 Yeah, so thanks again for being here and I was really excited to hear your podcast that you did with my friends Monashichiro and with Sina last year when there was a bunch of takeaways that I find extremely interesting because they combined an aspect of epistemological and shift and also applied to how we were thinking the regulatory framework and the political framework, but also this connection with a shift in consciousness, especially consciousness bound to certain geographies. So you made a comment about Western countries and Asian countries and especially like Asian country that are they still think they can get capitalism right, you know, some this kind of modernity, this resistance of modernity that is trying to permeate also other countries. And then I think something that is really resonating with me specifically is this pulsation, this regeneration that is also tied to a new way of accounting for the energy flows. And I think this is a very nice stage because I mean, I think after anybody study a little bit of what's going on in the world, you cannot help but thinking that we need to somehow tie our the thermodynamic nature of our of our biosphere with our constitution and with our laws. And of course, it's a problematic space. It's something that is not so also technically easy to be to do. But I'm very excited and curious to to hear what you've been working on in that action. And also I think it's a nice stage because increasingly every year, the CCC is hosting climate aware and climate adaptation talks that are very specific also in the nitty gritty of, you know, all the planetary boundaries that we're hitting, inviting, inviting scientists and politicians and and different perspectives. So I think this is a good direction that we are seeking as a Congress. And yeah, so I leave the stage to you with us. There is also Oliver Salter, which will is joining us at the end of the talk, but he just joined join us in the room and Jacob Huun, which will also make some some questions at the end. So I'm going to leave the stage to to you, Michelle. Oh, right. Thank you so much. It's the first time I talk in a CCC related event. So I'm very happy with that. Well, so basically what I want to do is, you know, we wrote a report at the P2P Foundation called P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival, in which we looked at emerging new forms of accounting. And what that tells us about how we can reorganize our economic flows. So basically, can we produce for human needs within the planetary boundaries? Right, which assumes that we know when we make decisions what those planetary boundaries are. So the key issue that that, you know, we have to solve as humanity is the issue of externalities, right? You have positive and negative social and ecological externalities. And the system that we have now, which is only based on, you know, the value of commodities, including the value of labor as a commodity, does not take into account these externalities. And there's been various studies showing that market pricing, you know, does not actually reflect any dangers to the to the ecology of the planet. We have the sixth extinction of the animal and of the animal kingdom. And it's it's not reflected in our economy. We can't see it. Right. And that has a bit to do with the history of accounting. And I maybe want to start with this by saying how important the accounting is in the history of humanity. So for example, if we look at the origin of accounting, that's actually also the origin of the state. So it's in Mesopotamia. I don't know, 2000 BC, I've got the exact dating, but it's in the book against the grain from James Scott, which I really recommend. So the first tablets of clay with language are actually accounting tablets. You know, it's the grain coming in and out of the of the royal temples. And so that's very important. And I learned, for example, that for 1000 years, language was not the the written language was not used to represent speech, but to represent accounting. That's really interesting. Then the second phase is the reorganization of accounting by a Franciscan monk in Italy, Luchto Patschui, if I pronounce it right. And he invented a double entry book accounting. And this is very important because double entry book accounting is really about what comes in my entity, my closed entity, my firm, and what goes out of my firm. And again, you have no vision of the natural world of what you do to people. It's simply, you know, economic value and whether you have profiting capital going up within your own. And so it's really more kind of narcissistic accounting that is the basis of our current economy. And so here's the so the question is, can we change that? Can we have forms of accounting that can reflect not just the value of the commodity, but the value of, you know, what we do with people and the environment. And so that for me is a third accounting evolution. And it's connected a bit to the emergence of the blockchain. Whatever we think about the blockchain, what it does, it creates an infrastructure for shared accounting. So we can move potentially from closed accounting to ecosystem accounting. And so nearly all the blockchain projects that you can look at, that's what it is about. There are open collaborative systems where people can come in and out. And they can share accounting and logistics to the degree that they want to. So I think that's a very important step. So sometimes I say to make it easy for people who are not technical and I'm not very technical myself. Now we move from the Internet of Communication to the Internet of Transaction. And what that means is that what we have developed around open source and urban commons, you know, what I call the Stigmergic collaboration, so mutual signaling, that is now possible to do in physical production. Before the blockchain, we did it for open source or knowledge, design and software. But now we can actually do it for everything. Everything that's represented through accounting. Any flow that we can represent to accounting can be subjected to the same capacity of looking at each other in an ecosystem and adapting our behavior in real time if we want to. So that's really what I want to talk about. So what we did, and this is what we usually do at the P2P Foundation is, so we don't say how things should be. We actually look at what we call seed forms. And seed forms are, you know, basically you have a system in crisis. We can solve it within the logic of the system. And so people start exiting the system and try to solve their problems in new ways. And these new ways potentially represent, you know, something that comes after the crisis. So you think about the medieval times, you know, you have the invention of purgatory. So suddenly you can be a Christian, you can earn money. There's the printing press, there's the voluntary book accounting. So this is actually the basis of capitalism. So that's what we're talking about. And so in the report, I mentioned three new forms of accounting. The first one is Contributive Accounting. So typically any open source community where, you know, which is open for permissionless contributions will have the same issue, which is you have a whole community that is co-creating value, co-creating use value, something that is useful for everyone like the Linux operating system or Wikipedia or whatever. Now then the market, you know, over time a market is created around these open source comments. And then the issue becomes where only some people can actually realize their value through the market. And so typically what you have is a lot of people will contribute to an open source system, but only some of them, you know, can make a living through their efforts. And so there's a question of equity and fairness, which is typical for open source projects, which is how do you deal with that dynamic? And so the solution to this is Contributive Accounting. So very easy. The basic principle is you have a community, you have some kind of membrane around the community. And what you do is that you say, okay, so whatever comes from the outside, which can be government subsidies or, you know, market income, and now I have a plane flying over. So I'll just pause for 15, 20 seconds. Just to make sure you can hear me. All right, you can hear me. I'll just continue then. So Contributive Accounting are basically schemes where you differentiate between the outer and the inner. And so you're going to redistribute a part, at least the part of what is coming in, with a different system internal to the community. To make a very simple example, you have a Translators Collective. They do a lot of things for free. So they count the characters. And they say, well, anybody has a contract to translate a book, which is partly due to the co-creation of the value we did together. Well, 15% of that will go in the second accounting scheme. And that will fund the contributions, right? And, you know, my friends at Commons Transition, they have this booklet about this co-coops. That's about that. It's how do you create internally a more just and fair value distribution based on not just commodity value, but on contributions. So basically, you know, I call this value sovereignty, right? You declare within your community that you're going to create value in a certain way that is different from the mainstream economy. And by the way, this is nothing new. If you know Bernard Lietard, the mystery of money, which exists in German, he will tell you that throughout history, there's always been two kinds of currencies. You had the royal currency, the extractive currency, which was to fund the army basically. And then local communities often had different currencies. For example, in Bali, I live in Thailand. So this is my neighbor. In Bali, they have a currency for the watershed, you know, to fund the watershed maintenance in that in these communities coexist with the national money. All right, the second form of educate of accounting is flow accounting. And that's something that exists for the last 20, 25 years, maybe, but is now taking on taking off. And that's called REA resources event agents. And I call this post cost, post capitalist accounting, because just like contributive accounting, it moves away from the pure commodity value system. And what you do in flow accounting is saying, well, you don't have double entry. So you don't have a closed entity. But every transaction represented is a 3d picture of where you places in the ecosystem, right, the resource, the event, the exchange, and the agents that are doing this transaction. And that is visible again, to all the people in this open ecosystem. So this is the second form of accounting. And the third form of accounting that I discussed is called thermodynamic accounting, you could say. So matter energy flows. There's different projects. If you want to look at that must see SMM us I a S EM is based in Barcelona, but the one that I looked at is called global thresholds and allocations from our three dot Oh, and these people are multi capitalists. So they want to take into account not just financial capital, but environmental and human capital. And they want to treat these three couples equally. So this means that today if you you know, cheat with the finances, you can dump in jail. But you can end up end up in jail if you do something bad to the people or the planet. If you recognize those three capitals, then you would actually also be liable for how you treat these externalities. Okay, we're not there yet, because that would require a lot of legal reforms and probably social struggles. But one of their innovations, which is really interesting, is called global thresholds and allocations. So what does that mean is that you have some institution, a global institution, that basically is a group of scientists that monitor the availability of resources. So not just the planetary boundaries, as described by Kate Rayworth, but all the all the commodities. So there's a list of 131 they call this commodity ecologies. And so imagine a group that just keeps track of what is available in the world in terms of copper. What is the expected findings of copper in the in per year, you know, based on an historical average? What is the growth of productivity in the use of that material? And also what is the bio circularity? So if you reuse copper, how much copper is left? I think it's 70%. So you know, they have these tables. And so what what we can do and what they're prototyping and experimenting with is diffusing this knowledge of flows of matter and energy into every accounting system. And that begins to become quite exciting to me because that means that you know, you have to keep the capacity as an agent. So it doesn't have to be top down, you know, like rationing, which could happen if we, you know, continue like what we're doing today. But you actually enable and empower all the Asian distributed system to make decisions within that framework, right? So and I want to continue with this with which we're kind of trying to convince you that this opens up a vision of a new what I call a cyber physical infrastructure for production for human needs within planetary boundaries. And it's based on three different levels. And I think most of you are too young to know about these debates. But in the 1930s, there was a huge debate was called the calculation debate. And you had the old style socialists who were saying, you know, we need to plan rationally plan the economy. Not just the markets, we had Karl Polanyi and others were also involved in this debate. And the other had you had Schumpeter and Hayek saying, No, this is not possible. We need markets to do that. And of course, the the market economies won this debate. But I think it's possible to do three things, which is take the best of the comments. So take the best of the market pricing as a signal for allocation and take the best of planning, which is but in the sense of frameworks that determine the degree of freedom within certain frameworks. So the first layer would be a strategic collaboration. You're in an open ecosystem, you see what everybody else is doing. And so you can adjust your behavior, because you have a whole optical knowledge of the whole system. Right? Just as if you do Linux or Wikipedia, you know what everybody else is doing. And so you can adjust your your contribution. That's the same idea. But it's now moving from just knowledge, design and software to accounting and logistics and coordinating physical production. The second thing you can do is to inject what I call generative market practices. You might be familiar with radical exchange. There's a group of people that are specialized in this know how do you can use market techniques to actually have fair and equitable outcomes, how to do that. They focus on that. And for example, you would have a proposal like fish coin, which basically says, you know, this is a cryptocurrency for the fishing industry, which represents the the reproduction capacity of the fish. So it's not a money that is blind to externalities. But it's a form of money that is intelligent and integrates that knowledge in itself, right? So you only distribute as many fish coins, then there is fish that you can fish without endangering the reproduction of the fish. It's just one example. So you could have a whole series of these specialized currencies that, you know, manage specialized markets within certain constraints. And then the third level is what I call orchestrated planning. And so I'd like to introduce a little concept. I call it the fifth magisterium of the commons. I got it from a friend of mine called Robert Conan Ryan. Sorry, I forgot his name. Robert Conan Ryan, I think. And so his idea and I resonate with me is that we have four magisteria, that's politics that regulates what we get from the state, the economy, who gets the surplus, the culture, what can be said and not said, and science with legitimizes facts. And, you know, they're relatively independent functions in our societies that they're even beyond the nation state, they regulated that trans national levels. And I would suggest that we also need a magisterium of the common. In other words, we need a capacity to manage and protect human communities and extra human resources and communities, right? So basically the humanity embedded in the web of life. And you might be interested in that I won't have time to explain we have now movements like the sovereign nature movement, you know, that proposes to have DAOs, right? You have forest commons, it's the DAO, it has sensors, it can mobilize lawyers when there is overgrazing or over cutting of its woods, it can generate income and it can actually distribute that income to the contributors who protect that commons in that case that forest. Just an example how this might work in the future. But so you see you have a kind of an idea that I that I'm proposing is to integrate the best of the commons, which is the collaboration open collaboration effect, the best of the market. And also orchestrated planning, which is used as a framework. So you're free within a certain frame, you can do what you want, but you can't destroy the conditions of life. That's the basic idea. All right. And so we need institutions that that can protect that and we don't have them yet. But that's basically what I wanted to tell you so that you know, as we transition to a more stable human system that can live for longer period of time in balance with with nature, that actually we are starting to have the technological means to do that. And these already exist, they're being prototyped experimented with. So this is not just a topion, this is actually something that is ongoing. And of course, technology alone is not the answer because you need institutional change to make that work as well. But as you know, we work on public commons cooperation protocols at the P2P Foundation. And that's also moving quite fast in the world. So I think that, you know, what they say in China crisis is opportunities the same word. So the more we enter in this downward spiral of systemic crisis, the more also people are motivated to look for alternatives. And so all these seeds forms start to make sense. And all these patterns start into connecting with each other. And can kind of be a prefigurative vision of a potential new economics. And so I also finished, and you know, you can ask me maybe via Eugene or something. I have a three chapter commons economics textbook that we are pre publishing privately for the moment. So if you're interested in knowing more, and then P2P accounting for planter survival, if you look it up in Google, you'll find it in the full text, which explains what you know, the story I was just telling you now. So that's that's the basic story. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you very much. I think our audience really enjoyed it. And somebody is asking in our Telegram Q&A, which I also invite you to join if you want. They're interested in all those reference. And I told them to look in the book. But I also ask you if you want to just share a few links with me. Also via email, I can put them in the in the in the chat. And yeah, actually, let me just change the view so we can also have Oliver and Jacob on. And Oliver, I think you so you were really interested during the conversation. You're muted. Oh, I'm muted. Yeah. Thanks, Michelle, for taking the time to latest all out. There was so many interesting and new concepts also for me that I want to dig into afterwards. And of course, nice. It's the first time we managed actually to see each other on a vehicle has been a while. My question that came up is like, when you're a small organization, or a startup that that wants to start deploying internally, these processes of better accounting, better value, specifically value accounting. What do you recommend? Diving into reading what practices are really useful, or maybe small practices that you at the PHP Foundation already use to do this? Maybe there is no handbook for the for the moment, because all this is fairly new. So we have one little booklet. It's called Value in the Commons, which is just to help you think differently about what value is. Then, of course, P2P accounting for Planetary Survival, which gives you access to these sources. So, you know, like Sensorica, for example, is a really good example of a very sophisticated contributor accounting system. They've been doing it for 10 years already. The disco book, which is a Sensorica, Sensorica, it's an open hardware commons, they make sensors. And they have a very sophisticated, yeah, it's Canadian, Tiberius Brashtanivau, I hope I don't miss spell his Romanian name. And they have a lot of literature online about the project. And they're, they're very sophisticated, you know, for example, they put all the collective property, which is called non-dominium. That might be interesting just to explain to the audience. So dominium is, you know, the normal private property, I'm the master, you know, dominus of my property, and I can do what I want with it. Non-dominium is it belongs to nobody in particular, but to everyone at the same time. And so what you can do, for example, in the case of Sensorica, if you need a machine, you know, you can crowd from the machine, but the machine goes into the property of the trust. And so anybody else in the system can also start using the machine, right? So you have a system then for the collective use of the machine. So you're mutualizing, you know, the hardware, as it were in that system as well. So it's, it's a very interesting and sophisticated system. And then disco, which I forgot what it means. But it's, you know, kind of like a DAO, but for the commons. And that's by friends of mine, Stacko Tomcozzo and commonstransition.org. So you might have a look in that. I have a section in my wiki, which is wiki.p2pfoundation.net. And I have, you know, a lot of documentation under the section P2P accounting as well. So until now, basically, unfortunately, what you need to do is talk to people like TB or me. And we know many people, we're very well connected with the people doing that. And we'll say, well, you know, talk to them, talk to them, talk to them. And then you, you will, you know, learn about it by yourself. And then you can say, okay, can I contextualize this in my own situation, right? And then do your own thing. There's no standardization yet. We're in, you know, we're in the period of Cambrian explosion of these new accounting systems. Yeah, in this direction goes my question as well, like, what is the fields where you feel like you gave some examples, but like, I mean, interesting how this pattern then also will interact, how the fish coin will interact with the tree coin. I mean, but how do you envision the implementation of these new accounting systems? How is the interplay between, I mean, you have some foresight. Yeah, well, that's, that's a bit of a problem. So, so it's a bit what I said about the Cambrian explosion, right? So it's a big problem within the commons. And, and, like, I should give you an example. So I was in Tuscany a few years ago, and they had 16 different pieces of software to order organic food in the solidarity economy only, right? So this is a big problem. People are reinventing the wheel all the time. So what I'm advocating, and, you know, I actually believe in public commons cooperation. So I think that, you know, we will have public institutions in the future as well. There's no way around it. And so we look at, can we have optimal relationship between the commons and the public sphere, you know, so that the commons remain free and autonomous, but can still cooperate with the public sector, right? And so here's a thing you could do. I don't know if you know John Takara, he works with something called factor 20 reduction, which I'm very enthusiastic about. For example, if you want to do transport of goods and services in a city like Berlin, if you use cargo bikes and pedaling, you can do that with 98% less energy and still do the same amount of transport, right? So the idea is that we will start, we have to start mutualizing our provisioning systems, all of them, you know, real estate, housing, so shared mobility, shared housing, shared, you know, shared organic food. And then we build ecosystems that in those provisioning systems, for example, community supported agriculture is a good example, right? It's an ecosystem that combines a group of consumers and a group of organic producers. And, you know, they're still buying it from each other, but the ecosystem is a commons. They is not based on a power relationship is based on solidarity and cooperation between all the partners in the ecosystem, right? And so the kind of basic attitude that I advocate is the idea of reverse cooperation, or reverse cooperation, sorry, what so what you do is, what kind of collaboration do we need with public authorities to make our commons work? And what kind of market mechanisms do we need for commons to make our commons work? Right? And so instead of having the opposite, which is no capital eating the commons and extracting value from the commons, you have to reverse the logic and start thinking, like, how do we preserve our community? How can we preserve our livelihoods? And start organizing ourselves so that, you know, this that we get a bigger part of the surplus. And, you know, if you think about the blockchain that way, I'm, you know, in Chiang Mai, it's the capital of digital nomads. So we have a lot of people here, developing these ecosystems. And, you know, that's already how they start thinking, right? They, when you do a crowd funding, ICO, and, you know, we can be critical about the hyper capitalist aspects of this, but it can be done in different ways. Basically, what you're doing is, first of all, you're distributing the capital, you're no longer dependent on just one bank or one venture capital, the whole world can participate in your project. And you consider the coin as micro shares in, you know, what is the expected value of your project is. And then they keep 40% of the tokens for labor. And that's really interesting. And then you have progressive groups, like Exa, Economic Space Agency, like Commons Engine, like Common Stack, like the Holochain. And these are all blockchain or, you know, post blockchain oriented project that have these other values embedded in them. And then finally, sorry, I'm rambling on, the idea is to create what I would create is coalitions of public players, solidarity and impact and solidarity finance players, and the Commons to mutualize development of these infrastructures, right? So if you do shared mobility, you know, like co-op cycle, for example, you know, you could have an alliance of cities supporting this for all the cities in the world. If you want to have, you know, fair, fair B&B type solutions, you could have these alliances funding open source depositories. And so this is something I call protocol co-ops, protocol cooperatives. They invest collectively in open source depositories, which can be used by everyone. And then you, you know, you can textualize it, you localize it, but you don't have to redo everything every time. And that's, that's the problem. So if I can say one thing, more thing about this, you know, I've been following open source cars for 12 years now. None of them has worked except maybe open motors, which is more like a white product. They don't really operate publicly. And local motors, which is just crowd sourcing this design, but none of them has really worked well. And now you have this company called Arrival. And they do everything with proprietary software. So finally, we have distributed manufacturing. But instead of having an open system, we're going to get yet another proprietary system with one company controlling everything. Right. And that's very sad to me that we had 10 years to do this, and we haven't succeeded in doing this. So, you know, if we're too slow, we're going to miss a lot of opportunities. This brings me actually to one of the next questions I had, which is in thinking about building up these regenerative processes of value counting. And now the example that you brought with the open source cars, why do you think this didn't work? Why do you think it only worked once or like started to work? I never heard of that company. So I assume it's, but a player that you consider as being maybe more, more. Yeah, they have 1000 software engineers. So they're extremely well capitalized. And they have a big factory in London. I think they're actually in Berlin as well. But I'm not sure about the details. But you know, they have their videos, you can check them in YouTube. It's very impressive. They, you know, they have the whole thing is ready. It's like, you know, hub and spoke. You can install the factory in a week. And then they can start building vans and buses for the cities, which is something I dreamed about 10 years ago. And technically it was possible. So the problem is that open source itself works because you know, it's, it's bodies voluntarily working, you know what I mean? Like, any software engineer can say, I'm going to do, you know, open source software, and you can live with your parents until you 40 and you can do it. You know, but once you need buildings, materials, you need capital, right? And so what I'm thinking we need to do is to find a connection between the cooperative world, which has a lot of money, you know, the big co-ops and the open source world. And that hasn't happened yet. So that's a problem. So it's really comes down to funding. It comes down to funding and to find ways to solve that issue, which hasn't been solved yet. So what we're doing instead, and this is not bad, of course, is that we're starting with all the small stuff, right? So I don't know if you know the multifactory model. So these are craftspeople coming together all over Europe, looking for empty factories. And then they, you know, they make, they work with wood, 3D printing, metal, iron, and they work with open source and cooperative principles. And there's 120 of them in Europe already. And they have an invisible factory where they, you know, kind of do their open source collaboration. So, you know, they exist or in France, you have a huge federation of farmers called Atelier Payson. They already made like thousands of designs for, you know, machines for farmers, open source machines. They're much more successful than open source ecology. So these things exist, but they exist, where, where they're low capital requirements. So they still function, you know, a bit in the periphery of the system. You're already unmuted, you were already unmuted, you need to unmute yourself. I think we definitely need a follow up conversation on this one, because we will continue the placemaking the solar bank beyond the CCC as well. And I mean, we will come back later today to the scope of the city having a conversation on municipalism, metaphylicity movement, and for, you know, for the framework of placemaking the solar bank, we were really coming a lot from the kind of really neighborhood scale level. And a lot of the ecosystem building just needs to come from really a different even state innovation or like from from different kind of powers that that support that. On the other side, I'm already very inspired. And I feel we can just wrap up here and keep the continuity open as well as for our listeners in the in the chat to engage further and see, see how this can be, can be. Yeah, yeah, I'm, you know, I'm open to any form of cooperation, or, you know, more talks, whatever you need to cool. And I need to learn also, of course. Awesome. Thank you for joining, Michelle, very much. We'll see you in five minutes with an exciting workshop on this channel. Stay tuned.