Arthur Brock argues that businesses need to stop hiding value behind patents and secrets, and instead make visible what differentiates them: organic certification, fair-trade status, reputation. Holochain lets individuals own and control their own data while creating decentralized currencies, unlike blockchains that just manage token inventories.
Chapters
One of the things I would be suggesting is look at what are the kinds of value that you can make visible that's unique to your business. So realize that certified organic or bio you know, if you're in Europe or whatever, is a currency. It's a reputation currency that makes a current, a flow involved in producing the food visible. Because when you're in the store and you're holding two apples in your hand, how do you know whether pesticides were sprayed on the, you know, on the one or the other, you know, like, or whether chemical fertilizers were used or, you know, different things like that. You can't see the flow that produced it. And same with things like fair trade or things like that, right? That's saying, was slave labor involved in producing this product? I can't see who was treated, how people were treated, but here's a way to try to make visible something about those flows. So as a business person, I would ask, what parts of your business are not visible? But our unique value that you're providing, how would you make those visible? That becomes a kind of current C. So that's one practical step. I know I didn't mention Holochain, but Holochain is now a place where you could encode that, where you could build that. So Holochain is a software technology, and you have to have software developers to build some of these shared rules on it, right, an application on it, So I would say start thinking about your business. One is that currency thing, what flows invisible value, could you make visible? But another thing is, what is your future business model that is not just about enclosure and extraction? Because if you think about it, the industrial age success strategy has been enclose some bit of value and charge for access to it. Whether that value is intellectual property and it's a patent and now we're charging, whether it's a physical space and we charge admission, whether it's a secret way we have of building this widget and manufacturing this widget and it's a trade secret and we're the only ones who can build the widget. But mostly it's all around enclosure and then extraction of value from others for access to the thing you've enclosed. And I think as we moved in— move into a networked world, as JF was talking about, the dynamics change significantly, and it becomes less about this enclosure, but it's still about access, right? And even enclosure is like the money in your bank account. You've enclosed that value, now you're hoarding that from the flows in the system, right? But what if gaining access to the resources that you need, you know, many of the things that we need to access are not just consumables. Yes, there's food that we consume, and, uh, but many of, much of what we're spending money on and much of what we need access to, to coordinate, coordinate access around is not just consumables. And yet our whole economy is kind of in this consumption frame. And so this is all a part of what is shifting. And so being able to think differently about the value proposition of your business, not just from this enclosure model, I think is important. And then being able to be a responsible steward of data and information and control. So like JF was talking about, about Facebook controlling a chunk of his digital identity and Twitter controlling a chunk and Google controlling a chunk and different things like that, but he doesn't own those things. Like, how do you actually become a steward for some of these processes but build on a platform like Holochain that actually lets people own their own data? And control their own data, and even revoke access to their own data, you know, if trust has been breached or if they leave a system and, you know, that kind of thing. And I think the last thing that I want to just put in here in terms of practical is that it may sound a little mysterious, this data-centric blockchain versus agent-centric Holochain, or, you know, but But what it comes down to with regard to building currencies is actually very concrete. What you do on blockchain is you build tokens, you build these sort of magic digital objects that move around, and you're managing an inventory of tokens, if you will, and who's holding them. Where in Holochain, you're basically doing accounting. You're doing peer-to-peer accounting. At least that's the way we recommend implementing currencies on Holochain.
