 Good afternoon everyone. Hello from the grotto. Hello, I'm Max Miesen, architect and writer based at the University of Luxembourg, and I'm here with four fantastic other individuals, who I think they will briefly introduce themselves, and then we'll jump into the reality of the conversation. Alright, we do a round I guess, which no one can see but us. I'm Ludwig Engel, I'm the director of Studio for Immediate Spaces at Sandberg Institute, which is part of the Riedfeld Academy in Amsterdam, and I'm a futurologist and urbanist. Hello, my name is Frenzel Kain. I am an architect and I am currently a PhD candidate, doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. I also worked as a curator, which I do also from time to time, and yeah, I think this is all. I am pretty much interested in the topics around man-altered landscape, climate change and spatial policies. My name is Hannes Kraseger. I'm an investigative tech reporter based in Zurich, which is a town in Switzerland, and I'm trained as an economist, and I'm a family father of two kids. Hi, my name is Maria Maric. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg, architect by education and profession, and I am interested in work with the questions of real estate, architecture and media. Fantastic. So, thanks again for being here. I'm just going to say a couple of words how we ended up in this particular configuration. So, when Joelle asked me to be part of this, I proposed a couple of names which I thought were particularly interesting in the context of also what we're looking at at the moment in the context of our program at the University of Luxembourg. And so my own research is circling around issues of participation and cultures of assembly, and at the moment we're setting actually up a platform, a virtual platform and a physical platform that is supposed to research issues around cultures of assembly in ash, which for those of you who don't know, it's a city in southern Luxembourg. And in those platform setups, we will be dealing with questions around institution building, special politics, special governments and justice. And so this is, I think, kind of interesting in the context of also the particular setup of this series of talks and particularly the issue of surplus. And also, especially in the context of the exhibition that's currently at Moudam, Art and the Economics of the Digital Age. So, one thing that I thought could be interesting maybe to just kick off the conversation would be to think about surplus also in terms of surplus publics. So what this means in terms of virtual social spaces and platforms and therefore governance. And I thought I'll start with Hannes since we've been talking about this before and maybe to talk a little bit about the issue of digital platforms and information architecture, which is something that you've been working on quite a lot, and questions of e-territory and governance. Yeah, so I think we are about to enter a new period of our life in the digital era where basically most of our lifetime and probably also the income we earn will be spent in the digital, meaning we will basically become digital first beings. And so if you look at it, and I've been, for like the last 10 years, I've been exploring digital spaces. If you look at the spaces that we are currently spending our time in, most of them are more or less archaically governed spaces, meaning that what we can see there and how we can interact with other people is governed according to a more or less pyramidal governmental model, meaning there's an owner of the system or a system admin defining the rules for the platform or the search engine or the site that you're visiting. Then there's an army or a couple of moderators that work on executing these rules, meaning implementing them. And then there's us, meaning the users, meaning profiles, user accounts, entities, things that have no inherent rights. And so if we think of the digital as the primary place where our life is happening, we are entering a situation where we're basically deprived of many rights and many abilities. And even more than that, we are also potentially deprived of perceiving reality in a more or less unregulated way. If you think of how a platform is able to decide what you as a user are able to see, meaning the information that you get, and this is where we are coming to the idea of information architecture. Information architecture for me is the idea of what kind of information are you going to be able to receive and probably also send on a platform and also how are you going to be able to interact with others or the platform. And so this is information architecture. And think of the difference between going to Twitter or going to Telegram or going to Instagram or Facebook. You have different options of what you can do, what you can see, what you can send. And you have a different set of rules that are set of how you can behave and exploit the potentials that are offered. And these rules, and this is where we come to platform governance, these rules, the platform governance is what manages the information architecture. So underlying the information architecture, there is information governance. And as I said, the governmental scheme is more or less pyramidal. And it doesn't see us as a form of sovereign entities. So we're more or less economic subjects, perhaps, but not on a rights-based level. And that also, for me as an economist, I'm not talking about human rights here, but I'm also talking about property rights, meaning on a platform, I don't even have the right to own myself, meaning I can be deleted at any time and for no reason. And there's not even a right that I get the information why I'm deleted. And so all these rules were made and all these concepts were made in a world, and for a world that didn't think of the digital as A, a permanent long-term future that we're about to live in forever. And B, a world where it was easy to kind of like switch platforms, where it wouldn't actually matter if you get your account deleted, right? And now that we're about to enter and I'm concluding, a world where we will basically be digital first and live most of our daytime, probably even in virtual environments, such as the one Mark Zuckerberg was recently promoting as Metaverse, then we have to consider if this form of platform governance has to be rebuilt and how the world that we're going to build has to be shaped in terms of information architecture. And this is also why I'm participating as an external, and I'm very proud to be participating as an external PhD student at Marcus Chair, because I'm trying to learn from you as architects and city planners and futurologists what we can draw and learn from the lessons in the physical space, because they have not yet been applied. It's pretty naive and pretty archaic. What is there out there? And I have a question regarding this. A couple of years ago you published a super interesting book called, Das Kapital will nicht. And so now there seems to be some kind of, I don't know if this is fair to say, but some kind of like, say, spatial turn in your work. So also you just said that you hope for some kind of input from, let's say, spatial experts on this issue, but could you describe a little bit more what do you think has changed since you wrote this book and how is this kind of issue of platforming and forming this interest now? So I think that's a pretty interesting question. I think some important inspiration was when Elena from Something Fantastic asked me what would be a hallway in the digital world, meaning a space where you accidentally bump into people. You're basically probably within a context, right, an institutional context, but you can, there's also certain exits and entries and that was one thing. And then there's this idea of, think of a physical wall and how architecture is actually information architecture. So a wall does not only, it separates spaces, right? So it can, a wall could help you to separate the public from the private space just by blocking the information who is behind that wall, right? So it creates privacy. Then you put in a window. So a certain amount of information, let's say visual information can pass, but you can't access because there's no door, right? You have to enter a door, right? So I thought like most of the information that, most of the, I'm sorry, most of the architecture is actually already information architecture in many ways because it's shaping the societal configurations that happen within and externally, right? And to what degree has this already been formalized and understood within architectural theory, I wonder, and I'm trying to explore. And yeah, I think that was early on. I was thinking about walls basically because we talk of information architecture and systems architecture in discussing digital topics. For years I've been trying to reach out to architects asking them like, how do you guys with all your experience in designing spaces, right? How do you apply this currently? Because what happens is that the spaces we live in today are mostly for like 12 hours of my day, I'm like online, right? So the space I actually live in is a digital place and there's people talking of architecture of that place, but these are not architects. So architects are basically have lost their role and their say in creating the spaces that we live in. And that was super interesting to me as well. I think it's very interesting what you mentioned. Also I was recently looking into, let's say kind of spatial development, also the question of architectural expertise in the metaverse. And for instance, you have a lot of platforms in kind of that domain emerging blockchain technology usually based which I want to return to. Speaking of platform governance, I think it's super interesting to tie this to the promises of blockchain in a way and the way they appeared in the society. But speaking of the role of architects, I also kind of stumbled upon information that for instance Decentraland is one such iteration of the metaverse. Let's say kind of not the Facebook one, but kind of digital platform that simulates in a way also, virtual reality, real estate trading, land speculation, etc. There is a company, it's called Republic Realm, and they call themselves real estate developers and they kind of describe their expertise as something between architectural and urban planning, cryptocurrency brokerage and event makers. So I think this kind of space is also really reshuffle. I think what we know is architectural knowledge and architectural expertise in a way. So I think it's interesting to also look from this perspective, not just the spatial kind of characteristics of the metaverse, but also who designs these spaces and what do they mean in that sense? Yeah, and actually I have to get back to your question. Like it's been for you. So my book in 2014 was referring to a feudalist regime, right? We are living in a feudalist system in the digital space, right? Think of the banning, you get banned from platform, right? Think of the idea of leaders and followers and so on. Think of the total autocracy of the platform owners, right? But from that came the idea of living in some sort of like medieval city, right? And then as I actually live in Switzerland in sort of like ancient concrete structures, right? I sometimes marvel about how these structures have evolved into a system where we have like public squares, right? Public infrastructure and hospitals and streets and also like a public administration overseeing these places that grew as anarchic and probably as feudalist later on as the digital spaces. So there's like a ton of physical references and also churches are super inspiring to me, but I would like to talk about this later problem. Maybe Maria, could you also say something about how this material that you just talked about also touches on questions around digital commons, maybe? Yeah, also the question of surplus I think is kind of super prevalent there. I mean, what these, let's say early platforms, at least this is my kind of initial research conclusion from the research I did so far, I think they are really kind of the way they function right now. They operate in this, let's say very ambitious promise of blockchain technology that kind of promises to abandon precisely what you describe, this feudal system of platform capitalism. So blockchain kind of assumes distribution of value and distribution of information that exists without the center, right? So there is a chain, right? A blockchain practically. It's a kind of ultimate decentralized system of information transfer. But what the platforms actually do in real life, I think they represent some kind of very vulgar translation of land and real estate speculative practices that we have on the ground into the digital domain. So I think in a way blockchain kind of legitimizes, it almost appears as a narrative that legitimizes now the novelty behind these projects, but in reality they are mostly about land and real estate speculation just in terms of any capitalist development. So I think it really opens up the question of commons. For me it seems like a very, very kind of a tipping point question. I mean I have no clear answer to that question, but I think it's a super important future, let's say development of these platforms in a way to kind of rethink them through the terms of commons. I mean the way they function today, I think they definitely do not tackle in any way on what we know as commons, you know, right? So it's all about what is the public's practically of these platforms. It's a summary of consumers and kind of experiences that you kind of perceive there. So I think it would really need in the future really rethinking what is the community of the digital, what is the public of the digital. And then also what are the spaces that correspond to these categories. If for example square, let's say in physical space for me, square is the perfect embodiment of surplus in a physical space. You sit there and then something extra in a way happens out of this social interaction. I wonder what would be the parallel to the square as a kind of urban typology in the digital space where the way it functions right now you have just a summary, a mass of consumers of people who seek some kind of visual or any kind of experience. So I wonder what would be the notion of the public and then what is the embodiment, the spatial embodiment of this publicness in the digital. Super crucial because really think about it. Is there any public square in the digital that you could please, I'm on research here? No, of course not. I mean I don't know how, should I start my sermon now already? Yes please. I think one of the major things that we need to discuss is surplus is a super physical word in its meaning. Because I think in the digital world there is no surplus as every bit gathered has the potential to become of future value. Or you could also say everything in the digital is surplus as data generation surpasses the capitalist logic of value in the now sort of, you know, kind of packing it into futures. So I think the idea of the surplus itself is a very, very physical thing. And maybe we in the more architectural discourse are also a bit romantic about this. Especially with public squares because we also know how public squares is also just an instrument to guide, surveil and form public and public opinion. But of course the idea of the surplus in the physical is much more easily graspable in a sense. I would kind of extend on Maria's, I also, I mean Hannes, you can't see it, listening to it, but his eyebrows are already indicating that the no surplus in the digital will be challenged later on. But I think there's one reference which could be of importance when we think of this because the principle plus by La Catorne Basale, which they build with, does something else. Please explain to some, what is that? We have the time. Yeah, exactly. But I think it's exciting because what it does is Jean-Philippe, like in a conversation we had some time ago, he said, well look, you need to empower everyone to be a host. You need to design apartments in a way that everyone can throw a dinner party at their place. So we try to design apartments that are large enough for everyone to be a host. And they call that the principle plus the idea that they still build really cheap or the cheapest way possible, but that they are not investing in communal spaces, but they are investing in the enlargement of private spaces. This comes with, like, with, you know, rethinking paradigms of how to live. For example, there is room depth of more than 20 meters. Normally you won't say you can't have more than 12, then it gets too dark and no one can live there anymore. But what happens then, if you have 12 meter deep rooms, you usually have the entrance point exactly at the darkest spot, but then you store everything in the brightest spot. This is why you have all these beautiful verandas filled with trash because you always enter from the middle. So if you have a really large room, you can reorientate the entire idea of how you live and store everything where everything is already dark, where you don't want to be in the first place. But that is only possible if you rethink the idea of a room that can be much deeper than you would usually have in a housing state. There is a certain empowerment of this surplus because you literally give back agency to everyone to design their part of the platform in the architectural context. I'm not saying I know how to translate that into the digital realms, but I think it's super important that this is something that is still in debate in the physical architectural discourse and that there is still something that when we talk about commons, about community spaces, about how to come together is also a bit of an outsider's position, not to say we need to collectivize and come together, but to separate and keep close to each other. There's just another example, Abdul Malik Simon, a Singaporean ethnographer, who's analysis of the Jakarta, let's say, of the cityscape, where hardcore religious positions and hardcore progressive LGBT groups literally crash in the same spaces. But instead of separating them, they keep a culture of distance within the vicinity. And because of the contested spaces, they can't go anywhere else, they all have to meet in the same spaces. And how do these spaces look like? For example, in one case here, he gives a parking deck below residential areas where everyone comes down to, but there's no car parking, but that's actually the only public space everyone can access. And you have queer community and hardcore religious community on the same level, and they observe each other. They are not interacting with each other, but they are observing each other, thus creating a sense of, you know, living together. I think it's super interesting that you describe it like this because your question of what do these spaces look like, it's a question that reappears in this whole discourse around this transition from, let's say, physical spaces into virtual spaces. But I think your example, Ludwig, is really fantastic because it shows that it's actually not about how the space looks, but how the space is organized or governed. And in this sense, this is actually the translation to the virtual because it's all about protocols. I mean, if I understand correctly from also what you are looking into in terms of your research project, maybe you can say something about this, the kind of idea of a liberal kind of platform that, I mean, I don't know, maybe you describe that. Yeah, so the question that I asked Ludwig about how it looks like is because I've learned as a reporter, especially for our listeners and readers, it's crucial to get examples if they want to follow ideas and visual ideas. And that's also what you would see in the metaverse marketing. It's basically mostly visuals that people start to understand these things. But as I understand your Jakarta example, for instance, there's a huge space with non-declared, there's no declaration of different fractions on that space, right? So they have to figure out their own sovereign places, right? You're saying they're in one corner and they're in the other and there's no police probably patrolling. So this is why I'm asking for your absolute right. There's two ways that democracy can happen, right? Democracy can happen on the level that it's sort of like granted by a king who hands over a certain amount of sovereignty to its subjects, just as in Luxembourg, for example. But there's another way where the people own the country and they start to define the rules collectively, first constitutionally probably and then translating into direct laws. And I live in Switzerland where actually we constantly change our constitution, right? We're constantly editing the code of our society. That's the way we live and we even do it on local levels. So we have great problems actually in translating and even in moving around in Switzerland because local laws are so different. It's much more than text laws. It's about the schooling and so on and so on. But all this happens on an even higher idea and that would translate in a technical language into protocol. What is behind the constitution that we've created and that we are still constantly editing? What is behind the laws? That's a shared technology on how to... A shared technology that in gravels, so to say, puts in stone certain assumptions, like fundamental assumptions, like in the digital, that would be, you cannot be deleted. Or it would be like you cannot be excluded from participating in editing the roles, the laws of the platform, right? And if people speak about protocols, they mostly mean in the technological language, they mostly mean a system like the web mail or the mail system, where many different companies have built their own mail system, but they can interact because they follow the same technological specifications in order to be interoperable, right? So you can mail from Gmail to Yahoo and so on. And that is the post-platform ideology. It's protocols, not platforms, right? That's a discourse within technology for the last 15 years. And the blockchain culture specifically refers to this idea of protocols, not platforms. And they're starting, and I would love to learn what you think about it, and they're starting to develop systems that could host their own platforms, but for example, on the premise, and that's crucial about the blockchain, on the premise that there's no power that can single-handedly delete something. That's a core element that is widely misunderstood and not appreciated enough. The idea of creating money includes the idea that there's no single entity that can delete some money somewhere. It's not only about being able to not copy it and so on. And so this sets in stone the precondition, one of the preconditions for building a protocol that would enable a democratic participatory system, that we have a technology now, or a protocol now, that would help us actually moving from the status of a deletable user to a something that is self-sovereignty or that is sovereign in a way that only itself can decide to kill itself, right? Probably not even that. That's something we... is there suicide? No, I've never thought about that one actually. It's a suicide in the blockchain. Am I able to even delete my ethers, like make them disappear? I don't think so. I think it's very interesting. I think when we talk about blockchain technology in some kind of isolation, then we can, you know, abstract, let's say, its democratic principles and everything. But then when we see the translation, for example, the way industry now uses the blockchain technology, what it does, it actually just builds in a way a smarter, under quotation marks, platform, right? So instead of this entire, you know, like the decentralization becomes a promise, but then still the platform is curated by somebody, you know, in the end of the day. So I think there is no, you know, full disappearance of the center. So for example, in this project, this central land that I was mentioning, the owner of the platform, I think it's the company called Metaverse, something international, let's say, whatever, I'm not exactly sure about the name. But they call themselves the curator. So they're not anymore the owner of the platform, but they're the curator of the platform. In reality, all the information that is stored on the platform, including all the NFTs of ownership of land, of real estate developments, all the property that you kind of digital property that you create as a citizen there is stored on a centralized server. So in the end of the day, you know, like I think, you know, when we kind of pass these several rounds of translation, I think in the end of the day, the Web 3 paradigm, you know, that kind of builds upon the failed promises of Web 2, you know, like late 90s, early 2000s, when there was this huge hype about, you know, a rise of social media, everybody would be free to express themselves, like perfect idea of democracy, right? You know, Facebook and everything else. I mean, now we are witnessing of immense failure of this promise. And I think what Web 3 is doing is kind of building upon the idea of abandoning, you know, the platform, abandoning the, you know, some kind of centrality of the platform. And then there is this very big promise of decentralization, which I am very interested in. I'm just like sometimes I'm wondering like what are the limits of this promise as well, right? When we see the way it works in reality, we also see a lot of translation from the, you know, physical world on the ground and practices of governance and politics we have practically. They're kind of often mirrored rather than challenged in this space. But at the same time, I always kind of like to return to the idea that technology means nothing unless we use it in a certain way. So it always depends on who has the right to use it, who is using the means of production if you want. So who has the tools in a way to do something. So yeah. Actually, I think there is like a quite related, half related question that emerges from the tangible world that we know, especially from our Western point of view that we kind of like all share here. It's about the archiving. What happens actually with this data? How do we archive it? Since oral archiving like maybe like transcripted written archival is maybe no longer this kind of like elements that we can go back to and like really dig into to kind of like read somehow the collective history or like the shared collective memories also. And I don't know if like one of you, maybe this is also my ignorance talking also a bit because this is like a whole world also that I'm quite like step by step discovering a bit. But I think this is like one kind of the core subjects actually since we were talking also about the commas and everything. This is the question of memory. I think it's very related to the question of value. Like how and what is valuable in the ephemeral, you know, space in a way where everything is just there to kind of catch attention. I mean, for me, it's a perfect attention economy. It's a perfect kind of spatialization of attention economy like all these platforms that we are mentioning now. So I think when value is something that becomes so fluid and so, you know, movable in terms of attention, right? It creates, I would always see, I don't have an answer. Like how do we archive the digital world? But I think it's somehow closely related to how we will define value in this domain, right? I mean, just one thing to add. We had this in modernism, we had the discussion between the built and nature. There's supposedly famous quote by Mies that nature belongs to the outside. So there's not even one flower in a Mies building because nature is outside. This is like we have a separation between nature and men. Of course, men at that time. You know, culture, men at that time. And I think this sort of... Also, sometimes we're sort of reflexively engaging again into this dualism. We're kind of, we're separating between the physical and the digital. And I just have a clever quote because I would probably not come up with something like that. But Nathan Jurgerson, social media theorist, he says the notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected. And I think that's sort of a link to Flancel's question about what do we archive. Because I think if we treat these two entities separately as being archived in different ways, we exactly lose what was actually happening right now. Because there is not oral history on the one side and digital bits flaring around on the other side. And these two entities need different archival systems. Is this enmeshed of these two that now needs to be archived? I mean, that's a fascinating thought. I think we have to be more specific. I'm rather talking about the pre-digital as the IRL, right? It's before networked information, before networked digital information, right? So that's my point of comparison. It's not the offline world because I do believe that we're in an enmeshed post-internet situation. Of course, since like handhelds and whatever, you're absolutely right. These are not separable rooms, right? Or spaces and so on. And that's exactly what is inspiring my thinking of applying spatial knowledge and spatial practices on this new enmeshed situation. Because I do actually think what happens online and offline is totally the same in a way or totally correlated. And that even makes it more important to think about the questions of information architecture and governance systems. And that's the sole reason that I think these spaces are connected. But what I find interesting is I've never thought about what is the idea of nature. If we talk about online, right? And one thing that just came to me, will see we're speaking, and probably this idea is not solid, is like nature, the strange, wild things that are still online. We're not yet in an embodied situation, right? We're not yet in an embodied digital situation. So it's mostly cognitive, so it's mostly things that people like say, forms of communication. And the nature from the perspective of a platform owner, like Facebook, whatever, would be wild, untamable things that people are doing, right? Think of shit storms, right? Think of, and that's also probably what I would see as closest to a public space. Because things are happening that are beyond the pre-planned order of things. It's not curated yet. It's not curated because they have not yet developed the instruments to sort of like manage the platform when things like that thing happening. And this is also what I'm doing in my journalistic practice currently. I'm looking at these Facebook leaks that Francis Hogan has helped put in the public space. And what you see there is a ton of like qualified systems, engineers, architects, so-called architects and developers, trying to like manage these unforeseeable, almost like natural phenomena, right? So here we have nature and how do you call it, right? And the build, right? I'm sorry. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah. I mean, as you speak, for me, I would say that the digital, right, also reminds us in a way that nature is a construct. You know, I would say that this is also where the translation kind of takes place. But as you were speaking, like, what is public in a way? What is the wild imagination of the digital space? I got reminded of a very nice article by Mackenzie Wark, where he writes about another book. And he kind of dwells into the book. It's by Mattel Bitanti, I think is the name of the author, who made a book based on the Reddit comments on the appearance of yellow sims in the SimCity game, which are homeless people in the SimCity. And, you know, the way they kind of stroll around is super organized and curated space without having the place of their own. And the way the community of the SimCity tries to manage the problem of homelessness and all the proposals, you know, now that come around, like from let's build a wall around them and then burn them, you know, like inside of the wall, to let's introduce the SimCity police, etc. So I really, I thought this was a, this just reference came to my mind as you were talking about the wild and kind of, you know, unordered in the digital. I thought this was a very interesting kind of almost, I don't know, interesting example of this. How do you spell? What's the book's name? I can share. Mattel Bitanti is the author. And unfortunately I forgot the title, but I can share. B or P? Bitanti, B-I-T-T-A-M-T, Bitanti, yeah. I think this idea of like just because a Sim is almost close to a real city, I would quickly, I mean, when I started thinking about the term surplus, it's not only a term that speaks of entropy and excess and all that, but it's also a term that speaks of a certain generosity that comes out of unplanned mismanagement. Like an army surplus store offers something that is not being put in use by the ones who contracted it to be produced and they channel it into a sort of non-existing market because there is no demand, but on the very low end, so they actually end up selling something for way less than it's actually worth creating an iconic uniform for the ones who are protesting the system. It's like, it's beautiful. How a surplus system within a city becomes also the symbol for the protest against what creates the surplus. And the city in itself is also this sort of very anthropic, not well managed place that allows for all these irregularities. It allows for constant shitstorms without being deleted, which, at least as you put as a disclaimer, luckily for our discussion, in a central European context. I'm not trying to argue globally here. But this makes it also so tough, I think, from a European perspective to understand these platforms that kind of want to prevent you from having a constant shitstorm. Because that's also a raison d'être of being part of a city, that this constant friction is being there. And I, you know, just sorry to, I mean, maybe there's something for discussion there. But one thing I thought was so crazy that I saw a headline in the last days where it said, UAE, United Emirates, to create first nonprofit city. And it was an idea that it was sort of, you know, a philanthropic endeavor, creating a city that wouldn't run on its economy, but, you know, just be sort of a nice cultural atom. But I think this is at the heart of what a city is, or should be. And so I'm kind of intrigued by this transfer now, how to get that into the digital realms. So that's super interesting because according to, so what you're criticizing here is that it cannot be a city if it's just centrally owned and planned, right? Because just the mere idea of the city is that people come there and make certain places their own and they build on top of each other and then, right? So we do not yet have cities if we don't have property. And so probably we should quickly define what Web 3 is because we are constantly referring to it. Web 1 is the idea of the old internet like you set up a website, right? Basically you can go there to read something. Web 2 is like, oh, you can now comment on the website leading to Facebook. There's like interacting on websites, right? So it's read and write. It's communication. And then Web 3 is the idea of, hey, just like in Web 1, you have your own website. It's your space, right? Plus the benefit of communication, meaning you read, write and own. That's the promise of Web 3. That would be the promise of now here's the land. And they're actually, as you said, Maria, they're literally referring to stars and galaxies as in the case of Tlaunerbit and many other systems where they're actually selling land right now. There's a land grab happening. I mean, maybe in order to pick up the audience, could you maybe explain from your point of view the difference between community governance online and opposed to Zuckerberg's Metaverse speech? Sorry, can you repeat the question? So, because we talked before, I mean, this was not part of this conversation, but about the Metaverse speech by Zuckerberg. So the Metaverse speech is, did you watch it, Maria? I saw it, yeah. So, probably you go ahead. I mean, it's a tricky question. I would say he doesn't really reveal a lot. It's really like a one hour long advertisement. I don't think it's, and he is a robot, I would say, after watching this one. I think they don't, there is practically, I mean, technically answer what I got at least from this speech. There is a kind of platform, it's called Horizon, that will manage the Metaverse. The Metaverse would take place probably in the next five to ten years, so it's still a speculative project. The first iteration of the Metaverse will be called Horizon Home. So the first thing they plan to do, and I think this brings us back to the beginning of the discussion, is really to spatialize nowadays, right? So everybody has a kind of opportunity to build their own virtual home, right? To kind of make this space homely in a way to, you know, I think it's a one important aspect, but when it comes to governance and community, these are still quite vague concepts in this talk. I mean, Facebook is running the platform, that's clear, actually Meta, the new company, is running the platform. And community is discussed more in terms of how can we sit in a kind of common space, common virtual space and consume the content. So I think in that sense I would say there is, I don't know if I can extract something more meaningful from that, from the talk that I heard. That's already, that's a brilliant summary. So for like 90 minutes, Mark Zuckerberg is more or less showing just the surface layer that includes many more or less spatial things, right? So it shows us rooms and bodies and people, and now you can do things that you can do like flying around and switching your physical appearance and stuff like that. But as we said, the core promise of Web 3 was not that we have fancy surfaces, but the promise was that we would be able to own a thing, right? And so there's not much talk, as you said, about the governance and about ownership, but there are two references. So one reference is that he's saying we want to create portability, meaning that if you're in the, let's say, horizon or metaverse and you move over to visit your friend in the Twitter space, right? And you have some clothing that you bought, you want to bring it over in order not to show up naked or just need to buy a new thing, right? So think about you having a fixed avatar that you're taking over to the other place. I mean, these are all ridiculous ideas. People will laugh about that so hardly in like five years, but just the first step into a future is always trying to translate the old media shapes into the next thing, right? So here Zuckerberg goes and promises portability, but it's not yet clear who sets the preconditions for the portability, who will define the rules. And then there's a thing, so it's an empty idea of Web 3 he's promising. And he's, so as a journalist, I'm used to look at how many, what is the word a person uses most often? I always count, and in that presentation, it's the word creator. It's a niche work. Most of you don't even know what a creator is. I didn't know it that much as well. But creators are people who materially live from digital artifacts in some way. Steve Bannon is a creator of negative online sentiment, right? And mass movements. Or an influencer is a creator of a certain feeling for a followership, right? People who produce software programs could be creators, right? So he's constantly saying, hey, this will be a world for creators. Meaning he's acknowledging that there is a new economic model that has risen on Web 2, where people depend and live from digital artifacts. And for these people, Facebook is something like the Soviet Union. These are startup folks, and they don't want their stuff to get deleted just because Facebook changed some sort of politics, right? Or disallowed because they are against their political thing. So what Facebook is doing now and promising to build the next platform, or rather protocol if he's promising to have portability, is just like the Soviet Union at its height of saying to the free people who now know how to create value online, hey guys, come live here. It's so beautiful. I have built like a super great theme park, and you guys can have your own. It's the same model that he has had before. It's like offering you the free row house to live in, and he captures all the surplus value. Meaning everything surplus in this digital world is a pretty interesting phenomenon because you're building something if you're online, and you are absolutely not able to capture the value of it. Only the platform can capture the value. For example, YouTube can display ads, right? And they decide how much of a share you get, and then you get demonetized. Just as we saw in the case of OnlyFence, the other platform that suddenly started to withdraw prostitutes. Probably they wanted to delete a lot of sex workers that are on the platform just for some reason, right? And so there was this situation where they would all lose their income. These are creators, right? And so it cost a huge shitstorm from the creators on OnlyFence. And that's the archetypal situation that Facebook is planning to recreate on the new system. Create a place where it owns all property rights. And that's also what he's trying to do is he's bribing the new class of creators and we soon will be creators ourselves. He's trying to bribe them with his multi-billion dollar investment into a land of milk and honey where he still owns the property rights. And the question is whether these new and still shaky and very naive and unformed Bitcoin illusionaries and blockchain visionaries will be able to provide an alternative land that feels equally good and well or at least decently well at a place where they are basically not offering a nice row house. They're just offering some wild, moony terrain with no plans on it and nothing, right? And we'll create a smooth there or into the nice row house. And that's why he's appealing to creators all the time. And it's all based on this underlying premise of Web3 and governance and so on. So this would entail that you're part of the design process of the protocol or not? Right. So there's no offer to become part of the governance. For governance in the video, Facebook or Zuckerberg calls in Nick Clegg as a representative quasi-politician, his politician on his own payroll and asks him how will we manage the safety? Yeah, we'll take care of that. Okay. And then he seps him off actually. That's the funniest part of it. After like two or three minutes. And then it's gone. And then it's like it's again another aristocratic or autocratic model, clearly. Where the also somehow the data architects are kind of like the government architects of this new world, also at the same time establishing both rules in terms of like, I mean, spatial policy, but also maybe some kind of like communication policy also at the same time, since they will already kind of like constraint these places, right? Yeah, he's just appointing them. It's his company. They're on his payroll, right? So there will be no change whatsoever somehow, just an illusion. I think the power of what Facebook is proposing is I think it's definitely not groundbreaking in any way, like the model they're proposing. I mean, you can, first of all, all these other, I mean, still in a speculative phase. If you want to really look into how it works, you can look into sandbox, you can look into the central land and many others who came before and even many, many others who came before them, right? So we are talking about two decades in a way of, you know, a project that kind of goes on for two decades. But I think the power of Facebook is exactly in two things. First is the massivity of their users. There are two billion users of Facebook. You know, I think when you just think of this pool of people who are already networked, you know, into the system of this platform, you're talking, you're having the biggest capital you could have. You're having the users and I think this is three and a half billion. If you combine WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, it's three and a half monthly average users. The second thing I think is very powerful is not just the Facebook as a platform, but the entire set of other applications, really, you know, that they entail. So I think there, what's important about the Facebook's metaverse is the scale and the resource they have. And that's why I think what they do, their conversation on metaverse somehow, you know, tells us that this is not just, I think at least what it seems to me, but maybe I'm wrong. It's not just a temporary hype buzzword that will, you know, somehow disappear. But I think when such a large company with so many users actually decides to switch to make this kind of turn, I think then it also means that there will be potentially followers also to this trend. So yeah, but I would say the principle of governance as soon as you have a corporate, you know, corporation that leads and creates the whole platform in a way, I think it's very clear how it's going to work. My question only becomes, you know, once we have this space and once we start really operating in this space, what are the commons then in this space? Is it possible to actually have the commons when tools are owned by somebody else and, you know, when governance is already predefined by let's say kind of entity in this sense corporation or, you know, do the commons, you know, in a way require a different kind of, you know, starting point. So for me, it's always a very tricky, tricky thing to think about. Yeah. And I mean, one could one could be quite negative or already on a dystopian outlook. Now, if you if you consider this path saying you look at the at the history of social movements and utopias that tried to imagine ways and protocols to implement ideas of commons. I wasn't referring to that, but please go ahead. I was referring more to the platforms that kind of preceded, like, you know, but please go ahead. And so I think, again, we're sort of it feels that we are already at a point where the system, whatever that is, has already reserved these energies into framing them, you know, as part of their reflux, sort of what what is being washed back by pushing something out. So this is this is already kind of, yeah, it's already part again of the narrative. I think we're in where you're you're right, but in a short to medium term perspective. And that's what we all have actually lost throughout the last 20 or 30 years of our lifetime where we've experienced the rapid technological development. This is a this is almost probably an evolutionary step in the history of mankind, where we're becoming these like more connected, you know, beings, right? It's becoming embodied slightly, you know, more and more. And now these ideas are emerging that we could have some sort of like communal governance, communal ownership structures, right? And you're saying like the existing Alexander the Great aka Mark Zuckerberg has already an answer to that. He has billions of knives and knives out there. And he has tons of gold and he has already anticipated the movement. And will the Empire will stay strong. It just took us like 3,500 years to move from Alexander to beautiful Switzerland, right? I mean, I actually do think you're right in the short term. But these ideas are still worth translating it. And that's actually the core. This is the core of the bringing the spatial knowledge into, right? Yeah. And I mean, maybe that brings me to something that is sort of at the heart of what I'm currently excited about. Sorry to bring that in. But I think for the last 10 years I sort of lost interest in architecture as a space designing entity more and more because I felt it was so toothless. You know, and even like the slight excitement with Keller Easterlings act of form where you at least grasp that there could be something architectural and all that. It's still, you know, it kind of, I didn't, I don't know. But I think there is a quality in design that excites me again, which comes a bit out of the idea of prefigurative politics. The idea that you would be able to install a physical base of people collaborating as living together as an exclave within the existing system prefiguring a future that would be better in one way or the other, but not putting it into a distance or into a dream or into a narrative that is there to approach, but to actually try it out in the present, but not in the hippie sense of going to the countryside and installing your own commune, but staying inside the existing society and kind of performing this coming society within the society. And you're probably not going to follow me on the example I give you now, but I think Zuccotti Park as an epitome of Occupy was such a strong spatial movement that it actually created new forms of interaction online and offline, but it wasn't going to the countryside having someone with a little bit of money to spare and trying to keep up the good mood until someone turned foul and turned the whole idea into a dystopia. But really kind of, you had the, I'm super idealizing this concept, but you had the broker, you had the Wall Street broker going to work every day and seeing these people practicing their ways of teaching, being with each other, actually living, not protesting his way of living, but actually showing an actual alternative to this way of living right there. I'm not saying this lifestyle is good, this lifestyle is bad, I'm saying there is a potentiality of a spatial designer of someone who can actually help manifest these spaces, help activate and program these spaces to make this sort of parallel universes that are still deeply entrenched with the existing system real. There's actually a really interesting image that comes to mind in the context of what you were saying, which was Tarja Square, when they took the first drone shots actually, because usually you would see footage on the street level and basically looked pretty chaotic, typical kind of protest footage, and the moment that you see it from above, you actually realize that it's like super curated, almost functionalist city with different kind of parts of content and interaction. I thought it was super interesting. Just for everybody who's not like 30 years and older, what was Sokoti Park? You're so mean. No, that would be my editor asking me, he would say great example, but probably nobody knows it anymore. Could you just quickly describe so that I get you correctly, what was Sokoti Park? Sokoti Park was the occupies movements base camp in New York City. When was that? That's a good question, 14, 15 maybe? No, I think 10 maybe. I think it was 11. Yeah, 10 or 11. Even earlier than that. It's even earlier I think. Okay, now I get your question. Actually, I didn't think it was that much in the past. And so what was special about what happened at Sokoti Park, and this again goes back to the question of protocols, governance, information, architecture. 11. 2011, great. So Occupy started in 2009, and Sokoti was like the climax of the Occupy Street protest movement in New York City. And what they had was this wonderful language that helped them to coordinate non-hierarchically and make decisions as a community in a group. Is that what you're referring to? I'm actually not referring so much to the way they communicated, although that was what has been afterwards imitated I think also informed a lot of progressive communication cultures or how cultures of assembly actually are organized. But I also meant that in order to sustain it in Sokoti Park there was a lot of what usually you would have point support infrastructure. There was day care. There was medical care. There was food provision. There was psychological aid. There was basically everything one would need in order to be able to be a protester. But through all that, the idea of being part of that and protesting through care work, protesting through cooking all that suddenly became an idea of how a small community could actually do help each other. That's brilliant because this refers, you've raised the question of decentralization. The system you described in Sokoti Park helped the protesters to disconnect from central powers. This is why they set it up so they couldn't get blocked by the centralized power structures. They wouldn't depend on the hospital to accept them because they had their own medical service, just as an example. There is this notion of decentralization and it seems to be a spatial notion. I'm not sure if the word is even spatial or not, right? But there's Nathan Schneider, a researcher at Boulder State University, I think. Boulder University and whatever. Nathan was one of those Occupy activists. He was a reporter as well, like an activist reporter, I think. He became a scholarly analyst of community governance and decentralization, and he put out a paper. What do you actually mean by decentralization? If you think of a decentral system, you guys know this much better than me, I guess, right? But I read this and I thought, yeah, that's what I'm actually feeling. There's a model where you have no bigger knots in the system or there's a model where you have three-ish structures and where does decentralization actually begin and what is a decentralized system, right? And that's important when we discuss, for example, many of these, you know, I was looking at Polkadot recently. Polkadot is a, they have their own blockchain and they offer coins and they have a currency and you can build things on Polkadot and it's been made by one of the Ethereum co-founders, Kevin Wood, and they have like a governance structure, but in that governance structure, the people who make the laws are basically there's just like 10 people in the structure and these are the founders of Polkadot. There's an election system, but actually nobody's using it because it's probably built by some laymen, people who think about politics, but they have probably no fundamental knowledge of how to build a participatory voting structure that actually makes those people using Polkadot or building on Polkadot participate in the governance as well. And this can be used as a trap. Hey, guys, here we are. Here's your decentralized system. Just come in. Actually, it's centralized because it makes it hard to vote by intent. So that's the openness. The Wikipedia promise, no? Yeah, and so this is the design question. But I would quickly, just before it's lost, I mean the decentralization aspect is one, definitely. But I think another one is much more powerful because the decentralization aspect you could also say has been true to every utopian commune ever built because, well, they all tried to be self-sustainable, stepping out the system most of the time geographically. And it's sort of always, it was always an idea to step out of the system, become self-sustainable, to not be dependent on the system anymore and come up with something new and then maybe find more followers that would also all drop out of the system. You can do it left and right. You can do it with Fourier and you can do it with A and RAND. It doesn't matter. That always works like that. But I think the most important moment is where the neighbors of Tsukoti Park start bringing in medical aids and foods. Where the neighbors of the sealed off Hong Kong University go in, provide food to the protesting students every time the police tries to come in and crack them. And so that it's not, it's not decentralized in a way that it's somewhere else but that it actually has these spillover moments where suddenly the law-abiding citizens feel their duty to abide the law is actually to support these. And this is the powerful moment. It's not this moment of autonomy. It's this moment of where actually something is so strong as a counter-model that you feel you want to be part of that. It spreads as a hack almost in a way. So structurally it's decentralized but still anchored within civil society. And that's what I think this prefigurative idea is truly, truly intriguing. Where it's not just this utopian speculation where everything is possible or this super realistic analysis of all the regulations and instruments that work at hand to form where these actually collide and the one spills over into the other. I'm not much further with that thought. But that would actually, that would actually... Isn't this Easterlings active form? Like how would you, for example, connect it to what she writes about? I think in a way her active form also stems a bit from this prefigurative politics that comes out of the post-occupy experience. So I think it's all a bit in the same bubble. But I think the active form with Easterling is always sort of at least how I feel it works best to say, well, we have all these instruments available and we actively use them to claim our design, to claim authorship on the design. And then we don't have this sort of... Architects can't design anything anymore. It's gone, you know? But there's actually an agency within that. And I think with this prefiguration, it's a bit less driven by the forensics of today's analysis. It's a bit more on the speculative side. It's a bit more like done rabie style where you would actually, through new form and through new material, would also find new ideas of how to construct and program. But isn't that the... No, no, it's... I mean, I was also thinking of... You know her book, Extra Statecraft, of course. The last chapter of the book is called Extended Repertoir for Activism, something I'm like misinterpreting this for sure now. Whose book? Extra Statecraft. Yeah, especially the last chapter. I mean, in regards to what we described, she kind of lists, there she lists some strategies, like a hack, gift, humor, joke, etc. I mean, just to kind of make a connection with what you were talking, I think what she also has in mind is thinking beyond design as a kind of fixated statement when we talk about architecture in space, but rather thinking of tools that could replicate and kind of hack the system that are spreadable in a way. So joke spreads. It's a meme. It travels incredibly fast. Can jokes bring down government? Exactly. I mean, that's also a super nice reference. Meta heaven. Yeah, and then I think what she does very nicely in that book is to kind of extend in a way the imaginary of what is architectural toolbox of design, right? So it's not just models, drawings, and buildings in a way, but it's also creating in a way the virus that could eventually spread itself around. And I think the way you were talking about the Occupy movement, I think the kind of value you were describing, I think it's relatable to that. It's about almost creating in a way infrastructure that has the capacity to extend itself, replicates itself. And yes, absolutely, 100% true. And it actually helps me to think a bit further what I feel it could also entail. Because the hack or the reframing or the idea that you would somehow use the forces within the system for another activism, that is kind of, I think, the clear strategy that we have all chosen or established as a practice in the last decade, I would say. No way you really say, okay, working on the system always means working in the systems, but how can I re-channel the money to whatever one? So a simple example, we had, like for the German pavilion this year in Venice, we had a specific budget for a catalog. So we channeled all that budget into a homeless newspaper. The homeless newspaper works that it has ads, which then allows the newspaper to be given out for free to homeless people and the homeless people can sell it and get their money. So we basically channeled the money through that. The catalog became the homeless newspaper, which was given out for free because we had paid for it already. So the homeless could get that money for their own. So no, it's just like, that's maybe, that's a hack. No, in a way, we kind of just use the system. But I always thought that you somehow need to separate idea and action. Like the classic Mannheim utopian studies on every utopia is totalitarian because as soon as you tell someone how to think, it means you occupy the truth and you have to be wrong. You can be the most positive and caring human being. You are wrong because you say that's the truth. And so I always thought, okay, it needs to be separated. The one needs to be put into another future, into another time. It needs to be a narrative that can't be used for action. But this prefigration, I thought, but if you really establish a complete system within the larger framework, if you're not only hacking the other system, if you're not only kind of sucking the energy out of the enemy, but you're actually creating a positive nucleus or a nucleus of other energy, that would really change the conversation also about the power of speculative ideas. I think I said it. I just came to that thought with your question. I don't know if it holds up the next five minutes. And that's I think where we are actually now. I really do not like the meta-haven joke you just showed. Can chokes bring down governments? Bringing down governments appears to be one of the easier tasks of our days. There's quite many tools, some of them are chokes and many of them are actually chokes. I'm not interested in hacks anymore because hacks presupposes a given structure and I try, I find like exploits, right? So I'm fed up with the idea of subversion and counterculture and all of these things that are implied. So I think the paradigm, and this is also why I'm interested in architecture, is from hack to builder. And so the utopia that I'm interested in is not the pre-formulated configuration, which is a more or less always totalitarian thing, but rather to hand out people sort of like the sand from which they can form their version of the future, like a multi-fold thing that totally is just different from the centralized top-down structure that is about to get implemented even more forcefully. And this is not just a theoretical threat we're in. It is a serious thing that is happening now. If the most monied company in the history of mankind run by one person is trying to capture even more of our life because an embodied internet will mean more data has to be captured, also about like your physical thing and all the environment, all of that, and it's regulated by one person and that structure is being put on top of the already failing states and all these things we believe to be like powerful entities, right? It's not about bringing down governments. The government is down already, right? There's a new government and it doesn't even see itself as a government. It's just saying we're a company and there's a handful of them. That's beyond the pyramids. That's the worst point. What I love about your idea is what... I understand the prefigurative now as just handing out the stones and the sand and the ground and these things that people can build. Is that correct? Is that the idea of prefigurative? Who's handing out the stones? It's not that someone, some entity, some philanthropic entity is handing out the stones but it's actually a group of people that finds that they have sand, stone and element X and they're actually doing it. They're actually trying to set up something with what they've got. So that would be Sam Hart who's in Berlin right now with Interchain and Cosmos, right? These are the more community... Have you heard about these guys? No, I don't know. So Sam Hart with a T and... So this is based on trust? It's a question. Is it based on trust? What do you mean by based on trust? That you trust him or her or a group of people to be giving out... They have some sort of open source software and it's a blockchain. It's a variation on the old blockchain theme and you can basically build any kind of thing from that and they've even set up a fund where they use some assets they have to support you in building things they might find meaningful. So they basically... They say, hey look, that's how we... Here's the physical formula of the sand. Here's the sand also and here are some building stones. Take if you leave them. You can copy them because we're in the digital. They're not handing it out. You have to copy it yourself, right? And then if they think it's a good idea they support you becoming a builder. So the paradigm again from a hacker to a builder, right? And the same actually is true to... There's another thing called diesel which used to be called BitCloud. It's by a former Google engineer. It's a decentralized social network. So formally, blockchains were not really able technically to host social networks. Meaning you couldn't really build like a Facebooky thing on a community-owned and governed blockchain because it was just too complex, too much data, right? It was made for simple transactions, even Ether and so on. And so he's built like a... Apparently a blockchain, but there comes another problem. So I'm a person interested in that thing. But I'm not a software developer. And this is where the trust issue comes in. The problem of literacy. Literacy creates a new... Because for example, Nick Buterin never thought before the great fork, right? He had never thought about himself being properly the king of the realm. But because the technology is so complex and there was an unforeseeable question, like suddenly had to resolve, the people who were part of his entire Ethereum world then didn't know where to go. And so the leader had to step up. And then people have to trust the leader. And so I don't see how we could get out of that problem. Or maybe not an individual leader, but a techno-elite, let's say. And I think it's also not... I would say it's not the matter of kind of finding the answer, like whether it's a hack or is it a builder, but rather really offering the kind of multiplicity of answers in a way. I mean, you're talking about... When you talk about the open source software, you're practically talking about the tools that are available to everybody. So I think this is the core of the whole commons idea, right? You cannot govern if you don't have the resources that are available or tools that are available. So knowledge to transmit. Exactly, literacy. Exactly, I think this is crucial. But I think also what is essential is not just... And this is where I want to return to what Ludwig was describing. It's not just the formula of how things start, but how they are maintained. And I think this temporal dimension and dimension of community and care that you were talking about, I think it's very important. And there is a very good article by a common friend of ours, Dubrovka Sekulich. I think it's titled, What can urban commons learn from the, I think, free software community or something? How's that guy called? It's a girl. It's not a guy. Dubrovka Sekulich. Didn't Guy refer to all things? No. I'm happy to say it's a woman. Dubrovka Sekulich. Dubrovka Sekulich. The title is... It's what urban commons can learn from free software community or free software hackers. Sorry to misinterpret, but you will find the article. And I think what she very successfully points out in this text is this notion of community and maintenance. So it's not just about providing the means, but it's about shaping the virus, the spreading, the infrastructure, whether this infrastructure is human, in this case we are talking about human infrastructure is community that will maintain the knowledge and maintain the skills. And I think this is another layer which is just crucial. It's not just a model of working, but also how this persists over time. No? No, no, no. I was talking about this with Marcus before. So I was talking about the churches. I'm interested in churches. And the church... There's this institution, for example, for the Duomo in Milano called La Fabrica. And it's the company that is in charge of maintaining. And back then they were in charge of, for example, how do you call it, stone, where they gather the stone and organize the workers and so on. And that company exists since 1380, and they are still around. And that's basically an analogy to the software community, right? And so that still, even in open systems, is a problem. So if we think of the strangeness of the signal in Moxie Marlin Pike, the guy who's basically the head of, or go-to person when it comes to signal, the messaging service, right? Or Richard Stallman at canoe licenses. These are complicated characters. Even, you know, the Wikipedia founder, right? We used to make jokes about him, like 15 years ago, Jimbo Wales. So there are these people who have superior knowledge and sometimes they have superior access rights. Even within Wikipedia, there is a special function called the Jimmy Wales function that nobody has but him. And I don't know how to get out of that trap, actually. But I think it's interesting, like maintenance. I mean, bringing up maintenance, I think it's also a question of, on the one-hand responsibility, but also, on the other hand, scale. And this question of whether you actually always have access to this kind of Wikipedia phenomenon and also ongoing involvement. And, you know, I mean, when we met many years ago in LA, and when we were writing about this Wikipedia and also the pirate party at the time and liquid democracy, I mean, that's also really, I mean, a question of on the one-hand responsibility that you actually always, at every point, want to involve everyone. And, yeah, so it's complicated. But I think the question of maintenance and care can also be helped through technology. Just maybe that's also, I mean, what I'm referring to now is most of the research that we did for the 2038 pavilion in Venice where we asked experts from various fields to imagine that they came through a couple of crises and we just made it. It's not great, but it's also not as bad as we had imagined. And what does this world look like? And there's one example of a forest that self-manages itself and that through technology becomes an active agent that's able to actually have people maintain it but not to what the people think it needs but to what it needs to become a successful actor within the economic system. So the forest can sell part of its produce to then hire others to reforestate other stuff. Who's that talk about the people who do... Terra Zero. Terra Zero. And who's behind that? In this case actually guys. Which guys? It's just a speculative idea. It's not a company. It's called environmental personhood. It's a legal term, actually. It's a legal concept. It's environmental personhood. You can find it. I can share some articles. I mean, there is the story of the dome and cologne that owns itself. So the Cologne dome is not owned by the church or by the city but it's actually owned by itself. So there's contracts that the dome takes to maintain itself. So it's a DAO? Maybe. It's a decentralized autonomous organization. Yes. So the Cologne dome is that already? On paper. Since when? Since whenever it's got built. It's like a thousand years. Well, it's not a thousand years old, I reckon, but it's ever since. And so I think that is one idea how to also overcome this conundrum if you give the network the agency and not the founders of the network. There is something to change. Sorry. And maybe another quick addendum to that. We talked with Vint Cerf and one of the chief technical officers at Google about how to imagine 2038 and there came up the idea of individual, autonomous, personal AIs so that everyone would be enhanced by their own personal AIs that could also be disconnected or stays, you know, as we voluntarily disconnected from the larger network but it's still a support infrastructure for the individual to smooth access to the collective network. There is actually a friend of mine working with the founder of FabLab, for example. I'm trying to figure the name but I don't have access to the internet right now. He's called Jonathan Ledgerit and they're trying to set up a monetization scheme for animals. So the idea is that every animal would automatically register on some kind of blockchain and then animals could compensate their predators, predators for not killing them, for example. Meaning we would have a total registry of all animal beings and a separate currency that flows between... The project has an official name and the guy who does it is actually a professor at Braque University. I would really fear for the clever wasps to pay off all the birds. I just wanted to say welcome to the Anthropocene. The man is finally taking over everything. That's how it... So that would be an easy application, what I'm saying here, like a use case, right? So the giraffeie paying for not to get shot, right? There's a real couple of people actually working on the implementation of that and that's not 2038, that's happening right now. And it's an international project so it's interspecies money and interspecies currency if you want to Google it. I'm super interested. What did you say it's called TerraZero personhood? Environmental personhood. It's basically the same idea, I guess. I totally think it's a mess. I think it's messy. I think it's... Even the idea of identity. For example, a does an and have any sort of identity. And also the management, the way we try to suck in then also natural subjects into the kind of human-made management system I think it's also very bizarre. But when it comes to environmental entities, for example, in contrast to an animal, let's say, when it comes to a river, let's say, or a forest, it's an ecosystem. And I think this ecosystem sometimes also... There's a very thin line, for example, between indigenous communities. For example, there was a river in New Zealand I think was also subject of environmental personhood process. I think there, when you talk about management it also means kind of giving rights to the communities that are kind of grown together and live together with this river or whatever the natural subject is. So I think it's not just about managing the river in the legal sphere, but it's also fighting for the rights of the indigenous communities to kind of give back their environment both politically, economically, et cetera. I think there is another dimension. When we talk about putting animals on a blockchain it sounds a bit scary to me. I don't know what others think, but maybe I would like to find out more really what this is about. But coming back to what Ludwig you were mentioning about the dome in Kelm, right? In Cologne. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know if you saw, there is this project, the TTH Zurich, which created a lot of fuss and kind of media traction. It's called No One Someone, written N01S1. It's a project of the first self-owned house practically. They kind of designed a small mediation hub that is registered in the property register of Switzerland with its own NFT address, its own digital address. And the whole idea is about negating the ownership of a house, the house practically by generating rent, generating its own funds which could be used as repair funds, et cetera. Sounds very interesting, but as soon as you try to dig in and try to really understand how this could work on a larger scale, I have 1,000 questions, really. I don't know, it opens up for me always when we see something in such a model-like, isolated shape, let's say. It always opens up the question of what Hannes was also asking, who gives the stones? Who sets the stones in a way? How do you start such a network? I don't know if any of you know the project? No, okay. But that's the DAO thing that Ditalik Buterin talked about, and that is actually based on a book by science fiction writer Daniel Suarez who wrote a fascinating trilogy called The Demon and it's about somebody who set up a person that could be the Google founder. He basically gets killed and his program starts to set up a scheme. I don't know anything about this project, but to me, just from what you're explaining, it sounds like it's not necessarily a counter-project as, for example, like a counter-platform, but maybe more similar to the way that, let's say, if you have solar panels in your garden or on your roof, that you can also, I mean, you can run your own system, essentially, if you want to, but you can also feed back into the system. Is this the case or not? I'm not sure. This is the case. I mean, the way I understood it is practically, for me, I mean, I really try to understand the project. Sorry, I'm kind of, maybe I didn't grasp it fully, but what I understood it, the way I understood it is this is a kind of a model house. You could imagine a network of houses that own themselves in a way. And then there is, actually, there are a lot of similarities to how cooperatives could function. So I don't see that the technology there is really groundbreaking in a way, but for me, it was quite mind-boggling to also hear. There is a house that owns itself and all the questions that kind of this opens up, the questions of maintenance, for instance, the questions of, for example, the first question that comes to my mind is this separation between the building and the land. For me, this kind of creates even a bigger gap. You can build a house, the house can own itself, it can manage in a way itself through the network of repair, repair men or repair women that kind of exist around this house. But then the question of land always, I think it's always like, you know, something that claims this project, it kind of claims to be the model, you know, usually as this one, for example, it always reminds me of the shortcomings as well, like how the complex actually this, you know. But I think that it has a prefigurative quality in that way, that it has its own entity, it creates its own system, but of course its relevance only becomes apparent in direct comparison with the surrounding. So I think that's super important. So I was just opening the interspecies money pitch, and the story is actually quite beautiful. We were talking about the place of nature in the digital world, right? And that's actually the starting point for that project. So the digital age has far removed us from nature. That's the assumption. And so the idea to assign monetary value in a capitalist reality to the natural world actually turns that natural world into a force. That's the argument. And it's just, so there would be a very big amount of money, meaning power, and it's beyond man's scope, so to say. And that would help bring us because the author's fear is that we are actually in an existential threat situation, existential risk situation here right now with climate change and so on and so on. And it's even aggravated by the digital space because it has removed us further from the biological world, let's say. And so how can we bring it in by giving it money, digital money, and a system that enables it to use that money for its own purposes, right? That's, I think, is the starting point. Just, yeah. We come to money then as power again, no? In a way, which is reality, I guess. Yeah. But, yeah. Is it similar? Maybe you know more about Bitcoin. This was part of the German Pavilion in Venice, the project. Bitcoin? I think it was in one of the videos. Bitcoin. I cannot remember exactly well how it worked, but it's a similar system, yeah. And it's also... The activity of bees generates value, and then if you care for your beehive, you are contributing to the value that then goes to the, you know, care for the bees in a way. Exactly. It's a story in a way. And it's also, again, the idea that you would really... There was a bit of... I think a couple of years ago, there was suddenly this misunderstanding of caring for the planet would mean to actually take the non-human actor's perspective. Trying like, I'm a rat now. I'm free now. And then everyone was referring to Bruno Latour's Parliament of Things, imagining a giant amphitheater where a giraffe and a lamp post a server farm and an anthill would debate on how to live together. I mean, isn't this what's still happening at like 50% of the art schools right now? I wasn't... Sorry. I would say yes. But to come to an understanding that it's actually human expertise about these processes that would actually help bring in these perspectives, that, of course, makes a very big... That's a very big difference. And this is sort of also with the bee coins, it's sort of bringing in a human perspective on the healthy development of this ecosystem as part of the health of a larger ecosystem, which is then boiled down to a manageable size and thus can be reintroduced into mending our broken system. I love it, but here's the economist speaking. If you compare it to a perfect world, right? You'll always be sad about the options at hand. So economists, basically, compare it to where we are now and isn't even your shitty bee coin better than where we are. That's the basic question. But that's sort of the basic proposition of 2038, yes. That all these ideas are being presented as actual outcomes in the now instead of... Where can I see your 2038? 2038.xyz. And who's behind it? Is it again BMW sponsoring it or Shell? The German government is behind it. It's the... Wonderful, wonderful. And it's an amazing... It's a huge research team of about 60 to 80 individuals that worked on the German pavilion over the last two years in very different roles, also very decentralized, also very... Yeah, because they're not only German, actually. They're not only German people that worked on it. I think there's... But there's at least some German people working on it as well. In case government is listening. No, I think they were very irritated by the whole thing. Like to propose a post-national pavilion that wouldn't show anything in Venice, but only online. That was very confusing. For whom? For the ministry. Because you basically enter the pavilion and it's empty pavilion and the only thing that you find there is QR codes. And then you use your smartphone and then you enter basically the world 2038. Either virtually you go to the cloud pavilion or you watch all the videos where everyone tells you how everything became as it is now. So, what's the new Athens then? That's the wonderful moment we're living in right now. So, as stupid as it seems, we're like pre-Athens or we're like early Athens right now when it comes to creating this encompassing digital, physical, fidgetful thing here. Right? It's beautiful. We're like just about to discover our democracy might be a potential and we could potentially build it and there's like the first arenas that we're building now. And I think as stupid as it sounds it comes out of this monetary blockchain new world and it's still sadly very, very early. And I think Ludwig is right. We will see first of all, we will see the metaverse going large, right? Is that what you think? I'm a, you know, as a futurologist I'm a radical optimist. So, no, of course not. We'll see something else. Okay. Yeah. Thank you so much, all of you. Thank you. And see you in Tomorrowland. Thank you. Thanks. Bye-bye.