In this segment of the Holochain workshop, host Virginie Glaenzer introduces Belinda Noakes, a former senior IT professional turned consultant and courage coach. Drawing on her experience inside a large tech corporation, Belinda questions the prevailing, dollar‑centric definition of wealth and proposes a broader framework that recognises value that cannot be captured by money. She enumerates categories of “invisible” value—clean air, water and soil; health impacts of pollution; intergenerational genetic effects of chemicals; downstream ecosystem services; cultural and spiritual significance of Indigenous sites; and even subtle energetic structures such as ley lines. Belinda asks how well current systems measure, track, and acknowledge these forms of value, highlighting the difficulty of translating them into monetary terms. A brief interjection from another speaker points to the ecological ripple effects of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone as an illustration of how minor ecosystem changes can have large, often unseen, consequences. The discussion sets the stage for exploring how decentralized technologies like Holochain might enable new ways of accounting for and tokenising human‑centred, non‑monetary value.
Chapters
Let me introduce you to Belinda Noakes. Belinda spent 20 years in the IT industry working in the public sector and for one of the big tech companies. After taking an extended break to get healthy and gain some new skills, she remembered what she found interesting about technology in the first place. Belinda now consults to startup and scale-up businesses on how to create human value using technology systems and works as a courage coach supporting professionals and business founders to turn fear into fuel or change.
I'm going to talk to you a little bit and pose some questions really about how we currently experience wealth, how we have experienced wealth, and how we could experience wealth differently. Having spent quite a few years inside one of the very big tech companies, I have seen what I would call— what I could call the pointy end of corporate capitalism.. And one of the things that it did was spur a desire in me to explore other frameworks for thinking about wealth and success and value. So we're going to talk about making the invisible visible, and I want to start with the question of, you know, what's invisible today? And essentially the answer is that almost everything that can't be captured in dollar-based currencies, money-based currencies, is invisible today. Which of course includes— sorry, excludes many kinds of value that some of us regard as precious, and even most of what we what we regard as sacred. In fact, most kinds of value that we regard as precious and sacred can't be captured in money. So let's talk about, as an example, the environmental value of clean air, water, and soil, right? How do we measure that and what do we measure? How do we recognize the value there? So we could start with talking about, okay, how does a change in a natural ecosystem increase or decrease productive economic capacity? We have some ability to track that and measure it and express it in dollar terms, but we're not even particularly good at doing that. And then it gets much more tricky when we start to look at other kinds of considerations, other sources of value or loss of value. So what about when when we look at the kinds of disease just for humans that can be caused by pollution? How good are we at measuring that, tracking that, and expressing the value of it? How about the intergenerational effects of chemical use? So the kinds of genetic mutations that we start to see multiple generations down the line in farming communities where people have been using chemicals for a long time? How about the impact of pollution at the headwaters of a river system downstream, so physically, geographically removed from the source of the pollution? How good are we at actually making that visible to ourselves and to others? How good are we at recognizing the value of a site that has cultural significance to Indigenous people? There's a lot of conversation about this in Australia at the moment with mining companies blowing up the sacred Indigenous sites every other week and attempting to calculate compensation in dollar terms without much success. How good are we at acknowledging or even recognizing that there might be value attached value that we derive from the natural energetic structures of the earth. So ley lines and vortexes, and what happens when we disrupt or maintain or strengthen those.
And then we get to the effect or the value of minor changes in one or more ecosystem variables, changes that might seem minor to us but that might actually prove not to be minor at all. And if anyone doesn't know what happened or what is happening in Yellowstone National Park in the US as the result of the introduction, the reintroduction of wolves, um, in the about 15 years ago, um, I encourage you to search for National Geographic Wolves of Yellowstone.
There's a lovely 5-minute video on the kind of cascade of effects that happened in a natural ecosystem just by reintroducing one critical species that had been hunted almost to the point of extinction, including reshaping of the flow of water in rivers, which I think is a lovely allegory for, for a number of different things. Right. So what's the thread there around what's visible and invisible? I'm going to argue that the thread around visibility and invisibility is that pain is invisible today, largely, to us when we try to express everything in dollar terms. Everybody experiences pain differently. But that's actually— it's a problem that pain is invisible because pain is the source of value, either the creation of value or the destruction or loss of value. And value happens when someone experiences less pain. That's actually at its essence what value is. When somebody's lived experience of pain changes for the better. If we accept that, then it follows that if we can monitor and measure the change in somebody's experience of pain and we can actually track a reduction in somebody's experience of pain, then we've created value. This is an important thing to think about if we aspire to be next-generation entrepreneurs who want to create different kinds of companies, different kinds of organizations doing different kinds of work in the world. Because we might want to think about these kinds of questions when we think about our business ideas. Who is actually in pain here? So not— it's a different question than what is the problem that I'm solving. Yeah? It goes deeper. Why is that person or are those people or those groups in pain? What is their actual experience of pain? How would they describe it both in terms of their qualitative experience of it but also the magnitude of it? Because if we can get a handle on magnitude, then we can start to track change over time. What is the root cause of that experience they're having of pain? Now we're getting to— if we can address the root cause of their pain, then we can actually reduce the pain that they're experiencing. Now we might be on to a problem that is worth solving or at least addressing, even if we can't completely solve it. So that then, you know, if I was an entrepreneur who was thinking about a social media platform, for example, right? Keen to do a Facebook alternative. Okay. What might the value be of? If I think about what I understand about pain that comes from the current big social media platforms, how might we actually start to change that? What might the value be of a non-addictive social media platform that encourages kindness and builds stronger peer relationships and actually creates or cultivates resilience to shame, especially for children and young people. So, now that we start to have a sense of what might be invisible in, for example, the business models of the pain that might be invisible in the business models of the current big social media platforms, how can we start to reveal that? And address it. So how could we measure and account for the value of this alternative non-addictive social media platform? Well, firstly, we could design it differently. And secondly, we could measure success differently, both within the platform itself in terms of what the, the users or the participants in the platform see as a successful interaction with the technology, and also we could measure success of our company differently. So what does this have to do with Holochain? Why am I even talking to you about this? Well, okay, Paul gave us a lovely explanation, and Sid as well, on how Holochain is more scalable, it's more resilient, it's more versatile, and it's more devolved than blockchain-based solutions, for example, and certainly than traditional centralized technology solutions. But what does that actually mean? What does that actually allow us to do with this technology? Well, first of all, we can track and manage and then account for the value to different individuals of a wider range of transactions and interactions. Sid alluded to this, right, when he talked about how when it costs a lot of money for every transaction, you only track what is worth a lot of money. So when transactions become cheap or almost free, then you can start to track all different kinds of things, of course with informed consent, right? And then you can do different things with the completely different dataset that you then have available to you. And then the other thing I think that we can do with Holochain is we can then observe and measure and quantify and even tokenize the value of pain reduction for specific people and to specific people. This is not something that traditionally technology systems have been even able to do, let alone good at doing. But I think Holochain's a breakthrough. I see in Holochain the potential for us to use technology to reduce pain rather than using technology as it's traditionally been used the majority of the time, which is seeking simply to make more money and accumulate more power. I believe also that Holochain can help us to address different kinds of problems. We can actually tackle, we can ask different questions and pose different answers to them. Meaning that with Holochain we can actually create value by making the invisible visible and by transforming people's experience of pain. It sounds kind of outlandish to talk about a technology platform as having the potential at least to facilitate the alchemical transformation of people's lived experience of pain. However, I actually, when I look at Holochain, that's what I see. I see the potential in the technology and I see the potential in the community. And I think that when you have a technology platform that actually, because of the way it's been designed and the kind of capabilities that it has embedded in it, and that it allows us to use, and then you have different kinds of people that have traditionally been involved in building technology applications. Those two things combined, we can really do some very, very interesting work here based on starting with a fundamentally different set of questions and concerns and posing a completely different set of answers and solutions.
