Thrivable Technology
What are the tools that enable a more thrivable world to emerge and evolve?
In asking that question and living into it, I have embraced Holo and Holochain. After a decade and a half of pursuing an opportunity-based narrative through social entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and peer to peer engagement, always striving to make a dent in the world for the betterment of all, I am choosing this technology to give myself fully to uplifting. I came to this conviction through a clarifying process.
Nilofer Merchant has inspired me again and again with The New How and 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era work. This year she did it again with Onlyness. I ask myself, on reading it, what is the unique place I occupy? From that, who can I connect with? And together, what can we then do to make our dent in the world?
What is my unique place?
I challenge everyone toward greatness, toward an opportunity-based narrative of the world and toward gratitude and awe. I often ask, “What might we co-create together that has us thriving and the world we live in thriving with us?”
I live in this intersection of technology, P2P values, social entrepreneurship, and finance.
And then, who can I connect with? I learned way back in the Thrivability Sketch days (2010) that we can do more together than any of us can do alone. Scenius, the collective amplification of wisdom and creativity through a group or scene, is phenomenal. Way more than any individual.
So if I want to apply my unique abilities to make the world more thrivable, what scenius might I join to amplify that possibility with others?
For me this feels like a few layers.
There is the daily work of partnership with others who resonate on a similar frequency — a passion for the work and living into and through their gift and contribution to the world.
And then there’s the larger swirl of connecting with networks of passion and purpose to build meaning and value in the world. With Holo, and the Holochain platform it is built on, I feel both of these layers of synergy. I knew when Arthur reached out to ask me to bring my “outcome-focused” energy to the project that he saw what I could be capable of and expected me to bring every ounce of it to make this possible.
Here, at Holo, I can apply all that I learned in writing, “Cultivating Flows: How Ideas Become Thriving Organizations.”
More than that, I saw that the way we had been dancing back and forth for years on making the invisible visible, enabling collaboration, and increasing agency and autonomy was coming into form through the technology. As we have moved along software development and engaged the public, I feel a great alliance with so many in my networks who have asked: “what does an ethical, responsible, and enabling technological framework look like?”
This is, of course, the creative practice, the pragmatic action coming from “Thrivability: Breaking Through to a World That Works” that I published in 2012. This is how it comes into being as a company, as a technology. This is what that process of perceiving through multiple perspectives, understanding the shifts and dynamics of an evolving world, and then doing through co-creative dance of living and learning systems (symmathesy) becomes.
There are no perfect answers to the questions. There is a practice of living into the questions, the tensions of polarity management to engage. Here we navigate and negotiate a more antifragile version of the world.
I have been struggling with specific questions around our technology.
- What is the infrastructure that respects our privacy? And at the same time enables enough transparency to foster trust?
- What design allows us ownership and control of our data? And at the same time creates and cultivates a commons beyond the individual?
- What connects us with others to share and learn and grow together as a community? But also protects us by creating boundaries and barriers that give us a sense of safety and identity?
- What rewards people for sharing and being a contribution? And does so without extracting wealth from those sharing it?
- What creates enough trust to lubricate human interactions without becoming administratively burdensome?
For me, Holo and Holochain live into these questions in a way I feel deeply excited by.
- Both are inspired by natural systems and living ecology principles. Biomimicry applied to crypto-technology.
- Holo rewards people for sharing hosting capacity with the most minimal transaction fees because it is designed to serve hosts and those hosted rather than a central office that controls the flow. It solves the challenge of managing minuscule bits of data and tracking the accounting of them without adding to the complexity.
- Holochain is agent-centric not data-centric, meaning that it is putting the participant at the center of control and ownership. I own my data. I control permissions for others to access it. And by starting with the person at the center and then connecting them to a larger system, Holochain manages the dance between identity as something I control and something I am situated in (my reputation and activity engaging with others).
- I can imagine the applications this structural design makes possible, and they excite me. I can imagine applications that honor my lived experience as it truly is. I can imagine markets that help companies address risks by funding nonprofits to address those concerns. I can imagine applications and even currencies that help us make visible the value flowing in our communities, giving dignity to all contributions and contributors.
Let us come together to make this dent in the world. Holochain offers the structure that forms the preconditions for a more thrivable world. It is up to us to co-create, atop that base, the intersectional tools and opportunities that work for majority of the people on the planet.
I am all in.
Note: I really took the Onlyness book deep into my practice. The books sections move from me to we to us. I have put that into practice in the very design of the #holochats conversations. I am asking each of you to share and express yourself which we can then connect to each other and from there grow a better collective awareness of the field by which all of us can benefit. Me. We. Us.
