Holochain - Ep #18: What is the Impact of Holochain on our Society, Businesses and Personal Lives?

Welcome to Pass the Mic podcast, a production of EconoX Studio and music by Benjamin Schleds. My name is Virginie Glaenzer and I'm your host with a million questions. Today we'll be discussing Holochain with Jean-François Nobel, Arthur Brock, and Runa Bujus. In this discussion, we'll try to understand what is the impact of Holochain technology on our society, businesses, and on our personal lives. For those tuning in for the very first time, a Pass the Mic podcast is about sharing different perspectives on a specific topic, not only to help us expand our understanding of the world, but also to explore new ways of looking at it. Before we start this conversation, let's begin as we always do with a tour de table and have each of you tell us your name, what you do briefly, and why you're interested in this topic. So why don't we begin with Runa? Yes, hi, I'm Runa Bawes, originally from Iceland, entrepreneur from Iceland, relocated to Los Angeles, and I'm the founder of the True Power Institute, where I have been trying to help leaders understand the new world we are moving into through conscious leadership particularly, but also introducing them to new business models and a new way of working in the workplace, more self-organizing and self-management, managing the workplaces, and I also have another hat now, and that relates to wanting to evolve people's thinking and in a way how they see power. So my True Power Institute is really, the mission there is about helping humanity evolve their relationship to power. And my other hat is with a new foundation that's being formed called Clementina Foundation. That Arthur, which is a brainchild of Arthur's, and where we are trying to shift power dynamics in the world through technologies like Holochain. Fascinating. I can talk more about that. Thank you for being here. Jean-François?

So, Jean-François Noubel, I live in France, 56 years old. So, I define myself as an open source earthling, and I've chosen to have an experimental life. That means to explore every evolutionary possibility. I do research and development in the field of collective intelligence, a new research field that tries to really understand how living systems work, and not just human systems, but living systems in general, and how consciousness evolves by making and building new shapes new individual and collective shapes. So that leads to my experimental life, trying to see if we design new collectives, what happens inside ourselves, what kind of shifts happen. But also, if I also design a new society, a new language, a new way to exist, how does it reflect also into the collective? And I feel, of course, extremely connected to Holochain because the way we design not just currencies, but distributed systems or neuronal systems will also completely change the way we look at the world and the kind of collective intelligence we can build collectively.

Can't wait to get into this conversation. Thank you, Jean-François, for being here. And then finally, Arthur.

Hi, my name is Arthur Brock. I'm one of the founders and designers of Holochain, and just like JF was saying about looking at living systems, the designs of Holochain are modeled on the solutions that we see in biology and physics for large-scale coordination without centralization. And yeah, the important thing to us is also, like JF was just talking about, collective intelligence. We think that it is possible for us to have a large-scale shift in collective intelligence and that we need tools like Holochain as infrastructure for coordination and communication and collaboration on all scales to— yeah, we'll get into that more, but I've been working on parent projects of Holochain for over the past really 20 years, and I'm definitely like an alternative currency geek, get way, way out into the weird parts of building currencies, not just as money, but as the ways that we coordinate flows, currents. So you can think of it more like current sees, right, like the ability to see currents or flows. And Yeah, I'm excited to dig into stuff here today.

Well, thank you very much for being here. So in 2010, I remember starting to hear about blockchain technology, which applied to finance gave birth to the cryptocurrency world. And then a few years ago, I actually bought some bitcoins when I was introduced by a friend to digital currency. 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 commands, 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, 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, you know, neuronal form or distributed form of collective intelligence where I can, you know, become a leader to some, you know, 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've witnessed 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 leads 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 know, 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, you know, discuss and agree on a one single vision and the 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, 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 in You just mentioned nature. I just find it interesting. Thank you for this introduction which covered so many topics. So Art, yes, I'd love to go to you and can you give us, without being too deep into the technology because it can be quite complex, but could you tell us the difference between blockchain and Holochain? And I also have this follow-up question which is what are the differences between crypto money and crypto technologies? Can you give us like a better understanding of that world?

Sure, I'm not going to unpack all of what I say here, it's going to— some parts may sound a little mysterious, but in short, blockchain is what I would say data-centric. It's focused on, on data having some sort of independent truth, and Holochain is agent-centric, which basically says data is always just an assertion from an agent. And so it gives us a very different relationship to how we manage data integrity and how we validate changes to data and all that kind of thing. And so what that allows us to do is to have Holochain scale in ways that blockchain can't. So blockchain has made a very inspiring promise of decentralized technology that can be immune to corruption and centralized control, right? And that, I think, is what inspires many people about blockchain. The problem is, for people who have actually tried to work with it, they have discovered many of the challenges of its ability to grow and scale into large, large applications, large-scale use, and its inefficiency. And that inefficiency actually revolves around consensus. It's fascinating that JF was just talking about the— we have such a rapidly changing and complex world that we can't expect to be reaching global consensus because in this complex world, we don't even always have shared language or ways of understanding the problems or that kind of thing. Now, consensus among computers is a much more simplified process, right? But it's kind of a reflection of the same problem that as you grow the number of nodes participating and the number of inputs and all that kind of stuff, to manage that everybody is agreeing on one state is weird. It doesn't work. It doesn't actually work on scale. It'd be like the cells in our body, the trillions of cells in our body, all trying to synchronize all the state changes that every cell is going through, you know, with one global ledger that every cell is trying to record. That would be horribly inefficient. That's just not the way we coordinate on large-scale decentralized systems. I would assert Holochain's architecture is the way that we do that. And I love your second question about the difference between cryptocurrencies and cryptosystems, is that I feel like we've lost part of the lesson or part of the value of blockchain, because blockchain's first application was a currency, was Bitcoin, was money, right? And so very quickly people go to playing the money game and don't— and they think about the value of the technology in that context instead of that the value of the technology was in establishing what we call intrinsic data integrity. In other words, data that can be provable in its integrity regardless of who's holding it, right? Because anybody can hold the blockchain, but they can't alter it. And similar kind of thing with Holochain, where anybody can participate in the system and then they can be holding some of the shared data in our DHT, our distributed hash table. We share data through a distributed hash table, not a blockchain, and every person has their own source chain, which is only their things, their statements, the changes they've made, get written to and then published to the shared space. So anybody can be holding data in the shared space, but they can't alter it. So the data has intrinsic data integrity, and we no longer have to collapse sort of data access and security with data integrity. Because our historical approach has been to build big walls around the databases and that kind of stuff and try to keep people out of— so it's like, who wouldn't want to log into their bank and change their bank account balance, right? So the bank, you know, has their actual data very highly protected in the databases and stuff, and who can actually write changes to the database is protected and monitored, audited, logged, right, to try to make sure nobody can change that data. Um, but if you actually structure the data in a way that inherently, cryptographically, like it's signed with cryptographic— I don't know how much we want to go into cryptography, but you can't change the data without breaking kind of the data fingerprint, the hash, which shows that the data has now been altered and You know, we can go on about this, but the idea is that it lets us all hold something collectively and be able to trust it can't be tampered with.

So thank you for adding those descriptions to the various terms that you mentioned. Let's be a little bit more practical. Can Runa or any one of you describe what are the impacts that distributed applications have, and if you can share some examples? I'm happy to take that, maybe speaking more regular person's language as some of you will be in this. So the first thing that I see is that this gives us the opportunity to move away from centralized economy that we have created and really is coming from a scarcity mindset to a distributed economy, which is bringing us to a more abundant mindset. And so that's one thing. And just this week, I was really highly reminded of why I'm so passionate about this project because I watched the documentary, The Social Dilemma, and where they're talking about the big giant technology companies and our social media and the effect that that has had on us as humanity and could potentially have on our society. We see, we see that this technology which is extracting, it's literally using us, the users, as their products and sell to the advertisers unbeknownst to us. And this is, and they are playing with our minds, so they go to neuroscience and play with our minds. And this is having effect on our behavior. We the people, and particularly on young people and teenagers. So mental health is being badly affected, relationships, families are being broken up, and they are talking about with all this fake news coming out now, the unrest in society, the political upheaval that we are seeing, that this kind of technology can have a very detrimental effect on the fabric of society. Literally, they talk about taking down our democracy now. So that brings pictures to the people. How would it be different if social media platforms were built with a distributed platform? It would be run by the people, not by a centralized agent like Amazon or Facebook or any of the big the giant tech companies that are profiting from us using the internet, us being able to be connected together. We will always want and need to be connected and have relationships, and so technology isn't going to go away. But the documentary talked about the dilemma and the challenge, but it didn't have any solutions. And so I think what Arthur is bringing is literally a solution, an alternative that we the people can choose to use. And we know it's going to take a long time, it's— this is a long, long, long-term project, but the more we can start educating the people about what technology is doing to us in a centralized system and what we can do about it by making different choices. Of course we have to educate ourselves, so that's why I'm I'm so grateful to you, Virginie, for being interested in this and offering us to come and talk about it, because I think Arthur is kind of a guru in the tech world, but we need to bring this to the people. And I think that's maybe where my role might come in, to bring it more to the regular people who don't talk the technology. So I'm excited about— and that goes straight to my mission for True Power Institute. Empower the people to take back their power. Right, so that's wonderful. That's a perfect getaway, a segue to dive now into this discussion. Now we're kind of set up the context, some technical, technicality, and then purpose, which is to bring the power to the people. So let's begin with a high-level approach to, of Holochain applied to our economy with this question, and then just any one of you just jump in if you feel inspired. So I'd like to know, in light of Holochain, how can our economy be led by citizens?

I have some very specific schemes and dreams about some of the early currencies to build on Holochain. Let me just clarify, Holochain does not have a built-in currency where most blockchains do, because they're so inefficient that they have to pay people to run them. Holochain doesn't suffer from that same inefficiency. We believe that if you want to run a Holochain application, the load that's being asked of you to carry is so small that you will carry it just to participate in that application in a space where you control your own data and are not the product to surveillance corporations, surveillance capitalism. So the currencies that I want to build as to help us actually transition from how I look at it is from industrial age economies and financial infrastructure to information age economies and financial infrastructure are currencies that are backed by real human needs. So first of all, they have a kind of stability to them. Most of the cryptocurrencies that you see right now are highly speculative and highly volatile. They kind of go up and down all over the place. If you accept money for your business in it this week, it doesn't guarantee you can pay your rent with that money next week because it might have dropped 50% in value, you know, like, um, and that's a very risky proposition to, for, to ask people to take on with that kind of instability in the money. So what we're looking at is currencies that are backed by real human needs, like energy, food, housing, transportation. And actually the first one that we're working on is hosting power. Now hosting power may not sound like a real human need, unless you realize that in the modern world, hosting is really a code word for communication and collaboration coordination on all scales, because we carry these little devices around with us now, you know, that we coordinate and communicate with each other through digital applications that are hosted somewhere, right? That, that, and being able to have this kind of peer hosting network take away even the centralization of hosting from the big players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, you know, is a whole different framework for this. So that's a part of us taking back that power. But when we have these currencies that are backed by value, let's say, for example, let's use energy as an example. You have solar powers on your roof, solar panels on your roof. Now you can sell energy to the network as an energy producer provider, right? And that also lets you become an issuer of the currency based on your past provision of energy. You start getting a credit limit that you can borrow from basically to have a negative balance to spend into the positive. And this is a, a different form of issuance. Many people don't realize that there's different ways that you can issue currency. There's fiat and backed and mutual credit, and all of the cryptocurrencies that are out there today are issued via fiat, meaning they're spoken into being, created by decree. Fiat from the Latin means to decree. Like the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible starts off with fiat lux, Like, let there be light. I speak light into being. That's God speaking light into being, right? There was no light, now there is. And that's the way that our national currencies work. There was no money and poof, now there is. The bank gets to speak it into being. And that's the way cryptocurrencies work. They just shuffle around who gets to speak it into being. But the different miners or stakers basically get to speak it into being.

And those are not— it's not like a bartering system when you say I produce energy on my roof, I can then place that as a currency or exchange that or transform this energy, it becomes a currency on the network.

Well, the energy is still energy, but there is a currency that is for coordinating energy, for being able to share energy, you among communities or regions. And so yes, you become not only a provider of value, but an issuer of the currency. Because we don't necessarily think about that, but if you think about it, all of us can create value. But if we create dollars or euro, that's called counterfeiting. Right? So there's a special group of people that are allowed to create the money that we exchange value through. And because of that special power, they're actually— that's one of these concentrations of power that JF mentioned. They are able to kind of pull the puppet strings on the value we create and manipulate the value we create through a whole bunch of mechanisms, but what this does is it actually changes, it turns the power structure upside down so that the creators of value also become the creators of the currency, instead of counting on bankers or other extractors or middlemen to create the currency for the value that we're creating.

Got it, okay. And we can go into a deeper discussion around what various currencies can Holochain offer to individuals? And we'll talk about with more practical and down-to-earth examples applied to businesses and individuals. But before we move into that other topic, so what you're saying is that Holochain provides some sort of infrastructure that gives back the power to individuals through various forms. And so my question that just arises is How do you think the current organization that currently have the power in today's society are gonna react? I mean, we've seen with blockchain, and there was a dip in the market with blockchain, and there is some, you know, say that it actually was created for the banks to catch up and develop their own blockchain system. So how do you think the rest of the world is gonna react? And when I say the rest of the world, those people who actually control the power today?

Are you asking me?

Anyone, anyone. That's the first thing I'm like, oh wow, this is amazing, but—

Well, one of them— so I want to make sure that we're not saying Holochain is just, you know, magic and magically solves all problems. Holochain solves a very specific problem. And what it does is it provides what I would call an unenclosable carrier. And I'm going to explain what that means in a minute, but it provides an unenclosable carrier for people to build rule sets for how we want to interact with each other. Now, that rule set is also embodied in an application or a distributed application or DApp, right, a decentralized application., and those decentralized applications can be currencies, or they can be social media type things, or they can be, you know, and underneath it Holochain is providing the infrastructure to build those on. So you ask how will people react, how will the powers that be react? Well, one of the things about Holochain that's a little bit different than blockchain and all of the centralized infrastructures is is that it truly has no points of enclosure, it has no points of centralized control. Zero. Not a single one. So there is no place that can be attacked or shut down to stop a Holochain application or to stop Holochain. I mean, Holochain is completely open source. If all the developers of Holochain were whatever, wiped out or imprisoned or, you know, whatever they try to do, the source code is out there, right? Nobody can stop it from being shared. It's not— so even that, even though we are one of the sort of sources of centralization of generating it at the moment, everything we do is immediately shared so that we can't be shut down. But basically, the whole point of an unenclosable carrier is that as long as any two people want to interact via that carrier, nobody can stop them. There's no third-party intermediary that is in the middle of those people that can shut down that connection or deny them access or anything like that. And at the stage that we're in, there's a little bit of an Achilles heel, which is that most people would be using Holochain through the internet and they have to therefore connect, you know, to an internet service provider, which is like a mini-monopoly of telecom service providers in each country, and at the moment that's a little bit of an Achilles heel, but Holochain is not— doesn't rely only on internet protocol, it can use any network transport, so it can be using community mesh networks, it can be using Bluetooth if we're in the room together, it can be, you know, so any way that you can connect, you can talk via Holochain. And so we're not— even if you could like pull the internet kill switch and shut down the internet, people could still actually use Holochain applications via any form that they can connect with each other, like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or, you know, anything like that. It doesn't rely on centralized servers or anything. So when you say what would the powers do, I don't know. There's a lot of things that they may or may not do. I think at the moment we're still not looking like that big of a threat to them, but at the time in which they might notice a threat, there's no way that it can be shut down.

It would have to be a law or some sort of legal regulation. But now that you've tackled that topic, and it might just be my mind, you know, looking for what if, I would love to discuss how we as individual and business owners or entrepreneurs can co-create this next world. And so the questions that I had, the question that I have is how do we make our business evolve? To fit in this new economy. In other words, how do we become compatible with Holochain? And when I say we, it's a business, and you can take any example of business. I'm personally very interested in— I'm part of a marketing agency, and I'd love to know how do we as a marketing agency fit with Holochain and provide our services or create a new currency or participate in that evolution. Well, maybe I could offer something because you mentioned currency. Arthur and Fernanda Ibarra and one of our cells in our ecosystem called Commerce Engine have actually created an e-course around currency making, which anyone can go and buy at Udemy. So that's a great a great way to start educating yourself about the different types of currencies. And what I have learned from Arthur is that money to him is just like part of a fingernail in the whole ocean of current seas, as he sees it. So money is such a small part of that. So I think to help us start to imagine what we could possibly do is to learn about currencies, currencies and making of currencies and see what comes out of that. That's one thing, and I know that they have probably plenty more to say about that. Have you seen, Jean-François, examples of businesses that are in the process of becoming compatible with Holochain or thriving in this new economy or new form of economy?

Well, speaking to so many CEOs all the year, all the time, you know, the COVID and pandemics and the crisis, today's crisis, but also the big crisis that will very likely come, like a big economic collapse. Many people will wonder, you know, what should they do because they don't have money anymore. But you may not have money, but you still have tools, and especially you can create, you know, those cryptocurrencies and distributed cryptocurrencies based on Holochain to continue your business. Because when people don't have money anymore, they still have wealth. They still know how to work. They still have the apple on the tree and, you know, the water in the wheel. And so all the real wealth, the actual wealth, remains out there. They did not become poor or stupid because they don't have money. They still have everything. So they just need the means of exchange, and the means not just to exchange, also, but the means or the language to to represent the forms of wealth that they want to co-build. And why would they do that with such a poor tool called money, when we can build a much richer language to represent so many forms of wealth? And not only to make ourselves dependent on banks and all the obscure rules out there controlled by a few, when you have the alternative to now build thriving economies with your peers. So I see more and more, I mean, on the field, you know, in my meetings and conferences that I give to CEOs, I see more and more of them asking themselves, well, I create value, we create value with a company. Why should we keep creating value and using money as a carrier? Maybe we could start, you know, maybe a small portion of our business to do it with different currencies. And why wouldn't we use, you know, what comes with the new technology that comes there? So that, I really see it as a very likely scenario. Some people want to do it because they want to do it, because they want, they get so tired of this terrible extractive economy that just exhausts them as human beings, but also exhausts the environment, that they want to play a different game. And others also will shift there because they just don't have a choice. You don't have any more money in your bank account. So, hey, maybe you have something, you know, free, that provides a better service, that also brings a better language for, you know, languaging wealth, not just what you buy and sell, but also all the human value, the thriving of ecosystems that you can create and all these things. Money will never express those things, those forms of wealth. So if you have those technologies available, why would not you use them? And you might become forced to use them just because of the situation. I also see, and I will speak more personally, you know, I belong to the vegan community and I truly believe in the values of veganism, which most people confuse with the way you eat. Veganism means the end of speciesism. That means you know that you don't need to kill and enslave and torture animals to exist for eating, for, you know, your clothes, for everything, for medicines and everything. So veganism means stepping out of speciesism. And my question, like the 200 or 300 million people in the world having chosen a vegan lifestyle, we ask ourselves, hey, how can we build a vegan economy? And a vegan economy means that whatever currencies we'll use, it has to go from a vegan hand to another vegan hand, and it has to buy and sell and produce vegan products and services. So money can't do that, because money, you know, I can buy a local vegan product here, but the next hand, it can go to the local hunter or the butcher or someone who really doesn't care about those things. So we need to put the social contract into the design of the game. And I will never do that, I can't do that with conventional money, I can't even do that with the current blockchain technology. We need something that can play a much more sophisticated game so that it knows from which hand to which hand it can go. And so we can design that with Holochain. So I have extremely high expectation in designing a vegan economy with others,, so that we know that enhancing that economy will support the world that we want, with, you know, a compassionate world, and that also restores ecosystems and all these things. And one last thing connected to your earlier question, Virginie, you asked about also the question about citizens. You know, this next world, this distributed world that we need with highly individualized people and this holomidal collective intelligence, we can't have it without networked societies. That means we can't have this kind of society with the infrastructure that enables it. So, that means we need to build— more and more, we have two kinds of life. We have the conventional old biological life, like I sit in this room and I have people around me and we interact physically with our biological body, but I also have today a digital self. Like right now you see my digital self, a reflection of my biological body, but also my digital selves mean, you know, the semiotic pheromones that I leave in the internet, you know, what kind of a comment I will make on a forum, my Facebook account, and all these things distributed there. But today, my digital self does not belong to me. It belongs to Google, it belongs to Mark Zuckerberg, and all these things. That means a whole part of my evolutionary self, my online self, does not belong to me. And that raises a very crucial question about what kind of world do we want. Do I want to remain a slave? Am I the property of someone? Today, if I speak honestly to myself, a part of myself belongs to someone. I have made myself the slave of someone. Yes, I have lots of advantages, but believe me, they will collect what they need to collect. So at least two very crucial questions about how can you become your digital self as a free human being in the online world.

Does that make any sense? Completely. That just is a fascinating area that not only we take for granted, but very few people actually questioning. I mean, people all over the internet about, oh, my private data, but I don't really see anyone taking any action to actually doing something. And if Holochain is one path, that would be brilliant. So let's talk now about practicality. You know, it's one thing to agree with the idea, to share the values around Holochain and the possibilities, but now let's talk about what's next. In other words, for people who are listening, not just myself, but others who are in an organization or thinking about starting a company or trying to see how they can use their skills for, you know, in their— to create a livelihood. What are the various possibilities? What's the next step with Holochain? What should we do after listening to this conversation as a business owner and as an individual?

So I think there are a few different kinds of things that I'd actually kind of like to answer while weaving together some of the things that we just talked about. Runa talked about current seas as more than we normally think of, and, you know, one of the things I would be suggesting is look at what are the kinds of value that 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, 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 on the one or the other, or whether chemical fertilizers were used or 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 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 are unique value that you're providing? How would you make those visible? That becomes a kind of currency. So that's one practical step. I know it 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, 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 is 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, but many of, much of what we're spending money on and much of what we need access to, to coordinate access around is 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 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 a list, an inventory of tokens, if you will, and who's holding them. Where in Holochain, you're you're basically doing accounting. You're doing peer-to-peer accounting. At least that's the way we recommend implementing currencies on Holochain. And what's interesting about that is that creating these tokens, issuing these new things that you are then trying to convince people of their value, and you're managing the supply of them, and you know, all this different stuff, it starts getting into these domains of regulatory stuff stuff that's about, like, new classes of securities, like issuing stocks or things like that, right? But accounting is already legal everywhere. The problem is that old-school accounting is walled into a single organization, right? The books and the ledger are— and even double-entry accounting are defined by an offsetting debit and credit. Within a single ledger of an organization. There's a whole other kind of accounting that emerged in the 1980s and has continued to grow, and there's an ISO standard around it called REA accounting, Resource Event Agent accounting, which is really like inter-organizational accounting, or you could say supply chain accounting. And so one of the things that I would recommend is actually businesses starting to look at this approach. Because one of the things that we're doing is supporting a project that's building REA accounting on Holochain. If you want to look at that project, it's called Holo-REA, Holo-REA, and what becomes kind of fun and strange and magical about doing this kind of cross-organizational or supply chain accounting on Holochain is that it It's a cryptographically signed, intrinsic data integrity, auditable kind of accounting thing where your transaction between two people actually becomes your accounting record, is digitally signed by both people, so you can't alter it or change it without breaking the other person's signature. And it starts to allow any unit of account within a business If your business does services in hours, if your business registers domain names, or it has barrels, boxes of apples, or crates of whiskey, or whatever it is that you have that you're selling, the units of account that you're managing inventory in your business have the possibility of becoming cryptocurrencies. You don't have to issue other special tokens. You can borrow against your cases of whiskey that you produce. If your supply chain will pre-purchase them from you, you know what I mean? And you can go into a negative balance of cases of whiskey that you earn back by producing the cases of whiskey and selling them. And it's a strange way that we don't think of about currencies right now, but it's very practical. It takes a lot of the mystery out of it and stops becoming these sort of weird magic tokens that you're trying to hype the market about and convince them that it's of value and starts being really grounded in the value flows that we, that we exchange for real.

Right. Well, I'm so glad that we're having this recorded conversation because there's a lot of things that you said that is just, you know, way too complicated in a way. So we'll write a blog post and We'll put all the various domain or URL that you mentioned. Now, I'm a marketer and I've been in technology my entire career, right? And I love technology for the power that it represents and this openness as a humanity and as a society that it actually creates. But when I work with many small organizations, whether they're selling art online or a SaaS platform, they're really very far from understanding Holochain, and so I'm wondering if you already offer working groups for CEOs, entrepreneurs, or agencies like the one that I'm part of to really understand and help brainstorm, because what you're talking about is asking ourselves the question, how do my business fit in Holochain, requires me to step back, look at how I make you know, how I make money flows, the values that I'm creating, and looking for new business models. Do you have a working group that would allow entrepreneurs and business owners to come together and kind of brainstorm together, or something that we as an agency could put out in the world?

We have various local meetups that happen And we have various online meetups that happen. And we have, so like online meetups via Zoom, especially during pandemic times is a way a lot of these things, you know, meet. But then we also have online forums and discussion areas where you can post questions and people can answer you. You can get answers from some of us, but also people in the community answer each other and support each other. Forum.holochain.org is a more technical forum, forum.holohost.org is more about, is a little less technical and more about the hosting framework we're building on Holochain and the hosting-backed currency and that kind of thing, but you can post these kinds of questions anywhere in either of those forums.

Okay, yeah, I mean it's definitely an fascinating topic and world that is open up, that is being opened. But yet we know that as human, we are fearful creatures. And so the reason, the reason number one why innovation in organization is so difficult is because as soon as the mind gets excited into a new idea, then it's being countered by this other part of ourselves that doesn't want to have more work, that, you know, starts doubting. And I think if Holochain was to open up a whole new world, we've got, as individuals, entrepreneurs, to find a way to collaborate instead of just sending people to, you know, very technical areas. Because otherwise what's going to happen is that people who have that knowledge, that are software developers will capture that and keep it for themselves, which is part of the conditioning. And you're trying to break this conditioning, right, the way to look at the world. Wonderful. Well, this was a very rich conversation that we definitely need to unpack, and 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 of 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 reflection 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 a large public. So I started to explain, you know, what a network society would look like and, you know, unlimited access to content and community building and tribes. We used the word tribe at the time. 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. And people, after the conferences, they 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. And I can understand why they said that because yes, we still had the very geeky face of that, which I think Holochain still has. It's very geeky, you know, 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 HApps, 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. 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 or Amazon or Facebook and so on. But those you will participate in will belong to everyone and you'll have open source code. And yes, you will have leaders, of course, because you can ask, you know, 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 things or expert in whatever, you know, you will, we 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 the 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, 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 infrastructure. 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 qualification and the last thoughts. Runa. Yes, there was something that Jean-François said that caught my 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 Coventina 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 Holochain 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, 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 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 where 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 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 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? You know, and everybody's like, oh, that's way far out there, or 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 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 And 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, um, 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 if you don't think ahead, somebody else is going to implement the new business models on Holochain and end up leaving you behind. 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, you know, 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 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 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. As Holochain's app store grows like that, 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 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 am 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. Thank you for the invitation, Virginie Glaenzer.