Accidental Gods - The Thrutopian Podcast

How can we create more connection with the people who matter - locally, nationally and internationally? Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield has designed 3-person chess where the pawns can declare world peace, set up the Treaty of Finsbury Park between humans and other species - and experimented with quadratic voting on the blockchain to create real local democracy. More at https://accidentalgods.life

Show Notes

This week's conversation ranges over an astonishingly wide range of topics from ways to facilitate interspecies communication through play and ways to play 3-person pacifist chess (and thereby change the world), to the nature of democracy and how the use of quadratic voting on the blockchain to inspire artistic endeavours in north London might be expanded nationally and internationally on the scale of global governance to shift the cultural dominance away from capital hegemony to a more fluid, genuinely inclusive democracy. 

All this in conversation with Ruth Catlow.  Ruth is co-founder (with Marc Garrett) and co-director (with Charlotte Frost) of Furtherfield, a project based in Finsbury Park in London which organises for inclusivity and equity in art and technology and advocates for their use in imagining and building real social change and positive environmental impact.

Background and Bio: 
Furtherfield's mission is to open up the tools and debates of the exclusionary realms of art and technology for collective action for collective good. Ruth and her colleagues invest time and energy in decentralised and distributed p2p practices, fostering new creative collaborations between artists and communities, as well as challenging debates about the role of art and technology in society.

With this, Ruth's work advances critical discussions of emergent technologies and their implications and she has, for example, led the way in terms of understanding what blockchain technologies mean for the arts and beyond. She directs the Furtherfield decentralised arts lab, DECAL and is also key to the development of live action role play (LARP) games for research, partnering with researchers to craft imagined/futuristic scenarios in which a group of players explore a complex socio-digital issue. 

Since late 2020, Ruth has been immersed in the massive Interspecies Treaty LARP as  part of her participation in the EU Horizon 2020 funded CreaTures project. All participants advance more-than-human justice by playing the game as other species, representing them in Assemblies to discuss and plan an Interspecies Festival that will celebrate the signing of 'an Interspecies Treaty of Cooperation (known as 'The Treaty of Finsbury Park') in 2025. 
Ruth is also one of the organisers of the 'Radical Friends' conference in 2022 and co-author/editor of the book that arose from it called 'Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts' and co--PI of the Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab.



Furtherfield https://www.furtherfield.org
DECAL https://decal.furtherfield.org/
Ruth's website  https://ruthcatlow.net/
CultureStake app https://www.furtherfield.org/culturestake/
More on the XDai blockchain https://medium.com/mycrypto/what-is-the-xdai-chain-and-why-should-i-try-it-40f539732fb4
Radical Friends https://torquetorque.net/publications/radical-friends/
Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab. https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/blockchain-lab/
The Treaty of Finsbury Park  https://www.furtherfield.org/the-treaty-of-finsbury-park-2025/
Cade Diehm - paper co-written with Ruth https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/finsbury-park-2025
Finsbury Park https://www.parksandgardens.org/places/finsbury-park
PBES Report https://ipbes.net/global-assessment

What is Accidental Gods - The Thrutopian Podcast?

Another World IS still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose - and now it's collapsing around us. So how do we co-create a Thrutopian future that we'd all be proud to leave as our legacy?

What stories can we weave of possibility? Of transformation? 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 really matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, between ourselves and the Web of Life - so that we can reclaim our birthright as self-conscious nodes in the web of life?

We can do this. Some of us already are. Every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being, courageous pathfinders who are exploring the emergent edge of inter-becoming.

As a species, we have all the answers, we just haven't yet crafted all the new stories and woven them into a future that works. 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.

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.

Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor