. And you’re interested in the tech solutions?

Grace: No, that’s just the piece of the puzzle the universe put on my lap. Let’s call it that way. I’m interested in whatever the universe put on my lap. And so let’s say we’re a bunch of bubbles, or a bunch of coordinated organisations. It could be my XR branch and it could be my local water cleanup club or my gardening club. Each of us belongs to a number of these organisations. What is the information that we need to communicate to one another in order for us to be a network of bubbles?

Manda: Yep. Okay.

Grace: And a lot of times what happens is we try to onboard all our groups to the same platform, and that so far I have not seen as a successful model. Oh, let’s all put all of our groups on high/low, or let’s put all our groups on Mattermost or Slack. It doesn’t matter what and then we’ll be coordinated, but you know, that doesn’t work.

Manda: It’s just another place for people to get lost. Yeah.

Grace: And it’s another centralisation of power, right? Another platform. So really what we’re talking about is how do we communicate among each other and what is it we’re communicating? And right now what we’re communicating is KYC and money. Kyc: know your customer. I’m going to give you my passport and my government issued ID so that you’ll know who I am as a real person. The government has authority to tell you that I’m a person, right? And I can show you that as my proof of personhood, you could say, or my proof of validity that I’m human, which is okay, great.

Manda: Maybe.

Grace: And then we’ll exchange money. Or maybe we’ll put it in a pool together, an escrow together, if we want to coordinate together. But that’s about the limit of it. And none of that information that I’ve just described, like the government’s recognition of me and the fact that I do or don’t have money, are the information that we need to coordinate a climate majority, for example. That’s not the useful information. And so that’s really where it is. So the first thing that we need to communicate is who’s a member. Like if you’re trying to create a large, even just a movement of people on the street, you need to know who’s in and who’s out and who’s in good standing. And who’s been to several movements before. You know, who’s a legit member. We don’t know that. And one of the consequences is that we do have people who are dysregulated in some way or another, and they go from group to group wanting to contribute to the movement, but we don’t have any way of signalling to the other group, hey, this person has, you know, they’re great the first three weeks and then they speak out of turn and then they dominate and then whatever. Right? And we don’t have the right to tell that person, don’t do that here. Because who are you to tell me?

Manda: Okay, so we don’t have group rules that everybody’s agreed to and bought into?

Grace: We might have the group rules, but we don’t have any way to do graduated sanctions. So I’m going to just keep going back to Ostrom’s principles, right?

Manda: Okay. Yes.

Grace: How can I do graduated sanctions if the only thing you are is you’re a volunteer who shows up, right? The only thing I can do is either kick you out or not kick you out. I can’t say, hey, why don’t you take this communications or sensitivity course and then come back? Otherwise, I’m going to withdraw your membership card. Or I can’t say, okay, we’re going to have three levels of membership; we’re going to have basic, we’re going to have trusted and we’re going to have council members. And I can signal that to another group. Like this person who goes to the other group is either just a regular member, a trusted member, or a council member. And now that other group knows how to relate to that person. Oh, you’re a trusted member of that group, that means I can tell you some secrets about where the next action is going to be. But if you’re not a trusted member, it’s like, you know, we’ll send you a text five minutes beforehand, right?

Grace: This is the first thing. Like, what level of trust do you have with what other groups? And then I as a group can say these are my trusted partner groups. But if there’s no membership card, I can’t know. And how that works today in reality, I saw this in the Ecovillage movement, which is where I did a lot of the studying of these patterns. I went around during the time when travel was restricted in certain ways and so they weren’t necessarily taking regular volunteers. So my ecovillage in Slovenia called ahead and said, Grace is okay. And then when I came back, they said, how was it at this place? And they collected the trust information in their head about the new eco village I visited. And that’s how the information about trust is collected. It’s not very efficient. And the leaders of these movements get burned out because they’re carrying the information of telling the other guy, hey, don’t let that person in. And they’re carrying the information, plus the weight of carrying the information, plus the responsibility of saying bad things about the other person, even though they really don’t want to. And they burn out.

Manda: I can imagine. Yeah. Okay.

Grace: Like you don’t have a list on the Excel spreadsheet file of the person that you know, he’s great and everything, but sometimes they’re dysregulated and you need like a buddy system for that particular person for them to be a productive member. We don’t have any of that in our movements and we don’t have the capacity to deal with it. And we’re not backing each other. So I’ll just tell you a funny example. So I ran a small technical writing company, and one day I get this emergency call from a client and they’re like, we have this really super technical thing. I said, okay, I’m going to send you somebody. He’ll do the work and he’s brilliant, he’s a genius and he’s going to come there. And for whatever religious reasons, he won’t look anybody in the eye, or maybe neurodivergence, and he won’t shake anybody’s hand and he won’t take any notes, and then he’s going to listen to everything you say, and then he’ll turn off his phone for ten days and not talk to you. And then he will give you the exact, precise technical manual that you need.

Manda: Wow. Okay.

Grace: They said, look, we have a hard deadline: send him. Two weeks later, they called me and they said exactly what you said happened.

Manda: Right. And so they were happy because they were forewarned and if they hadn’t been they’d have been on the phone within 20 minutes going, this guy, we can’t have him; send someone else. But you have integrity and you have the capacity to read people.

Grace: Well, my group called Technical Writing Company in this case, knew that the other group called Company in that case, needed a resource called Barry, and I was able to provide the resource with all of the adjacent information with the resource, so that they would know how to handle it. So it might be, listen, I need somebody to glue themselves to an aeroplane. Okay, I’ve got five people who will glue themselves to an aeroplane, but you need to know this one’s a this/that/the other thing and you know, they’ll have these limitations and they can only work during the whatever it is.

Manda: Yes. But the weight of that. I’m imagining, because you and I both know that we’re not just working in the material world, logistical world. We’re also working in a world where the energetics of that and emotional flows matter and resilience matters and co-regulation matters. And because those things are very hard to quantify and this is why people burn out, because that’s not there. So also, partly because I just ended up watching something called Undeclared War. It was an espionage binge watch, and I don’t really watch television, but I got lured in because tech and espionage. And I’m looking at how easy it is, the people with the best capacity to read other people and fit in, are often not necessarily the ones you actually trust. So gaming the system, particularly, if we want someone to glue themselves to an aeroplane, and we would like them not to be a mole for the authorities, thank you, is a really hard one I would say.

Grace: I think moles is probably the hard ones. Like that’s the hardest ones that I don’t really know how to solve. And I’m in this industry, which is the decentralised technology and there are moles there. And we do pass around secret information about, you know, we think this one. But like it’s been 20 years and nobody has any proof of that. But I’m going to put that aside. But what I am pointing to is where trust is. Like you and I have trust between us, but to some degree we have trust because of the context and the groups that we belong to. And there’s social consequences of that. In our case, because of the way you and I are operating in this particular milieu, there isn’t a consequence. But if I were being sent by a company or if I were being sent by Sideways; let’s say Sideways.earth is my organisation and there’s a few of us there. It’s not huge, right. And I mentioned Jack and James, who you’ve had on the podcast and who I’ve worked with in the past. I could just be name dropping or you could look and you could say, oh yeah, we actually did something together. But if I go and represent myself as part of this thing called Sideways Earth, and I represent myself poorly, you might not want to talk to anybody else from Sideways Earth again, right? And sideways earth might kick me out. Or the opposite. They might call you up and say, hey, listen, Grace has really had an off day and how can we make it up to you, Manda?

Grace: And that’s where group trust fits in. A group of people, like in an eco village, makes sure everybody eats. And if somebody is sick, they get the day off and the group makes up for that. And if somebody has a bad day, the group makes up for it. And if somebody is amazing, then the group can kind of lean on them more. And if somebody is amazing but being lazy, the group can say, hey, we really know you’re capable of more than that, and we need you to do more than that. And the group can also say, hey, Grace, you talk too much. And they have the right to tell me that.

Manda: Yeah, they’ve earned the kind of social capital. You don’t talk too much. But anyway.

Grace: It’s not necessarily earned. It could be earned, right? But I’ve put myself in that group agreeing to their terms and agreeing to enforce the terms among the group and agreeing that I’ll only get to keep my membership card if I agree to those terms. Or maybe I’m trying to get from basic member to trusted member, and I know what the actions are that I’ll need to take in order to get from basic member to trusted member status, and therefore I’m going to behave myself. And if they tell me, Grace, you talk too much, I’m going to listen to them because I know I’m not going to get that trusted member status.

Manda: I’m leaning quite heavily in this moment on Graeber and Wengrows Dawn of Everything, and my reframed understanding of tribes and tribalism and what it is at the very deep limbic level, to be amongst a group of people where you share that flow of unspoken information. And I remember specifically saying there were three clans, not tribes, within the whole of the Americas. And I think it was the Elk, the Coyote, and Let’s say the Eagle, I can’t remember. But if you were Elk Clan and you needed to walk away from the people you were with, because they’re just a bunch of idiots and you need to leave, anyone in the Elk Clan, even if technically your tribes were at war, had a duty and a right to take you in. And you could go from the top of North America to the tip of South America, and Elk Clan would look after you. And that seems to have been an inviolable rule. And at the other end of that was the social technologies that existed if somebody came back with what they called the Wetiko virus. Which was this person is just completely no longer integratable. But we have a lot of social technologies to get them back into integration. And it feels to me that a lot of this is really deep subcortical stuff. And in E.O. Wilson’s phraseology of Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, technology of Gods that we’re still working with that Palaeolithic sensing of what it is to be tribe. And how I know when I’m safe amongst people with whom it’s okay to be vulnerable and know that they will trust me enough to be vulnerable in their stead and in their turn, even. And then that flow of safety and co-regulation and coordination can move. And none of this is ever written down or even really writable, because you can’t encode sensing to that extent, I think. But what I’m feeling from sideways.earth and the others is that you are managing to encode some of it in our technology of Gods world. Is that right?

Grace: So yes, all of that. And there are aspects of it that can’t be encoded and aspects that can be encoded. Like how much I trust myself to say things around people and all that. These are different things, right? Trust isn’t one thing, it’s what do I trust you for? So as you are aware, I belong to the people of the book, and the book encodes it. And if you’re thrown out, you’ll be outside the tent for seven days. And then you do a ritual bath and you do this many sacrifices, and then you give your best bull and la la la la, and then you’ll be reinstated in the tribe. And that’s written in the Old Testament.

Manda: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Grace: It’s written exactly what you’ve described. This is a nomadic peoples, right? Like my people don’t do well once they’re settled. You know, they’ll be there for 50 to 100 years and get really out of their heads and not believe in their God anymore.

Manda: And have to move on.

Grace: And be kicked out, right. And have arguments about whether we should be more religious or more secular. So familiar, right? But as a nomadic people, this list of regulations, 613 of them, is a protocol for what you’re talking about. And if I go to one of my religious institutions today, there’s a protocol right now because of the security situation, where if I want to go pray, I know exactly how to identify the people. If you go to a synagogue today on a prayer day, Saturday or Friday night, it’ll look closed. And I know where to look for the people who are there, usually wearing black, they’re two guys and I know where to look for them and I’ll look at them, they’ll look at me, they’ll come up to me, they’ll ask some questions that I would know if I were one of the tribe. There’s 613 laws, right? So there’s a lot of questions. And the prayers go in a certain order and they’ll ask me certain questions and let me in. Now I look pretty harmless. If I looked a little different, they might ask more questions or be more suspicious, or maybe even check my bag. I usually don’t bring a bag. But there’s still a protocol. And then I’m trusted to go into a building to pray. And that’s all I’m trusted for at that moment, but I had to pass the protocol rules.

Manda: Right. Okay. Got you.

Grace: So if you were in a clan, you might have certain tattoos or beads or something that you could actually show body modifications that are only given to certain people who reached trust level number five, right? And this is universal.

Manda: Okay. Yeah. And, you know, things that you wouldn’t know if you hadn’t gone through the initiations that take you to there. And once you’ve gone through the initiations, if you’re still alive at the other end, then you embody that level of understanding.

Grace: Yeah. And so if you’ve glued yourself to an aeroplane, or accidentally spilled some tomato soup on a painting or something, you know, horrible terrorist acts where nobody gets hurt, you’ve gotten some cred, right? You’ve got some street cred. And the question would be, how do I represent that in a digital way? Now I don’t have to wear it on my body. I could have a digital certification in a secure app on my device where I hold those certifications and nobody even knows I have those certifications. But if I’ve got a certain certification that says, because I published some unpopular thing about climate change, my government now wants me, that secret certification could be read only by safe houses.

Manda: Okay. And I read the other day that Claude can now hack into any computer on the planet. Are we saying that the AI will not be able to hack into this?

Grace: I’m not saying any of that. There are always going to be problems. Like I’m talking about experimenting with something at a regional level. I’m not talking about I’ve secured at a global level yet. I’m talking about, hey, could we experiment with this now?

Manda: Okay. All right. There’s a QR code that only something you recognise is or whatever.

Grace: Yeah. A verifiable credential is what we call that. In the decentralised identity world I have verifiable credentials, I could show that credential to an OpenStreetMap app, and it would show me the safe houses, but it wouldn’t show you the safe houses. And you wouldn’t even know that that credential existed unless you were a safe house. This is technologically possible.

Manda: Oh, I have so many ideas for the new novel as you speak!

Grace: Great, great. Exactly. This is what I’m trying to tell you. So this is completely invisible to us, or we don’t think about it, right? If I go to a rent a car, I can walk into a car rental place that has never seen me before and I didn’t reserve and give them a piece of plastic and they will be able to validate that I’m allowed to drive. It’s the exact same digital technology. It exists, and it can be done in a privacy preserving way. Because if I’ve got a plastic driver’s license in my wallet, who knows? The government who issued it and me. We can mimic that digitally with verifiable credentials today and digital identities today. Not government issued identities, because government feels that they own that data. But we could do that within our communities in a way that would be privacy preserving, in a way that there is either no database held at all, like if you give me a piece of paper, I could hold the piece of paper, or you could have a database just of your own members. It could be done either way. But you don’t have a database of anybody else’s members.

Manda: And can it be distributed? So there’s no central database. Is this a distributable thing?

Grace: Absolutely. Okay so this is about registries or the next level up. And so that’s like accreditation authority. I’m going to talk about dojos rather than a university, right. Is this an accredited dojo? Well it’s accredited by Tae Kwon Do, but not the Aikido people. And probably within the Aikido people, there’s those Aikido people and these Aikido people, right? And these Aikido people have a list of the dojos that they recognise and those Aikido people have a list of the dojos. That’s accreditation. So there may be public or private lists of the accredited organisations. These are my lists. This is Grace’s list or Manda’s list of the accredited organisations I trust. I may or may not publish that list. So the Ecovillage network for example, they have a list of ecovillages, they have a list of eco projects. And then there’s a list of intentional communities. And then there’s a list that Oasis, which is the French Ecovillage network, has a different list. And all of those lists may or may not overlap, but I as the accepting authority, like if I’ve got my membership card in a village, when I show you the membership card, and you’ve got bicycles and you give them to any eco villager for free for up to a day, but you’ve got to be on the list that you recognise. And you’re like, yeah, I like the French Ecovillage network, but the Italian Ecovillage network, not for whatever reason.

Manda: Yeah, they crash the bikes all the time.

Grace: They crash the bike, whatever. They talk too loud.

Manda: We don’t believe this, Italian people listening, we don’t believe this.

Grace: No, no, no, they’re wonderful people. But, you know, for whatever reason, I accept this list and not that list. Or these ones have to pay a deposit because of the past history of them. I can now look electronically at my registry list, and it says that membership card is from an entity that I recognise. And you don’t need to know me, you just need to know that I’ve shown you a credential from a member organisation, that you have a list of the member organisations, and there’s no central database anywhere.

Manda: Yeah. Okay. All of this feels to me as if this is new paradigm thinking within the structures of the old paradigm. And I’m curious as to… So we had multiple power outages yesterday. I was listening to Microdose this morning about how France had to massively cut down its nuclear power output, because the rivers that cool the reactors were too hot. And so as we move forward into a world of increasing instability, or decreasing stability, this feels very tech heavy. But I guess maybe are we going to be able to do this on un-smart phones? How are we moving it into a world where we’re trying to shift from the old paradigm to the new paradigm, I suppose, is my question.

Grace: Yeah, this is a hard question, and I don’t know the answer to it. But again, can we try this at a regional level question? But I’m the director of the Decentralised Identity Foundation. These types of decentralised technologies have been developed and are being deployed in places where internet and electricity are intermittent. So these credentials come with sort of a self validation thing. And it may be that if mine has expired, you won’t be able to know. Or if mine was withdrawn. Because there is an online list of who had their credentials revoked.

Manda: Okay. But you’ll be able to know by tomorrow morning when the power comes back on. At least for now. Alrighty, so where do you see this going? Let’s start with is this growing? That would be the first question. Are people understanding the need for this and is it expanding?

Grace: It’s very hard. So I’ll tell you where it is and where it’s been and how it’s been difficult for us to deploy it. So where it is right now is some of this technology is being developed specifically within the Linux Foundation, which we are also under, for the maintainers of the Linux code who are all over the world. And they’re going to be having a ceremony in October at the Linux gathering in Prague, where they visually have to see each other, so I know this is a person and not a bot, and trade a credential saying I met this other maintainer in person, and now I can give you this credential, this digital credential. And if I’m holding 10 or 100 of them, I was actually at that event and I met this person in person. And if I’m holding enough of those credentials, for sure I’m a person. It’s like probability of personhood. They call it proof of personhood, but I call it probability of personhood.

Manda: Yes. Very Audrey Tang. You’re only going to trust the people where you’ve looked in their eye and have shaken their hand, and they felt like a human, reasonable probability of personhood. Okay. Brilliant.

Grace: So that’s a trust protocol or a ceremony as they’re calling it. And now I can’t tell you if I trust the person, but I know they were a person. That might be one type of ceremony.

Manda: Yeah, I met them as a human.

Grace: And in the maintainer code group, it’ll be I trust them as a person.

Manda: Because?

Grace: I trust them as a maintainer, because we’ve been maintainers together and now I saw them as a human being. And we’ve been maintaining this code, and we are a closed community of people who have been maintaining the Linux code. The kernel code. And so that’s the first implementation that we expect to be launched in October.

Manda: Can you just talk a little bit? I realise we’re going down a rabbit hole, but I’m really curious because Linux is something that I’ve heard about but not been in for a long time. So tell us about maintaining the code, just for curiosity. What are you doing and why?

Grace: Okay, so I am not a Linux foundation. Like I’m not a Linux code developer, but I will tell you what we’re doing in Decentralised Identity Foundation with the same thing. Linux is an open source operating system that is running my computer right now. It’s quite easy to use. It is really not a big deal to move off of windows and onto Linux.

Manda: Or Mac?

Grace: It might be harder to make your Mac box into a Linux box. I’ve not done it, but you can do dual boot quite easily on a Mac. Anyway, it’s an operating system and it’s maintained as open source code by volunteers. Now, these volunteers tend to work for companies that are using it, because Linux is the most widely used operating system in terms of running the servers of the world, not for your home boxes. But it runs fine on your home box and somebody has to maintain it, just like somebody has to write the code. And that’s who these people are.

Manda: Okay. All right. Thank you. And it matters partly because it’s not, my understanding is, it’s not being captured by predatory capitalism yet. Because it’s open source, it’s run by volunteers, it’s not owned by Microsoft, it’s not owned by Palantir I hope. They might use it, I guess, in some of their deep systems. But it’s not OpenAI, it’s not anthropic, it’s just there as a kind of radical answer or a radical option to the really capital heavy digital world that we swim in. Is that fair?

Grace: It’s more complicated than that. So Linux was developed as fully open source, like one of the primary users or primary companies that’s been using it as Red hat, which was acquired by Microsoft, Visio, Microsoft, or IBM. My memory may not serve.

Manda: Okay, but one of them.

Grace: And the Mac operating system is based on Linux. Ios is based on Linux.

Manda: Okay. But it forked.

Grace: It forked. That’s a fork. So there are distros, they’re called distros rather than forks, of Linux, which are completely not captured. And there are distros of Linux that are more captured. And so it depends which distro you have. And my actual computer is something called a nitro key, which is actually hardware that’s been cleaned up by open source freaks in Germany and shipped to me. It’s not the most hardcore private distro because that one’s harder to use, but it’s a very clean distribution of Linux.

Manda: Okay. And you’re running Zoom. I mean, you’re running otherwise fairly normal software on it.

Grace: Yeah, absolutely. I’m running Slack on it. It’s totally fine. You can run anything you can run in a browser obviously, but quite a lot of Zoom does have a version for Linux. It’s quite common now and it’s not harder to use, there’s just slightly different buttons.

Manda: Okay. And when they go to Prague and they hold a ceremony, does it have a spiritual component or are they using ceremony to mean protocol?

Grace: They mean protocol.

Manda: Oh rats. There I was thinking a whole bunch of otherwise tech people might be going to enter into some kind of interesting spiritual stuff.

Grace: Yeah, well, you do have to be a special person to be an open source person. If you’ve ever gone to an open source conference of any kind, you will feel immediately a completely different vibe than a normal tech conference. It’s a different kind of person. I actually brought a friend to Fosdem, which is the largest one that there is. It’s in Brussels every year and again been slightly captured by certain large organisations. But I brought a friend to Fosdem and my friend said, these people, there’s something about them.

Manda: How interesting.

Grace: It’s like, oh, you don’t really know what open source is, do you?

Manda: Okay, so what is it that’s there? It’s more radical? It’s less master’s tools and more new paradigm? Give us a flavour for those of us who are never going to be able to attend one of these.

Grace: The people who contribute to open source, just like the people who contribute to any non-profit movement or doing things they believe in. They’re developing software either because it’s their artistic expression. And some people may say that code is not art, but it’s their artistic expression. It’s a creative endeavour. Or because it’s something they need themselves, or because they believe in human rights and they want privacy preserving technology. I mentioned before DWeb Camp, decentralised web camp. I mean, it was a week long camp experience with people of all ages who have been fighting for internet freedom forever.

Manda: Right. And how many, roughly? Are you allowed to tell us?

Grace: There are about 500 people there. No, it’s not secret. And after that, I went to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is the group of people who run the internet. And that’s done in a fully decentralised way, in some way. It’s a little captured, but the people who run the internet are, again, volunteers who come to these meetings three times a year, and they talk about protocols. And just to tell you how interesting it is, just to give you a taste, I was in a meeting for an entire hour where people were super excited that somebody had put two slashes into their identifier protocol. Because it’s illegal as a identifier on the internet. So like after HTTP, there’s two slashes, right? And so that already is used and you can’t use that syntax. So they spent an hour talking about oh, should we do three slashes? Or should we take the slashes out? And should it have dashes in it? And we didn’t reach a conclusion, but boy, was everybody super excited, for an hours long conversation.

Manda: Oh, right. Yeah. I can see a fork of my life where this was, where I went and I’m actually quite sad that I didn’t go down that route. Anyway, go on.

Grace: This is how geeky it gets, right? So that’s why I’m starting with this is the result that we’re trying to get to, and this is where we are. Where we are is the first people using it are super geeky. In my organisation, we have about 12 working groups. And so what I’m going to do is take the same implementation and set it up so each working group can decide their own criteria for membership. Not me, the executive director, but each working group. And I don’t get to approve working groups. I can approve membership because I know somebody signed a contract to become a member. Which is basically an intellectual property rights because we do everything open source. So I can say, yes, they have signed a membership. And then they can use what I’ve given them, this credential to go to a group or to contribute to our GitHub, because they’ve signed the intellectual property agreement. Okay, it’s not the most exciting use case, but it’s a use case.

Manda: No, but it’s a test. And to see does it work and how scalable is it?

Grace: Exactly. And then each working group will determine what the criteria are for membership in their criteria. So is it both chair people have to approve you or five members have to approve you? And similarly, how do you get kicked out? And so this is unlike most systems on the internet. It’s going to be designed so that at least three people have to kick you out and not one godlike administrator. Right?

Manda: Right. Okay.

Grace: And then we have some working groups that are joint working groups with other organisations, like the trust over IP Foundation or the W3C. And so now if they’ve got membership cards and we’ve got membership cards, those joint working groups allow somebody new to show up in there and show their membership card. And so this is the first proof of concept that I’m working on right now, to see that this at least works and is something that any group, council or chair people could implement.

Manda: Okay. Alrighty. So we’ll come back in a year and see how it’s going. Let me just recap because we went down a number of rabbit holes. So we’re looking for a scalable system to help spread trust because as we said at the top, we don’t address enough of the primary coordination mechanics for scalable trust. And we’re still using old paradigm tools for coordination, resource sharing, and conflict resolution. So I’m trying to spread my brain out because it seems to me resource sharing, we’re talking economies, essentially, conflict resolution is largely conflict over how resources are shared, as well as if we call emotional resources and spiritual resources and human credential resources as a resource as well as material things. We’re basically talking about the whole of human being stepping away from the death cult of predatory capitalism and the captured hierarchical legal structures that we have at the moment, and moving towards a much more distributed, person based, even if mediated by technology, it’s still got a very human flaw to it. And the human networking concept to it, that requires, I would think, a degree of self-regulation and co-regulation. It requires a degree of emotional literacy, or it would be good if it had a degree of emotional literacy in order to function. And if it does function, we are getting to a point where we can step out of the shadow of the old economic system and the old legal structures. Am I extrapolating too far, or is that where you think you’re heading to?

Grace: Yes, that’s exactly right. I might describe it a little bit differently, but basically what I would describe is something like: I’m trying to create digital representation of how societies function normatively or historically or biologically.

Manda: Good societies that function well.

Grace: I’m not making a judgement call.

Manda: Okay. Because some societies function hierarchically extremely efficiently. It’s just not very pleasant if you’re not near the top.

Grace: I’m very afraid of making a judgement, because I’m aware of my humanness and of my inability to or limitations in knowing what’s good. Like, I certainly think I know, don’t you?

Manda: But I’m less. I have more hubris than you have, I think. But anyway, go on.

Grace: I don’t know. We can have a competition one day, of hubris. But I’m trying to design something where organisations will co-regulate. And what I would say is something like, if you can’t have a membership card unless you’ve joined a group, then at least some level of regulation is required. Or some level of groupiness is required. Now, some of these groups may be not to your liking or my liking, or dysfunctional in some way, or antisocial in some way. But then they won’t be on the accreditation list of something I would want to work with. The fundamental thing is, now we can at least recognise the group that we have affinity with and do something with them as groups. And I’ll talk about the resource sharing after I talk about the conflict resolution. Just because the conflict resolution in some way is super low hanging fruit.

Manda: Yeah, okay.

Grace: So the first level is within my group, if I’m issuing you a membership card: A, B, C, D, right? And so I went to dinner at a family thing, like distant family. And they said, oh yes, Steph’s kids always dress nice. Okay, all right, my group has a reputation, as dressing nice. And my mom would not have us show up to dinner where we were invited as a family member without something that we brought and in proper attire. There’s a regulation authority.

Manda: So that was your group rules?

Grace: Yeah, that’s the group rules, right? So that’s within the group. We are completely agnostic about that. Your group decides its rules. Your group decides how to punish or not punish or graduated sanctions. Or if there’s a king, not within the realm of our technology, because our technology is from group to group. Now, let’s say we said that we’re a group of ecological friendlies. We’re going to call it the Ecological Friendlies and we’ve got ten organisations that want to collaborate and we write up a code of conduct and we say, okay, we’re going to invite each other to each other’s events, and you need to have this code of conduct in order to be on the Ecological Friendlies group. And now your group is on the accreditation list or maybe your group holds a credential that says, we are on the accreditation list. And now I go over and I have dinner with you guys and you use single use dishes.

Manda: Whoa. Okay, that wasn’t on the list. Yeah.

Grace: Okay. Right? And I say, hey, guys, look, you know, it’s not on the list, but we don’t think it’s all right. And they say, look, it’s not on the list. And they were made of bamboo or paper and not of plastic. And now we have a mediation authority, because when we wrote the code of conduct, each one of our groups volunteered four hours of mediation time per month and now you and I can go to mediation with one of those third organisations, not us, and something will be decided that is a graduated sanction.

Manda: Okay. Or not. We might all decide that bamboo plates are the thing and that becomes new norm. I’m not suggesting it would, but we can create a new norm within the group of groups.

Grace: Yeah, but only if the bamboo was, you know, an invasive species that was being utilised or whatever. Exactly. And that mediation authority,  so you talked about graduated sanctions and you talked about conflict resolution as having to do with distribution of resources. I think that’s probably the least interesting case. The more interesting case is can we uphold our values?

Manda: Okay. Yes. All right. Yes.

Grace: Are we upholding our values? And that’s the low hanging fruit. So if we had ten organisations that had these membership cards that co-wrote a code of conduct and each donated four hours a month to mediation, we would now start to have the structure for, it’s not exactly a legal institution or a jurisdiction, but just think about the example I got. That’s an example we care about, but we have no way of holding one another to account for not using single use materials when we have a picnic. And it’s so small, it’s not the most important thing, but that’s where it starts. It starts with, okay, now we want to have the food rescue organisations in Shropshire, and we want to have the incredible edibles in Shropshire, and we want to have the organic farms in Shropshire who are all dealing with food stuff, adhere to a set of values. Those membership cards mean a lot.

Manda: Yes, yes. All right. So I’m thinking about stuff that I was listening to recently. Exactly that. Somebody spoke, they were in the States and they said people are producing organic beef on feedlots that are literally hectares of concrete with cows on, but they’re being fed organic cereals from Brazil. And that means it’s organic meat and people don’t know. And how do we help people to eat food that is both nutrient dense with the right nutrients and adheres to their values. And you end up with a certificating authority, like the organic authority in the US, that is being massively abused. And then somebody else comes in with a new, let’s say, pasture for life certificating authority that then undermines it, until somebody finds a way to run the edges of that. So what we’re trying to do, what you’re trying to do, I am hearing, is to create something where the values matter more than the ticking legal boxes. And that feels to me as if everybody who cared about, let’s say organic food in the US, actually cared about planetary well-being and human well-being, they would not be running beef feedlots and feeding them imported ‘organic’ soya. So how do we get to the shared values? I’m hearing you that nobody had really thought to put single use plates in the system.

Manda: And now we’re looking at, well, what is a single use plate and is it a compostable single use plate? And the compost really wants it and it’s useful and it costs considerably less, let’s say there’s less carbon embodied in it than an actual plate. And we’ve done the maths, and you could use 2000 of these for one actual plate that’ll probably break in less than 2000 meals and and it’s a good thing. And that feels like that’s the kind of conversation we can be having. Is there an evolutionary mechanism for what are the values we’re actually living by? Because life is so complex. Our lives are so complex and the plate is not just a plate. There’s so many parameters of was your multiple wash plate imported from China and made by five year olds in a slave factory and ours we pressed it ourselves out of newspaper. I don’t know. It only lasts one time but the newspaper comes from next door. There’s so many variables. And I’m wondering, in real use, insofar as you’ve used it, are we seeing a kind of increasing evolution and nuance of values? Is that making sense as a question?

Grace: Yes, and that’s a big leap. How I envision it being used is something like what I mentioned to you. A bunch of groups, ecovillages eco farms, particularly in the area where people have resources that they would prefer to share rather than sell.

Manda: Yes, we have that.

Grace: Or a bicycle network. Or let’s have a fleet instead of everybody having an individual car. Or let’s have a tool sharing where we want to implement some level of sharing economy, food distribution, so nobody goes hungry. Let’s try this out. And in terms of the values that we’re going towards, I think they get to get organically coming up from the bottom. I mean, there’s a couple of things. The first is I don’t think that I am qualified to decide what they are; I don’t think anyone is qualified to decide what they are. But the other one is that, you know, mustard seed, right? The values are local. You know, there’s a mustard seed story in the Buddhist texts, and there’s a mustard seed story in the Christian texts? In the Buddhist texts, there’s a woman who’s lost her child and the Buddha says, go around and find a house with a mustard seed from a house where no one has died and she can’t find it. And a mustard seed is something that everyone has in India. But in the Christian scriptures, I don’t know the story, but a mustard seed is really rare in the Middle East.

Manda: Uh Huh, okay. Right. So it’s got a different value and a different message behind it.

Grace: So I don’t want to impose those values and they may change. And if there’s a big flood or if the government crumbles, inshallah. The circumstances are going to change, but if these groups have a coordination mechanism and a conflict resolution mechanism and okay, we really don’t want to eat packaged foods, but the food recovery system has found this much stuff was going to get thrown out by the supermarkets, and we’ve got this many families. Well, that’s what we’re going to eat because right now it’s the most ecological. So it’s non-judgmental, but what it’s simply doing is enabling communities to find their own values, because the values will be practical for the circumstances. And I always think of values as a homeostasis thing. Like I want transparency and I want privacy, but they have to be at the right balance with one another, right?

Manda: Because there’s an intersection where those two cancel each other out.

Grace: Exactly. So I always think of values as a bit of a homeostasis that is appropriate for the circumstances.

Manda: Okay. And flexible. And so what I’m hearing, I think, is the absolute key to this is that people approach it in good faith and that they have internal flexibility. Because yesterday, exactly what you said about packaged food, I can see it coming down the line. In the UK, the supermarkets wrote to the government last week, saying it’s when, not if, we have a food crisis and it will be this year. Which is a big admission from a system that is basically designed to keep the shelves full and nobody even thinks about where their food comes from. So we are going to have a food crisis and we will want as much as possible for local food to be local. And if the local supermarket is throwing out ultra processed food in plastic bags, we’re all going to have to just eat it because it’s what’s there. And so finding ways to help people have the emotional self-regulation, to be resilient, to be flexible, because we live in a world where people can create their own internal boundaries and they can become quite brittle and quite rigid. And good faith, internal flexibility, where I can talk to you about my sense that we’re up against a boundary that I hold, that probably doesn’t obtain any more; that four hours of mediation are going to be crucial, aren’t they? And it’s going to have to be good mediation by people who also understand how to mediate. Yes?

Grace: Maybe.

Manda: Okay. Unpick that.

Grace: Okay. So the requirement is that you want to be part of a group and that the groups hold the resources rather than the individuals hold the resources. Those are the requirements of this system. And let’s say we’ve got a group and our group is a neighbourhood group and we didn’t exactly get to pick the people there, and there’s a few people and blah, blah, blah. But our neighbourhood needs to collaborate with the incredible edibles. Our neighbourhood has solar panels or our neighbourhood is a working class neighbourhood and we know how to fix stuff, but we haven’t grown any food. And we either are or aren’t, you know, some of some of these guys who know how to fix stuff they aren’t so self regulated, but we bring them in with a buddy. Because we need as a group, as a neighbourhood, to provide some service that our town needs as this food shortage shows up. And we know we need food, and we’ve got some really great handymen, and some of them are very spiritually developed and some of them aren’t. And some of their kids are immature because children are just immature children. And we as a neighbourhood regulate that and take care of that internally. And those worksmen, we’re going to send them to you and they’re going to say some words that maybe, you know.

Manda: Racist stuff to the people who are looking after the cows.

Grace: And maybe not racist, but they might use some inappropriate words or whatever, but they’re going to get the fence fixed and we’re going to deal with it as a community.

Manda: Interesting. Okay. And is it the vision that you think the dysregulated people who, let’s say maybe racist, misogynist, whatever; is it your experience, or is it the vision that they mellow with time? I mean, I think this is Rebecca Solnit’s of Paradise Made in Hell, that people who might have been savagely in opposing tribes and potentially, I don’t know, white male supremacist; at the point when the earthquake has hit and everybody is having to dig out their neighbours from their houses and build a shack that you can all shelter in, find themselves less triggered by the stuff that used to kick them off the day before. Is that a thing?

Grace: I’m sure that’s a thing. Like you look at anywhere where tragedy has struck and how human beings behave humanly. So first of all, there’s a faith in human capacity, I guess, to the racism thing, or whatever antisocial behaviours we may have, I want to say a few things. One is I don’t think racism is as big as it’s brought out to be. And it is natural. Tribalism is natural. Now we’re talking about tribals. We’re tribals and we’re going to feed our tribe first and that tribe second. And I don’t have a strong value judgement about that, although I’m a highly tolerant person and I grew up in a very mixed neighbourhood, and I grew up to think that racism is bad. I recognise that this is part of our human evolution, and the flip side of tribalism and the cultural coherence that we need, the flip side is racism. And wanting to stick with my tribe and my behaviours and my religion and my values, it’s just an aspect of how we need to organise as humans and of the homeostasis, because there is a homeostasis between, I’m going to call it conservative and liberal. Which is: conservative is we’d better keep everything the same and liberal is things gotta change around here. And you need homeostasis.

Manda: Homeostasis as in balance. Or as in a gentle shift.

Grace: Balance, right, yeah. Like if things go too far radical, the conservatives need to say, hey, whoa whoa whoa whoa. And if things go too conservative, the radicals need to say things got to change. Yeah.

Manda: And that applies when we have a stable Anthropocene. And whether we like it or not, everything is changing now. I mean, this is part of the reason I think that conservatives are climate deniers because they don’t like it but we’re seeing it; it’s happening all around us. Change is going to happen. Do we not need to evolve our emotional capacity to surf the waves of change, rather than pretending that we can stand on the beach and tell the water to go away?

Grace: That’s a really deep question. And probably there are people who are better experts. I obviously have an opinion about this.

Manda: But I value your opinions, Grace.

Grace: Right. So again, no, I think belonging is important. I think bridging those values is important. And I think in any circumstance that might happen, the flood, the fire, the whatever, there are going to be the conservatives who say, I believe in my duty to a human being, and I’m going to rush into the fire and I play by the rules. Those people who are rules based individuals are important. I play by the rules, and I don’t divorce my wife and when my duty calls, I go. And we respect those people, no matter how left wing we are and no matter how peacenik we are, we respect that attribute of a human being who says, no, I’m going to stand up for my country or for my place or for my tribe.

Manda: Okay. I had never labelled that with a conservative label before, but I hear you.

Grace: I follow the rules and this is what we do. You know, there’s a fire and I’m a good Christian and what it says in the scriptures is we do this, that, and the other for our neighbour. You know. That’s a conservative outlook is like, these are the rules and we follow them. And in my scriptures it says we do this in times of tragedy; that’s a conservative view. And some of those are good values because they’ve been kept over time. I am conservative in some way, right, I’m a religious person. And I’m liberal in other ways, I’m a total peacenik, right?

Manda: Oh, we could unpick that. Yes.

Grace: Like internally, right. When is it time to say, I want to keep my tradition? And when is it time to say, you know, homosexuality is totally fine. Like, I don’t care what it says in the scriptures, right? When is it time for which one of those values?

Manda: And how do we make that call in the moment? Because it seems to me we’re heading to a place where the luxury of long, drawn out internal negotiations and between humans negotiations, is going to be much less. I think we’re going to have to be able to make a call with much greater flexibility in the moment, and act when the earthquake hits or when the wildfire is sweeping down 120m/s or whatever it was; you have to act. You can’t stand around thinking, well, how do I feel about this just now? And that means our limbic system moves orders of magnitude faster than our cortex, and we will end up reacting at a limbic base. And if we’ve done the work already, then our limbic base will be in a different place than it might otherwise have been. And I think that’s not a liberal conservative thing. That’s a human. I’m sure there must be conservative ways of doing the work as well. It’s not just a liberal thing.

Grace: Yeah, yeah. Look, there are mature and nice people in all places in the political spectrum, and there are spiritually evolved people in all places in the spectrum. And those are important things that I think, I guess I’m going to relate it to what I’m working on. What I am relating to is creating tribes, right? And tribes have in them the ability for people at different levels of their maturity and the steps to get to the next level of maturity. And what you do with the people who are, whatever, they’re a little bit on the spectrum. We make an arranged marriage for you and whatever it is, right? Tribes create those protocols and they create protocols, hopefully, that are inclusive of everybody in the neighbourhood, and those are going to evolve. We have lost all of those protocols, like those of us who are not from ancient religions and don’t adhere to our ancient religions or animist traditions.

Manda: Okay. Yeah. We don’t want monocultures.

Grace: Which are almost all gone. Most of these traditions are completely gone and not documented, and we’re trying to reconstruct them, and it’s going to take a couple hundred years. So you’re asking me a question about something that’s going to take a couple hundred years. And my opinion about it is that variety is important for a number of survival reasons. We don’t want monocultures, and those guys are vegetarians and those guys only eat that type of animal, and those guys never touch that type of animal, because that’s how tribes evolved. And the way I talk about it in modern times is something like, this a little bit outdated, but I’m still going to say it. You want German cars and Italian food, you don’t want the other way around.

Manda: Okay, yes, possibly I haven’t eaten a lot of German food, but yes, whatever. Yes. Okay.

Grace: And those are cultural things about what those cultures have evolved to be good at. We love multiculturalism and to say that the German values are just like too rigid. It’s like they’re too rigid for me.

Manda: Yeah, but they make great cars.

Grace: But they make great cars and electronics, right? And the Germans get along with other Germans because they have a long tradition of this type of behaviour and this type of language, and they understand each other. And that’s culture. Culture is great.

Manda: Okay. Gosh, there’s so much we could unpick here, Grace, but I’m aware that we’re well over the hour already. So let’s recap. We need distributed ways of coordinating trust in tribal groups that then have a system for coordinating with other tribal groups. And it may be, I’m feeling, that this turns out in the way if I’ve understood Primavera’s coordination concept; you might have a group of groups that are eco friendly, but you might also have a group of groups that are white supremacist Christian nationalists. And those two groups of groups probably don’t talk to each other an awful lot. But we at some way also would like a system that ensures that one group not endeavour to impose its values on the other group, which is otherwise known as war, generally speaking. And it seems to me that one of the things I would like us all to get to very fast is we can’t afford the geophysical impacts of war as we wage it. Now this is back to Einstein, who said, we don’t know with what weapons the Third World War will be fought, but the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones. And I think, you know, in the 21st century, it would be a really good idea not to get to that stage. And so have you thought ahead? Because you’ve thought a lot. If we have groups of groups that have created trust and a divide that clear between the eco friendlies and the Christian nationalists say, how does the interface of that work? Without ending up in what Cory Doctorow, who we were talking about before we opened, he calls a hole in the ground surrounded by guns. And we don’t want to end up with a hole in the ground surrounded by guns. How do we interface?

Grace: That’s really funny. Obviously, I have all the answers, and I’m going to tell you exactly how it’s going to go Manda.

Solve the entirety of the world chaos in the next three minutes. Give me some ideas because you think a lot, Grace. Explore.

Grace: Yeah. I do think a lot. So the first thing is there’s an area where you and I actually disagree, which just comes up all the time. Which is we only have a closed window and it’s got to be fast and it’s up to us.

Manda: Well, I’m seeing four degrees C coming down the line and I don’t see how that’s survivable.

Grace: I don’t disagree with that. Okay, I don’t disagree with the four degrees C, and I don’t disagree with the what’s survivable. But I disagree with the what’s on us and the sense of urgency and we must do this, and we must do that as a paradigm for action.

Manda: Okay.

Grace: It’s not untrue necessarily, it’s just not my framing for action. My framing for action is I trust in the universe and in the fractal that I am and the peace that’s mine. Whether we as humanity, what we as humanity, that part of we’re responsible for, is part of the old paradigm. Like, I’m going to be the agent for change and I’m going to figure it out and we’ve got to… Like, that’s part of the problem.

Manda: Okay.

Grace: My paradigm for action. Again, this is mine. Is I get up every morning and I engage in right speech and right livelihood, and that’s all I can do. And I’m not the only one on earth accountable for how it goes. And the planet has her own wisdom. And if my life is a meaningful life, I mean, my little speck of dust life.

Manda: Total perspective vortex. We’re back to Douglas Adams. Yes!

Grace: I’m doing my best. And do I have all the orchestration? No, I don’t have all. But I have some ideas about how this is going to be. But like I said, just to give this paradigm shift, my paradigm is like, yeah, sure all those things are true and post doom and all that. And I’m here to do my fractal that was given to me by the universe and the more I panic about how little time we have, the less it serves me.

Manda: Yeah, I was not suggesting panic at any point. I’m not sure we have 200 years, but…

Grace: No no no. Yeah yeah yeah. But there’s a way that you describe, that we might not have that time and it might not be possible to achieve a world that we’d be proud.

Manda: No. But we have to give it our all and try. Yes. Totally with you on that.

Grace: We have to give it our all. And I know that I might not leave a world that I’m proud to leave to my children, but I’m going to leave a legacy of what it is to be a human being that I’m proud of. That’s all I can really be responsible for. It will evolve differently in different places, obviously, depending on the resources, depending on the culture, depending on. Et cetera. Et cetera. But some of the things I talk about are something like: okay, if you’ve got a whole bunch of villages along a river and they’re all using some sort of membership card, and generally speaking, the guys who fertilise their gardens, like my mom fertilises her garden, and my sister has an organic farm next door. Like it’s a constant, right? And my mom just puts a little bit of something around the edges just to keep the bugs away and she feels this fine. And my sister thinks it’s horrible, but okay, they live next door to each other and they still have meals. And sometimes my mom won’t eat that or my sister won’t eat that. And they have meals together, right? Like this is kind of a microcosm.

Manda: But if they lived on the same river, they would care for the river together because nobody wants the river to be full of shit.

Grace: Exactly. So they live along this river, and even though they have some disagreements, they’ve got some monitoring sticks in the river. And they know at this location something’s going on. And so the five villages around that village come by and they say, hey, we’ve noticed this little bit of a something going on in the river near you. Can we have tea? Perhaps you’d like to come over to our house for tea and we’ll talk about it. And that is again graduated sanctions, which might escalate. This would be the ideal for how this system might work. Another example I give, and you’ve read my thing, was the hippie community and then the techno utopian community. Now the hippie artists are growing these mushrooms with the techno utopians. And the hippie community generally distributes them for free to their friends within the network, and gets food and electricity in return. But if the techno utopians want them, that’s fine. There’s a price for that. You know, they’d like some electronics and some stuff that they can’t quite get locally and that’s fine. And then both of them have valid credentials that the chicken bus will recognise. The chicken bus will ship things without asking too many questions from one community to another. So now they’ve all got these credentials and they have some commerce between them, even though values are not aligned.

Manda: Right, okay. And the chicken boss is the guy who says their credit is good, your credit is good.

Grace: Yeah. We won’t ask too many questions.

Manda: You deliver, they pay and it’s okay.

Grace: Or whatever. Like, we won’t ask too many questions. And maybe that has a different price than if we do ask questions. Like this border crossing is different from that border crossing. And there’s a farm on the border which recognises chicken bus, you know, and nobody knows about the farm except for chicken bus. And there’s a tunnel that nobody knows about, and if you don’t have a chicken bus credential,etc. So yeah, like I imagine those things and I imagine every society is different. It’s not going to be one way.

Manda: No, no, of course not. No. Humanity is too diverse. Definitely not one way. It still feels to me, partly because fractals and Web of life having its own intelligence, that if we’re not going to head over the edge of the cliff of the sixth mass extinction there are certain values that will have to be held in common. Like valuing an ecosphere that functions and our place within it. Because if we don’t, then there is no place within it. And I wonder if you see a sense of common values within all the diverse places that you go. I think probably most of the places you go are very heavily aligned with a sense of, I feel a sort of raw wildness in what comes from the open source community, but I’m guessing you move into other places. Do you have a sense that honouring the web of life is a thing, or is it not there?

Grace: You know, there’s something called the law of nature, and it’s not written down in a book. And it is the law of nature. It’s like the law of gravity. And it is the law. And that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in, is because people thought you could put things on a piece of paper, and that would be a law, and you could violate the laws of nature and not have drought.

Manda: Wildfires.

Grace: Wildfires, and, you know, the reversing of the AMOC. It’s called the law of nature and that’s what it is. It’s not some human values we write down; it’s the law. If you do good things, you feel good. If you do greedy things, you feel more greed; it’s the law.

Manda: Mhm. Okay, but where does that take us?

Grace: Well, the law is always enforced. The law of nature is always enforced. And we may or may not get ourselves through this mass extinction. I don’t know, but it’s not for me to decide, it’s for the law to decide. Again, this is a leap of faith.

Manda: Yeah. No, no, I get all of that. But I’m wondering in the communities that you move in, are people seeing that more? Is there more of a sense of wanting to connect to the web of life, in a way that we can live that? I want you to tell me this is happening.

Grace: Is that happening? I’ll tell you what is certainly happening. And you’ve spoken about that with a number of your recent guests. What’s certainly happening is that everybody knows that this system does not work for them. Everybody knows. If you’ve got the richest man in the world saying, hey, we got to get off the planet. Like it’s not working for you either?

Manda: Yeah. Right. Buying another rocket didn’t fix it.

Grace: It’s not working for anyone. Okay. That’s for sure.

Manda: Yeah. Okay. So our ideas of how to fix it may be different. Because he tweeted recently that he was just trying to do the best that he could for humanity with the time he had left.

Grace: Everyone believes that. No one thinks they’re the bad guy.

Manda: Yeah. Very few.

Grace: So we’re all doing our best. People want more human connection. People want to slow down. People feel better when they slow down. People want to be near green, alive things. The ecological movement is people doing little things like, oh, I am going to recycle. Even though, you know, maybe it’s just a tiny drop in the bucket. People want that. And so we’re seeing people move towards that. It is the only thing to move towards rather than away. I’m not a utopian. I don’t think, oh, this is all going to fix itself or we’re going to figure it out or whatever. But I believe in life.

Manda: And the fractal ripples of living a good life. That feels like a good place to end. Was there anything else that you wanted to say this time around? I’m sure we’ll talk again, Grace, but was there anything else that leapt to the top of your mind that you wanted to say?

Grace: No. I mean, I think this was really good. I mean, I think maybe a recap to something like we’ve talked mostly about identity, right? Digital identity. Which is kind of weird. Like we didn’t really say those words, but what we’re talking about is who has the authority to say I am a person and I am a member of society. And we’re talking about that as a really, really important part of infrastructure without which it’s not possible to create a parallel society. It’s the membrane.

Manda: And we’re talking about creating a parallel society. I think that’s so important too, that people will see and want to join because it works.

Grace: Exactly. This I think is our biggest failing as a movement, is people say I want to get out of the system, but we don’t have a thing to invite them into. And that’s where I’m headed with that. My theory of change is you’re going along this track and you’re like, oh, there’s a track over there. I could at least put one foot on that track. So maybe I’ve got two phones, one with my government issued identity, one with my sideways identity. And so I get some of my food over here and some of my food over here. And slowly I edge more towards the side I want. Because right now we just haven’t offered an alternative. Everyone wants one. How do we recreate that?

Manda: Yes. Because I feel and I think you feel, when people experience something that feels open and generative and connected and trusting, it’s going to feel so much better than the system they’re leaving that there’s got to be a tipping point. I recently reread or read Malcolm Gladwell’s rewrite of Tipping Point and Tipping points are a thing. But that’s it, you’ve got to have that third attractor to give people something to move into.

Grace: Thank you.

Manda: Okay. Thank you. That’s been brilliant. Thank you so much. And thank you for being willing to explore beyond the edges of ordinary space. It’s really, really good. So Grace Rachmany, thank you for coming on again to the Accidental Gods podcast.

Grace: And thank you for having me.

Manda: There we go. That’s it for another week. Huge thanks to Grace for seeing the gap between where we are and where we need to be, and thinking deeply about how to fill it, and then getting on and making it happen. Actually testing it out there in the real world. I am so impressed and so grateful that there’s somebody actually doing this work and really, really interested to see where it goes. So at some point, I sincerely hope Grace will be back on the podcast and we can explore those questions. But in the meantime, I have put a lot of links in the show notes. There is a lovely conversation on YouTube about co-creating the third attractor. There’s the Sideways Earth on GitHub, and if you’re interested in the Decentralised Identity Foundation, you can go and explore that too. I’ve also put a link to Elinor Ostrom’s eight Principles for governing a Commons, which we talked about at the top. So go off and explore. Very few of us have Grace’s technical capacity, combined with her spiritual perspectives and her lived experience of what it takes to make communities really work. But we’re up against a lot of edges now, and each of us does have communities of place, of purpose and of passion. The people where we live, the people who do the things that we do, the people who care about the things that we care about, and helping these communities to become resilient.

Manda: To become self-regulating and co-regulating feels to me so important now. We are going to need to be sharing food. We are going to need to be sharing transport. We’re going to need to be shifting the way that we work away from constant consumption to much more into being. And if Grace and the others who work with her are blazing a trail of how to create the nested commons, how to link all of our communities of place and purpose and passion in ways that actually work, that feel really generative. So we wake up in the morning, we feel good about all that we do. Then we need to be building the commons, the communities that are there to be linked. When we have all of the social and digital technologies to let us link them. This is not trivial, I realise. But actually, what else are we going to do? So give it a go. Look at the communities you’ve got. See how you can begin to employ Elinor Ostrom’s eight principles. See what you can do to help the communities recognise that that’s what they are and begin to build. That’s our homework for this week. Fixing the world in seven easy steps.

Manda: I know it’s not. And I also know it’s not the only way. But somebody posted on my Facebook wall earlier this week that ordinary people need to know what to do. So that’s one of the things that we could be doing. And for other ideas, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot, to Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the audio production, to Lou Mayor for producing the video and sorting all the YouTube. To Faith Tilleray for the website, for the tech, for putting up with me writing said book and to probably being less social than I might otherwise be, and particularly when Faith is busy creating everything for her masters. Yay! And then, as ever, an enormous thanks to you for being there. And particularly to those of you who subscribe and leave reviews. Those are great. We really appreciate them. And also, as ever, if you know of anybody else who wants to understand how we can knit our communities together and how important this is to co-creating a future we would be proud to leave behind, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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