Zero Degree Project for Cooling Off Capital - Part 1: Initial Ecosystem Offering (IEO)

1. Project summary

The Zero Degree Project for Cooling Off Capital is a joint initiative led by the Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory (KGC) at Stanford and the Economic Space Foundation (ECSF). Its aim is to explore innovative, practical ways of meeting the climate change challenge by: 1. researching and developing new models for financial innovation using distributed virtual ledger technologies and cryptoeconomic affordances; 2. prototyping crypto-scalable commons and other types of eco-sustainable economic practices building toward a Zero Degree Economy. A Zero Degree economy is one where the economic practices do not contribute to increasing climate temperature any further than the present state.

The Zero Degree Project for Cooling Off Capital is open to different forms of collaboration. It currently includes the World Collaborative for Transformative Community (WCTC, a Stanford/Palo Alto based umbrella 501(c)3 for building bottom-up transformative infrastructure); the LEMO Foundation, the Ahupua’a Ecosystem Stewardship Initiative (AeSI, Hawaii), the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS), along with the SenseLab (Concordia University, Montreal), RSF Social Finance, and Waldorf Community. Each economic space initiative is being developed to be a Zero Degree eco-sustainable economy in its own unique, local and mutually benefiting way.

We believe that ever-growing segments of the population are deeply interested in investing their time, their creative appetites and their capital in portfolios and ventures that are collaborative rather than competitive, towards sustainability (Zero Degree) and equality (meritorious and open networks). To this end, our Zero Degree Collaborator (Z-Collaborator) is set to launch an Initial Ecosystem Offering (IEO) bringing together different curated economic initiatives (or “rafts”).

The Initial Ecosystem Offering is a value preserving arrangement for co-evolving and implementing shared vision for cooling off capital. The idea is to foster an ecosystem of sustainable practices and values that processually integrates within its realm the externalities embodied in climate change, externalities that are currently not recognized in capital formation. We believe that this plural ecosystem of economic spaces powered by cryptocurrencies with embedded governance capacities will act as an emergent investment attractor that has the potential to bring systemic change in climate-finance by accelerating institutional innovation for prototyping entrepreneurial creation of Zero Degree economies. Indeed, this portfolio of creative and sustainable initiatives will constitute a unique opportunity to invest in an expressive and self-amplifying wealth system for the Value Conscious Economic Sector (VCES) (philanthropic foundations, enlightened sponsors, social entrepreneurs, etc.)

2. Breaking the Spell of Capital: An Ecosophic Diagnosis

“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

It always struck me as funny that we might drown in our own liquidity.

Kim Stanley Robinson

We have no faith in the invisible hand.

We have no faith in the invisible hand to adjust the natural thermostat.

We have no faith in the invisible hand because it is the one who cast the spell,

The spell of unlimited growth, the spell of endless progress,

The Spell of Capital.

The spell of Capital works as a collective trance that’s below and around us, lifting us above ground, abstracting us — extracting us — from our shared living conditions. The famous diagnosis according to which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism tells us something essential in this regard: whatever we call capitalism holds a deep, intimate grip on us that goes well beyond the ideas we entertain about ourselves as being rational economic agents.

Capitalism, or the economy as we know it, must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs, insofar as a substantial portion of the actual costs of production remain unaccounted for. This is what economists call externalities. We have been so successful in drawing the line between what matters economically and what doesn’t that we are now on the verge of civilizational collapse.

This crisis can be summarized in three divides that disconnect us from each primary source of life: ecological, social, and spiritual. The ecological divide manifests in symptoms like environmental destruction. The social divide manifests in increasing rates of poverty, inequity, fragmentation and polarization. And the spiritual divide shows up in increased rates of burnout and depression, and in an increasing disconnect between GDP and people’s actual wellbeing.

Our challenge is to reverse engineer this destructive process. We need to resist the economic reductionism led by for-profit corporate entities and start building a world beyond it. How can we internalize in commons what has been systematically externalized by the current economic system? We first need to foster a new ecological wisdom — a new ecosophy — that integrates the three dimensions of life aforementioned: the ecological, the social and the spiritual. And: we also need to make it economically viable and operational. But how?

The collection of precarious and diverse rafts we are assembling in our IEO is a humble attempt at learning to live in the growing ruins of the economy as we know it. We are well aware that building a multitude of micro-worlds won’t be enough to create a better world for the whole. Our challenge is to build crypto-economies that take scalable responsibility for all life-forms populating this planet, without shying away from the tremendous infrastructural challenges and wealth of creative resources this will require.

3. Crypto-Economics to Cool Off Capital?

“Can we say that this is a community, or do we merely dwell together to make money from each other?”

TS Eliot

The spell of Capital has made us insensible to the actual and always local conditions of production of value. The discipline of economics has celebrated this relative insensibility to the ecological context in its own perverse yet “business as usual” way by taking pride of delineating ever more precisely and pseudo-scientifically the realm of its externalities. The counter-ecological tendencies of the capitalist system have been analyzed and described in countless ways. Basically, we need to learn how to resist mono-economic reductionism and start building a world beyond it.

“We live in a civilization in which the primary currencies are money and power — where more often than not, the goal is to accumulate both at the expense of society at large. This is a very simple and fragile system compared to the Earth’s ecosystems, where myriads of “currencies” are exchanged among processes to create hugely complex systems of inputs and outputs with feedback systems that adapt and regulate stocks, flows, and connections.

The paradigm of a single master currency has driven many corporations and institutions to lose sight of their original missions. Values and complexity are focused more and more on prioritizing exponential financial growth, led by for-profit corporate entities that have gained autonomy, rights, power, and nearly unregulated societal influence.”

Joichi Ito, Resisting Reduction: Designing Our Complex Future with Machines

Crypto-technologies will produce a radically different economy. The very notion of for-profit firms accumulating away mirobolant amounts of money will be durably disrupted in the coming years. The mechanisms by which Capital is over-heating the planet could very well come to an halt. With blockchain and virtual ledger technologies, the economy is becoming a design question for everyone to contribute to if so they wish.

The money as monetized today holds a higher perceived value because it discounts the many environmental and human negative impacts associated with capital formation. But with crypto-economics, it becomes possible to re-engineer and decolonize the money-form from within. That is: we can design money-forms and circuits of exchange that reflect our desires and values. The opportunity to redesign the current global economy is opening to us from programmable money — money that is not itself an end-goal commodity but rather what it was always meant to be, a tool for exchanging and collaboratively generating value. We can start engineering a world in which the surplus-value generated by our productive activities won’t get extracted and conserved in anti-social stores of value; a world in which the sociality of production and circulation will remain at hand, immediately felt throughout the newly designed economic spaces we are participating in.

Instead of imposing a uniform system of one value upon us, like fiat currencies enforce, our goal is to facilitate the creation of a platform ecosystem for rendering the heterogeneous multiverse of values socially and financially liquid. Each economic space within our Zero Degree ecosystem will issue their own carefully crafted token, each of them embedding the ways by which they wish to contribute to a more sustainable and Zero Degree economy. Thus money, this normally flat and neutral means of exchange, will become an expressive medium and key component of crypto-scalable commons, geared toward collective well-being and emancipation.

How to design token economies that counteract the production of externalities and the quantifying storage of value by internalizing and distributing it qualitatively throughout and within the ecosystem? This is the challenge to which you are invited to participate, as a future economic space creator and/or a foreseeing investor in this new Zero Degree crypto-economy.

The Z-Collaborator’s goal is to benchmark the cumulative climate temperature contribution across each of Zero Degree economic spaces. We will research and provide scalable tools to cool off capital through easily replicable protocols and templates to achieve adoption at global scale. Our research will focus on innovative methods of measurement, metrics and algorithms to track economic assets that reduce global temperatures and prevent CO2 emissions. Our Zero Degree Index will track quantifiable data streams to gauge each prototype in relation to others, ensuring that prototypes who chart out and follow our protocols will successfully achieve their collective goals. The research and field work at prototype sites will shift how we value assets where colder financial assets produce higher value and wealth than hot ones in a measurable and trackable cooling index. With this start, we envision that the research and the field site experience of the participating VCES based banks and financial institutions will be codified into new mode of value-based climate financing for leveraging the cooling of the estimated trillion dollars in financial assets needed to be mobilized and cooled urgently.

4. Initial Ecosystem Offering: Some Initial Z-Collaborators

The following initiatives are only the beginning of an expanding and evolving partnership. Our invitation is open-ended: the challenges we are facing are numerous and multi-dimensional, practical and theoretical, transcultural and “inter-species” too. We are interested in the very fact of bringing our different rafts together as an initial seeding gesture toward mutual stakeholding for strengthening the coming Zero Degree ecosystem.

Economic Space Initiatives (to be further extended)

1. The Ahupua’a Ecosystem Stewardship Initiative (AeSI, Hawaii)

AeSI is a project to create a new ahupua’a system and live in a natural, intuitive and supportive way of our “island earth”. By living within an ahupua’a’ ecosystem our visitors and collaborators will do their part to spread the responsible utilization of resources and for balancing our climate before it’s too late.

The initiative embodies the spirit of oceania navigators as we become way finders for the uncharted territory that is climate change; teaching and inspiring others to become co-navigators for the planet so that we ensure our continued and thriveable existence here on earth. This vision is an offering that connects us all and motivates us all to propagate earth-cooling practices.

The purpose of AeSI is to ground the creation of a Zero Economy Token into a framework that can both function with the existing monetary Economic Models, as well new long term value based non-monetary economics.

2. The 3 Ecologies Institute (Montreal, Concordia University)

The Three Ecologies Institute is a collaborative learning environment dedicated to participatory experimentation where concept-making meets embodied creative practice. The aim is to provide active meeting points between theory and practice, in a transdisciplinary frame bringing a diversity of domains of knowledge and modes of inquiry to bear on one another.

The Institute will be based in the community, with ongoing collaborative ties with community partners, but it will retain a link to the university and its resource and knowledge base, as an independent, non-profit organization developing a unique schizo-economic model in partnership with ECSA.

The Institute will not offer credits or degrees, will not charge fees, and will have no prerequisites for its courses. It is conceived as a radically inclusive, open learning environment where thought is practiced and learning enacted, as values in themselves.

The name of the «3» Ecologies refers to the mental, social, and environmental. As part of its transdisciplinary profile, the Institute emphasizes the complex intersections between these three ecologies. It sees all of its activities as occurring at their cross-roads. This relational orientation is expressed in the way in which its activities integrate concerns about sustainability, taken in its widest meaning, to include the sustainability of creative learning endeavor at the individual level as well as the viability of collaborative group endeavours.

3. Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS)

GCAS is a thriving experiment in nomadic advanced education, offering affordable and high-level classes both on-line and on-site in our various European, Asian, North American and Caribbean classrooms, each with a fully engageable virtual platform.

GCAS is committed to globalizing (hence democratizing and decolonizing) academic discourse and bringing together students and faculty from around the world to think, research and work complementarily and collaboratively on some of the biggest issues we face. Educational institutions are more and more crippled by a corporate, profit driven ethos designed too often to foster and maintain dominant social hierarchies while creating prisoners to a punitive debt cycle.

GCAS has created the first college and institute of higher education to be owned and operated by world-class faculty with integrated mutual stakeholding system based on distributed ledger technologies to break away from the toxic student debt cycle. Indeed, in partnership with ECSA, GCAS College Dublin features “TOP” (Tuition > Ownership Program) that gives graduates the opportunity to co-own their college by converting the tuition a student invests in a degree program into ownership shares after graduation.

I would like to thank Syed Shariq, Vienna Looi, Jay Cabrera, Melissa Vo, Thomas George and all Z-collaborators for their contribution to this tentative offer