INTRO - Going long on Civilization
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[Active] The Hypha DAO / DHO
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We focus on building the tools and technology our movement needs.
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Hypha’s building tools and conducting practical experiments in Web3 that are helping us coordinate and scale our efforts to solve systemic challenges like climate breakdown, political instability, depression, and poverty.
Hypha, named after the individual hairs that comprise mycelium networks, which help healthy ecosystems coordinate, is also the name of a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) ecosystem building tools that help healthy economic systems coordinate.
After all, wouldn’t it make sense if our economic systems behaved more like healthy ecosystems? Designed to equally support our human and more-than human worlds.
Climate breakdown, poverty, homelessness, political disenfranchisement, pollution and more of humanity’s great crises share something in common.
They’re all large-scale coordination challenges.
Ask almost anyone if they would like these crises to be solved and you’d get a clear consensus.
Yet they persist, and many have given up trying, believing that “humanity is doomed”. This recent IPCC (Intergovernmental panel on climate change) report confirms this perspective; at least, if we don’t radically alter our trajectory.
“The litany of doomsday projections move anyone who is still listening only to despair. Despair is paralysis, it robs us of agency; it blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury at the bottom of Onondaga lake…” -Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Even though humanity possesses the raw ability, and the collective desire, to restore our global ecosystems; these crises persist and accelerate unabated.
Why is this?
One reason is rooted in the tools humanity currently uses to coordinate at scale. Tools like markets, money, and corporations.
Markets
Our outdated markets consider our more-than-human world and the literal health of our planet, the only planet we humans can call home, as an “externality” that is scarcely considered.
The market says it’s far more profitable to pollute a river and sell bottled water back to the people, than it is to make our rivers drinkable again. It’s more profitable to indefinitely treat sick people, than it is to maintain healthy people.
“The world economy is a pyramid scheme”- Steven Chu Nobel Laureate, FT
Money
Our outdated money by nature of how it’s created and distributed, subsidizes, finances, rewards and creates many of our crises:
Climate “Given these dangers, you might find it hard to believe that fossil fuel companies receive a staggering $5 trillion in subsidies annually, equivalent to over 6% of global GDP.” — Forbes 2020
Inequality “The top 1% officially have more money than the whole middle class”-Business Insider 2021 “Fed Chief Powell, other officials owned securities central bank bought during pandemic" — CNBC 2021
Degenerative Growth, Climate, Inequality “Without growth (e.g. infinite growth on our finite planet), debt increases faster than income and wealth and the whole system crashes. Before that, you get polarization of wealth income and unemployment.” — Charles Eisenstein on debt-based money
Corporations
Our outdated corporations, built to serve markets and money, place profit above all else. But, you already know that. The corporations driving the world today are so degenerative that Google couldn’t even maintain their incredibly low bar motto of “don’t be evil” let alone “be net positive for humanity”.
The monolithic “Platform Economies” of Web2 (the Airbnb’s and Uber’s) build community to exploit them (to continue to grow profits when organic growth has stalled). This eventually causes a systemic breakdown and new startups rise to replace them, by once again starting off at the bottom of the S curve. This endless revolution cycle keeps our economies stuck in models of zero-sum competition and exploitation. Web3 offers us an exit, through building net-positive organizations and communities built off the principles of regenerative growth and scaled cooperation.
Net positive organizations are a voluntary and extreme exception to this pattern. Not the rule, or default.
Not only are our coordination tools inadequate for helping us solve our challenges, they’re the fuel that’s incentivizing and financing our crises to begin with.
Why?
Is it because the super rich want to destroy our planet?
Is it because business leaders are evil?
Or, is it simply because the tools we’ve been using are not intended or designed for creating thriving civilisations and coordinating the regeneration of our planet?
Or thesis, it’s the latter, and we need to build tools to change this story. Now, this is an audacious and overwhelming challenge to get right. But, it’s a challenge we can’t back down from just because it seems to big to take on.
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” — Audre Lorde
Going back, the roots of our modern governments and economies were designed centuries ago in a world barely recognizable to today. In a world that could scarcely imagine the global challenges we’re facing or the technologies we wield. How could we possibly expect these tools to help us today?
In short, humanity’s most popular operating systems for scaling coordination are outdated, buggy, and full of malware.
Yet, there may still be cause for pragmatic optimism.
“…Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter positive creative relationship with the more than human world. Meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It’s not enough to grieve, it’s not enough to just stop doing bad things.” -Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
The Web 3.0 Renaissance
Not long ago suggesting that humanity, or any group of people for that matter, adopt a new economic system would be enough to prescribe that person a heavy dose of pharmaceuticals and join the 66% of Americans on prescription pills (an example of a degenerate economic system that values sick people more than healthy people).
A once reasonable reaction…
Because, for the last few centuries the right to experiment with new economic systems at any meaningful scale; was reserved solely for nations states that wielded the political ability (often through authoritarian power) to run such experiments. Some of these experiments have been costly and bloody and, not surprisingly, have been turned into the memes used to demotivate further experimentation. A political leader even suggesting that they may try a new economic system was enough to get their nation invaded by more powerful nations. This has severely limited humanity’s ability to experiment, learn and evolve new types of economic systems.
Today nation states are stuck in a series of multipolar traps and other myopic coordination challenges, and are failing to implement meaningful changes to steer humanity away from biosphere collapse and the loss of millions of species.
“1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction.” — UN report 2019
After decades of meaningful efforts to solve these challenges it’s clear we should not rely on nation states to solve our problems. It’s clear they don’t have the appropriate tools, systems, or incentives to do so (else they would done so already).
Web4 could be seen as the next stage of Web3.0 — though likely more appropriate to label it as Web3.1
The printing press was credited as the core transformative technology that catalyzed the Medieval Renaissance — and ushering in new civilization forms for humanity.
As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. This time around it’s the tools of Web3 that will be credited for catalyzing the modern renaissance.
“Following Thomas Khun’s work on scientific revolutions and Arnold Toynbee’s work on the rise and fall of civilizations, we can state that whenever an economic paradigm is unable to provide useful answers to a period’s biggest challenges, society will enter a transitional period in which, sooner or later, it replaces the existing logic and operating system with an update and better one.” — Otto Scharmer & Katrin Kaufer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
This ‘transitional period’ is now, and it’s called Web3.0.
Web3 a Modern Renaissance Providing Humanity with New Operating Systems
The founders of capitalism, socialism, communism and the rest of the popular “ism’s” could scarcely imagine global and instantaneous communication. Let alone imagine the ability for billions of people across our planet to provably verify data and autonomously execute global exchanges.
They were still using parchment and pigeons it was outside their scope of possibilities.
In today’s renaissance humanity has fundamentally new tools to create fundamentally new economic and governance systems with.
For a simple example, Bitcoin offers the world a new financial operating system, built off the foundations of a provably scarce currency paired with a trustworthy and unchanging monetary policy. Bitcoin fundamentally changes the game.
The Bitcoin operating system has been such a powerful and successful coordination tool that it has orchestrated millions of humans across the globe to consume almost %0.1 of all energy that humanity creates each year!
This is an enormous global coordination feat that shouldn’t be understated or dismissed.
At least 2 key concepts are at the heart of this success. Memes and seigniorage.
Memes Richard Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” Bitcoin launched at the height of distrust in our financial institutions in 2009 the first block of the Bitcoin Blockchain contains “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”.
Humanity needed a more trustworthy financial system, and Bitcoin offered that, and as such it became a potent meme for freedom, boundless creativity, a life-raft for escaping the failing financial systems, and hope.
Seigniorage Bitcoin was able to coordinate this behaviour because it employs one of the most powerful ideas humanity has ever created, seigniorage.
Seigniorage is the difference between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it. Or in other words, the ability to make money out of nothing. Or in other words, the ability for whoever it whatever wields seigniorage to scale coordination through money.
At Bitcoin’s current (September 2021) prices and block rewards it mints ~$15.5+ Billion USD worth of new Bitcoins each year. The entirety of this new money is used to defend and secure the Bitcoin network. ~$8+ Billion USD went to pay the electric bills, leaving ~$7B+ as revenue for miners (those who run the machines that produce the blockchain and provide Bitcoin’s security) for producing this service. All of this effort is to provide security to the Bitcoin network making it more expensive to hack or manipulate creating one of the most robustness, expensive and secure financial systems.
In this way the Bitcoin’s defense budget, as a share of total spending is 100%, or otherwise said; it’s more bloated than the U.S. or any other financial system.
All said, Bitcoin has inspired a generation to dream of a better future and to prove that it can be built. Bitcoin coordinated millions across the world to action, it now consumes more energy than the entire country of Egypt. This coordination feat should not be understated.
If this technology has been able to do all this. What else could it help us coordinate to accomplish?
Could we use this technology to coordinate globally to create circular economies, local and regenerative food systems, pollution cleanup, reforestation and the other foundations necessary for a 22nd century civilization?
Imagine if instead, that the $15.5 Billion in Bitcoin created last year went towards financing things humanity desperately needs to thrive. $15.5 Billion a year towards subsidizing local food systems, reforestation projects, returning land for commons to reverse homelessness and extreme poverty, providing interest free loans to startup ecovillages, circular economy businesses, and the laundry list of regenerative actions humanity needs to take now to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown.
Bitcoin creates money for security and to pay the electric bills, creating a highly secure form of “digital gold".
Central banks create money to accelerate wealth inequality, make war, squander wealth, and subsidize ecocide.
New financial systems emerging in Web3 (like SEEDS) are creating money to finance and subsidize the creation of regenerative economies.
Consider a global currency that uses seigniorage to create the circular and regenerative economies that come to ‘back’ the currency. Just as national currencies today are backed solely by their national economies (and in some cases, militaries), the currencies of Web3 will be backed by the global economies and communities who adopt them.
This transition gives people the freedom to put their value (money) where their values (ethics) are.
If we transition the “work of running miners and burning electricity” into the “work of regenerating civilization”, then this renewed perspective can unite our efforts across once warring communities and transcend the coordination challenges that have prevented us from meaningfully acting on our global crises.
Instead of climate scientists, activists, and others who’ve been rationally chastising Web3 (by confusing Bitcoin with all of Web3) because of Bitcoin’s energy consumption and waste; they may instead be championing this technology for its capacity to coordinate systemic regeneration as a more direct approach to achieving the aims of our environmental and social activism.
Climate and social activists can begin building and joining regenerative economic systems (where the networks consume negligible amounts of energy), opposed to endlessly waiting and asking for nation states to act. Further, we can experiment with new types of economic systems where nation states are unable, or lack the political capital to do so, and when we create one that works — then we actually have something to advocate for.
Web3 has provided the financial primitives for humanity to create fundamentally new types of economic systems.
All this is just the beginning of what’s possible when we start redesigning our economies from first principles design thinking.
Reducing the cost of experimenting with new economies at scale
There is a near infinite variety of civilizational operating systems that can be (are are being) designed and built upon decentralised, open-source and immutable foundations. Such as currencies that are neither inflationary (like central bank currencies) or deflationary (like Bitcoin), or altogether new types of currencies and economic tools — like, Voting Rights, Reputation, Contribution Points, Gratitude, or Seeds.
We can build currencies that don’t extract or concentrate wealth. Beyond inflation and deflation rests a steady-state economy that’s designed with regeneration at the heart.
Web3, is ushering in a Cambrian explosion for new socioeconomic systems.
This technology has dramatically reduced the cost of launching and experimenting with new economic operating systems. Now it’s no longer just politically determined nations states that get to experiment. Now, any group of humans with enough time and dedication can create entirely new economic systems and bring them to the global open-source market.
For those who are fundamentally against cryptocurrencies, or just generally don’t understand their value, then if for nothing else their value is in the breakthroughs they’re catalyzing across a vast array of scientific disciplines (from cryptography to psychology and everything in-between). The wisdom we’re gaining from these experiments is compounding at a breakneck pace.
Yet, none of the experiments in Web3 matter all that much if humanity destabilises our biosphere in the process. It’s critical that we redirect the enormous coordination capacity of this technology towards healing our communities, our planet, and creating a more beautiful world.
Perhaps most importantly, Web3 is changing hearts and minds and restoring hope for the newer generations that have inherited our ancestors’ mistakes.
We see in this recent DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) report, a welcomed contrast to the “humanity is doomed” story. No longer is our future bleak, these tools provide us an ability to create a new story!
What happens when you imbue the renaissance technology of Web3 with regenerative principles. You get the Regenerative Renaissance.
The Permaculture (combining permanent culture with permanent agriculture) Principles provide a compass from which we can design new economic systems with.
Hypha is an organisation living and breathing Web3. It exists as a transparent, immutable and decentralised organisation. It’s been building tools designed to:
help humanity scale our coordination towards solving our global crises.
help communities and organizations of any size coordinate more effectively to thrive within social and planetary boundaries and achieve their unique purpose.
create economic systems that are regenerative by design and default. So the net impact of these economic systems are restorative and life-affirming opposed to life-negating and destructive.
Kate Raworth’s graphic of a “Doughnut Economy”.
More intelligent economic systems would consider social and planetary boundaries as their foundation (and not externalities) from which value is generated and directed towards restoring. Anything less is civilizational suicide.
Imagine if the trillions central banks created recently went towards restoring our social and planetary boundaries opposed to continually bailing out Wall Street.
This isn’t all that radical of an idea. Stephanie Kelton, an MMT (modern monetary theory) economist explains how it’s already possible for governments to use seigniorage (print money) to fund solutions to our crises.
To paraphrase Stephanie, “governments need not be concerned about ‘paying back the debt’ but instead concerned with controlling the rate of inflation/deflation and in how this new money is put to good use.”
Instead of waiting for governments to find the political will to adapt to our global crises. What if we just built this new economic system within Web3 in a voluntary, transparent, and open-sourced manner?
We could build the economic system that Stephanie Kelton, Kate Raworth, Charles Eisenstien, and so many other luminaries have been calling for!
We could program our economic system to autonomously balance inflation (to a predetermined target) and direct economic surplus and seigniorage (e.g. new money) towards restoring social and planetary boundaries. We could create an economic system that’s regenerative by design.
Economic systems that embody the 8 Principles of a Regenerative Economy
Our task ahead is too important to continue to wait to take action
Hypha builds tools that empower humans to start coordinating at scale today.
Tools that help us reclaim our sovereignty and responsibility to heal our communities, regenerate our planet, inhabit new organisational structures, and build new economic systems.
We cannot continue to wait for our governments to continue to fail to adapt tools that are insufficiently designed for the task at hand.
We need to start taking fundamental action now by creating, adopting, experimenting, and continually improving upon new economic systems.
Systems that will help us build new types of civilizations fit for the 21st century to joyfully carry humanity into the 22nd.
What are some of these “printing press” technologies of the modern renaissance?
Hypha’s built a suite of complementary tools that provide communities with the resources they need to create and engage in new types of organisation and economic systems of various scales.
SEEDS — Regenerative Economic Systems
Seen above is the “Regenerative Civilization Scorecard”, tracking SEEDS impact towards People, Planet and Prosperity tracking economic, governance, and ecosystem health and positive impact over its short (2 years) life. At the heart is “earth overshoot day” tracking the date by which humanity has exhausted earth’s renewable resources. You can see it all in action at joinseeds.earth/dashboard
Hypha’s been contracted by the Citizens of SEEDS to build tools for their decentralized economy. On the surface SEEDS is a fee-free currency (no fees are necessary to not continue or exacerbate exploitation, and necessary to be a superior alternative to cash) providing the on-ramp into Web3.
However, more importantly SEEDS is a planetary community of regenerators (those who seek to restore ecosystem health and wellbeing) who’ve been building, modeling, experimenting with new economic realities.
SEEDS creates open-source economic systems that are “regenerative by design opposed to degenerative by default”, to paraphrase Kate Raworth of Doughnut Economics.
SEEDS does this through providing a growing suite of economic primitives and building blocks.
Citizens directly control the creation and flows of public money by tweaking and upgrading decentralized algorithms, using decentralized governance, that governs their monetary system.
For example “Contribution Score” is a module (economic primitive) in SEEDS that can comprise of anything that can be proved (such as transacting in a currency or planting a tree). This provides a participant a score which determines how much of the new currency, determined by the “Currency Stability” module (that governs the inflation/deflation rate) that participant will receive. In other words, its as if central banks created a “contribution list” that if Citizens contributed to the well-being of society then they could earn direct income as a more intelligent and regenerative compliment to a UBI (Universal Basic Income). But instead of this being designed and decided by a “Central Bank" it’s designed, voted-in, and decided by all those who participate in the decentralized governance of their economy.
These two modules together provide an alternative to Bitcoin’s unresponsive monetary policy and uni-budget. With the “Contribution Score” module communities can consciously decide what they consider a contribution to their community and actively compensate those contributions (whatever can be measured). There are many more primitives and modules of SEEDS that can be found in full here. Such as “Gratitude” a protocol that helps communities reciprocate contributions that are difficult to isolate and measure in a way that goes beyond the zero-sum game of the dominant economic systems. This provides a paradigm changing combination that can helps humanity align personal incentives (profit seeking) with net-beneficial social and planetary outcomes.
What would our world look like if the most profitable decision was always the best decision for people, planet, and our shared prosperity?
With these modules SEEDS cultivates new types of economic systems that re-engineer seigniorage towards intelligently designed outcomes (like incentivizing regenerative behaviors). Through the governance modules participants enter an infinite game whereby they continually tweak, upgrade and add modules to improve their ability to increase quality of life, restore planetary health, and create thriving communities and circular economies.
More on SEEDS: check out this recent article announcing a new currency called “Gratitude”, check out this recent video on “The Crypto Revolution and the Regenerative Renaissance”, or simply check out the landing page, and find additional resources in the footer, such as the SEEDS Constitution and comprehensive Economics Guide for more details.
Passport
The SEEDS Passport is one way the people of SEEDS discuss, govern, and upgrade their new economy and civilization. They can exchange value using unique currencies, like Seeds, which is the world’s first “better than fee-free” currency supporting regenerative outcomes or with other currencies like Gratitude. They can participate in an incentivized forum that compensates them for sharing their wisdom. Then they can take this wisdom to the governance section to take part in direct and decentralised governance to evolve and steer their economy.
The DHO (Decentralised Human/Holonic Organisation)
You may have heard of DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations) that have been, understandably, receiving a lot of attention lately.
Well, at the heart of Hypha is the DAO or as Hypha calls it, a DHO (pronounced DO, as in “this is how we do”) ecosystem.
The H stands for Human, as Hypha endevours to put human thrivability at the heart of the networks, organisations, and tools being built.
This tool is used to coordinate, make decisions, steward shared assets like a treasury, vote on governance policies, assign roles, create quests (with milestone payouts) and more in a trustless, decentralised, transparent and autonomous way.
For example, if a member creates a proposal to payout 10,000 Hypha tokens a week for 12 weeks and this proposal passes. Then this proposal will automatically execute and payout over this period. A new proposal could be presented to stop payouts should an agreement be broken. None of this requires any other human or centralized party to execute on these agreements. These tools allow humans to scale coordination, through scaling trust by removing corruptible or fragile dependencies.
The H in DHO stands for human and holonic.
Human, because the DHO is designed for the human at the center. Because it’s humans using these tools and they ought to fully support and nourish our individual and collective development and evolution (opposed to trying to program or automate the human out).
Holonic, because of how the DHO scales coordination (through holons and fractals) so that teams and organisations remain small and nimble. Yet, through aligning incentives, shared semantics, and reduced transaction/coordination costs teams can more readily coordinate globally amongst each other to create impact at the scale of multinationals (at least, that’s the working theory).
It’s early days for this technology and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface for how we could redesign the future of organisation and coordination.
The DHO isn’t just for new types of businesses. Any group of humans seeking to coordinate shared resources for a common purpose can use the DHO tools to do so.
Showcasing a variety of capital, resource and value flows of a community.
Regional DHO’s (collections of people who are coordinating to better meet their local and regional needs) can track social and planetary markers and program in economic policies that are triggered based on this data. This could be a way to compliment local governments in addressing local and community challenges and opportunities.
For example, if a region notices that nutrition in their community is deteriorating they can use this to trigger grants for community gardens and local regenerative agriculture. These tools can help fill in the gaps of community coordination where local governments are unable or unwilling to do so. Important enough to say again, that these policies (like issuing more value to community gardens) aren’t “top down" policies forced on communities but rather “middle out" policies created and governed by the community participants.
Coordinate with organisations across the globe.Groups (businesses, networks or communities) can use the DHO tools to coordinate anything. Like managing a treasury of impact funds directed by the community.
The power of organising through software becomes exponential. Whenever a community discovers or invents a breakthrough module (let’s call it a Coordination App) it can be installed by any other community within the Hypha ecosystem — allowing groups to learn, experiment, benefit, and evolve as a whole. All of this helps increase learning while localising risks, because if one organisation experiments with a coordination application that fails, it need not cause harm to the rest of the ecosystem and can even serve as a warning to other organisations who are using that app or module. This mirrors how forests ecosystems evolve and coordinate.
Swap tokens with other groups and teams.Regional Citizens govern their own local economic systems and flows of public money.
Imagine enjoying dinner at the new restaurant that just opened up in your community. Imagine being able to pull out your phone after you just thoroughly enjoyed your meal and being able to purchase the tokens offered by that restaurant or an index of tokens that represents the whole village. This is one route towards rehabilitating the commons through opening up avenues for communities to collectively own their communities. Some groups may go further and moved beyond “ownership” to “stewardship” where the community bas a whole owns the assets of the whole community and participants instead embody stewardship roles and are afforded access to the community’s assets. There is endless possibilities for communities to redesign their economic realities.
One of the biggest barriers for web3.0 mass adoption was the risk of losing all your wealth if you misplaced your private keys. So, Hypha built a wallet with decentralized social key recovery. Meaning you can choose trusted friends and family to have the ability to recover, freeze or alter your account should they act together to do so. This provides the best of both worlds, censorship resistance and the freedom to misplace and recover your keys.
The Web3 wallet provides more security while replacing the tedious litany of passwords that Web2 forced upon us. The wallet is your portal to sign into all the applications and tools of these new systems.
Economic Modeling
Any new economic system would be incomplete without tools to test assumptions, run experiments, and model flows of value. Hypha’s built economic simulation tools to test and evolve regenerative economic systems.
An economic modelling tool for SEEDS
Going further Hypha is currently exploring displaying economic modelling from a warmer and more digestible perspective. Opposed to charts and numbers to tell an economic story, what if you could walk into a 3D or VR garden that tells the economic and governance story of your community.
For example, each sunflower in our virtual garden could be a proposal and each bee could represent an interaction with that proposal. So, simply looking at the sunflower patch you could quickly understand which proposals are getting the most attention, how many proposals there are, how active the governance is and so much more.
As we continue to explore what it means to truly have democracy. A true democracy is where we, the people, are truly sovereign beings who have a meaningful say in the governance and evolution of the socioeconomic systems we inhabit and a choice in which systems we inhabit to begin with.
Then as a society we start to remember the importance of education. The importance of making complex systems digestible so we can begin to see what collective intelligence and true sovereignty really means.
Further, since participation in these economic systems are voluntary, humanity can no longer rely on force, coercion, and punishment as a primary tool to motivate behaviors. If an economic system becomes too inequitable or coercive then its members have the freedom to leave to (or to create) other systems that offers them more value aligned with their values.
A Renaissance not a Revolution — for the Revolution can’t save us
Revolution literally means “a cyclical recurrence”. Bitcoin is the Revolution offering a fundamental improvement in many areas (such as immutable and transparent financial systems). However, it exacerbates inequality and waste (2 of humanity’s critical crises) and offers no path to improve coordination towards systemic regeneration or other coordination challenges.
What we learned from Egypt in the years following their “successful revolution”, is how quickly they fell back into old patterns. One reason could be that the revolution didn’t offer a viable alternative system. The people were clear on what they didn’t want, what wasn’t working, and they successfully coordinated to take it down. However, they failed to come up with viable alternatives to replace the old systems with. They missed the vital step of coordinating to create new and viable alternatives. In the absence of these viable alternatives the power vacuum quickly defaulted to old patterns and today Egypt is not far from where they started.
As they say, Democracy and Capitalism are the worst forms of governance and economic systems… except for all the others…
The renaissance mission is about building, testing, redesigning, modeling, mapping and communicating new economic realities. To demonstrate and provide viable alternatives to the ‘worst forms’ we have today and clear the paths towards systems change.
A renaissance over a revolution. A joyful transition into viable alternatives opposed to a cataclysmic crash into chaos. Alternatives that can help us evolve beyond neoliberalism and ‘late stage capitalism’ into new operating systems capable of carrying humanity (and the rest of life on our planet) gracefully through the 21st century.
It’s time to say goodbye to those suicidal systems and welcome alternatives.
Web3 gives us the ability to build, own, opt-into, and be the change we wish to see.
An Audacious Task
“One-third of plant and animal species could be gone in 50 years” — Science Daily, 2020
Every day we delay taking systemic action on climate breakdown, we lose more species and trigger additional positive feedback loops that may make solving our climate crises untenable.
Hypha understands that if we don’t start radically changing behaviours to solve our converging crises, then civilization is at risk of collapsing (as all the other civilizations of history have) once again.
Creating a new economic system is an enormous task.
Yet, it’s not one that we can afford to shy away from or continue to ignore.
This, in part, is why Hypha’s ecosystem and technology stack exist, to help support experimenting with and building tools that can help us transition.
Just as the mycelium network of a forest isn’t the forest, fungi is but one part of a symphony of plants, animals, minerals, nutrients, water, air, sunlight, and more that co-create a healthy ecosystem.
Hypha and their current allies alone could not, and do not, make a globally regenerative economy. Hypha doesn’t endeavor to try to solve these global crises alone.
That would be an absurd approach, and unnecessary.
Instead, Hypha focuses on building open-source tools that help unite the diversity of organisations, movements, communities and more across the globe that are already playing key roles in this transition. Tools that can scale infinitely and spread virally.
Hypha’s tools are built to empower, unite, and amplify the diversity of efforts all aimed at creating a just and thriving civilization by providing new economic and organizational system to coordinate within.
It’s an audacious and necessary task and Hypha is all about building the tools to do it.
Instead of trying to change the prevailing systems. We make new ones.
“Going Long a Civilization” is a term borrowed from the book “The Ministry of the Future” by the award winning author Kim Stanley Robinson, as he paints a future where humanity had to wait until the 2050’s for nation states to finally get around to meaningfully acting on climate change after unfathomable devastation occurred.
However, an alternate timeline is emerging within Web3; offering us a new story and path. One where humanity can start coordinating globally today to act on these challenges and be living in pockets of regenerative civilizations by the 2030’s (for those who opt-in).
Removing systemic barriers
We build a regenerative economy by removing or redesigning systemic injustices and barriers as systemic opportunities.Though we can go beyond simply removing the barriers to start inviting us all in to participate and be part of creating the change we so desperately need.Organisations also earn a share of public funds to direct towards their organisational purpose based on how well that organisation contributes to the wellbeing of people, planet, and shared prosperity.
One example: Before Web3, living in a “developing country” was a barrier to join the burgeoning world economy, contribute to a global pool of ideas, land high-paying jobs, establish corporations and get funded.
With the transition to DAO’s (borderless, global, and anti-racist institutions) the barrier of living in a poor country changes to an opportunity (reduced cost of living).
Web3 and DAO’s are going to lead the “Great Equalizer” across our global economies.
As with most exceptionally powerful technologies, the world of web3 can be used for creation or destruction. We see a paradox and dichotomy where these tools can be employed to:
better support the earth and her inhabitants, or further divide us into superficial tribalism and abuse her in the process (with energy and electronics waste).
exacerbate humanity’s crises (waste, inequality, fraud, and excess); or bring balance, truth, equal opportunity, and intelligent use of Earths finite resources.
spread and enforce the ideologies of artificially induced scarcity to every faucet of society and to further commodify all human interactions; or create new economic realities that heal the dual diseases of famine and excess and the erosion of joy, community, and meaning.
It can be used to create untold fortunes for a minority; or used to decentralise abundance and create a new story where all people have the resources they need to joyfully pursue Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, their Ikigai, or otherwise.
The technology of Web3 can create true abundance. Not ‘abundance’ as in ‘everyone owns a yacht’. Abundance as in everyone has a home (not just a house), food, love, community, purpose, meaning, and joy. This promise of abundance can and will be met in regenerative economies.
Web3 offers both stories.
The new world is inviting us to take part in creating it. To take an active role in reimagining how we coordinate together to redesign civilization.
Are you ready?
As many DAO’s do today we live in Discord. Drop by, share your talents, and let’s build new economies together.
