The Shell money interviews (Video 1) were recorded in Vanuatu at the same time as the evacuation in Ambae, and during this phase Torque press brought out the book Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain in England and artists collected at the Theatre of Measurement workshop at FACT Liverpool. In January’s Moneylab on the panel “Art and Equity? Tokenizing Culture with the Blockchain” real problems arose on how decentralized computation could actually challenge dominant economic, social and political power structures. The sense of what the Cascade Network could be rose out of this confluence and meetings in Wired Sussex organised by Swarm Dynamics.
Let's look at the Cascade Network and identify what would be required. We need, in no particular order.
Blockchain can deliver a technology that is trusted by all, and can accommodate flexibility and deliver resilience. But how to create an abundance system from a crypto-economic ecosystem of coordinated activity underpinned by trust and embedded agreements?
How does an abundance system come into being? How do we create a network open to deep reflection and expression from taking inspiration from traditional forms of women's work in the Pacific?
Not everyone on this project has visited Vanuatu and after reading through Traditional Money Banks in Vanuatu which speaks of the Shell Money as a system of Cash being created on the beach in conversation with other women, Stuart Wilson felt this image:
Women working with images of their mothers in collaboration with their ancestry through a fold in space-time to create new Som, without damaging the environment. These are witnessed by a system of peers who can express support resulting in the appearance of symbols of value within the cascade.network. Once it is agreed that true Som has been created - the Som is instantiated into existing in the network and the cascade network grows through the accumulation of living culture of the community over time.
The essential aim is that the Cascade Network creates value out of rich expression and care. That it support an abundance system in which everyday creative lived experience is supported by a network for interactions that go deep into meaning and create sacred value. The network does not exist to harvest entertainment, advertising, or provide endless new distractions for the attention but for going deep into ancestral and cultural remembrance.
Based on traditional shell money, Som, we are exploring creating a beautifully designed object. This could operate as a kind of currency that exists in the virtual network but can be exchanged as a beautiful material object. This would mean that one way to create Som is to develop creative artefacts within the Cascade.Network, and / or to perform representations of the Som creation process in return for the generation of virtual SOM.
We want to link consensus not only to other players in the network but to nature. Considering that nature can be observed and communicated via an oracle within a smart contract - which opens up the possibility of including Volcanic activity, Weather conditions, richter scale tremors etc.
We are exploring solutions that have ecological care built into it from the ground up and that have very low impact on the world.
References
Traditional Money Banks in Vanuatu
Institutional Cryptoeconomics - A new model for a new century
Sacred Economics New Materialism [extract] >>>
The appearance of life in space may be compared with some kind of awakening, almost as if—as it comes to life—space itself, the very matter, wakes up, awakens, and it is this awakening of space in varying degrees—indeed in infinitely varying degrees—that we recognize when we see life in space, when we see life in buildings, in the mountainside, in a work of art, in the smile upon a person’s face.
—Christopher Alexander
On a deeper level ... economics should be about things, specifically the things that human beings create, why they create them, who gets to use them, and how they circulate.
...beauty, life, or soul cannot be reduced to a formula.
It can be found in simplicity, such as Shaker furniture, or in ornateness, such as the Masdi-i-Shah or the Tomb of Mevlana. Alexander offers some powerful ways to recognize it. In comparing objects, we can ask ourselves, “Which of these has more life?” “Which of these is more a mirror of my self?” “Does this object make me feel my humanity is expanding—or contracting?”
Accordingly, to create objects with soul, objects for a rich and beautiful world, we must invest them with life, self, and humanity; in other words, we must invest them with something of our selves.
No matter what money system we have, if it does not induce or allow this kind of creative process, then we will not be living in a sacred economy. By the same token, by fostering within ourselves a realization of the sacredness inherent in materiality, and by aligning our work with that sacredness, we lay the social and psychic foundation of an economy in which more and more of the things we make and do for each other are beautiful, personal, alive, and ensouled.
...we have created a material world devoid of soul, barren of life and killing of life. All for what? The pursuit of efficiency, the grand project of maximizing the production of commodities, and underneath that, the domination and control of life. This was to be the paradise of technology, life under control, and finally we see it for what it is: the strip mall, the robotic cashier, the endless parking lot, the extermination of the wild, the living, the messy, and the sacred.
A sacred object embodies something of the infinite. It is, therefore, intrinsically antithetical to the commodity, which is defined by a finite list of measurable specifications. And, as we have seen, the homogeneity of money induces the same in everything it touches, dragging all into the commodity realm.
Ultimately, then, sacred economics is part of the healing of the spirit-matter divide, the human nature divide, and the art-work divide that has increasingly defined our civilization for thousands of years. In our journey of separation, we have developed amazing creative tools of technology and culture that would never have existed had we not departed from our original wholeness. Now it remains to recover that wholeness and bring it to a new realm, to create with nanotechnology and social media things of the same life, beauty, and soul that the old masters created with adzes and song.Let us insist on nothing less. For what purpose have our forebears sacrificed, if not to create a beautiful world?
The old divide between making a living and being an artist will crumble, is already crumbling. So many of us, more and more of us, are refusing that divide. No object will be too insignificant to merit our care, our reverence, and our effort to make it right. We will seek—are already seeking—to embed all things in wholeness. All of the movements I have described in this book are carrying us toward a world that beautiful. The social dividend, the internalization of costs, degrowth, abundance and the gift economy, all take us away from the mentality of struggle, of survival, and therefore of utilitarian efficiency, and toward our true state of gratitude: of reverence for what we have received and of desire to give equally, or better, from our endowment. We wish to leave the world more beautiful than we entered it.
...abundance has always been available to us. It is our perceptions, and not our means, that engender scarcity.
"A vein runs through spiritual tradition that says that we, too, give back to the sun; indeed that the
sun only continues to shine through our gratitude. Ancient sun rituals weren’t only to thank the
sun—they were to keep it shining. Solar energy is the light of earthly love reflected back at us.
Here, too, the circle of the gift operates."
Could it be, then, that as we step into the abundance mentality and the generosity of the connected self, the self that connects I and thou through love, the sun will shine more brightly? That new “suns”—new sources of the infinite generosity of the universe—will become available to us, reflecting back our love? We are born into gratitude; it is our primal response to the gift of life itself.
Shall we settle for anything less than a sacred world?