Conversation, Money & Purpose: KERNEL Block III — Module 0

For the next 8 weeks, I will be participating in the KERNEL Block III Fellowship as a part of the Opscientia team. The KERNEL network is a thriving peer-to-peer community of the most talented and creative crypto-curious builders from around the world. As an introduction, we have been provided with some fascinating reading themed around money, conversation and purpose. From what I gather, this is because to start any meaningful conversation about Bitcoin, crypto, blockchain, and decentralised ledger technologies, we have to start at the very beginning.

Conversation

KERNEL fellows are taught to think in terms of complementary opposites. This means learning how to hold multiple viewpoints in our heads at the same time and move away from black and white thinking. This is also described as quantum thought, the ability to contemplate 1 and 0 and the ‘space in between.’ Additionally, humility is at the core of KERNEL as with good, comes bad. We can therefore prepare for the world to lash back at us when we strive to build something that changes it for the better. We have seen this with Web2. Just take Google’s ‘don’t be evil’, this was very well-intended and altruistic but ultimately, the universe has a way of balancing out the good and the bad. Those who have impacted meaningful positive change have done so in a way that embraces complexity rather than shies away from it. There is no quick fix, anecdotal solution to the world’s problems and that is the beauty of it.

Following on from this, the idea of trust is at the core of web3 and Bitcoin’s maxim of ‘don’t trust, verify’ encapsulates this. This ultimately means a shift away from trusted third parties to do our bidding towards a peer-to-peer system where trust is replaced by verification. If we define all the ways people can cheat and lie, then we can encode them in software to mitigate against this. I have found this shift in thinking about trust the most difficult to break down and restructure in my mind. I think this ultimately links back to the fact that trust is one of the oldest paradigms of what it means to be human.

Paul Myburgh, the author of The Bushmen Winter Has Come, explains that much of our modern world consists of vertical conversation whereby those participating are constantly competing for airtime. These conversations fail to build upon one another and give no ‘space in between’ the communication of different ideas to contemplate what has been said. Instead, he suggests we go back to a more constructive conversational way of being — horizontal conversation — where participants share trust, living within the same context and conversations continue and can be picked up tomorrow, or next week, or sometime later. Through this much more meaning is shared.

The object of a dialogue is not to analyze things or win an argument, or exchange opinions. Rather, it is to suspend your opinions and to look at the opinions — to listen to everybody’s opinions, to suspend them, and to see what all that means.
— David Bohm

Dialogue, as David Bohm envisioned it, is a radically new approach to group interaction, with an emphasis on listening and observation, while suspending the culturally conditioned judgments and impulses that we all have. This unique and creative form of dialogue is necessary and urgent if humanity is to generate a coherent culture that will allow for its continued survival.

Money

With the advent of human society came the advent of money and money is just a medium to communicate trust. Andreas Antonopoulos touches on how money and language are the same and “at its very basic level, money isn’t value: money represents an abstraction of value. It’s a way of communicating value.” Ancient forms of money were fully decentralised, no third party controlled the system. If you held a form of money — be it feathers or rocks — you owned them, if someone stole them then ‘finders keepers’ so to speak. This was a system of ownership.

However, our current financial system is a debt-based architecture — client-server (a.k.a. master-slave) as Andreas puts it. What this means is that if I put my money in a bank, I lend it to them in return for interest on that money, theoretically. In turn, they then lend this money, with interest (not so theoretically), to those who need liquidity. However, they can turn around one day and decide: ‘We aren’t going to give you this money for one reason or another be it financial mismanagement or government corruption. Now for the more conservative reader who has lived quite peacefully in a democratic, ‘free’ society for the majority of their lives, the thought of banks not complying with the trust agreement the bank made with us seems unimaginable. I assure you it’s not. Just look at Venezuela or Greece (or somewhere closer to my heart but that would be illegal to type on this page). Even the Great Depression is still (almost) in living memory (if you are very old).

Guess who is the master and who is the slave in the context of banks and their customers

This brings us to decentralised ledger technology and the rise of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a fundamental transformation in the architecture of money — this should not be understated — because it changes radically from a system of master and slave into one where every participant is equal and where a transaction has no state or context other than that required to obey the rules of a network no-one controls.

Your money is yours; no one can censor, seize, or freeze it. No one can tell you what to say with your money.
— Andreas Antonopoulos

We exist in a society where this is deemed acceptable. Might we strive for something better?

Moving away from currency we realise just how important these principles apply to the continuation of free and open scientific research and how Opscientia and open science fits into all of this. Bohm states “science is, at least in principle, dedicated to seeing any fact as it is, and to being open to free communication with regard not only to the fact itself but also to the point of view from which it is interpreted. Nevertheless, in practice, this is not often achieved. What happens in many cases is that there is a blockage of communication.”

Yes. I am saying that, provided it is a true dialogue, it will release creativity. Take science, for example. It is already admitted that if scientists are constantly talking about their work, attending conferences, publishing, exchanging information, new ideas arise in a way that can hardly be noticed. It is still very limited because people are defending their positions and worrying about the financial rewards they are going to get, and so on. But suppose all those pressures were to go; you would have free creativity in communication.
— David Bohm

So where does this new technology fit in?

Technology is the tool by which we enable our most fundamental needs — food, shelter and companionship. When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church on October 31, 1517, it was the invention of the printing press that enabled the idea of Protestantism to spread across Europe. This technology enabled the peer-to-peer sharing of information and in the case of religion, it removed the necessity for a central authority of trust to disseminate information about God. No longer did people have to listen to the clergymen, instead they could read (or look at pamphlets with images) to make their own assumptions about their belief system. Christians were no longer indebted to the Catholic Church, they could now take ownership over their religion — you could say this goes back to the roots of spirituality. (I don’t want to get into a religious debate as I have no firm views one way or the other — this is purely for the sake of comparison).

Now, let’s take this idea and transport it to how we look at money. By switching from a debt-based system to one of ownership, we take back control of the communication of money and ultimately trust. To me this is the ultimate goal however, the world is not black and white and the reality will probably be a mix of both decentralisation and centralisation. Furthermore, one of the questions I find most interesting to contemplate is how do we use compassion and understanding for one another to build more meaningful technologies that enable us to create a truly free society and leave behind the pseudo-capitalist system we have now.

Purpose

Finally, we must consider our purpose for being here and ask ourselves deeply about our intention for doing this. The Silicon Valley mantra of ‘build fast and break things’ has come close to tearing our society apart at the seams and only through intention and purpose and striving to be better ourselves can we even start to dream of building something better for humanity. I hope that reading this you have both learned something and moreover, I hope you have disagreed with something. I hope this disagreement has challenged your belief system and helped see our existing social structures through a slightly different lens.