Jean-François Noubel argues that blockchain still mirrors centralized, pyramidal power structures despite claims of decentralization. He proposes Holochain as a nature-inspired alternative that uses feedback loops like neuronal networks, better suited to handle today's complexity and growing demand for self-realization outside extractive economies.
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[Speaker:VIRGINIE GLAENZER] But today, in the midst of our traditional pyramidal infrastructures being questioned and considered in a way as a hindrance to our personal freedom, several new technologies have been emerging. In the search for new social collective structures, one of them is called Holochain, and it has appeared as an open-source framework. So these new technologies are promising a more human internet and a more fair world, which we'll talk about. So let's begin our conversation by asking you, Jean-François, a couple of questions to bring some context into our discussion. So can you tell us the difference between blockchain and Holochain, just kind of a way of setting up this conversation, and then as a researcher on collective intelligence, can you describe how these technologies can help us evolve society and our collective intelligence?
Well, I'll definitely leave the difference between blockchain and Holochain to Art, the expert here in the room, way, way, way beyond what I can explain, although I do explain it a lot publicly, but Art will do it even better than I do. But what I can see, we can really witness today a very interesting period where what we call pyramidal collective intelligence, all the pyramidal structures, centralized command and control, top-down, siloed structures with chains of command, they have always worked with also centralized currencies as a way, of course, to build power. And the concentration of money leads to the concentration of power, and the concentration of power leads also to the concentration of money. And just because of a physical law called the Pareto effect, and I won't go into details about that, but the way, the kind of currencies we've seen so far in the pyramidal world since the rise of civilizations, they've always, or in most cases, used those kinds of currencies that serve the concentration of power by design, just by design. So, it has worked so far for thousands of years, because evolution has created this kind of humanity centralized, you know, pyramidal collective intelligence. But today, it seems that this form of collective intelligence has reached its limits. It works on extraction, it works on centralization of power, that means a minority of people making decisions for others, whether you elect them or not, same principle. And you cannot ask a minority of people to embrace the huge amount of complexity, systemic complexity in the world. If you want to have a huge expanded collective intelligence, then you need something more distributed. That means you become a feedback loop, I become a feedback loop in a much more powerful way than what the kind of feedback loop I would give in a pyramidal structure. So we need to move from those top-down siloed structures to a more neuronal form or distributed form of collective intelligence where I can become a leader to some degree for some projects or some ideas. You can become your own leader for other things. And we also witness from the sociological perspective, we witness also the rise of individuation. That means in the world, we can measure that more and more people decide to become themselves. That means they feel very unhappy about the way the world works. They don't want to contribute to the extractive economy anymore. They want to question also the meaning and the ideologies behind all these things. So, individuation means that you will go into a journey of knowing yourself, and if you become yourself, that means you become unique. If you become unique, then you may not want to play the normalizing game that you need for building chains of command. So, if you have a society made of highly individualized people, then that leaves a very deep question. How do you deal with this level of social complexity? How do you deal with people who don't want to play the game, the chain of command game anymore, who don't want to rely on centralized power, even well-intentioned centralized power? I don't want to make that an evil thing, I just say it has limitations. You have lots of pyramidal structures with very well-intentioned people doing their best, but it just doesn't work. It can't embrace the level of today's complexity. So if you have a society, highly complexified society, then you need people, highly individualized people, to cooperate together, to make decisions together, to envision not just one future, but many, many futures together. You can't have just a consensus like, oh, let's discuss and agree on one single vision and one single version of reality. You have to deal with a huge amount of diversity. That means you have to deal with a distributed system. And nature has done that for, you know, forever. Our neurons do that. Mycelium does that under our feet in the woods. So we have to see how nature works, how also it became capable of uniting tens of thousands of trillions of cells making a body, and you don't have a CEO cell in your body and then a VP cell in your body and a whole chain of command. It also works in many regards in a distributed way. So how can we bring this physics to a larger scale, to the next level? And Holochain has this intention of observing how nature works in living systems and apply this kind of design, which the blockchain doesn't really do. It tries, we can see it as an attempt for that, but Arthur will explain that much better than I do.
It's fascinating how we're starting to talk about technology and you just mentioned nature. I just find it interesting.
