Feeding the leaks 🪾

Happy solstice times, all.

I hope you had a moment to inflect and introspect. These seasonal turnings are great opportunities within which we can let go and invite in.

I did just that, on a particularly frigid midwinter’s night.

Under the stars, by the fire, I made a quiet commitment. Not quite as potent as a True Vow, as David Whyte might describe,° but a quiet commitment. A gesture in the vicinity of a vow.

* ‘All the true vows are secret vows, the ones we speak out loud are the ones we break.’

I will break this quiet commitment (already have) but, lol, that’s okay.

This quiet commitment is, effectively, to not complain so much about the ills and evils of the world. At least for a season. “GoOd ViBeS oNlY”.* ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

Besides, if you’re paying attention, it’s too easy to despair.

And, if you’re not paying attention, it’s too easy to uncritically subscribe to the naïve progress narrative, and the convenient-but-false hope if offers.

The real challenge is in finding the hope-beyond-hope.

* Note: this doesn’t mean that I am abandoning moral clarity. Only that I am finding better avenues than ‘complaint’, which seems to simply feed the cycle. Or, more specifically, ‘explainy’ complaint, which steers us away from relationality and warmth.

The hope-beyond-hope

A few hundred days ago I wrote a post asking: Are we beyond hope? My disposition was, and still is, that I hope we are.

For there is a hope that lies beyond hope. New possibilities; and the embeckoning of a world more curious and kind.

The way remains non-obvious—emergence is only ever truly apparent in hindsight. But there are glimmers to attend to, and leaks that lead the way.

Bayo Akomalafe wrote of this a few months ago.

‘“Exiting” capitalism, white modernity, or any dominant system, is not about finding an alternative in the traditional sense, but about learning to notice the emergent, the minor, the paraontological openings that systems themselves produce as they mutate. As they speculate. It is about attuning to disruptions, to what I call “weird fidelities”, the fugitive pathways that do not announce themselves as “alternatives,” but as leaks, cracks, and dissonances within systemicity.’

I found this quote via fellow wizard Rune Soup, who wrote an exquisite piece on what escapes capture.

‘Feed the leaks. This really is the right way to say it. To say anything else falls too dangerously close to knowing what should happen or seeking to be the sole agency forcing a preferred outcome. It is simply to show up and give energy to what is seeking to emerge through the web of connections in which you are an intentional node. This generates a permission field conducive to novelty.’

Similarly, Ryan (Ra) James Keep writes of shifting their focus toward the invitation that more of us are beginning to attune to.

‘I’ve stopped using the phrase “systems change.”

Why?

Because it keeps our attention tethered to what’s broken and what’s crumbling. It distracts us with what resists transformation. It seduces us into believing that with enough reform, repair, or finesse, we can redeem a system built upon a foundational worldview of separation, extraction, and control. It channels our focus and our energy on trying to tinker at what was never designed to hold life with sanctity and dignity in the first place. Buckminster Fuller reminded us that we don't transform the world by fighting the old, we do it by building the new, or as I would put it, the (k)new, with such coherence and beauty that the old becomes irrelevant.

The hard truth is this: the old system doesn’t want to be fixed, nor can it. It cannot be changed. In fact, some systems are not meant to be changed, they are meant to be composted. I've stopped trying to refine, prolong and optimize the destructiveness. I am not here for that, that's a waste of energy.

I'm here to remember the future. And remembering is not a concept or an intellectual trick. I am here to build parallel architectures of care, reciprocity, and deep aliveness. I am not here for systems change. I've stopped trying to Trojan Horse my way into the door of someone who doesn't want me there anyway.

I've gotten over my disruption, and gotten into my invitation.’

This resonates—and yet also: I’m still Trojan Horsing, smuggling wit, wisdom and warmth wherever I can. Ergo, I’ll continue to oscillate betwixt the established and the emergent.

As Dr. Fox I (try to) move quietly and plant things, doing what I can to tend to the conditions for a world more curious and kind. And as foxwizard I work with fellow infinite players and those of us questing amidst the liminal. It seems to be the role I’m called to, at least for this current chapter.

Which brings us back to this question of the hope-beyond-hope.

We’ve had an uptick in enquiries from event organisers seeking a futurist. But a large portion of these enquiries are from folks seeking an ‘AI evangelist’. They don’t want their people to think generatively about the future with wise discernment—they want, much as Alicia McKay recently wrote of—‘lightweight tutorials and uncritical hype’.

I generally approach ‘The Future™️’* as a complexity practitioner, illuminating where our default trajectory might take us to (as discussed in the previous museletter), whilst also shining some light upon some of the adjacent possible.° This informs the ‘quiver of options’ we can cultivate and attend to as we quest.

* ‘The Future’, I contend, is best approached mythically.
° “The biosphere grows into the adjacent possible. It does not evolve toward an optimal design, but rather expands into the space of possibilities made available by its current structure.” — Stuart Kauffman, theoretical biologist.

Many of these options are leaks; portals to new worlds and ways. Except, of course, they have yet to fully reveal themselves. This is part of the mystery and charm.

And so, with this in mind, let’s move onto another scenario of what our future may yet possibly become.

The Future of Continuity (of Life) 🪾

Here’s part two of my conversation with Simon Waller. Here we explore what our world might look like if we were to continue on our current trajectory—only this time, our focus shifts from beyond the habitation arc of one of the megacorps and to the outer wilds.

This scenario features a kind of ‘post-liberal communitarianism’ coupled with bioregional networks and decentralised, convivial coordination technologies, and a sacred economy oriented towards planetary mutualism.*

* Or, with less jargon: This scenario envisions community-based living that moves beyond individualism-politics, grounded in local ecologies and supported by friendly, decentralised tools for collaboration. It imagines an economy shaped by reverence and reciprocity, oriented toward global cooperation and care for all life.

This vision of the future is not utopia, but there are elements of The Great Simplification and of our species maturing toward a more embedded, animate, and custodial role.

Here’s the second part of the narrative scenario I wrote and shared with Simon, lightly edited by a shoggoth.

I’ve tried to stay grounded and somewhat realistic about what this scenario might look like. I may have overly romanticised what participation in collective governance might look like, though. The reality is more tedious and frustrating.

I have also intentionally skirted away from where the ideology of convivial, communal, and ecologically custodial care might clash with the ideology of infinite growth, capitalism, extraction, exploitation, and centralised control. What I wanted to do instead is simply paint, in broad strokes, what it might look like if we were to live in better relation to each other and the living systems we depend upon for life.

I’ve a few notes that will be of interest to those who listen deep.

Money

Today’s children are the adults of this future scenario. Unlike most adults of today, the adults of this scenario know that fiat currencies (especially the almighty dollar) are effectively backed by forever wars and climate change. They know that fiat currencies are ‘the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world.’ This understanding gives rise to requisite suspicion, and an enquiry into the nature of money itself.

The society in our scenario might be at the point of knowing that, from a ‘civilisational’ perspective, “money is a sign of poverty” (as Iain M Banks writes in The Player of Games). The focus instead shifts towards true value.

Value

In our current world, a whale is only valuable (in the eyes of the market) if it is killed and harvested. And a forest is only valuable once it is chopped down and turned into lumber.

Of course, you and I both know that there is more value to behold in a living whale or forest than a dead one. But: we measure extractable and exchangeable wealth. And we optimise for what we measure. The Infinite Machine (from the first scenario) runs on this logic, and artificial intelligence accelerates this.

Our ‘eye of value’—the ability we have to perceive intrinsic value, as Zak Stein writes in First Principles and First Values—is currently, collectively, sorely diminished and distorted by the prevailing paradigm.

But in this future scenario, we would be working towards more sacred economics that is much more aligned to planetary regeneration, bioregional custodianship, and real value (intrinsic and otherwise).

Wealth would not be hoarded or stored by individuals. In fact, there would be a shared understanding that ownership only exists via consensus.*

* If at all.

Consensus

Relational consensus underpins everything, yet blockchain consensus offers a new way to coordinate effectively—in a trust-minimised manner—with those we don’t yet know.* And given the global nature of the metacrisis we share, this kind of transnational, decentralised coordination is increasingly necessary.

* Embassy and relatioanal protocols practiced within Indigenous Knowledge Systems are, perhaps, even more apt.

In our current world, ownership is reinforced via laws, which are put into place via governments, which—in purportedly democratic countries—are elected via ‘the will of the people’. However, it could be argued that much of this is now ‘captured’ by market forces. Narrow goals and rivalrous dynamics give rise to multipolar traps, in which all participants are incentivised to pursue individual gain over collective coordination. Even ‘the will of the people’ is vulnerable to disinformation and algorithmic discord. (See the recently released documentary ‘Leviathan’ for more on this).

But! Decentralised, open source, public, transparent, immutable and censorship-resistant blockchains coupled with smart contracts can allow for greater coordination globally.

Crypto, hey?

I was once going to run “An introduction to blockchain, crypto, smart contracts, decentralised finance, NFTs, regenerative finance, protocol-development, AI-agents, web3 (and web4)”—but then the orange man launched his own memecoin and I soured on the idea.

Maybe I’ll do something in the future, let’s see. In the meantime here’s a wonderful collection of video podcasts on regenerative finance and web3 » The Regeneration Will Be Funded.

Also, Gregory Landua, the author of Regenerative Enterprise and founder of Regen Network, hosts a Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I myself tend to grit my teeth at any techno-optimist solutionism that seems to be blind to complexity—but this remains quite grounded.

The primary goal of regenerative finance is ‘the trick’—convincing people to invest in true value (eg, living whales and forests) rather than hollow-but-profitable value (eg, whale meat and lumber), whilst not becoming corrupted in the process.

Decentralised, convivial protocols

You can also learn more about The Infinite Garden. What I still love about the whole field is that there are wholesome protocols to be found amidst it all.

Take Aave, for example. You can think of Aave as a collectively-owned bank.* But, what’s more, their governance is transparent. Here’s an ongoing conversation, spanning over a year, to see how a merit system might work to better reward user behaviours. It provides a good glimpse into the kinds of conversations that would normally be hidden away. You can also gain transparent, real-time insight into the financial status of the protocol. When private centralised companies like FTX imploded as a result of an $8 billion hole in their accounts, and when the market crashed, decentralised finance protocols like Aave did just fine, and continued to work amidst the chaos in a transparent and trust-minimised way.

* Related: I will be speaking at an upcoming event for The Community Owned Banking Association of Australia, soon.

This is a stumbling point for many. “But I don’t want to live in a world without trust,” you might say. Me too! Many trusted that FTX were solvent and doing the right things with their funds, just as many trusted that banks were acting responsibly—all the way to the global financial crisis. But with a decentralised non-custodial open-source liquidity protocols like Aave, the amount of trust I need to have is minimised, because at any time I can verify what’s going on.

In summary

This museletter has meandered, much as leaks do.

The point I keep coming back to, time and time again, is to keep your wits about you. There are leaks to attend to. Glimmers that hint and lead us to better ways.

There remains much to be horrified with in this world we share. We are in The Fourth Turning, The Great Unravelling, and what psychotherapist Francis Weller would describe as The Long Dark:

‘We are entering the long dark. I use that term not negatively at all. I use it alchemically, that certain things can only happen in darkness. We are in a time of decay, a time of collapse, a time of endings, a time of sheddings. These are necessary. 

We are seeing this last gasp effort to try to uphold the old structures. Keep capitalism going. Keep the stock market inflated. They’re all going to collapse. They have to because the system . . . is unsustainable. Not only in terms of world resources, but just in terms of human capacity to endure that kind of emptiness.

The collapse is happening. I think what we have to do right now is ask ourselves and each other how do we become skillful in navigating our walk in the dark? How do we cultivate imagination? How do we cultivate collaboration? How do we cultivate fields of reciprocity with the Earth, within human and more-than-human communities, so that we’re not extracting more than what can be replenished? How do we cultivate the spiritual values of restraint and mutuality?’

Collapse isn’t the end of the story, as Gabrielle Feather recently wrote. Or, as Dougald Hine wrote in The Dark Mountain Manifesto:

‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.’

In midwinter solstice, we live within the dark. And the good thing about the dark is that our vision can adjust to attune to that which glimmers in the penumbra. New (0ld) ways embeckon, for those of us with the wit to see.

Much warmth,
—fw