In the closing round‑table of the Holochain podcast, host Virginie Glaenzer invites each guest to share final thoughts. Jean‑François recounts his role in bringing the internet to France in the 1990s and draws a clear line between owning knowledge and owning the underlying infrastructure. He envisions a near‑future where Holochain apps (HAPs) are as easy to use as today’s centralized smartphone apps, giving people the freedom to choose which “game” they play rather than being forced into the opaque global‑finance system. Runa reflects on the looming scarcity of money for institutions, arguing that economic pressure will make alternatives like Holochain essential for survival, and she feels personally fulfilled supporting a technology she sees as life‑giving. Arthur expands on the strategic implications: while rethinking business models isn’t a prerequisite for using Holochain, it is crucial for organizations to stay relevant as the new capacity of a non‑enclosable carrier reshapes coordination and collective intelligence. He likens Holochain adoption to early internet and blockchain trajectories, noting that users don’t need deep technical knowledge to benefit, and announces upcoming tooling (a CRISPR‑style app‑builder) to lower the barrier for developers. Virginie ties the conversation back to Acorn Oak’s cooperative model, emphasizing that Holochain’s values align with their pursuit of collective intelligence and promising to provide resources for entrepreneurs and small organizations.
Chapters
I want to thank everyone for this insightful conversation. As we come to the end of the hour, I'd like to finish this chat the way it began, with a tour de table. And the intention for this podcast is to help each of us to become the self-authoring leaders of our own lives through meaningful action. So let's pass the mic and share any reflections that have emerged from our conversation, or any last thoughts that you feel was left unsaid that you'd like to leave us with. So why don't we begin with you, Jean-François?
I had the privilege to become some of the people who brought the internet in France back in the mid-'90s, and you know, explaining the internet before it became, you know, reached the large public. So I started to explain what a network society would look like and unlimited access to content and community building and tribes, we used the word tribe at the time, and all those things. And it looked very, very theoretical and highly technical to people. And you really needed, of course, technical people to build whatever forms of network at the time. People after the conference would come to me and tell me, you know, we'll never see that ourselves. Maybe our great-grandchildren will see it, but in my lifetime I will never ever see those things. I can understand why they said that because yes, we still had the very geeky phase of that, which I think Holochain still has its very geeky alpha test, beta test and all these things, so you need geeks for that. But in a few years, maybe a couple of years, I don't know exactly, Art will say something more precise than I do. But you will have HAPs, Holochain apps, already designed. That will make it very easy. You will just have to sign in or to hire some developers, but it will become as easy as any centralized app that you see on your smartphone today. And so you don't want to ask every people to become highly involved in very deep design and distributed design because it has its own complexity. Very likely, joining a vegan economy or a carpooling network in your city will very much look like the actual applications that you have today, except that those apps that you see on your smartphone today, they belong to Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon or Facebook and so on. But those you will participate in will belong to everyone, and you will have open source code. And yes, you will have leaders, of course, because you can ask— I can't ask you or you can't ask me to become an expert in carpooling, for instance, or an expert in certified organic organic things or expert in whatever, you know. You will need to still trust people who will have the power of their knowledge, except that having the power of the knowledge doesn't mean having the power on the infrastructure. The infrastructure, you own it. That means if you disagree with the people who have the power of knowledge, you have the choice. Today, if I just want to become a citizen, you know, a parent, a human being, a student, a worker, I don't have the choice of the game that I can play. I become obliged, forced to play one single opaque game called global finance. Every time I spend $1 or €1, that means I play this game, and I don't have a choice if I want to exist. In the next years, I will have the choice to play, what game do I want to play? To play with who, and that makes a whole, whole difference. So let's not confuse the owning of knowledge and expertise, which people will have, and the owning of the infrastructures for that. Very different thing, and we need now to separate those things. As Art said, you may have the knowledge, but you have to put it in an unenclosable career. That means in some place where you can shoot out all this knowledge and distribute that, and you don't own the infrastructure for that.— a big, huge difference.
Thank you for the clarification and the last thoughts.
Runa? Yes, there was something that Jean-François said that caught my interest, and I hadn't gone that far into the future exactly like that, to connect that with what we are doing with Holochain and the Covantina Foundation. But that was that because things are crumbling and money will most likely dry up or be very limited to many leaders in organizations and institutions, the choice for them to survive might be to look at the alternatives. And that's where I think Homo Tian comes in. So it's not even that it might be a nice thing to have. What I'm realizing is that their necessity might actually escalate the time that it will take for this to become more mainstream. Even though I know Arthur is always thinking long-term and he's thinking much, much further than he has explained today, I know. But just like you're saying, it looks daunting to regular people. I mean, how on earth am I going to be a part of this? But I think when we are pushed into a corner, we still have to survive and we have to thrive. So we will start looking for alternatives. And that's why I think I feel very fulfilled on a soul level to be a part of supporting and nurturing something that I feel is life-giving to humanity and offering us an alternative.
It is a breath of fresh air to hear about a technology that can actually empower people, especially after this documentary that you mentioned, which is, you know, a very dark look on technology.
So yes, hopefully another one with a solution. Exactly. And ask Arthur to star in that one.
Yeah, absolutely.
Arthur, what would you like to leave us with?
As the founder of Holochain?
When I said earlier like the practical steps you could take was like rethinking business models and that type of stuff, I didn't mean that that's required for going on to Holochain. I think it's required for businesses to survive the kind of economic transitions that we're going to be headed through, kind of like when when JF was talking about that he was bringing internet to France, you know, and AOL— you were working for AOL, I think, at the time, right? Um, you know, and everybody's like, oh, that's way far out there. Like, I remember I was very early on in the mid-'90s, I had a web design company, and, you know, talked with people, and they're like, oh, this is— the web is just a fad. That's just gonna go by. And I'm like, There are things that are fads, and there are things that are fundamental new capacities. And new capacities are not abandoned very easily. We do not go backwards from a new capacity to coordinate. And what I'm suggesting is that Holochain, as a non-enclosable carrier, is a new capacity that it will be very hard to go backwards from. So this becomes— this this starts having a kind of gravity or pull that starts bringing us in a direction of how we can coordinate in ways of higher collective intelligence, right? Instead of the centralized control. And if we— if you don't start thinking about that, then you get left behind, just like the businesses that didn't think about how the internet was going to affect them. What has Airbnb done to hotel chains? You know what I mean? Like, they beat them at the internet game. There could have been other options, there could have been, you know, but this is a similar kind of transition, and it— so when I'm saying inviting people to think about their business differently, I'm not saying that's a requirement to use Holochain. You can implement some of the old business model things on Holochain, but But if you don't think ahead, somebody else is going to implement the new business models on Holochain and end up leaving you behind. So, yeah, I'm not also saying Holochain is like the savior or the thing that's going to win this race of creating this thing that we need for upgrading our collective capacities to navigate the kinds of crises that we're facing today. But something like Holochain, something, a copy of Holochain, a derivative of Holochain, somebody who markets themselves potentially better than us, or us, like it could be us, but these are the kinds of forces that you can't reverse. And even blockchain has been movement in that direction. There were In the early days of blockchain, people just ridiculed it, and now the banks and federal governments and everybody are getting on board, afraid that if they don't, then they will become irrelevant. And so the other thing is, you don't have to understand Holochain to use it or benefit from it. It's kind of like if you think about a Blu-ray DVD player, most of us don't know enough about the electronics or the optics or the mechanics to build one, but we can all use one, right? We just push the right buttons. And so as these applications become more and more available, yes, there will be people who know how to build applications. And yes, we're building tools to make that easier. Actually, in the next couple of weeks, we should be releasing our CRISPR tool for slicing and dicing Holochain DNAs, and that will start making it easier for people to build applications. But it's just like people now download all these apps onto their phone, they don't know how to build apps, you know. As Holochain's app store grows like that, people— there will be an ecosystem of various solutions that people want and need, and will start using.
Wonderful. Well, it's definitely something that we at Acorn Oak will take a deeper look. And it's interesting that to me Holochain almost started with a reflection on the values, and if those values become a tool to reach and expand our collective intelligence, it's It's definitely something that we at Acorn Oak are interested in doing, the same way that we are in the search of a structure, and we have chosen the cooperative model to come together and co-create. And although we haven't thought of, is this going towards collective intelligence, it is actually a form of collective intelligence, which I'm personally passionate about. So thank you very much. We'll put all the links. We'll try to make it even clearer and simple for organizations, whether they are entrepreneurs, single entrepreneurs, or small organizations that really want to have a deeper dive into Holochain, available on the podcast. But I want to thank you very much for this very insightful and rich conversation.
