Irina was there to hug people on arrival. Many had not yet met. Some had cycled here from nearby, others had left their bicycles at home, flown by aircraft, walked, caught the train across Europe.
[There are some simple rules guiding how this is written. It tries to use descriptive language, in third person. It tries to focus on actions, not embodied meanings, if possible (not always). It switches vantage points, as though changing camera view, or maybe jump cuts? A static view gets boring. Some recordings were used in its construction, because memory is not what it used to be.]
Irina was there to hug people on arrival. Many had not yet met. Some had cycled here from nearby, others had left their bicycles at home, flown by aircraft, walked, caught the train across Europe.
This was Amsterdam. [The term 'cosmopolis' came up, later in the day, by Venkatesh Rao who beamed in as a strange intermixture of generative AI and video pixels. A cosmopolis, a city that contains multitudes of cities, cultures, ways of being all in the one place. An old term, there to ask us how far we've come in our ability to imagine complexity. But that’s later.]
There is coffee, rooibos tea, juice, grapes, figs, pretzels, croissants, and greetings. There are chairs in rows, and there are short introductory presentations. There are interjections, someone (Irina) trips and falls, her coffee splattered all across the wall. In other words, there is formality and informality. A gathering of dynamic minds trying to solve big problems of our time.
The event is a three-day design charrette dedicated to the design of Civic Economy Protocols. Our host is the Civic Interaction Design Lab at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The two event leads are Professor Martijn de Wall and Iksander Smit, who led a global call for participation and launched a detailed research report for context.
Their call out was a provocation - one that prompted us all to be here:
" Communities are reimagining how to organize economies that serve collective well-being rather than profit alone. At the same time, new digital tools—blockchains, smart contracts, protocol-based infrastructures—are transforming how we coordinate, govern, and exchange value. But how do we ensure these tools support civic life, rather than replicate extractive systems in new forms?
The invitation speaks to a way of thinking we all feel like we need to hold on to, dedicate our lives to even. Can we design technology ecosystems with civic value in mind? Many people here do that. Some are old school hackers, some are blockchain enthusiasts, some are cooperative managers, some are curious about what this all means. There is me, Sarah Barns, I travelled the furthest to be here, which maybe makes me the most enthusiastic.
There is a keynote speech to set the scene: Indy Johar from Dark Matter Labs.
Indy arrives a little late, just as the outside wind and rain gathers force. The wind howls as he starts to speak. He is speaking about the climate collapse we are living through. Rain lashes the windows.
Our makeshift structure feels as though it could be unmoored at any moment.
Indy won’t tell lies like other people in authority do. He explains that 3 degrees 'is the world we are operating in'. Three degrees means eight degrees in large cities. Three degrees sees much of the world around the equator, where billions reside, become uninhabitable. Three degrees means wet bulb moments, when a human body cannot sustain itself under conditions of humid heat. The rain and the wind lash the windows; we are in a makeshift structure in the Metabolic Lab; we are attentive to his message.
Indy tells us: he does not come out of randomness. Speaking to the theme of 'civic economies' he tells us he has spent many years establishing collective movements of change makers, impact hubs, consensus builders. He shares a perspective: Consensus, he says, escapes context, and context, particularly differential context, is what we each have. To build consensus over time means narrowing the individuation of context, and in so doing flattens change. Organisations thrive through differentiation, not consensus. He is speaking of the challenges that cooperatives face when they try to move quickly, be consultative, be efficient, be resilient.
Indy is the prominent figurehead of a 'multivariate team' during times of planetary emergency. All this is to say, he says, that the forms of bounded and unbounded organisation are what now matter.
Indy won’t tell us exactly, but he will show us how to unlearn. He seems to be saying that centrally-controlled organisations will, over time, 'lose their edge'.
He says civics is really going to matter.
Indy doesn’t use notes, he has minimal slides. He wants us to revisit our terms of engagement with the world. He feels very present and alive here, in front of us.
He tells us that insurance companies are a service organisation that exist to price risk. If your risk goes up, I charge you 2000. If it goes up, I charge you more. An insurance company that exists to price risk is not going to be a company that seeks to reduce or mitigate that risk. Three degrees in the UK means the rails start to buckle. It means riots, it means whiplash effects in price. High quality nutritional food has become 82% more expensive in the last two years alone.
Three degrees means climate breakdown, not climate change. Amsterdam, like London, may plummet to minus 20, or crank up to 40.
This is volatility, this means loss of farming which depends on stable weather patterns. This is a fundamentally different ecological context, a different operating context.
We are listening to numbers now. $814 billion: the money going into mitigation. $10 billion: the money going into adaptation. Will these terms even matter soon?
He tells us: we need to consider more deeply now what bounded and unbounded mean; why these terms matter.
The 'bounded organisational object' he refers to is the nation state. This is where we are going here. How does a nation state secure itself in the face of this volatility? How does it protect its citizens from shocks? What does a term like 'security' mean, when we are so globally produced? Security, says Indy, is not bounded, it's metabolic. Funny, we are here in the Metabolic Lab, so that chimes.
He says: Security is systematically entangled.
Indy brings our minds to the matters of nutrients, critical minerals, farmland, and then asks us about cognitive security: What happens when we disarm society of the capacity to think? This is the challenge of LLMs.
Indy is not the only person talking like this.
An un-dated piece by Jonathan S Blake, associate director of programmes at the Berggruen Institute, takes a similar view [click below].
After Indy speaks, he takes some questions, then leaves. He was running late, and now he must be off again. The wind is wild outside.
So we are gathered here, in a makeshift structure, to grapple with the question of civic economy protocols. This no longer feels abstract; it feels vital. What Indy says always feels like a shock to the system, because he refuses to lie about how bad things are. The stakes are high. We are part of a movement that matters.
Irina asks us for a moment, to calm our nerves. She asks us to take a moment to breathe together. To feel what it likes to be present here, together, before we take a walk outside, to learn about the story of hope that is Metabolic Lab. Where it is wild outside.
Getting whipped by wind and rain outside
