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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
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Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week I'm joined for a second time by friend of the podcast doctor Andrea Leiter. Andrea was with us back in episode 312 when we discussed cryptocurrencies and how we could bring regenerative principles into gaming, and how transnational law works, and how capitalism might heal itself from the inside out. Andrea is, as you'll have gathered, something of a polymath. She has degrees in transnational law. As she says later in the podcast, her PhD thesis looked at international states disputes settlements. So when I say ISDS and my head explodes, that's what we're talking about. But she's also deeply embedded in cryptocurrencies and regenerative finance and views on economics that I find fascinating. And we knew after the last conversation that there was going to be a lot more that we could talk about, so we booked in straight away. And I thought that we were going to be discussing the Economic Space Agency and its protocols for post-capitalist expression, or the concepts outlined in Exo Capitalism, which we did mention in the last podcast as well.
Manda: But then in the pre podcast conversations on email, Andrea sent me the outline of a paper that she and colleagues are writing on the network state and its implications in transnational law, and actually its implications for all of us. And yes, it does sound obscure and unrelated to real life. And it is complex, but it is not unrelated to real life. This is absolutely something we all need to know about before we find ourselves living inside a legal structure that mandates for no death, no taxes, and no democracy for the people who have the money. Because, as with any fascist enterprise, there will be an in-group that is protected but not constrained, and an outgroup that is constrained but not protected. And if you're listening to this podcast, the chances of your being in the in-group are vanishingly small. So here we go. To make a few things clear, before we start, we will be discussing the ideas of the network state as put forward by Balaji Srinivasan in his book called The Networked State; How to Find a New Country. It's also on a website of the same name. And no, I have not linked to these in the show notes. I am really clear that I do not want these things on anything that has my name associated with it.
Manda: So if you want to go and find them, you can do a Google search. I have, however, linked to Primavera De Filippi and her ideas on Coordi-nations and the ongoing work on Bioregionalism by Joe Brewer and others, because these are regenerative. These are the future that we could choose to work towards though, as is clear from this podcast, I think we have a lot of undoing to do. We need to undo the mechanisms of the market economy, but the market economy is very swiftly being overtaken by the cryptocurrency economy, and most of us don't even know this exists. Most of us do not swim in this water, and we need at least to understand that the people who currently hold the levers of power definitely do swim in this water, and they like it, and they want to keep swimming in it, which means they need to keep it going. I don't fully know how we stop this from happening, but I know that we need to do so. So with that ringing in your ears, people of the podcast, please welcome Doctor Andrea Leiter, director of the Amsterdam Centre for International Law and so much else.
Manda: Andrea Leiter, welcome back to the Accidental Gods podcast. In a very changing world, how are you and where are you this Monday morning?
Andrea: Thank you very much for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be back with such a fantastic host like you. And I am currently in Austria looking out at very nice snowy weather, so that is not so bad, I would say, in this really indeed crazy world that we are in. Here it looks quite peaceful and nice.
Manda: Okay, I have snow envy. We have kind of sleet out there. It's grey and murky and very cold, but not cold enough to have snow. So anyway, such is the changing of the world. Since we last spoke, the world is moving fast. I thought we were going to be talking about protocols for Post-capitalist expression, which I would still like to talk about, because it is a really well worked out critique of capitalism, looking at how we might look at exchanging value differently. However, in the meantime, Trump and the people behind Trump, I think we can all agree that Trump is a useful idiot that they will continue to prod and push out in the world stage to do his crazy old man in the attic act, until he ceases to be useful, at which point they'll get rid of him and we'll have Vance. Who is much, much more scary, I would say. Partly because he knows why they're doing what they're doing. Trump's just a vacuum with a narcissist inside, but Vance is plugged into the people who want Greenland for very specific reasons. And they're not giving up. I think we all breathed a sigh of relief when it seemed like he was backing off. And given that I've read the early drafts of a paper you're producing, I don't think they're backing off, and nothing else suggests to me that they're backing off. They've just gone away to think about it a little bit more deeply. So we need to know why they're doing this, I think all of us, because I think it helps us to understand where geopolitics is going. And because we are an explicitly thrutopian podcast, I would like us to look at how we might structure the world differently once we understand how certain people are trying to structure it. So, Andrea, explain to all of us in as simple terms as we can, for people who aren't international legal lawyers, why do certain players in the American administration so dearly want to get hold of Greenland?
Andrea: Yeah, so that is a very good question. And I think there are many parts to an answer to it. But let me just say that this came to my world in watching news on Austrian television, in which a correspondent has been asked the exact same question; why does Trump want Greenland? And in her answer, her name is Miss Navidi. I will have to find her first name, but she is a commentator expert who was asked in the news. And she said the tech billionaires want to build their network states in Greenland. And so to someone who has never heard of this notion of the network state, it's just a by line and you're just like, yeah, whatever, I didn't pick that up, let's move on. Like, they want resources, they want stuff. But for me, when I heard that, I almost fell off my chair because since I inhabit the weird worlds of crypto utopianisms and dystopianisms, the notion and the concept of the network state is familiar to me. And I have been watching the developments around this concept for quite some time. And so here it comes, full on in on the national news as what is driving Trump's Greenland politics. So I think that the proposition here would be to unpack that. So how come we hear this term and what does it mean and how do we go? Yeah, sounds good?
Manda: Please go. Yes yes yes. Let's unpack network state. Because you're right, those of us who have been on the fringes of this, yeah, it always struck me as a crazy notion. And because I thought it was crazy, I assumed everybody else thought it was crazy, until I realised how much momentum was behind it. And the people with huge amounts of money think this is a really cool idea. Some of the people with huge amounts of money. But yes. Okay, so tell us about network states. Tell us about Balaji. Tell us about the proposition and then the unfolding of it.
Andrea: Perfect. I mean, if you allow me to maybe just prompt all of this by saying that from the get go of the re-election of Trump in his second term, the role of the crypto industry in his politics and in his manoeuvrings, I think has been largely underestimated. So we hear ever more of it and he's been explicitly very loud with all of his crypto endeavours. I mean, there's no trying to hide anything.
Manda: He's not subtle, is he?
Andrea: He's not subtle. Exactly. But I think that people have not paid much attention to it in the broad public debate. And so if we can just rewind for one second to say, even in the elections, the crypto corporate donations that went into the 2024 elections were the biggest corporate donations recorded in the US until then. And so this was a really consolidated attempt at making a very pro crypto government possible in the US, in both houses.
Manda: Yeah, and they supported both sides. I think that's important to say. They were playing both sides. Whoever had got in owed them a lot of money.
Andrea: Precisely. So on both sides, candidates who would take appropriate stance were supported and were supported very successfully. And if we could visualise this, you know, instead of seeing the typical image of a blue and red map, what we would see is just a crypto coloured map, whatever colour you want to give crypto on this, and almost entirely. So really crypto came out as one of the biggest winners of this election. And there are a lot of facets to that, because in certain ways it really also speaks a bit to a kind of financialization of the election process. An interesting bit of this puzzle, I just need to mention it because, again, I think that people are not paying attention to this, is that so-called prediction markets are accompanying this development, where you can make bets on whatever you want. And of course, one of the biggest events to bet on were the elections and was this election. And so I think that the implications of what it means that people are betting on particular events to take place, and have a financial stake in a particular outcome of this event, changes everything about how they will go about achieving that result. So it's not just that it is a prognostic thing and saying, yeah, I think Trump will win. And then I just put my hands into my lap and wait.
Manda: No, I think Trump will win, I bet on it, and then I try to make it happen.
Andrea: Precisely.
Manda: And we could go down a rabbit hole. I spend quite a lot of time down a rabbit hole that says Trump won every swing county in every swing state by just enough to not trigger a hand count.
Andrea: Interesting.
Manda: And even Reagan didn't achieve this. And some quite smart people that seem to know what they're saying, say the odds of that happening are one over ten to the power 88. And he pretty much stood up the day after the election and said: Elon Musk is amazing, he knows all about electronics and we won Pennsylvania. And the thing about Trump is there's no filter. He says what he thinks and what he thought was Musk won the election for him. And Stalin said a long time ago, it doesn't matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes. And nowadays, I would say it doesn't even matter who counts the votes, it matters who collates the data about the counting of the votes. And so, yeah, I mean, it's way too late. And I still don't understand why Kamala Harris and her team did not require hand counts, when the person who had headed Biden's crypto security detail, put out an open letter saying you need to have hand counts. And they didn't. And why not? It wouldn't have hurt. But anyway, so there was a lot of, as you were saying, crypto bros who were very, very, very happy that Trump won.
Manda: I have a friend who was on a cruise ship going from somewhere in Europe to somewhere in the Americas, I think Panama, at the time of the election, and it was empty. And so a bunch of people took it over and brought in people from right across the spectrum of politics to be on a ship. And I gather there was quite an interesting response when the results came in, because this ship was cruising and someone we both know of, Primavera De Filippi was on there, but so were a whole bunch of very, very alt right network state people, who were celebrating a lot until people started to explain to them what it might mean. So they basically bought the election. I think we need to say out loud that we have the best democracy money can buy, and they have a lot of money. We don't have a democracy; we have a kleptocracy. The 'democracy' that was designed, was never designed to give ordinary people any scent of actual decision making power. And what's different now is that tech people have most money instead of oil people. And before that it was coal people or railroad people or people who enslaved other people. It's always been whatever is the latest iteration of imperialism, has owned the power and has pretended to lease to the general population a degree of power. Would you say that was fair?
Andrea: Yeah. I mean, I do think that you have continuities in many ways. I also think that in that sense, the question of corporate money in US elections has always been difficult. There's this famous ruling of Citizens United of 2010 of the Supreme Court, that of course was a landmark in the sense of enabling corporate power to have a large influence. So it's not utterly novel, what we are seeing with the crypto industry interventions in the US elections. But I think that it points us toward, I would say, a different mode in which it is being done. That's why I would say that it's really, in a certain way, a financialization of sovereignty in a way that we haven't seen before. So these prediction market examples, you know, I think operates differently to how corporate donations would have operated before. Also with the fact it's really ironic. So all of that money that went into supporting the elections, what you had as a result of Trump being elected was, of course, a big increase in the price of all cryptocurrencies across the board. And also the crypto markets went up.
Manda: Right. Yeah. So they got it back within days.
Andrea: They got it back within such a fast turnaround. So it would always be a quid pro quo. You spend money in order to make money, I mean this is nothing new under the sun. But the sheer quantity and also the short amount of time that it takes, it just points us to phenomena that I think we are also not fully equipped to respond to. Like, what do we make of this? Where is the problem exactly? Like how do we frame this? So I think that is one thing that we see, that we saw in the election with the role of the crypto industry. And I would also insist on making a second point here, that I think is much more uncomfortable, because I think looking at this and saying, well, these crazy people and this crazy industry and these crazy bros, what are they doing? It's always quite a low hanging fruit. I mean, crypto is amazing like that. You can just shoot it down every three seconds, because it's insane what people are doing, parts of the ecosystem. But I think what is important also is that there is a real question of the voters who turned to particular representatives because they came out pro-crypto. I mean, it's not just a one way street. There is also something about having spoken to a constituency that kind of reconfigured itself. There was a lot of debate about why male, Latino and black voters would have turned Republican, why some of the core Democratic camps would have turned Republican.
Andrea: And I think that again, here also, we don't understand what crypto means in that respect. It means a quick bet on maybe securing some financial gain in the future. This is not a wholesome society that we are heading toward. But I think for people who are living in precarity, I mean, who is going to blame the attempt at making some bucks? So I think this is a another side of that. And I think it's important to keep those two things together, because that also explains why people might be following with these ideas and why people might be flocking on to this. And I think rather than making yet a grand abyss of the idiots over there and we, the enlightened ones over here, I think there is just really like what's at stake here is the question of how do you secure a future? How do you do that? Who do you entrust with building a vessel and a container that will do that for you? And so as much as I disagree with everything, and I think that it's horrific the direction that we are going, I think that the question of where and who do we turn to for this is one that is really a real one and a big one.
Andrea: And so with having said that other part of the puzzle of why crypto, I think, has had an appeal and continues having an appeal to a particular segment of society, maybe then to say that indeed, since Trump was elected successfully, and since there is this very successful, this very pro-crypto political landscape in the US, they have also indeed been good at bringing out legislation that is extremely favourable. So on the one hand, regulatory acts, the genius act that revolves around stablecoins is one part of the story. We can maybe touch on this.
Manda: Could you unpick that for us a little bit in a minute?
Andrea: Yeah. So maybe the genius act we put to the last, even though I mentioned it first, because I think it's the most far reaching. But just on more minor things, the head of the SEC was exchanged. So Gary Gensler went out, who was very sceptical of crypto. And in that vein, also a lot of cases against crypto industry players were either settled or were dropped. So in many ways, there was a very obvious pro crypto industry outing. And then indeed, on the legislative acts, I think what is important is the Genius Act. Also, the name, I mean carries Trump all over it, no? And that act is relevant because the Trump family went very explicitly into crypto endeavours before the election, with their company World Liberty Financial. And in order for this company to do the things that they wanted to do, the Genius Act was crucial.
Manda: And what did they want to do?
Andrea: Because it allows them to bring what is called a stablecoin. And stablecoin is a cryptocurrency that is pegged to a different value, that can either be what is technically called fiat currencies. So state backed currencies like the US dollar, mainly the US dollar, it can also be other currencies. Or it can be gold.
Manda: Yes, you can tag it to whatever you think is most stable.
Andrea: Silver, whatever kinds of resources you want. Or it can also be a mix of cryptocurrencies. So there are different setups for these stablecoins, how they are used. But in order to be allowed to issue that, which is a certain form of private money, shadow banking if you wish, a version of shadow banking. The Genius Act really opened the path toward that and enabled that strongly. Where we are going with stablecoins on the horizon, it's a very complicated question. I think it's yet another of these bigger puzzle pieces that should not be just seen as some lunacy to get rich. I think, much rather, it should really be understood that it is a question of where are we headed with US dollar hegemony? It's in decline for some time in different ways. You know, people have been thinking, speaking and writing about this. The stablecoins that are issued by a private company of the Trump family, but are pegged to the US dollar and are advanced and advertised by Donald Trump in his double function of being the president of the United States, but also being the founder of this company. I mean, it's too complex and complicated to really have a straightforward sense of where does that take us?
Manda: Okay, but I think this is a useful thing to map out, because nobody else is going to talk about this with me. So thank you. So we have Mr.. I am a very stable genius, creating private money. He's basically giving himself a license to counterfeit something that could be like dollars or could be like gold. I listened to James Midway's Microdose podcast last week, two weeks ago, and he was very clearly laying out that China is accelerating its move to make its currency, the renminbi, be the global fiat currency. And Douglas Rushkoff, in lockdown or before lockdown, was invited to a place in the middle of the desert, the most expensive hotel he'd ever been to in his entire life, and he thought he was there to give a talk about Futurism. And three blokes in suits turned up in what he thought was the Green room, and after a while he realised this was the talk. These were his audience. And they were explicitly asking him how they would control their private armies at the point when the event happened and the event was the collapse of the dollar. And he suggested that they should start making friends with their private armies. And in the end, they they got down to do we kidnap their families and hold them? But no, that means we'd have to feed them. So actually we're going to use electronic collars to control them. These people are actual psychopaths! But what I took away from that was they are expecting the dollar to collapse. So they are creating a parallel currency that they own and they issue, in order to protect themselves against dollar collapse. And I have always thought that the day we can make the dollar worth zero and the pound and the euro, all of these people are basically ordinary people again.
Manda: If you have $1 trillion and the dollars aren't worth anything, then you just basically don't even have a pile of paper that you could burn. You have numbers on a computer screen that are worthless. However, they are in the process of trying to create value exchange systems and value storage systems that are independent of other global fiat currencies. And it seems to me that these are only worth anything if everybody agrees. That's the point of a fiat currency. Everybody agrees that a dollar is worth a dollar, and that a dollar can buy a certain amount of stuff. Because you can't eat dollars, you can't eat gold, you can't drink it if water is gone. Coins of any sort only have value if we all agree they have value, or somebody with a very big army can tell you that they have value. Which is, as far as I'm concerned, how coins began. The Romans or whoever turned up with a lot of blokes with swords and said, this thing with Nero's head on is worth more than a little bit of silver of the same size. And you will agree, or we will steal your children and crucify you and turn your kids into slaves. And we're basically back to that; the people with the biggest armies get to impose their version of value exchange, and they're busy siphoning it out of dollars into something else. How does a stablecoin or anything else maintain its value, if the only people who say it has value are the people who have stablecoins? Does that question even make sense?
Andrea: Yeah, I mean, it's really complicated Manda. It's a difficult, I think, monetary theory. Like, honestly, sometimes I feel like I've been trying to keep up, but I'm out of my depth in certain ways, I have to say, with this. Because you don't only have the question of how is a stablecoin worth something? Which would be the question of how is Bitcoin worth something? Or how is Ethereum? That's already a complicated question. Or why is a dollar worth something, to come at it from that. But with stablecoins, you have this creature that on the one hand rides on the stability of fiat currency, namely the US dollar, which means that it also rides on the capacity of a public spending body to be a backstop.
Manda: Right.
Andrea: So in many ways, the stability comes from the fact that public funds will ultimately cover the losses no matter what happens. So this is a bit the tricky thing. Where then you have public authority over that money and then this is how it goes. That's why it's public money, because you can have both the spending and the backstopping in one democratically controlled kind of way. I think that would be the argument for why money should always be public. And if you have now coupled that to a cryptocurrency token, which also runs on a different kind of infrastructure, the question of how is it really pegged, like if there is a run on the USD one token that Trump holds, how is that secured through fiat currency? I have to say, I'm reaching the limits of how I can understand what will lead to what and what will trigger what. And I think that we will have to see how this plays out. I think that a lot of the innovation in the stablecoin space happens precisely around these questions. What is a safe stablecoin? What is not? There was the Terra Luna collapse in relation to the FTX Bankman-Fried collapse, where the algorithmic stabilisation of the stablecoin did not hold. So there is a lot of experimentation, a lot of complexity and depth. But what I do think where we can, I guess, say something meaningful rather than losing ourselves in complexity and steering away, is, I think, one way of explaining the origin of money would be from what is called the constitutional theory of money. There are scholars, particularly in the US, who have advanced this kind of knowledge. Christine Desan is one of the thinkers who is most important at Harvard Law School, who would trace historically the coming into being of money, more to the existence of a community that takes that particular coin value description as something that is valuable within that community. That can be traced as either paying soldiers, you know, you fight and I pay you in this coin, and then I accept the tax that you owe me also in this coin.
Andrea: So it constitutionalises through the fact that that token is valuable in an exchange between the community and the people who want to contribute to it. And in that sense, it's interesting to think also about cryptocurrencies along these lines. So if you think of Ethereum for example, if you want to engage with the Ethereum ecosystem, you need to have aether and you pay a particular gas fee. So it's a bit like that. It's a bit like I want to play along with Ethereum. I want to be part of the system. I want to be able to use that particular currency in order to access all of the things that Ethereum enables. And so I have to buy into that, I have to get this kind of currency, and I have to spend it in order to interact with the system. And part of its value comes from this logic in which you need it in order to interact with it. So you have a utility in it with the system. And now again, to come a bit back to the question of the Trump token and what is that? I think that there is something that is meaningful to say, to be very careful here, to not overstate; this USD1 stablecoin of Trump, the question will be who uses it and for what? And how do we make it useful? How do we bring it so that it becomes really engaged with in the larger economy? So then there is reporting which tries to put together two separate deals that have happened. One is that an Abu Dhabi technology investment fund, made an investment into Binance, which is a US based crypto exchange. While at the same time the US struck a deal with Abu Dhabi about Nvidia chips. So this Nvidia deal was not paid in US dollar Trump, but that previous deal of the Abu Dhabi Investment Fund into Binance was a 2 billion deal in the denominated Trump coin. I mean, people are careful to say, is this connected? Is it not? The New York Times.
Manda: These were separate deals, right?
Andrea: They were separate deals. But The New York Times has put a lot of effort in trying to show the overlapping timeline and all sorts of things. So they haven't come out saying straightforward, this is it. But they said, look, there is a lot that allows us to say there is something happening. So in that sense, it's interesting, because then the USD1 becomes the means of payment, the means of settlement for big term deals. And now, just recently, at the end of January, Pakistan's central bank is now exploring the use of USD1 in its payment system. So we are seeing that indeed USD1 as a means of settlement for payments is being pushed in different ways and different things. And this is, I think, familiar again, to make a longer lineage in oil concession agreements, right back at the beginning of the 20th century and mid 20th century. One way in which the dollar became so powerful over the US pound was by making it the means of settlement in oil concession agreements, in which it was clear you have to make this payment in the currency of the US dollar and not British pound.
Andrea: And so not to overstretch, but just to say as an analytic analogy, in order to try and understand, in the same way that you said, you know, oil has its role and had its role historically, where do we see crypto? I think one of the things in which we can understand the role of these stablecoins and the Trump backed stablecoin is when we see it pop up as the means of settlement for these big deals. And we are just seeing the beginning of that. But I think this is when it really becomes serious and we are seeing the early days of that. So this is a long winded and complicated multifaceted answer, but I think this is a bit to understand and locate the US stablecoin endeavour. And indeed in the relationship to China and what China is doing and how the US is trying to raise that. I would not dare to predict things here, but certainly this is how the game is being set up.
Manda: Wow. Okay. And even reading your paper, I hadn't really got to the depths of that. So where we're at, if we take this down to absolute basics, is that throughout history, the person who had the power to create the currency, whatever the currency was, whether it was sesterces in Rome or UK pounds. At the point when it was no longer linked to actual physical metals which were in limited supply, then the person who could generate the bits of paper, or now the bits on a screen that had value, was the person who controlled that value and had most of it. And what it sounds like is that the stablecoins are an attempt to remove that control from the nation state of the US and put it in the hands of a family and those in their orbit, which would make them God, Emperors of whatever expanse began to use that currency. Because the US has been the most powerful nation on earth for a long time, because it controlled issuance of the dollar. And it could issue more dollars at any point when it felt like it and thereby make itself richer. It's just, you know, we make the money and we have as much money as we want. And now a different political entity is striving to make money that may supplant the dollar, particularly if the dollar is undermined by the Chinese.
Manda: Let's leave that because we wanted to get on to the nation state and the network state. So we have in the world nation states. And I think it's worth going back to Hobbes definition of a nation state as that geopolitical entity which gives itself a monopoly on the use of violence within certain geographic borders. So the Americans can have ICE in Minnesota doing things that are utterly appalling and it says, that's fine because we are the government. And if you even stand there, we can kill you, because that's our legal monopoly on violence. And if you look like you're doing anything else back, then we can also kill you. It's pretty explicit now. You know, even a year ago, you'd have had trouble having something quite so obvious to define that. But we've been doing this around the world; we, the white Western nations; for many, many centuries. And actually the Romans did it 2000 years ago and and they were not the inventors of it, they were just quite good at exporting it around Western Europe. So a monopoly of violence within certain geographic borders; that's the nation state. The network state takes that in a new direction. Tell us a little bit about Balaji and the network state and how it's evolving, and why Greenland is critical to the vision of that.
Andrea: Yeah. So the network state is an idea that was proposed and I would say floated in a book and a website that has become now really strongly associated with this name, Balaji Srinivasan. So this was 2022 and was drawing really strongly on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology as an affordance that enables such a construction. And basically what the proposition is, is that you can have a virtual community first. So the first element is a however coming together virtual community, that then slowly and steadily, as he says it so nicely, crowdfunds territory around the globe to develop a community that is rooted in a decentralised way in different places, and that at the end of the day, should have the status of something like a sovereign state. And I think, there's much to be said about the history of international law. I mean, I'm an international lawyer and this is like just too much that I want to say all in one about how we think about this. But I think to just move slowly and to unfold what the idea of this proposition is first, to then see how does this relate to international law and to the history of international and so forth.
Andrea: I would say that it picks up on something that is relevant. Online communities, virtual communities, do play an emerging role on how we socially relate to each other. I think also in the Western world, digital nomadism is a real thing. So people are doing this. Covid was an accelerator for this in many ways. And I think that, again, to keep it as real as possible, the question of where does that leave the question of how individuals secure their lives? Is an open question. In the Web3 space, precarity is enormous, and people have studied this. What is the precarity of Web3 workers? Because basically you end up having no more health insurance, you are not in any pension fund. All of these real things that hold life, when we operate in this mobile and virtual way, become difficult questions to answer. So now the network state is not a response to this per se. The network state is rather, I think, coming from the backdrop of saying we high achieving individuals want to come together and lose the shackles of the demands that these democracies make on us, and just be really successful and rich and great together, without having to take care of anyone else.
Andrea: But I wanted to prompt that with the digital nomadism and the virtual communities, because I always would like to keep the vision straight, that we are straddling a very thin line here. And it's not just, again, straightforward, those over there and we over here. It's a phenomenon that is enmeshed in transitions that I think we need to respond to. Not with their response, but with a different response. So the network state is that proposition. And I think that if we anchor it in its intellectual history, we can also see a bit better where it comes from and what it is and what it's not. So here what is important is on the one hand, the people that are pushing that from a philosophical perspective, and I think here we would have to look into an institute that is called the Seasteading Institute, which was founded by Patri Friedman, who is the grandson of Milton Friedman and has received enormous funding from Peter Thiel. This idea of a, I would say, libertarian fantasy of having a lot of jurisdictions, small jurisdictions, seasteading, because the high seas, which is nobody's territory, would be the place to go for this.
Manda: So we need to be clear for people listening who are phonetic that this is Seasteading. Also, if anybody's interested, there's a very interesting novel called Venomous Lumpsucker, which looks into Seasteads in a way that makes them more obvious what they are. But basically let's not quite take cruise ships, but let's create floating islands in places that are not owned by anybody else. It's largely to be free of any kind of regulation and any kind of taxation. It seems to me it's the obvious philosophical extension of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which is huge. And even in the days when I was working in computer games companies, everybody read Atlas Shrugged and thought it was a really good thing. Except me. I was like, what? But there's a particular worldview, and particularly in young men who are dissociated completely from any concept of being an integral part of the web of life, who want to be unshackled by what they see as any kind of responsibility to anyone for anything. Is that fair?
Andrea: Yes, I think that's fair. And I think that the trajectory that you are drawing to Ayn Rand is precisely spot on. I think a good slogan that would hold this together is no death, no taxes, no democracy, right? So I think this is really the tripartite that is being chased. And no death, I think really in terms of longevity research, all sorts of things of how to live longer for the very particular ones who can then afford these things. So then no taxes. Really this is the cue here; how do we make it so that we don't have to pay taxes. And no democracy? And I think here what is interesting and what is worthwhile, I think, noticing is that the proposition of how this governance should work is something that would be corporate governance.
Manda: Yeah. This is Curtis Yarvin on steroids.
Andrea: Precisely. Curtis Yarvin. This is precisely the lineage. Again, that is really, I would say, extremely authoritarian and has a taste of euthanasia. So it's like, which particular people do we need and which ones do we not need, is baked into this. Particularly in versions of Curtis Yarvin, who if you read his writings, you would find that he would shrug it off and say, oh, I'm just playing around and I'm just being silly and making jokes here. But I think it's really written in there that there is a supremacy idea, that there is an idea of a particular kind of human that should be life extended and should be dominating the world.
Manda: And they're white and male and technocratic.
Andrea: Precisely, of course.
Manda: Which is interesting given that Balaji was not white, but they still think he's a cool guy. Some of them think he's a cool guy.
Andrea: Yeah, and I think Balaji's rhetoric is interesting because he positions himself explicitly as someone who says, you know, for all of us who do not hold Western passports, this proposition is an important proposition. So again the political spectrum is complicated to navigate. There are bits and pieces of everything flying in here. Where you would say super left progressive language comes with hardcore alt right propositions. And to decipher that is precisely the task at hand. So that's why we're putting the network state in this libertarian lineage is the way to go, in order to understand where we are going and what is driving on. And I think that to now come full circle as to why does this matter, why do we talk about it, the fantasy of these weird people? One is, of course, they amass enormous amounts of capital. I mean, that is just a given fact.
Manda: They may be weird, but they're very, very rich.
Andrea: Very, very rich. Precisely. And then the network state becomes, from an international law perspective, again, a proposition that is worth noticing. Because it's vehicle of choice for how to crowdsource territory is something that we know for many, many years in international law; so-called special economic zones. Or you can call it all sorts of zones, which basically, as was described very beautifully and extremely easy to read by a historian, Quinn Slobodian, who has really also followed the mindset of these people. There's a book called Crack-up Capitalism. He's very prolific. He has three very good books The Globalists, Crack-up capitalism, and then Hayek's Bastards that he published in short succession. But crack-up capitalism, for this discussion is particularly important. Because what he says is that even though we have this, let's say Hobbesian or let's rather put it, the Westphalian idea of what a nation state is, and that the globe is basically composed of nation states that are territorially bound and that come together in this family of nations, as the beautiful euphemism goes. He says: that was never the case. We always had a globe that had these sovereign states, but was poked through a million little zones. Little zones that have special status, zones of exception of all sorts of kinds. And he traces that historically, from places like Shanghai after the Opium Wars, being a particular jurisdiction. To Hong Kong as another dream of how do we build this in a different century? So, you know, you can go through the centuries and you can see these different tiny little zones that always had a particular status. And I think that's the way we need to look at it. I think he's spot on with saying, there was never such a smooth thing as the way that we see the map with all of these beautiful lines and that's just how it goes..
Andrea: And it's particularly capitalism that needs these zones of exception, that needs to have the possibility of these holes, to gain a competitive advantage, to be able to accumulate unencumbered, to escape regulation, attempts of redistribution. All of the things that we would want from a strong left regulatory state apparatus, were always escaped through these zones. And this is where now the network state basically just comes in as yet another iteration of claiming such a jurisdiction for itself. And now here comes, I think, the part where we really need to start paying attention. If we follow the negotiations of peace negotiations in Ukraine, in Gaza announced for next week. I mean, maybe by the time this airs, Trump has put up his new plan on what should happen in Gaza. But special economic zones and the rights of what happens in these special economic zones. That's where the juicy bits will be.
Manda: So tell us a little bit more about the detail. If they were able to do this in Ukraine or Gaza, and they were setting up special economic zones in cities in the UK at the end of the last conservative administration. And I actually haven't looked at what they were doing there, but they did not sound fun. They had their own police force. I mean, they had a completely different taxation system that was basically private. I mean, it looks like this is what project 2025 was trying to do with the whole of the US. But let's take Gaza or Ukraine. Actually, let's just take Gaza. Netanyahu has quite clearly endeavoured to wipe it out; to just remove all of the people from there. And then they go in and they clear all the rubble, they build their new special economic zones. What really frightens me about all of this is that as far as they're concerned, we have a stable climate and we really don't have a stable climate. But leaving that aside, they create a special economic zone. What happens inside a special economic zone from their point of view?
Andrea: Yeah. I mean, I think exactly as you said and just to say it explicitly out loud, first and foremost, it's a genocidal project often, and it's a giant dispossession project. So it starts from there. And and I think that if we look at Greenland, especially, for example, I just have to throw that in the mix because this is where this is negotiated as well, as if it was a terra nullius. I mean, in Greenland, you know, they really pretend it's just a big, what did he say? It's just a big block of ice.
Manda: There's nobody there.
Andrea: So, you know, even the physical territory is not acknowledged. So it always comes in this language that is genocidal and not recognising the peoples and the things that are where all these special economic zones should be. And so it continues this story of neocolonial dispossession.
Manda: On steroids.
Andrea: And then the question becomes, again, I would say, intricate technical legal arrangement of what exactly is supposed to happen there. And I would say if you see jurisdiction as something that has a lot of layers, then I think you can just see what kind of composition of these layers will be there. You have different branches in law. Now, you mentioned police force. I mean, you have the executive, that is always what is the administrative and indeed police force questions. This often remains, especially the executive, often remains untouched with special economic zone. So that's really as far as you can go, to really say like we are not respecting your police force, we are not respecting your criminal code. That is really extreme, but also that exists. So that you can even plug out that completely.
Manda: Okay, so we go into Gaza, we create a space which has boundaries. We're back to a geopolitical space within which we, the executive, claim a monopoly on legal violence. And we will impose that because we will fund ICE, effectively, in our space. And then we get to say what happens.
Andrea: So that might be. So we will have to see what they come up with. We have no idea how far that will go, but at least I would say that even if you leave, and this will, I think at the end of the day it does play a big role; what is with the executive? What is the monopoly of violence and in which way? But even just on the, let's say, more economic side of things; the question of tariffs, the question of taxes. And then of course, the question of regulation for all sorts, because again, when we come back to our triad of no death, no taxes, no democracy; health regulation, research possibilities on all sorts of things to just get that out of the way. I think these are, broadly speaking, the things that are being pursued. And I have to say, I know too little about the negotiations that are taking place around Gaza. But there was already last year the Tony Blair Institute was criticised so strongly for bringing out a token now to make land purchase available through Tokenising land. So we have had a bit forebearers of what is to come. We will see. We have to wait and see what will come in this written proposal. But what we do know is all the special economic zone that has crypto flavour, that has been around for some time, in Honduras.
Manda: Okay.
Andrea: So I think it's a good example to look at what have they done there rather than to speculate what will they be doing, because we just have to see. But to say we have to have our eyes on it, that's the important part. So in Honduras, even before crypto was the name of the game, in, I mean, I don't know exactly - 2016 maybe, I guess? Something around that. The Honduran government granted special economic zone rights in the Bay Islands, in particular in Roatan, one of the Bay Islands there, to a group of venture capitalists who basically had a proposition of saying, we will have a very efficient kind of run jurisdiction here. So if you come and build your business here, you have much less red tape, right? We'll just get you started much faster. Your taxes are low. We also have a different kind of judicial system for settling commercial disputes. So you will just have a fast track commercial dispute settling system. So that's typically what special economic zones are. They are very business friendly zones, low taxes, taxes in the one digit, all sorts of efficiencies for running business.
Manda: And super hell for anybody working there who isn't running a business.
Andrea: So this is now where all the things come. So I just saw this place in Honduras has the beautiful name Prospera. So it's really almost cynical to call it that. And indeed, the big question of how does that relate to the population who already lives and has their lives there, is the first question. So there were no dispossessions outright, as far as I can tell, from Prospero, as I understand. Land was purchased in contract agreements, but again, where is the equality of bargaining power here? Is a big question. And so this has been developing. And then crypto became a big part of that. So there's a Bitcoin centre on the island. Longevity research became very important. There's a lot of work around researching medication and of all sorts of kinds of new drugs. And all of that then got repealed when a new government came in.
Andrea: Honduras brought in a socialist government and repealed, also accompanied by really big public protests, the special economic zone rights. People would say this is like quasi ceding sovereignty, what we have done here, this is not right. We shouldn't be doing this. We need to repeal all this. And so the government did repeal these special economic zone rights. But then comes the catch. A catch where, again, good old international law shows its ugliest face.
Manda: ISDS.
Andrea: Precisely. You called it. ISDS International Dispute Settlement.
Manda: Which is the biggest con on the planet. I mean, they should just say no. No, we're not doing that. It should not be possible for ISDS to exist. You're going to have to explain what ISDS is because my brain is already exploding. Tell us about ISDS in layman's simple terms.
Andrea: So ISDS is a short version for calling a legal system, an international legal system that is called international investment law. And basically international investment law, I would put it this way, this was the topic of my PhD and the first book that I published on how to Make the World Safe for investment. In which I traced a bit, where did this legal regime come from? Like, how on earth did we get there? Precisely because you would think in, again, this picture of the globe that we have with all of these sovereign states, that are the lords of their territories and they have permanent sovereignty over natural resources, and they are the legislators and all of these things. That's the image that we have. And in this image, in the moment in which we would see socialist revolutions and a big wave of decolonisation at the beginning of the 20th century, this idea that the sovereign state should be the ultimate arbiter, so to speak, on what happens within a state territory, was challenged. Precisely because if you would look at either Eastern European states, the Soviet Union when it first came to be after the revolution. And then, of course, also in former colonies. If you would look around what is the state of property in these places, you would have a lot of foreign investment. You would have a lot of companies who own a lot of the industry, who own big chunks of land. You call it. So if you basically are the president after the revolution or after decolonisation, and you step onto your presidential balcony and you look around, what you see is a lot of foreign held property.
Manda: But then you could just take it back. You're the president.
Andrea: Precisely. So you try to take it back and you say we make compensation schemes for this. We try to calculate, we try to see what we can do. So you do it all with due process and all of the things, but that's not good enough. And the question of how do you even calculate who benefited from this, in which ways, you know, were really big. I mean, Iran is a big example for that, where British Petroleum was nationalised back then with an offer of compensation which ended in a coup like full on coup d'etat.
Andrea: Same story in Chile, same story in many places. So this is the very violent part of that. But what was happening in the meantime is that, I would say, a bunch of smart lawyers in the service of corporates and former colonial powers, managed to develop a very intricate smart system that we now call investment law. That at the end of the day, basically elevates the jurisdiction over these foreign property holdings, from the national level to the international level. That's the move that investment law allows. That it's no longer a question of sovereign decision making. It's now a question that has to be adjudicated in an arbitral tribunal. So they have these ad hoc decision making bodies.
Manda: Which have three people, all of whom are from the industry. And you don't get to see how and why they make their decisions. It's a con. Why does anybody allow it Andrea?
Andrea: So I mean, again, I would be more nuanced with this in many ways as well.
Manda: Okay. You did your PhD in this. Yes.
Andrea: There is a body of law that they apply. The question of how has this been approved? Has this how has this been consented to? You do have bilateral investment treaties. So at some point, Honduras did sign a treaty in which they agreed to these rules. In the case of Honduras, this is kafta, so this is a regional investment treaty. Because indeed the idea is to be able to lure Foreign investment into the country to develop all sorts of things. And also, if you want to build an economy, you need capital, you need resources, you need machines, you need knowledge, you need all of these things. So again, when you stand on your presidential balcony, you ask yourself, how do I get this? And then you might be inclined to enter into an agreement like that, that says we will protect the investments that you make here, and we will not treat them arbitrarily. Now, what is arbitrarily and what isn't? Like it's a complicated field, but at the end of the day, I completely agree with you that this has been to the disadvantage of countries of the global South, by and large. 100% to a great disadvantage. People are trying to get out of this system. Many have indeed stepped away from the system. Honduras had stepped out, but they are still bound because there's something like a sunset clause. You cannot just leave. Now they have stepped back into it because they have again a new government, so we will see what will happen. So it's a complicated, messy story. But let's bring it back to what is happening with Prospera, one of the biggest examples for what a network state could develop into, the special economic zone rights when they were taken away, they just sued Honduras for 11 billion. And the case is pending. It's ongoing.
Manda: Right. And I'm guessing Honduras total GDP is not 11 billion.
Andrea: Exactly. So one of the poorest economies is being sued for such a giant amount, in the name of what exactly? Prospera? What? So this is the crux of it. So I think that we need to understand that these negotiations of special economic zones, the question of what is a network state doing there, how does this operate? Has a lot of different layers. We have the layer of international law that is here and is standing and has for a long time been protecting foreign capital and has mechanisms to do so that are not so easy to change.
Manda: Unless you're Donald Trump, when he seems to just ignore international law. I mean, this seems to be international law gets to be what you say it is if you have the dollar behind you. Is that not the case?
Andrea: Yes. But it's also the case that this particular regime of investment law, what you need to know about this is that there is a convention that is its sibling. It's called the New York Convention, doesn't matter. Which makes it so that if you have an award from one of these arbitral tribunals against you as a state; so let's say now Honduras, this arbitral tribunal finds that they do owe 11 billion. What happens is that there is a convention, international convention, that many states are part of, that forces these states to execute this award in any country. So Honduran property around the globe that is not used in official capacity, it can't be the consulate, but that is in private usage, but is officially owned by the state of Honduras, has to be executed against the amount of this award. So this is why this international investment law system has a lot of bite, compared to many other rules in international law that we see disappearing these days.
Manda: Okay, right. Because it's going to hit the people right at the top. It's not going to hit your average peasant farmer because they don't have property in Paris. But the people who make the laws and who have made those decisions might do.
Andrea: And the state has property. The state just owns property against which you can execute. So this is a bit and again with a lot of nuance, and we are moving like a trailblazer through a lot of complicated things. But to set this up, I think this is how we need to understand; so there is the core layer that has been there for a long time and has been there before: special economic zones, colonial property holdings that then form into foreign property holdings. How are they protected? Have been protected through investment law all along. We know this. What is new? Why is this relevant to now? And why should we watch these special economic zones? Is that with this network state idea, the proposition of crowdsourcing territory. So we hear the Tony Blair Institute speaking of tokenising the land. This is a new kind of conversion of the technological affordances of blockchain technology in this very particular libertarian gaze, with now the combination of a president who is super pro crypto and who is leading peace negotiations, and can negotiate on territory.
Manda: Peace.
Andrea: Peace! And can negotiate on territory with enormous force.
Manda: Right. And let's move this to Greenland. What are they planning? So they want Greenland. They want to take Greenland by force if necessary. And frankly, if they really decide to do that, they'll just fly as much people as they need into Thule Air Base, and Greenland is theirs. I don't see I don't see the rest of the world declaring World War three over Greenland. I think if they wanted Canada it might be different, but even then, it's hard to see the rest of the world standing against them. So they take Greenland. What do they do with it then? They turn the whole of Greenland into a special economic zone?
Andrea: I mean, I think this is where I think they can afford not to be so violent. I mean, I think this is where they can backtrack. It's perfectly okay for them not to have to take Greenland in a military way, and not to blow up NATO and put everyone against them and put this probe. I think that to me, I mean, this is my reading of these negotiations, is that they just realised they don't need to do it that way. We make it via the art of the deal. It's much easier.
Manda: Who in their right minds makes a deal with Donald Trump? I mean, honestly. But go on.
Andrea: But this is you know, I think that they will propose a deal that just says, you know, these particular parts. And, I mean, it has been scoped. I don't know the geography of Greenland sufficiently to be able to locate where they have an interest, who lives there, what that means, how this is going to go down. But they have been scoping what is relevant, what is important, which areas, which territories. And indeed, I think we will have to see what comes in terms of what are the propositions. Which kinds of laws and national regulations will be taken out through saying, we establish special economic zone here. What kind of rights they will give themselves. I don't think they will give themselves any obligations. I think they will only give themselves rights and what they will be able to get there, we will see. But the proposition of having a tax regime that is independent for sure.
Manda: No death, no taxes
Andrea: Exactly. So again, if we think of no death, no taxes, no democracy, we'll see a bit of a roadmap of what is relevant to them. And I think, yeah, that is what is at stake at the moment. And I think that everyone who is involved on the policy level, all the international lawyers, so to speak, in foreign ministry people, I don't think that they have this on the radar so clearly.
Manda: Okay, we could continue down that rabbit hole, but I'd rather leave listeners with something a little bit more thrutopian. Because we are hitting biophysical limits. I mean, that's the thing; when Steve Bannon first proposed his 10,000 year Reich, I thought I could be really scared about this, but actually they're ignoring the fact that we're hitting climate tipping points. And Trump has just ripped up all of the regulation in the US relating to anything about any kind of environmental regulation, which is truly horrible. But also, there seems to be an accelerationist mindset within the crypto bros, which is, let's get this over. They've read too many dystopian science fiction fantasy where they think that there will be survivors and they will be the survivors, and they'll get rid of everybody else, and that'll be just fine. And they'll carry on in their pristine world, which is somehow... I mean, they just don't understand what actual biophysical collapse means. Because they do live in really separate spaces. And someone that I follow on blue Sky said recently, you're all wondering what happens after the network state and why would we join a network state, and you don't understand that these people exist already in a network state, and what they're doing is siphoning value from the whole of the rest of the world into their existing crypto spaces and digital spaces. And the fact that they might be in San Francisco or Cupertino or Hong Kong or Singapore is irrelevant.
Manda: As far as they're concerned, they're in a space that they control, and the living world is an aesthetic option that they can choose not to have. Which is a level of disconnect that does weird things to my head, but it exists. So we exist in a world where biophysical limits exist and we're racing towards tipping points beyond which I don't see complex life surviving. And humans are pretty complex. So if we were to design a new way, it seems to be the nation state has had its day. The nation state is a relatively recent evolution of human cultural biology that exists when you have a de facto top down, hierarchical power exerts power over the people beneath it. And I assume you and I don't really like that and don't think it's workable in the long term. If we were to create a different way of reconnecting people, that didn't have geographic boundaries within which a certain political entity had a monopoly in physical violence, and we were to create something using all of the tech that we've got at the moment, in a way that was actually healing for people and the land; that created connectivity in a way that was generative. What would it look like in your view?
Andrea: Yeah, I mean, it's a big question, but I think let's go with, a bit what is available or what is out there already. And I think that that would be a moment to give a shout out to the people who pursue what we could call ReFi. So regenerative finance, coordi-nations. So the notion of coordi-nations was coined by Primavera De Filippi and some others who also do research and work in this crypto world, as a counter proposition to the network state idea. And I think that it's a really nice play on words. I'm not a fan of nations, but I'm a big fan of the idea that we coordinate globally in a meaningful way, and I would have to see where they have written up their propositions properly and where they are at with their refi coordinations ideas. But it is really not meant to be something that replaces anything. It's not meant to replace the state. It's not meant to replace anything in an antagonistic way. It's just meant to say all sorts of small scale, bioregional initiatives can gain from being connected, coordinating and enabling the possibility of scaling in one way or another, in a precise and meaningful way. And thereby just enabling more, I would say liveable projects to continue and to expand. So I think that is something where the same idea and these same propositions are taking off in a different direction. Much less funding.
Manda: But perhaps more workable if we can follow the project of making the dollar and all of the USD1's and all the rest of it have no value, then it doesn't matter. What matters is the people and how much they care. And that, I think, might be what it comes down to.
Andrea: So I mean, I think that you said it so beautifully; 'For people for whom the biophysical world is an aesthetic option'. Amazing. Yeah. And people do believe that that is so. And this book that I mentioned already in our last conversation, that I'm still thinking through and thinking with exo capitalism, puts forward in a really strong way that care work, for lack of a better word, or you might call it life regenerating work, whatever makes life liveable and keeps life alive, doesn't scale well.
Andrea: And these technologies are technologies of scale. In all sorts of ways they are working on modes of reasoning that scale extremely well. And numeric languages and languages that are computational languages and things where you can just do a lot of things at scale very well. But life doesn't scale so well. So I think that this is a question; how do we push back against an economy, as they say, with absolutely no limits? Because it scales in its very unencumbered way, in which it has no connection to the living world anymore. And it doesn't need that connection.
Manda: Well, it thinks it doesn't need that connection. At some point it will need oxygen and water and food.
Andrea: We humans will need that.
Manda: Yes. The AI doesn't need that. Yeah.
Andrea: The AI also needs water and it needs resources. But let's see how it's going to go about getting that. It's tricky. So I think that we humans, we have no place, a very little place in this economy that is being built. Our frame of comprehension is minimal. We can't make sense of numbers that have more than three digits behind the zero. Like that just doesn't mean anything to us. So our scope in which meaning can live is different. Law is a very deliberative mode of reasoning. It's a human mode of reasoning based on natural language. Machines reason differently. They have different ways of doing. And I think that the economy that is being built is just pushed ever more into that sphere. So I think we just have to build an economy that is independent of that. I think that really the way to go is to go back to bioregional projects, to really living off the land and living well off the land, you know.
Manda: And with the land.
Andrea: And with the land.
Manda: To develop a spiritual basis for life, where the living world is not an aesthetic option, but is an integral part of how we live, is a very different proposition. My goodness. Right. We're running out of time and I know you have to go. So that's amazing. Andrea, I really want to come back for number three at some point. Let's give it a while. Maybe till the end of the year, maybe even into spring of next year. But this is just, there's so few people I can talk about this with at this level of depth who really get it. And I am so grateful to you for coming on to the podcast. So thank you very much once again and for highlighting where it is that we need to be paying attention. Thank you.
Andrea: Thank you, thank you very much. It's always a pleasure talking to you.
Manda: Likewise. Thank you. Well, there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Andrea for her capacity to take such complex concepts, and with great heart and great compassion and a great sense of moral justice, turn them into things that us lesser mortals can understand. This is one of those fields where it's easy to feel lost. I hope by now you feel less lost, and yet that you are alerted, at least to the potentials for what some people in some parts of the world are trying to do. And the fact that it doesn't have to be like this. It's easy to feel overwhelmed. But I'm the one who just finished teaching a gathering, helping people how to honour fear as our mentor. (Thank you to those of you who came up and had the courage to do exactly that). And so I want to be clear that we're not sharing these ideas, because it's useful for any of us to get more hooked into the rage or despair at everything that we're facing, than we already are. Rage and despair have their place. But when they're reactive rather than responsive, they're not useful. And what we need more than anything else at the moment, is that we bring our whole selves as fluidly as possible in service to life. And yet we will not begin to build the new structures that will work if we don't also understand the speed and scale of people who are building other structures that are not designed to work in service of life.
Manda: And network states are undoubtedly those structures. So the more that we can work together to build something that's genuinely regenerative, the better. There is going to be a place for technology in all of this. That genie is out of the bottle. That horse has long since bolted. We are now a technological culture and a technological species. But that doesn't mean we have to aim for no death, no taxes, no democracy, just because we don't like actually having to live in community. So it remains the case that building communities between all parts of ourselves, ourselves and each other and ourselves and the web of life, is still the single most important thing we can do. And that bringing ourselves whole and fluid to that, because we're doing the inner work, is the gift that each of us can bring to the web of life. I hope by now this is obvious. We say it on the podcast often enough, but there's always someone for whom this is the first time.
Manda: So if that's you, welcome and thank you. And I hope you've learned something from the conversation you've just heard. As ever, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for this week's production. To Lou Mayor for the video and Anne Thomas for the transcript. To Faith Tilleray for all of the work that goes on behind the scenes to keep us sane and moving forward and connected. And again, as always, an enormous thanks to you for listening. And if you're one of the people who's recently given us a review, I am extraordinarily grateful. Truly, they make my days shine. So thank you. And for those of you who share us with friends, this too makes our days worthwhile. Word of mouth is the best way to share community, and this is what we're endeavouring to build; a community of ideas interconnected so that between us we can build a new future. There we go. That's us doing that for this week. We'll be back next week and we'll see you then. And for now, thank you and goodbye.