On Values
The most significant story of crypto is still unfolding and it lies in the microcosms: the new customs and culture we are actively resisting, incubating, testing and living.
The potential of people, places, and projects steeped in values such as decentralization, distribution, peer-to-peer, permissionlessness, transparency, censorship resistance, and credible neutrality is too great to put into words when it is still being written. (More on these terms below).
All we have are our stories.
At a mystical-sounding place, Edge Esmeralda, Vivek and I collided with others drawn to “an IRL lab of experimentation for new ideas, tech, culture, and organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing.”
It was here we attended a health unconference in which each workshop was created emergently by participants. I made friends in the sauna who moved me–shifting how I view impact and recalibrating my perspective from a macro lens to a micro lens.
It was here Vivek and I piloted a workshop, “Augmented Locality,” exploring overlaps between digital and physical spaces. We participated in Esmeralda by bringing digital ideas into local contexts. We explored “Archives” at the Healdsburg Library and “Bulletins” at the Healdsburg Town Square, both ideas that have skeuomorphic lives technically but ultimately begin locally.
This IRL experience at Edge Esmeralda, and in the work we aspire to do at Kernel, help to make my sense concrete: that a movement energized by founding values in crypto and other emergent technologies signal a significant shift in what we understand to be possible.
The groundswell is manifest in the people, places, and projects aspiring to innovate, invariably transforming our culture with it.
Many latch onto blockchain technology because of its capacity to redefine wealth and the values it enshrines in its code–indelibly laced with traces of A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto. It began with Bitcoin, continued with Ethereum, and now lives in a variety of crypto projects beyond these initial two.
Founding Blockchain Values
- In 2009, Bitcoin became the first currency powered by cryptography with no central locus that did not require a client-server architecture, but allowed each computer (node) to participate in and co-create the network. We call this decentralized, distributed, and peer-to-peer (p2p).
- It is a currency anybody can participate in so long as they have the interest, an internet connection, and an on-chain wallet. We call this permissionless.
- It is both a currency and distributed ledger that executes according to immutable computer code. We call this transparent, censorship resistant, and cryptographically secure.
- It does not favor any user, any transaction, or any one outcome, functioning agnostically for whomever uses it. We call this credibly neutral.
Note: It is worth testing how any living crypto project holds up against founding values.
On Customs and Culture
And so what do you get when people, places, and projects inspired by the values of an emergent technology re-imagine the world by considering the implications of attaching incentives to computer code that is immutable, incorruptible, physically unattainable, legally undefinable (for now), decentralized, and distributed?
I argue that you get microcosms that maybe we cannot wholly and simplistically call good but that we may call resistant.
Microcosms full of unique souls–each who resists in part the corrupt centralized and extractive practices defining corporations and legacy systems; opaque governments, democratic processes, and legislative policies; and the second order consequences that produce skewed levels of disparity and inequity, food insecurity, environmental destruction, social malaise and loneliness, inaccessible healthcare, commodified education, and perhaps the most depraved of them all—the poverty of the imagination: a sense that we have no agency to transgress the inertia anesthetizing us.
The crux has been hiding in plain sight, and one we discuss often in Kernel á la kindred soul, David Graeber:
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Being part of a non-speculative, techno-optimistic corner in crypto is the most hopeful I have felt in my 33 years on earth. Hopeful because of the growth in spaces that embody emergence and participatory learning. Hopeful because such spaces stoke our imaginations and remind us of our agency–that we don’t have to accept systems as they are when we are the ones who create them.
This is the change I find most compelling–the cosmically cultural shift: that we practice new customs and weave a new culture greater than the one we have been given.
The changes are stirring technically, as well. Cryptography allowed for cryptocurrencies, and advances in the field have only grown more compelling: with more programmable cryptography, the field shifts from defensive to offensive, and beyond to serendipitous. Stablecoins, recently coined “room-temperature superconductors for financial services”, have reached global adoption rates that rival Visa. Our data infrastructure is vastly improved by the cypherpunk ideals entrenched in crypto, just in time to balance the strength of private LLMs and artificial intelligence.
It is our vision at Kernel to co-create peer-learning environments that outlast ourselves. To create environments with foundational architectures of participation: structures and customs that allow us to share in playing the most valuable games we can with one another.
Kernel believes in ‘tools that help us help each other,’ and we frame crypto tech, and tech more broadly, in such a light. We attempt to give back the evil of the web–notably the tendencies to over-consume and extract.
This leaves us with questions to begin again: in which environments do we aspire to participate, and what am I doing to co-create them?
Heirloom Commons 
Leave a comment