Decentralised Indigenous Organisations (DIOs) — Part II : The Forces of our Time (2/2)
Unconventional Forces and the Expression of Freedom
Part II (2/2) on the DIOs series.
In the previous article we explored Conventional Forces to show how they could help to the creation of DIOs, in this article we will explore its other side — the Unconventional Forces.
The Unconventional Forces
Unconventional Forces can be defined as forces that are not yet recognized by nation-states as conventional due to their disruptive nature to the status quo.
How to frame Unconventional Forces ?
Unconventional Forces usually find their origins in libertarian and anarchist movements that, in today's world, are transcribed mostly onto the Internet and new technologies such as Web3. The term 'Forces' is meaningful, as it means that Unconventional Forces have managed to create significant leverage to challenge conventional ones and build enough momentum to be consider as a serious opposition. The current leading forces are the cypherpunks who are promoting strong cryptography to disrupt the way we exchange value in society, pushing traditional finance to its edge.
Why consider Unconventional Forces in DIOs ?
As we will see below, its decentralisation and self-organisation intrinsic value, its non-violence ethos, its open-source composability, its transparent trustworthy database, or its permissionless access, are all fundamentals to address the metacrisis with more flexbility. However, beyond this technological edge, there is a deeper meaning to connect web3 to Indigenous Peoples – by doing so, we are ‘bridging polarity’ of humanity.
By ‘bridging polarity’, we mean connecting two extremes often considered as opposite to open a whole new field of possibilities. On one side we have the Indigenous Peoples, deeply connected to the web of life, and on the other side we have the cypherpunks, deeply connected to the web of society1. These two communities are at the exact edge of the human spectrum, and yet, they share the profound desire to create a better future for all humanity.
The Web3 Building Blocks
Let's explore different primitives2 of web3 to see briefly how they could support the creation of DIOs.
a. DeFi (Decentralised Finance)
We already acknowledge that a large part of the metacrisis is due to poor financial management and misallocation of capital. Whether it is from our debt system which is completely disconnected from reality, or because of the opacity and centralisation of the banking system, traditional finance (TradFi) as we know it today, is a dead body.
This is why DeFi is one of the most interesting innovations as it could participate to direct financial capital where it’s necessary to bring liquidity without the rigidity and constraints of TradeFi. DeFi is alive.
What is Decentralised Finance ?
“Decentralised finance, or DeFi, is a system by which financial products become available on a public decentralised blockchain network. That makes them open to anyone to use, rather than going through middlemen like banks or brokerages. Unlike a bank or brokerage account, a government-issued ID, Social Security number, or proof of address are not necessary to use DeFi. More specifically, DeFi refers to a system by which software written on blockchains makes it possible for buyers, sellers, lenders, and borrowers to interact peer to peer or with a strictly software-based middleman rather than a company or institution facilitating a transaction”.
For some of us, opening financial freedom might be counter-intuitive. It is easy to get seduced by resource control and tight capital management in times of crises. However, it is clear that control and centralisation of financial power is a complete failure for coordination, which is not likely to be improved by the upcoming CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies). Can we trust traditional financial institutions to supervise global solutions that they have largely contributed to?
On the other hand, the force of DeFi (and Web3 in general), lies in its proposal to separate money from traditional political institutions, as we have seen in the past with the separation of the Church with the State. A free, decentralised and inclusive financial system places people at the heart of the process and democratises economics by stimulating education and experimentation around money. Soon, any community will be able to easily create its own local monetary system. This is the flexibility and openness we should strive for in times of great uncertainties.
From that perspective, it’s easy to imagine Indigenous Organisations having their own set of DeFi primitives, where any human connected to internet could decide to bring liquidity to it. Combined with the legitimacy of Indigenous Peoples and the urgency of our situation, DIOs integrating DeFi tools might be able to attract a lot of capital in the coming decades.
b. ReFi (Regenerative Finance)
ReFi, for Regenerative Finance, is a nascent movement alongside DeFi, which is based on the principles of regenerative economics to reimagine the relation of the financial system with the living world. To quote an article written by Ledy Praddos, tokenomics engineer in Web3 :
’the vision of these new proposals is to address sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity and the underpinning socio-economic and institutional structures that exacerbate these crises’. ReFi’s mission ‘is to systematise incentives to make regenerative places feasible and designing alternatives to our domination culture systems with regenerative ones that value caring and nature’.
ReFi is a fast growing community, especially within the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystem, facilitated by projects like Gitcoin that fund public goods. This ecosystem alongside DeFi, is highly innovative to coordinate capital towards positive impacts. The ethos of ReFi is really close to principles defended by Indigenous Peoples.
DeFi and ReFi are truly powerful innovations to direct important flow of capital within a defined purpose and community. DIOs could act as catalysts for these tools, making them accessible to Indigenous Peoples.
c. DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations)
What is a DAO? it’s ‘like a community, business or organisation which is collectively owned and managed by its members. Rather than concentrating ownership into the hands of founders, directors, and investors, a DAO distributes ownership to a variety of stakeholders in an ecosystem, including contributors, users, strategic partners, vendors, employees and so on. DAO’s help break down the traditional power hierarchies that are responsible for extreme concentrations of wealth’.
DAOs primitives are a new way of organising a community in a decentralised, global and transparent manner. The exciting part is that it’s possible to compose and coordinate multiple sub-DAOs with other primitives such as DeFi, ReFi and NFTs. This composability will make it possible to create new experiments around governance and financial models to create a positive impact (See: ImpactDAO movement)
As we saw in the first article of this series, DIOs shares common values with DAOs, except that DIOs is contextualized with indigenous peoples and has a more spiritual and cultural consensus prior to any use of blockchain technology.
d. Privacy Technologies
Privacy is inherent to the well-being of every community, and especially for the integrity of minorities, as is expressly recognised for Indigenous Peoples by the article 12 of the UNDRIP:
‘Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites’.
Privacy is easy to visualise and defend in the physical realm, but what about the digital one? A place where Indigenous Peoples are increasingly exposed in order to effectively defend their rights. From that threat, we could assume that the use of privacy technologies are included in the UNDRIP as a fundamental right for Indigenous Peoples to protect their cultures and traditions in the digital age.
To understand the deeper meaning behind privacy technologies, we need to turn our attention to the cypherpunk community who are advocating privacy as a fundamental human right.
As expressed Eric Hughes, one of the initiators of the cypherpunk movement: ‘privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world’. This is why, for cypherpunks, privacy is fundamental to create an open and free society in the digital age, as it ensures not only freedom of speech, but also freedom after speech. The real power of this community is its non-violent ethos through the use of strong cryptography, which in this sense, is truly disruptive compared to all previous libertarian movements3. A new paradigm summarised by Julien Assange, founder of WikiLeaks: ‘Strong cryptography can resist an unlimited application of violence. No amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem’.
Privacy is fundamental to Indigenous Peoples and DIOs could guaranted the integration of digital privacy to its Indigenous members often located in authoritarian countries where they risk violent repression.
e. NFTs
What are NFTs? NFTs for Non-Fungible-Tokens, can be defined as ‘non-interchangeable units of digital data’ that contain a piece of identifying information making them distinguishable from all other digital assets.
At first sight, NFTs might be disputed in view of the whole media apparatus as highlighted colour pixels sold for millions. On this point we agree, this technology doesn’t meet the stakes of the metacrisis. Yet, NFTs are much more than just digital pixels, they are an incredible technology that opens up new ways of raising funds, align incentives among stakeholders, and create inclusive narratives and Lore4 for communities.
For instance, NFTs could be used to collectively own, manage physical assets like real estates. NFTs can also be used to create decentralised identity (DIDs), facilitating the creation of web of trust. NFTs can also embed intellectual property rights that bring fair value to artists, especially for collective art, an innovation that could lead to a more creative-centric-economy.
NFTs are also starting slowly to be composable with DeFi, where soon digital assets reflecting physical assets will be used to leverage resources in a new financial ecosystem, and unlock liquid features for illiquid assets like real estates or mortgages5. The kind of responsiveness we might need to pool more capital with agility to address the metacrisis.
NFTs are also a powerful piece of culture that can be used to mobilise large communities, create social events and gamify the way to interact with the world. It might sound futile in the light of the metacrisis, but it could play an important role in reconnecting the new generation to deeper meaning with new stories embedded within indigenous cultures. We can illustrate this with AMAZONIA, an art exhibition and NFT gallery in augmented reality that presents an immersive digital experience of the Paiter Suruí and Cintas-Largas tribes in Brazil.
In conclusion, the use of NFTs opens up new ways to merge different sources of capital, whether financial, cultural, intellectual, social, natural, experiential, material, or even spiritual. The creation liquid capitals provides opportunities to pool a new spectrum of resources to fund social and public goods.
Side note: The main criticism of this trend is the risk of financialization of everything. However, our ecosystems are already turning within the ongoing financial system, as well as our social, cultural and even spiritual life. In response, since it seems almost impossible to reverse the financialization of humanity in the short term, the answer may be to take this financialization one step further and give everyone access to a free financial system. Unleashing financial innovation could reveal the incredible creativity and diversity of humanity's wealth (and not just a few hands), as it would allow us to consider new sources of capital as a medium of exchange and a way to communicate value.
f. Quadrating Funding
Created by Glen Wyel at Microsoft and Vitalik Buterin founder of Ethereum Quadrating Funding (QF) is an innovation to fund public goods without relying on traditional public authorities.
‘With this mechanism you have a crowdfunding campaign that is allocated dollars from a central matching pool based on which projects are more democratically supported as opposed to those into which more capital goes. It is in opposition to 1:1 as that is plutocratic and based only on capital needs. It is instead based on the number of contributors as opposed to the amount funded, reducing whale power and favouring democratic. Example: You raise a grant that gets $100 from 100 contributors, and I raise a grant that gets $100 from 1 contributor, despite both grants being donated $100, you will get 99% of the matching pool. It’s a cool mechanism because it is a collective intelligence mechanism that routes money to where the “poor and the many” have an advantage over the rich and the few’6 .
QF can be summarised as ‘the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community. It amplifies the donations made by a large community over the contributions made by a small group with big pockets’. In other words, it opens a new way to fund public goods outside traditional market, aside many others web3 coordination and funding mechanisms7.
g. Ethical AI (Artificial Intelligence)
We are at the beginning of a breakthrough in Artificial intelligence (AI) as we can see with all the excitement around ChatGPT. Paradoxically, AI is one component of the metacrisis that threatens all humanity while being also one of the tools that could drastically improve coordination amongst large groups of humans or create disruptive innovations to regenerate the world.
To address this technological dilemma, like for Web3, we can argue that any technology already widely shared in the collective stream has no turning back. An invention cannot be uninvented, especially in the age of the Internet. Therefore, the solution might be to understand and use it as soon as possible as an additional tool to address the metacrisis. As a collective, we now have the great responsibility to frame ethically the use of this technology, something that may need to be aligned on ancestral knowledge of Indigenous Peoples. It may even be possible to create, under their guidance, AI that connect us in a different way with ‘non-human being’, as it is the case with the Earth Species Project, a non-profit, open-source collaborative experimentation dedicated to decoding animal communication with AI.
AI is a huge threat for humanity, but like any problem, the solution lies within. Seeing this threat with a friendly eye might be a wise answer to deal with this technology.
The Knowing of the Unknown
There are undoubtedly a multitude of other Unconventional Forces that could support the emergence of DIOs. This part is a tribute to all those past, present and future Unconventional Forces hidden in the beauty of the unknown.
. . .
The point of highlighting Web3 based solutions is because its community is incredibly creative, optimistic, aware, young and open-minded. Web3 succeeded in only a decade to become the largest open-source market in human history (2+ Trillions dollars in 2021). This pool of open innovations allows rapid iteration of new experiments at ‘light speed’, which, in terms of pace, is what we need to address the metacrisis. But this incredible growth is not only due to its open-source market and its financial opportunities, there is a much more subtle entity behind – the Network (Part III).
Next : Part III — The Network.
Born from millennia of violence tearing humanity apart between control and freedom.
Primitive : ‘well established, generic building blocks. They are designed to do one very specific task in a highly reliable fashion’
Most previous liberal movements were violent because they were in the physical realm, such as the Paris Commune, whereas libertarians from the digital realm can avoid physical violence while still actively disrupting their own reality, as the cypherpunks are doing.
Lore is defined as “a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.” Lore tends to exist in cultures with long and complex histories, something that is extremely common in fantasy genres
One solution proposed by Trent McConaghy, co-founder of Ocean Protocol, is to pool in one place the mortgages of cities where sea level will wipe them off the map in the coming decades, to create a collective pool of resources to fight climate change. According to him, this could unlock trillions of dollars.
https://supermodular.xyz/coordination-mechanisms/#Quadratic_Funding
See note 9