# MetaCAugs Meeting 2020-04-14

Attendees: Robert Best, Charles Blass, Roland Legrand, Jim Whitescarver, Melanie Weir, Michael Linton, Graziano Maino, Joshua Bridge, Lauren Nignon

Melanie: thinking about how art and food systems are connected.

Roland: finally finishing up on his class.

Charles: Re: HyphaDAO: Charles and Lauren talked to Franz Joseph earlier today. A friend of ours, Aaron Perlmutter, is starting a new project that has been bubbling for one year, around a mutual insurance fund, called ApocalypseDAO. Charles' biggest challenges are sleep deprivation and seasonal allergies.

Michael: in a very bad mood. Has been watching Rebel Wisdom about the Cassandra situation. Jim Hunt was saying that there were potential shifts, into hippie medievalism (technology is bad and wrong, let's go in the woods), outright war, etc.

Roland: There are three drivers, depending on your optimism. There could be technology appearing, like CRISPR. New leaders could emerge, and finally, social movements, such as women, gays, and civil rights movement, important long-term forces for good. Not everything is necessarily lost.

Jim: I hope that UBI comes out of this, and I saw a lot of things happening in that direction. Even Pope Francis jumped out in favor of it. A bunch of others are bringing it up, like CounterPunch. That would be a great outcome. In the US they have extended unemployment, sent money to everyone's bank account. It's halfway there.

Roland: in some countries you don't have UBI, but systems which make people feel more secure, like in Denmark, where the state will guarantee your income and retrain you for another job. The idea is that the state will protect you as long as you want.

Jim: a hundred years from now, I don't think that humans will be working.

Roland: we will have all sorts of difficult migration issues, if different countries have different degrees of UBI. In Europe, you have well developed social systems, and problems with immigrants coming and people feeling resentful, leading to extremism when people feel their SS system is being hijacked.

Jim: Maybe we should just pay people to stay home. The transition is not easy...I think that if people get minimum wage for not working, and we make doing business easy, that people will better themselves through enterprise, because they don't actually want a minimum life, they want more.

Michael: JOrdan Hall said the dificulty with UBI: monetary system being rivalrous is the problem. It is trapping you back into same mess. It should be a Universal Basic Signal. Don't go down that route, you have to find your way out of the compulsion of a money system. It would be easy to make a shift. We could do that in a matter of months.

Jim: The monetary system is the root of all email, and if we could create our own currencies they wouldn't be a scarce resource. We could still be creating value, but not according to the whims of the money power. We buy our own integrity.

Michael Linton: Their money always goes away when you spend it?

Roland: How do you tackle the problem of scarcity without the money system?

Michael: You need several currencies for scarce items, the tracker for that which you need to be careful with. Create a context when the individual is responseable, where the money creates good feedback loops. Nowadays money acceptance is quite feasible. The essence of circular money is that it comes back to me.

Roland: I don't understand that. How does this work? If I want a scarce resource, like a VR headset, I give money to the guy who made it, and then he will have the money and I will have the headset.

Michael: They key is that the headset came from a very long way away. The essence of circular money is that they keep the money within the local circle. If what you are doing in the world is not a benefit to all, you can't spend so much in your world and need to be more productive. If you are determined to have the headset, we will need to go to Congo, and there will be a stress that is addressible through conventional monies. But we don't need to have that kind of scarcity mindset in our own communities. That scarcity is addressible if we step away from the just-in-time supply chain mania. I don't want to sound condescending, but it's like trying to explain riding a bike to someone. It's the same with closed loop money. Until you've done it, you just don't know.

Roland: I would think that you need different money systems.

Michael: There is an import/export component (extractive), which could use traditional money (nicer).

Charles: there is onboarding, and systems change aspect. Within DAO systems, people have been wrestling with onboarding, making it easy enough for non-tech people.

Roland: one can activity make a choice, even though I do like the idea of local community stuff. But one might prefer a cosmo, individualistic feeling. Like I might feel closer to you guys, where I can more easily have a conversation with you than with my neighbors. One could say that I cherish the independent, and I can use an anonymous cosmo system. Maybe a capitalistic tendency, but many people recognize themselves in that. Maybe the people who earn that money do it in a decent way. They want to get paid in a currency that makes them independent from their neighborhood.

Michael: That comes along with an egocentric identity. The Greek origin of "idiot" means a self-interested identity. Or you could be a citizen, whose behavior takes into context the common wealth. In our current system we see nothing of the commonwealth.

Roland: You could have both. You have the exampel of the Greek citizen who is part of his local community. And the Jew always had a tendency to have highly mobile currencies that they can use in case of increased oppression, like diamonds or gold, so that they could move away. Sometimes that's a very healthy thing to do, especially if you are gay and living in a small town in the Midwest US. I reject that it is the ultimate indicator if someone is good or bad.

Michael: I didn't say that, just talking about downstream consequences of behavior. Once you give away conventional money, it usually goes to exploit someone else.

From Melanie Weir in the chat: ProSocial work happening with a group of creatives and scientists exploring intention as an element that is often neglected in conversations about the commons: https://twitter.com/tvolmag/status/

Jim: It's almost impossible for us to change the money system. We borrow a million dollars from the bank, and we have to pay it back with interest. If you have a scarce commodity, you can tokenize it. It is separate from the rest of the money.

Robert: In my mind we were still doing check-ins. I am showing the Game-shifting board.

Joshua: We are in a time where we don't know what's going to happen. It's very scary, but sometimes that's really good.

Martin: (hard to understand)

Mariette: has been working very hard lately. A rebirth that we are going through.

Jim: My stepson unfriended me because I was comparing Covid with the flu, and that we don't know the numbers.

Charles: We could get hot and heavy with regard to data and perspectives. I am not sure that it's the best use of this call. If you are African-American, for example, you would have a totally different perspective.

Melanie: Something has been ruminating in my mind: I haven't stopped yet, haven't had am moment to pause. The conversation with my dad: a conversation with facts and figures, and I was just calling to check in. There seems to be different hats in different rooms, and it is becoming louder. I have to meditate in between meeting people from different places. This is being amplified in different ways; there are feelings, there are facts going on. I don't know what exactly of what I am trying to say, about this feeling of agitation. What are we here for? What is happening here?

Mariette: One of the things that this group has allowed me to do is to see what the community of practice looks like. It brought back this sense of how I personally reacted in exploring with others; it brought back a sense of a game of life. I have found on the internet this idea of quantum androgenous, and synarchy, and panarchy, interesting ways of saying the same thing, coming to these ideas from a different perspective. We have a deep need to be heard and to be seen. Like, during the currency conversation. How do we become aggregators? How interoperable can I be, and the things that I work on? For me, the interoperability of the game of life is very present right now. Today I felt that I really like being outside right now, listening to birds. Nature-based silence, I prefer it to all my playlists, online random yoga classes, etc. This call, using videoconferencing, is also deepening. The noise of it is disappearing.

Joshua: I really resonate with [interoperability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoperability); Robert and I talk about this alot.

Graziano: I observed in these weeks that we have a lot of deep emotions. We have tried to look to the future in this group. We have taken time to do this. In some groups, with colleagues, I have noticed a way to express many emotions. It's important, it's okay, it helps everybody to be listened to and express, but I feel as a kind of defense, to have some moments to put together more contructive ideas to help other people to work through this confusion, to have the capacity to look forward. The idea is to try to follow the line of McGonigal, to imagine something all together. We designed this canvas to build a community of practice, in Italian.

Robert gives us a demo on the DiGO, Hypothesis/