There's this conversation around a glacier and Iceland running for president. And it's got like people gleefully saying it's a joke and they're also serious about it. OK, so if you're if you have suffrage or you're granted some citizenship standing or like political standing, I should really say, then like the political system has to be accountable to your words, catering to your votes. And that's another kind of form of niche construction.
So to be to have agency is to be detectable to the system, but in the process of being detectable, you alter it. And so we should like try to transform these systems, which I think have historically only been understood as socially oriented and by social, we just by default mean humans only. And maybe one of the fundamental underlying premises of this kind of thinking is that the social does not just only include people. So law, economic, political technologies that are like a kind of social technology, they're enlisted towards a broader notion of the public, which would include whales or not just charismatic megaphone by by regions, ecosystems, forests, et cetera.
Greetings, future fossils. And welcome to episode 220 of the podcast that explores our place in time. I'm your host, Michael Garfield. And this week we are speaking with Austin Wade Smith, animist, designer, ecologist and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, New York.
Austin is the executive director of Regen Foundation, which some of you might remember from my recent episode with Gregory Landway and speaker John Ash. Regen is a US based nonprofit designing a just transition to sovereign regenerative economics supported by emerging decentralized technologies of governance, sensing and ownership. Austin's work explores opportunities for social, legal, economic and information technologies to foster greater independence between individuals and our living world. They teach design and engineering courses related to their research at universities in New York.
Today, we talk about Austin's recent articles on autonomous or convivial ecological institutions, the land stewardship equivalent of a self-driving car as we put it in this conversation. If you all go back to episode 178, where I interview Chris Ryan, paleoanthropologist and host of tangentially speaking, which incidentally, I just recorded an episode for, which is extremely exciting. You've been a fan of Chris's for many, many years. But anyway, the point is Chris's book, Civilized to Death talks about the way that our institutions have taken over.
They're in the driver's seat of our planet. People really are not and have not been for arguably thousands of years. And so the question becomes, how do we live symbiotically with our institutions in a way that is suited to the mental, emotional and physiological well-being of people and as well to the diversity and health of our living world as someone who spends an enormous amount of time researching and thinking about the evolution of artificial intelligence. And as someone who following the writings of people like Cosmo Shalisi and Zander Pago Nathan, regard our corporations and our states as forms of artificial intelligence and who maintains that we actually live in a post-singular world, where many of us spend most of our time trying to stay out from underfoot of these eldritch entities that barely recognize our existence and certainly do not care for us.
The question of how we might use recent technological advancements in machine learning and in distributed ledgers to make human beings and the ecosystems we depend on legible and valuable to the new archons of the technosphere. Why that is a question of existential concern. And what else is a question of existential concern? Your support for this podcast.
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And this one. Thank you so much. Enjoy. Austin Wade Smith.
I want to start. Is that OK? Can we start? Be can start.
Awesome. Austin, it's been a minute. How are you? I'm good.
Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. This is kind of like capping off. Capping off like a really high output week in a high output like season, I would say, like a whole spring in a way that's nice to pause and have some time for reflection and to unpack things in a little bit of a longer format. So it's like a treat for me.
I'm stoked to be here. Right on. Yeah. It's so the timing is always just so uncanny for me.
I was I've been trying to get in to record with a friend of mine, Lance Keltner, who was this badass, Austin, former former Austin based musician who used to play shows with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson all the time back in the 80s. And he and I have been talking about getting in on his new studio in Santa Fe now since like October, like right after I met you or around that time. And I went in yesterday to cut the first track with him, which is named after James C. Scott's book, Seeing Like a State.
Sounds sounds like. You know, so like there is this the kernel happening here at the end of April. It's all about legibility and system systemic sense making and, you know, what what it looks like to to redesign our institutions to be more as you put it convivial. Yeah.
And just to put a cherry on top of that, I was I just hung out with Chris Ryan, who wrote that book, Civilized to Death. He was passing through Santa Fe to record a show and that was our cool conversation on 178, which was, you know, the institutions are the dominant life form on our planet now. And so how do we, how do we help them? Tell us.
No, yeah, he's like, how do we redesign the built environment so that he as he puts it so that we're living in the San Diego Zoo rather than the Calcutta Zoo. But I just I just love, I love this paper that you have shared the ecological institutions, protocols to grow autonomous and convivial ecological actors, which we will link to in the show notes. And I want you to impact us. But before we do that, I want you to give people a bit of human level framing on Austin Wade Smith on who you are, because I had the luxury of getting to meet you on ground level last fall.
And I'd like to offer the same as by proxy right on. Sure. I'm really happy like the paper and happy to get into it. Yeah.
So my name is Austin Wade Smith. I also go by AWS pretty often. My pronouns are they them. And yeah, I am oftentimes confused with being Amazon Web Service and email correspondences.
And I love that. I think like being conflated for one of the largest providers of cloud computing infrastructure is a kind of like, that's a kind of confusion I'm into. I've trained as an ecologist and ecophysiologist and an architect. So when you're talking about the built environment, it definitely like resonates with me.
And yeah, I guess I identify as an animist and an artist. And I think probably the bigger theme that threads through my creative practice that certainly in the piece that we'll talk about today and the work I do professionally is around the kind of notion of animism and not just not just as a sort of relationship between a perceiver and a perceived thing, but like how it's embedded into infrastructure, how we embedded into technical systems. So I do that in a kind of more formalized way, but at the region foundation, which is the nonprofit arm of the larger region network. And I would say like in very concise terms, what the region network tries to do is the opposite of finding people for harming the planet, which means we're trying to like reward and support people who are healing the planet.
And that seems like that's so obvious that we should be doing that. It actually turned out really hard. It's really hard on all these different levels, but the basic premise is really simple that we need like, we need like a more holistic accounting, not like fake accounting that just sheds whatever externalities and convenient for a corporate actor, but we need accounting that makes our financial life look a little bit more like ecological life. Yeah, so I explore that in my work at the foundation and I really like it.
I have a hard time putting it down. But then I also have a kind of practice. And I mentioned a lot of different things. I'm surrounded by a bunch of little servers, little Raspberry Pi's around here.
They're doing various things. That's kind of like part of the AWS things, making myself an endpoint on the web and playing in that kind of slidge. Yeah, I call that project, feral computing, which I think feral servers and feral technologies pretty active in the piece. Yeah, I'm based in Brooklyn and I absolutely love orchids and flank heights.
You can't see that. You can't see that. You can't even type behind you right now. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm trying to transition to video. So, oh, if you don't mind, I might post this so people can see your kite. Okay, right there. I'm gonna come to it.
Yeah, I got a little kite atelier going on and trying to make the side hustle more of a main hustle. And there's something there's something like very sensuous about flying kites. They say it's like the opposite of lifting weights, which I kind of love, like pulling lifts. It just sort of inverts a lot of assumptions about the way things work on the head and in the process makes things just joyous and fun.
Like, you don't see people flying kites frowning very often. Or like always somehow like touching the air. There's like surfing in this big commons that we all are collectively not trying to completely fuck up. Anyway, yeah, kind of fun.
So a bit of backstory on this piece then. Did this like, which came first, your work with region or you were thinking about autonomous ecological institutions? Like, yeah. Yeah.
Well, they're definitely co-evolved and the ecological institutions paper is certainly an articulation of like a lot of the sort of, I would, I think it's like a formalization of a lot of things that are ambiently, I think really motivating to a lot of people who are a part of the region network. So they're like, I think maybe I'm trying to synthesize through a kind of framework and a language that's quite personal, but I think it's tapping into like what a lot of my colleagues and dear friends are like feeling and resonating on. And in thinking through like how to, how to do work that seems ethical and like, like with purpose, sometimes that can feel daunting. And I came upon the rights of nature movement maybe like eight years ago, and I was just completely obsessed with the premise.
I thought it was like the smartest thing I've ever heard and very, very clever, like has this kind of wit to it that's like, um, energizing and kind of animating. So I've been interested in the notion of non-human agency and how that's expressed through different systems for quite a long time. And that's what got me into region in first place. Cause I was like, hmm, maybe this could happen through economic terms too, not just through legal terms.
This has to be all rights based. It could be a value based premise of non-human agency too. What would the two look like together? Um, maybe we should synthesize like Earth law, some of what's happening in the Earth law movement with the regenerative economic movement.
That's the basis of the idea. So region is building an open source stack for like regenerative economic accounting, like real, not fake accounting, but like trying to, trying to define what, what right relation or generation looks like in a particular context. And the really, really big emphasis there is that the terms that are governed locally, they're not imposed from a top down or from external, uh, we know best, uh, premise, but it's more like a collaboration between local contests and context and like guilds of different partners or stakeholders. Um, but anyway, yeah, the, the premise that what, what region network is building as a sort of open source framework, I think basically plugs into the container that right, that the Earth law system has made, but has struggled in some ways to enforce or to like make impactful because it's still relying upon conventional legal, fine, you know, financing for lawsuits, which are expensive and, you know, maybe it's maybe the designation of having legal standing, which is effective with the right signature is, it says it has, has standing has a right to flow or the right to stand if it's a tree or a river or whatever.
Um, you know, it's kind of, it's like, it's like, it's signifying that, that we understand this relationship to be like a being that should have a seat at the table. And, and that's nominal and symbolic in a lot of ways, but maybe that could be plugged into the same idea can be like proliferated across many other mediums to try to make like a mutually reinforcing type of actor. And that's, I guess, like we've been talking about like, how do the rights of nature and region intersect? And so this paper I've been working on for two and a half years or so, um, in collaboration with the Earth Law Center, shout out Grant Wilson and Kevin Schneider, who are active collaborators and sort of like a legal side, legal experts in this project.
So I would just like to read little snippets from this and then have you riff on them because this is a, you know, not to just like blow smoke up your ass, but there are some really eloquent turns of phrase here and I think it's a very articulate piece of work and it would just be nice to let you kind of, uh, yeah, annotate yourself. Sure. So, uh, I like this one, you know, I've been thinking a lot about agency in light of AI and, you know, the, the debate over, you know, people are kind of throwing this term around like AI agents. Um, and you know, the debate over whether what we're dealing with really, uh, our agents or whether, you know, AI broadly understood is more of a sort of inert cultural technology, like a library or, uh, you know, some other kind of, uh, you know, written language or this kind of thing, you know, whether it's, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a layer of knowledge compression, uh, or whether it's like, you know, to me, this seems like just a factor.
Yeah, just to frame this. It's like this is, I mean, you know, you want to get like William Burrows or Terrence McKenna, then you might take the position that might, like my buddy, Jacob Foster, are you Bloomington takes that, uh, memes are agents, you know, that, that ideas live on the subster organisms, they live on the substrate of human brains. And, uh, you know, there's something that's useful in that way of seeing. Um, on the other hand, it's scary, it's paranoid.
Uh, it's easy for people who are afraid of terminators to slip into a dark place. Thinking in that way, if they're not already, if they haven't already made this sort of meta noia turn and, uh, you know, like, you know, they're comfortable with their own, you know, hollow byons, like the notion that the germs living in their gut are not like other to them, you know, so like this whole notion of where to draw the lines in, uh, in a sort of innately planetary ecological way of, of seeing, you know, uh, how do we understand technology in relation to ourselves? These are like crucial philosophical questions right now. So I love that you close to the beginning of this paper.
You say this project begins from a proposition that we call, uh, what we call agency is oftentimes lesser reflection of an organism's innate capacity as or attributes, but rather their ability to be legible to the contexts within which they operate living or otherwise. Um, and you know, this is just, again, to go back to like James C. Scott and seeing like a state, uh, this notion that agency is not a sort of objective property of a person that, you know, a person has more or less agency within a structure. And so I'd love to hear you speak to that.
Sure. Yeah. The, the domain of who is considered to have agency has is a, is a, is a historical force and the like dispossession of that agency or the rewarding of agency. And he was the power to do it.
Certainly he's been going on for a long time and this is maybe continuous with that. Um, yeah, that, that quotes a great starting point because it's kind of the first principle of the whole, of the whole process. And maybe underneath that is a question of like a question around intent and will, um, that could be, you know, like determinism and stuff, big, bigger philosophical question, but agency is not a stable config. It's, um, it's actively navigated.
It's actively conferred. It's contested. It's precarious. And it, it moves in different mediums like rights or value as two common examples.
I'm using here in this project. So with the instability that comes with agency comes an opportunity to like use it as a medium rather than just the sort of thing that something is or isn't endowed with that it's actually like a consequence of a kind of like how we're constituted by these other regulatory infrastructures. Um, and like I can have agency if I am a citizen or if I have, have a green card, there's different degrees of that agency and participating in other political processes. And so I think like, um, cracking open the stability of agency as, um, a kind of discreet, you know, like just like an anything that is stable into actually making like, Oh, this is a medium that we should be playing in.
And we should be like exploring how to like maximize agency in various forms. And to do that, you, you explore and research the way that agency is manifest. So like in the, in the non-human standing example, like rights or what court systems see. So if you can create a system by which non-humans are like a broader range of humans or like any kind of actor has rights, then it has agency within the court of law.
And that means that in thus like the legal system is in some of in service for its in working on behalf of this actor or these types of actors. Um, and I like the idea that it would be like a medium that you would try, we would try to explore this as a design process. I'm a designer like at my root. So it's in making that term less stable and more like conferred and contested.
It becomes a process less of like a, a natural view or a noun. And maybe there's a little bit of like relationship to what you're talking about around the sort of like, is it a, is it a meme and actor or is it like a particular kind of compression system that there's a sort of active form, like a verb form of agency that we should be exploring and like tuning, playing with finding resonance patterns inside of like lawyers have been like legal hackathons or a thing. I just learned about this like a year ago. It's like, well, this is amazing.
Okay. Like there's, there's a culture of this hacking of agency that's not just in like, you know, in the shell or whatever, moving across other systems. So it's sort of, this is an effort to try to weave many of those together so that they resonate and have a greater level of impact or potential ramifications. Yeah.
You know, one of the things that I think you handle really adroitly in this is, there's that bumper sticker that says, you know, if I believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one and I gave a talk on this kind of stuff at Burning Man back in 2017, only two in the show notes where I was, I was saying, you know, I'm actually up to a point. I'm actually okay with the idea of corporate personhood. If, you know, we actually grant people the same kind of protections under the law that we do corporations and the real, the gap there seems to be in the amount of economic power and agency that corporations can leverage such that you get these bizarro situations like Warner Brothers defending a non-existent copyright to the song Happy Birthday for a century just because they can lawyer up more than any other, you know, any other, you know, like agencies at a, a different scale, you know, and so this is, you know, this is the situation in which we found ourselves where someone manages to hack the legal end of it, but we haven't found a way to hack economic legibility of individual, you know, corporations at the scale of an individual person or, you know, at these other, you know, the scale of a watershed or whatever, you know, so like, I like that you give examples of, you know, why can't we grant blue whales and old growth dogless furs, the same kind of legal standing we grant corporations and then later on, you mentioned the possibility of using legal rappers such as unincorporated associations and zero member LLCs as quote promising structures from which novel ecological institutions might emerge. But then, yeah, I mean, so there's this issue and this is sort of, you know, where we get into your, your argument that we need to find and that we have ways, you know, we've started, you and your colleagues have started to think about ways that these, you know, like if we're gonna, if we're gonna talk about granting legal personhood to Pachamama or whatever, Pachamama has to afford its own lawyers, you know, it has to afford its own guardians and stewards and so on.
You're going to pay taxes. Right. Right. So, so it's not just, it's not just legal legibility, it's economic political legibility and I'd love to hear you get into the gritty of that.
Sure. Yeah. Well, right. So, um, I think the notion of legibility is probably one of the most powerful thought instruments like we have at our disposal, just like in general.
And so the idea of the reframing of the agency common to like, the agency is a reflection of legibility and how legible, understandable, recognizable you are to the system that you're inside of and inevitably in the process of being recognizable or like legible, you, you alter the features of the environment that you're inside of. And a kind of aha from me that I really enjoyed to the process of putting this together and this journey that has sort of supported it is thinking through in first principles like earth native and ecologically native processes, which described this phenomenon quite clearly that they can like graph back on to like more human derived systems and progenic systems. And so niche construction, I think is a really big one, which is like me wearing my ecologist hat that's like, you know, the beaver who constructs the dam is altering the features of its habitat in such a way that it's changing the sort of landscape within which it operates. And then the extent to which that you're able to like impact in the transform your environment means you're shaping the landscape within which you exist.
And we're pretty familiar of thinking about that stuff from a biological level, like we alter our own environment. But that same idea of niche construction could be employed across other kinds of infrastructure and technologies, like creating a legal niche for non humans, like corporate personhood has already created a niche that can be occupied by more things than just corporate actors. And similar process to say like, well, if we could come up with a system by which the living world that sustains us, that sustains human beings and life on earth, like that has value, we'll call it a care work or like reproductive care work to sustain us on a systemic level, that in effect, we're exploring like niche construction in an economic domain too. Or if there's notion of like representation or suffrage, and you're like, there's this conversation around a glacier and Iceland running for president.
I mean, it's got like people gleefully saying it's a joke and they're also serious about it. And okay, so if you're if you have suffrage or you're granted some citizenship standing or like political standing, I should really say then like in theory, the political system has to be accountable to your words, like catering to your votes. And that's another kind of form of niche construction. So to be to have agencies to be detectable to the system, but in the process of being detectable, you alter it.
And so we should like, try to transform these systems, which I think have historically only been understood as socially oriented and by social, we just by default mean humans only. And maybe one of the fundamental underlying premises of this kind of thinking is that the social does not just only include people. So law, economic, political technologies that are a kind of social technology, they're enlisted towards a broader notion of the publicer, which would include whales or or not just charismatic megaphonibaly, bioregions, ecosystems, force, et cetera. And yeah, I think there's I think there's a lot of like power in that in the sense that it's maybe part of this exercise is to take the terms of social life that humans have so narrowly maintained to take them as far as they can logically go on their own terms so that they undo themselves.
And like, another take corporate personhood, dead seriously, in a way that like allows it to basically work in a broader service to like life. And I think that that's like a, I don't know, I think that's a really exciting premise. And maybe I'll conclude this riff by saying that I think this is like an instrument, like this is like a framework with a set of instruments that we might tune and use as necessary in the climate justice process, which is social justice and like one in the same. And so they're helpful.
People oftentimes don't like that these worlds touch legibility is like kind of like a dark forest where if something is recognizable to an economic system is therefore now destroyable, exploitable, exploitable, and don't like that. And I don't like it either in some ways, but I think maybe kind of like a broad hands jazz hands, broad stroke response to that your question is like, that I'm really tired of the kind of preciousness of the separation of like, oh, social technologies, and then there's nature and we'll keep nature like there. We are nature, we're fundamentally part of it. We are part of it.
We are part of watersheds, we're part of rivers, we're part of forests, they don't just exclude us. So the kind of anxiety around like not allowing the living world to be integrated into social technologies, I think actually kind of perpetuates a sort of separatism of us versus nature. Like nature should be over there and should be left alone. It's like, no, we are nature, we're implicated in this.
And so there's a sort of spirit of like play and exploration that I think comes into it. And I kind of wish, there's not like a goal, but if people think that this is completely absurd, what we're talking about here, then maybe something's gotten across, they're like, whoa, okay, like this actually registered, but like, you know, there's examples in the right to nature movement where people are just like, this is kind of dumbfounded by the premise. And that probably means there's something there like double click on or like lean into. Yeah, that's what your comment makes me think of.
Yes. Okay. So I'm really glad that you brought up this, the double-edged sword of legibility, because obviously like as soon as you can stand up and be counted, as it were, then you're also someone who has a target on your back. Right.
Right. And so in a similar way, when I had your friend and colleague Gregory Landoey on the show in episode two, 17 to introduce region to the future fossils audience, we talked about this thing that I've been kind of prosecuting with him for a while now, which is in what ways do you all, meaning you and everyone working with you on the region project broadly, understand the marketization of land stewardship. Like, how do you design that to protect against economic predations through, you know, the kind of predatory speculations that we see going on with carbon sequestration or other kinds of ecosystem services? And I like that, you know, I like that you bring up the complexity of the situation in this paper and you caution against collapsing ecological complexity into sort of a single variable assessments.
In that way, you know, Gregory made the point that, you know, that if for instance, as is the case with like the Jaguar credit in the Amazonian headwaters, that the land stewards are the ones making the decision about what does and does not count as a viable metric for the health of the ecosystem that they're protecting, then what you have is this enormously heterogeneous patchwork of locally determined metrics. And that becomes a much harder thing to collapse at the scale of a global market into something that's going to steer the whole thing off course. But then here you have, in this case, you know, if the ecosystem is self-governing, the question that I have, and maybe we're kind of skipping ahead here, because I do want to kind of drill, if it's a horrible for a few years. I do want to find some of these ideas and just take good.
Yeah, I want to extract some, no, I want to clarify some of this, you know, the fundamentals here before getting into this, but well, whatever, we're here. You know, how do you imagine the, the, you talk about oracles and, you know, sort of, you know, the ways that you could set up ledger-based systems and sensors and so on, so that an ecosystem can monitor itself and make sense of itself. And I'd like to hear more about how, you know, because like specifically, you say, in effect, autonomous ecological institutions are a kind of self-driving ecology. But like a self-driving car is being trained on the behavior of human drivers.
And also, we have this sort of problem with levels of autonomy with self-driving vehicles. And, you know, even though Mercedes is now selling like level three self-driving cars in the States supposedly, that you can actually fall asleep at the wheel. You know, how do we, like, how do you imagine us getting to the point where we can trust the machine layer that we've built on top of all of this, and that we are using to interface with these institutions as legal and economic entities to actually give it, give us metrics that make sense. Like, how do we, how do we trust this thing to steer?
Yeah, yeah, totally. So the question, well, the double, I'm going to start with a kind of like, weak sauce response that I think is helpful in just illustrating my general position on some of this broader framing and question is if there is the opportunity for people to meaningfully disagree on whether or not an approach around local definitions of regeneration should be defined as having value and then sold, if there can be an opportunity where people disagree on like making things legible or not, then I think the foundation has been successful in some ways. Because in order to disagree, you have to agree on like a hundred other things in order to even have the same language and the same premise to disagree on something rather than just people talking past each other. So Michael, and I think the goal of the foundation is to fundamentally support public literacy around the ethical and technical underpinnings around like regenerative economics so that people are aware of what's at play and they can, they can fork it, they can dismantle it, they can evolve it, they can participate in it, but we have an informed conversation around it.
So the kind of double-edged nature of legibility that I think of like legibility as a dark force that now you're open to like predation I think is incredibly alive and present in the awareness of the work that we do, I do Gregory and others do and people bring that up a lot like it's a new thought. And I think the tension that is in that question is like a very animating tension that I think we have to go through in order to actually not be separate from nature, like we have to navigate that tension to really, really undul society and ecology and like recognize that we are the earth and we are for some of our ecosystems. So that discomfort is worth sticking with. I'm not here to say one should come out on one side or the other that we're putting a market in the temple of what is sacred and we're therefore violating it.
If we take this sort of self-evident truths that we are a part of the living world fundamentally, then it's going to smash us into some of these questions around the discomfort around legibility. And I'm pretty much committed that that question is something I'm going to kind of dedicate my life to unpacking in public and in more direct or one-on-one conversations and through practice and action and stuff. So the idea being that value can only really be defined on a fundamental level locally and you can say what's local, what's the boundaries of local or just kind of people can hand wave and say grassroots but that a lot of the source of harm and dispossession around valuing living systems or carbon sequestering organisms or whatever that might look like or carbon credit or whatever is that it's depredicated upon an imposition of what's right in effectively a kind of neo-colonialist conservation mindset that bypasses the people who are doing the direct work and just is effectively like a money laundering scheme for corporates who are trying to chip away at their net zero commitments. And so I broadly speaking, Regent has a premise is designed so that the governance and the definition of what regeneration or what we call right relation looks like is happening at a local level and that's durable.
That's like not getting co-opted or like manipulated or tampered with and you can use decentralized ledgers with integrity to do that. So in the piece I distinguish between data oracles and social oracles and there's a kind of extension between autonomous systems and convivial systems there. And so like I think if I'm actively working on building oracles that would allow like a DAO or a set of contracts to do things based off of like environmental data like input like if the wind blows north do this set of actions and okay that's like interesting doesn't really you know it gets much more complex much more complex much very quickly like that's kind of what you're pointing out and saying like okay well there's like a one dimension of trying to define a right relation in terms of one dimension is crazy reductive. So in the piece I talk a lot about decentralized protocols which is like a way of saying like blockchain identity ownership sensing and verification and governance like a lot of these things that are able to be maintained through decentralized consensus rather than through a centralized authority that you know those those processes can be fundamentally in service to and supportive like social oracles not just data oracles.
So the autonomous ecosystem autonomous ecological institution at the end of the paper I sort of like say like that's kind of missing the point y'all. But how crazy is it that we've found ourselves with the technical capabilities to make truly like autonomous ecosystems that could do things and they could directly put pressure on human society to do things through their own pre-programmed or like contractual basis we have that possibility now and coupling or genovaconomics and earth law together opens up this whole renaissance where we could do that but but we are not separate like we're not trying to build autonomous things we're trying to reintegrate to live with and that's why I kind of landed on the term convivial and it has everything I know like and stuff like that but I'm thinking of it sort of like not autonomous like to sort of like the autonomy isn't the point we're not trying to make something more separate from us but actually weave ourselves back into the fabric of things so the friction that can come with people defining what regeneration looks like through a governance process through a consensus making through ritual practices whatever that might look like like that's the that's the good stuff and how that might inform and direct the behavior of these larger sort of new institutional actors let's see but I put the autonomous ecological institutions out there because we can technically do that and it is basically like yeah you could use an LLM or an AI that was built on a model of knowledge systems or of being able to look at earth observation and deduct behaviors that should happen based off of what it's observing and stuff like you train the model to make use autonomous things and it's sort of like planting like a rogue legal financial instrument into the soil and like seeing what it does which is like fun is a conceptual practice but that the convivial part is where like the card is always turning towards that and so I love this kind of paradox that we like coupling that with happening in like earth economics and earth law together allows us to create these sort of autonomous actors only to really be humbled and fundamentally realize that there's that kind of autonomy is like missing the point that we're trying to we re-spin ourselves into the into the living world and so I wrote another piece called common sense which describes how oracle their commons and community oracles so the interaction between the two of them that there could be data inputs that are taken from sensor networks earth observation coupled with traditional ecological knowledge systems or forms of storytelling or people forming consensus and those things can and should be thickened and woven together and that we're like we're really trying to get like something heterogeneous here where it's not just like only autonomous or only convivial or that there's there's a relational system of value and a transactional system of value and the transactional system is when it pillages the relational one like it's actually more heterogeneous and patsy than that and that the the tendency to push it towards a kind of binary of like a tonic or convivial or like relational and transactional which I'm not kind of introducing these terms now but people have a strong predilection to like take that philosophical scenario to its conclusion and come up with a binary that seems incommensurable when actually there's a lot of people who are excited to try to find something that's rough and ready and hacky and working that at its first principles is like respecting and honoring people who are doing the damn work on the ground and maybe that's alive in the notion of how one can make credits like this this this double editing of legibility yeah as a is a potent and meaningful philosophical framing but in context yeah it's heterogeneous and inconsistent to itself and there's certainly transactional objects within what we would consider to be in a spaces where that's not expected to occur and there's relational thinking that happens you know within societies or modern societies like it's it's weirder than that it's way weirder than just this like fun binaries that people deploy and I think we're kind of like paralyzed ourselves from the joy of the philosophical like conviction or like the incommensurability of them and actually it's like this weird guccy suspension of of different kinds of things in different locations and you have to actually listen and show up and like participate as if you're unlike depended on it rather than being like here's my understanding of what this philosophy is and this is how this is going to work like how often yeah I mean just to take up you know a piece hopefully a sizable piece of what you just said you know I it sounds to me like the real juice here is akin to something else I've been talking about with people a lot lately just in terms of where I see the greatest value in AI models of various kinds not just language models you know video models etc which is you know so when my buddy van betower took the entire corpus of future fossils and made a chatbot out of it I realized that basically what he had done was he had taken the work that I was doing for the social media audience of the Santa Fe Institute when I was working there and automated it so that there's a little librarian that's sitting there providing retrieval augmented generative responses with you know time stamp citations somebody that knows the material and rather than speaking with the authority of the organization can point you to primary sources which functions as a kind of content destroyer like it provides I got love this I was I just blogged about this I forget who it was on twitter that said we don't need more content creators we need content destroyers like what we're dealing with right now is an information scaling crisis because the this goes back to like what was it episode 60 I think when I talked with Daniel Schmachtenberger about how we had decoupled our ability to sense from our ability to act and and so like you know people experience this enormous despair because we're plugged into I go over my buddy's house and he's watching news about the Israel Palestine thing and there is not a damn thing he can do about it and the complexity of that situation is like really beyond the ability of the news to adequately report and you know certainly it's not clear you know where we you know where we allocate our you know our limited individual energies to these these sort of various global concerns as they erupt across our cybernetics and sorium and and yet now we have these you know the the inklings of tools that can help us navigate what you know Richard Doyle called the info quake and you know so I see like if I'm to understand you correctly you know the the conviviality of these ecological institutions and the you know bringing the human and the landscape back together in our understanding and in our you know ecological I mean in our economic and you know political and legal processes this is you know this this is the oracle allowing us to like you just said listen and learn what actually matters to the health of that that system rather than to come you know drop in and you know say you know what matters here the wood we're gonna take the rosewood that's what matters here you know and so this is so pertinent to a much much larger I mean I won't say it's larger but it's like it's a much more general conversation that I've been having with people you know even like well outside of what seems at first pass like the conversation about ecological institutions which is again you know how do we make as you put it you know you cite braiding sweetgrass I mean Robin Kimmer you say you know in order to be heard you must speak the language of those who you want to listen and like the biggest thing that keeps popping up again and again and again and seemingly every conversation I have is this question of how can we teach corporations to care about the variables upon which their own long-term survival depends because like right now all they can see are you know it's like this thing like well how do we make trust in the yeah I talked about this at the region summit with with Amber Case and Michael Zargam you know like how do we you know how do we make the you know the trust that users have in their their platform a bigger part of the governance of these tech platforms and so I don't know like I'm kind of rambling here we've reached that point of the show but like I just wanted to get I want to pin back again to comments that you made in this paper on digital knowledge commons and open-source software governance and how that overlaps in your thinking with community research management and bio-physical commons and again this is this is where yeah it seems like you can't factor out the human-on-the-loop piece of it because you're saying okay this here's the Austin quote to say that non-humans ecosystems and bioregions have value is to leverage an economic system for the protection and regeneration of the planet to make a more than human world-ledgable economic systems is to reject the notion that planetary health is an extra-nality to financial calculus rather the economic system is compelled to be a steward of systems of value outside extraction so basically I you know the climax here I think is me inviting you to riff on how this kind of thinking gives people hope that broadly speaking we can help organizations better understand the landscape of people of which they are composed that we create oracles where corporate leadership can read the sentiment of their own staffing or that governments can get a better sense for the well-being of their constituencies than we currently do with GDP you know like Eric Bynhocker's work at the Institute for Economic Thinking and Oxford talks a lot about eudaimonic economics and it seems like you're providing a scaffolding like an actual infrastructure for this that helps us actually think about how to implement this kind of stuff right I think you're kind of talking about like what are the patterns what are the patterns in the practices of sense making as a verb and as something that we collectively do together and we can describe that process at different scales like you're giving the example of a corporation and and like how to sense make like internally what's happening where is sentiment where is the desire for an organization's for it to evolve or like from who it's composed of and this like there isn't you know there's it's so rot from manipulation but I think part of this idea is of this kind of institution ecological institutions plays on this notion that there's like a durable way to to determine state not to just not to say that state is always going to be the same or that things can be reduced to just like a single like description because it's always weirder than that but that there's like it's kind of like oracles all the way down that we can build we can ecological institutions can be oracles they can they can be driven by them and they can be an interaction of humans forming consensus or practicing governance with one another through signaling that honestly like I mentioned like modular politics and modular composable governance and the work of like Medigov comes to mind walks science too it's really exciting around sense making and conforming coherence within groups of people around the state of things that can then be used to drive other stuff and there's a certain like shining a light where there wasn't where there was darkness before that there's a that there's been a that like the systems that we have in place which are greatly contributing to the degradation of the living world and people in the environment broadly speaking have a structural incentive to be blind to the consequences of what's happening and that in the absence of that information like you know you can't contest you can't like push back on it like if we didn't know then then you're not really accountable so rather than actually knowing and having to be accountable there's a strong incentive for like things to not be sensed and part of what's underlying this is like the radical project of collective sense making that's durable not like permanent even perfect or correct but that it's more durable that can be used to drive things like policy or institutional you know like behavior or resource allocation and that we're we're in this like we're invited to think through the kinds of commons that we're making and to go back to the sort of like open source software and like commons governance thing like we're creating new kinds of commons for sense making and that could be applicable internal to an organization or could be a definition on whether or not like a forest has been replanted or regenerated or whether or not a coral reef has gone fully bleached or not like in a non centralized in a manner which does not rely on central authority we're having some level like verification of the state of the world that's hard to put down it's like or like it's impossible to ignore so that that might drive but it puts pressure directly on different systems too to be accountable so it's like we're trying to like willfully undo this structural ignorance structural blindness that's not thereby accident and by making that legible we invite this sort of challenge that it could be co-opted but so many forms of exploitation happen because like the consequences are just considered not detectable to the system at play you know and it's an externality consequently and so yeah I think that there's an invitation to think about data and observation systems and quantified metrics as problematic in some ways and helpful in other ways as like not in fundamental contradiction of like people forming consensus together or telling stories about what happened informing a kind of coherence around that that can be corroborated and informed by measurements and some kind and vice versa and we're building these this kind of collective practice of sense making that I describe here as oracles and in this other piece common sense as oracles and they're they're commons that might borrow from the kind of commons that we know of like Wikipedia like knowledge commons and like my physical commons like fisheries or forest or aquifers that were we're fusing those two spaces together so I really like the idea of thinking of these institutions as like seeds for collective sense making in context but there's a sort of scaffold for collaboration across different modalities quantitative and qualitative local and global or bioregional and guild-based as I described it in other places around the sort of sense making that drives new kinds of behaviors of institutions and so this ecological institutions is sort of like okay well we're gonna get these legal wrappers that allow us to have non-humans to do all these things and they'll they're gonna take input from like this sense making process that we're collectively supporting nurturing protecting building etc. I have one more question for you sort of like bonus round here puts you on the spot thing but I just want to say for folks to bait you into reading this paper if we haven't already that you you have an appendix with a bunch of implementations they're really really interesting speculative scenarios you've got I just you know folks go read this you got the smart aquifer the political water body the migration corridor chaperone ecological data trusts sacred ground and an orca pod image licensor in Puget Sound drought-based parametric insurance for farmers a festival fund regenerative homeowners association bioregional fund forced self-issues credits land back in sovereign ground management like oh my gosh you know like if you're thinking if you're trying to come up with ways to implement this stuff in your own life Austin has basically given you you know a place to start but the thing that's beleaguering me right now is the question that you just raised about the steep economic incentive to ignore externalities you know like if you're if you're kind of already there if you've made this the psychospiritual movement to seeing the the importance of all this it's one thing we all have the built to they didn't this is not like enough this is not a substitute for that personal work just to kind of talk about that in the piece yeah so I mean I guess my question to you is for those of us stuck inside of the belly of Leviathan's like google facebook amazon how would you hypothetical consultant Austin Wade Smith come in and explain to these enormous monolithic institutions that this stuff matters that there are things that they are not tracking and they should be the yeah that's fun the salty answer is like okay you all are so excited about longevity well because you're gonna live forever you're gonna inevitably face the consequences of your short term so what kind of what kind of temporal cycle are you working on in terms of your reproductive care work and then by that I mean like reproducing the conditions in the biosphere that would allow human life to continue going so that would be fun like I maybe start with like some long different types of like oh you're in theory gonna be facing the consequences of your short termism so let's begin there another version of that is like I mean I I'm like there's there's economic and legal leverage in this in this idea and I'm not also skirting like getting around the government the roles of governments to like make corporate actors or individuals accountable like that is very much a part of the scenario it's not like it's it's trying to leverage new forms of legibility to increase pressure the idea that you would try to make like cleaning the cleanup after the party profitable enough to the point where it's really going to compete like isn't isn't like it's a hard sell like hey like we're gonna try to find an economic incentive landscape for people to be accountable for the mess that they've made or like a handful of people in the organizations have a huge mess making history I think that there's the I think I say this in the piece like when people say there's no like how are you going to incentivize an economic like argument around this I think that argument will make itself is making itself already if we don't actively do things to like to do care work and sustain the living world which sustains us like we will put a value on standing for us that sequester carbon or aquifers that that sustain us with freshwater like we'll put a value on these things and taking care of them and it might be I hope it doesn't require a total collapse in the biosphere in order for that to happen so it's not an if it's gonna happen it's when is that going to happen and can we do that consciously because we're not the idiots collectively we have tremendous potential and see this it's not coming it's here to like design that do it by design not by default or by like emergency override because because we're fucked and yeah like that's probably a blend of of of of saying that there's trust that like the regeneration efforts that are playing out are are real like they're verifiable and their impact is verifiable and it's it's like transparent in a meaningful way and like understanding that okay well as part of the life cycle of projects like it has like the whole life cycle has to be reintegrated and now we have this sort of new set of like institutional actors that can support in that process so yeah I don't know if it like solves I don't think it's like solving something per se but it is giving a unique kind of container for a sort of it's both a container and a kind of actor that can participate and sort of accelerate that process and I talk about the notion of surface area in the piece which is like we're trying to multiply the surface area by which the non-human world puts pressure on human beings and our corporate ghost to change and part of a helpful way of doing that is to make the consequences impossible to ignore or try to make them impossible to ignore through durable attestations around the state of the world that you can't hide from or pretend you don't see so you know how that plays out in terms of like you know being the health and safety inspector for different like corporates to be like you have to be you know I mean I think like it's absolutely going to be like compliance not like all voluntary basis and you know if we're going to like pay taxes then one we could pay taxes to profit entities that that follow a purpose and a mission that we believe in like genocide or or like any number of other six systems that are currently happening but we could consider like okay we're paying part of our taxes to the living world itself and that there should be containers for like different bioregions and different biomes to be able to actually receive that payment and then there's governance bodies in place that can like be transparent about a process of what's the best approach to regenerate them and support them so like underneath the hood of this is like this this potential that now there's like a new kind of like anger a new kind of like trust or fund that's that's that's grown in the soil that can participate and potentially accelerate this process but I don't know if it like solves it because it's kind of like a hard nut to crack the whole whole thing here or we just give dolphins guns yeah we're just we're gonna spend a lot of time swimming with them or like yeah or is it work as that can just take on boats in the Mediterranean there's a lot of examples of they're making it legible yeah they're making it very clear right on to that well Austin this has been awesome uh any I mean that was kind of an ole moment but you get a little ole yeah you have anything else to say and parting yeah I guess like one of the I'm gonna try to be concise about it like I think that this idea and in the piece through throughout it I reiterate like loops of stewardship and and and reciprocity and so like the basic unit to build an ecological institution is not an individual actor but a loop a relational loop between an actor and their context because they're not separate from each other and that you can talk about how earth sustains us and we we care for the earth and it allows it's a continuing sustaining us and that at work is a sort of fundamental revisiting of the basic unit of analysis about what composes society rather than being like a self-interested actor or just like an actor as a discrete noun but the verb that is a relational bi-directional process and that is probably the most effective stable single unit of analysis and composition of these things so like we we I think it's an exciting invitation to think about what is what composes institutions not as a series of actors but as a series of loops of stewardship and relationality and that that's like a fundamentally an ecological thought not just because it's got a bunch of chlorophyll and like rain moving around like it's like wet and leafy but because we understand it's fundamentally bi-directional and that like you can't escape that you and we we're trying or people have tried for a long time but we can't escape that so we're trying to take that as a primitive relationality and like stewardship and reciprocity has the the primitive and then like build out institutions from that and I think the original name for this project was called Earth Native Institutions because it's like starting from that first principle of relationality being the driving process through which we create a social fabric or new kinds of quote ecosocial assemblages yeah it's been really fun to be here I had fun jamming thanks for the invitation and I hope people are tempted to like try this try this on and be like okay well what kind of like assumptions or premises are being held here and how do they sit with you like because I think some of it is definitely spot on some of it might be off like but it's an active effort to infight a more meaningful conversation around this stuff and that's that really animates me and so hopefully people feel compelled to like check it out and engage in the conversation and form their opinions and start one up and like whatever they want to do but that there's a will to act based off of it so yeah it's dope to be here and thanks for helping people learn more about this. Absolutely I mean all I have to say in closing is I vastly prefer this sort of computer assisted uh driving with lane changing and parking and and cruise control to doing it all myself we're expecting the car to do it all for me you know and I think that that's that's I think you're you are I'm placing my bet on this sort of design principle showing up in more and more of the systems that we find ourselves in meshton over the years to come so kudos thanks for taking the time to be on the show and everybody go check out the this and the other essays on austin's mirror account which again are linked in the show notes thanks everybody have a great day thanks again so much for listening if you enjoyed this conversation I highly recommend bopping on over to austin wade smith.com for a deeper encounter with a fascinating person and their fascinating ideas also you can check the show notes if you haven't on sub-stack or patreon for copious links and additional research resources or you can interface with the future fossils chatbot at askfuturfossels.com and let the retrieval augmented generative language model that encodes me and hundreds of wonderful guests help you navigate your own geography of rabbit hole curiosities very nicely curated time stamps embedded player citations for every answer it provides your inquiries or you can hire the real thing you know how to go hold of me thanks again so much for listening take care talk soon