In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week’s guest is someone with whom that journey goes wide and deep. Andrea Leiter is one of those polymaths who brings not just breadth, but an astonishing depth to her work of bridging from the collapse of late stage predatory capitalism, whatever we choose to call it, to the best that we can bring into being. Andrea works at the intersection of law, digital transformation and economic innovation. So you can see why I find this particularly exciting. She’s director of the Amsterdam Centre for International Law and is deeply aware of and involved in transnational law, digital economies and institutional innovation and all things crypto, as well as being a social justice entrepreneur. So she is crossing many boundaries of the things that are growing fastest in our world. Her PhD was awarded jointly from the University of Melbourne and the University of Vienna, and her dissertation examined the historical foundations of international investment law and the legal architecture of global capital. I kind of think I ought to read it, and I expect I would not understand most of it.

Manda: However, clearly her expertise lies in the design of new institutional forms for just and sustainable futures and it really gets it. She knows that the current system is breaking down, and that it’s up to each of us to build what we can towards a different future. I came across her when she was a guest on the amazing and definitely must listen Blockchain Socialist podcast, and I heard that she was the co-founder and CSO of the Sovereign Nature Initiative, a venture which aimed to, in its own words, merge nature with digital Ecosystems and introduce online communities to ecological stewardship, while developing novel funding mechanisms for vital biodiversity protection and restoration. Which sounds pretty cool, right? And you will hear more about this in the conversation that follows. But I really want to emphasise that in the process of setting up the SNI, Andrea designed the decentralised ecological economics protocol, which shortens to DEEP, because crypto people really like algorithms, and which demonstrated how blockchain infrastructure can serve biodiversity goals. Under her leadership, SNI developed and distributed more than 1 million digital collectables and activated new models of ecological value creation. And you will hear more about what that was and what it allowed to happen in the conversation you’re about to hear. Because one of Andrea’s superpowers is her ability to take complex concepts like blockchain, cryptocurrency, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, and, crucially, the potential for technology to be used to heal, as well as the many ways it is already being used to harm.

Manda: So we spent the first half of this conversation exploring the baselines of where we are and what’s happening in the world. And I refer to Andrea’s blog called Who Gets to Bet on the Future?, which is all about the cryptocurrency influence on the US electoral process. It first appeared on her transformative private law blog, and I have linked to it in the show notes and it is well worth reading. She also mentions several books on the way through, and I’ve linked to those in the show notes too, because they are new to me and I now have copies of each and they are completely mind blowing. Exo capitalism is available as a PDF where you decide what you pay. This is the value of publishing with a small press that actually understands what their books are discussing. And Protocols for Post-capitalist Expression (yay!) is open source, so you can read it and engage with the process with the others in the economic space agency. So this is a conversation that is so much at the intersection of everything that we need to understand and often don’t; technology, cryptocurrency, AI, law, the markets and everything they do to financialized value. So I hope you are as excited about this as I was and remain. People of the podcast, please do welcome crypto advocate, changemaker and bridge builder Andrea Leiter.

Manda: Andrea Leiter, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this slightly damp November morning?

Andrea: Yes, I am in Amsterdam and it is indeed slightly damp. It’s a bit grey, but we are used to that in the fall here. I’m at the university in my nice office with a beautiful view, so I’m quite well, I have to say. Beginning of the week, lots of energy, good week ahead.

Manda: Excellent. Thank you. And thank you for coming on. We’ve been planning this for a long time, since I heard you speak on the ReFi podcast, I think, quite a while ago. And what I was really struck by was your vision of how we could change the world. You’re a lawyer, you’re a blockchain specialist. You have written an LLM protocol, which leaves me incredibly impressed. And you’re one of the few people I’ve encountered who seems really to engage with the steps that might take us on what I would term a thrutopian journey, from where we are to a place that will take us closer to the edges of emergent change. So with that as our baseline, I think you’re one of the people that I could ask, what is your theory of change and how do you see it enacting, if we could enact it in an ideal world?

Andrea: Thank you. Yeah, a big question, a theory of change. But indeed, I think one that I’ve been chasing and trying to figure out what to make of that. My answer would be, in a nutshell, incremental change. And I would say maybe even already alluding to the work that we’ll be discussing in just a minute; I think we need a new code. And I think the question of how do we develop a new code and make it so that it is being carried by a population, to leave these very big conceptual terms in the room, I think that’s the challenge. And I think that it is indeed, to put it less loaded, I think that you need to come up and suggest something much better and much more attractive, and get people to join.

Manda: Right. Thank you. Okay, so we need something better and more attractive. Yes, I have a theory of change which comes down to the acronym MADE, which is motivation, agency, direction and empowerment. And I think you’re offering these. So the motivation is we can see something better. And the agency is I can see that I, the person who is motivated, can act. And the direction is I know what the next best step is. And the empowerment is I’m not so weighted down by the existing system that I am unable to take the agency that I can see. And again, you’re offering these. So let’s look at the better. What is it that you and I, particularly you, with what was the Sovereign Nature Initiative and DEEP, which we will look at, I hope, and whatever is coming in their place. What is it that’s better that we can offer people?

Andrea: I think that’s the hardest of all of them, no? I think the better is really the challenging question. And I think there is no clear, straightforward answer in terms of a vision of this is the better life. So I would say, let me throw you around and say, okay, let’s maybe turn it around and say, where are we at? What are we departing from? And what can we do in light of this? It’s easier for me.

Manda: Okay. Yes. Go for it.

Andrea: I think starting from the big vision is the hardest for me. I would say I go the other way round and I would say, where do you start in a place of ruins? Because I think this is where we are at and we find ourselves in a place of ruins. And I would also say that one of the things that is important to keep in mind, is that from the perspective of a Western liberal democracy, as I am living now in the Netherlands, it really looks as if the crisis is unfolding just in this moment ahead of us. But maybe to speak with the words of a phenomenal anthropologist, Elizabeth Povinelli, we are actually seeing an ancestral crisis. We already experienced a giant crisis. It’s just for the few of us who are privileged enough to have lived in the liberal Western world, that it appears to be a crisis that is new, or is on the horizon. So I think that is also something important to say, is that a large part of people in the world have been living in a crisis state for a long, long, long, long time.

Manda: Inflicted by the capitalist imperialist model.

Andrea: Precisely.

Manda: By the global minority on the global majority.

Andrea: Precisely. So I do think that in that moment of discussing crisis, one way of getting at this is that maybe what we are seeing is the end of the end of history. There’s this book by Francis Fukuyama, who speaks about the end of history now, as if liberalism is the latest stage of human development that we will ever achieve, in the 90s. And that was criticised already in the 90s by a lot of people. However, I think that what is interesting is that now it seems as if we have reached the end of the end of history. So even the hardliners who were willing to believe that from the 90s onwards, that we have reached the highest stage of civilisation, are now confronted with the sense of, oh, my dear Lord, it’s a crisis. It’s not working, it’s not happening. So maybe that’s a framing that helps. It’s the end of the end of history, which means it’s the end of the Western belief that we have the best version of a system. And so I think that’s a bit the diagnostic that I would suggest is out there; there is a new sense of crisis for some, and there is a very old and long known sense of crisis for many others. And I think that’s the place of ruins that we are at and it is indeed, as you said, it is the outcome of an exploitative, colonial, economy that has been in place for a long time.

Manda: And the mindset that went with it.

Andrea: And the mindset that is here with it. So that’s where we are at. We are in trouble, we are in crisis. The system that we live with and under is almost like a compulsory movement that takes us along. And it’s really hard to fight yourself out of that, if at all possible, I would also say that. So just again, to maybe bracket the question of what is the better? I think that we are really also caught in something that is almost like a compulsory movement, and we have to find ways in this compulsion. What do we do with it? Can we tweak and tweak here? So I come back to the question of what’s the theory of change? I think incremental change, opening lines of flight, opening different little pockets, for something else to emerge, for a different code to emerge. But I think the battle is really at the how do we throw a wedge in? How do we open a little bit of a door? I think that’s, for me, the threshold that we have to aim at at this moment in time. To then move to a better, more balanced, less growth obsessed kind of life. And my work or the work that I’ve been doing together with many colleagues, is really to try to build that wedge that we can throw into these mills that allows something new to open and something new to emerge.

Manda: Okay, brilliant. So let’s reframe or let me mirror back what I think I just heard. And this follows a lot from Jeremy Lent, a couple of weeks ago, who said that we live in the world that Margaret Thatcher defined by Tina, which is ‘there is no alternative’. And we’re domesticated into this frame. We may be born as little forager hunters who want to connect to the web of life, but by the age of six, seven, eight, if we’re very lucky; the older it is, the better it is, but we’re still domesticated into something that is fundamentally toxic and is destroying us and leaves us with that sense of constant lack that we then try to fill by our consumer consumption. And the compulsion of that is I have to keep acquiring stuff. And the richest man on the planet is sending rockets to Mars, and he still doesn’t have enough stuff and is still on ketamine every other week for his depression. So we can fairly safely say that that model doesn’t work. And yet the definition of insanity is we do the same thing time after time and expect a different result, and we’re busy doing that. And yet also, no problem is solved from the mindset that created it. So how do we from within this mindset, how do we from within the sea, change the nature of the sea? And yes, incrementally. And we’re looking for critical mass of incremental change, and we’re trying to create the wedges that will create the openings for people to get through. What are your wedges? What do they look like? How do they work?

Andrea: Yes. So maybe this is a good moment to say that one of the wedges that I am interested in, but I’m not so sure it operates like a wedge, maybe it’s actually an accelerator, is blockchain technology. So my journey into really like getting my hands dirty myself, in trying to build projects, develop things, leave the ivory tower of academia and do project work, came with the advent of blockchain technology and crypto more broadly. And I was fascinated by this technology because I was always interested in what makes money and how money goes around, because I think that many people just on an experience level, would share the sense that if you have money, things just become a bit easier, smoother, certain things become possible that weren’t possible before. So on that very base level of like if you are looking to build your life and safeguard things, if you have a bit more money, it just becomes easier. So there is a really profound sense that money matters. It matters if you have it or if you don’t. It matters how much of it you can have access to. It’s not enough to just have a sense of the good life and how you can be fulfilled by love and friendship and all sorts of things if you suffer from economic hardship.

Andrea: So this is a bit of a backdrop to say that blockchain technology was something that came out and to me, at least, said: we make money bottom up and we reinvent institutions, and we do that on a giant scale. And I thought, wow! What? This is possible in like the 21st century? You can just come up here and say, I found a new way of making money or creating value, however we want to call that later on, and I’m showing you how I’m doing this on a large scale with a big community, and we make our new own rules. We recreate institutions, we decide what is what and how we distribute and how we produce and how we do all these things. So to me, blockchain technology was one of the few, I mean, in my lifetime, the only experiment that did something like that on such a large scale. So that is the in I would give on blockchain technology and why it is interesting. And so with that we can go into two different directions.

Manda: Easily.

Andrea: One is how is the world of crypto today in the large scale? And what is the wedge that we were trying to build with crypto?

Manda: Okay. But before we get there, just a little bit of background. Because you don’t look old enough, frankly, to have got into blockchain at the beginning. Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever they turn out to be and I have lost touch with who we think they are now. But the white paper came out…

Andrea: In 2008.

Manda: Right.

Andrea: With the financial crisis.

Manda: You were still at school in 2008, tell me? You don’t look old enough to to have been paying attention to that. But anyway, it was the 2008 or 9 financial crisis. And it has always struck me that the beginnings of blockchain and bitcoin iteration of blockchain were very, quite Western, to the edges of alt right libertaria. They were incredibly founded on the supposition that everybody was selfish and everybody was out just for themselves and that nobody would ever get together to coordinate within blockchain. I got really interested in it around 16 or 17 when all the Chinese Bitcoin farmers got together and the guys in the states were like hang on, that doesn’t happen. You can’t do that. And we were watching a crisis within Bitcoin, that was a cultural crisis, because the underlying predictive rules of blockchain had assumed that nobody ever cooperated. And the Chinese were quite happy to cooperate. And they could at that point have forked the blockchain to be exactly what they wanted it to be. And in the end, they didn’t. But the blockchain and the Bitcoin iteration of blockchain, and I completely get that we’re moving to Ethereum shortly and you’re going to explain the difference, was a cultural response to a particular version of a particularly toxic way of storing, exchanging and organising value, and accounting for value, which is what money is. And it didn’t necessarily stop the toxicity, it just underlined the fact that basically the banks make money out of nothing and then sell it to us at a profit. And look, somebody else could do that. How does that help us step beyond the idea that the acquisition of stuff is going to heal us, when we know that it won’t? Take us through that one. Does that make sense as a question?

Andrea: It does make sense as a question. And I think that the way to go in is to say that it’s not a monolithic movement in crypto, I would say. So. I think that your description of the origin story of Bitcoin, so to speak, or the intellectual history, definitely is a cypherpunk anarcho libertarian kind of story. Even though I would say that even here there is a mix and mash of different ideas and of different traditions that come in here. So I think the closer you look, the more you see that it is differentiated. But what is at the heart of it? And I think what makes it at once so attractive, but also risky, is that indeed, politically speaking, it’s really hard to delineate what it is that we are seeing here. Because it’s a pushback against establishment wealth institutions that could as much come from a right wing libertarian position, that says, you know what, what is the claim here? No death, no taxes, no democracy, which is I think a lot of the crypto movement and the spirit of the crypto movement.

Andrea: But the idea of having to overcome pushback against and transform the dominant economic institutions, would for someone like me, who is interested in wealth redistribution and the question of how do we change the code, be just as interesting. Not from a libertarian position, but from a Commons position. From a building new protocols of collective engagement, bottom up. So I think that both of these parts can be brought forth by the affordances. Affordances is this nice technical term that says what is the function of a certain tool? The affordance of a chair is to sit on it. So what is the affordance of blockchain technology? The affordance of blockchain technology is that indeed it allows you to redesign value and institutions that then are structured in certain ways that decide how value is produced, how it is measured, and how it is distributed. In an alternative to established economic institutions. So I think that’s where those two things come together. And I do have to say that, in order not to sound crazy naive, the libertarian right wing strand of the blockchain environment is far larger than the hippie, leftist, social ecologist, kind of…

Manda: Blockchain socialist.

Andrea: Blockchain socialist and so on that are out there. And indeed shout out to blockchain socialist Josh. It was with him the interview that you heard originally.

Manda: It was. And it was amazing. Yes. And I will put a link to that in the show notes for people. Because a lot of people were very, very happy when Trump got elected, because they saw that that was going to somehow unchain blockchain and make them all incredibly rich. And I have read your paper, which I will link in the show notes, that basically showed that it did, and that a lot of blockchain people had bet a lot of money on Trump by giving money in. Because in America, basically you get the democracy you pay for, and they had paid huge amounts to ensure that Trump got in, on the basis that this would then promote their capacity to run the Ponzi scheme that blockchain seems to have become, even faster and bigger and harder than they did. So can we take a short moment, I don’t think we can necessarily go through all of your paper, but nonetheless it was very interesting to look at; the impact of how blockchain has impacted Democracy now. And what the potential is for maybe the Ethereum offshoot of blockchain or the non Bitcoin blockchains to be part of the new code that opens the wedge to a different world. That’s a quite big question.

Andrea: No, but it’s good. And I think it’s important to get a bit out of the way or to say it out loud, indeed, that there are so many big problems that have come with crypto. Especially since the election of Trump. It really would be almost irresponsible to speak about the potential of blockchain without being very explicit that there are enormous movements on the way at the moment, that look frightening to the core. So indeed, what became very visible with the election of Trump was the involvement of crypto industry interests in the American election. And it was very interesting. There was a map that showed in which states crypto candidates were successful. And you know, you are so used to seeing these blue red maps of the US after the elections, but if you were to colour it whichever colour you want to give blockchain, blue-pink, textile, black, whatever it is, you would see that almost the whole map was covered in the same colour. So just that visual cue tells you so much about a part of this election that we missed, or many of us were not fully aware of, at the time of the election, and we have now seen unfold.

Manda: Yes.

Andrea: And just speaking briefly about the intensity this. So the biggest corporate donations in the history of American elections were indeed given this year by the crypto industry. And we’ve known this before in the US. As you say, this is nothing new that in a sense you can support a particular campaign and then in the aftermath, benefit economically from that outcome. But crypto just did it much more intensely. So the investment that was made led to the fact that after the election, the crypto markets exploded. So whatever the investment was that was made originally was returned 15 times.

Manda: Right. And that didn’t used to be a thing, that you could get 15 times your investment. You might have got 10% or 20%, but not 1,500%.

Andrea: Precisely.

Manda: And I think we all knew that there were the christo fascists and the techno fascists, but we weren’t really watching the crypto fascists. And the fact that it doesn’t really matter whether they were Democrat or Republican; they bought the candidates. And, you know, we need a whole new system. The system is not fit for purpose. This is demonstrating this over and over and over again. And I’m thinking, we are making some assumptions that people listening may not follow yet, of how do we link particularly Bitcoin, but blockchain in general, to fiat currencies? Because if I were to make up monopoly money, which I could do tomorrow, it doesn’t necessarily have any value. And I could hand people trillions and trillions of monopoly money and they’d go, yeah and? But what we’ve managed to do since 2008, so within this millennium, is to create a system of making money out of nothing. I mean, blockchain, obviously, you have to have power in Ethereum. There are things that you need to invest in order to make the money, but people are managing to do it. And then bet up the value of that and have it be worth something that the rest of the world acknowledges has a value. Can you unpick that one in ways that won’t lose people without taking the next ten hours?

Andrea: No, but I would try, and I think that there is indeed something profound in this question, that I’ve been chasing in my scholarship, which revolves around this extremely difficult notion of value, that you can hardly grab in any meaningful way. But in a political economy kind of tradition, which would maybe also be called a Marxist tradition; value is tied to labour. This is a labour theory of value, right? That we know where the idea is, that it is the human labour power that creates the surplus value of things that can then be absorbed in the capitalist economy and can be extracted. And I think that this theory of value has been struggling in the digital economy and in the financialized economy to make sense of the phenomena that we are seeing. Of course, it still plays a giant part. Labour still is one of the biggest and most important things also for humankind. Like how much do I get for my pay? And these battles are very, very important. But I think that if we look at how much of the economy is now produced by a financialized economy, as opposed to really like a labour based economy, we will see that there is a question of how do we explain that? How do we explain that giant chunk that makes money out of nothing? And I think that really this is an ongoing question in scholarship across the board. Like you will see all sorts of new iterations of capitalism. Now we have informational capitalism; Julie Cohen wrote a phenomenal book on these questions.

Andrea: You have Shoshana Zuboff with surveillance capitalism. You have Evgeny Morozov proposing something like techno feudalism as what we are actually seeing. So people are trying their hand at, getting at, how do we make sense of this and giving it a step from different directions? And I have to say that I think that the most convincing and interesting thing I’ve come across in this respect is a book that was very recently published called Exo Capitalism, which is yet another title of capitalism. But the proposition here is that indeed we have moved on. The capitalist system has moved on from the necessity of the human substrate, as they call it. So it’s not labour that is feeding the value, it is indeed the time which you hold between financial transactions. They call it arbitrage. Arbitrage would be something that people with an economic vocabulary would be more familiar with. I’m not that kind of economist, but what I would like to say about this still is that arbitrage is a phenomenon that basically just means you can take advantage of the differences in prices on different exchanges.  In cryptolandia, it means Bitcoin is offered at one exchange for that value, on another one it’s slightly different; you buy here, you sell there. And from this arbitrage you make money, right? That is a phenomenon that we have known from before. This is not something super new, but it is part of a financialized economy and it has become ever more important as the basis of value.

Manda: Yeah, well, I just have a question for my own understanding. So Polanyi talked about the commodification of land, labour and capital. And I had begun to understand the commodification of capital as being a product of compound interest. I listen to Gary Stevenson of Gary’s Economics. He’s a working class lad who won a competition, ended up working for one of the huge banks and became their biggest traitor, because he didn’t accept the rules that everybody else accepted. And he basically bet against the US for a long period of time and made enormous quantities of money. But then he stepped out, and now he’s trying to educate people. And he pointed out on his podcast that if I were a billionaire and I had 1 billion, if I did nothing with it but invest it at a relatively low level of interest in fairly safe stocks, I would make £1 million a week for doing nothing. And that that’s a feature of compound interest. That’s the way interest works, and that’s part of the commodification of capital. But arbitrage, as I’m understanding, is making use of the fact that exchange rates always have been. So the dollar to the pound has been a slightly different rate, and you could maybe go through the franc in the old days to the dollar. And there were lots of people who used to make quite clever amounts of money by just shuffling money around within the exchange rate areas. And so now what I’m hearing from you is that there’s a whole area of the financial markets that are making money by shuffling around between fiat currencies, which is mostly the dollar, and different iterations of blockchain currencies. Is that what you just said?

Andrea: Yeah. So what I think what is important here is that the crypto industry, the world of crypto, it’s like a magnifying glass to use in order to see all the things that happen in the broader scheme of things. So I think the world doesn’t consist only of the crypto economy, very obviously there is much more going on. It’s a big chunk. It has grown steadily. But what it does, what crypto does, it allows us to see things more clearly that otherwise are harder to get out. And so that’s, I think, what we can do when we look at how, for example, arbitrage works in the crypto markets. It works in other places as well, and maybe more complicated, but in the crypto markets. And in order to grasp that, that’s, I think, one way of explaining it to just say: you can take advantage of these differences in the different kinds of exchanges. And this is something that is the story, for example, of FTX, this big crypto exchange. Sam Bankman-Fried had this really big crash story and legal proceedings and all the things with it, because here, someone who came from the financial world and knew arbitrage and all the other concepts that I don’t know; derivative trading, futures trading, all of the things that we only know in theory how they work as non futures traders; they took all of these concepts and they brought them to crypto and they said, wow, here it’s even less regulated. You can just go wild with all of this stuff. And so this is something where you just see in the crypto industry how these things unfold. But what is important, I think, about this notion of capitalism, and I need to acknowledge here the authors of the book, because it’s a very recent publication and it’s a very small press in which it came out.

Andrea: It’s edgy in that sense, but it’s really brilliant. So Marek Polak and Roberto Alonso Trillo, who are the authors of this book. What they make so explicitly clear, something that I’ve been trying to say and couldn’t because I didn’t find the right vocabulary, but that I see in crypto everywhere, is that really the value comes from a time delay in an almost automated trading system, right? So you need these small time delays. And crypto has a beautiful word for that called Hodl. So for everyone in the crypto world Hodl it’s a meme that stands for hold. So there is a thing about turning the letters around. So Hodl is what crypto people will say to each other in a bear market, right? Hodl hodl hodl. And then there is quagmire. We are all going to make it? Are we all going to come out well on the other side? But the HodLing, which is such a cultural funny phenomenon, is something that is foundational in this theory of value in a financialized capitalism. In a software Capitalism, as these two authors call it as well. Because it’s not the labour production of value that makes it. It’s indeed this automated trading system, and it’s the delays of the holding that enables arbitrage, that enables differentiation to a degree that makes trade possible. And so this is what we see in the crypto economy. And I think that a nice way of saying this in my language would be what we do in crypto is hodl the void. We are hodling the void collectively.

Manda: Right. Right!

Andrea: And in the name of Hodling the void, we are eating the world. Bitcoin is eating the world. These technologies are eating the world materially. But we are hodling the void because we have arrived at a place in which value is made through the hodling.

Manda: Can you unpick the eating the world bit to explain to us how it’s eating the world?

Andrea: Yes, eating the world. I mean, it’s provocative. And I think the Bitcoin blockchain, in a sense, is a good bridge here. The Bitcoin blockchain is closer to labour than the Ethereum blockchain because it indeed consumes energy.

Manda: Huge amounts of energy.

Andrea: Enormous amounts of energy in order to do what it’s doing. And so it is eating the world materially at a very fast rate. And it’s really, I think here there is a compulsory movement that I think is best explained again on the sheer level of experience. So for someone who might have been in the vortex of this crypto stuff and has heard of it, everyone has heard, oh yeah, Bitcoin made so much money. People who bought bitcoin early, they got so rich. The amount of times that I’m being asked, do you invest in crypto? Can I still buy something? Should I buy something? I mean people are concerned for their futures. I understand. I mean this is again coming back to if you have a precarious life, no wonder you’re gonna look around trying to see where can I make a cut? So this makes perfect sense. But again, it’s a compulsory movement in the sense that as long as you’re not bought into these values and to these coins of all sorts, you are constantly feeling you’re missing out. Everyone else is taking off ahead of you, and you are not part of the story. And in the long term, you’ll be a loser. As soon as you buy into it, you want it to go up!

Manda: You’re part of the thing. Right. And then you want Trump to win because you’re going to suddenly become very, very rich. And to hell with democracy. It doesn’t matter.

Andrea: Exactly. And then you are perpetuating a system that is eating the world, and it’s eating the very material basis of your life.

Manda: Yes. Whoa.

Andrea: But there is a certain compulsion in that, that I think is really hard to escape. It’s really hard to manoeuvre and really hard to navigate. And I think that coming with a moralist kind of sense of this is all just Ponzi. I mean, the crypto people call themselves the degenerates. There is, of course, a political kind of ugly right wing part to that again, but I think that again, here, we see the meeting point of what would be really the subalterns of the world. You know, the ones who are not part of the big games and the big plays and so on, the degenerates. And reappropriating that term and say, you know what? I too can bet on the future. I too find ways to bet on my own future. I’m not just here to be your ball of play. So there is politically a complicated and I think not easy to disentangle association between different kinds of strands that converge in this. And I think where that leaves us with, how do we relate to the politics of blockchain? What do we do with it? How do we go? If we if we keep this compulsory element in mind, I think it helps us to move away from oversimplified solutions of saying, let’s just regulate it away. Let’s just push it out. Let’s just blame everyone who buys into this to be a Ponzi scheme, monopoly playing, casino going idiot, who doesn’t know what they are doing.

Manda: Because we’re all in the casino. They just found a way to make the roulette wheel always run on black for them.

Andrea: Yeah, precisely. We are all in the casino. We are all complicit in the casino. We are all playing, and we are all trying to make our cut in one way or another. So that’s where I think that when we think about again, what is needed, is I do think that what is needed is a proposition of a collective future that can hold.

Manda: Yes.

Andrea: So at the moment, people feel very alone in the question of how do I secure my future? The pension system is not holding. Not even in good old Europe. The state as a social provider, or as a sociality at scale that did some kind of redistribution, is really being put on the back foot evermore. And for many, again, this is also important to say, for many, the state was never the provider.

Manda: Was not working in the first place.

Andrea: So it’s again, this mix of those of us who had privileged lives for whom the state did its job, who are now realising this is not working anymore. But there are many, many, many others who always saw that this state never provided for them and did nothing but repress. But this is really where the question now becomes what is a collective future that is trustworthy, that can carry and hold? How do we speculate collectively on a better future?

Manda: Right. In a way that feels attractive to people who have just discovered the way to make the casino payout every single time for them, and that that is fulfilling a need, exactly as you say. Particularly in the US, where the crashing system means that healthcare, for instance, is utterly unaffordable for ordinary people, and shortly food is going to be utterly unaffordable by ordinary people. And you found a way to make sure that you have a consistent flow of money, of course you’re going to make it work. And if pretty much all of the democratic system has been bought by the people who want crypto to keep moving, then the political economy is never going to change. Then welfare and keeping people going is no longer the priority of the people who’ve been bought up by crypto. Keeping crypto going is their priority. So given all of that, given that we have a system that is unstable and unsustainable  and is going to crash. Either we’re going to hit biophysical limits because it’s eating the world and it eats a bite too much and everything falls apart, or the political economic system just disintegrates to the point where it’s no longer possible for it to function. How do we create the wedges, we’re going back to how do we create the clear code and the wedges that can say, yes, you have found the way to make the roulette wheel play on black for you every single time, we see that. And yet, here’s a crack in the system, and here’s a way through that will feel more attractive, not just to the people playing crypto, but to the actual vast majority of people who have no clue what crypto is. Where does that emerge?

Andrea: Yeah. So I think that I only have a small partial answer to that, in the sense of saying where we tried to go with this endeavour, of working at the intersection of this funky crypto economy. And indeed the desire to have money flow and go into those kinds of activities that sustain our life in this world and on this planet. So I think that what is important to keep in mind, as I said before, is also that the whole blockchain universe is not monolithic. There are different cultural strands, different political ideas. And I think what stands out to many and is known to many, is that the Ethereum protocol that was launched in 2014, really comes not just as a technological upgrade and update to the Bitcoin protocol, but also as a political and cultural distinct movement with a different kind of idea and different values underwriting it. And so maybe on the technological side, just briefly, to say that the so-called consensus mechanism in the blockchain was changed in the Ethereum blockchain. It did an upgrade. It started on the same kind of protocol as Bitcoin did or similar, let’s say, which is called proof of work, where you need to dedicate computational power to solving complicated mathematical riddles in order to gain the right to produce a block in the blockchain. And Ethereum then did an upgrade on what is called proof of stake, in which the same kind of securing of the ledger, of the appropriateness of the ledger, on a decentralised network of computers, is done through game theoretical incentive mechanisms. To put it this way, which is then called a stake that you stand to lose if you misbehave, or if you don’t give a truthful record of the blockchain.

Manda: So I think, can you tell us a bit about, I don’t know how to say his name. I say Vitalik Buterin, but I might be pronouncing it wrong. Tell us a little bit about who he is and why, and how. He’s clearly super smart and actually we know who he is when we don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Or we didn’t last time I looked. But he’s out there and he’s, as far as I can understand, explicitly trying to create a system that is likely to have the potential to be more egalitarian. Can you just fill us in a tiny bit of that detail?

Andrea: So what is remarkable, I think, with the Ethereum blockchain is that it is led by and guided by people who care a lot about a civic responsibility. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, co-founder, is a lighthouse in that sense, standing out as someone who has always shown a profound sense of responsibility for providing a infrastructure for a public good. That’s also how he would understand the project of Ethereum. It’s a public good infrastructure. It’s an alternative to a centralised internet. It’s a privacy project. It’s again also new economic and social structures project. It’s a democracy project. So there’s a lot that goes into that. And it’s really hard to walk that line in a world like the crypto world, because the interests are so many and you are driving with like a metre sight, basically. You have no idea where you’re going. You don’t know what is coming. You’re you’re answering to calls on the spot. It’s a really tough thing to do. And I think that really, I say that with the utmost respect, really. That not just Vitalik, but people who stand behind Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum blockchain have done a phenomenal job at constantly reminding people that there is a different kind of way of using it, a different kind of way of trying to think of the of the potential for better democracy, better funds allocation, better internet governance that can be done with that. And so it’s also a bit from this kind of pocket of people, which I would have to say I first engaged with around 2014, 2015.

Manda: Right at the beginning then.

Andrea: Yeah, right at the beginning. With the Ethereum ICO and things. And with the Ethereum ICO, we were part of that journey. And what has fascinated me from the get go was that coming from a, let’s say, community organising background myself, I was very intrigued by the fact that at these early crypto events, the energy was so high people were flocking to these events. They were so fascinated by what was going on. And even on an aesthetic level, if you would look at the stickers and if you would look at all the cultural cues, you know, instead of smash fascism, it says decentralise the web. But the aesthetic was very similar. So it was very much a subcultural, political and community driven movement that made this project come along. And not just Ethereum, I want to say, there were other iterations, Polkadot, different protocols that really build on that kind of vibe. And the early blockchain events were driven by this spirit and it was very little talk of financial extraction. So that was not, I think, the first idea that guided that system. So fast forward, things have changed a lot now, and really indeed financial applications have taken over the crypto industry almost entirely.

Manda: Even Ethereum?

Andrea: I mean, Ethereum operates as a layer one blockchain upon which many other projects and applications are running. And so in that sense, yes, also the Ethereum blockchain is being used mainly for DeFi decentralised finance projects. And that’s not something that anyone would be able to control in any way. That’s part of the decentralised architecture of the system. And I think we could do an extra episode on the question of what are the affordances of blockchain that make it so, that it is finance first and foremost, that jumps on it? Is it the technology? Is it zeitgeist? Is it just this moment in time in which, no matter what technology, it would have been financialized? So what is it exactly that that makes it so that you have a structural, almost kind of a path into the financialization.

Manda: Yes. This compulsion to make money.

Andrea: Precisely.

Manda: And here’s a route to make huge amounts of money quickly and largely effortlessly. It doesn’t require you to go out and learn how to build things, or chop down trees or go down mines. You just sit at your computer and tap a few keys and you can make a lot of money. It’s kind of attractive.

Andrea: Precisely. So this is something that I think really also is worth a lot of exploration. In what is the technological setup? What are its limits? So if you come from a scholarly critical attitude, critical in the sense of what are the assumptions that have to be true in order for this to fly? So if I want this to be a thing that enables an alter economy, what needs to be in place for this to fly? But this is a lot of work that still has to be done. And I think there are just not enough humanities researchers in blockchain, because everyone thinks it’s ugly and dirty and filthy and full of whatever things. So if you are a humanities blockchain researcher who feels called…

Manda: Let’s get together.

Andrea: Let’s do more work together. There are already many, I don’t want to underplay that, but nevertheless not enough. But to say also that in that spirit, when I met this whole Ethereum ecosystem for the first time, indeed, the impulse was, as with many people in this environment, the question of so what good can we do with this stuff? If we can make money from the scratch, if we can build new institutions from scratch? Wow. Holy moly, what are we going to do with this? How can we do better world building through this technology? And this is ongoing I think until today, there are so many projects that are trying to think about that. And not just think about it but that are implementing all sorts of protocols, attempts, projects, whatever you may call it, that go in this direction. What is remarkably sad about all of this is that they don’t scale in the same way that financial products scale. So we come back again to like, what is it that makes certain things fly and other things don’t? And why is that so? I would say that, yeah, the only thing that you can scale easily is extraction.

Manda: That is so sad.

Andrea: Yes. I mean, it’s a provocation, I would say in many ways. But I genuinely believe that there is something about if you want to use the language of care work now. And by care work I would say the work that it takes to sustain life. So that’s just tending to living things and continuously  keeping them alive. That is work that is slow, that is dirty, that is unattractive. You have no time sovereignty. It’s work that is really not light work. It’s really hard work.

Manda: And however much you scale it, you can’t extract more money out of it. It doesn’t do that. Yeah.

Andrea: It doesn’t scale well. It just doesn’t scale well. It’s unattractive and it doesn’t scale well.

Manda: Right. But it feeds us when we do it right. When we create the communities of care, that’s what gives us a sense of meaning and purpose and being and belonging that no amount of money is ever going to give us, clearly.

Andrea: Precisely. So maybe it doesn’t need to scale. How great! It just doesn’t have to scale, it’s just good as it is. But it’s confronted with an economy, as the exo capitalism authors would tell us, that is continuously trying to lift itself into further abstraction so as to be able to be faster. So you have a bit of a counter movement here, that is sustaining life is slow and unscalable and very meaningful and very fulfilling, but it’s met with a system that makes demands counter to this, constantly.

Manda: This is the wetiko, the hungry ghost. Yes. And this is what happens when an extractive trauma culture meets a whole holistic initiation culture, and then just rolls right across the top because the values are different.

Andrea: Precisely.

Manda: And it’s really hard. How do we reverse the values is really the question. To the point so that constantly accumulating doesn’t feel like that’s what your life is for. And that’s hard, when we live in the sea where constantly accumulating is what we’re taught. And up to a point, it does work. Your life is easier; you can pay for healthcare, you can buy yourself a faster car. And I can’t remember who it was, but there was a sociologist that I listened to again back in 2017, who’d done a lot of work and demonstrated that particularly in East Germany, the women had it much, much better. That there was free childcare, you were guaranteed a job. There was no need to marry a rich man in order to give yourself safety. There was no difference between the consultant surgeon and the roadsweeper. And if the roadsweeper was a nice guy, that was a good thing. And that capitalism was the inverse of that. And she said she went out and she ended up on some Reddit forum and she said, these young men got that immediately. Capitalism is much better for men.

Andrea: 100%. I’m so glad that you say this, because I really think that, you know, you can put it with the nose on and just say capitalism is a masculine project. But that doesn’t say much. And to many that is just something that they are not very attracted to. But I do think that really care work is deeply feminine work, and we see that it’s the opposite of what is taking place at the moment. And there’s no surprise that all of finance and technology and all of these fields are men dominated fields. And I always find it really difficult to negotiate with myself. How much time do I spend in this world of finance technology, of the scaling of the money, of the madness? And how much time do I actually, or should I just refuse and not even engage? Is it worth to be in? I think many of us know this now, this negotiation between these different appeals. But I think that’s really a big question. And just on the mini comment, I cannot not say it; so the Eastern European women; So I’m Romanian.

Manda: Right. Yes of course.

Andrea: So I very much come from a different kind of feminist tradition. And I have a mother who showed me a very different kind of life, in which indeed it is a professional life, but it is also a life of caring. But it’s not dependent on a man. So I think that that is something that is really the Holy grail to try and tease out, of how do we have a sense of returning to a less abstracted, slower, less maddening economy without falling into tropes of, you know, here is the master of the household and we all have to subdue.

Manda: Right, right, right. Which is where the US current administration would like to take us, because somewhere inside is a very wounded little boy who needs to gain control.

Andrea: Precisely.

Manda: We don’t need to go there. We haven’t touched yet the Sovereign Nature Initiative and the DEEP protocol and I really want to. I think definitely, if you’re willing to come back, I want to definitely have a second conversation, because there’s so much in this and you’re so good at expressing things clearly and you’ve thought so widely. But you created the Sovereign Nature Initiative. And I understand it’s not still running, but the idea behind it, the concept that began to link young people for whom gaming was a thing. And I speak as a gamer. I spent a lot of my life playing World of Warcraft. It’s there. And so that dopamine hit was a thing. And linking that to the world beyond the windows in a way that was meaningful, struck me as absolute genius. So please, can you tell us a bit about the Sovereign Nature Initiative and the DEEP Protocol? We’re heading towards the end of the hour, but just keep going, it’s fine.

Andrea: Yes, with the greatest pleasure. So I think that Sovereign Nature Initiative is really best described, and we call it internally like that, we call it an eco derivative. Because we are playing with that language of finance and the idea of derivation and the idea of abstraction, that sometimes might be necessary in order to connect worlds that have previously been unconnected. So the work that we think that we did with the Sovereign Nature Initiative, and I also want to just briefly say it’s an initiative that I co-founded together with two other colleagues, and they know who they are. And then we built a fantastic team, and with this team really carried this vision for about five years. And it was very much a collective effort of everyone involved there, in trying to think okay, so Sovereign Nature Initiative and eco derivative; we connect different kinds of worlds, basically to say it less pompous. How can we bring this maddening crypto economy in service of regenerative biodiversity projects? How do we make it so that the money, the gains, the energy, the curiosity, the drive, whatever you can find in the crypto world that was really like boiling, and connect that to Projects, to stewards, who are on an everyday basis, replenishing our lives on planet Earth. And so with this initiative, we funded this in 2019. The work started a bit earlier, but we incorporated in 2018 officially and we went for a couple of hackathons.

Andrea: We said we went to local biodiversity stewards, one here in Amsterdam and one in Kenya that we had previous connections. Pretty random. I could tell a sophisticated story about why that is, but it was really in many ways also just random. And we asked them, what do you need from technologists? In which way could technology be in service for you? And so we developed some challenges that we defined in collaboration with them. And then we opened that up to the world of Web3 developers, hackers and all sorts of people to whom we had a connection. So in many ways, the Sovereign Nature Initiative was always a bridge builder between communities that had nothing to do with each other. I think that’s one of the places in which the value of Sovereign Nature Initiative lies; is making that connection and bringing these things together and make them interested in each other. And so through a couple of iterations, what we ultimately landed on and what we understood, is that most of biodiversity stewards use data in order to monitor their own works and processes, in order to understand what are we doing, what are we achieving? And data, in the broadest sense of the way, you know. And to make it more concrete, I’m going to speak about this first project that we did in Kenya, together with the Kenya Wildlife Trust.

Manda: The lions.

Andrea: With the lions in the Maasai Mara, precisely. In which basically it turned out that this is a project in which they engage with predator protection. It’s called, which I also find this beautiful; Predator Protection. They need protection, our predators. A different way of saying it is human wildlife coexistence, human wildlife cohabitation. So how do you make it so that there is no conflict or as little conflict as possible in light of desertification, ever less vital and fruitful land, and so on? How do you make it so that predators can cohabit? And in order to do this work, they basically study the behaviour of the lions in the Masai Mara. Makes perfect sense. You need to understand how they roam, what they do, how they go. And so they have what they call ‘lion catalogues’, in which each lion is identified by name and by visual cues, by all sorts of things, by the pride that they are born into. Then the male lions leave their prides and there are some gruesome killing involved in taking over another pride, but they move on. It’s an ecosystem. It’s a world of its own. And part of the work of the Kenya Wildlife Trust is studying that. Rangers in the field, biologists and so on and so on. So what we suggested at Sovereign Nature Initiative is to say that this data that these biodiversity stewards, as we call them, is producing, can have value in this really fast paced digital economy. What value can it have there? How can it have value? And the assumption that we had is that, and that is maybe a false assumption, so I’m saying it’s an assumption; we thought that the digital world has an overproduction of non meaningful nonsensical data. You can basically now with AI with everything you can generate all sorts of things like with a click and it’s just something out there, some noise.

Manda: It’s just noise. Yeah.

Andrea: So we thought that the time is ripe for trying to imbue this crazy digital economy with some meaningful data. And meaningful in our world, that meant connected to the real world, connected to events in the world. And so we suggested to a Web3 gaming community that they would integrate these data sets from the Lions into their game. And the way that they did that was by developing lion avatars, which would be the companions for the players. And these lion avatars are connected in a pipeline to the datasets of the lions in the Masai Mara. And so when the lions in the Masai Mara, when there is something new happening  with the lions in the Masai Mara, these updates travel into the lion avatars. And then, depending on the game logics and however the game operates, these avatars can do new things. They can, whatever; turn pink, they develop wings, they are slower or faster, whatever. So we left that to the game developers to make sense of, this data, in their own universe. But what we offered was the standing pipeline, and the idea was really that (1)this is meaningful data. It’s just much more exciting to think that whatever this creature in your game does now is connected to a real world animal.

Manda: A real lion. It’s not just a random number generator that decided to throw you yet another iteration of a bit of armour you’ve already got.

Andrea: Precisely.

Speaker3: It’s a live lion. Yes.

Andrea: Precisely. So that was the idea. And that also, in a sense, nothing is as random as life, right? So that you can really also have an added value. I mean, we never push this fully through because all the game developers told me no, but Andrea, you need a randomiser at some point in this. You don’t have raw data in. So depending on what you take out.

Manda: Why?

Andrea: Well, I’m not sure. We always, I think, got stuck at the question of what level of representation. What kind of data do you take? How do you build that in? So I mean, there’s a lot of translations that go on, from the Roaming Lion to the avatar. We also never wanted this to be a representational system. So we always said, A lion is not a lion, it’s not a lion, right.

Manda: Because you don’t want someone to go out and shoot their opponent’s lion in order to make sure that their lion gets the extra wings. That needs not to be a thing. Yes, exactly. But you don’t want any variant of that.

Andrea: So that would be the worst. Exactly. And you don’t want any variant of that. And you also want to be really clear that a lion in the metaverse, a lion in a game is not a lion. It’s like a funky creature of something. So that was really important to try to keep that apart and just say, this is a data flow. This is not a representational thing. But because we also wanted to move away from this idea that the lion has a value, ecosystem services tries to put a value on everything. So that’s one of the things in which we have come with our econometric thinking; how do we internalise the externalities? Let’s put a good number on them. We wanted to circumvent that and said, no, it’s the data sets about these lions that are being valued. It’s the data set that travels into the game.

Manda: Can we? I’m aware at the time, but this feels really important. Why were you wanting to… I mean, I can see it, but I think we need to unpick it, because even the concept of giving everything ecological some kind of value is relatively new to some people. And then for some people, it seems obvious that, you know, for instance if at the moment a dead whale is worth more than a live whale, then let’s make a live whale worth something, and then dead whales are not worth more than whales. And then we don’t kill so many whales. And yet, you know, we live in a capitalist system where extraction is going to happen. And if live oil has a value, someone’s going to find a way to make it do what they want it to do. Why was it so important to make the line in the game not be the line on the Masai Mara?

Andrea: I think that the critiques of the question of putting a price tag on an animal or a natural entity are many. I would cut it back down to saying you reduce into a number, and that comes with a lot of consequences that you don’t see immediately. But I do think that one of the big problems that we are confronted with right now is that we are so in awe with mathematics, for good reason. It’s beautiful. Such a beautiful system. You can do so many wonderful things when you just put things into numbers, and you can model and you can predict and you can do really phenomenal things, which are very useful in many ways. But I do think that it comes at a price, if you reduce all of the living world into these numbers so you can do good things with it. I really want to not come out here as a mad person who says we don’t need any numbers, no statistics, no nothing, but I still think that if you try to respond to the ecological crisis by saying, let’s put a number, let’s put a value on that entity, you have reduced the possibilities of appreciating not just that entity as singularity. So you have singled it out, you have taken it out of its context because you have to.

Manda: Okay. So this lion is worth n number of dollars and the other lions aren’t. And it seems to me this is an emotional, spiritual, energetic thing as well as it is a financial capitalist economic thing, because it’s not just a number, it’s a number with a symbol in front that means it suddenly has value.

Andrea: Precisely. So I think that’s precisely it. And it’s also I think that it’s the relation between entities that creates so much life. But to put a number on these relations becomes impossible. So I do have to say that also we learned from the biodiversity stewards that they do work a lot with identification data. That is their bread and butter. They do identify individual entities because this is how they study them. So it’s always a matter of degree. It’s always a question of how much you do that. It’s never if you do or if you don’t, it’s to what degree. So that’s why we thought that it is much better for us, because that’s also much cleaner and much more precise, what we are interested in, is this data set about the lion. And it also keeps the human that is part of this ecosystem of protection in the loop. Because without the rangers documenting the lion, there is no data about the lion. So you have from the get go, I think, just a way of acknowledging a bigger part of the ecosystem and really precisely putting the humans into the loop.

Andrea: So I would like to say, to finish that story of the game avatars and just say that indeed it was really an interesting project for us. It worked well. I mean, our friends from the community, which is a Polkadot Web3 driven, tiny gamers community of a couple of thousand people. I still find it phenomenal that they just jumped on board with this and said, sure, that sounds great, let’s do it. So these Lion avatars were sold to the community as NFTs, and even in this relatively small sale, they generated $100,000 in the sales of which then 70,000 went to the Masai Mara project, to the Kenya Wildlife Trust, and 30,000 went to our Sovereign Nature initiative in order to sustain this. So we have the 70 over 30 cut that we always proposed to do. And with this first iteration of the project, it was really beautiful. It was really interesting to see. And just a very tiny note was what was also phenomenal to see, is that the Kenya Wildlife Trust, with this money, what they did is to buy a new car. So, you know, there is not much money that goes into conservation with which you can buy a car. No one wants their money being put to the dirty work of buying a diesel engine Jeep.

Manda: Right. But that’s what you need to be able to go and see the Lions.

Andrea: Precisely. So I thought that was beautiful. And then we had a big sticker on the car that said sponsored by Sovereign Nation Initiative and the community. And so I think that just on so many levels, symbolically, it says so much about what it means to really try to bring sustainable funding streams to biodiversity restoration projects and to not make it a donation. So the idea here was this data is added value to the gaming product. It’s not a nicety. It makes your game more interesting and it makes people want to play this game for other reasons. So that was really the cue there. And it was meant to be continuous and with new updates you could unlock new features. And so that there could be an ongoing monetary stream. But I do have to say that the project, I think at the moment there’s not much happening with it anymore. I think that it was just too underdeveloped in many ways. You know, we couldn’t pull the weight, neither the community nor us to do really this data integration full on. So we tried to to talk to big game developers. We try to speak with Epic Games, which we pitched to different kind of games. But they are big companies. They have difficult, complicated decision making mechanisms. They have lead times of 2 to 3 years. So it was really difficult to get a foot in. But I also want to say, if someone from the gaming industry listens to this and thinks this is a brilliant idea, we are here. We are ready, let me know, get in touch, because we are still ready to do this.

Manda: Get in touch. Yes, because I can think of the game. Yes. I mean, heck, Blizzard, guys, you could bring this into, you know, a couple of releases down the line of World of Warcraft. I’ll come back. I would play it. Can you imagine playing a battleground where the lion that you’re riding might suddenly sprout wings halfway through? Because the lion on the Maasai Mara just mated and produced cubs, and you don’t know what’s going to happen, but your battleground would be changed. That would be so exciting. Never mind. All right, so getting into gaming on the podcast, not a good thing, but I’ll see if I can spread this around. But then, I mean, we could spend a whole other podcast discussing the nature of gaming, because it seems to me that reframing gaming could reframe a critical mass of people very, very, very easily. And why are we going out and having to kill orcs and murlocs and things instead of tending the land. Even, this is a very small aside, but for a while in World of Warcraft where there was a side game. It was basically a little farming game and it drove me mad. I still did it because I wanted to get what it gave me, but it was all extractive; plough a field, plant things, stop the rabbits coming to get it.

Manda: Why do we not create a game where you’ve got an acre of sand. Here’s the regenerative model, here’s the industrial model, you have to feed 100,000 people. Go! And the sand works on principles that it would actually work in real life. And we would have regenerative farming as our model by the end of the week, because a lot of very smart people would work out very quickly that industrial farming is going to degrade their land, and regenerative farming is going to build it. And they could do the modelling of how much CO2 it takes in. The whole world would change overnight. And we don’t, because the people who build these things don’t think like that yet. But again, if anyone’s listening and you want an idea for a farming game, come and see me. Okay. We are so far over time, Andrea and I so want to speak to you about other things. Let’s loop back to the beginning: a wedge, clean code. If somebody were to make you president of the world tomorrow, have you got the beginnings of the wedge that we could make that would help to break us all out of the casino? And if the answer is no, that’s fine.

Andrea: I don’t have The Wedge. I have just, I think, again, a very banal, I guess, sense that the cost of capital and the possibility of, as you called it, with Polanyi, Commodifying capital, is completely out of control. So I do think that the biggest inequality emerges from there. If you do not have capital, what does it cost you to get your hands on even just a little bit of capital? And if you have capital, the exorbitant amounts that you can make with it, there is just no guardrail whatsoever. It’s infinite. So I think again, exo-capitalism, it’s like capital without an economy with absolutely no limits.

Manda: Okay, I need to read that book.

Andrea: It is the beautiful subtitle. So just to say within the capitalist system, which I think is the playground that is around us, and I do think that there is so much power enmeshed in the capitalist structures right now, that my focus is on how do we build a wedge, in a sense,to even just make it a bit slower. Block it a little bit. In that question, how do you make it so that you can have access to capital For those who don’t, and that you can somehow make the extractive part of big capital smaller? And this is something where indeed I, just to land back on Sovereign Nature Initiative, why this initiative mattered so much. And the concrete wedge, which is more interesting than my big musings about what you do in the abstract, would really be to say the question of how nature is doing is being ever more present. Finance needs to know how nature is doing in order to price its items well, and to give it food for being able to make all sorts of financial instruments out of it. So the interest on how nature is doing is just going to keep growing. The people who know how nature is doing are the biodiversity stewards. So how do we make it so that it’s not going to be tech text sensors, satellite measurements, all sorts of tiny sensors put into the soil that directly report to a tech company and take out all life that is there in sustaining biodiversity.

Andrea: I think that’s the wedge that we need right now, and that’s the wedge that we wanted to build with Sovereign Nature Initiative, to say this data is valuable in the digital economy, in the games and all of the things. But at the same time, we were planning to hopefully build a consortium of biodiversity stewards who can collectively defend their knowledge of how nature is doing in the long run. Because in agriculture we have already seen this. Farmers have no more stake and no more say in the data that is being extracted from their work and goes into all sorts of analysis. So I think that’s the moment in biodiversity restoration, where there is still a chance to say, this is the wedge; this knowledge is very valuable. And how do you make it so that the communities who are on the ground continue having their livelihoods secured so that they can continue doing their work, and that we don’t move into this really funky, weird place in which tech sensors tell financial instruments constantly how the pricing should be readjusted. Yes.

Manda: How much they can extract from this bit of land. Wow. That’s opened a whole new set of doors. But we haven’t got the time. I have one last question, though. We’ll make the time for this. Because I get incremental change and yet we have Zoran Mamdani in New York and Zack Polanski in the UK who are basically saying, tax the rich. And I know that Zack Polanski knows how money works because I’ve listened to him talk to Richard Murphy, and he knows we don’t need to take in tax in order for the government to spend. That that’s a myth. But that the tax is to lessen inequality. And it seems to me that one step beyond that, and I can’t see a way out of this where we don’t take this step, is that the dollar ceases to have value. The day we remove the fiat currencies and replace them with something that is equitably shared, and that doesn’t have the arbitrage and the capital accumulation, that doesn’t work like that. I don’t see a way through this unless we do that. And then we just need the the governance structure that allows that to happen or that enforces that happening. I don’t see any way through that isn’t that. If you see a way that does, maybe that’s the next podcast because I’m possibly not thinking widely enough or deep enough, but I don’t see a way that we get through without that.

Andrea: I mean, without going into it, it’s a big question, and I think that there’s the question of the relationship between crypto and the dollar is really difficult. I want to give a shout out to a student in Hong Kong, maybe 21 years old or something. When I spoke about crypto and all of these things, after the talk, he said, but excuse me so do you think that this is a re dollarisation or a de-dollarization project? And I just thought, wow.

Manda: I want to speak to this person.

Andrea: You’re switched on student. This is phenomenal. And I have no clear answer. What is it and what Trump’s doing in this whole thing with his own stablecoin and so on. It’s really hard to tell what it is that is going on there. But indeed, I would say that maybe just to end on a more positive note, is there’s another beautiful book for anyone who is interested in going deeper, which is called Protocols for Post-capitalist Expression by the Economic Space Agency.

Manda: Oh!!

Andrea: And they have been doing the conceptual work of trying to think about how these crypto protocols, what would it mean? Let’s say it’s conceptual. It’s really good work. How we bring that to light, Yet to be seen. But it’s a beautiful book.

Manda: I’m looking it up as we speak, and I will find it and I will put it in the show notes, and I will read it, and I will invite those people onto the podcast, because it feels like that’s what we need. Post-capitalism has to happen or I don’t see us getting through. But it’s eating itself as much as it’s eating the world. And we’re in a race of does it eat itself faster than it eats the world? If it does, it’s over. If it doesn’t, we’re all over.

Andrea: Yes, I think so. I think so. I think it’s a suicidal project. It’s eating itself.

Manda: Yeah, totally.

Andrea: And I also think that very honestly, I think that our role is almost limited. I mean, this sounds very fatalistic, but I do really think the question of how we do in this system, I don’t know how we get to a level of a collective consciousness that would enable us to really change the tracks.

Manda: That’s the spiritual side. That’s why we have the spiritual aspect to this podcast, because we won’t get to it through linear protocols, but we might get to it through energetic, true connections.

Andrea: I’m with you on that.

Manda: That’s another podcast. Andrea, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I have loved every moment of this conversation. I could talk to you for hours. We’ll book another one if you think that that’s a good thing.

Andrea: Absolutely.

Manda: And we’ll come back and talk about one of the many things that we could have talked about on here. Nate Hagens always ask his guests, what would you like to talk about next? But I think we’ll work that out when we get there, because six months from now, the world will be a different place. In the meantime, thank you so much for all that you are and do. I will put links to everything that you’ve mentioned in the show notes. I’m just so in awe of the scale and the scope of your thinking, and your capacity to make things happen. It’s brilliant. Thank you.

Andrea: Thank you.

Manda: So there we go. That’s it for another week. Huge thanks to Andrea for being a super brain, and for having the capacity to take such complex ideas and make them comprehensible to the rest of us. That is genuinely a superpower, and I am so grateful. And also so impressed by the breadth of Andrea’s reading. Genuinely, I got to the end of this podcast and I downloaded Between Gaia and the Ground by Elizabeth Povinelli, Exo Capitalism by Marek Polak and Roberto Alonso Trillo, and Protocols for Post-capitalist Expression, which, I have to say, I find a genuinely exciting idea, by Dick Bryan, someone whose name I can’t pronounce and Akseli Virtanen. These are right at the cutting edge of what we need to know. So I will read them, and if possible, I will get the people who wrote them to come onto the podcast. But for sure, Andrea is coming back next February, and we will go deeper into whatever areas of this are most alive for both of us at the moment. In the meantime, please do follow up some of the links in the show notes. I completely get that for some of you blockchain, crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Web3 are the ocean in which you swim.

Manda: But for a lot of us, they’re not. And yet they are controlling the political governance of our world at the moment. And we need that not to be the case. So working out how we can create the parallel polis that allows this not to be the case, is part of the work of this moment. That and as we said in closing, doing the energetic and spiritual work to change the nature of the frames within which we swim. To change the nature of the belief systems that orient us. To change who we are and how we relate to all parts of ourselves, ourselves and each other, ourselves and the web of life. And yes, I will continue to say this over and over and over again until I think it’s landed with everybody.

Manda: So there we go. That’s it for another week. Huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot, to Alan Lowell’s of Airtight Studios, for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcript, and Faith Tilleray for managing last week’s gathering. Thank you to those of you who came to Dreaming Your Death Awake. It takes a lot of work behind the scenes. Thanks also to Lou for managing the breakout rooms and all of the tech while it was running. Really, I am so grateful to everybody who comes along to help and to engage with the depths of the work. I genuinely think that if we can fall in love with every moment of living, then we will change who we are. And we can’t do that until we’ve fallen in love with the inevitability of our own death. It really strikes me as weird that there are people on the planet who think that no death, no taxes, no democracy is a good way forward. It’s like deciding that you want to stay in primary school.

Manda: So there we go. That was the last gathering. I loved it, thank you. Next gathering is on Sunday, 4th of January, 4:00 till 8:00 UK time. There is a link in the show notes. And if you know of anybody else who wants to really get to grips with how we can build bridges from where we are to where we need to be, 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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